Remembrance of summer in the old house

i must have written this draft at our old house, when i still had a job, and it was summer!!

i think of my father when i adjust the bamboo shades on the porch. because the strings go around little cleats!  i love tying the string around the cleats and love knowing how to do it. it makes me think of my father and sailing and the cleats someone invented that you didn't have to make the knot around (boo!)
i like pulleys too, and the shades have pulleys. it's a chore adjusting all the windows and shades before i go to work. and then everything is open in the evening to let the cool in.
Vermont people who laugh in the face of 30 below 0 Farenheit get crazy when it is 90!  they never heard of drinks with ice in them, cold washcloth on the neck, wearing shorts and sandals (not black) and a hat, sitting in the shade, or god forbid, keeping the windows and curtains closed!
they want to let a little air in!  BUY AN AIR-CONDITIONER they scream!!
i can't imagine why my friend thought 85 degree weather was a good day to bake a pie, and then complained because her house was so hot, and would not believe that her rayon dress was not the coolest clothing she owns!
 mostly they wait it out. my neighbor used to take a cooler and pillow out back and sleep on his trampoline!
best place to sit out the afternoon heat is on a rock in the middle of the frigid stream.
when it's gone on being hot for more than a week, i have run out of summer recipes, and cool clothes to wear to work!
but i love it....all too soon we will have good sledding weather back!

serendipity strikes again

all they had were the really big watermelons, not the small sweet ones, but we figured it would be ok for the party.
 but then we didn't get to go to the party!
 plus it was hot hot hot
 thank goodness for the world wide web, the information highway, the 'net.
i discovered a new fabulous hot weather cooling beverage...fill the blender with watermelon, mince up some mint (rampant in our back yard), and when it's all a liquid, chill it.
it looks so pretty in a glass with a sprig of mint.
deeelicious, plus i filled several quart jars and froze them for winter.
watermelon mint ice cubes would be good too!

sunday morning before the heat settles in

he caught a fish just as i walked by! 
i've walked around the 3 or 4 blocks of this village for years; always something to see in this town of 600 people in 42 sq miles.
this morning it was a crew of parents behind the school working on the new greenhouse and pavillion, and
a big crowd (25 cars!) at the church, i could hear singing.
along the brook by the falls no kids were swimming yet; the fire chief's truck was parked nearby.
uh-oh, 
but then i saw him up the hill a bit holding a fishing rod.
i waved but he was intent as his rod bent.  i watched to see what he'd snagged.
he pulled in a 6 or 7 inch silvery fish -- couldn't see for sure, but it had to be a trout!

summer's end

labor day was summer blue and pink
shy autumn played around the edges
tuesday never dawned
cold rain down your back


and rain and rain and rain and rain
and i opened my eyes to dreams of yellow pencils
and the smell of paper wrappers on crayons
chalk dust squeak


oh to be in second grade
and the cold rain falling
my new desk shines smooth under warm lights
and my teacher is so beautiful!

getting away for the day

Labor Day monday
a beautiful day!
sunny, breezy, not too hot, not too cool

in the morning,
cars headed north with kayaks on the roof
and cars headed south with kayaks on the roof

cars with bicycles on the roof drove north
and cars with bicycles on the roof drove south

later bicyclists bicycled by going north
and more going south

in the evening it all reversed.

phoebe! phoebe! phoebe!

mom and pop phoebe are raising a family on my back porch platform again this year. 

i'm so honored!
 (see last year's nest http://sitsup.blogspot.com/2011/05/phoebe.html)

they have a trio of hungry mouths and they are run ragged from early predawn (4 or 4:30 am) to dusk (8 or so) bringing creepy crawly things, flappy things, and probably spiders, since i don't see any in the porch eaves. 

next year i'll wash the windows before they get here -- i realized i can see the nest from a back window.

painting the church

across the street a van pulls up and unloads men and ladders. 

they've been working all week on the big new england white church, scraping, sanding, and now painting.  it's going to look great! 

they are a quiet group, well behaved, fairly lean, did you guess? 

i didn't at first. but i'm pretty sure they are from the prison.  

a good deal for the church, non-profits can hire them for a low wage, and a good deal for them.  

make some money, get out of jail for a week, do some good for somebody in the summer sunshine and green hills.

it used to creep me out a little to see these guys out working somewhere or playing volleyball in the prison yard,

until someone pointed out to me that they are pretty much mostly our friends and neighbors.

fish story

around mid-morning john got in his car and drove to the village store and post office. 

walking from the store back to his car, he passed a woman who said "there's a fish on the hood of your car."  

idly his brain muttered to him about how many crazy people there are in the world.  

nonetheless, he walked around to the front of the car, and there on the hood on the passenger side, was a smallish trout.

soon a group of people stood round the front of the car staring at the fish and putting forth theories about how it got there...none of which made much sense. 

although it is actually the car that we bought to replace the one that the flood destroyed, you can't make anything of that!  

eventually ryan came out of the store, looked at the trout, and opined that a bird had dropped it.

that was the best explanation heard, and everyone nodded, reconfirmed in their belief that the world and life actually do make sense.  here's a picture.

(blotches are reflection of tree branches above the car)

life on a boat

 flying is so very useful when for example hanging the pleasant sounding windchime mudpie made in toady's class !

 

 nothing quite so nice as life on a houseboat in the summer in Raglan!

 

something glowing

last night we slept fitfully waiting for the wind that follows the eye, listening even as we dozed off and on, still dressed and downstairs in case a tree, one of the many big big maples now rooted in nothing but soft deep mud should fall on the house. there was not a light in the village because there was no electricity and the stars THE STARS were a wonder beyond telling and as i gasped at a shooting star above i glanced down at the grass below the window and something was glowing.
what glows at 2 am? a wind-dropped solar light would not be still bright, reflective paint would have nothing to reflect, a rectangular glowing shape in the grass maybe 18" long and 2 or 3 wide. nothing in my experience could explain this.
the next morning on the back porch i remembered the glowing thing and looked over where i'd seen it.  and there it was.  an old rotten piece of tree branch.

