October!

September is history! Pun intended.   At least it has been for me.  Adjusting to a new routine with lots of history reading and papers and stress and intellectual stimulation.

But it is not all about me.  Can you believe how fast these last 4 weeks have gone by?  The month started, and we were outside working and playing and swimming, and now we have the heat on, and fires in the fireplace.  This weekend, we started shutting down the summer, moving the grill into the garage and perhaps putting away the lawn mowers.  Time marches on.

The photo is another sign of mourning.  It was Peter's last jar of Mom's chili sauce, which we enjoyed last week end when Mary and I headed down to NJ to check in on the recuperating Janet and her live-in caregiver, Peter!  We had burgers and cleaned out the chile sauce, and Peter found a couple of store bought replacements we will have to use.

Janet is (and has been) surprisingly upbeat about her leg and loss of mobility.  She's going to work, to the theater (a cast party!), to stores and restaurants.  It's a lot of work for her but it is admirable all she is doing.  We helped do household chores, and enjoyed lots of conversation about the election and school and jobs. Peter and I went to a soccer game and we watched "The Hunger Games."  Johanna was arriving the day we left, so more help was coming.  She and Sean and a former student of Peter's had gone Saturday night to see Bruce Springsteen at the Meadowlands.  Or whatever it's called these days.  And, prior to that Johanna had spent the week on Martha's Vineyard, at Janie's house.

Mary came back and got a call for substitute teaching, which she did twice this week.  A start.  She came to Northampton one night as I had to stay over, and she checked out her old college haunts,including her old rental, just steps away from the railroad tracks.  Oh to be young.

She has been busy as well doing landscaping around the house, so we are filling in the beds near the foundation.  Hope the deer leave it alone.  Mary saw a wolf when she drove in the driveway one day, so maybe we won't need a dog to keep the deer away.  But, what would you rather have, a wolf or deer?  Or Little Red Riding Hood?

Annie was supposed to be going to Myanmar today for a brief vacation.  Wow.  She had looked into changing jobs, but then decided to stay where she was.  Margaret and Andrew had tickets last week to the Patriots game in Baltimore.  They made some new friends with wierdos with purple, spiky hair.  And Joe spent last weekend at Ann Arbor, where he saw a college football game.  He sounds busy at work.  Good.

This weekend, we had a houseful, with Marj and Lew, and Marj's mother here for the night.  Friends dropped by for birthday cake.  We think the big attraction is Bubbles, our new, very social kitty.  Two weekends ago, we had another houseful with friends of Mary's from her school in Maryland, and brother Dan, who came up for his high school reunion!  We love visitors!

The leaves are turning here, and we're almost at peak foliage.  The rain has made things a little dreary but what's not to love with the change of seasons.

Hope you all are well.  Love from up here.

 

Catching my breath

Wow.  Has life taken a turn.  For well over a year, I have talked about going back to school.  Researching, applying, interviewing, and planning.  Mostly gabbing and babbling on about it. I now have three classes under my belt, two papers written, four books and too many journal articles read.  I thought retirement was an adjustment.  The history is interesting, with a lot of variation, but the lifestyle is so far a little stressful.  Poor Mary.

Part of the adjustment is that I am now a Kindle guy.  I like not carrying around all the books and paper.  The verdict is still out if note-taking and finding stuff is easier.

Somewhat related to that, we took a day trip last week up to Fort Ticonderoga, making good on a long-awaited interest in seeing both Lake Champlain and this colonial fort which changed hands repeatedly between the Iroquois, the French, the British and the revolutionaries.  We spent more time in the gardens of the old residence/hotel adjoining the re-built fort. While in the fort museum, we found ourselves drawn to the maps showing Pittsfield (Pontoosuk) and the story of Col. John Brown, a Pittsfield resident who led a successful attack on the fort at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, but was killed in military action a year later.  I happened to read about this phenomenon of "personalizing" history in The Presence of the Past, one of the books I read for school.

But enough about me. How's Janet?  We see on Facebook lots of pictures; she's back at school (not sure how) and has lots of people signing her cast.  I think she's now half-way through,  What a long haul.  We spoke with Peter last weekend, and he said he spent the day doing laundry.  We plan on going to Princeton this coming weekend, so Peter anyway could catch the Springsteen concert.

Speaking of which, we got a text from Margaret at the DC Springsteen appearance.  Later we saw on Facebook Jeffrey was there too.  Did you see each other?  They both gushed over the four hours of entertainment.  

We had a long talk with Joe, who is settling into long hours at work.  He still has time for college football.  Do you miss grad school?  And Annie is contemplating a new job.

What else?  Did someone mention a cat?  Yes David did.  We settled on a name for our new boy cat, who we can't help calling "her."  Bubbles, in the tradition of naming pets after characters in the Wire; it's close enough to a dog we used to own, and of course, we will call her/him "Kitty" anyway.

John and Marilyn returned from their long trip out west, after a week with their entire family in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, they headed for Georgia, New Orleans, Houston (for the space center), Austin, Ft. Worth, Colorado, Mt. Rushmore and then home.  I probably missed a few spots, they took in a lot of territory and a lot of our country.

This weekend, we hosted Dan Boyle who was here for his high school reunion.  He joined a full house of two of Mary's former teacher colleagues who took a long weekend to come up and enjoy the Berkshires.  Fun.

