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AMY SMITH LINTON

Bloggetty Blog Blog...

We Sing Willie Nelson by the Dashboard Light

6/24/2017

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Within four or six blocks from our driveway, one of us strikes up the song. We don't make a long performance of it, just a quick, twangy couplet. Off pitch, most likely, but in tune:

"We're on the road again/dee-doodle-deedle doh-dee-dee-dee."
​
It's kind of nice cap on the list-making, packing-and-stowing, what-else-are-we-going-to-need phase of a road-trip. It marks the start of a long book-on-CD (this time, Midnight Crossroad by Charlaine Harris), the continuing dispute with the GPS, and the best the snactitian can manage. 
​
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Sailing gear, clothes for hot-to-chilly weather, snacks, books on CD, stacking planters, miscellany.
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All the stuff, plus a birdfeeder, a small boat trailer (unassembled), fishing gear, a large cooler, small cooler, some buckets, chairs, sleeping bag, handtools, additional miscellany.
You know how in The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins has the occasional, intense longing to be home, with the kettle just beginning to boil? He goes on the adventure, but he suffers with homesickness.

I don't think I've felt that for years. I get home, unpack, and start climbing that Matterhorn of dirty laundry. I turn the hot-water heater back on, pay the bills, make sure the cars start and the refrigerator hasn't keeled over...but I'd be just as happy to bounce right back out the door and have the next adventure already.
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The Lost Sea Adventure
We're out and about (not to mention underground) for some chunk of time.

​I hope to write, but may miss a few blog-days.


So far, we are accident-free. Knock wood.


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So far, we've visited some buddies, actually stopped for barbecue lunch (!), and visited the delightful Craighead Caverns in Sweetwater, Tennessee for a Lost Sea Adventure.
Before winding our way home again this time, we hope to sail the Flying Scot NACs regatta, do a bit of roller coasting at Cedar Point (billed as the Roller Coaster Capital of the World), and wrangle some farm chores...
​
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Summer Reading Recommendations

6/16/2017

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A tall glass of iced lemonade beaded with condensation.

A pillow-lined nook on the porch overlooking open water or a garden.

The warm breeze carrying the scent of seaweed, or pine, or fresh-cut grass clippings. 

And some books.
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I had the enviable job for a while of reviewing new books for the erstwhile Tampa Tribune. I'd go into my editor's office with a big empty LL Bean tote and then stagger out like a bookwormy donkey. I'd review books that I liked and ditch the ones I didn't.  
 
As a job, it didn't pay very well, but I did get to keep the books.
 
These days, I don't gobble up piles of reading material. Even with the bounty of the public library easily within reach, good books seem thin on the ground.  When I do find one, I wish I were still writing reviews. Word of mouth only goes so far.
 
And hence, a couple of summer reading recommendations.
Ann Patchett Truth & Beauty, Joe Hill The Fireman
If you are a fan of Stephen King's apocalyptic masterpiece The Stand, let me humbly suggest Joe Hill's The Fireman.

The parallels –– each a brick-sized opus with a New England setting, a fatal plague devastating the country, a pregnant heroine –– are entertaining but not distracting. Both books take place in the near future and tackle deceptively complicated moral dilemmas –– as is the wont in apocalyptic fiction.

The disruption of society in Stephen King's 
The Stand sets the stage for a showdown with capital-letter Evil in the form of Randall Flagg. In The Fireman, the enemy is less showy (not a Big Bad, as Buffy would say), which gives Hill's suspense an edge: what does victory look like when the evil is not separate?
 
Hill's take on the calamity is not a super-flu but a fungal plague that sets its victims on fire. His descriptions are vivid, his pacing brisk (hold on!), and the characters reveal themselves with a nice, writerly economy.  

Hill's novel also offers plenty of cool cultural references*, and it's worth noting that Hill is the son of King –– a fact he didn't make public until he had himself earned a little success.  
 