Perseids answer the crickets - summer is ending

dark before 9 now
takes us by surprise - and lo!
meteor showers!

driving through the night
shooting stars distract our
watch for deer on the road

                                                         ~mudpie

nothing gold can stay

summer's perfect day
until i heard the cricket

and knew all was lost

                                     ~mudpie

more hot hot hot

heatwave or not, we are fortunate that it cools off at night.
and we have the brook!
sprung up out of cold springs and tumbling down out of the foothills over rocks through deep shady ravines down and down to the falls and the swimming holes it can turn your feet numb in a matter of minutes!

yesterday afternoon, 90 degrees and rising, at the local store, the staff was putting a sign on the door "Gone Swimming Back in 1/2 Hour."
they explained "we have the best boss! he told us to go cool off in the brook!"

enjoying the heat wave!

hot hot hot!

the east coast heat wave has been in effect here for a couple of days!

being old fashioned, we did what folks did in the old days -- went to the movies!

("Come on in! It's COOL inside!")
not just The Movies, but we went to the brand new Springfield VT (home of Homer Simpson) movie theater, which after 3 years has risen -- just in time to open with the new Harry Potter -- phoenix-like, from the ashes of it's burnt down self.
not long after the town won the distinction of being named the official home of Homer Simpson, some rejected young lover in an apartment above the old downtown movie theater started a fire which burned the whole building down! we've missed having movies just 20 minutes away.
and now it's back!

the other way i've been keeping cool, with plenty of friendly funny companions, is at the ool in Raglan! 

and no UV to worry about either.

mudpie is sunning on the raft in her new bikini.

click to enlarge - dive in!

the p in the ool

 if you look close here you can see the P, more than one P, someone has put in bottom of the ool. done i heard as a joke.

don't you think it is suspicious that Enjah knew all about it?

click to see larger

at the ool

mudpie is staying out of trouble at the Raglan ool.

lots of fun things to do there if you are energetic, or just loaf around with friends.

and no worries, there's no P in the ool.

party on!

there must be a mathematical formula to figure out how long it takes 2 miles worth of cars to stop for an accident on the freeway (that's when we came along) and how many more cars will line up behind us over the next hour or so.
that many cars stood still, engines off, going nowhere for their holiday weekend, in the afternoon on July 3.
are vermonters nicer and smarter than other people, or is it only the horrible violent traffic snarls that make the news?
here's what happened.
people got out of their cars, walked around chatting with each other, meeting each others' dogs and kids. kids in front of us played volleyball with a beachball over their SUV. the breakdown lane became a promenade, young couples, old couples, teens on skateboards, cell phone yakkers, a kid with a guitar, and a nice lady who went car to car telling us satellite radio said it was a motorcycle accident (which i don't even really want to think about).
what could have been a miserable time of frustration trying to get to the party, actually became the party!

click to enlarge

if it's july, it must be summer!

just when we quit staying home because it was raining
stopped bothering with umbrellas
took rain as the natural condition of life
it stopped
and the sun came out

-----------------------
sorting out the garden's jungle mornings, evenings
(hatted --
against my dermatologist's anxiety)
i tear out thriving 'wrong' plants
leaving the 'right ones' to flourish.

these to discard these to keep what is the point of this
i ask myself,
enjoying the sun thru my shirt
the sweat under my hat.
a waste of time.

the garden will never be done year to year the weeds the thinning
wasting time,
wasting time...
the time i could be wasting
some other way.

no no no not the crickets!!!

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

heard the first one yesterday. you know what it means...summer is coming to an end. my heart always sinks when i hear the first cricket, just when i am getting warmed up finally!
i can't help but remember Charlotte's Web:

The crickets sang in the grasses. They sang the song of summer's ending, a sad, monotonous song. "Summer is over and gone," they sang. "Over and gone, over and gone. Summer is dying, dying."
The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last forever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year--the days when summer is changing into fall--the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change.

postcard from the vacationing blog

i am like a god! a carelessly destructive one, as most seem to be, whose purposes are unfathomable to the creatures whose lives i disturb.
six cords of firewood for the winter were delivered and dumped in our driveway a month ago.
most years i would be stacking it in the garage, whenever so moved, not rushing, enjoying the process, but not this year.
john has promised the job to the kid (the one who mows our lawn) and arranged to pay him by the job. is it my bit of scottish DNA playing up that keeps me therefore from moving so much as one piece? perhaps i could divide the number of pieces into the quoted price and subtract each one i move?
today i had to relocate a few pieces to weigh down the tarp over the lawn mower. (i've learned not to say tarpaulin, as i have gone into stores to ask for this and been told they never heard of such an item).
as i said, the wood has been there a month now. i picked up the first piece, at the edge of the pile, and there, curled under it, was a red eft, surely one of nature's most sweetly innocent and vulnerable looking creatures. i carefully replaced the wood feeling like i had done something bad.
as i went on choosing and removing pieces, i caused monstrous upheavals in critter land. entire nations of earwigs... mothers, fathers, babies... were sent screaming in panic in every direction!
ants of course live and store their eggs everywhere, and can hardly be avoided being disturbed with every step. it doesn't help to know that ants will die if lost from their family of sisters, and that earwig mothers actually watch over their young until they grow big enough to fend for themselves.
the slugs...well i'm not sure if they were male, female, both, child or adult, and i'm not even sure they noticed that the log was moved. i have read that slime mold is quite intelligent, but i don't know of any research involving slugs.