Rolling On One

We started Monday by felling a tree. There was a dead four- or five-inch diameter beech at the edge of the garden that Arlene was concerned with. Matt and I first decided which way we wanted it to fall. I hacked at it for a while with a hatchet, making a big V on the side to which we wanted it to go. Matt went to the car, got a rope, shinnied up the tree, and tied the rope around it eight or ten feet up. He went over to where we wanted it to go and started pulling. The tree very cooperatively fell, but got caught in another tree — I guess even where we wanted it to go there wasn’t really enough room for it. Matt pulled it off the other; we lifted and tugged and got the end, which had dug itself a foot into the ground, up; and we had a good fallen tree. We looked at it and thought, we really could use a chainsaw to cut this up.

It was hot enough for swimming. Anne and Matt had bought a big inflatable raft, a Coleman Party Dock. Matt inflated it with the shop-vac and went off mountain biking. Arlene started walking down to the beach. Anne and I thought we’d paddle the raft down to the beach using canoe paddles. Well! The thing is not easy to paddle. It took a lot of effort to keep it going the least bit straight. By the time we were a third of the way to the beach we realized that we were doing it the hard way. We called out to some people sitting on their dock to ask if we might land there, and they said sure. Their two blond Labradors were very interested, but refrained from jumping on the raft. We landed safely and carried the thing the rest of the way.

Even on the third of July the water wasn’t the least bit too warm. I did get my courage up to get all wet and to swim out to the float. Maybe I’ll start to become a better open-water swimmer if I at least do that a few times.

I had started knitting a hat, just a ribbed watch cap, 80 stitches on 10.5 needles, with the blue handpainted bulky yarn I got at the Denmark Sheepfest, that morning. I was working on it at the beach. It started a long conversation about sewing machines with a woman whom we had met at the beach a few weeks ago.

After swimming, and after Matt got home and washed lots of mountain biking mud off himself and his bike, we drove to Windham to do some serious shopping. Matt felt strongly that we needed ladders around the place so we would be able to do routine maintenance on gutters and so on. He and I went to Lowe’s while Arlene and Anne shopped at Big Lots across the street. We ended up with a 20-foot extension ladder, an 8-foot stepladder, both nice lightweight, non-conductive fiberglass, and a 14-inch Poulan chainsaw. That’s the smallest, lightest chainsaw they had. I figure, I’m a small guy, and I’d rather have a wimpy chainsaw that I can control than one that’s too heavy for me to handle. This one is marked “for occasional use only” which I guess means don’t expect to run it for hours on end. I think it’ll be adequate for my needs.

That’s a bit ambitious of a title. It was a four-state day on Sunday July 2, and it could have been five states. If we had gone three miles the wrong way at the start, we would have been in New York state. But we started out going to the Mass MoCA. The big gallery there had a show called “Amusement Park”, but it didn’t seem to me to be much more than a collection of old amusement park rides. Maybe the artist thoughtfully selected the lighting, but I wasn’t impressed. A lot of the other work was more conceptual, which is OK if you spend a lot of time reading all about how it was done. I was less impressed than many of the times we’ve been to the MoCA.

We left North Adams a little after noon and went east on the Mohawk Trail to Florida, where we turned off to the north, trying to work our way up to Vermont route 100 and route 9. I’ve never looked at the side roads off that section of the Mohawk Trail, but I had bicycled up route 100 to route 9 and west to Bennington at the end of my freshman year in college. After several miles (of lovely countryside!) there was a town line sign and the road turned from pavement to (very well-maintained) gravel and we were pretty sure we were in Vermont. A few more unmarked intersections brought us to a parking area by a lake. I parked, got out, and said to some people who were fishing with their kids, “Hi, where the heck am I? I’m not even sure what state I’m in.” It was still Vermont, Sherman Reservoir, former source of cooling water for the long-gone Yankee Electric nuclear power plant in Rowe MA. A left turn off the road we had come down was the way to Readsboro. One of the kids, maybe 7 years old, wanted to be sure I saw where his dad had caught his bobber on the tree across the way from the overlook they were on. I said, “aw, I’ve lost so many bobbers in trees…” So will that kid, when he’s big enough to cast by himself. From Readsboro we were on state highway 100 to 9 into Brattleboro.

