The Stone Place

A couple of summers ago, Ber and I decided to go for a ride - just jump in the car and go somewhere, without planning. We drove over through Livermore Mills (a village that is barely there anymore) to Peru, and bought a big Italian sandwich at a deli, and ate it while sitting in a cellarhole on the manicured Peru common.

Cellarhole on the Common. Not Tavern on the Green, but a lovely spot for a picnic. 

After our picnic, we drove around on the dirt roads that lace through the woods, and decided to go up to The Stone Place. It is the site of a former farm, now completely wooded over, in the Green Mountain National Forest.

Griffith Brook, running very low.

The road is quite ordinary for the first quarter-mile, a narrow but well-maintained gravel road leading to a house. Beyond the house, however, the road becomes much more interesting. It is one lane, two tire-tracks with a high row of grass and weeds growing between them, and trees and ferns pressing close on either side. For all of its primitive nature, however, it is kept open and passable, to a point, and we were able to drive perhaps another mile into the woods. We parked in a broad clearing and walked the rest of the way, crossing a plank bridge over Griffith Brook, which, in the middle of that dry summer, was reduced to a froggy-smelling trickle. 

The road turns uphill, away from the brook, and toward a stand of young trees growing in a large area that was clear-cut about twenty years ago. It is here that we found the graveyard. Of course we knew it was there, but it is always a little strange to come across a graveyard so far away from habitation.

The Stone Family Cemetery

It is a small plot; only five gravestones stand inside a tiny, fenced area. Five members of the Stone family rest there, surrounded by birches and spruces and ash trees. The Forest Service maintains the plot, clearing it once a year and removing any fallen trees. There is no gate in the spiky iron fence, so unless one wants to risk being impaled, one has to be content with squinting at the inscriptions from outside the enclosure.

We decided to keep going up the hill, following the old road up the side of the mountain. We scuffed through sedgy grass, and stopped to admire the beautiful, rare bottle gentian that grew there. We found a hop-vine climbing a spindly cherry tree, and explored the remains of an old orchard, where gnarled, twisted apple trees dropped their fruit for the benefit of the wildlife. The ground beneath the treees had been cleared; we assume it is the work of the Forest Service, creating good browsing places for the deer.

"Want to keep going?" Ber asked after we had left the orchard, and stood in the road, looking uphill and down.

"Hmm..." I looked up the hill, along the path we had not let trod, and down the hill, the way we had come. My knee ached, and I knew the ball game would start soon. "Let's go up a little farther."

We climbed the hill, and the path soon went under the trees, in a place that had not been cut-over in many decades. The woods were dense here, still and quiet and sweet.

The Doorstep

Looking to the east side of the path, we saw the outlines of some stone walls, and went to investigate. We found that the stones formed a rectangle, and soon realized that we had found the remains of the house - the house the Stone family had built. We stood on the broad, flat doorstep that must have led to the main entrance, and I wondered, how many times dis someone gratefully cross that threshhold, going in after a hard day's work, into the cool house, or out of the cold, to get warm near the fire?

Bricks from the Chimney

We found not only the house, but the foundations of the barn - a much larger square, and the stone walls that formed a kind of funnel leading from the road to the barn. This was where they drove the sheep and cattle into the barn from the pastures, or out to the road, to be carted off to market.

We found bricks, which some previous explorer had pulled from the debris and left piled on a wall. They were weathered, and green with moss, but we could not help thinking of the chimney that must have stood there, long ago.

In poking around the corner of the house foundation, I found a bit of metal protruding from under a rock, and pulled it out. It was a horseshoe, heavily encased in rust. Ber and I passed it back and forth, and then I tucked it back into its hidey-hole, knowing that if I left it in sight, someone would take it away, and somehow, we didn't think it ought to leave this place.

The Cistern, and the Ash Tree that Split It

Ber found a cistern - one of the only pieces of concrete we found there. It was a large square vessel, split in two by the growing of a huge ash tree. The bole of the tree was squared off from having grown in the cistern, and then it had outgrown its dimensions, and split the concrete apart.

"The well can't be far from here," Ber said. "They wouldn't have piped water very far." Within minutes she had found the well, too. It was very near the house foundation, almost built into the cellar wall. It was hooded over with a couple of slabs of rock, to keep unwary people and animals from falling in, but there was enough of a gap to peer in, and see the circular stone wall of the well descending into the earth.

