Rolling On One

The weather in the Boston area has been seasonable for March, or maybe even a little on the warm side, the last few days. It was sunny today and a comfortable temperature for walking. I decided to see if the path around Cutler Pond had dried up after all the rain of the last couple of days. It had. There were a few muddy spots, but fewer than I remembered from last year. Maybe the parks commission has done something about the drainage on that path. Whatever, it was very pleasant walking with a mostly firm surface and not much ice.

The birds were back, too, at least a few. The ice is about half gone from the pond. Waterfowl, having spotted the open water, are checking out all that food that’s been in the refrigerator for the last few months. There were swans chasing Canada geese out of their intended territory, gulls (I think herring gulls as well as ring-billed gulls), and fifteen or twenty common mergansers. I didn’t see any birds on the river, which is nice and high — four or six inches below the top of the old concrete bridge abutment or whatever that is.

There weren’t a lot of land birds in evidence. I saw a couple of robins and my first three grackles of the year.

The best bird was something I’m not sure of, a good-sized hawk that flew over the pond away from the 128 side and disappeared behind the trees on the river side. If I didn’t think it was too unlikely I’d say peregrine, but cooper’s is more reasonable. The wings looked pointed but rather broad and the tail was narrow and not really long.

Sometime yesterday Arlene emailed me at work something like this —

“I was at the Mobile Book Fair to get my next book club book, and I found a knitting book by that guy so I bought it for you.”

Who was that guy? I hoped she knew that I had got Knitting with Balls from Amazon, and hadn’t got me a second copy. I didn’t figure it out until I saw the book at home. Just so you can guess, here’s the background: We had both looked at the copy of Glorious Knits that I got out of the library, and when we were at Black Sheep Knitting Company I had pointed out a copy of [that guy] Knits Again on their counter and said it was the same guy.

Right! it’s a copy of Kaffe Fassett & Zoe Hunt’s Family Album, in the Mobile Book Fair’s remainder section at $5.98. Arlene says there was a stack of copies there, on a table across from the shelves with the remainder knitting books. That would be New England Mobile Book Fair on Needham Street in Newton.

I was questioning my judgement for a good fraction of yesterday. For the last half of last week we had been watching the weather forecasts for the weekend with some trepidation. Predicitions called for a storm starting Friday night around midnight and continuing all day Saturday, with about six to ten inches of snow for our area of Maine. We decided that we could probably get there before it really started, and be plowed out to get home on Sunday, so we came up here.

It started snowing just about when we got to Portland, around 8:45, very lightly. The storm must have been moving from the southwest, because as we got off the Maine Turnpike and headed north we moved out of the snow. When we stopped for groceries in Windham we were interested to see that the parking lot was much more crowded than it usually is when we stop there. It was half an hour earlier than we usually get there, and maybe that was part of the reason, or maybe even in Maine people go out to stock up on groceries before a snowstorm.

I’ve sometimes said that high snowbanks remind me of the scene in the first Star Wars where Luke is piloting his X-wing fighter along the slot in the Death Star. Certainly the road from downtown Casco to our house was like that this weekend. The snowbanks are too high to see over. There’s a shelf in them about two feet up from the road, where the plows have made a second pass with the blades up from the pavement and offset to the side, so the top of the snowbank is pushed farther from the center of the road to make room for the next storm’s snow.

Sure enough, it continued to snow most of Saturday. There were periods in the afternoon when we looked outside and didn’t see any snow in the air, but mostly there was snow falling. It wasn’t particularly cold. We went out on our trails for a little while. The snow was so light and fluffy that the snowshoes sank down four inches, most of the way to the next layer of crust.

