From White to Green

I'm still in culture, or should I say, climate shock.  After this winter, it seems strange to look out the window and see green.  It's hard to think of opening the door to the porch and leaving it open.  But, it's here and it will be this way at least until September.  Wonderful.

The green has meant we have been busy getting gardens ready.  Mary's flower gardens around the house look great, but some critter has already started on her flox.  I have one more row of carrots to plant and then I can take a break and just watch everything grow.  

There was a lot of green along Joe's 26 mile marathon route this weekend.  Not sure he had much reason to take it all in, at least after mile 6 or 13.  One man at the finish line asked me if it was Joe's first marathon.  He then offered that this was a particularly hard one to do for the first marathon, with all the hills.  The biggest hill I think started at mile 25.  But he finished it, and has bragging rights.  I had signed up for the half-marathon and toyed with the idea of running even though my toes and my back had stopped me from training.  I chickened out the night before.  Congratulations, Joe.  Margaret wrote him and asked if he pooped in his pants.  We drove home in the same car with him and can reliably affirm that he did not.

Annie was up here as well for the long weekend.  She is getting ready for her cross-country train trip which she starts this week.  Another marathon.  She is planning many different stops, including Chicago.  We hope to see her when we are in Seattle.  Yes, next week we fly to San Francisco for a Peace Corps conference, and then take advantage of being on the west coast to drive up to Seattle.  Only two states away, but two full days of driving.  We miscalculated since we thought it would be like driving from DC to New Jersey, also just two states away.

Other big news were graduations!  In case you missed all the Facebook photos her proud parents posted, Annie had two graduation ceremonies, one for Teachers College and then one for the whole university.  She carried the banner in to the cathedral for her psychology cohort of 100 people!  And Maura also had two graduations, one for her nurse pinning and one for the school.  Congrats to both.  Mary went down for Maura's graduation, and then stayed on to swim in a memorial for Dan at the YMCA, that Annie also came up to swim in.  Patrick, Kathleen, Maura, Elsie and Mary Fort joined for that event as well.  

Annie hopes to see the Dundee folks on her way out west.  Andrew and Lur too will be traveling shortly after that, off to Myrtle Beach SC for some deserved R&R.  Lur, by the way, is taking a pottery class.

Margaret traveled to Pittsburgh this week for work, and I told her to sabotage anything related to the Pirates and the Steelers. We also see on Facebook California travel by Melodie and Jeffrey.  Fun, fun, fun.  And a little work. 

Nature notes - The quiet Sunday morning on the porch was interrupted by a quiet, but very healthy fox, wandering by.  He eventually saw me and ran off, but it was the closest I've been to a fox.  Funny thing is that the cat decided not to go out for the whole day. Wonder if he could smell what I could only see.

Summer reading this year includes lots of Shaker books, another Melville novel, four Shakespeare plays (finished my class on the histories) and hopefully something fun.  I thought that would include listening to Great Expectations in the long car rides back and forth to Amherst.  But I am not sure if I have any expectation that I will finish that one.  

We had some birthday celebrations - Matthew and Sean!  Congratulations.  And whenever Matthew has a birthday, it means Peter and Janet have a wedding anniversary.  Hope everyone had spectacular celebrations.  

We close with two photos of hair, Daniel at his prom and Pop on his honeymoon with Mom.  Am I the only one to see the resemblance in style across generations?

No better brothers

Do you know what a power snap is? Do you know what a dun is? Do you know which trout tolerates the widest range of temperatures? Have you ever seen a tippet (hint: it's not a bird)? Do you know what a Royal Wullf is? Ever tied a surgeon's knot? A nail knot? Do you know what a ferrule is (hint: it's not a lizard)? Have you ever held a Hardy Zenith? How small is a midge (the one with the nasty hook on it)? Done any tying with deer fur? Where is your Hendrickson? What kind of back cast do you do? Have you ever wanted to shoot line? Flourocarbon or monofilament? Have you used a tie-fast? Did you learn the rule of 11? The rule of 4? Do you know why is there a piece of red yarn tied on the end of my line?

Do you know the sublime feeling that comes from standing in the middle of a lovely stream dappled by sunlight and making a perfect cast to the far side and watching it drift behind the targeted rock?

