Dear Blue House,
Although you predate me considerably in years — you were one of the first farmhouses in the area after all — we do share some history. When we moved to Girard Avenue in 1974, you were there to greet us. You were yellow at the time and somewhat neglected, but that wasn’t so unusual in Lowry Hill back then.
When the elderly-seeming owners moved on, the Clemence family moved in — Roger, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Minnesota, and Gretchen, a teacher at Grace Nursery School, along with their three children, Peter, Ben and Liska.
With the trained eye of an architect and the attentive care of a teacher, they lovingly restored you to your former self and painted you a perfect shade of ecru with bright white trim. But when the children grew up and out, the parents also moved on.
Which brought us the era of Ruth and Robert Bly, she a psychologist and he a poet. OK, not just any poet, a colorful world-renowned poet, author and activist. And being colorful, they painted you the beautiful shade of blue that you wear to this day. Robert wrote poetry in your carriage house and later built a multi-hued Scandinavian-style writing studio in your backyard. The days of the Blys were heady days, bringing a roster of A-list poets through your doors — and ours.
But now Robert is penning poetry across the firmament and Ruth is living in California to be near her daughter, and there you are, waiting for the next chapter.
Will your new owners respect your poetic past? Will they honor your farmhouse history? Will they protect the massive oak trees that lock their branches over your roof like Chinese love knots?
Your neighbors from across the street fervently hope so. Until then, we’ll “run along holding the wing-tips,” as we have for each other all these years.
“Our good life is made of struts
And paper, like those early
Wright Brothers planes. Neighbors
Run along holding the wing-tips.”
From Robert Bly’s poem, “I Have Daughters and I Have Sons” from the collection, "Talking Into the Ear of a Donkey,” published by W.W. Norton in 2011.