The Well

"Think there's any water in it?" I asked.

Ber peered in, as much as she could. "I can't see any," she said, "But it's been such a dry year..."

Inside the Well

I couldn't see any better than she could, so opened the flash on my camera and stuck my hand in the hole, and snapped a few pictures. Sure enough, beyond the litter of leaves and spiderwebs, there was the glint of water. Whoever had sited that well had chosen a good place.

It was beautiful there - serene and fragrant with the scents of ferns and earth. The woods were almost silent, but for the quiet trickle of a vireo's song. We stood and looked at the traces of the buildings that were just visible - stone walls, slowly disappearing beneath leaf-mold, delineating the footprints of the house and barn, and the outlines of the paddocks and meadows. We looked at the apple trees - no doubt the descendants of the Stones' original trees - and knew that if we looked, we could probably find roses and lilac bushes, and wondered if there were still daffodils that bloomed early in the spring.

"They did so much work," I said. "Think of all the work it took to clear the land by hand, and root out the stumps, and build the walls, and the buildings... and now it's all gone."

Ber climbing out of the barn cellarhole; house foundation to the right

 

It must have been backbreaking, endless work. Cutting the trees, digging and lining the cellarholes and the well, hauling god-only-knows how many tons of rocks to make the walls and foundations, hauling the lumber and bricks to build with. I wondered what the house had looked like - whether it had plaster walls, and if there had been any decoration. There must have been; even the poorest farmers had some kind of color in their homes - stencils on the walls, a glass vase, patterned china dishes, inexpensive framed lithographs, fuzzy gray photos of family members, colorful quilts on the beds. What kind of home had they made here, miles from the village, on a southeast-facing mountainside? Where are their descendants now? Are there any stories in the family of the long-vanished farm, any photos of it, tintypes stashed away in a trunk someplace?

Ber looked off toward the valley. "They must have had a fantastic view."

Indeed - with the spread of the valley below, and the rumpled mountains crowned in the distance by the rounded bulk of Stratton Mt. The view was, of course, blocked now by the dense growth of trees. "I wonder if they had time to look at it," I said.

The farm was abandoned sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century. Bricks, window glass and roof slates were probably salvaged or scavenged; meadows went rank with goldenrod, then hardhack, scrubby trees and then encroaching forest. The orchards no longer provided apples for cider and vinegar, but food for deer and bears. The hop vines went untrained and unpruned; their descendants still tangle the trees beside the road. Dad says he remembers going up there when he was a little kid in the 1920s and '30s, and seeing the derelict remains of the house slowly decaying into the ground, before the Forest Service and the CCCs went in and knocked it down and took away the debris.

We left it, left the cellarholes and stone walls and broken cistern to the silence of the woods, where the July evening sunlight was angling through the trees. We walked out past the apple trees, dropping fat yellow apples on the ground, past the hop-vines, past the cemetery where no one places flowers, but where the blue bottle gentian grows wild. Down the long hill, over the bouncy plank bridge, out on the narrow ribbon of road toward the sounds and sights of people.

2012 Official Where The Heck has Winter Been Day

(Written on March 1, 2012. Forgotten for more than 3 months, but here it is.)

Today is the first day of March. Since it is a Leap Year, winter is one day longer than usual, and yet it has taken until today to get a decent snowstorm. Normally I'd be writing my Officially Sick of Winter entry... but we have not had any winter to speak of, so how can I be sick of it?

There was a storm on the last weekend of October, but it dropped at most 6" on ground not yet frozen, and it all melted away before too many days had passed. There was snow on the ground for Thanksgiving, but by early December, that too was gone. There was no white Christmas here, and the only precipitation we saw for most of January was frequent hard rain that ate the frost out of the ground, and made the riverbanks, grievously wounded by last summer's floods, to melt away and crumble into the river, turning the water an awful murky dun color, like coffee with too much cream in it. What ice did form in the rivers was made of muddy water, and each rainfall would heave jumbled stacks of mud-ice blocks onto the riverbanks.

