Rolling On One

We’re in Newton this weekend for the Celebrate Newton crafts sale on Sunday.

Saturday night we went to Passim, I guess I should say Club Passim these days, to hear Tony Bird.

Passim, if you count Club 47 which preceded it in the same location, has been the place to hear folk music in Harvard Square forever. Well, “since 1951” is pretty close to forever. It’s half a floor below street level, packed with tiny tables, with brick walls and windows through which you can see shoes and legs of people walking along the alley between the two sections of the Harvard Coop (that’s Co-operative, but pronounced like where chickens live.)

Tony Bird sang a lot of new songs and only a couple of his older ones. When we first heard him  years ago he was singing mostly songs about Malawi, where he was born, and South Africa. I really liked those. Arlene has always been fond of his long, rambling, image-filled songs which could go on for fifteen or even twenty minutes. Last night he had one new one of those, two songs about his mother (who apparently died not long ago), one really nice upbeat song “Let’s go play soccer” inspired by the world cup, and one about tennis star Rafael Nadal, and several others. He also did “Walkabout” about the Kalahari desert and the bushmen and “Mango Time,” which he probably can’t get away without doing (or maybe he does like the audience response which it always gets.)

I’m glad he’s still writing new songs, but I miss some of the old ones, the description of the Rift Valley, how he learned Bundu Music, all the wildlife Down in the Dombo, and the story of the time the leopard was sitting on the rock where they liked to watch the sunset from.

I’m very pleased with the Susan Bates Silvalume circular needles that I got at The Village Knitiot last weekend. The joins are not quite as smooth as Addis should be, but my #6 Addi (it’s busy with the body of Matt’s sweater) doesn’t have as good a join as it should and these are just as good as that really is. The Silvalumes are a pale green and pale red color, which is a big help for knitting in the round on 2 circs — no question that you’re using the correct end when you change needles. I zoomed along almost to the top of the first sleeve on them. I knit the first 2/3 of the sleeve on DPs that were a little too short for the job and I kept dropping stitches from them.

I had my first appointment for the root canal yesterday. I’m amazed at how well I feel today; I hope it will last. These things seem to vary tremendously — some are very painful for a couple of days, and some just not bad.

Yesterday I had brought a yoghurt for lunch, and ate it before the novocaine had worn off. Half my tongue was still knocked out. The half with sensation felt the yoghurt was cold, and the other half seemed to be saying it was warm. Really strange.

The endodontist’s office is in Wellesley Lower Falls, right next to the Charles River, maybe 200 feet downstream from a dam. There was a view of the water from the dentist’s chair, when the chair was upright. The river was high and raging from all the rain we’ve had lately. Too bad I could only see it before the procedure really got going. I have to say, the procedure itself wasn’t significantly more uncomfortable than getting an ordinary filling, and less uncomfortable than some big fillings. It’s just a question of how you’re going to feel for the next several days, and so far, so good.

Thanksgiving weekend turned out to be a big time for grouse. We saw one in the crabapple tree again. We got a particularly close look at one in a berry bush (I think it’s burning bush, or barberry, or something with small red berries that aren’t edible by people) just off the front porch — it’s just to the right of the vertical post of the porch railing. That’s Charley’s car beyond it, with a red squirrel building a nest on the motor.

and two less satisfactory but wilder sightings. Anne thinks she saw one when we were walking at Poland Springs. The rest of us didn’t see it, and she only got a glimpse. Arlene flushed one while we were cutting more trails on Sunday.

The one by the front porch was close enough to observe in detail, if not cooperative enough to get a good picture. Looking at it through binoculars, I could see a ring of feathers around the neck, almost like a feather collar. I thought that was probably how it got its name.

There was one more grouse in the picture over the weekend. At the Aububon society’s Gilsland sanctuary near Portland there’s a mounted grouse hanging on the wall.

There were picturesque clouds in the sky over the Hannaford’s parking lot in Windham last week.

Don’t try to clean your screen! That’s not a speck of dust in the middle of the picture, it’s a seagull. We’re about fifteen miles inland from Portland harbor.

One of the alternate routes to Casco is to take exit 47 from the Maine Turnpike and go up River Road from Westbrook to Windham. We’ve seen a sign pointing to a covered bridge off that road, but before last Wednesday we either didn’t have time to explore it or daylight to make it worthwhile. We had both last week.

It turned out that the bridge is just half a mile off River Road. We pulled into a gravel turnout just past the bridge where a couple of pickups were already parked. A guy carrying a rifle with a scope, wearing an orange vest and cap, turned around to look at us. No cause for alarm, it’s deer season in Maine. We said, “Hi, we’ve never checked out the bridge before” and he smiled, waved, and went off into the woods.

