Simply 60

A river runs over it (all)

Mercy. It was my honest intention to find something else to write about, something other than rising water. But what did I do today? I slogged through two inches of standing water at Emerson Playground this morning to give the dog a proper walk. I went to Costco later on. I drove to Acton in hopes of buying hiking shoes for England at Eastern Mountain Sports. Mudane. Boringboringboring. Especially in the light of rising water.

Here at 276, we could as easily be playing King of the Mountain. Our house is situated on a rise. The long backyard slopes down to the Sudbury River (aka, in flood times, Lake Temporary). While the rest of Massachusetts and all of Rhode Island sink and pass under flood conditions, we sit on high watching the drama unfolding with the academic interest of the non-threatened. 

That is until Pete got the word that the cottage we own next door had six inches of water at one end of the basement and one of two sump pumps not pumping. Then it got personal.

 But not so personal that we had to panic. Or call in the National Guard (unavailable; busy elsewhere). Instead, when we saw the barricades go up on Nashawtuc Road, on which our property abuts, we decided to walk the dog in that direction. The river had backed up behind the bridge and was flowing over the road. When we waded through, it was about four inches deep. Deep enough to pour over the tops of my Bean boots. Alas. Wet feet.

Statistic: Over 18 inches of rain have fallen this month, making March both the wettest March as well as the wettest month ever in recorded Massachusetts history.

Clearly, this is the flood — actually, Part Three of The Flood — of the century (and it's so young!). It's the most exciting thing that's happened in Concord since the Minutemen got excitable and fired that famous shot.

Tomorrow, I'll go out with a camera. Stay tuned.

Truffle: A phone call from an old friend. It may take a natural disaster but, heh, you learn he's thinking of you and that's worth it's weight in gold. Besides, it's been a long time.

Quote of the day: "By the rude bridge that arched the flood,/Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,/Here once the embattl'd farmers stood,/And fired the shot heard round the world." (Ralph Waldo Emerson; Sorry. This quote was an inevitability given my Concord come-froms. So there. I've gotten it out of my system. Another reason to be grateful for all the rain.)

The best laid plans

A plan for a rainy day. I always think I will savor the forced indoor labor consequent to an all-day deluge. Not so. If today is any indication, when sheets of rain blew sideways and when that wasn't happening the sky weeped as if there were no tomorrow. It is astonishing how much rain has come down. Is coming down still. I keep thinking it will rain itself out. Like a good cry. You can only carry on so long before you are reduced to dry heaves followed by catatonia. 

It's the kind of day when I actually ferreted out the tax documents Pete wanted, backed up my computer, made a dentist appointment — all the things one puts off with very good reason, namely procrastination. You would think I'd feel uplifted by the things I'd ticked off a list so old, so musty it was a breeding ground for dust mites. Instead, I simply felt weighed down. Barometric pressure will do that to a girl.

So I tried to think of other things. Like being asked if we — my sister and I — would like to attend the races at Ascot when we're in England this June.  As in, Royal Ascot. As in hats, girly shoes, gladrags and HRH. But I got the tunes from My Fair Lady all muddled. Something about the rain in Spain falling mainly on the Ascot opening race.

Truffle: Noomi Rapace as Lizbeth Salander in the Swedish film The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Quote of the day: "Rain! whose soft architectural hands have power to cut stones, and chisel to shapes of grandeur the very mountains." (Henry Ward Beecher)

Building the ark

I don't know how to build a box but I'm setting out to build an ark. I will be more selective about the animals I invite on board than Noah was. Good heart that he was, he ushered forth with no discretion. What other answer is there to the existence of cockroaches and scorpions and mosquitos? Bugs. Clearly I have a problem with bugs. But I digress.

By Wednesday of this week we are expecting another seven (!) inches of rain. Translated into snow that would be 84 inches. More. Good night, Irene. One of our rivers (we have three in the vicinity) was at flood stage at 5p this afternoon. Cresting isn't expected until tomorrow or even Wednesday. The bluebird house, our backyard barometer, is about to go under yet again. Tonight I suggested to Pete that he rescue our canoes. Normally, they loll above the river on their little platform. But tomorrow, thank you Scarlett, could be another day.

