Moving! Boxes!

Tomorrow is a yard sale in the little community in which I live. Okay it's a mobile home park, but really upscale, all right? Since I'm moving just the bare necessities - and happy with that - ecstatic, really! - there is a lot to offload, and what better way than to join a park-wide yard sale. All those things that I don't have to pack - please buy them! But just three hours of reaching into and out of boxes, and my back is aching! I've put all my quilting stuff on my bed, so I still have to deal with that before I sleep. From the bed to the floor.

Thank you, Barbaranne, for helping me today and tomorrow, too. 

Signs of Fall

Although the weather remains hot during the day, without a hint of a nip, the nights are now cool, and it suddenly is dark earlier and earlier. There's a path that Jenny Lind, XieXie and I have made, by taking one step at a time twice a day for two years. XieXie's catlike tread doesn't leave much of a mark and besides he wanders off trail more than Jenny Lind and I do, creatures of habit that we both are. This morning, I was surprised to see the path completely buried in oak leaves. Surprised, because the oaks are still very green, and because it happened so fast. 

Is this not only a weather change, but a sign that we are embarking on a new path?

Murphys Creek Park

Memories to cherish.

 This is Murphys Creek Park. The first picture include the little waterfall (about a foot tall, maybe 18 inches) and has the gazebo and bandstand in the back. The second picture is the creek with its bridge, taken from the steps of the library (below). At the top of the steps is one of many Celebrated Jumping Frogs of Calaveras County.

In the summer the creek is full of children, wading, inner tubing, splashing. It's deep enough to be a lot of fun, and shallow enough to accommodate young children with their parents. It's also shallow enough to warm the water, which starts out as snow melt a few thousand feet up the hill. School started this week, and now the creek is empty.

There will be one more First Friday Concert in the Park next week. Different restaurants, stores, caterers prepare an $8 picnic meal, and we all sit on benches, lawn chairs, quilts, and listen to great local music, and some of us dance. That sounds like I'm one of the dancers, but I'm not. It is lovely to see couples who have been dancing together for decades, teenagers, young children, all out on the open dance space. 

Reading

Look to the Mountain has been read, with great nostalgia for New Hampshire. It was completely unfamiliar to me, after all these years, and I enjoyed being in it this time, more than I did the story, as I recall I loved when I was much younger. Place names are always magical. Maybe because I have moved so many times, the names of streets, towns, landmarks are the unbreakable ties, threads that weave my life. In the book, the main character was given a piece of land to farm, and on the deed, it said "100 acres more or less." It was explained that once the community grew enough, the land would be surveyed, and if it were less than 100 acres, he would take enough adjacent land to make up the difference, and if it were more than 100 acres, he would give back in the same way and in both cases the parcel would be of his choosing. The land was chosen with this in mind - an adjacent good piece of land as a possible addition, or an easily lopped off hilly piece to give back.

My grandfather bought his summer farm from a family named Littlefield, and it had been in the Littlefield family since it was awarded as a Revolutionary War bonus. That's the story. The deed was supposed to say "100 acres more or less." Now I wonder if that phrase didn't come from the book, or was it an original deed with that wording on it, and coincidence that the wording is exactly the same. Thus is history made.

Grandaddy named the farm Hill Acres Farm and as a child I was sorry that he didn't name it Littlefields. In fact, it is comprised of many little fields, so the name would have been apt. Just over the bushes from the farm house is the Littlefields graveyard - a beautiful spot. Debby and I spent hours there (where the grownups wouldn't find us) reading the names on the graves, sharing our secrets.

Tonight I find myself not knowing what to read next. I started Dr. Rat, and it was too grim, written by a lab rat, who deftly describes all the horrors I've never wanted to imagine. Dogs are in it too. I took that one off my Kindle quickly. And started another bookbub.com book called Pam of Babylon. That starts off with adultery; shut that down quickly as well. I've got some books coming from the library - Open and The Tender Bar, both memoirs or autobiographies. (What is the difference between memoir and autobiography?). When they come in, maybe tomorrow, I'll have to read them first - I only have two and a half weeks here! I also have a book on order, Snatched from Oblivion, by Arthur Schlesinger's ex-wife. 

So tonight, what do I read?

Monkey Brain

I hear Buddhists talk about the monkey brain, and I know that I have one. It is running around in my head even right now, reminding me of things that I've forgotten, and then reminding me again when I've again forgotten. It's making new plans even as I set the old ones in place, changing our mind, canceling appointments maybe, making new ones. And we wonder that we have a slow time quieting for sleep.