*My favorite reference: the boat to Martha Quinn's island is the Maggie Atwood. Oh yes, that Martha Quinn. ​
The Fireman requires a chunk of time; and if you haven't budgeted some hours on the porch, you may have to forego sleep to finish the book. 

But isn't that what you're looking for in a summer read?

via GIPHY

If you've never read The Stand,  that's your other half of summer reading about the end of the world.

​What? You don't like speculative fiction?

Really?

Even though I think all fiction is to some extent speculative fiction, okay, okay.

​Try 
Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett.
It's not fiction at all but the memoir of the author's friendship with Lucy Grealy. Grealy, of course, wrote the Autobiography of a Face about her lifelong struggle with facial cancer, facial reconstructive surgery, and a longing to be more than her own appearance. Patchett is the award-winning novelist who wrote Bel Canto, The Year of Wonders, and Commonwealth.
Grealy and Patchett attended Sarah Lawrence at the same time and then were thrown together more or less by chance as roommates at the Iowa Writer's program.

Their friendship is marked by contrasts: mercurial, feckless Lucy and methodical Ann, both ambitious writers, so very unlike one another, and yet...and yet. Thereby hangs the tale. 


Patchett tells the story with the kind of unflinching honesty that at first shocks: chapter one introduces us to Grealy as she embarks on sexual adventure with a repellent older man.

Patchett's affection for Grealy, however, carries her readers beyond this to the enduring camaraderie and deep understanding that makes a friendship extraordinary.


I take it as a recommendation for the book that it was the source of quite a kerfluffle when assigned as the freshman reading book at Clemson University. (Friendship between girls not a suitable topic, evidently.) Likewise, I admire Patchett's sensible, kind approach to all things literary (just found her blog. Dang, she really is cool). 
"We were a pairing out of an Aesop's fable, the grasshopper and the ant, the tortoise and the hare. And sure, maybe the ant was warmer in the winter and the tortoise won the race, but everyone knows that the grasshopper and the hare were infinitely more appealing animals in all their leggy beauty, their music and interesting side trips. What the story didn't tell you is that the ant relented at the eleventh hour and took in the grasshopper when the weather was hard, fed him on his tenderest store of grass all winter. The tortoise, being uninterested in such things, gave over his medal to the hare. Grasshoppers and hare find the ants and tortoises. They need us to survive, but we need them as well. They were the ones who brought the truth and beauty to the party, which Lucy could tell you as she recited her Keats over breakfast, was better than food any day." 

From Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett

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The Would-Be Farm: What is That?

6/13/2017

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We spend a good portion of our time, we humans, trying to identify and categorize all manner of creatures, including one another. (Is that a boy or a girl? What kind of accent/haircut/outfit is that? One of ours or one of theirs?)

And, even when we can't identify, we sort things as either "good" or  "not-good."  

Any little kid can tell you that dolphins are nice and good, while sharks are mean and scary. 

via GIPHY


Many of our judge-y assessments are arbitrary and useless (dolphins are cute, sure, but they can be real jerks), still, I'm not above them.  

Demonizing a whole species (yo, squirrels! and yeah, you too, eight-legged freaks!) doesn't really make sense, but there it is.

​I won't argue about why 
the Lychee and Dogmeat Festival is so despised when Meat Week doesn't rouse the same ire, but in the interest of full disclosure, even a brief foray into research on those two carnivorous events has rendered me a touch yarkish. 
Anyhoo. ​

​Judging is arguably how we survived for hundreds of thousands of years of evolution: correctly id-ing food vs. non-food, sorting bad guys from among the good folk of the world, drawing clever parallels between similar things.
An open mind could result in a quick and messy death back then: Thag the cave-human couldn't hesitate in deciding if that Sabertooth lion was a puddy-tat or a predator. 

On the other hand, a closed mind might make Thag take against, oh, ferinstence, fire.  