So. If one were going to build a boat, an ark even, how to go about it? Once when I was a wee thing, we were vacationing in Maine. My brother built a lake-worthy raft of, if I remember correctly, white birch. I was some impressed, as I always was by his considerable prowess in many things (that's what seven years will buy you). So I copied him and built my own. It sank. I was five. Still, it does not bode well for my ark-building engineering skills on the morrow. But it may well be: Build or swim.

Truffle: This from a reader, via email. "I've started looking for my own truffles during the day. It's amazing how many would be overlooked without that mission." I wish I had said it so well. Thank you, Cathy!

Quote of the day: "Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat." (Jean Paul Sartre)

Finger sandwiches

Today I made 120 of them. Approximately  60 were eaten. We threw the rest out. 

What is it with me and leftovers? This is when I begin to think I was an abused child after all. My mother was the Leftover Queen. Apparently she is not alone. Over the span of all these decades I've run into numerous people who love leftovers. I am not among them. So my knee-jerk response to the remains of yesterday's meal may not have any foundation in good sense. 

Here are the leftovers I will eat with relish: pizza and gravy. Not, you will be relieved to read, together. Neither of which is available to me now.

Sixty finger sandwiches do not figure among them. Even though I lovingly made them all. Forty cucumber sandwiches, 40 egg salad sandwiches, 40 ham sandwiches. All the size of a quarter, squared off. Obviously we were having a gathering here this afternoon, for Pete's pet non-profit: Communities for Restorative Justice ( a big name for a little group whose principle role is to give youthful first-offenders a crack at justice outside the court system). Infinitely worthy. If only they had eaten. And eaten.

We do these things because we believe. I do this simply and unequivocally for Pete. 

Truffle: Being released from hypoallergenic dogfood prison. Slowly we are re-introducing various foods to Cajun who came down with a roaring case of giardia a couple of months ago. Now on the mend, let the good treats roll!

Quote of the day: "Success in entertaining is accomplished by magnetism and tact, which combined constitute social genius." (Ward McAllister, Society As I Have Found It, 1890)

Black and white

When The Help was suggested for my book club by a member, I knew from the topic that I was going to read it whether the group voted to do so or not. I finished it today. Then I went online and ordered the audio version. It is as important that I hear this book as it was that I read it. In all my reading life, which is considerable, I cannot recall having such an urgent response to a title.

Next Thursday I'm supposed to lead a discussion on The Help. It amuses me that it's also April Fool's Day. Why this coincidence amuses me is this: one thing I cannot do is lead an intellectual, quasi or otherwise discussion of this book. It is so far and away the book I had in me (but didn't know it and would never have had Kathryn  Stockett's courage to write) that I am reduced to Jello-O just thinking about it.

You'll have to read the book to understand this: but I had my own Constantine.  Her name was Lee Renwick. Ironically, she was my family's maid in Pittsburgh, that is, well north of the Mason-Dixon line. To me she was what would be called now a surrogate mother but then might have been called a nanny. Back then, in the 50s, it was how many a black woman earned money, no matter where they were in the North-South scheme of things. We moved away when I was six years old and I waved goodbye to her never understanding, let alone being told, I would never ever see her again. Although we visited Pittsburgh many times, there was no visiting Lee. It wasn't done. North or south.

I knew the black maids in their starched uniforms serving privileged white women of the '60s in the south, too. Not just knew them. But loved them. We moved from Pennsylvania to Kentucky. I was schooled, in every sense of the word, in the South. Next door to us lived Dr. Alice Pickett, a spinster obstetrician, and her black maid Edwina. I spent hours in Edwina's kitchen. Hours. It was her company I sought, not Dr. Pickett's. When the eminently good Dr. P died, Edwina simply evaporated. Gone. Poof.  I was in my early 20's and naive enough to be stunned that she never came back. She had, after all, lived every day but one per week, in the little bedroom off the kitchen. 

I never got back to Lee. I never had the opportunity to tell her I loved her, remembered her, was deeply influenced by her for life. But my sister and I did track Edwina down. We called and asked to pay a visit. Edwina, all decked out in her Sunday finery, and her niece received us with infinite grace. And I think, though, I'll never know for sure that Edwina got it. We were there to pay our respects. 

