It's a very good Scrabble day when I can play "jonquil."

Be that as it may, my sweet mother-in-law calls them jonquils, and when she proposed a big honking field of them at the Would-Be Farm, I said heck yeah!  

​Pat is a wonderful gardener, and even in her early 80s, she can out-shop, out-weed, and out-sew me pretty much any day of the week. So when she said she wanted Jeff and me to be reminded of her each spring at the Would-Be Farm, I enlisted her actual aid.

Long story short, we ordered something like 200 bulbs from Holland last fall. Thank you John Scheepers.  We hopped a plane (back in the days when people did that kind of thing without thinking about it much) once the package arrived in the North Country.

We made a girl's weekend of it, staying at my sister's civilized house, eating yummy meals, and playing dominoes at the end of the day.

And we flew South, happy but full of anticipation and the usual worries: Would squirrels eat the bulbs? Would the plants freeze to death?  Would deer eat the bulbs? Would an early thaw fool the plants? 

Springtime is brutal on hopes.  When bright flowers do indeed rise from the cold clay -- oh glory.  

Okay, so everything has changed.

​More or less.

Less in some states. 

But for many people, especially those with a healthy respect for both the science of infectious disease and the preservation of our elders, this summer seems like the start of a not-so-brave new world.

So here's what I am missing.

In photo format, because nobody wants to hear that tone of voice.

With vintage photos, because it does seem like a long time ago since we went out dancing, or hung out without a care with multiple generations of the family ––or not-family –– or planned a trip, or hugged people, or shared aprés-sailing stories...

But all this aside, please be sensible and gentle with one another. We're all trying our best –– even when it's not that great, it's likely all the effort we can manage. 

​That is all. For now.

A title like that and you're still reading? Bless you! I hope I can make it worthwhile.

As a rule, I prefer to share stuff I adore. Rare finds. Unlikely but likable things. Unexpected pleasures. Books that I think deserve a wider readership, for instance, or experiences that I'd like to encourage others to have.

But that basic human urge to share the other side --the irresistible impulse that says, "Jeepers, this stinks! Sniff it!"  

Is there a Germanic term for this instinct , like schadenfreude? There ought to be.  

It would be generous to imagine that our impulse to share things revolt the senses is like –– as the old phrase has it, trouble shared is trouble halved.

But I don't guess kindness is any part of the underlying motivation. I believe the reason we love sites like cake wrecks and people of Walmart is NOT to reduce the shock one feels. Sharing amplifies that shock but also, like a clever party-goer, scrapes off the offending image or scent onto someone else. Here, look, isn't it awful?!   

So when I say the three worst songs in my music history are as follows, I am not simply trying to entertain. 

And as a bonus, because back when irreverent reporters waited for results or otherwise idled in the Sports Department of The St. Petersburg Times, the game we played was to pick the line-up for the band that was playing in Hell.

​Karen was always on the skins. 

We started on this Would-Be Farm adventure with the idea of novelty: new experiences are meant to  keep our brains nimble and what-not. The effort of tackling a fresh set of challenges would be good for us. 

Such as driving a tractor and putting fruit trees into the ground and helping them grow roots. 

Such as returning to the North Country where I grew up and re-learning that country environment. Plus introducing Jeff to some exotic charms: a bullhead fry, turkey hunting, snow. 

​Knowing that, unlike actual farmers, our livelihood and future is not on the line when the dam busts and the crops fail.  

So, round about January of each of the past five years, seed catalogs begin to sprout in my mailbox. Deals from on-line nurseries pop up like weeds. Calls to branch out into new crops... I won't belabor the metaphor any more than I can...bear. Muah ha ha.

Round about April, it's become our happy habit to make our ways North. I try to get there in time for my sister's birthday early in the month, and Jeff generally follows after sailing Charleston Race Week. We usually get a snowstorm or two, maybe an ice-storm, just to remind us that we are mere tourists in the North Country.

It's too early for planting in early April, and it's more than a bit nippy –– though we do have a WOOD STOVE this year! 

