End of summer 2012 highlights reel

The Lobster Festival and the Union Fair

Four different houseguests, three days of sailing, two family gatherings, and a waxwing in the crabapple tree

Foggy Jonesport

A sailing trip Down East to Canada, just Himself and a friend from Outward Bound

Tostitos the Fish succumbed to galloping fungus and went to be with Jesus

Thing One had a fantastic summer as an apprentice on the schooner American Eagle

The mother of all seventh-grade-girls' sleepovers, aboard this 142' charter yacht whose captain happens to be Thing Two's friend's dad

Back-to-school shopping (ouch)

Three cords of wood delivered and needing to be stacked

And much, much more... but I've run up against my storage limit on this account, and life has changed enough since I started this little endeavor:  the kids are busier, my job is more demanding, and when the dishes are cleared and homework is done and I'm finally able to sit down of an evening, usually around 8.30 or 9, someone else is invariably using the computer.

So the blog is slowing down.    The occasional recipe or knitting project or shameless plug (which reminds me, I have one of those to share soon) or random thoughts.  

Thanks for following.

Family Affair

My mother was the oldest of five siblings.

She is survived by two brothers...

...and two sisters.

One brother and one sister are sort of local; one sister lives in South Carolina and one brother lives in Rhode Island.  Despite the distance, it's a tightly-knit crew.









Because of the distance, though, and careers and busy lives and kids and grandkids, it's rare to get everyone - especially with their spouses - together in one spot.

They were all here last weekend, though, and they spent an entire precious afternoon at my place.

Inevitably, the conversation turned to family history.  Much of the lore is fairly common knowledge; some of it, though, comes out in bits from this person and pieces from another, depending on who talked to whom over the years.

There's great-great Uncle Buzz, born in 1893, who worked as a cook on a schooner on the Maine to Bermuda route.  On one trip, the captain died, and Buzz, being the most qualified of the crew, brought the schooner home.  Apparently he also had fair certain knowledge of the whereabouts of buried treasure (the existence of which along the Maine coast has long been rumored), which he took to his grave.  Who knew?

Then there's my great-great-grandmother Maude, who was widowed young in 1897 and whose only daughter became the object of a custody battle with her late husband's family over an imagined inheritance (they lost).   There are shadow stories of a second pregnancy which was forcibly terminated by the late husband.

Or how about my great-great-great-grandmother Etta, who is the first woman in the family who experienced clairvoyant dreams and visions?  One of Etta's sons nearly lost his life in a terrible storm at sea - the details of which Etta could describe accurately before the son even came home to share his tale.  (This gift is shared by my grandmother and one of my aunts, but skipped my line, thank heavens).

Someday we shall write a book.

2012 Great Schooner Race

Thing One called Thursday night.

The fleet was gathering and anchoring off the breakwater in Rockland Harbor, in preparation for Friday's Great Schooner Race.

It was a beautiful night.  

He asked us to come out.

(When your tall, confident, independent 15-year-old who has only been gone for four days calls and wants to see you, well, your heart lifts a little.)

So we grabbed Chinese takeout and Wilson the Agoraphobic Goldendoodle, tootled across the harbor, dropped the hook and enjoyed dinner and the view.

Thing One rowed over after the small boat races.

While he ate our leftovers, he filled us in on his adventures (which include going aloft, twice, untethered, while underway).

Snatches of sea shanties in three-part harmony drifted over from the Stephen Taber and each schooner fired off its cannon.

(Add cannons to Wilson's list of phobias.)

Friday morning was a beauty, too.  The schooners jostled for position by the starting line, off the lighthouse at the end of the breakwater...

...then spread out across the bay as they caught the wind.

The Schooner American Eagle making Owls Head

One can only imagine what it must have looked like a hundred years ago, when Rockland was a hub of shipbuilding and lime transport and the harbor was crowded with vessels like these, and much larger than these.

We're hanging on to a bit of history here.

