By Kaaren Kitchell

A decade ago, wars of liberation were being fought all across North Africa and the Middle East. Smaller, more personal wars of liberation were being fought in France, too. Here in the fifth arrondissement of Paris, my husband Richard and I battled the forces of French bureaucracy to liberate our household goods from their shipping containers at Le Havre. We had valued most of the fifty boxes at $50 each. Many contained books, writing supplies, and journals. Many contained art. How do you assign such things a dollar amount? Customs was suspicious. All were the same value? Were we smuggling precious objects to sell in France without declaring them? Or were these forbidden items?
The struggle to liberate our belongings took forty e-mails, twenty phone calls, 300 euros, and three weeks, but the boxes were delivered to our door. A man drove three hours from Le Havre to our apartment, and with the help of a Romanian worker named Christian, carried my grandmother’s heavy wooden trunk up five flights of stairs. (It wouldn’t fit in the ascenseur.)
The truck driver, a shy florid man in his 50s, seemed ready to pass out as he entered our living room. Christian, younger and fit, was smiling, unfazed.
The driver accepted a glass of water but would not take a tip. Christian stayed all afternoon, helping us slice open the boxes containing sculptures and paintings, and breaking down the cardboard for recycling. That night, we greeted beloved works of art as if they were old friends.
Are objects alive? Of course they are. How else to explain the numinous quality, the sense of the sacred, the spell cast on us, by the things we unpacked? These things spoke to us! They told us stories. Sometimes one would break into song. Time and space won’t allow me to tell you every single story we heard in the several days of unpacking, but here are a dozen:
1) The round-backed trunk that belonged to my Norwegian-American grandmother, Esther Heimark, a poet and playwright who also sold antiques in the small Minnesota town where she lived with her husband Julius and three children. Her trunk now contains the following
- Drafts of her poems
- My grandfather’s accounts of his parents crossing the United States by covered wagon, farm life in Minnesota, and his decision to become a doctor
- Genealogical books about my Kitchell family ancestors, Puritans who fled religious persecution in Kent and Surrey, England, arriving in Guilford, Connecticut in 1639
- My oral history interviews with my parents (How strange and heart-breaking to read them now, and see how lucid my father was, just before dementia set in.)
- Generations of family photos
2) A bentwood chair, also of dark wood, from my grandmother Jeannette Kitchell’s apartment in the Sequoias in San Francisco. I visited her often in my 20s and watched with delight as this well-educated, elegant woman warmed to my then-boyfriend, Arab, a wild and wooly bohemian painter, whose dyslexia, undiagnosed in childhood, had prevented him from learning to read.

3) Dana Point, a painting that Arab made, shortly after we left the schooner, The Flying Cloud. We had lived on this boat for two years, renovating it to travel around the world. The painting has three levels: landscape, woman’s body and bird. Surreal, like the work of Salvador Dali. (Life with Arab was surreal as well, but that is a novel-length story.)
4) Celestine (pictured at the top of this page), a papier mâché bear made by my sculptor sister Jane to honor our father—-inspired, perhaps, by his qualities of strength and fearlessness. Celestine stands in the non-working fireplace of our living room, leaning forward eagerly, just as my father did in life.

5) The soft wool blanket showing bears and men and women holding hands that my mother knitted and gave to me. I repaired a couple of holes our cat Marley had made kneading it, as I lay in bed.
“Oh, that was the worst thing I ever knitted,” my mother said.
“But it’s beautiful!” I said.
“I mean, it was the most difficult of anything I ever made.”
6) A painting by Kathleen Morris, Shrine for Couple #3, from my years as a traveling art dealer in Santa Fe and points west. In the late 1980s, I came to Los Angeles and stayed in a suite at the Chateau Marmont. It was a good time for selling art. I began to find the excitement of the city more appealing than living in the rural Southwest. So I moved to L.A. in 1990 and soon met the poet Richard Beban, whom I would marry.
7) Books by friends. Richard and I met at a 1994 poetry reading in the bookstore, Midnight Special. With friends, we later started a poetry reading series at the Rose Café. It lasted three years, and exposed us to all the rich work of poets from Los Angeles, and around the world. When you no longer live in the same town as your friends, at least you can have the companionship of their books.
8) A photo of Carolyn Kizer at The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. She was the first person to read at our series at the Rose Café, and became my mentor and dear friend. Later, we bought her Paris apartment where we were now unloading our treasures.
9) Prayers to the Muse, the cross that my sister, Jane, made for me when I received an M.F.A. in creative writing at Antioch University, Los Angeles. It is made of red leather, end-papers and dry wall mud. It is burgundy colored and hangs above my desk, reminding me of my deep love for books—and Jane’s faith that I’d publish my own.
Antioch gave me lifelong friends who are also devoted to the muse. Six of us formed a writing group in Playa del Rey, and we continue to celebrate one another’s publications long distance.

10) Charlie the marble. I opened a well-wrapped package and out tumbled Charlie. Charlie was named for the photographer husband of my great friend, Polly, in Berkeley. CA. We lived in the same artist’s commune there, in the late 1960s. Charlie died several years ago, after a liver transplant. A glass artist took his ashes and made 300 glass marbles out of them as gifts for those who loved him. Richard and I each have one, which we keep on our desks. We talk to Charlie, and Richard even wrote him a sonnet. He reminds us that death has no dominion and that we are all at play in the Elysian Fields of Eternity.
11) My sister Jane made a Kachina called The Minotaur for Richard. It captures his Bull spirit (he is a Taurus). Richard and I were married on that island near the site of the ancient labyrinth. We chose Crete because it was the last Western culture that had few weapons and little war—where the focus was on beauty, love, and peace, and women had equal power with men

In Cretan mythology, Ariadne was the daughter of King Minos and Queen Pasiphae, The Cretan Aphrodite, or goddess of love. With her ball of thread, or “clew,” she helped Theseus navigate the labyrinth and slay the minotaur—the half-man, half-bull hidden at its core. The Minotaur was an unredeemed version of the god of passion, Dionysus, to whom Ariadne had been promised at birth. When Theseus abandoned her on the island of Naxos, Dionoysus returned to her. They married and she became immortal—her crown now appears in the night sky as the Corona Borealis. Their story is the ancient version of the Native American vision quest, and of modern depth psychology. This myth inspired my 35-year vision quest, my marriage to Richard, and my book of poems, Ariadne’s Threads.
12) C. G. Jung’s The Red Book. Before we left Los Angeles, Richard and I went to the Armand Hammer Museum to see the magical mandalas that the great psychiatrist, C. G. Jung created for his own healing. He was suffering a breakdown as he intuited the violence that would sweep Europe, resulting in World War II. I bought this volume many years ago, but it is so numinous I can’t read it yet. At the right time I will.
Kaaren Kitchell’s latest book is Ariadne’s Threads, available through spdbooks.org. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and anthologies, and in a fine art manuscript from the Getty Museum. She and her late husband, the poet and photographer Richard Beban, taught workshops in Living Mythically at Esalen and The Los Angeles Jung Institute. For more about their adventures in France see Paris Play.