Well, I did, and I do, and I have. What a transcendent weekend. John and I took an intensive two day and three evening fly fishing course at the Joan Wulff Fly Fishing School at the southern end of the Catskill Park, in a lovely meadow and mountain setting way out of cell phone service (thank goodness for that). It was very intense but also relaxed, about 25 people, most beginners but some better. We had five instructors, and Joan Wullf herself, a legend of fly fishing. She and her late husband just about invented the modern pursuit of fly fishing. She spent a few minutes with me and showed me exactly how to get my cast perfect, and the light went on and I am hooked, as they say. Very nicely organized: lecture with demos, then practice at one of the two ponds outside, another talk, more practice, practice tying knots. Talks about trout and their feeding, and what flies to think about. I thought it was funny that it wasn't until late Sunday afternoon that they told us what to actually do if you hook a fish. And one of the instructors tried to hook one of the stocked fish in one of the ponds, and although they were throwing pellets in and several fish were feeding, none took either of the two lures. Even teachers have bad moments.

This was a birthday present from the three best brothers anyone could ever ask for. It was the real deal, no frolic, worth every minute and sore muscle.

John and I opted out of the pricey Inn accommodations and meals near the school and stayed in a simple cabin about 20 minutes away on a pretty stream. We each brought a home cooked supper – thank you Mary for that great marinara sauce – and ate breakfast at the Roscoe Diner, where they also made sandwiches for our lunches. It rained Saturday afternoon, so I practiced in the rain, but hey, it's fishing. While it would have extravagantly enjoyable if I had gone by myself, it was an added bonus to spend time with John.

So a thousand thanks and more to David, John and Andrew. Talk about a gift that keeps on giving. David, get ready for Mountain Springs to show your two fly "toddlers" more of the lore.

Happy Mother's Day

Here's one from the archives.  Take a look at the shoes and stylish black socks.  A poster for all that mothers do out of their love.    

​Surely there must be a mother's day song to go with the flowers and cards and love and bottomless gratitude.  We will have a quiet day here, with rest and gardening and newspapers and coffee and maybe even a nap or a bike ride.  We are ready for one, as we had a whirlwind visit yesterday from Marj and Lew and Marj's mother.  

We went from winter to summer in 3 hours it seems.  It sure is nice, but we don't want to hear any complaining about the heat until at least the end of May.  It's so nice to leave the house without a jacket or boots or gloves.  We have taken advantage with a lot of yard work, and Mary has been busy prepping flower beds and re-arranging and of course keeping the local nurseries afloat, single-handedly.  Our project today is to plant a weeping cherry tree at the corner of the house.

Lots of academic news this week, with Annie and Maura finishing their course of studies!  Final papers and exams done.  Maura graduates this coming week and Annie on the 19th. Congratulations.  Annie will have a good long six weeks off before she starts her job.  You earned it, chica.  When this gets posted, Margaret will only be hours away from finishing her semester.  And Claire must be getting close to the end of the semester.  Celebrate all.

Travel is a big part of these letters.  And, we have the first member in the family to visit Azerbaijan.  I couldn't even remember where on the map it was.  Joe came and went for a quick visit this week.  I will leave it to him to describe the charms of that country.  We made travel plans for the first two weeks of June to go to San Francisco and then head up to Seattle by car.  I've never really been to California, except for 2 San Diego day trips and one unexpected airport stop in SF.  And Margaret and Andrew got their tickets to South Africa for August.  

David and Paula spent a few days in New York City this week, taking advantage of some consulting work for David to go see the King and I at Lincoln Center.  David highly recommends it.  They are doing some infrastructure work to their house (gutters and soffits - I just found out what those were.)

Also highly recommended was a concert that Andrew and Lur went to featuring Steve Winwood.  Andrew also passed around a couple of photos of Daniel at his prom.  I think in the next letter, I will find a photo of Pop and compare it with Daniel's prom picture if only to see the genetic carryover of the hair!!

Peter and I found each other watching the same Mets game on ESPN one night, which the Mets won.  They look like they are for real, though I am not sure Mets fans are quite ready to embrace the confidence yet.

Mary is off swimming this morning, and I will settle down to read some more about the Shakers.  Fascinating group, and I have a ways to catch up with all that David knows on the topic.  He had a head start with Darrow School being on the site of the central Shaker families for over 150 years.