The hardest snowfall in January was a stationary squall that sat on the mountains between here and Manchester on the night of January 13th. My windshield wipers suddenly refused to function, so I rode with Linda, and we came up to Rawsonville. It snowed as hard that evening as I have ever seen it snow; we literally could not see ten feet in front of the truck, and sometimes could not see past the frantic wipers. It took an hour to travel the 15 miles from there to here, and by the time we reached home, Linda was a trembling wreck. Within an hour of our arrival, the snow had stopped and the clouds dissolved, leaving a star-dusted sky behind, as if to mock us and say, "see, you should have stayed put for another hour, and you'd have been all right."

Stupid weather.

February is often the coldest month, when the snow is deepest, and the deep frost buckles roads into wrinkled, broken devices of torment, when rivers are usually invisible under their blankets of snow-covered ice. This year, February was mild. Temperatures in the mid-40s were common, and nudged 50 degrees in warm valleys late in the month. In most locations beneath, say, 2000 feet in elevation, the ground was bare. Lawns started to have the soggy green look of early spring. Snowdrops emerged and budded.

On Leap Day, however, the snow began to fall. It came down pretty steadily all afternoon, and had accumulated about 4" by nightfall. Of course, I had to make an emergency trip to work, and drove home on a sloppy road, but it wasn't a bad drive. I've driven in worse.

Today it has snowed all day, sometimes hard, sometimes not snowing much at all. The radar picture shows another burst of snow coming from the west; the storm should be pretty well played out by nightfall, and will have left us with about 12".

The old hitching post in the front yard

This morning I went for a short walk up into the woods, while it was still snowing quite hard. Once I got up among the trees, there was almost perfect silence around me, save for the whisper of snow falling through the dry beech leaves, and the distant, muted sounds of traffic on the road - the scrape and rumble of a plow, the purr of a car passing, its tires silenced by the snow in the road. There were no birds in the woods; all the little feathered freeloaders were congregated around the feeders in the back yard, but even there they were not making much sound. It was mostly the soft buzz of their wings, the little kissing sounds the juncos make, and the occasional cussing of blue jays.

The woods were so peaceful. The columns of trees reached high overhead, darkening the already dim daylight, and holding little clumps of snow on bumps in their bark. There were no tracks, save the little stitched trail where a mouse had emerged from the snow and bounded across the path. The air was cold, but not bitter, and smelled fresh and clean - the exact but indefinable scent of snow.

I returned to the house when the wind came up a little, and thick white plumes of snow began to fall from the trees. I didn't want to get buried, so came back home, and changed into a more waterproof jacket, and went to start the tractor.

It wouldn't start, of course.

I shoveled out the area in front of the garage, and then returned to the house to tell Dad I couldn't get the thing to go. So Dad pulled on his boots - a laborious task, with his bad knees, hips and back - and got his coat and hat, and walking sticks, and we went over to the tractor, and he tried to start it, and it wouldn't go for him, either. We ran an extension cord out and plugged in the tractor's block heater, and we slogged back to the house, where Dad pored over the tractor manual, and then called Dave, the indispensable, and we waited.

After a little while Dad said he had an idea, and wanted to go back out, so he donned his warm things and scuffed back over to the garage. I had to get some supper going, and so started a pot of soup, planning to go over as soon as it was on the stove to simmer, but in the meantime, Dave pulled in and plowed a lot of the driveway, and helped Dad get the tractor started, so Dad cleared the rest of the yard, and I got the soup going.

It's just about 4pm now, and snowing quite hard again, though I doubt it will fill up the driveway.  The soup is bubbling happily on the stove. Mom is napping on the sofa; Dad has changed to warm dry clothes, and it's about time I took my boots off, because I'm not going out in the snow again, I don't think. Though it may be my last chance this winter to go out into the snow, I will pour a cup of Darjeeling and let the storm finish up without my interference.

The Art Book

My brother asked me recently to spend a little while teaching his older daughter how to paint. She is very interested in art, and got a treasure-trove of art supplies for her birthday - one of those studio-in-a-box sets, with 3 kinds of paint and 2 kinds of pastels and 3 kinds of pencils, and brushes, palettes, an easel, and so on. Since there is no real arts education on school anymore, and I have acquired a few skills over the years, I was recruited to be a teacher for a day.