Another moving tip. Don't wear flip-flops when you're carrying things. I thought of this one all by myself as I took trash bags to my car, down five or six steps. Wearing flip-flops. So I stepped very carefully, and make it to the car with grace and safety. Then, on the way back, I stumbled on my flip-flop toe and fell, sort of, up the stairs. Bent my finger enough to take aspirin. This morning in the shower I was scrubbing my toes to get the dirty spot off and when it stayed, I realized it was a bruise. 

Come on, monkey brain, let's get some sleep.

Wheels have dug in!

There is beginning to be progress. The spinning wheels have taken a grip on the road. I am, as usual, somewhat embarrassed at the accumulation of projects, fabric, books, clothes, shoes. Two bags of trash will go to the dump tomorrow morning (and I will miss that dump - it's just not a big city item), and a lot is ready for a yard sale on Saturday. I have sworn that I would never do that, but never say never, they say.

Here's a table full of mostly fabric, but some office supply too. Yes, the table can go, and the chair. Are there some readers out there who would like to stop by on Saturday? There will be treasures.

Oh, and yes, my friend, Maresh Girl, I will not move any wet plants. In fact, I will not move any plants at all. Which reminds me to go turn off the water outside! I do look forward to not pouring water wastefully into the ground. It's beginning to be cool now; feels like summer is almost over and fall is just around the bend.

Spinning my wheels

It has got to be officially over, my wheel spinning time. The boxes are waiting (in the car) and my household goods are not going to sort and pack themselves. I remember many moves.

Many places in Cambridge and Boston after graduation in '62. I think I generally borrowed a car and threw stuff in. One time I recall wrapping everything in a sheet bundle. 

Boston to San Francisco, 1967. I packed everything, including my cat, in my VW convertible and drove across country. For the first few years I was in SF, I didn't pick up much stuff, so moves were still easy. 

There was a move in San Anselmo (Marin County) that was from one house to the house next door, so everything was carried. My first husband, Mel, exhausted from carrying furniture - by this time we had accumulated furniture as well and stuff. He saw some plants that needed watering, and got a jar of water, and tripped over something and fell and cut his wrist quite deep. We went to the ER to have him sewn up. When we got home, I called first bath, but as I was getting ready to soak, my water broke, and we drove into San Francisco where our son, Will, was born at 4:30am. The whole labor I was holding on - for dear life - to Mel's bandaged wrist, and he never flinched. 

Many more moves after that, I finally graduated to a moving company, but this one my son, Mathew, and a friend of his, are moving me. I won't quite be down to just a VW load, but I am moving to a 650 square-foot one-bedroom apartment, and I'd like to furnish it sparely. It is time to let go of most things that surround me, and move and live with mindful simplicity. 

Last trip to Stockton

My afternoon started with an iced espresso from Gold Country Roasters as I took off for an appointment with my psychiatrist in Stockton, California. Stockton is the nearest city to Murphys, and between Stockton and Modesto, both Central Valley towns, that's where we in the mountains go for big city supplies. Stockton also recently declared bankruptcy. Today there was Peet's coffee, Trader Joe's, and the shoe repair. It's a big deal, going to Stockton; about an hour's drive through the foothills into the valley itself, on narrow, two-lane winding roads. They've just straightened out the twistiest part of the twisties on Route 4, but many challenges are left. Can I drive at all without putting on my brakes? That means anticipating all sharp and often badly canted curves, and using downgearing. Do you want new brakes or a new transmission? It's a tossup. Oh, and tire wear.

My Birkenstocks had been at the shoe repair since June 1. I tried to pick them up twice, but landed on their holiday or vacation both times. They didn't charge me shoe rent, because I'd paid in advance. Whew. Another bullet dodged. Life in the wild west. Trader Joe's is the mecca for all Californians to shop for inexpensive Trader Joe's special brand of groceries. As I thought about how close I will be to TJ's in Burbank (five minutes), my usual stocking-up TJ's shopping came down to a bag of Oh my! Omega trail mix, two kale edamame bistro salads, and five chocolate bars. It would have been foolish to drive over an hour for those items. A stop at Safeway for cheap gas - $3.999 a gallon. Just two weeks ago gas was $3.749 locally and now it's 4.099. How far does one drive sanely for cheap gas?  I've never done the math. Last stop Peet's coffee, for a great cup of iced decaf espresso and a new glass water bottle to hydrate my new Southern California life.