Still, even with a crochet throw of snow, you can see the rocky bones of the land early in early spring. And it's an exciting few weeks while plants wake up out of the cold clay and yawn hope into the landscape.

We're not sure when we'll get there this year. What with the Pandemic and all. Of course I ordered plants before COVID-19 was no more than a small cloud on the horizon.

I can't resist those colorful packets of optimism that promise poppies, lupins, chamomile. Plus garlic and seed-potatoes (thrifty hint: if your potatoes sprout in the fridge, put them in the ground --  you'll generally get a smallish bonus harvest a few months later instead of adding to the landfill).

And, because the larger fruit have not flourished under our neglectful stewardship, I have ambitions for Chinese chestnut trees, red currents, bush-cherries, and yet more elderberries. Although elderberries are not a favored deer browse according to experts, empirical evidence suggests that some deer will "sample" an elderberry bush to within inches of its life. 

As with so much recently, we'll just have to wait and see. We'll shelter in place and I'll let my farming daydreams slide me along a little longer. I'm not complaining. 

Practice might not make perfect, but it does generate words...

Story 1 -- Found
She found him well, if a bit pale. Not unexpected given that he'd been underground all this time.

She wondered if he'd turned his face, so like a flower with that hair of his, toward the light that had filtered down there.

What would he see from there? The soles of shoes, the clench of a mittened fist, possibly the odd glimpse up a skirt. And who would have looked down to see him? 


Story 2 -- Sentimental Fools
They were sitting side-by-side, the way young men do, not looking at one another. The one with the oversized sports jersey was saying, "I don't even."

His friend, a skinny kid with an unfortunate haircut, repeated the question, "But did you know that she was out there?"

Sport-jersey rolled his eyes at the question. "Like, somewhere my sweet prince awaits me?"

His friend slid his glass around the tabletop in a circle, making the ice clink. He didn't look up from under the rug of his hair.

"Okay, yeah, I mean I was hoping eventually there'd be someone.   You know ––" Sports-jersey's voice took on a mocking sing-song diction. "Somewhere, out there."

Sporty took a noisy gulp from his glass, pushing the ice away from his teeth with a pink tongue. The two gazed across the flimsy railing that separated the little tables from the rest of the sidewalk. 

After a long pause, Sporty released his breath in a puff and said, "I don't know how I found her, but I was looking for as long as I remember." 

His friend reacted with a single hair-flopping nod. They fist-bumped without drama, the glancing connection casual and unthinking.

Everyone knows someone who is irrationally (well, that's all in the perspective, right?) afraid of, say, legless reptiles or eight-legged wall-walkers.

​Not just slightly averse to these creatures, but seriously, panicky, clawing-a-way-out-the-window fearful.  

Each of my parents had one. For my father and his siblings, having survived a canoeing accident as children where they and their mother clung to an overturned boat while long strands of seaweed brushed their legs, the fear was snakes.

I never noticed Mumsie's issue until that first summer at the cottage. We'd gone to take a quick look at what they had purchased –– waterfront! as is! Bill Bailey blue! furnished with toys and musty furniture! –– on the shore of Lake Ontario. We ended up just staying all summer. Daddo went off to work downstate during the week while the three of us swam and read books and played with the neighbors (each according to her tastes. Mumsie was not much for running around pretending to be horses).

Naturally, given the body of fresh water, the long Northern summer days, and the untenanted nature of the cottage, there were spiders.  But it was a summer cottage. When sweeping, you directed the little pile of debris down that knot-hole in the floor in the hallway. On Thursdays, before Daddo came up, we'd eat ice-cream for supper. It was a Platonic ideal of summer cottage life.

Except for the spiders. One morning, we all scooted out of the house while Mumsie sprayed some sort of aerosolized poison. We must have been gone all day. Or maybe it was stormy when we returned, because while my sister and I, diminutive then, walked into the shadowy cottage without incident, our mother entered to a suspended carpet of deceased arachnids. All hanging at about eye-height from the ceiling. The horror. The horror.

Eventually, she dredged up a memory for me. "It might be this," she said, draping her paperback over her knee. "When I was very little –– on the farm in Springville –– I was playing in the creek."  [The word "creek" in the geography of rural northern Pennsylvania was pronounced "crick." A thing I miss from her.]