To prepare for the lesson, I looked for books to give ideas in teaching a few art basics to kids. What I found was disappointing and disheartening. It seems that a good 99% of kids' art-instruction books consist of "Draw Manga" and "Draw Cartoons" and "Draw Fairies and Dragons". The other 1%... well, I never found the other 1%. I got a used copy of First Steps: Drawing and Sketching, by Cathy Johnson, published by North Light Books. It is an excellent book, but assumes a level of skill, even for a beginner, that is way over a 9-year-old's head.

What to do? I want to get Caitlin to both exercise her imagination and learn observational skills, and learn how to use her supplies to the best advantage - that being giving her inspiration, learning and fun. Where is the book that tells how to do this? I don't think the best way to learn how to draw is by copying cartoon characters out of a book.

Children are smarter than they are given credit for. Why must their first real instruction in fine arts be to copy simple line drawings? Older beginning art students are given lessons in fundamentals such as observation and sketching. Why shouldn't children be given the same initiation into art?

One thing an artist must have is a long attention span and a lot of self-discipline, and as these things are not exactly any child's strong point, these have to be learned and practiced along with art techniques. I want to come up with something that is neither childish nor complicated - something that will inspire her, and make her want to spend the time an energy learning, but nothing daunting that will lead to discouragement and disenchantment with art. Like many children, Caitlin has a full schedule - school, lessons, various "camps", play-dates and sleepovers galore. She has little time to devote to something as solitary and disciplined as art.

So, I am writing an art instruction "book" for Caitlin. I start off with "What Is Art?", and set out some basic rules, including "be patient" and "have fun". I tell about different media, and materials, and tools, and how to care for equipment such as brushes. I briefly describe some basic color theory, and want to write a page or two on simple perspective.

I will next tell about how to observe. Every kid wants to draw an apple as a red circle with a stem on top, every tree as a green cloud full of red apples on a straight brown trunk, every bird as a "M" in the sky. Clouds - white cotton balls. Water - always blue. While she was here, I gave Caitlin an apple to draw, and she promptly drew a circle with a stem - despite the actual apple not looking like that. So, I want to tell her that learning to observe - learning to really see - is the most important thing. Does the apple have a stem, or not? Is it round, or knobby? Does it have bruises or scars? I want to instruct her to spend a fair bit of time looking at what she wants to draw before she sets pencil to paper, and then learn how to draw what she sees.

I want to then tell about, describe and demonstrate some simple techniques for using basic media - drawing with pencil, making a watercolor painting, making a drawing with pastels, oil pastels, colored pencils, etc. For subjects I will use common, easy-to-draw things like a coffee mug, a banana, a nectarine. I'll make the drawings and paintings, photographing each step as I describe it so she will be able to see how I depict shadows, layer colors, etc.

Later on, when she has a better grip on basic drawing and watercolor painting, I will help her explore acrylic painting, and then oil painting. I want to do these things in steps not only out of concern for her - I don't want her to be overloaded - but out of concern for her parent's carpeting. A palette full of paint, when dropped, will fall wet-side-down, of course, and I am envisioning a lovely, permanent, abstract pattern of many colors of acrylic paints on their pale-beige carpet. Yikes!

The book won't be too much of a reach for a kid, I don't think. I use simple language, but don't talk down to her and patronize her; kids know when they're being patronized, and appreciate respect, not just effusive praise. When an adult hunkers down and says, "Oh my, what a GOOD PAINTING! Aren't you WONDERFUL!", a child looks askance (I know I did, when I was a kid). A quieter, more sincere praise is more appreciated.

Once she has a grip on draftsmanship, then she can take off on flights of fancy. No matter what kind of art she grows into, she will have a grounding in some essential skills. As she grows up, and her ideas and thoughts expand and mature with experience, she will have basics - drafting, color theory, perspective, and knowing how each type of media behaves. Even if she doesn't choose to go into art, she will have this creative outlet as a pastime, a way to relax, express herself. That's all I want for her - to know about and appreciate the process of creating artwork, so she will have a broader understanding of this essential part of human nature.

2011 Officially Sick of Winter Day

23 degrees. Snowing again, another 6-8 inches on top of the 12-14 inches we got two days ago. The car is stuck in the driveway, and I still have to get to work today. It's the last day of Presidents' Week, and the entitled rich will be clamoring for their sheets and shams and monogrammed towels. I also HAVE to get to work so I can put in payroll, and be paid this week for the last 2 weeks of dealing with the entitled rich.