We didn’t go out of our way to look for Brigham Young’s birthplace but it’s there in southern Vermont. Bet you didn’t know that! I remembered something like that from when I bicycled that way, but I might have told you Joseph Smith instead.

If you hadn’t known, you would have figured out just along route 9 that they do a lot of maple sugaring in Vermont. We even saw some trees that still had the sap pipelines running between them. One roadside business was advertising that the family had been Vermont sugar makers for six generations.

At Brattleboro we got on I-91 for one stop and continued on route 9 into New Hampshire. We had been on some of those roads a couple of times last summer, on our way to a wedding just about a year ago and then to a family reunion a little later. This time we kept going — New Hampshire has lots of excellent secondary roads, and we mostly zoomed — until we got to Concord at about 3 PM.I parked downtown (it must have been exactly at the center of town, because South Main Street was on one side of the intersection and North Main was on the other) because Arlene had spotted something like Natural Foods Co-op Grocery and Cafe back a block. We walked back, got a cup of coffee, a very rich brownie, and a slice of chocolate walnut banana bread, and got back on the road. Note: we did not take the time to track down The Elegant Ewe in Concord. I was a little sorry about that, but after not getting any yarn in Pittsfield, and thinking of how much I had from the Maine Fiber Frolic, I figured I could stand it. We were back on interstates, 93 and 393, for a little while, then on old US 202 to Rochester NH and to Sanford ME. We stopped at a gas station – general store in Sanford, got a couple of Dove ice cream bars, and asked how far it was to the rotary in Windham. The woman at the counter said it would be an hour and a half, and that the best way would be to get on the Turnpike at Biddeford. At this point it was late enough, and we had been seeing enough of the countryside on two-lane roads, that we decided to do that instead of following 202 the rest of the way.

So we crossed all of New Hampshire, more or less at its widest part, and half of Vermont, at its narrowest part, and a little of Maine, nowhere near its widest part, and none of them at the northernmost part.

When we got to Casco, Anne and Matt were fixing a lobster dinner. They had already mixed up a blender of margaritas, working with a cup of tequila. I could feel the effects of one margarita. Two and one-third pretty much knocked me on my ass. However, they had brought along a DVD of Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which we stayed up to watch. I’m not positive how much of it I really paid attention to.

Millie and Joel had a timeshare week at a resort in the Berkshires and invited us to come up for the weekend (or more precisely, Friday and Saturday nights at the end of their week). We left after my work Friday, leaving Newton around 6:30, and headed for the Mohawk Trail. I’m always willing to drive out the Mohawk Trial at the slightest excuse.

The resort was at Jiminy Peak, one town from where I went to college. The ski area there had opened while I was in college, I think, or at least was very new then. I went there once skiing; they had (and, it turns out, still have) a lovely beginners’ slope that went all the way from the top of the mountain to the base. Well, I thought I’d be able to find the way to the place without checking a map. As it turned out, I had to admit, about 12 miles south of Williamstown, that I didn’t know where it was. I stopped at a motel to ask for directions. The turn for Jiminy Peak was another mile and a quarter down the road, so I wasn’t really badly lost.

Saturday we started out going (in Joel’s little red Toyota Celica convertible, with the top down!) to an open studio day in Pittsfield. Pittsfield has managed to keep its downtown alive, partly by turning old main street office space into artist studio space. It was a small-scale open studio thing. We might have only walked into twenty or so studios, but we had long talks with several of the artists, including a woman who does rubbings and prints of manhole covers, a fabric artist who does patchwork and applique paintings, and a man who does three-dimensional sculpture in paper, corrugated cardboard, and wood. The manhole cover rubbing artist had a book with photos of manhole covers. I thought she must feel about it the way I did the first time I went to a juggling convention — that it’s really nice to run into people who are more involved than you are with something most people consider oddball. She can look and say, here I go making these rubbings, but this guy spends way more time hunting for things to photograph than I do on the rubbings. I’m well within the bounds of normal!

