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Each year, I find myself taking photos that I hope will catch the visual essence of the sweetness of the season. This year, of course, I've snapped any number of pictures of the farm, but really, summertime in the North Country? It's about cottage life, boat-rides, and the Water (whichever body of water, it's always capitalized: The Lake, The River, The Beach). For over a hundred years, my family has spent weekends or weeks or the whole season on the granite shores of the St. Lawrence River.  The scent of old life-preservers and clean seaweed.
Sleeping porches. The "whap" of a screen door pulled shut by a long spring. Pine needles. Lichen.The lapping of water under the wooden dock. And the inexorable march of Labor Day...
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 It's a very good Scrabble day when I can play "jonquil."  In the world, I rarely call these flowers anything but daffodils.  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.
For many years, my book-loving Mumsie used to tell me about stories she remembered but hadn't had in hand for several decades. She had an ongoing quest to find a copy of The Swish of the Curtain, which she'd adored as a child. It was, she told me, about a group of theater-mad children who staged shows in their English village. She looked for it at every used bookstore, but when I told her I'd located a copy (ah! early days of the internet!), she shied away from actually getting it. She said she didn't want to find it like that. She admitted she'd rather not test her memory of its charms.
Naturally, in these internet days, there are online services that can help. For a couple of bucks, Loganberry Books helps the hive mind focus on your need. The Library of Congress has a page of suggestions for how to find lost books/lost lyrics and more. The LoC site links to a veritable warren of rabbit holes, by the way, if you are so inclined (declined?) to potter around chasing other people's trails. Like this Reddit page, this specific one, and so. many. more. <shakes head vigorously>
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.
One of our elders has what's known as "White Coat Anxiety." Whenever confronted with a doctor or medical professional in a clinical environment, her blood pressure goes sky-high. I worked with a woman who couldn't stand scissors. We'll call her Peg. Another co-worker, Liz, a capricious but observant creature, had noticed that Peg invariably moved books and files so that a pair of shears on a colleague's desk would be hidden from her view
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...  Frankenbarricade?  Elmo say "Please don't collide with delivery bike!"  No, please don't wake!  I looked. It's a thing we've enjoyed every now and then now for decades: an afternoon slouch on the couch watching whatever dope crap Jeff selects.  Back in our early courting days, we were en couchant watching some Voyage of Sinbad or another. You remember the kind of movie: claymation, sparkly costumes, "exotic" locales somewhere in the hills east of Hollywood. In any case, our heroes were bundled to the teeth, trudging across a featureless frozen sea when Jeff pipes up with, "Oh-oh, watch out for the giant walrus." Me: What? Jeff can flatten the affect right out of his voice so while it seems like a warning, the phrase comes out completely without urgency. He spoke to the television screen again, "Oh, no, look out for the giant walrus," Me: What in the world are you talk –– And at that moment, on the little rounded screen of my apartment's television, an enormous walrus broke through the styrofoam ice and speared one of Sinbad's less fortunate companions with a long tusk. My astonishment was complete. I said, "You've SEEN this before?!" Honestly, watching it for the first time seemed faintly ridiculous, but it did have novelty value going for it.  Little did I know that Jeff's tolerance for ridiculous movies was nearly as deep as my own ability to grouse about them while nestled next to him on the sofa.  It's kind of a match made in heaven.
After a considering moment, I came back with "I'll get fruity furniture, like chaise lounges, and I just don't want any lip about it." We both found these demands reasonable. And so it has gone.
The boat is large enough for a single person, who sits inside the hull with not much more than a noggin showing above decks. As if Paul Bunyan had taken to the high seas, or as if a person had inexplicably shrunk down into a shoe.
My childhood bestie, Care, reminds me from time to time about how it used to go down. She'd come next-door at the cottage on a summer morning and ask if I wanted to do something: swimming, running around á la wild mustangs, making miniature ballrooms in the field, catching rabbits.  I remember spending those summers perpetually in motion, but evidently there were too many times when my answer was the dreaded, "Nah, I'm reading."
 So far anyhow. Some years I read less, but mostly I read a lot. Quickly. I go heavy on novels, light on memoirs. I snack on essays and take sparse sips of poetry. I almost never read biographies. (That 5th-grade assignment on Betsy Ross <shudder>) Generalized history gets a pass, but I do like specific topics (The Black Death in 1348, anyone? Rats in New York? ) and anything natural history-ish. Stacks of books sprout wherever I perch: volumes I mean to read, books I have started, tomes I use for reference. When Mr. Linton and I downsized, I culled about a third of my collection and still needed to rent a scissor-lift to get the rest of them up the stairs. Sidebar Truth: While waiting for the delivery of the scissor-lift, and knowing the advantageous tide would wait for no book, Mr. Linton trotted the literal ton of books up stairs on tireless feet without a single complaint. Bless him. I have reading recommendations the way pharmaceutical reps have sample packs and cronuts -- with roughly the same goal. Minus the commission.  Goodreads, which is connected in the cross-platform sales way of the modern world to Amazon.com (which is to say, Amazon owns the "social cataloguing" website), has become my preferred way to keep track of titles. Instead of jotting down book recommendations on scraps of paper and then scotch-taping them someplace handy, a user can type in the name of the book (or a close approximation) or the name of the author and save it to the shelf of Books to Read. Were I a slightly more nimble consumer, I could obtain any book with a few keystrokes, but my connections are not so tight. Diversifying my stream: I read physical books that I buy. I read physical books that I borrow from the library. My sister (bless her!) gave me one of her extra Kindles, so I read on that, or on the iPad. We listen to books on CD or as podcasts or digital files. I whittled a few titles off the "Books to Read" list recently and discovered one of my favorite bookchoices for the year. Some friends may be getting a copy of The Fly Trap by Fredrik Sjöberg
Like all the best memoirs, the book –– slim, but promising to continue in another two volumes –– is not so much about Sjöberg's insects, but about what he has learned from his pursuit of them. I should be more embarrassed at my giddy fan-girl response to Sjöberg's story, but as my companions will attest: I cheerfully read aloud whole pages for their enjoyment as well as my own. My mumsie used to call it "burbling," the sort of cheerful, not-terribly-important chatter that doesn't –– strictly speaking –– require an audience. As nice a term as any, and onomatopoeic to boot. A propensity to burble was perhaps one of the reasons she sent me to kindergarten a little early. I've always had a lot to say. I've tacked away from sailing as a topic to burble about (about which to burble?) for the past couple of months here on the blog, but it doesn't mean that I haven't been writing about sailing.  A start of the Lightning Pan Am Trials at Davis Island YC. So for those sweet readers who tell me they enjoy this sort of thing, here are a couple of links to the Flying Scot webpage.
I've been doing an occasional column about boat names there for my Bar Harbor buddy Ned Johnston (Hi Ned!), who edits the class newsletter. "Sing a Song of Sixpence" Page 18 of https://www.fssa.com/files/scots_63_4.pdf "From Another Shore" page 16 of https://www.fssa.com/files/scots_63_3_web.pdf "THAT Name" page 12 of https://www.fssa.com/files/scots_63_2.pdf "What's in a Name" tag 11 of https://www.fssa.com/files/scots_63_1.pdf |
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