Just being kids (2012 edition)

The gang got together here last weekend.

Looking back at the pictures of them from just a year ago, the mind boggles at how much they've grown.

Thing One's friend M, back from his first year at MSSM, has really gelled as a person, it seems; another friend, T, is headed there in the fall to finish out the rest of his high school career.

They're all physically much bigger than I am.

They all have jobs.

But get them all together on a beastly hot day and they play Frisbee and soccer and capture the flag (with the sprinkler running at midfield) and have a campfire with S'mores and swing on the swings and go swimming in the lake with [most of] their clothes on and eat a shocking amount of food.

Monday morning we deposited Thing One on the schooner and we'll see him probably one night a week between now and mid-August.

Dammit.

Weirdo

Who does this?

In Memoriam 2.0

A couple of weeks ago we held a memorial service for my great-Uncle Lew.

A man like that needs more than one memorial service, see; this was his third, after one in Florida where he retired and a second in Tennessee where he had his career.  This one was for the benefit of my grandmother, who can no longer travel, and the Maine family who couldn’t make one of the others.

A bit of background, if I may.  Back in the 1940s, as I’ve mentioned here before, my grandmother went one way and my Uncle Lew went another, theologically speaking.  My grandmother and Uncle Lew loved each other deeply, but the two branches of the family have always regarded each other with some suspicion. 

Uncle Lew’s side exists in good-humored trepidation of the morally superior and judgmental Baptists, while my grandmother’s line compresses its collective lips in grim disapproval of the worldliness and wickedness of the faithless.  This mutual wariness was visited upon the second generation and most of the third, and it accompanied my grandmother, Aunt Gerry, and a couple of dozen uncles, aunts and cousins from around the country into the Thomaston Baptist Church for the memorial service. 

The eulogy was interesting because the minister didn’t actually know my Uncle Lew; but knowing my grandmother, naturally he made assumptions about Lew, and thus expelled bushels of warm air about St. Lew living his life for the glory of God and similar twaddle.  I’m sure it gave my grandmother great comfort but the rest of us had to stifle the urge to laugh out loud and/or bean the ordained one with a well-flung hymnal.

The afterparty, however, was at MY house, which is a twaddle-free zone.   We drank, we swore, we laughed, we played Frisbee (aging uncles and younger cousins together), we grumbled about politicians, we ate too much and drank some more.  The Baptists declined the Frisbee game and the wine, endured the rest because they were outnumbered, and tried not to show they were having a pretty darn good time.

(And since my grandmother went home to rest after the service, there was no need to conceal the wine.)

Uncle Lew would have loved it.

Le Weekend

It was that sort of weekend.

In the low 80s, light cool breezes, not a cloud in the sky.

Everything deciduous bathed in shades of springtime green.

The sort of weekend when you take the cover off the boat and open up all the hatches.

The sort of weekend when you air all your bedding and do seven loads of laundry and almost don't have to use the electric dryer, except you only have so many linear feet of clothesline.

You know you shouldn't set out your basil because it could still freeze, but it's that sort of weekend, and you just can't resist.

The sort of weekend you just have to play outside.  

On Saturday, Thing One turned 15.

(He got a full set of Grundens for his summer job, but the biggest hit was this coffee worship t-shirt.)

And on Sunday, Himself and I marked 17 years of matrimonialocity.











That sort of weekend.

All good.

Things I Have Inherited from my Mother

My mother was an avid houseplant person.

Me, not so much, but I took hers on a temporary basis that seems to have become permanent.  Kind of like the cat.

She had an amaryllis bulb which I perched on my sunny kitchen windowsill and tossed some water on every week, and it seemed perfectly content to sit there and send up green leaves.  

A few weeks ago, it pushed up a stalk with a bud on it.

And it bloomed on the anniversary of my mother's death.

Bob the Bus Driver

The kids’ school bus driver is named Bob. 