The storm on Friday was a wild one. While I did manage to get to work (Mary went with me, and drove, since such road conditions were, as she put it, "a piece of cake" after her 21 years in the Northeast Kingdom), the snow fell harder and harder, and was predicted to continue throughout the day. We closed at noon, after a jangled FedEx man brought a load of boxes and stories of getting stuck, and seeing cars and trucks off the road. It had taken nearly an hour to get to Manchester (we even passed a big tour bus which was stuck facing uphill in the downhill lane on the mountain road), but took a little less than that to get home - about 40 minutes. I've driven in worse.

Mary tried to get the car into the garage on Friday, but the snow was deep in the yard, and she could neither drive nor back up to the garage. After whumping into snowbanks a few times, she decided to surrender to the elements, and park in the open. We came in and put on dry warm things, and watched baseball (the 2004 ALCS Game 6, on DVD) all afternoon, and along about 3,30pm, the snow stopped, the clouds cracked, and the sun tried to shine, and I felt as if I was playing hooky.

Yesterday was a bright, sunny day, but breezy and cold. The wind pulled streamers of snow from the trees and sculpted drifts around the car. After breakfast I shoveled a path to and around the car, scraped the snow and ice from the windows, and shoveled again. Mary was on her way home, meeting with Ken in White River Junction, and I had to make a path down which we could lug all her stuff.

We got on the road at about noon, and the traveling was fine. The strengthening sun melted the last of the snow on the road, and we even turned the heater down in the car. But there is where the trouble began.

My boots were soaked. As long as I was moving around, I didn't notice, but sitting still, my feet cooled off, and my boots got cold.... and then my feet got cold.

There's nothing quite like the misery of cold, wet feet. Everyone gets chilly now and then, but my feet were COLD. Cold enough to hurt. Not frostbite-cold, but chilblains-cold. Cold feet make me unhappy, cranky, crabby, sad. Passing back through Chester late in the afternoon, I stopped at Linda's, and she rescued me with warm, dry socks and a cup of hot tea, and I felt the crankiness melting away as my cold, wet feet tingled with warmth.

Of course, I did have to put on the wet boots again and drive the final leg home, and when I got here, my feet were once again cold and unhappy. I could not park in the garage, of course; I gunned it through the as yet unplowed snow and slewed the car to an angled halt just in front of the garage, and didn't even try to get it inside. I know futility when I see it. So I slogged into the house, scattering snow onto the floor, and divested myself of the offending footwear.

I woke this morning to steady snowfall, piling up on top of Friday's snow. Though it is ending as I write this, and should be partly sunny this afternoon, tomorrow is going to bring yet another storm, this time with a mix of snow, sleet, ice and rain. The pretty fluff on the ground today will turn to translucent grayish slop, and then freeze to an iron-like crust.

I've had enough. This winter has been so long, and so hard, and I am SO ready for the end of it. Though yesterday was a pretty day, with plumes of windblown snow sparkling against a pure blue sky, it was the breaking point. The cold feet - that was the last straw. I've had enough.

First Snow

Today began with sunshine, albeit kind of thin and cold, any warmth it may have offered stripped out by the steady breeze that rattled the artichoke stalks at the foot of the garden. The ground was frozen and hard underfoot when I took out the bird feeders, and a few flakes of snow danced and whirled in the air, not seeming to land, but just dancing.

By early afternoon, however, the few fitful snow flurries that had come and gone during the morning had turned into snow that seemed to have a more serious intent. The sky clouded over entirely and the day grew dark, dark enough to warrant having lights on inside the house. The snow grew heavier; distant hills and mountains grew pale and gray and finally disappeared, and snow landed and whitened the ground, catching in cups of dry leaves and in the crevices of tree bark.

It is a quiet day now, though the morning was less so. It is the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and a strange holiday it was for us this year. Mom is in the hospital, and has undergone two major surgeries in the last 11 days. The last two weeks have been a steady strain of worry, punctuated with spells of sickening fear, breathtaking relief, happiness, and (for me) periods when I am simply too tired to feel much of anything - just emotionless, blank exhaustion.