She turned her head in the same questing way as when she was trying to recall the details of a dream. "I was splashing the water with a stick and there was an enormous water-spider. I hit it and it burst open and dozens –– hundreds?–– of baby spiders spilled out."

Gulp. Okay then. 

My sister shares the distaste for spiders. We've often agreed that should there be an unfortunate single-car accident in her life, it's a near certainty to have involved a spider emerging from under the dashboard and landing on exposed skin.

​As for spiders?  I understand they won't actually kill me, but I find it hard to casually look away once I've noticed one nearby. I find their globular bodies shudderingly distasteful.

Be that all as it may. I actually meant to write about weird phobias. There's no shortage of oddity in the world.  And phobias are the most common of mental illnesses.

Mental illness. Huh. ​

​I've felt claustrophobia. Couldn't get into an elevator for two years.  It was a side-effect, I think, of a dreadful boyfriend and asthma.

Once I nearly fainted –– and me a farm kid! –– at the vision of a big splinter protruding from someone else's finger. All the blood and guts in the world, and I was about to keel over from a splinter. I couldn't even help her yank it out. 

But that's pretty mundane stuff. What's more intriguing is the fringier fears.

Mr. Linton has been fishing pretty regularly, though because of last summer's red tide, he can't bring anything home. Social distancing is easy on the water. 

And naturally, he has a lot of boat-work to fill his days on shore.  

The two 2.4 Meter boats (one fresh, one experienced) are slowly coming into alignment. Jeff's re-rigged the older boat so that it's indistinguishable from the newer one. Fresh paint, fresh lines, carbon-fiber bits and bobs. He orders stuff on-line and obsessively checks delivery times.  He splices lines while watching Bosch in the evenings.

Given that many of our upcoming regattas have been cancelled, he seems content.

And me, I'm always looking forward to a chunk of time in which to write but as it happens, I've been distracted by real life. It's hard to make up a story more exciting than the news right now.  

So instead, I'm doing a lot of reading (check out my goodreads shelf for the bookwormy details).

​And making stuff.

We're avoiding the grocery store –– taco Tuesday involved some freezer-burned ground beef that I might normally have donated to the fishes, but it tasted fine with the fresh greens from the garden –– and keeping our IRL social distance from the world. I've become a big fan of FaceTime right now for actual social interaction. Yay internet!

I'm hoping to settle into whatever this new normal is and get back to my keyboard sometime soon, but in the the meanwhile, as they say in one of my favorite movies, "Rule #32: Enjoy the little things."

Wishing you safety and kindness from here...

The event begins on the first Saturday in March from the beach at Fort DeSoto in St. Petersburg.  This year, because of the small craft advisory in place for breeze, the race started under a weather hold and Plan B –– which meant that instead of having the 100+ paddle-craft, catamarans, sailing vessels, SUPs, and windsurfers scamper into the sea at sunrise to the majestic caterwauling of bagpipes, not much happened for a couple of hours.  

The incessant checking of the tracker began, somewhat less frantically for me this year as our dear friend Charli Clifton had taken on the on-shore chase-car driver duties.  He had the trailer in tow and would be picking up the boat and team at the end of their trip –– we hoped in Key Largo. 

Spawn had many miles to go before sleep, many miles, but also promises to keep.  JT(Jahn Tihansky, aka Moresailhesaid) and my favorite skipper Jeff "TwoBeers" Linton are busy guys.  JT had airline reservations while Jeff's next sailing engagement started the following Wednesday (ooh! Merlin to Eleuthra!). 

They hoped that the northerly winds would hold and catapult them all the way down. But if wishes were horses, and horses could fly? You'd have to really watch your step.  

As they tracked down the coast, conditions continued freshy-freshy in the low-20's.  Spawn beelined across Tampa Bay with a reefed main and jib, and then threaded the needle of Passage Key and Anna Maria, hugging the shore. Some swim-bouys may have been seen on the seaward side of Spawn. Oopsie!