Bob is a retired cop from New York City.  He has some great stories, which he only tells to kids who would appreciate them.

No one f*cks with Bob.  Seriously.   No one acts up on Bob’s bus.  He doesn’t yell.  He is just Bob.

If Bob arrives at your stop in the morning, and you’re not quite there, if you hustle he’ll wait for you.  If not, he’ll leave.  Even if he sees you coming.  If you don’t break at least a trot, he will drive away.

The bus stop at the end of our road is on a busy east-west thoroughfare along a stretch with blind curves coming and going.  Over the years there have been some pretty close calls as people have come barreling along a little too fast, in their 6.30 a.m. fug, and encountered a stopped school bus. 

My personal favorite involved black ice and a loaded dump truck laying about sixty feet of rubber while the car behind the dump truck did a 180.  I wasn’t sure exactly what message Bob conveyed to the truck driver – it was tough to lip-read from across the street, through the bus window and all the smoke – but I was very glad I wasn’t on the receiving end of it. 

Yesterday morning when Bob stopped for the kids, the car following the bus pulled way over onto the shoulder and up alongside the bus, like it was going to pass on the right, before it finally stopped.

Bob actually got off the bus to face down the driver.  I think if I’d been the driver I would have wet my pants.

Bob is awesome.

The kids are in good hands.

Track season

This spring has shaped up to be an awful lot like this winter:  rainy and in the 40s.  It's May and we still need the wood stove to take the chill out of the house.

But spring sports shall not be deterred, so short of a downpour, the track meet will go on.  Thus we stand for great lengths of time in the cold and damp.

These things are chaos.

See the kids with the blankets?  They were the smart ones.

Here, by the way, is a wind turbine that the high school students spent eight years raising half a million dollars to erect.  It was just installed, and the jury is still out on whether or not they'll see some sort of return on the investment.  Seems to me the cost benefit analysis was a little optimistic, but time will tell.  

So far no talk of bird strike.  My bet is there's some poor facilities guy out there every morning at 5 a.m. with a flashlight.

This is Camden.  We must keep up appearances.

Here's Thing Two tearing it up.  

She has potential.

Thing One is a good sibling - not only did he go to watch, he helped with measuring the long jump.  

And then we all came home and ate steaming bowls of lentil stew by the fire. 

Amen.

There goes that Mother of the Year Award again

Yesterday while Himself was shivering in a cold drizzle on a fog-shrouded mountain watching Thing One's Ultimate Frisbee team get clobbered...



...I stayed in my warm house.

My children are damaged

I am raising a family of profane coffee addicts.

Things I Have Inherited from my Mother

During the first three or four years of my parents' marriage, my father was chronically unemployed. 

We subsisted.

We had "hot dog goulash," as we called this, many times when I was a toddler.  You can tell by how well-used this recipe card is.  We also drank a lot of green Kool-Aid because a ten-cent packet, or whatever it cost in 1974, made half a gallon. 

Eventually my father got the call and was hired by the first of a series of congregations.  My mother spent the next twelve or thirteen years being a dutiful minister's wife and homemaker as we moved up and down the east coast - a new church every year or two - and she put a tremendous amount of effort into feeding us creatively and well on the pittance my father allotted for household expenses each month. 

She had dinner (meat, starch and two sides) each night at five o'clock sharp so my father could get to his recliner for the six o'clock news.  This was the playbook:

I don't know which edition it is, since the publication pages are missing, and the original binding was replaced, but judging by the Mad Men illustrations...



...I would guess we're talking early sixties.  Probably the first cookbook she got when she went off to college at 16.  It's very well-used. 

Here's a bonus:  A pie crust recipe written out by my grandmother.

The rest of the story goes like this.  Sixteen years in, my father soured on the whole monogamy thing, and the shock of the separation and divorce drove all those recipes and carefully crafted meals out of my mother's head. 

Ever after she loathed domesticity in general and cooking in particular. 

But she kept the cookbook.