The first time I was ever in Stockton was almost exactly 20 years ago. I was in my third day of sobriety and my daughter had started college in Northridge, Los Angeles County. She had driven down on the Wednesday, and her step-father and I drove the balance of her stuff on the Saturday, and drove back on Sunday. I was not driving, nor was I firing on all cylinders on Sunday, and didn't notice that we had missed the right-hand turn for the left-hand freeway I-5, and were barreling up 99. The freeways diverge, going north, just before LA. This in the days before GPS. They diverge widely, and when 99 gets to Stockton, they are about an hour apart. A u-turn and several foggy hours later, we made it home. 

Today will probably be my last trip to Stockton.

p.s. Back to Look to the Mountain, my sister and I decided that Coruway is probably a variant on Chocorua that was in use in the mid 1700's. Oddly, last night I was musing on the Indian spirits in the mountains, and their anonymity causing the name change, and a few pages later in the book, the main male character was also musing on the Indian spirits of the Mount Chocorua! Eerie.

Look to the Mountain

To make a correction right away, Mount Chocorua is not called Conway Mountain in the book - that was my tired eyes misreading.  It is called Coruway Mountain. Perhaps the names were changed to protect the anonymity of the ghostly denizens of the New Hampshire ranges.

I did start reading the book last night and so far, absolutely nothing is familiar. The page I read as a very young child of course I wouldn't expect to recall, but I read the whole book one summer in my teenage years. One of the joys of being in New Hampshire in the summer was the luxury of being bored, and being bored always led to adventures, including a hike up Mount Chocorua with an uncle and some cousins. Debby and I took a solo hike once, when we were of driving age, on Moat Mountain. We set some sort of record of beating the estimated climbing time of maybe an hour and a half, and in fact climbed it up and down in six hours. That was only one of the times we came home late, to the wrath of our grandmother. We couldn't understand parental worry at that age - we were invincible, and we went to bed stifling our giggles. 

Look to the Mountain was published in 1942, when I was two years old, and is the copy I am reading was reprinted in 1994. The earlier printings are surely still sitting on the shelves in summer houses, waiting for a bored teenager to pick them up. And to maybe pick them up again, 55 years later.

Still reading

Drinking Closer to Home turned out to be a little gem, in spite of my usual embarrassment of the '70's. I couldn't get a solid grasp of the characters. They kept slipping through my fingers and I couldn't hold on to who was whom. It was my first free book from bookbub.com and I would call the site an unqualified success for us Kindle readers.

The other day, I mentioned a book, Look to the Mountain, an historical novel about the area in New Hampshire where I spent my summers. There are two things I need to clarify. First, I said that it was the first grownup book I ever read a whole page of. I got sidetracked, and didn't go on to say that I didn't understand any of what I read, but I recall reading every word - I suppose it would be called "sounding it out." The other thing is that I guessed that the mountain was Moat, because I couldn't remember the name of the mountain that I really think it is. I recalled that name today, as the book was delivered - it just popped into my head - Chocorua. From out farm, directly in view (when the view was "out") was the Presidential Range, running east and west, with Mt. Washington dead center. Facing Mt. Washington, with all the other presidents alongside, to the left is the Sandwich Range. I think of it as running north and south, but that's probably confused childhood directions. 

I will take a minute here to open the envelope the book arrived in, and to find the White Mountain Guide that should tell me the directions of the ranges.  Be right back~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~Okay, I'm back. I couldn't find the White Mountain Guide but maybe I will when I pack my books to move - some of my books. I'm taking very few this time but I will take that, and let you know what I find about the reality - or not - of my geographical memory. I did open the package containing Look to the Mountain, by LeGrand Cannon, Jr., and am foolishly pleased that I finally remember it right - the mountain was Chocorua, but named Conway Mountain in the book. I wonder why he changed the name. Now I need to choose between this book and my newest bookbub.com book, which is titled Dr. Rat and is about, yes, a rat who's a doctor.

Gold Country Roasters

I mentioned in an earlier note that I had spent a morning knitting and drinking coffee with my friend Barbaranne in a new incarnation of a Murphys coffee shop. And I mentioned that I'd forgotten to take a picture of it. Today, I went again to have coffee at the Gold Country Roastery, and today I thought of using my cell phone to take a picture of the big, brass roasting machine. They have put it in a room by itself with windows for observation. It looks like a small antique steam engine in a train museum. They told me that I'd missed the morning roasting.  Today there were five friends stopping in for coffee in the early afternoon. I had a orange-tangerine fruit smoothie, and then a decaf double espresso over ice to take with me for my mid-afternoon appointment.