So, here's to all the mothers who read this, and even those who don't.  Thank you, we love you, you are the greatest. 

My new best friends

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I've always dreamt of working on a farm, so at the ripe old age of 60-plus, dreams still come true.  It's not exactly farm work, they have real farmers at Hancock Shaker Village, but I do spend a fair amount of time in the barn.  It's baby animal season there, so there are a lot of children coming to see the calves and lambs and piglets and chicks.  In fact, the piglets above are two days old, and I saw the last one a minute or so after it was born, even before the farmer.  The other day, I told Mary I spent the day picking up chicks.  It's supposed to be about the Shakers and their history, but for now it's mostly about cute animals. One thing is for sure, my nap time has dwindled, even though I spend only two days over there.

It is also supposed to be spring up here.  Yesterday it snowed most of the afternoon, and today a little more.  It even was sticking for a while yesterday.  I think the snow tires will stay on a little bit longer.  I had been hoping to put in a photo of our 3 brave crocuses, but they met a cruel fate.  This is just not the climate for daffodils and tulips that are fooled into sticking their first stems out of the ground, only to get beaten back down, never to recover.  The dandelions have a much better go of it, unfortunately.

But it is baseball season, and we are pleasantly surprised by the Mets, who seemed to have quietly put things together.  We also see photos on Facebook almost every day from Jeff and Melodie at Nationals' games.  Must be nice to live a couple of blocks from the stadium.

We did our annual burn this week of brush that we had accumulated over the past year.  This time, though, we recruited some help, in the form of the three Ghanaian boys who Mary is tutoring at school.  Not surprisingly, we were done in two hours, just before the serious rain started to fall.  It was kind of fun to see the young boys (sixth and ninth graders) use a hand saw.  They tried to make it work like a machete, and broke them both.  That's why it was only kind of fun.

Big news this week was a birthday, Peter's 65th.  Hard to believe.  The photo collage on Facebook that Johanna put together were of happy times.  Aunt Georgia also had a birthday, her 94th!

Mary had the week off, and she headed for Rhode Island to see Marj and Lew, and Mary Fort and Maura. She saw Patrick who has moved back from Colorado, and reports all is well with everyone there. John and Marilyn went down as well for the day, as they had to leave their house for the estate sale they were having.  They have been busy getting everything ready for the sale, including unloading quite a bit of furnishings, of which we were the happy recipients of a few, including new kayak holders - my third try. Unfortunately, their buyer backed out at the last minute, so they're back to square one.  Still they're heading back down to Florida next week. 

We spoke with Joe who's training for the Berkshire Marathon, that will take place on Memorial Day.  Margaret and Andrew went up to New York last week to see Annie and a few friends.  Both Annie and Margaret are still in crunch mode with end of semester requirements.

When he's not consulting on thorny insurance issues, David is keeping up to date on college lacrosse, which seems to be taking place in snowstorms this spring.  Andrew and Lur went out to Hope to see Claire last weekend in a concert.

Finally, as if I didn't have enough to do already, I am taking a course on Shakespeare's history plays through the lifelong learning institute - very stimulating, and with no papers, very enjoyable.  Mary has been heading up a free swim lesson program for the month of April that her team is putting on.  And guess who one of the start students is?  Me.  Although, I did overhear my personal coach tell someone that I had a poor kick.  He's almost right.  Actually, it's terrible.

With that, we close wishing everyone a healthy and joyous week, or two.

Love from up here.  

April come she will

Happy belated Easter.  Happy opening day of baseball.  Happy to see the snow melting.

Happy to see posts from Peter and Andrew of their updates from spring break.  Andrew also started the rounds of college tours with Daniel, heading over to Michigan.  Did I say college and Daniel in the same breath?  Yes,  Hard to believe.  Before we know it, it will be college tours for Auden and Donald.  And over in Fairport, David had spent a few days in Albany doing his commission work.

We had a full house this Easter, and happily so.  On Friday, we needed two cars to pick everyone up who came in on the same train over in Hudson New York, as you can see above in the photo. We were happy to welcome Leonore, Joe's friend from Portugal, who has just moved to Washington.  

We rushed home to dinner where our friends from Lagos, Peter and Jan Lochery, joined us.  They were up here from Atlanta looking for houses, having enjoyed their stay with us last summer.  And they put an offer on a house in Richmond and it looks like it was accepted. They have a house in Wales where we stayed two summers ago, and now they'll have a U.S. base, in the Berkshires.

