francie

Had dinner with M yesterday, who brought me a belated birthday gift -- a photograph of a Brooklyn brownstone, complete with front stoop and tree and shadowed windows. I had forgotten, a couple years back, that M was hellbent on coming up with a nickname for me (because the many I have did not, of course, meet her particular standards). Apparently what she settled on, apparently what I am to her, is a latter day Francie Nolan of sorts, and this made me smile.

"Late in the afternoon the sun slanted down into the mossy yard belonging to Francie Nolan's house, and warmed the worn wooden fence. Looking at the shafted sun, Francie had that same fine feeling that came when she recalled the poem they recited in school.

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring
pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green,
indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld."

While I love this poem, and wrote it in many a blank book when I was little, and memorized it and created vast imagined worlds around it, my favorite bit of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn involves Francie's favorite past-time. I have not read this book in twenty years but I still love the thought of Francie, armed with a bowl of mints and a library book (Francie very systematically worked her way through the local public library), curled up on the fire-escape outside her family's apartment, under the spreading branches of the tree growing up through the yard, her own personal Tree of Heaven.

Also I loved the bit about Francie and her brother being made to wear heads of garlic around their necks, as evidenced in my garlic soup ramble from a few years back. Clearly Francie has been a presence in my life for eons, even if not always entirely recognized by me. Now what to do with this framed photograph, given to me last night by a woman who has always, in her odd way, seen parts of me I never did.