This is one of many photographs of Murphys that I will take before I leave. 

Today

It feels late, perhaps because I got up earlier than usual today - thank heavens. I've been sleeping much too much, and missing four hours of each day. Today I missed less, and filled the remaining hours fully. 

I have a moving date! My son Mathew will be coming with a mover friend on the 14th of September, we will get rental truck and fill it with what I'm taking (a whole lot less than what I'm leaving, I vow), drive to Burbank on the 15th, unload and drive back on the 16th. Perhaps faster turn-around than I would like, but it's worth it to have Matt with me. Now I have just about one month to get organized. I will probably write this kind of blog more often, to memorialize my new life. 

So many new faces, places, endeavors. At the Burbank Senior Artists Colony, I could have a class or activity three or four times a day, easily. There's gym, swimming (and aquatic zumba!), anti-aging exercise, chorus, drawing, watercolor, painting and writing classes, movies, lectures, meditation, drum circle and every night at 9 is something called Verva watchers club. That's a mystery. Sounds to me like camp! And I will write about it.

I'm reading one of my free Kindle books through bookbub.com. Rarely do I know anything about the book, just what's blurbed, so I choose randomly what strikes my fancy. The book I'm on now is called Drinking Closer to Home, by Jessica Anya-Blau. It's light and funny and a little embarrassing how much I identify. 

Camps

One summer, my aunt and uncle, Barbara and John, went to somewhere exotic, like Bermuda, instead of summering as usual in Conway at Hillacres Farm. They put their two children, Debby and John, into the sister and brother camps, Waukeela and Waunalancet, on Crystal Lake. Even though my sister was there, I was lost without Debby for the summer, and at the same time jealous that she'd gone to camp without me. Still, I knew by a child's keen sense, that she was miserable at camp, and so was Johnny. We four cousins belonged on the farm, together, reading, washing dishes, making daisy chains, picking blueberries and wild strawberries, swimming, playing in the barn, on the swing that our grandfather had hung from the rafters three stories above our heads. There were two notched boards for seats; one for one person and one wider for two. The wider one was the most comfortable for one, we reached our arms out wide for the ropes. There were many things that could be done on that swing. One cousin could twist another, twist the rope all the way to the barn roof, and then the one in the swing would spin unbelievable dizzying for minutes, and then not be able to walk. One cousin could be pushed on the swing; pumping ourselves could never get up to the height that our feet might, if we were brave, touch the barn window over the big wide rolling wooden barn door. Debby and I sat together on the swing and sang, for hours. One of our favorite songs was a translation into French that we had made of Che Sera Sera. We liked songs with repetitive lyrics that we could sing in the car as well, to the despair of the grownups in the front seat. A good one was "He wore black denim trousers and motorcycle boots, a black leather jacket with an eagle on the back." We were not little girls at this point, but budding teens, fascinated with French and with bad boys. Another game the four of us played in the barn was Train in India. The back of the barn had a rolling door too, like the front, but much smaller. Some sumac grew next to that door, and we could sit on the door sill, dangle our feet over the side and pretend we were on a train in India. When we were much smaller, our grandfather parked his station wagon in the barn. He would stop at the house first, to unload whatever purchases he'd come home with, and then sometimes we would be given the magical treat of riding down to the barn in the station wagon. If we wanted to swing, sometimes we'd have to ask that the car be moved.

The summer Debby and Johnny were at camp, Mr. Harper, the man who planted lollipops in the sand at the South Conway Club beach, became Santa Claus for a Christmas in August party in the barn for Debby's birthday. There were lots of girls from Waukeela with Debby, and it felt wrong. Debby and I were, gratefully, to have many more summers to on the top of the mountain.

More reading

Last night I stayed up late and read all of Joan Didion's Blue Nights and it was wonderfully sad and blue and beautiful. She mentioned The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby; I bought it right away and started it today and plan on staying up to finish it tonight. It's not long. I had the movie on my Netflix list for a long time, but it's not now on instant viewing. I have no recollection of why I thought it interesting, for I knew nothing about it. 

It is the most eloquent memoir I can imagine. Bauby, who was editor-in-chief of Elle magazine, had a stroke in December of 1995, at the age of 42. After 20 weeks of coma he came to to find himself in locked-in syndrome, and was able to move only his left eye. With a method called partner-assisted scanning, he used an alphabetic system, with the alphabet reordered to have the most used letters first, whereby he could communicate by blinking when his partner reached the letter he wanted. Through this method, with with the assistance of Claude Mendibil, he was able to dictate the memoir of his illness, letter by letter. Bauby died three days after the publication of his book in March of 1997.