John and Marilyn came over the next night for dinner.  They are weeks away from closing on their house, and are spending much of their time here cleaning out their house, and giving away its contents.  Serious downsizing project.  I made Grandma's Easter egg cake for desert, which we ate a day before, since we knew we'd be too stuffed from our Easter dinner at the Red Lion Inn.

We actually worked off some of the eating and imbibing as some of us went for a hike in Pittsfield State Forest, and Joe and did some running, or at least Joe did with his 18 miles and I managed to shuffle for 8 miles.  There were a couple of serious games of Catan, I think it's called, a board game that seems like part Monopoly, part Risk, part SimCity.  But no Oregon Trail.  Another treat was the choir at the Easter service in Pittsfield.  From Africa.  Who woulda thought?  Andrew and Margaret went shopping at the Lee outlets, and we also watched Wisconsin upset Kentucky but only to lose in the final game.  Too bad.  And we watched Annie and Margaret try to squeeze in some homework for their courses.  

We had just seen everyone the week before, with a quick trip down to Washington and back through New York on the way home.  We took advantage of an invitation to a "house concert" at the home of one of Mary's former teacher colleagues to stop in and see everyone.  Since we had to be down mid-day on Friday, we headed out late Thursday to see how far we could get.  And guess where we stopped?  Hightstown.  We had dinner at the Americana Diner and saw Meadow Lakes - they still have not torn down the buildings where Grandma's apartment was.

Among other news is I have a new job,  I started today, as an "interpreter" at Hancock Shaker Village.  I hope I did not get in over my head.  It's for just a couple of days a week, but it looks like fun.  I gotta lot to learn.  David, any tips?

Peter sent along the other photo from his trip to Florida.  This is cousin Rell, who looks so much like her father, especially holding a big fish.

That's the update from here; hope you're all well, healthy and happy.  Love




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Sunshine!

We are back from our week plus a day in Florida. Here are some things we saw and did. (We were upgraded to first class on the way down: Janet "I could get used to this." Me, too.)

Friends are forever. We stayed two days in Siesta Key, a funky island community on the Gulf Coast, with Steve and Judy DelViscio. Steve was a Princeton roommate and he and Judy moved to Florida to go into the real estate business in 2005, just when the market tanked. They have a nice house in the highest point in their neighborhood – 5 feet elevation – and are doing much better now. We had a nice supper in town, which boasts that it has not a single chain store or restaurant. We also watched the Princeton women's basketball team beat U. of Wisconsin-Green Bay in the NCAA tournament. We toured the John Ringling house in Sarasota, a fancy palace on the water, but more impressive was a huge diorama (in a separate building) depicting how a circus would arrive by rail, get set up (with all the extras like dining tents, makeup tents, practice rigs, etc.), put on the show and then break and leave town, all in one day. It's the work of one man.

Family is forever. We spent two nights in Naples with Janet's cousin Nancy Byrne Reinhart and her husband Peter. They live in a huge gated and high-walled condo community south of Naples proper, still under construction. We spent the day walking around a large arts fair that closed most of the town's main street, and then had lots of delicious Florida blue crabs at a crab house. Naples has the largest concentration of millionaires and the largest concentration of golf courses (80) in the country. It absolutely reeks money and lots of it. About every three minutes a jet would fly over downtown on its way to the airport. All day. All private jets. Not my life, but the area is rapidly growing.

We also spent two nights at Aunt Georgia's spacious golf-course-side home in Stuart, and spent a lot of time with Rell, her son Jacob and Sarah. This is a nice area of the state – nearby Port St. Lucie is the Met's spring training complex – and all are doing well. Georgia is recovering from hip surgery; she said to Janet "My leg disappoints me." She has round the clock care and her daughters look after her, too. She'll be 94 in a few weeks. Sarah lives in a gated community about 20 minutes away and does a lot of painting. Rell has recently bought a house on the St. Lucie River and takes her canoe out on the river, teaches yoga several days a week and is off to India for a month to work on her knowledge of and devotion to Buddhism. Jacob is a great guy who will graduate from Cal Poly this spring and go up to Seattle to work for Amazon. Great restaurant dinners both nights.