We had expected Mom to be either home or in a convalescent center by Thanksgiving, but an infection warranted emergency surgery on Monday evening, and this set her back at least a week, but she seems to be recovering quite well, all things considered. Sitting up this morning, eating some solid food, chatting with the nurses. She'll be in a convalescent center soon (knock on wood) and hopefully home before long.

We were rather thin of company over Thanksgiving, only seating five for the celebratory meal. Last year we had eight, but this year Lucy was away, Ber's husband had a relentless cold that kept him home, and Mom, of course, was in the hospital. We made a good meal; Mary and Ber cooked the turkey while Dad, Justin and I went up to Lebanon to see Mom, and when we got back the turkey was done and the potatoes were boiling, and though we ate later than we wanted, we had a delicious dinner, raising our glasses to the health of our absent kinfolk.

Ber went home yesterday, while I was at work (Black Friday, of course). Mary and Justin went home today, but Mary will be back in two days. Ken is scheduled for back surgery at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Med Center on Monday, the same hospital where Mom is, and Mary will be staying here while he is hospitalized, as it is a much easier drive from here than from her home.

I look out the window now, and the snow has nearly stopped, and the clouds are breaking, patches of pale yellow glowing through the blue-gray. Across the way, the pines and spruces on the opposite sidehill are dusted with a powdering of snow, and flakes still dance and whirl in the air. The house is quiet; the mantel-clock ticktocks to itself, and Dad's stirring around in the kitchen, making banana bread. I can smell the fragrance of the stock I have simmering, the last of the turkey carcass bubbling gently with vegetables, ready to be made into soup.

I am so tired.... maybe I will nap this afternoon.

Nor Any Drop to Drink

It began yesterday morning, when I was awakened in the dark, soggy dawn by a curious and unsettling sound. In my half-sleep, I thought maybe Mom was watching a movie featuring sporadic gunfire, but as I woke further I knew this was not the case. Still, I laid there and listened, hoping it wasn't the noise I already knew it was. I got out of bed and went into the hall, where I heard more clearly, and beyond any mistaking - it was the well-pump blowing blasts of air into the empty cistern.

The motor would hum, and then another sharp, awful cough of air would resonate in the concrete-block tank. I shut off the switches for both the well-pump and pressure tank pump, and looked out the window at the fog-draped hills and trees beaded with raindrops. How could the well be empty? Maybe it only needed a few minutes to recover. I waited, then turned on the pump, and heard only the coughing again.

I heard Dad running water as he went through his morning routine, so I told him what was going on, and to be prudent with the water. I then sat on my bed and wondered what to do next. Since swearing and grumbling were going to be no help, so I pulled on some clothes and a jacket, and went into the back yard, where water still drizzled off the roof into a row of buckets. I dipped some into an empty bucket and took into the house to use for flushing, and then, after feeding the birds that were evidently starving, if their histrionics were to be believed, I used some of the precious water in the pipes to wash my hands and make a cup of tea.

The well had run dry for a day, just at the end of September, after a hot and terribly dry summer. We'd had a rainy spell in early June, and a few occasional thundershowers here and there throughout the summer, but by this time the ground was parched, and rivers had more dry leaves than water in them. The well ran dry only hours before a storm was due to drop between 4 and 6 inches of water on us, and so our water deprivation was short lived. October has been quite wet, with several storms, and cool weather to keep everything from drying out again. So I seriously doubted that the well was in trouble. We'd had rain the night before - buckets of it, and the little brook was running in the hollow, so I knew the ground was saturated.

Later in the morning, after coffee and tea and breakfast, Dad opened the well and found, to our infinite relief, that it is completely full, almost to ground level. This well is over 150 years old, hand-dug on a spot determined by a dowser. It's about 4 feet across and 15 feet deep, walled with fieldstones. It produces the best water in the world - soft and sweet, not a trace of the mineral or metallic precipitates that make other local waters taste "off" and make crusty stains on pots and sinks. It's a little silty, perhaps, but is the best. What a good feeling it was to see that well brimming with our good water - even it it wasn't getting into the house.

The pump was the cause; it had lost its prime. Dad fiddled with it but decided he didn't have the tools to deal with it, so went in and called a plumber, who said he'd be here in about 90 minutes. Much cheered, we went about other chores, expecting to hear the splash of water in the cistern before long.

