Bloggery - Highlights - Archives

Fall Comes to New England

October 01, 2009 - View Single Entry

It's here, and I've got Cheryl Wheeler's wonderful song running through my head. If you don't know Cheryl Wheeler or "When Fall Comes to New England," check out this YouTube video. I just discovered it and have already replayed it four times, even though I can see some of the same things out the window. The post-and-board fence in the video looks like just about every pasture fence on Martha's Vineyard. "The leaves are Irish setter red" -- exactly right (except for the ones that are sunflower, egg-yolk, or lemon yellow), though for years I thought Cheryl was singing about her Irish setter, Red. She's usually got a dog in residence, but I don't believe she's ever had an Irish setter. The leaves haven't turned yet, though there's plenty of color in the undergrowth: poison ivy, huckleberry bushes, and ferns make a vibrant bouquet of magentas, yellows, and greens. Right around the equinox, though, the oak leaves took on that dry dark green that tells you they're thinking of turning.

So it's October 1 and this morning I pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt to go walking with Travvy. Travvy didn't change his clothes; his winter coat is growing in at the same time his summer coat is shedding, and so far the late summer blow is far less dramatic than the spring one. It was 44 bracing degrees F when we stepped out. In fall you've got the sun in your eyes in at least one direction if you walk early or ride late, which I usually do.

The horses at Misty Meadows have their blankets on already. Misty Meadows has a heated indoor arena; they do the clip-and-blanket thing. I'm of the "keep it simple" persuasion; swapping blankets two and three times a day strikes me as a waste of effort. Allie, bless her, is a low-maintenance horse. She's well on the way to her fuzzy winter self; her coat fluffs up when it's cold and lies flat when it isn't. Where she is now she can come inside when she wants and stay outside when she doesn't. Unless it's howling windy or pouring down rain, she usually doesn't. When I got back into horses, I was amazed by all the blanketing, and by the cost of the high-end blankets that everyone seemed to swear by. The idea of dressing my horse in anything called "Rambo" didn't appeal to me either, so I asked around and did some research. For horses, I read somewhere, the ideal temperature is about 39 degrees F. Just because I throw a sweatshirt on doesn't mean Allie's better off wearing one too.

September License Plate Report

September 30, 2009 - View Single Entry

Tennessee and Montana, in that order, bringing the YTD total to 42.

Small Victories

September 19, 2009 - View Single Entry

This cleaning jag is drawing to a close, but yesterday I gave Uhura Mazda the bath she desperately needed. I do occasionally feel guilty that I am shortening her life by not washing her enough, but other times I don't really believe I am shortening her life by not washing her enough, so them's the breaks. Today she is clean. She gleams in the sun, with only a few dings, scratches, and rust spots to indicate that she will hit 100K miles within the next six months. Unless I give up driving and start getting around by bicycle, horse & carriage, or dog sled. Hah. When pigs fly!

Thursday night I came home to a message from Edgartown Books. Mud of the Place was "flying off the shelves" -- could I bring them a dozen more ASAP? I could. I delivered them around 11 Friday morning, then dropped into the Vineyard Gazette office to place some more ads. I placed ads in both the Gazette and the Martha's Vineyard Times during the (short) presidential visit in late August. The ads were pretty big and pretty expensive, but I think they're having an effect. Traffic to the Mudsite is up. Edgartown Books sold half a dozen copies in 10 days. And . . .

Today I stopped by Alley's General Store in West Tisbury to speak with Rhonda, who handles consignment sales. Yesterday when I stopped by to buy borax, I looked and looked but couldn't find any Mud on the shelves. Maybe they needed more? Maybe I had some $$$ coming? Sho' nuff. Now I've got a check for $72 and they want the four copies I've got left in stock. Good thing I ordered another carton from the printer yesterday.

Today I also made ratatouille. I have been meaning to make ratatouille for about two weeks. During that time the eggplant went squushy on me (is that how you spell "squushy"?), one of the green peppers likewise, and I had to cut the ends off one of the two zucchini. This is why I hate fresh fruits and vegetables: if you don't adhere to their schedule, they go bad on you. Frozen fruits and vegetables don't do this. There is nothing like a rotting eggplant in your vegetable crisper to make you feel like a worthless person.

The weather has been gloriously sunny, dry, and warm enough for T-shirts but cool enough to keep a long-sleeve shirt handy. Travvy came out with Allie and me yesterday. We had several confrontations and near-confrontations with dirt bikers that left me fuming, but Travvy and Allie were great.

This morning I got back to work on my "Why we need an independent feminist movement" essay. My draft is more coherent than I remembered. I think I know where it's going.

Life is good.

& Mary

September 18, 2009 - View Single Entry

Mary Travers passed on Wednesday, the 16th. Another voice stilled, I thought, and then I thought, No, that voice, like so many other voices, is ringing in my memory, moving me forward, and will be till the day I die.

My life has the most amazing soundtrack. Starting, more or less, with the Civil War songs I learned from my maternal grandmother (who belonged to the Daughters of the Confederacy as well as the DAR) and from the records of Tennessee Ernie Ford, moving on to the Beatles (the first LP I ever bought, age 13, was Introducing the Beatles) and all the glorious pop, rock, and political music of the mid and late 1960s, which could be heard, believe it or not, on AM radio. The Stones, the Beatles, the Airplane, Simon & Garfunkel . . . My family was nowhere close to musical, but I met Joan Baez, Tom Lehrer, and the Kingston Trio through my father's records. (I swiped his copy of Joan's first album when I left for college. I've still got it.)