The Everglades may not be forever.

We spent two great days in the Everglades. The original plan had been to spend just one day and then get up to Port St. Lucie to take in a Mets spring training game, but we were glad to have the additional day in the Everglades. I had always thought of this as a dark swamp, but it's not. It's a seemingly endless sawgrass prairie that is wet or damp depending on the time of year, and on the Gulf Coast, an area rightly called the Ten Thousand Islands. We took a boat ride around the islands and saw lots of dolphins. We hiked in an area called Shark River and saw lots of alligators, big blue herons and other exotic birds, striped turtles, and other wildlife. We took another boat ride into Florida Bay, at the southernmost part of the state and enjoyed watching the highly acrobatic ospreys dive for fish and pelicans trolling along the surface of the water. We also took a ranger-guided hike and learned about the gators and birds. I just finished a book about the onslaught of development that continues to degrade the area and adjoining Big Cypress, which is a real swamp.

We stayed in a motel in Homestead, and ate a marvelous genuine Mexican dinner in a dark hole-in-the-wall place.

Money, money, money. On our way from the Everglades to Stuart, we stopped off in Palm Beach to have lunch and to visit the Flagler Museum. On the two block area where we parked for lunch, we saw almost nothing but large Mercedes, BMWs, Lexuses and yes, five Rolls-Royces or Bentleys, four of them convertibles. Across the bay we saw a huge collection of humongous yachts, most of them much bigger than our house. Henry Flagler was the original business partner of John D. Rockefeller in Standard Oil of New Jersey, and he built a large Beaux Arts mansion on the Palm Beach waterfront as a wedding present for his third wife. Very, very, very fancy. It was later turned into a hotel and was threatened with demolition, but a niece of his bought it back and $12 million was spent to restore it.

     Well worth the visit: we saw how the other .001% lived then and how they live now.

A day that will forever live in – well, infamy is too strong, but certainly dismay. On Monday, March 23, in the morning I found out that I lost my Supreme Court appeal, 3-2, the majority opinion a completely dishonest pastiche. In the early evening, we watched the Princeton women lose to Maryland.

Overall, a very nice trip. Florida is very very flat: Jacob says the highest elevation in the entire state is 600 feet up in the panhandle. Gated one story communities and subdivisions are absolutely everywhere, interspersed with strip malls. Staying with family and friends is the best way to see any place. Also, I did learn that until I own a Rolls-Royce convertible, I do not want to live in Florida.

Dundee Update

What a week! First, Claire came home for spring break, but a day late because she had car trouble at Hope and had to wait a day to get it fixed. Then last Friday evening saw the Hope symphonette group play at a rural church north of us. Very impressive.

Daniel started physical therapy on his foot, the good news is that there is no tear. The orthopaedic surgeon found out through conversation that I had gone to Ripon, and he mentioned that a close friend from high school went there, and I knew him well. 

Lur is still volunteering at the area hospital on the oncology floor, and she loves it. We decided to rent a raised garden plot at the hospital to grow vegetables and herbs, and whatever is too much, will donate to the area food pantry. We went to the first meeting and were told the do's and don't's. Rule #1: Clean up your mess!

We volunteered at the local St Patrick's Day parade. The little town of East Dundee had over ten thousand people show up. I did crowd control with Daniel, and Lur was on the podium. She volunteers each week at the Village historical site, so she had an "in". One of our local bars ordered two thousand pounds of corned beef, and when we went by later in the afternoon, the place was packed. 

Claire had some friends from Hope come stay with us for four days. Lots of laughter, baking, movies, a day in the city, laundry, cooking and we got to hear them practicing music. A treat.

Lur and I got together with some college friends and got home at three o'clock am. We have not done that in a long time. The next night we went downtown at the Old School of Folk Music to see Tom Paxton and Janis Ian. Incredible. Some great old songs and Janis Ian has a stunning voice, and both are great guitar players. The day before I received an old album of Tom Paxton's from Amazon that I used to listen to all the time at Lawrenceville. It seemed to have the same scratches on it. I told Lur that I might of bought my own album back.

Claire went back to Hope yesterday which was good, because last night we got six inches of heavy snow. I hope it did not reach Michigan because Daniel and I are going up there this week to look at colleges.

A great week. Lot's of really good food. Great music!

Look closely and you might see Lur!