Two other stops in Pittsfield (not to mention a pretty good lunch at a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant) were an antique store, Wild Sage, that had one room marked “le petit musee” with art, and a closet off that room marked “le plue petit musee” with art postcards on display, and a felting – yarn – miscelleny store that had a big selection of Debbie Bliss yarn and lots and lots of Noro, among others. I resisted buying anything, but Arlene got a yard or two of monkscloth to do a punch needle rug on. The woman running that store asked me if I was meticulous in my knitting. I said no, that I was working on a mistake rib scarf, and I had noticed a real mistake in the ribbing, but that it was going to stay that way. After all, if it’s a mistake rib pattern it had better be able to tolerate a mistake or two.
From Pittsfield we went east on route 9 looking for Waconah Falls. It was a small state park with a big, well, small if you’ve seen Niagara or Yosemite, waterfall. Still, for a small waterfall it was pretty impressive, maybe about thirty feet high, with lots of water going over it after all the rain we’ve had lately, and very secluded. At one point the four of us were the only people there. The many colors of gray rocks and green foliage were lovely.

The road up to the top of Mount Greylock, the highest point in Massachusetts at 3491 feet above sea level, branched off our route back to the resort a little before our turnoff. Joel drove us up the mountain. Arlene and I climbed the 90 or so steps, mostly a narrow spiral steel staircase, to the top of the observation tower. Millie and Joel had been up it earlier in the week and stayed at the base. Although I spent four years in college in the next town over, I had never been to the top of Greylock before. It wasn’t a particularly clear day, but the view was still spectacular.

As I was bicycling to work across the rain-swollen Charles river between Newton and Needham, that “rain-swollen” reminded me of Homeric epithets.

My graduate school roommate was in the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies department at Brandeis, on his way to becoming a distinguished Bible scholar. That involved studying lots of languages, including some I hadn’t heard of before like Akkadian and Ugaritic. Some days I would find the dining room table littered with his scratch paper from studying the night before, covered with notes in Akkadian cuneiform chicken tracks. Then there’s Moabite, which (at least in those days) is known from just one text, The Moabite Stone.

Another year he was studying classical Greek, reading the Odyssey in the original. Homer is known for not using a noun by itself, but prefacing it with a couple of descriptive words. It’s never “the dawn”, but “the rosy-fingered dawn”, not “the sea” but “the wine-dark sea.” Apparently Buzzy got caught up in that, because one day I heard him walking around the apartment patting his pockets and looking under piles of papers, muttering to himself, “Where, oh where, are my ring-tingling keys?”

I finished (well, there are more loose ends to weave in, and to darn around the annoying gaps by the corners of the thumbs) the gray and maroon mittens. No, I don’t mind waiting for it to be cold enough for them. January will be soon enough.

These are the Maplewood Mittens from Robin Hansen’s Favorite Mittens, made in Opal on number 4 needles.

I don’t know, they got awfully long in proportion to the width. And if you look closely, one and a half pattern repeats from the top of the one on the right (the left mitten, just to be confusing) you can see that at the point where I was supposed to start a pattern repeat in the other color I switched colors twice – just did the first row of a pattern repeat and then started another one so there are two in the same color with just one row of stitches in between. But no way am I going to un-kitchener the top, rip back, etc.

So let’s see, I have a pair of socks in Regia self-patterning 6-ply on the needles (two socks on two circulars), a hammock, oh no, the Branching Out scarf in kidsilk haze that I haven’t touched in months and months, I’ll have to totally review all those different decreases, and a mistake rib scarf in alpaca/merino blend that I got at the Denmark Sheepfest. The hammock and Branching Out are real UFOs. Oh well.

The door of the cabinet under our bathroom sink was broken. Well, the Ives Push Latch on the door was broken. There’s no handle on the door. You push it in a fraction of an inch, the latch clicks, and a spring inside it pushes the door open. When you push it shut, it stays shut. Except that it wasn’t popping open when you pushed it because the spring was broken.

It’s easy to replace. The hard part about installing that latch is getting it in just the right place, because you’re only supposed to be able to push it in a tiny bit before it will pop out. Since there are holes there from the screws holding the broken latch on, all it was going to take was getting a new latch, taking the old one off, and putting the new one on. There are three of those latches in the bathroom, and I’ve replaced one sometime in the past.

I took the broken latch to National Lumber on my way to work to see if they had a replacement, because I thought I had once bought a replacement there. No soap. I guessed I’d have to try Home Depot.

Or maybe the Rockler catalog lists one — nope. If it did, I might as well buy two at once, because another will break sometime, and I’ll save on shipping and handling by having them on one order, besides having one when I need it.

