Category Archives: Massachusetts

When your birthday and Mother’s Day are always in the same week, it messes with your head a little

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Yesterday one of my sisters sent me an early birthday e-mail that said “enjoy your last year of being the only sibling under 50.” Let’s just let that one sink in for a minute on this Mother’s Day. I have a lot of siblings (think Stephen Colbert) and my life has been punctuated by the rewards and trials of being the youngest in a large family (mostly rewards). Because I am the end of the line and my mother worried a  lot about being an older parent with a young child (every time she left town she would say, “Now, if I die…”), I do measure annually  how old I was when my mother was the age I am turning this year. If I were my mother, I would have an 8 year old right now. How lovely to have a sweet little second grader right now. How exhausting. I have three children and this is the first year I do not have to attend a spring concert and I am overcome with joy.  Mom, thank you for the science fairs and Christmas concerts and Girl Scout flying up ceremonies. And I want you to know that I totally forgive you for not coming to my junior high volleyball and softball games.  Most of the time I didn’t even want to be there myself so I didn’t exactly stew about this for 30 years but really, thank you for all of the stuff you actually made it to because no parent could possibly be prepared for the purgatory that is some school events – and then multiply the times you have to sit through it it by 10. You never know when one is going to count and give you that incredible moment, though, so I will be there for every one that I can get to that’s left for me. So thanks to my siblings for breaking Mom in on some fronts and making her paranoid on others and for reminding me that being the youngest is just as much of a mixed bag as it ever was. I love you all.

Look! Here is the hill I am almost over!

Cranwell Window

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Like the rest of the world, I fell in love with Downton Abbey.  And after 30 years in Massachusetts I finally had a chance to drive through and make an overnight stay in the Berkshires.  Now is see what all of the fuss is about.  I expected the spring beauty of the rolling hills but I was not prepared for the diverse and breathtaking architecture of Western Massachusetts and Eastern New York.  This window is the Downton Abbey moment of my first – but not last – journey to Western Massachusetts.  It was taken at Cranwell, a gilded age property with a provenance that includes Harriet Beecher Stowe.  The pastoral and architectural beauty of the property was matched only by the graciousness of the people who worked there.  A real gem.

Roots & Bulbs

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Spring is a month early and I am not complaining even though we have had precious little rain.  Having come late to the gardening party I have noticed only in recent years that each spring things sprout and bloom in a slightly different order.  This year the change is more dramatic:  the peonies are well on their way, even as the forsythia is in full bloom.  The tulips seem visibly annoyed to being pushed aside by the busy peonies; they are used to having the front garden all to themselves. The azalea, battered by autumn storms and with no snow cover to protect it from the winter wind, seems to have given up in exhaustion and pushed out only a handful of blooms from nearly bare branches.

I am always particularly glad to see the tulips. The red ones are the first to appear and the first I ever planted.  I put the bulbs in shortly after September 11, 2001.  Before then, my attempts at gardening were halfhearted and largely unsuccessful; our yard is so shady and the soil so sandy and acidic that no perennial I planted ever came back the following spring. But the previous owner clearly knew what to plant and so the garden she built always filled in nicely.  But there were a few spots near the driveway that got a little sun and seemed a little bare, and the events of that fall got me to thinking that I’d been living in our house like a renter – doing precious little to show any kind of long term commitment to a family home now buzzing with three young children. The crazy world (remember Graydon Carter announcing the end of irony?) and the empty skies of that September made me look up from storybooks and changing tables and brought me outside, and made me want to plant something beautiful, something hopeful, for the spring.

So I did.  And they bloomed, and have bloomed every year ever since (provided I remember to put out soap to keep the deer from nibbling the bulbs).  When the trees at the front of the house grew too big we had to take two of them down and that gave me more sun and soil to work with, and my perennial track record improved:  sedum, cone flowers, delphiniums, daffodils, iris, bachelor buttons, phlox, creeping thyme. A few years ago hyacinths appeared out of nowhere and they seem to be proliferating.  The original daylilies are stalwart and dependable as ever.  The hydrangea and the poppies are dubious and bloom sporadically.  The hollyhocks are a total failure. The shady areas still baffle me; the ivies are anemic and I am the only person I know who can’t grow hostas.

Last spring I took an inventory and ordered more tulips and daffodils to supplement my reds – I wanted orange.  The box showed up in late August for fall planting, at which time I promptly broke my foot and was relegated to the couch for 4-6 weeks.  My plan was to get them in just after Halloween, but when I went to plant them the box was in the recycling, empty.  My husband had come upon them and handed the box to my daughter and told her to plant them, which she did, grudgingly, with little attention to where.  So all winter long I waited to see if and where they would come up.

This week, they emerged – a few here a few there, some in groups, some in rows, some in places where the deer dined on them so I don’t even know for sure which ones they are.  It isn’t the way I would have done it – it is better, creating a haphazard path of blooms up the front walk, starting with my 2001 tulips.  Nothing at all about this whole operation went according to plan but it all seems so right – this is her senior year, and these are her tulips that she planted at the only home she has ever known. Next spring I will cry when they come up and send photos of them to her at college which will delight and exasperate her.

It is only now, as I type, that I recall my own mother hovering over her tulips in our back yard in Saint Louis, and how the entire city seemed to be swimming in them the last time I went to see her in hospice. Saint Louis sees spring much sooner than New England so that visit was, for us, like Dorothy emerging from the back and white of winter to full technicolor spring. It was an intensely sad and joyful time, punctuated by tulips. Every time the deer snack on them I swear I will not plant any more, but I don’t think I can stop. Not now.