Books

Summer means reading, always. In New Hampshire, there were stacks and stacks and shelves of books everywhere you looked. And the Conway Library was a cool haven - it was a Carnegie library, and felt exactly the same as the one in Baltimore, in San Rafael, in San Anselmo. Going to town always meant a trip to the library. As well as ice cream at Stone the Druggist. Marble library, marble soda fountain, marble museum; marble cooled my childhood summers.

In the living room in New Hampshire, couples were curled up on couches, the rest of the grownups relaxed in chairs, and they all were reading. The four cousins were in the kitchen washing dishes; one to wash, one to rinse, one to dry, one to put away. Inevitably, when we were just finished, the grownups would come in with the tray of coffee cups. There was always a puzzle going in the living room, too, and a windup record player for old 78's. Jonah and the Whale, Mairsy Doats and Dosey Doats, Nebuchadnezzer, and the children in the firey furnace. The first grownup book I read a page of was in that living room - it was Look to the Mountain, and was about the settling of the area in the 1700's. The mountain might have been Moat Mountain. Okay, I've just bought a copy of it from Amazon, so I'll be able to tell you what mountain it was. Back to my early reading: I picked up the book, and turned at random to a page, and sat down and read it. I had no idea what it was about (I wasn't much beyond Fun with Dick and Jane), but I read a whole page, and felt a wondrous accomplishment. 

So I'll catch up here with my 2012 summer reading. I finished the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, and loved it. I did catch on to the atheist allusions, but as with many athiest writings, I came away with a sense of awe for something that is even more mysterious than I thought before. Then I read Prince of Tides, which was powerful and dark and brutal and lovely. That one came to me as an example of writing memoir as fiction. It's a fascinating concept. I just got Joan Didion's Blue Nights from the Murphys Library and started reading it earlier this evening. Another memoir book, of course. I hope I haven't already forgotten any books that I've read in the past month.

A book find for Kindle readers: bookbub.com An email a day brings me many free or nearly free books. It's an embarrassment of wealth.

What books will I take with me? What will the Burbank Library be like? 

ps I mailed in my signed lease and check for the first month's rent plus small deposit and I bought moving boxes and tape and paper.

Sherwood Forest

This photo was definitely taken before 1949 or '50, when my family bought a house in Sherwood Forest, on the Severn River in Maryland. But I'd bet it was taken only ten or 15 years before. It's only the clothes of some of the subjects that show the time a little. The porch could have easily been our house, and the rocking chair couple could have been my mother and father.

We went to Sherwood Forest instead of to New Hampshire, where we'd spent every summer since 1938, the year my sister was born.  Neither Lucy nor I was in favor of the idea, since Conway was home to us. (I think the other day I said Center Conway by mistake. Center Conway was our mailing address, but we were really in South Conway, and the beach with the lollipops was the South Conway Club. This writing experience is showing up all kinds of holes in my memory.) But my mother had been ill, my grandfather had recently died, and Sherwood Forest was close to Baltimore, where my father worked. He could spend all the summer with us, and not just a few weekends. 

Sherwood Forest was a kind of a family camp, but with houses rather than tents. There was golf, swimming, sailing, dances, cocktail parties for the grownups, and a full schedule of sports and games for the children. Lucy truly didn't like organized activity by then and got a job in the little snack store. I didn't like the feel of the program either, but I can't recall why. The golf was kind of dumb, my group felt, so we played one hole, and on the basis of those scores made up the rest and went to the snack shop, whose name is almost on the tip of my tongue. The swimming was interesting, since the Severn is full of stinging jellyfish. They're not fatal, but a good sting would raise welts and put an end to the day's fun. The swimming area was netted and that kept most of the jellyfish out, but we all got stung sometimes. 

Lucy and I shared a room on a bottom floor, and it was reached by a ladder, so grownups rarely came down. We were thus able to keep a horde of forbidden comic books that we bought sometimes instead of candy. My father would drop a board down the ladder to wake us up. Rude or funny? I could never tell. My grandmother came to visit for a week or two, and we all played Canasta every night. I can't remember how to play now, but it must be a good game to captivate a family from 10 years old to 60 or so. My grandmother's age was always just old. I wonder if my grandchildren think of me that way now.