The signs detract some from the bridge, but the river crossing is much nicer than we really expected.

Anne has been using some patterns from The Yarn Girls’ Guide To Simple Knits. She had this one all done except the collar by early Thanksgiving weekend. She wasn’t sure how to pick up the stitches for the collar. I counted the stitches she had, figured how many to pick up and how many to skip, and got her started. Here it is, all done. I think it’s Paton’s wool, two strands knit together.

It fits and looks good! I tell you, she knits fewer stitches per minute than I do when I get going, but more minutes per day than I do, and gets things done lots quicker than I do.

Anne, Matt, and I did more trail work around the Casco house. About a month ago they had started to cut a trail sort of from the far corner of the property back towards the house. Arlene and I lengthened it and then Anne and Matt brought it out to a monster rock near the left-hand edge of the property. Today we cut a trail from the middle of it back to the border trail and to the back of the house. Now we have a network of three trails, which we will call “The Surveyor’s Trail” (around the edge of the property), “Blueberry Trail” (their second one, because of a big clump of blueberry bushes in the middle of it), and “Rock to Rock Trail” (this new one, which goes from one big boulder to another).

Matt and I also, and earlier in the day now that you mention it, pulled down a big log which was caught fifteen feet up another tree. We had noticed it when we built the Surveyor’s Trail last winter and have been afraid of its falling on someone. We’re much happier with it on the ground.

I drove down to North Windham and finally got to look in at The Village Knitiot. It has more floor space than Naturally Fuzzy or Down Home, but not so much yarn as either of those. It’s probably the best local source for imported and luxury yarns. There’s a big selection of Misty Alpaca, a good color choice of some Norwegian mitten yarn (I mean, stuff that looks a little heavy for socks but light for sweaters), and lots of super bulky yarn. There was a news clipping on display with a headline something like “Nothing but Natural Fibers at Village Knitiot.”

The woman who runs the place (that would be Heather Lemire) was talking to me about Bartlett yarns, which I made my first sweater from. She said, “The alpaca is just too soft to wear well. Bartlett yarn is much better for something you’re going to wear shoveling snow or splitting wood.” That’s Maine knitters for you. She has been up to visit the Bartlett mill, which is about three hours from here. “It’s in the middle of nowhere. Actually you get to the middle of nowhere in about two hours, and then it’s another hour.” From a third generation Mainer, especially one with ancestors from “the county”, middle of nowhere means quite a bit. The controls of Bartlett’s antique machinery, still in use, are small because the machines were run by child labor in the days when that was the norm.

While I’m looking at Heather’s card, the phone number for The Village Knitiot is (207) 892-1128.

We had a grouse in the crabapple tree again today. Arlene spotted it walking out from next to our kayak. It crossed the driveway, walked over to the crabapple tree, looked around the ground to see if there were any fallen crabapples worth eating, decided there weren’t, and flew up onto a branch to eat fruit right off the tree. It stayed there until Matt walked out to the car, forgetting that the bird was there.

We drove out to Poland Spring Preservation Park to walk. A woman (who must have belonged to the only other car in the parking lot) coming out of the woods with her cocker spaniel said yes, there was no hunting there, it was the only place in the area where it was safe to walk around this time of year.

We must have walked two and a half or three miles, out the Stone Trail, most of the way around Oscar’s trail, back Griffin’s trail, out to the end of Montague’s trail to Range Pond (and the woman with the cocker spaniel had said, “They allow snowmobiling and hunting in Rang Pond Park,” so that confirms the pronunciation with a hard G). There was a goldeneye out on the pond, and other water birds way over on the far side that we couldn’t really identify. We walked most of the trail system there, two and a half or three miles. We peeked through the windows of the spring house and admired the coleus they were growing in it, checked out the hours (closed the day after Thanksgiving, open limited days and hours after that through the winter), and turned back to the parking lot.

There was a black animal the size of a Maine coon cat on the grass next to the parking lot. Arlene immediately called, “porcupine.” It was. It went about its business, looking for food in the grass, without paying much attention to it. We got as close to it as we cared to. Matt got several good pictures. The quills seemed to be concentrated in the back and tail, a fair number towards the front, fewer in the middle, where the fur was more brownish than black. The tail was rather flat and wide. The animal finally decided that we really were closer than it liked and waddled away, its feet wide apart, almost out to the side.

That’s the longest by far I’ve watched a porcupine in the wild. I saw one when I was a kid, one evening when my father and I and a couple of other people had been fishing at Brese’s Pond in Vermont, near a farm where we spent our vacations.