​"Oh, I am NOT having any of that –– cooking. Eating raw root-vegetables worked for my folks, why should I go messing with a good thing?"

Meanwhile Goram, Thag's slightly more nimble thinking neighbor, is gorging on nips and tatties, and Goram's kid's are growing like weeds.

​Guess whose offspring will be studying genealogy a few hundred generations later?

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NOT a sabertooth. Just a Lynx. Sort of a housecat the size of a Springer Spaniel. Able to leap 12 feet or so and make off with whatever you put on the counter.
"What's past is prologue"* even with as spendthrifty a pen (keyboard) as this one.  

*This quote from of course, The Tempest. Act 2, with Antonio and Sebastian piffling away on shore.

And with the prologue passed, the point of my piffle:
While strolling through my tiny kingdom, I find myself not just trying to name the plants, but also sorting them by my lights as bad or good.  ​I spent a studious half-hour or so on figuring out what these four plants were. Each with a maybe yellow flower, each growing rampant on the Would-Be Farm. Each a familiar mystery.
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Right to left: the nettle is easy, but as it turns out, it's not common nettle, but Tall Nettle. The second is Garlic Mustard, then Cypress Spurge. And finally, with the dandelion-y leaves, Marsh Yellowcress. 

Tall Nettle (Urtica procerea) is a stinger: tiny hairs on the stem will give you a dose of formic acid and histamine that feels a bit like the bite of a fire-ant.  Dried, it's used to treat scalp problems, while traditional herbalists would suggest applying the stings to arthritic joints –– sometimes the cure is worse, wait, no, it does in fact work.
Nettle also nutritious: steamed or cooked as spinach, nettle is full of Vitamin A and calcium. So while I want to say it's a bad plant, it's got its good points too.

Garlic Mustard (Alliaria petiolata) is a garlic-scented member of the mustard family. Shocker, I know, with a name like that. Pretty solidly a baddie, although it's edible from top to toe. I will be grazing on this plant next spring, knock wood.

Cypress Spurge (Euphorbia cyparissias) is a recent (1860-ish) immigrant to the country. It's an ornamental that spreads rapidly. Its seed-pods detonate and can broadcast seeds up to five feet. Whoa. It's poisonous to horses and cows (but not sheep. Go figure.)  
​While the milky sap is poisonous to humans, it has been used to remove warts. That's something.
Cypress Spurge has some other traditional medicine uses, but I'm going to keep my gloves on and pull it as a weed. 

Marsh Yellowcress (Rorippa palustris) is a mustard and a cress, which is all to the good. It's native, it likes the boggy wetlands that stripe the farm, and it is edible raw (ooh! peppery!) or cooked (add a little olive oil and balsamic vinegar. nom nom nom). 

Is it ironic that I am basically re-discovering the common knowledge of my hunter-gatherer ancestors?
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Music Selections: Word Tacos

6/9/2017

2 Comments

 
Sometimes a person just needs a silly song in a different language.

​!Hay Machete!
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The Would-Be Farm: Antecedents

6/6/2017

3 Comments

 
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Once upon a time, the Would-Be Farm was buried under the Laurentide ice sheet. Then it drowned under great Lake Algonquin, and then it was wild open country.

For millennia, these meadows and rocky outcroppings were the stomping grounds for wood bison, wolves, and of course, the Iroquois Confederacy. (Jeff continues to keep eyes peeled for an arrowhead).

Then along came the Europeans with their pesky notions of land-ownership.


I'll gloss past the colonization. We know the basics: the French trappers and traders, the priests, the English settlers, the Revolution. Now, to zoom in to the details of that little corner of the world that catches my attention. In 1791, New York State was strapped for cash and land speculation was all the rage.

Leading to the Great Macomb Purchase of 1791.

This back-room deal sold off nearly 4 million acres of Northern New York for a whopping 8 pence an acre. Of course the sale was meant to encourage economic growth and settlement; the land was meant to be earmarked for Revolutionary War veterans.

