William Morris and Me Gossip about an old house on the upper Thames 1895 Gossip about a new house on the North Fork of Long Island 2011

This photograph was taken by Ellen Wexler at the summer studio in Southold, Long Island. Allan is sitting at computer reading William Morris’ News From Nowhere”

William Morris and I have a lot in common even though one hundred and seventy seven years and five days separates our birthdays. I do hope that we don’t have our death dates in common as I am presently 62 years of age and William died at 62 years of age. Like Morris I too have two daughters. Like my wife Ellen, Morris in his fictional account of life in 2003 in ‘News From Nowhere’ written in 1890, Guest falls in love with Ellen “whose beauty, energy, and intelligence are clearly emblematic of the new society.”[1]

As I cleaned the beach sand from my feet and folded up the beach chairs, Ellen detached herself from our happy friends who decided to remain until the sun set over the distant shore of Connecticut. As we packed our towels and chairs into the trunk of our Honda, she took me by the hand, and said softly, ‘Take me on to the house at once; we need not wait for the others: I had rather not.’

I sat behind the steering wheel and almost without my will the car moved on along the road toward Hog Neck. The weathered grey asphalt; its patched raised repairs, four tires beating faster and faster as I pressed on the gas pedal, led us past Goose Creek on the left. On the right hand we could see a cluster of small houses and boats, new and old, and before us a grey clapboard house and a wall partly overgrown with ivy, over which a few grey gables showed.

We turned the corner onto North Bayview Road and again almost without my will we exited our Honda and walked toward the bluestone wall of our newly constructed Southold House. My companion gave a sigh of pleased surprise and enjoyment for the forest seen through the entrance veranda was redolent of an infinite variety of the greens of young June leaves. The robins and blue jays were singing their loudest with the crickets tuning up for their evening symphony. And the house itself was a fit guardian for all the beauty of this entrance to summer.

Once again Ellen echoed my thoughts as she said: ‘Yes, Allan, this is why we came out to Long Island: this simple slopping roofed house built by an architect without pretense in a simple hand crafted and modest style. Regardless of the turmoil that is going on in Manhattan, this is lovely still amidst all the beauty of its surroundings. It seems to me as if this house had waited for these happy days, and held it in the gathered crumbs of happiness of our confused and turbulent urban past.’

She led me up close to the house, and laid her shapely sun browned hand on the dry laid bluestone wall as if to embrace it, and cried out, ‘O me! How I love the earth, and the seasons, and weather, and all things that deal with it, and all that grows out of it, - as this has done!’

I could not answer her, or say a word. Her exultation and pleasure were so keen and exquisite, and her beauty, so delicate, yet so infused with energy, expressed it so fully, that any added word would have been commonplace and futile. I dreaded lest the others would come in for the potluck dinner and break the spell she had cast about me; but we stood there a while by the corner of the trash and recycling shed, and no one came.

We drew back a little, and looked up at the house: the door and windows were open to the fragrant sun-cured air; from the upper window-sills could hear the sounds of WLIU as if Amy Eddings shared in our love for this new house.

Ellen led me on to the door, murmuring little above her breath as she did so, ‘the earth and the growth of it and the life of it! If I could but say or show how I love it.’

I gently grasped the smooth satin finished stainless steel knob and rotated the door 90 degrees fitting it snuggly into its surround of shelving held paintings I completed while in summer residence at our former Mattituck studio. Ellen, caressing her fingers over the brushed China White jamb stepped over the threshold entering the Southold House. We wandered from the island of pots and pans housed in matte laminated wine berry Formica erupting through the black speckled gray linoleum covered kitchen floor to the CDX sheathed stair tower; its whale ribbed grey balustrades shielding our sight of the hovering second floor bedroom imagining its tatami-like water base polyurethaned oak plywood floor.

The extravagant love of ornament and very large homes, which I had noted in the people of Southold and Hogs Neck, seemed here at our Southold House to have given place to only the most necessary, and of the simplest forms.

We sat down at last in a room protected by the bluestone wall that Ellen had caressed, and which was still hung with a self-portrait of Andy Warhol. Originally of great commercial value, but now faded into pleasant grey and rust tones which harmonized thoroughly well with the quiet of the place, and which would have been ill supplanted by its original brighter and more striking colors.

She rose up and said: ‘Come, I must not let you go off into a dream again so soon. I want to see all that we can see first before our friends arrive and fill this Southold House with food and festivity.