This week, walking back from the lake with Mary, in the evening, in the fullest of summer, I wondered why there wasn't a pause button. These great days are going by too fast, and we need to spend a little more time right here. She is, as I write, driving back from dropping Annie and Greg off at the train station (an hour-plus away.) They had come up for a weekend in the country, away from the city. They are both having pretty intensive internships this summer and getting a lot out of them.
They packed it in, with only a weekend to get it all done. Yesterday they hiked almost ten miles, joining a friend along the Appalachian Trail. We picked them up and went to Jacob's Pillow that does a free, outdoors dance performance each Saturday and had a small picnic. After that, we returned home for 7 seconds, and then they (I went to bed) went up Mt. Greylock for a stargazing event. Today, was quieter: waffle breakfast, canoe ride, shopping and then back to the train. Wonderful to see them. They also got a chance to see John and Marilyn who stopped by today after their golf game. They had spent a few days on the Cape this week with two of their grand-daughters, Natalie and Sage.
Oh, and we had a week-late birthday celebration, on Friday evening. For her birthday, Annie had a day at a bar, with people stopping by throughout the day. Margaret and Andrew were two of those people, as they had come up from DC for the occasion. And Johanna also stopped by to celebrate. It's a far cry from the pool parties she used to have.
The big news is Joe is back on this side of the Atlantic. It sounds like he has had a whirlwind couple of weeks, leaving and then settling back in. He is full-time now on the China desk at Treasury. Not much to do there, probably. Actually, for all that involves, it looks positively tame compared to Ukraine, Syria, Middle East and Iraq. We long for the days when China currency valuation was the big news. Anyway, it's nice he's back, but he was fighting a bad cold, probably from all the extra effort to wrap things up at the end of an assignment.
I spent some time on the phone with brothers this week, mostly to make plans for our weekend in Cincinnati in early September. Andrew got tickets behind the Reds dugout for one game, and behind the Mets dugout for the other Andrew sounds like he has a long list of things to do for retirement, including unpack boxes that he brought back from Meadow Lakes with him a couple of years ago. Peter sounds busy at work (sorry). David is unable to join us as he is getting ready for a presentation at a seminar on worker compensation fraud the following week with the New York attorney general's office. He and Paula are also eagerly awaiting the arrival of young Donald, just a couple of weeks away. I imagine so are Tina and Matthew! And Oliver!
Our garden is coming in, and we have stopped buying lettuce and blueberries. Got a few more weeks before tomatoes and beans and squash come in. We even have a bumper crop of raspberries, at least ten times more than last year. That means we have had about 30 raspberries total. Mary has been expanding her flower beds, which are looking great, even if the deer have chopped off a few of her perennials.
She has also started her summer tutoring job, working with three Ghanaian boys who have had interrupted schooling. There is quite a growing group of Ghanians and West Africans in Pittsfield. Surprising, especially given the cold.
I am frantically working on a couple of history projects. This week, I completed a video for a presentation, on the preservation of the old library in town. You can see the 7 minute video by searching for "Preserving the Old Athenaeum in Pittsfield" on youtube. I am also working on a website tour of the mills in Pittsfield, which is still under construction:
milltour.org. Hope to have it done before the end of July. And, I finally got my thesis approved from UMass this week - I had been correcting some formatting issues that the graduate school thesis committee caught.
On a final note, I got for my birthday a National Geographic DNA analysis, and the results came in recently. I will try to put together a synopsis for this letter - but here's a little teaser: remember those pictures of Pop at his wedding when he looks a little Italian? Turns out he has a fair amount of Mediterranean in his background, much more than Grandma, who is almost all northern European. Mary, on the other hand, is 97% British Isles. Go figure.
Well, happy July. Enjoy these great days. Love from up here.