 I read Stockett — her first novel (come on! how masterful can you be out of the gate, huh?) — and marveled at her clear, uncompromising and unapologetically black voice(s). Cross gender writing has many a critic. Are Henry James' women realistic or elaborately dressed stereotypes? Is Virginia Woolf's Septimus Warren Smith plastic or lovingly realized from within? But what writer, especially what woman writer, has dared to write cross racially?  Oh sure, white women's voices show up in black literature but what white writer has dared to pen an entire novel from a black woman's point of view? What an enormous risk to take. And she got it right. The cadence, the syntax, the lyrical quality and earthy metaphor all come through, ring true.

I'm about to write a fan letter.

Truffle: Being brought to tears by the events in a work of fiction. Not once at the denouement. But too many times to count.

Quote: "Skeeter look away from me, try to smile. 'I don't care about any of that ole stuff, anyway.' She kind a laugh and it hurts my heart. Cause everybody care. Black, white, deep down we all do." (Abileen, The Help, by Kathryn Stockett)

A penny saved

If I had tossed a penny every time I rounded Brant Point there would be a copper reef breaking the surface of the Sound by now. I gave that up long ago. Became blase, though not jaded. There came a time when I simply knew I would be back on Nantucket. I needed no longer to make a wish, succumb to the superstition.

That does not mean leaving gets any easier. In a way, burying myself in a book, paying no mind to our progress off the wharf, around the Point, out the jetties and north toward Hyannis, makes it easier. What I don't know (read: acknowledge) won't hurt me. Of course Nantucket is all the sweeter for being occasional and I can  — and do — take heart in that. Still....

What sustains me are the small certainties of return: a hair appointment for May, a promise to be at Beverly's opening in April, the need to prepare the cottage for summer tenants and the garden for spring, talk of a book collaboration in the fall. And something else, something more elusive to name — if Nantucket is the island I am the mangrove, throwing roots at its shifting shores, holding on for dear life, swaying with the tides, getting blown over and blown away on up surging seas, only to wash back in and throw out another tendril or two until the next uprooting.  

Truffle: Getting my hair cut. This is definitely a 'girl thing' but few things in life are so pleasurable. If only Theresa would show up every morning thereafter and make it look as great as she does in her salon.

Quote of the day: "A line is a dot that went for a walk." (Paul Klee)

Nantucket town

Nantucket town. Town is the operative word. Although the missing word, the one used only in formal reference (Island) is pertinent too. The sense of community here is acute — from welcoming strangers to knowing too much about your neighbors, from performing unrequested acts of simple kindness (throwing the morning paper up to the high stoop of the elderly couple living down the road) to filling idle hours with cruel gossip, from having a wealth of 'human services' to denying any such service is needed on this, a fat-cat, white bread island, from being among the earliest communities in the country to abolish slavery to having a nearly extinct working class.

Ah, Nantucket. You are a fickle female. In the summer so overrun with foreigners it's hard to discern a known face. In the winter every corner brings a friendly one. Simple errands — a trip to the bookstore, casting an absentee ballot, attending the Historical Association's Thursday brown bag talk, doing a little shopping for my man, dropping off a silly Georgia hat to my friend Georgia — cause collisions of intersecting lives. As if the moat that surrounds us here is nothing other than a big corral, rounding us up like free-ranging cattle to the winter pastures of downtown Nantucket.

Susanne, Dick, Peggy, Peter, Stacey, Ralph, Cecil, Georgen, Libby, Ben, Matt, John, Elizabeth, Sam, Marcia, Mike —  paths crossed in this smallest of small towns. And in the space of two hours or less. It is what delights me and brings me up short. This is my town, as it their town too. There was a time when it was a shared anchor in a pitching sea. But truth is, it is not my town any more. Not really. Though I claim it still. I greet them greedily, they greet me with curiosity — when did I arrive? how long am I staying? When all I want of them is the reassurance of recognition, the illusion of still belonging.

Truffle: Reconnecting with my town. If only it could be Our Town.

Quote of the day: "...the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales." (Herman Melville, Moby-Dick)

Island in the stream of consciousness

A day spent on Nantucket is a day no better spent anywhere else, world.

It wasn't intended as a slumber party. We're too old and too in need of our sleep for that. But, after coming to terms with a new day in our individual ways, in our individual places, we convene for toast and tea and a leisurely morning that lasts almost to midday. We stretch like young cats, shaking off the lethargy. Beverly and I polish, and polish off, her artist's statement for her retrospective next month; I make final corrections on an article headed for the Concord Journal and email it off. These two acts constitute our 'work for the day.' 