Hmm — is it possible I was smart enough to have bought more than one the last time I needed a replacement? Stranger things have happened. I went to the cellar to paw through my

HARDWARE STASH.

You know the answer, or I wouldn’t be writing this. I had two spares; now, after replacing the broken one without taking half an evening going to Home Depot, still one spare.

The moral of the story is, hardware also lives in stashes. And it’s a good thing.

When I was a kid, shortly after World War II, “Jap” was short for, and something of an ethnic slur for, “Japanese”. Nowadays, certainly in Newton, if you hear that syllable it’s more properly all capitals and means Jewish-American Princess. There are lots of those at Newton South High and elsewhere in the Boston area, and more in the New York – New Jersey area. I haven’t hung around Southern California enough to know what’s hapening there. With upward mobility I’m sensing that there are also are Asian-American Princesses, African-American Princesses, and even White Anglo-Saxon Princesses around.

These young women don’t get that way entirely on their own. After hearing some stories about parents I have realized that there is another acronym that we need in order to have a full discussion of the phenomenon. You’re welcome to use this at your own discretion:

MOPs = Mothers Of Princesses

May you meet few of them.

The Shaker community at Sabbathday Lake, New Gloucester, ME, has tours of several of the old buildings in the place. We got tickets after we had watched the woodturning demonstration and went through the boys’ workshop, meeting house, and the ministers’ shop.

The Shakers must fit all standard criteria of a cult — founded by a charismatic leader, require members to give all their worldly possessions to the community. They made such big contributions to American culture, mostly in the 19th century, that I have a favorable view of them nonetheless.

The Shaker village at Sabbathday Lake is like a beautifully preserved oasis of the 19th century just off a major highway, route 26. In fact, until two years ago, when the road was slightly rerouted, the highway went right through the community. Our guide said that one of the community members wrote in her journal, early in the 20th century, “Seven automobiles passed on the road today. Our peace and quiet is gone.”

The thing that most impressed me about the buildings we were in is that there were Shaker peg rails around the upper walls of almost every room. Clothes, candle sconces, and other shelves were hanging from pegs.

Here’s something I didn’t know about Shaker creativity: One Shaker woman was working at her spinning wheel one day, watching the men outside sawing logs with a two-man saw. She looked some more at the spinning wheel, and the saw, and thought, and invented the circular saw.

The last active Shaker community is 15 miles from our house in Casco. In the summer they have a series of demonstrations and workshops in traditional crafts.

We went over this afternoon for a demonstration of wood turning, which was presented by (just so you know, this is a Tripod link) Peter Asselyn of Durham, ME.

Well! It was just a demonstration, but I couldn’t have hoped to learn more from a workshop (except for getting hands-on time myself, I guess). We were the only people talking to and watching Mr. Asselyn turn half of a bowl, so it was almost a one-on-one lesson. When we got there, he had the base of the bowl in a chuck and was sanding the inside. While we watched, he put a padded disk in the chuck, fit the bowl between the tailstock and the pad, and did some finishing cuts on the outside; cut off the foot which had been in the chuck when we got there; took the remaining nub off with a chisel, with the bowl off the lathe in his lap (and the chisel pointing toward himself! I want a really heavy shop apron before I try that!) and rubbed the bowl with walnut oil (straight from the supermarket) to finish it.

All this time I was asking questions and he was explaining what he was doing, showing me the subtleties of sharpening the bowl gouge and using both sides of the bevel on the blade for cutting and polishing the bowl, telling me about what tools are needed, recommending that I look up the American Association of Woodturners and discussing lathes in general.
And then, he gave the bowl to us!

Arlene had left the outdoor light on the deck (in Casco) turned on. Around 11:30 she looked at the screen door and hollered, “Look! There’s a luna moth on the screen!” There was, and better yet, when we looked, there was another one flying around outside. We took a flashlight, went out the front door and around to the deck to see them from outside, and there were more! We counted six luna moths, on the side of the house, on the deck, on the screen door, and flying around. “That’s more than I’ve ever seen in my life, all put together!” said Arlene.

We tried to remember when we’ve seen them before — at Marie’s house on a lake north of Orono, during the week after the end of school; at Tregelly Fiber Farm on the way home from my college reunion in June last year; at the Whitcomb Summit motel in the Berkshires the week after the fourth of July. So as far as we know, the latter half of June and first half of July is the season for them in this part of the world.