Around 8:30, a few hours after the snow had stopped, we heard the plow in our driveway. I went to the garage door to watch and Chris Pond, who has been doing the plowing this year, came out of his truck to talk for a few minutes. He says that this is the most snow people have seen here in many years, and that it has been very hard on equipment. He got a new plow blade a few weeks ago and broke it in half already. It’s not just me and my snow shovels and roof rake, and it’s not just people who aren’t used to Maine winters — people here are saying that it’s an awful lot of snow.
So what does it look like? In the bright sun of Sunday, here are some pictures:

The house, from the back:

Now, way over on the right of the above it’s not really fair; there’s a lot of snow in front of that window that came off the roof, either today when I raked the roof or last weekend when I was shoveling from on top. But most of the snow on the deck (except for a little I raked several weeks ago) fell there. There’s a picnic table and weber grill on the deck, somewhere, I’m pretty sure.

OK, now this picture just shows you how hard it is to tell with snow. It looks pretty uninteresting.

The thing is, there’s a lattice fence three or four feet high that’s completely under the snow in that picture.

This should be a little more convincing:

Normally, clotheslines are high enough that you can hang sheets and towels from them without hitting the ground. With this snow, the top of the crossbars is more like knee level.

I went out on the trails and hung a sign near the junction of our two diagonal trails (our trails are sort of a square with an X in the middle.) I don’t know how high off the ground it will turn out to be. The snow is never really level around the base of a tree (if there’s much of any wind at all when it’s falling) but I tried to be fair about where the snow level was:

Ever been out route 2 going to Greenfield? There’s a marker along the road calling out a flood height a few feet above where the road is. I was thinking of that when I put up this sign.

OK, so I’ll show you what I was doing last weekend. Shoveling snow off the roof in Casco, because the snow was deep enough that we were (or at least I was) worried about the roof collapsing. It’s just the roof over the addition to the house, one story high, that’s a gentle enough slope to worry a lot about snow sticking to it. And of course there’s snow on the ground, too, so there’s less distance to fall — but there was enough snow on the roof to form a parapet anyway, and I worked from the middle out towards the edge and got totally worn out before I got within three feet of the edge in any direction. There’s a window from the loft out over the roof. I climbed out, so there was no ladder in the picture. I actually quite enjoyed being up there, looking out over the snow-covered side yard and raspberry patch.

You can see the whole history of the winter in the layers of crust there. It’s tough to get a snow shovel through all the crusts. I brought up the ice chopper — it’s sort of like a hoe but with the blade in line with the handle instead of at right angles to it — and cut out a six-inch square at a time.

The best thing about clearing snow off a roof is that you don’t have to lift the shovel up a whole lot, just fling the snow sideways and listen to it thump on the ground a lot later. The bad thing is that the path that I shoveled for the oil delivery driver to get to the oil filler pipe is below that part of the house, so I had to shovel some of the roof snow twice.

Yes, the snow is deep. The clothesline, a little overhead in the summer, is now only waist high when you’re standing on top of the snow next to it.

We were pretty busy around the weekend of Feb 9, between going to concerts the 7th and 8th, the shower the 9th, and one more event, an art exhibit opening on Sunday.

Arlene had recently joined the Newton Art Association. They held a show for new members at one of the spaces they use regularly for exhibits, the Nordic Hall at the Scandinavian [assisted] Living Center across town. It looks like a pretty nice place, with a big Dala horse out in front and lots of Scandinavian modern furniture all around. I drove Arlene and the piece she was exhibiting over there the previous week but didn’t go inside that time.

So, when we went over for the opening, there was Arlene’s print with a ribbon hanging next to it! We didn’t know there would be prizes, but she came home with a check for third place, enough to pay her Newton Art Association dues for the year.

I probably finished these two weeks ago. Maybe one week, but I think it’s been longer. I think I recorded the details, but just for luck, they’re Peace Fleece on number 5s, done top down, magic loop, pretty much taken from Zilboorg’s Magnificent Mittens. I bought the yarn at Down Home Trading Company in Bridgton the weekend before Christmas. Well, the gray, white, and green. The black I got there the weekend of the dogsled races. What happened was, I picked out the gray and white, then remembered that Emma’s favorite color is green, so I got those three. These are more or less Arlene’s size, but longer than she really wants. I have started a pair for Emma, but with a little luck winter will be over before the mittens are done.