On the long swoop south east along the coast, the boys crossed tacks with stable-mates DC and SailorEd. Each team tried to gauge whether the breeze was better by shore or farther out. The jury never really settled on a side.

Because the conditions were so up and down, with the wind dying and then puffing a LOT, the Spawnsters set up their "triple rig." 

In the three or so minutes when the wind was lighter, JT and Jeff deployed the screetcher (a big, roller-furling jib with a free luff, ideal for either light air upwind, or off-wind work), and then as a black-beauty puff came barreling down on them, they'd quickly roll up the screecher and sail on reefed main and jib alone. When the puff passed, out came the screecher again...all the way to Gasparilla Pass (almost to Boca Grande).

Like downshifting for hills. 

Into Chockloskee at low tide meant an Abbot and Costello routine involving JT, knee-deep mud, a lost (and found!) shoe, and an attempt to check in without having a check-in box in play. A 100-foot trek through stinking saltwater mud for essentially naught.

The text he sent is telling: "Just left Chok. No lockbox ."   So many words go in that space between the x and the period!  

While JT was so employed, Jeff slowly and cautiously walked in the mud to turn Spawn around ("to get the weather gauge") for departure.  

Once they got JT back aboard and mostly de-mudded, our doughty crew shook out the reef, and proceeded with a favorable current and a tailwind. As a cheerful change of habit, no oyster bars jumped out and bit them.

At around 5, predawn, the leg to Cape Sable turned kindly. The boys were able to dry off and snatch a bit of shut eye.

They call it Cape Sable, but it's made up of three small bumps along the coast, each unnamed except as they relate to a person's progress (first, second, third...).  At the first cape, the wind was out of the northeast at around 8 knots. At the second, Northeast at 12.  By the third, KATIE BAR THE DOOR! The wind was blowing around 25 knots right out of the east.

We often remark on the speed at which the weather changes. For Spawn, in the course of 20 minutes, the conditions went from idle pleasure cruise to very heavy sailing indeed.  Knowing that they had the tide at least with them into Flamingo, the Spawnsters beached the boat before rounding the third cape.
​
They took down the jib and put up the smaller storm jib. They put the reef back in to the main. They reapplied unguent to their sit-upons and girded up their loins.

It took something like 5 hours to travel that final 10 miles to Checkpoint 3. The wind was howling from exactly the direction they wanted to travel.  The tide running against that wind made for yet another agitate cycle in their washing machine.

They ultimately decided to overstand the mark, sailing beyond Flamingo and then trying to skate downwind into the harbor rather than short-tacking up the coast.  Once they got to windward of Flamingo, they had a sort of slalom downwind course between mangrove islands.

Shooting along, hoping to reach a minuscule powerboat channel, they sailed right up to some standing seabirds working along the backside of some mangroves. Standing seabirds –– as any boater will tell you –– is a sure sign of impending land.  

Of course, in hindsight, it was a wise –– if bitter –– decision to stop early.  More than half of the fleet bailed out early. In discussions afterwards, the words "epic" "gnarly" and "nightmarish" were tossed about freely. There were triumphs and actual tragedies.  

But on our boat neither triumph nor tragedy, we are grateful to report. Another 24 hours of pounding upwind? The mighty Spawn never made a peep, never leaked, never balked, but the main bulkhead definitely felt the conditions.

And of course, next year, the Spawnsters will be clearing their schedule to make time for a day's delay should conditions require.  

For those hoping for an overview of the 2020 Everglades Challenge...that story is still coming. The team is safe, which is the main thing, and engaged in their next adventure. I hope to post a report early next week.  

Meanwhile, something completely different from that...

We spent a long weekend in Manhattan recently –– summary: a bunch of us were were going to Italy to celebrate Sarah's birthday. Along comes Covid19, and poof! Manhattan it is!

The gang took taxis and subways, saw shows and shoes, walked Times Square and wandered museums. It kind of felt like every activity was going to be retold with the preface, "Back before the Pandemic, you could..."

Anyhow, wandering at will through the chic-chiciest of boroughs, especially wandering with artistic types like my companions, made me look twice or three times.

A few highlights of what caught my eye...