There were only two Sherwood Forest summers, and then we returned to New Hampshire as before. Hill Acres Farm was the name of the revolutionary war farm that my grandfather had bought from the last living Littlefield. I wish he'd named it Littlefields, but I wasn't born yet and couldn't express my opinion. New Hampshire was where we belonged, with aunts and uncles and cousins.

Butbank Senior Artists Colony

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/15/for-healthy-aging-a-late-act-in-the-footlights/?emc=eta1

Little did I know that a week after my application for residency was approved that my new home would appear in the New York Times! The article told me much more than I already knew about the project, and I am much more impressed even than I was before! I share the article with you, so you will know too how much gratitude I have for the gift that has been given to me. I can't remember if I sent you this link in an earlier, not, but this is the Artist Colony's website:

http://seniorartistscolony.com/

Songs keep running through my head - 

When you walk through the rain, keep your head up high...
Look for the silver lining...
Tomorrow... (from Annie)

I am a living miracle, and conscious of that fact every moment.

Baltimore Museum of Art

I asked my sister why she didn't go to Camp Whippoorwill. She said, "You know, I was the one who was not supposed to like organized activities." That says a lot about us, the labeling of people even at that early age, in our family and in the 40's and 50's world in general. I was always labeled the opposite of whatever was her label of the day, thus I did get to enjoy lots of organized activities, not knowing that maybe my sister might like to as well. We did very little together, although we were only two years apart. 

But she reminded me that we did go together to the Baltimore Museum of Art's summer art day camp. I'd forgotten it, and what I do recall now are a few bright shards of memory. First, it was cool in the museum. In Baltimore in the summers before air conditioning, being in a cool place was a physical thrill. It was probably 99 degrees outside, and that much humidity, and walking into the museum was treat enough for the whole summer. The rooms were quiet, marble, huge, cool. There was Rodin's Thinker outside, and his Ballerina in the entry hall. The Thinker was just there, but the Ballerina, with her tulle skirt, seemingly made from bronze cloth amazed me. I wanted to touch it, but I had been taught to hold my hands behind me in museums as well as in stores. Much later, when I saw both statues in other museums, I was astounded. I thought they belonged to Baltimore only.

I remember none of the works of art that I must have produced during those out-of-time days in the basement of that museum. I only recall being covered in colored chalk at the end of the day, and drinking cold water from the water fountain and watching the color swirl from my face and hands down the drain.

XieXie

This is how XieXie deals with the long triple-digit days. I had to rouse him to go for our six o'clock walk. 

Camp Whipoorwill

My first camp was Whipoorwill, a Girl Scout camp on the Magothy River in Maryland. I was young enough that when the daily penny postcard from my mother didn't arrive, I was silently, grievingly, sure that she had died. We lived in tents, with a floor of slatted wood. One of the cruelly felt games for naive newcomers was 52 Pickup, which consisted simply of taking a precious pack of cards and tossing it on the floor. We must have played other card games, like Go Fish, or War, but 52 Pickup remains a hollowness in my stomach. During my first year, I learned to swim, and graduated from red cap to yellow cap, and was able to swim in water deep enough to require real swimming. The second year, as my mother drove me from Center Conway, New Hampshire, to Maryland, for camp, my mind was filled all the way with the absolute knowledge that I'd forgotten how to swim, and that I'd be sent back to red cap. New Hampshire was were I'd always spent my summers, and Girl Scout camp was an exciting, but worrying prospect. 

I was a child of silent worry. In kindergarten, Miss Hoyt had a worry bird, made out of a pine cone and painted clothes pins, that we could talk to. Miss Hoyt understood about silent worries. If I could be persuaded to come out from behind the easel that held in private wonderful jars of tempera, I would gravitate to the worry bird. My pictures were always painted to the very edges of the paper.

Of course, I remembered how to swim, and my worries were abated by being a returning camper. I felt more reliance on my friends. I was proud when, at the end of the first day, the counselor said, "It's time to clean the lanterns. Now, whose names do I know? Sunny and Gail!" With a swagger, we made those kerosene lamp chimneys shine. Another year, Sunny and I became fascinated by the experience of the three-legged race, and came to the flag ceremony still tied together. Our counselors were not amused, and I learned years later that there had been a Phone Call Home to Discuss Behavior. 

The counselors were magically attractive, with all the mystery that teen-agers carry. They read us Nancy Drew; they carried tampons in their shirt pockets. They were our friends, but not too much.  