Heavy sigh.

Nothing new under the sun: scheming and greed resulted in a solid scandal and several fortunes lost and made and not a lot of veterans hammering swords into plowshares. 
Namesake Alexander Macomb* was a fur-trader/wheeler-dealer, who, in the way of many a land speculator, found himself in the weeds:  even at pennies an acre, 4 is many millions of acres.

​He spent time in debtor's prison after the Panic of 1792. He was forced to do a bit of a fire-sale of his purchase, which is how Jefferson County ended up with a contingent of French aristocracy for a while**.


*Why, yes, his son was General Alexander Macomb, who lead the United States to victory at the Battle of Plattsburgh, which helped turned the tide of the War of 1812.

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**Indeed, these French fled their Revolution; many settled in the young US, but alas, as political tension with France developed, President Adams signed the "Alien and Seditions Act," in 1798, which basically repealed freedom of speech (no public speaking out against the government!), made citizenship harder to attain, and expelled foreigners. Oh the irony of the French Festival!  

​Heavy sigh. 
​
Some decades later, the Would-Be Farm took shape. Roads arrived, and someone drove a few hemlock posts to mark the corners of the property.  ​​

​
The earliest European owner might have put up a house. Some barns. Sheds. So might the next couple of owners (I have the title search in hand. Who knew that the Farm was part of Macomb's Purchase? I'm surprised by how interesting I find it. I never liked history class in high school.)

​But these days, the only remaining structure is an abandoned farm house. 
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I assumed it was a kit house, the kind that came unassembled via train car from the Sears Roebuck catalogue. (And you thought Ikea shelving is hard to put together––!)

After all, it’s a familiar, plain, elegant pattern of so many farmhouses in the North Country. 
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But as it turned out, assuming is wrong again: Sears’ kits really hit their stride after 1905, and this house is circa 1880.

I don't know what the design is called, officially –– vernacular architecture, maybe? with a splash of Neoclassical?  Maybe one of my clever architect friends can give me some more insight on how to best describe it.
Of course we toyed with the idea of restoring the old fella.

But it’s about 20 feet from the road. It's not especially charming. There’s a truly gruesome detached outhouse.
And most decisively, the underpinnings of the structure have come undone: while the topline looks good, the interior is all sliding into the foundation.

Gravity is not just a good idea: it's the law.

 
One day, when I am tip-toeing around in these sad little rooms, I might find myself hip-deep in debris alongside the porcupine that lurks in the cellar.

I always check to be sure the phone is in my pocket when I venture inside.
There is so much future to dream into reality with the Would-Be Farm: what else is it to plant a bunch of twigs but to wish an orchard to life?

But it's comforting to find out a little about its past.

To know, for instance, that the flowers (the iris and violets, hosta and columbine, lungwort and daffodils) probably came from this 100+ year span of women before me who cared for this farm: Julia and Harry farmed the land from their wedding in 1937 until 1980. Julia's mom, Georgiana was probably born on the farm in 1868, and spent her 80 years on this bit of earth. So nice to meet you! I hope you like what we are doing with the place.
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References and reading material

https://npgallery.nps.gov/pdfhost/docs/NRHP/Text/64000558.pdf
 
​https://www.britannica.com/topic/Iroquois-Confederacy
 
http://www.omdhs.syracusemasons.com/sites/default/files/history/McCormick,%20Daniel.pdf
 
http://www.mlloyd.org/gen/macomb/text/mansion.htm
 
https://archive.org/stream/ahistoryadirond00clubgoog/ahistoryadirond00clubgoog_djvu.txtwas w
 
old abandoned buildings of northern new york http://oabonny.com

http://mlloyd.org/gen/macomb/text/amsr/wt.htm

​https://localwiki.org/hsl/Macomb%27s_Purchase

​http://www.ushistory.org/us/19e.asp


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