This turned out to be one of the hardest Springbok puzzles we’ve done. We started it the weekend of January 26, left it for a week, and finished it the next weekend. It’s one of those good old Springboks that holds together when you pick it up.

We were in Newton on Saturday Feb. 9 for a baby shower for Katherine, the daughter of long-time friends (where by long-time I mean Katherine’s mother used to give Arlene rides to work in the winter of 1969 when our car wouldn’t start). I neglected to bring a camera to the event, and was hoping Katherine or her father or someone would email me a couple of photos to put up here.

We were slightly staggered by the volume of gifts — Arlene is from an era when people would give one item, rather than three or four or five, at a shower.

Katherine’s sister April sort of organized the event from across the continent. We’re not sure just what that consisted of; maybe it was along the lines of “you should have a cake — well, find a cake you like and I’ll pay for it.” But I think there was somewhat more to it than that. April works for Google and probably is as well versed in getting work done over the internet as most anyone.

I liked the bingo game, which gave everyone something to do while the presents were opened besides looking at the presents. There was a bingo card for each guest, with each square (except of course “FREE” in the middle) naming a potential shower present — “baby blanket,” “book in English,” “book in another language,” “diapering supplies,” “baby safety equipment,” (in this state you’re not allowed to drive the baby home from the hospital until you’ve shown them an approved car seat) etc. I imagined that the bingo boards were done in Excel, given that several guests were describing themselves as Excel geeks. In fact, the baby is pre-nicknamed “little geek.”
Katherine and her husband asked each guest to fill out a page of sort of profile, so the baby would have a record of who its parent’s friends were. They weren’t all the same. One question on mine which stumped me for a while was “favorite game.” I finally settled on “ruffed grouse — oh wait, that’s ‘favorite game bird’.”

Passim, Friday Feb 8. We went early enough to have supper at Veggie Planet, the cafe there, which was founded by a friend of Charley’s — Didi Emmons (I think that’s the name — hold on a second — yes, that’s right) who used to live in the same building as his best friends in Jamaica Plain. Didi wrote a cookbook Vegetarian Planet which really made her name, at least locally. So the Cafe at Passim was originally hers, though she’s not closely involved with it any more, and named for the book.

We were seated right next to the stage, off in one corner stage left, and couldn’t have asked for a better table. Really, that wasn’t surprising considering how small the audience was, how early we reserved tickets, and how early we got there.

I’ve probably written about Tony Bird before. After the show, he came over and said to Arlene, “You have a really gorgeous voice. They should pay you to sit in the front at all my concerts and sing along.” That and the accompanying hug pretty much made her week.

Listen to WUMB radio (U Mass/Boston) at noon Eastern time on Sunday Feb 10 for a concert recorded live last night with John McEuen of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. You can listen on the web.
That was a member concert, for station supporters. Arlene phones in to request tickets to the member concerts whenever she hears about them. We didn’t know who McEuen was or what we were getting in for. He is just the most amazing instrumentalist I’ve ever seen, with the possible exception of Pat Donahue (who now is a regular on Prairie Home Companion, who we also saw at a WUMB member concert). He plays banjo better than anyone else you’ve ever seen, and fiddle and guitar as well as anyone. He is also about as funny a performer as you want to see, but on the radio you won’t see him turning around to look at the empty stage behind him as he plays the bass strings on his guitar and says “how about a hand for my bass player.”

He talked a lot about the history of the Dirt Band and about how they made the “Will the Circle be Unbroken” recording with all the big names in traditional country music. He had lots of amazing stories — e.g. auditioning with the Rolling Stones and meeting Arlo Guthrie just before Arlo’s recording of “City of New Orleans” came out, when Arlo asked the guy who wrote the song, “why did John Denver change your words?”

“Back in the ’60s people used to say, ‘I got really fried last night’. These days, those same people say, ‘I can’t eat that, it’s fried’.”