I'm nearly certain that I was listening to Peter, Paul & Mary while still in high school. "Blowin' in the Wind." "Puff, the Magic Dragon." "When the Ship Comes In." "Leaving on a Jet Plane" was a huge hit my freshman year at Georgetown U., and everybody got weepy singing along as they prepared to leave for Thanksgiving or Christmas with the family. It was less of a hit with me, though I liked it well enough. I liked political and poetic songs much more than sappy love songs. If it hadn't been for Peter, Paul & Mary, along with Joan Baez and the Byrds, I wouldn't have appreciated the genius of Bob Dylan's songwriting. I couldn't stand to listen to him sing. Can still barely tolerate his '60s voice. But the songs, the songs . . . !

Another thing about Mary Travers: her range was about the same as mine. I could sing along without going into falsetto or breaking in the middle. Altos rule! (Tu solus altissimus = "only you altos are great.") Sing along with Joan Baez? You jest.

She's gone, but what a life. What a life, what a life! And only 14 years older than I am, which means she was only 14 years older than I when she sang in concerts and made recordings and generally helped inspire me to keep on keeping on.

There's lots of wonderful stuff about Mary out there. Start with what her singing buddies Peter Yarrow and Noel Paul Stookey wrote. Then browse through the guestbook. Nothing is wasted. Carry it on.

Shelved

September 16, 2009 - View Single Entry

I don't subscribe to many magazines, and I'm not self-deluded enough to keep infinite back issues in the belief that I'll get to them "one of these days," but the avalanche on top of Travvy's crate did include almost three years' worth of Poets & Writers (a bimonthly), two years' worth of Ms. (quarterly), a few off our backs and scattered issues of the Pennsylvania Gazette, which the University of Pennsylvania sends me bimonthly because I'm an alumna. I decided to hold on to all but the old Gazettes at least long enough to see if they pleased me enough to justify the space they occupied. First, however, I had to find some space for them to occupy that wasn't on top of Travvy's crate.

The obvious choice was the shelves at the head of my bed. The drawback was that these hadn't been straightened up in quite a while -- not as long as the kitchen floor had gone unswabbed but still long enough for the less-read books and the less-used shelves to have accumulated a certain telltale fuzziness. This turned out to be a two-morning job.

My studio apartment is divided into two parts, one a little bigger than the other. The smaller "half" includes the kitchen and has a pebbly linoleum floor. The bedroom/office half is wall-to-wall carpeted in utilitarian blue-gray. Straddling half the dividing line between the two is a built-in set of shelves about six feet high. An assortment of tchotchkes occupy the top shelf -- a blue-eyed Siberian husky stuffed toy, a rearing wooden horse, a small Jordanian flag, two ceramic goblets, a brown Wedgwood pitcher my grandmother gave me, and so on. It gets pretty fuzzy up there because I can't see the top of it unless I stand on my bed, so that's where I started yesterday.

The next two shelves are accessible from both kitchen -- they're right over the sink -- and bed. On one side they're lined with kitchen stuff: cookbooks; big jars of flour, white, whole wheat, and rye; quart-size Mason jars of white beans, black beans, garbanzos, lentils, walnuts, and other staples; half my oversize collection of mugs (the other half is in a cupboard), and some empty jars and infrequently used bowls. The bedroom side is mostly a photo gallery of my journey from feminist bookstore worker to born-again horsegirl, with a few useful items -- a reading light, and a box of green Kleenex that Travvy chewed the end off when he was in his insatiable chewing stage. The lower of these two shelves is exactly nose level for a large dog standing on my bed. I lost an old pair of glasses before I finally figured this out. My boombox remote and my kazoo survived but are scarred with teeth marks. I finished those two shelves yesterday.

This morning I did the lower, bedside bookshelves. This involves some maneuvering because the bed is a snug fit with no room to walk around it, and besides the ceiling follows the pitch of the roof. So I'd lie on the bed with my trusty vacuum at my side and pre-dust, dust, and rearrange the books, some of which, of course, I'd either thought I'd lost or forgotten I owned. The magazines that formerly sat on Travvy's crate are now stacked neatly on the shelves. All the books are standing upright. I can actually see the little alarm clock if I look over my right shoulder.

Over my left shoulder yesterday was a paper slide creeping out from behind my deskside chair. It's gone. True, there's a swirl of newspapers, folders, photographs, receipts, and miscellaneous papers on my bed waiting to be clipped, sorted, and/or filed, and at least one of the piles on top of Travvy's crate is not (not, not, not!) going to stay there. Progress, however, has most certainly been made.

I'm no one's idea of a clean freak, but now I'm eyeing the other neglected corners of my apartment. Morgana's keyboard, for instance. If a keyboard this grungy belonged to anyone else, I would hesitate to type on it for fear of getting cooties. Most of us are born inoculated against our own grunge, or we develop immunity PDQ as soon as we start having to clean up after ourselves. We know where our own grunge came from and believe that most of it is harmless. Most of us are not willing to extend the same tolerance to other people's.

Enough, however, is enough. "Moderation in all things" certainly includes cleaning. Some people make a respectable living cleaning houses, but just about no one gets paid to clean her own apartment. Rather than take on my computer desk, I am about to resume cleaning up the manuscript I'm working on. I get paid for that.