Window Under the Dome

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This is the view from the second floor over the lobby that stands under the great dome at MIT.  I walked by and often stood at this particular spot nearly every day for a few years back in the 80s and 90s, and there was always something interesting to see either inside or out:   the skyline across the river, tickets and events information at lunchtime, engineering students in a bridge-building competition, or the regal rhododendron in full bloom along the perimeter of Killian Court outside.  After I left the Institute I returned to the Lobby a few times to sell hand painted clothes at the craft fairs.  It was lovely to work in such a busy and imposing structure; it made every task seem useful and important and sometimes I would invent reasons just to take that walk down the Infinite Corridor and feel the buzz.  I miss it sometimes but on recent visits have found that the nostalgia of the architecture is not enough; it was the people and the work that kept me going, and I would almost prefer to look at the photos than walk down the corridors where, now, nobody knows my name.

Last Tomato

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We have a sweet children’s book called First Tomato, in which a young bunny picks the first ripe tomato and her mother makes her fresh tomato soup.  Only after downloading this photo did I notice that the morning light reveals tiny spiderwebs on the tomato plants, a harbinger of Halloween.  Taken just a few days ago, it already harkens back to seemingly distant, definitely brighter summer days, and I am hoping that the remaining tomatoes will ripen before the frost arrives.  We wait all through June and July and into August for that first tomato, but we never can be sure when we will eat the last, finding sometimes that the days have gotten too short and we have waited too long.

A Temple Grandin Moment

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It’s the first day of school and the new ridiculously early schedule and the blazing heat make me feel like I imagine these cows feel – I just want to stand in the shade and barely move and not think at all.  I am already nostalgic for summer and the late afternoon moments when, while riding with a car full of kids (autistic and not, for the record) past the farms, all of them would spontaneously start to moo at the grazing cows.

Cape Light

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My feelings about Cape Cod are complicated – it seems to be a place so very stuck between eras, never successfully occupying either present nor past - but I never fail to be charmed by the light, how it brings out colors that seem to exist nowhere else, particularly in the early morning and late afternoon.  It’s beach plum season, when the colors of both summer and autumn are exposed by the golden light in frosty skin of the pink-blue-purple fruit.

BP: Goo Gone

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As I woke up to the radio this morning I heard the first news item about the British Petroleum oil spill that I did not need to hear again to understand.  The cap on the oil well is secure but something – they aren’t sure what - is coming up through the ocean floor nearby.  It might be pressure building up as a result of the cap, but then again it might not; such seepages can occur naturally.  Thus, BP is reluctant top loosen the cap because that will result in more fines for them, but apparently they can’t be held legally responsible for the rupture in the ocean floor.

Despite the 24/7 spill cam  documenting the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and the valiant efforts of Anderson Cooper, it’s still difficult for me to get a handle on both the science and magnitude of the spill and how it came to this.  As I type at my computer in my air-conditioned home atop a two car garage I know that I am complicit in the energy dependence that drives companies like BP to do something that is inherently dangerous to the global ecosystem.  I’ve pored over the graphics illustrating how deep water drilling works, how relief wells will help, how natural gas and oil are mined but not necessarily collected at the same time and how bacteria that feast on the oil are depriving the rest of the ocean of the oxygen they need to survive.  The only news item I won’t read is Kevin Coster’s solution to some or all of this - you won’t be getting a hyper link to that one from me.

At some point someone suggested that the President or Secretary of Energy provide the public with strategies for responding to the crisis – and in ways more practical than planning a vacation to the Gulf.  If people can start carrying reusable bags to the grocery store like more people are doing nowadays the possibilities really are endless, days and  in these days of PowerPoint I am really shicked that no one has issued a bulleted list of things people can do to cut energy dependence – of if they have why they haven’t shown up on milk cartons and paper bags. 

Speaking of which, my own personal ray of hope has been the flourishing of the farmer’s markets near our house.  When we moved here 17 years ago there were three tiny, tired farm stands that we counted on for corn, strawberries, blueberries, zucchini, tomatoes and potatoes each year.   Now, we have a Friday farmer’s market near the center of town and those three old farm stands – all within sight of one another – have each constructed new buildings and are offering local milk, eggs, meat, bread and cheese.  This year, for the first time, it’s possible to skip the supermarket entirely for weeks at a time.  We are saving gas on trips to Costco and we are helping the local economy as we develop a taste for grilled vegetables.  It is the Michael Pollanization of America, and it’s great.

Still, my thoughts keep drifting to the basket under my kitchen sink.  For years I have been slowly replacing the Dow chemicals under it with more environmentally friendly cleaners – more white vinegar and less unpronounceable stuff.  But my favorite bottle in the basket is Goo Gone.  It’s a  miraculous citrus-based grease and adhesive remover and it makes all of my worst petroleum-based household problems go away and smell lovely.  I have to admit that I don’t know that all of it products are all natural.  But I harbor fantasies of giant tankers of Goo Gone dispatched to the Gulf of Mexico where the waters and sands will be restored to an orange-scented bliss.  And if that was Kevin Costner’s idea, I don’t want to know about it.

Photos:  Vineyard Sound, July 2009; Spring Brook Farm, July 2009; Summer Produce, July 2009.