I spent two weeks there for a few summers, and the last summer, when I was a white cap, the highest rank of swimmer, I learned canoeing. Our test for the canoe badge included capsizing the canoe, then righting it and riding the water-filled canoe back to land. A thunderstorm was threatening, and we paddled vigorously as our counselors signaled wildly from shore. 

Summer

It's a hot summer. Today the high was not 106, as was feared, but 102, which is still very hot.

9 PM:
Murphys, 81.6 
Burbank, sadly, is hotter, at 84 
San Francisco 54.4
Baltimore 74.5
Boston 77.9
Center Conway NH 79.8
San Rafael CA 66.6

These are all cities where I've lived. I remember Baltimore on summer nights when it was 99 degrees and humidity was 99%. This was before air conditioning and sleeping seemed impossible. In one house that we lived in, my sister and I would go to sleep in our parents' bed, and our father would carry us upstairs late at night, when the temperature of the second floor had lowered a bit.

Luckily, most of the summer was spent in Center Conway, New Hampshire. It was always a challenge to pack sweaters and coats for the long, long drive, but we would arrive and it would be cool.

You know what Mark Twain said about summer in San Francisco? It was the coldest winter he'd ever spent. Slight exaggeration, but when inland heats, it pulls the ocean fog and blessed cool air in from the Pacific. Even San Rafael, in Marin County just to the north of San Francisco, that phenomenon held true; although the days were hotter, nights were always cool.

My last two summers in Boston I spent on Cape Cod, as a counselor at a camp run by Boston Children's Services. At least that's the name that I remember of the agency. I can't remember the name of the camp, although it'll probably come to me in the middle of this hot summer night. I do recall it was on Bloody Pond, which name they kept trying to change, to no avail. What inner city kid wouldn't want to be at a camp on Bloody Pond with the ghosts of the Indians killed there. (Forgive the archaic ethnic name - it's part of the legend.) Even Wikipedia doesn't find my Bloody Pond, so perhaps the grownups finally did effect a newer and less exciting name. 

During my first summer there, in 1966, I kept my apartment in the North End of Boston and would manage a few days at home from time to time. I lived in a vaguely restored tenement, with a bathroom in the hall, to be shared with the other tenant on the floor. My apartment was a three-room railroad flat along one side of the air well that served to provide fresh, but unmoving and hot air to the apartments that lined it. 

Which reminds me of humidity. The east coast is full of it, I remember, and I hear it still is today. So the temperature figures above are not a true reflection of how it feels. We don't have any humidity here in the foothills of the Sierras. I'm not sure there is humidity in California, unless you count fog. It never rains in the summer at this elevation, although summer thunderstorms are not uncommon in the high country. I remember many camping trips in the pouring rain. But we never went home because of the rain.

The danger of thunderstorms in most of the state is the danger of a lightning strike in the hot, dry, dusty grassland or wooded mountains. 

Tonight I have the air conditioning on, two ceiling fans and a table fan in the bedroom. I confess that I will leave the AC on all night - it'll go off when the temperature gets down to 77. I'll be asleep then.

Moonrise Kingdom

This movie is great! It is carried not by the cast, all of whom are wonderful, but by the cinematography or whoever it is who is responsible for the shooting of the film. It was like reading a children's book with the best possible illustrations. Each shot seemed a page across which the action moved. It was so like reading Goodnight Moon that I kept looking for a mouse in a corner. And the music, I can hardly find words for. A lot of Benjamin Brittain, some Mozart, Hank Williams. I'd have to sit and study the credits to name them all. Oh, and the credits, which ran to an empty theater except for the three of us, were worth watching all by themselves. I was amazed that they named everyone on the orchestra. 

See it if you can!

Third Eye

Yesterday, I saw these photos, either by email or by chance on the internet. This first one is a depiction of the third eye, known anatomically to the Egyptians and as the Eye of Horus, and known to us as the pineal gland. It is associated in certain philosophies with seeing into the spiritual world. 

The image to the right is of the six chakras, with the third eye clearly located under the crown chakra. 

And below, an addition to my collection of photographs from the Olympics.

Giddiness

I got a call today that my application to the Burbank Senior Artists Colony was accepted! Murphys to Burbank mid-September. Here's my balcony. Come visit!

Curiosity

Our Curiosity is on Mars. The day of that event, I read the weekly Brain Pickings, and one article, with a twelve and a half minute video, was about a piece of music. I will copy in here the article's description of the piece, and below it, a link to the video.