It was a week of sadness as well, reading of the events in Libya and other countries in that region.  I did not know Chris Stevens, but I did recognize him, probably from seeing him in the hallways and cafeteria.  He sounded so much like he was doing the right thing, in reaching out to Libyans, and showing them the face of the country that we know, but they don't.

On that sad note, we sign off, with love from over here.  

Home to Fairport

As you have heard by now, we have returned for Fairport and to a very suspicious cat - where have they been? "I'm well fed, but where have my owners been, and gladly they didn't bring back any new "family members that I have to break in".

The quick version of the story of the trip is 8,199 miles, start to finish. Along the way, we saw all of the Great Lakes on the same trip, we crossed many rivers, including the Niagara, The Soo, the Mississippi, the Missouri, The Yellowstone, the Galatin, the Madison,the Powder and Platte Rivers, the Firehole River, the Frasier, The Columbia The Colorado,the Mississippi (again) the Ohio and more. We traveled in canyons and to mountain tops (12,400') to be exact),we saw rain forests, and deserts,we saw evidence of volcanic eruptions (My. St Helens) and earthquake landslides - on the Madison River. We met couples from Lancaster England to Canberra, Australia. We watched killer whales, bale eagles, ospreys, grizzlies and wolves,bison and elk;. You could say with some exceptions we saw wildlife ranging from Antelops to Zebras (yes zebras in a pasture along the interstate in Kansas. We visited some old Dickson family destinations, Elkhorn Ranch, Soldiers Chapel on the Galetin River,and Indian Hill and Indian Hill Church. As with any trip, there were highlights, times or locations that just stood out, and will become high on the memory list, before we begin to loose ours. Throughout the trip we both acknowledged that it was a trip that we should have done for you boys (Matthew and Jeffrey)years ago. It is a big and glorious country, not constrained by regional pettiness. It needs to be experienced. And, while we're glad to be back, be warned, we're thinking of our next trip.............

Winding down

Driving up to Vermont last week, we saw the tell-tale signs of summer ending: golden rod, cooler nights, glimmers of yellow on the occasional tree, tired,drooping leaves.  Sounds like me. 

 

We went to Vermont to visit the cabin of Charlie and Annie, which we had last visited in 1981.  Shortly after we got there (4 miles from the Canadian border), a couple of small, blond boys appeared from the cabin next to ours.  I remembered small blond-haired kids 30 years ago, and sure enough these were the children of the small boy and girl 31 years ago.  On the long drive home, we passed by Claremont, where we spent the first year of married life but didn't have the heart to go into town.  Nothing there for us, but bad memories of a tough teaching year.  We were familiar with the exits on highway 91, which we used to take to both Pittsfield and Pomfret for weekends.

 

On our minds up there were Peter and Janet who were toughing out their first couple of weeks of life with a broken leg.  Mary had initially gone down with them to help the transition.  Janet saw a doctor on Monday and got a cast, albeit a purple one, and a walker.  That seemed to help.  Peter set up their den to make moving around easier, and Janet was camped out in their first floor guest room.  Johanna came home after Mary left to help out.  We spoke to them last Friday night and they have survived their first week of a long ordeal.  Judging by her Facebook output, she is either bored or getting a little better.  Hope it's the latter, but I can understand if it's the former as well.  Peter's entry which follows has more details. 

 

We got nice photos from Margaret who had gone with Andrew and D to Chincoteague for a weekend of camping on the beach.  Looked like everyone was having fun, but especially D.  Andrew had been in Tampa for the run-up to the Republican convention and even had two by-lines in the paper last week.  And this weekend, Margaret's in Charlotte NC awaiting the opening of the Democratic convention.

 

We also got a few photos from David and Paula tracking their progress through Lake Louise, Jasper area of Alberta, Vancouver and now Oregon.  Paula wrote saying they were having a great time.  

We talked to Joe who tried his hand at cooking crabs last weekend, and was preparing for the opening of college football this weekend! 

 

Our garden just passed its peak.  We have had a good year for beans and cherry tomatoes.  The lettuce was not as full as last year, and we still can't get the hang of carrots.  The big, beefy tomatoes were being eaten by some critter right before they ripened, so I picked them when they were green.  And we have some green/orange/red tomatoes on our window sill.

 

This is my last week before classes start at UMass.  I have been going over there a couple of times a week to work with students applying for overseas scholarships.  I have received the course syllabi for the two courses I will be taking, and there's a lot of reading.  I have started, and the material is very interesting, but there's a lot of it.  I got the jitters.  Margaret mentioned she has also signed up for a class at GWU.

 

We know Annie had a long weekend of vacation down in Hong Kong last week.  She sent us a photo with her new computer.  Speaking of which, I broke down and got a Kindle.  Now I just have to figure out how it works. 

Out in Dundee we hear that Claire is captain of her volleyball team, has a new oboe.  Daniel is sitting out football season in anticipation of basketball.  What happened to soccer?  .

 

What else?  We saw Woody Allen's new movie (not as good as Midnight in Paris), we had a mini-Peace Corps reunion as the director from Gabon was vacationing at Jiminy Peak, and we got a kitten!  

Love from over here.