But the afternoon wore on...and no plumber. The appointed hour passed; the sun sank behind the trees to the southwest...no plumber. There was no water in the pipes; the only clean water we had was in a 3-quart jug I'd filled on Sunday to take to work (Manchester water being mineral-heavy and unpalatable). We eked it out; most went to boil a pot of potatoes for supper, and I used a splash to brush my teeth but didn't wash my face before bed. What I really wanted and needed was a bath, but unless I wanted to go down in the brook like a bird, or filter and boil a few gallons, I was stuck.

This morning there was just enough clean water left for Dad's coffee and 2 cups of tea. Dad called the plumber again, and reached an answering machine. Not knowing how long we might be without running water, I took two milk jugs to the brook and filled them. It had rained hard much of the night, and the brook was running high, so it was no problem to collect 2 gallons of the clear, cold water. I poured a gallon through a colander lined with a paper towel, filtering out bits of leaves and pine needles, before boiling it. This is the water that I used to make the cup of tea I am drinking now.

The plumber called a while ago, said he'd be here in an hour. It remains to be seen if his "hour" today will be as long as his "hour and a half" yesterday. It's nearly 10am now; I HAVE to bathe before I go to work, and I have to leave here no later than 11.30. I guess I'll have to go get another jug from the brook and boil it, and have a splash in the sink.

I cannot be too annoyed, though, or consider this a great inconvenience. At this moment in Haiti, thousands of people are suffering with cholera, that terrible and violent water-borne disease. Having a sip of water there is like Russian roulette, with most of the chambers loaded. But here, water probably clean enough to drink untreated is gushing down out of the woods. How lucky I am to live here!

A Meal to Fit Inside a King

Tonight Dad asked what we had to cook for supper. It's been a kind of a hot and tiring day, and a good meal is what we need - not a scrounge-supper of bread and cheese or a dish of cereal, or something insubstantial like that. Besides, that's what I had last night.

I had a lot of salad stuff that we'd accumulated over the past week - lettuce, cukes, some cherry tomatoes, string beans, dill and peas that Ber had brought last weekend; a couple of good fat summer squashes. I'd also bought a package of chicken thighs today, and so thought of having a salad with marinated chicken pieces.

While Dad de-boned 6 chicken thighs, I washed lettuce - two kinds, a salad bowl and a boston-type. I washed, trimmed and sliced 2 medium-sized pickling cukes, and rinsed the dill, and left it standing in a glass of water.

Then the marinade - nothing fancy, but enough flavor without masking the richness of the thigh meat. Extra-virgin olive oil (a mainstay), and a couple of tablespoons of good, nutty toasted sesame oil. I ground a good bunch of black pepper into the mix, and sprinkled in a half-teaspoon or so of granulated garlic, the same amount of dried marjoram and a little less than that of dried thyme. A couple of dashes of soy sauce went in, and I mixed it all well. Dad cut the chicken into small bits and mixed it well with the marinade, and we let it sit.

I took a fat summer squash and a smallish zucchini and cut them both into 1/2" thick slices, cutting the biggest slices of yellow squash in half. This would be boiled, floated in just enough water to cover them and boiled hard, until the flesh becomes translucent, and the seeds come out. This is a tasty, subtly sweet dish, delectable with pepper and butter. Mmmmm.

Dad snipped the beans, and they went into the steamer; he snipped and pulled the strings from the snap peas. I washed the pint of golden, red, orange and pinkish cherry tomatoes, and set them in a bowl beside the sliced cukes. Over the cukes I sprinkled a little of the dill, shredded to little bits.

I also made a cruet of my favorite dressing - cider vinegar, 2 cloves of garlic (minced fine), top up the cruet with EVOO, and sprinkle in crushed dried basil leaves and a few good grinds of black pepper. Of course it's still "raw" and won't have its best flavor for a couple of days, until the garlic and basil have infused into the liquids, but it's still pretty good when newly made.

The chicken was cooked in more olive oil, and drained on a paper towel, so as not to get too much oil in the salad. To complete the meal, we have some brown rice that was leftover from 2 days ago, to warm up and have on the side.

The steam from the pot of squash smells heavenly; the scent of dill and cucumbers is making my stomach growl. I have to go eat!