What could be better than the solar system set to music in a near-perpetual homage to Bach? Little, but a three-movement choral suite inspired by Carl Sagan might be it — a magnificent mashup of Sagan’s timeless words set to harmonizing voices and an awe-inspiring montage of space exploration footage. Here’s to cosmic goosebumps, courtesy of Canadian composer and teacher, Kenley Kristofferson.

Here's the link:

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/08/01/carl-sagan-kenley-kristofferson/

Olympics 2

Here is another shot of the London Tower Bridge with the Olympic rings and the moon. When I posted a version of this yesterday, I wondered if it were what snopes.com calls fauxtography. Today, research finds that in the UK Daily News, this photograp is attributed to  Reuters photographer, Luke MacGregor.

2012 Olympic gymnast Gabby Douglas, photographed by AP photographer Greg Bull.

There have been very few years that I have watched or followed the Olympics on television. I did watch the China Olympics opening ceremony two or three times, always with breathless awe. My television watching is waning, for now, and soon to be almost non-existent. I've sold the set and am only keeping it to watch a few things I've TiVo'd, while I bind a quilt for a friend, and knit some spa washcloths for the boutique at the Independence Hall Quilter Faire at Ironstone Winery in Murphys. The Olympics' sportcasting sound, which comes on when the set is first turned on, (and I could change that, but haven't - why is that?) is not pleasant. I suppose that, as with music, you either like sound of sportscasts or you don't. 

Olympics

This will be my memory of the 2012 Olympics.

A small town summer evening

This is Main Street in Murphys CA, population 2,000. It usually doesn't look like this, because normally, there are cars lining the street. They must have cleared it for the photographer! Often it's this empty at midnight!
Murphys has a park, and on the first Friday of every summer month, there is Music in the Park. Although you can't see it in the picture, just beyond the picnic table is a stream, cold from snow melt, but shallow enough to warm up in the summer, shallow enough for little kids to splash and swim, deep enough for tubing. There's a bridge from the park to the town library. Tonight was Music in the Park night, with the three-piece band named Plan B. The drummer is a local insurance broker - I don't know the other two. They played '60's and '70's music mostly, but they didn't just copy the Beatles or the Stones, they played their music, so the sounds were different, fresh. Most of the park is lawn, but the area just in front of the gazebo is gravely black top, and on a night like tonight, filled with dancers from babies in arms to toddlers, to oldsters who danced as if they'd never stopped. The eight dollar dinner is always provided by a local purveyor, and tonight's was by the local Sierra Market, and was the best I've ever had at the park, chicken, tri-tip, deli salads, watermelon, cookies. I was with friends, of course, and the music was too loud for conversation, but the warmth of sitting with best friends - as well as the warmth of the evening - was a balm to my heart, so I could listen to words of love and not cry. "They're writing songs of love, but not for me," kept going through my head. Music is still piercingly poignant.


This is the Murphys that I will be sad to say goodbye to.

My life is moving!

I am so excited about moving, that I can't seem to get enough detachment to write about anything else. Today I watched furniture walk out of my house (on friends' feet). I am dispersing almost everything. Almost sold my bed, but changed my mind. And today, I filled out and mailed the lease application - fear but doing it anyway, with trust. Coincidentally (I think not) in my mail today, from my attorney, was my copy of our proposed answer to whatshisname's proposed divorce settlement. I don't like that word. It's scissory, sharp, cold. Let's use the formal, dissolution of marriage. Dissolve it did, but not gently, turbulently. Like 10 Alka-Seltzers in a glass of water.  It's still awful, but still the vistas open in front of me.


Anyone want to buy a white grand piano? I'll make you such a deal.


Reading: Your Life as Story, the second book of His Dark Materials, Prince of Tides. The latter will have to take a break while I finish the Dark Materials and work with Your Life as Story,  which is part text book, part workbook, part literature.


Send chocolate.

Burbank Senior Arts Colony

Today was spent staring at the lease application, and being struck with fear. I was afraid that I had crowed too much too soon about this wonderful place that in my mind I've already moved to, and that the fates would punish me by pulling rug out now. I was afraid I wasn't grown-up enough to fill out the application properly. I was afraid I would be turned down, ashamed, stuck in Murphys.


This is silly! I have a friend, who announced recently that she had no fear. It was such a calm and sure statement, so beautifully confident that the room we were in was struck in golden silence for a moment. I am remembering her today, with gratitude, and I am borrowing her fearlessness. And I am remembering the statement that courage is being afraid and doing it anyway. 


I am on my own, but I am never alone. I am simply not dependent on another person to provide my happiness or security - or to fill out a lease application for me!