Door Number 8

Monday, August 20, 2018

Canoeing on the Retreat Meadows

Where the West River and the Meadows join

A bit of explanation may be appreciated since one doesn't usually canoe on meadows. But these are water-meadows. And non-seasonal at that. What was once prime farmland flooded when a certain dam was completed in 1909. Now, winter, those same lake-like "meadows" are covered with ice-fishing shacks. Summer, they host kayaks and canoes. They are called the Retreat Meadows because they are adjacent to the Brattleboro Retreat, a hospital complex for mental health and addictions.

What happens here geographically is that two rivers meet--the great Connecticut, the boundary (here) between Vermont and New Hampshire, and the lesser but exciting West River that can thunder down the slopes and produce such disasters as Hurricane Irene's destruction when something like 13 Vermont towns/villages were isolated from any traffic in or out (other than helicopter) because our lovely "babbling" rivers, of which this was one, brought on havoc! Though adjacent to the Connecticut, the meadows are more a part of the West River.

What the West River looks like when said to be "babbling."

Okay ... so some weeks ago, seeing summer flee, as it is prone to do, having celebrated the Fourth of July, knowing that Labor Day was imminent, I told a certain member of the family that before summer was over, I wanted us to go canoeing ... and especially since it had been several years since we had last been.

So we picked yesterday to go. Good temperatures--mid-70s. A bit of cloud cover so we wouldn't fry out on the water. A Sunday when she and her little ones weren't otherwise engaged. We met up at the canoe rental spot, paid our $25 for one hour, and embarked. It turned out to be the 12- and 8-year olds' first canoe trip. So she gave them an on-the-spot tutorial in rowing since both wanted to be engaged in this fun family activity.

It was a perfect day--paddling away, enjoying ourselves, catching glimpses of Canada geese, ducks, an egret (or was it a heron?), curly water-weeds, and other Sunday folks out on the meadows with the sense that the water was so shallow, the draft of the canoe so slight, that one could step out and not be submerged.

Fishing

What The Meadows will look like in two months

Sunday, August 5, 2018

High Summer

"It's been dry, dry, then hot, hot, then wet, wet." So one of my vendor friends at the farmers market summed up our summer so far. And right now the "wet wet" is mixed with more "hot hot." After living in this house for more than 20 years, I was finally compelled to buy an AC window unit to at least cool part of my upstairs. The downstairs has to rely on pulled window shades plus a fan. But I still get in the car and use its AC as I drive around. And I still visit the library with its comfy chairs and just-right temperature.

But winter sets in with such a vengeance that I feel it's important to appreciate summer while we have it ... with its green green days as that color overtakes everything from our trillions of trees to the greenish skies that appear with the approach of a good crashing thunderstorm.

I personally prefer the dry-dry to the wet-wet whether it's hot-hot or not. But those non-humid days are rare--belonging to country far west of here. We in the northeast are part of the high-humidity crowd. It can be debilitating and make us grumpy. Or send us off to the nearest lake or river for boating and swimming because that's one thing we do have around here: water.

Here are some of our summer views:

Getting ready for the canoe race

Afternoon party

For when the party crowd is ready to sit

The Fourth, bocce balls and all

Hammock and honey

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

A Bit of Reminiscing

Breakfast in the 1940s

We get so used to the way things are that we forget how they once were. For instance, when I go to buy meat--I get pre-packaged meat; alas, our good butcher closed--there are basically five choices: lamb, pork, beef, chicken with ground turkey in the freezer. Back in the '40s and '50s, my mother used to come home with mutton, heart, tongue, liver. Bones were free. We also ate a lot of our own rabbit and chicken during the war, rabbit being as common on our table as chicken.

The veggie department, on the other hand, had many fewer choices. Stores didn't carry such things as bok choy or broccolini or rainbow chard or fennel. Or even a variety of fresh herbs, though there was always parsley, free for the taking, since it acted as a display decoration. So there was nowhere near today's choice, but then, if I'm correct, we also didn't have the problem of pesticides in our food, everything then being still organic. And no one had yet invented that GMO horror.

Rainbow chard

When I was growing up, watermelons were a half cent a pound. Except for bananas, if you wanted something exotic like papayas or mangoes, you had to visit a place with a tropical climate. I remember my father (who, being an Easterner, had spent summers in Maine as a boy) once told the story about the time he was at Paramount filming a movie. (In the '20s or '30s sometime.) The film was set in Maine and had a scene where the set designer had placed a bowl of persimmons on the dining room table. At that, my father complained, saying that was not realistic as no one in Maine even knew what a persimmon was. Persimmons were a California thing. (We even had a persimmon tree in our back yard.) But the set designer didn't care and simply left it there.

I also remember the day mayonnaise came back on the shelves after having been non-existent during the war. My mother sent my brother and me up to the corner grocery to buy a jar. I was in third grade. We also found bubble gum for sale, something I'd never heard of though my brother (who was older than I) seemed to know about it. Soon after, we saw our first bag of corn chips. I'd say that was 1947.

My mother was what is now called a "stay-at-home-mom"--then called "a housewife". (No one called a woman "a mom"; only one's children used that term. A woman with children was "a mother." Like in Happy Mother's Day.) So, staying home, she made fudge, pineapple upside down cake, scalloped potatoes, meatloaf, creamed tuna on toast, waffles --start to finish, everything from scratch. There were no packaged mixes, no take-out, no micro-waves, no frozen dinners. At least not just then.

We ate home-cooked, wholesome. Not exotic. No garlic, no mushrooms. A little tabasco or paprika was about as adventurous as we got. Plus poultry seasoning in turkey stuffing. The only pasta was spaghetti or macaroni. Chicken was usually floured and fried in fat. Or it was boiled, boned, and made into a gelatin aspic, particularly nice on hot days. Salads were iceberg lettuce with mayonnaise. Or Waldorf salad with apples and walnuts.

Then things started shifting and the first fast food burgers arrived. They cost 15¢. That was maybe 1954. I had my first pizza in 1955. It was then called pizza pie.

Until they closed up, my mother adored going to drug store soda fountains, sitting on a stool, and getting a nice coke with a squirt of cherry or lemon syrup mixed in. Or else she got a chocolate ice cream soda. The "soda-jerk" (usually a young man) made it as you watched. A tall glass with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, some chocolate syrup, and a splash of soda water, all mixed together with a long spoon. Then more ice cream, syrup, and soda water with whipped cream on top. Being so fond of them, my mother used to reminisce about the last ice cream soda she ever got. It was at the drug store on San Ysidro in Santa Barbara. It had cost 45¢. She could make them herself and did sometimes. But it was never quite the same.

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Saturday, June 30, 2018

A Gallery of Photos: The Westminster Garden Tour

This is the 17th Annual Westminster (Vermont) Garden Tour, all on a hot (but so-far bearable) weekend. I went this morning before the temperatures rose all golliwag and concentrated my photo-taking on just one garden, that of Landscape Designer Gordon Hayward on McKinnon Road just near the village of Westminster West. I've featured the tour in previous blogs so some of these scenes may look familiar, though the photos were all taken afresh this morning. The setting, as you see, is glorious, off in the countryside amid dairy farms and artists studios, embraced by stone walls and woodlands.

According to the little booklet that I was given on the tour, "Since 1984, Gordon and Mary Hayward have been developing a one-and-a-half-acre garden around their 220-year-old farmhouse." It's the subject of their book, The Intimate Garden (W. W. Norton, 2005) and features a post-and-beam gazebo, an outdoor dining area, a four-quadrant herb garden, and a pool garden among other features.