MY SISTER'S LABYRINTH
/
When my sister Robin turned 40, she embarked on a 10-month trip around the world, toting a camera bag, a backpack with “the barest essentials,” and a “stack of airline vouchers as thick as a filet of sole.” A high school art teacher on sabbatical, she recalls the “amazingly intricate architecture” of Jaipur, India and certain windows in a cathedral in Toledo, Spain where “light shined through on the first day of the vernal equinox.”
But frequently, artistic inspiration ignites close to home. Several years later while visiting the Mariandale Center in Ossining, New York, less than an hour from where she lives, Robin found a classic Cretan labyrinth. “As I walked through it, I felt some thing inside me shift,” she says.
She returned home determined to build her own labyrinth at the edge of the wooded acreage surrounding her house. As an avid gardener, she had frequently used a flat circular area in that forest as a burn pile — “perfect." Her hefty collection of white clam shells (many gathered in Maine) would line the paths and “gleam in the moonlight.”
But she needed moss too, remembering her visit to Kyoto’s Koke-dera (Moss Temple) during that 10-month-trek-around-the-globe, where Buddhist monks added moss to their gardens for serenity. Looking deeper into her woods, she discovered mounds of lush green carpeting.
Drawing the labyrinth became more complicated. “I started by placing four dots on a piece of 8x11 paper,” she says. Then she began hoeing circular paths. “Later when I walked it, I realized the approach wasn’t right. I wanted the entrance to face the North Star, so I shifted it a bit.”
Over the next few years, Lucille’s Labyrinth (named after my mother) has become a treasured spot during our annual family reunions. We siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews (and occasionally a stray hiker from the Appalachian Trail who gets invited for a night’s respite; don’t ask) gather around the edge of the labyrinth.
Brother Ross leads the Hogan Heritage Ceremony when we honor and remember relatives no longer with us. The “Hogan Harmonizers” (brother Robert on B-flat tenor horn, cousin Connie on cello, sister Robin on spoons, cousin David on guitar and Mr. Wonderful on ukulele) play “The Rose” and “The Parting Glass.” At the end we march off to the balloon toss singing “A Nation Once Again.”
The rest of the year the labyrinth is my sister’s pet project. “I tweak it all the time, weeding and adding coffee grinds along the paths,” she says. She constantly replenishes the creamy shells and recently planted white bleeding hearts and foxglove around the edges.
“I love the combination of mossy green contrasting with the shells and flowers,” she says. “I quickly spot the labyrinth whenever I go on Google Earth.”
Labyrinths have been described as “complex and circuitous paths that lead from a beginning point to the center.” All labyrinths are symbolic, and my sister’s is also: it’s for family remembrance and reflection and, for those of us gathered this weekend in Central Valley, New York, a place of love.