Feeling noble in our accomplishments, we make an unspoken pact to spend the rest of the day playing. We set off for town with the obligatory to-do list, and while we're at it, we go out for lunch, visit a friend for a tour of her house-in-progress, stop by another's to find him not home, look at a vintage house about to come on the market and exercise wishful thinking and, finally, though hardly the end of our play, we take a walk to the end of Littleneck and back, wishing only for a dog to justify the endeavor. 

Separate obligations call for separate evenings but then we reconvene for the multifarious pleasures of women friends — sharing food and gossip and modeling clothes; discussing men and relationships, the news of the day and finally inevitably, because this is a conversation between Beverly and me, hashing out for the umpteenth time our opposite takes on the question of God. 

It was a good day.

Truffle: Breaking light through storm clouds over Madaket Harbor. 

Quote of the day: "I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best." (Marilyn Monroe)

Deluge

It's hard to believe Al Gore doesn't have a point. The climate's gone wonky everywhere. Not only did Concord get eight inches of rain last week but another three is expected today. I'd say that was a conservative estimate. What I do know is that the rain is coming down and the bluebird house, underwater last week, re-emerged this past weekend and is now sinking fast all over again. 

It's been raining all day. This morning, decked out in head to toe foul weather gear I trekked around the neighborhood with Cajun (the dog's gotta pee, after all). Then I drove all day in drizzle and increasing fog until I reached Hyannis and could hear the ferry coming in but could not see it. On board, the windows of the boat fogged over. We could have been sailing through the clouds. We were sailing through the clouds. Ones that had settle fat and over-saturated onto Nantucket Sound.

Back in my New York City days I had a white noise machine — a Hammacher Schlemmer 'best'. I used it to block out the elevator in the hall and sex next door. I could chose between surf and rain tones. Rain was best. It was soporific in a way the intermittent breaking of waves can never be. It was good but pales in comparison to the melody of Mother Nature's real tears.

In Madaket now, the night settles in around me, the house silent. I listen to the rain and wonder is it inside or outside of my head.  The rain beats down. It drips from eaves and rolls down windows. Outside the world fills up and spills over. Inside, peace. I listen,nestled in a dry place. Like huddling under a down comforter on a frosty evening, I savor the protective shield which is this house. And sleep seeps in like rain blown under the door.

Truffle: Beverly's five perfect yellow tulips and three curly willow branches. An exquisite, Zen-like beauty, herald of springtime, defier of winter.

Quote of the day: "One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world was better for this." (Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, on the occasion of the passage of Obama's health care reform bill)

Fat lip

OK, so I was horsing around with the dog. Why are there always consequences for play? Anyway, I managed to take a hip in the lip. So I sit here holding an ice pack to my face and typing with one hand. Very slowly. Very tediously. Brings home the ridiculous nature of the incident. 

But it got me thinking about why joy always comes at a price. Indeed, how does one define joy? Or even know it when it hits you in the face? HA! That is a joke. Question still stands. And quoting The Prophet is cheating.

I had a friend once who uniformly brought me up short if I expressed duplicate happiness. Example: we were driving to New York from Nantucket down I-95 — not a pretty picture in and of itself. But there is one very short expanse of that highway that goes past a reservoir or somesuch, on the north side. It was autumn. The colors were dropdead gorgeous. I gushed at the sight on the way down. When, driving back to Nantucket three days later, I was struck again with the same beauty and said so. My friend (former) commented drily, in an oh-so-bored tone, "You said that before."

Why can't I say it an infinite number of times?! my little hurt psyche cried out.

Now, with the lip of a prize fighter fresh from the ring, I say: Bring it on! I'd rather have a fat lip than a thin soul.

Truffle: It may not sound like a truffle but here goes — Stepping across a wet stretch of path I'd walked on successfully two days ago, before the drying out had even begun, and sinking up and beyond my ankle. It was a shock. It was cold and wet. And a shock. After it sucked the wind from me, I laughed. How pretentious we are to think we know what is, or will be.

Quote of the day: "God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide." (Rebecca West; on thinking of Texas's Board of Education's role in what our children read in school)