New Year’s Revelations

Since New Year’s Resolutions usually don’t work out very well, I decided “revelations” would be more fun to explore. But really this a sort of review of things I’ve been doing and places I’ve been in the past couple of months, that did not make it into my other 2021 blogs. But I’ll try to frame them as “revelations” to fit into my chosen theme!

But for those of you who actually like resolutions, there’s a fun way to make some, courtesy a randomly generated wacky collection courtesy the new Futures exhibition currently in the refurbished Smithsonian Arts and Industries building. Just follow that link, and click in the white box inside the green circle with the little robot looking thing in the right bottom corner. It’s sort of addictive. My favorite one was “As often as possible I will fire things from a trebuchet.” (My daughter and I have a thing for trebuchets after seeing a show on PBS about them one time years ago.)

2022 still sounds rather futuristic, but it’s here. I always try to end on a hopeful note in these blogs, so here’s hoping for some good things this year. Meanwhile, here are my “illustrated relevations.” (NOTE ABOUT FEATURED IMAGE ABOVE: This plate of tandoori roasted vegetables at a Jersey City, NJ Indian restaurant, encountered in November, was a true revelation of deliciousness. The American flag is a nice touch, too. Here’s to more culinary adventures in 2022 like this one!)

Sometimes revelations come close to home. Here, the new canal boat that will, later this year, start taking tourists on a historic journey along the C&O canal is revealed to be sitting around waiting in Georgetown.
As friends and family celebrated the life of my husband’s cousin Wendy, who passed away in November, in the outdoor dining structure of a restaurant in Greenwich Village, NYC, a humongous thunder, lightning and hail storm blew through. While we were skeptical that we would emerge unscathed, it was a revelation that these pandemic inspired structures are really quite sturdy. And that the temperature can drop 30 degrees in a matter of minutes.
The camelia garden at the Hilton Head Island Coastal Discovery Center is a revelation. Who knew there were so many types of camelias and that they bloomed so beautifully in December? Well, the Camelia Society did of course!
While I knew my father once sported a very jaunty ‘stache, finding this image in my mom’s collection of randomly arranged photos was a revelation just the same. My daughter got a kick out – she never knew my dad but is getting an idea of his sense of humor and “spirit of adventure” from these old photos.
The annual decorating of the cookies is always revealing of the strange imaginations of my daughter, husband and even myself. I actually turned what was supposed to be holly into The Yellow Submarine this year.
Not sure of the revelation here, though I guess you can count the lottery scratch-offs that are a holiday tradition with us as “revealing” what you win or mostly don’t win. Here my mother, who will be 96 the end of January, and M.E. commune at my sister’s on Christmas eve, with Hunter the Dog joining in.
Circling back to revelations almost in your own back yard, here an image of the wetlands boardwalk at Huntley Meadows in nearby Alexandria. My friend Janette and I took a nice long New Year’s Eve walk there, before the weather turned and it snowed (on January 3!). Here’s to more adventures near and far in 2022!

Water Therapy

For the past almost month, I’ve been in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina staying with my sister due to family health issues. We are not originally from coastal South Carolina, it’s just where she, her husband, and my mom all retired to after spending vacations there. So, we’ve been visiting for years.

I have mixed feelings about Hilton Head. I like the water – beautiful beaches and a series of scenic sounds, lagoons, and other waterways great for kayaking. I like the temperature, lots warmer than the Frozen Northern Mid-Atlantic this time of year. Not so crazy about the politics, the use of the word “Plantation” in the name of the developments, and a few other things. (Oh, and I have to say that having had my mom in the hospital here twice in the last month, the health care leaves a lot to be desired as well but that’s another story.)

Last year when we rented our own “villa” here for the month of January, I found out you could join the “kayak club” here at Palmetto Dunes Plantation’s Hilton Head Outfitters for a reasonable calendar year price. Palmetto Dunes has 11 miles of kayakable lagoons, and their kayak launch makes it really easy for a “senior kayaker” like me to get in and out quickly and relatively painlessly.

Throughout January, and during visits in April and October, and in the last month, I have more than paid for my kayak club membership in paddles around the lagoons. Eleven miles sounds like a lot, but I have been around the whole of them at least twice or three times now. Different seasons bring different colors and birds and just things you didn’t see the first time, though, so it’s all good.

Being on the water, under your own power, is definitely therapeutic for me. Quiet, just your paddle dipping in and out of the water, watching the sometimes obscenely opulent homes arranged along the lagoon slide by, looking for alligators (I’ve only ever seen one this whole time) and trying to sneak up on the herons to take photos… all good. I can forget everything else for an hour or two. How sad it is that my brother in law passed away a week after Thanksgiving. How hard it is to see my mom so frail and mostly confined to bed. How much I miss my own home and friends back in the DC area.

Here are some snaps of my watery adventures. I hope you all have a peaceful and happy holiday and get to indulge in visiting some of your own personal favorite places and activities. May 2022 bring all good (or at least better) things for us all.

Shifting colors, moving water, amusing boat names.
Even though this is a highly populated area, with homes lining the lagoons, in some parts of the system you can get the illusion of being “in the wild.”
The wildlife is pretty tame. It’s easy to get close to a great blue heron until it catches on to you.
Look carefully as Mr. (or Ms.) alligator is pretty well camouflaged here. And really, very small as alligators go. The lagoons are brackish so not so conducive to these shy critters.
Lots of “happy places” that your mind can return to (even if they are in someone else’s backyard, but you can image sitting out there on a nice day yourself.
Strange (and timely?) dock art.

Getting Penitent in Philly

A visit to the Eastern State Penitentiary Museum in Philadelphia is informative, eerie, and thought-provoking. This massive museum is in the Fairmont neighborhood, so if you arrive there hungry, you can pick from an array of cuisines within a few blocks. Fortifying oneself with some food is recommended, as a full tour of the sprawling grounds of the museum will get some steps in. We chose substantial and delicious bahn mi (described as “Vietnamese hoagies”) at a small cafe called iPho (get it?) a couple blocks down the street.

We discovered that you could park on the street for free, but after lunch we wisely moved from a two hour to a three-hour parking space. You’re going to need that extra hour if you want to take in the whole museum (and you have the stamina for a three-hour museum visit). And, also if you pay online ahead of time you save a couple bucks. (My husband did this from just outside of the museum on his phone after reading that fact on the entrance sign.)

Okay, so finally inside the high gray walls of the museum, where you pick up an audio tour and strap on your headphones. I developed a dislike of audio tours over the years, because some of them are just too distracting and go on way too long. But this one was excellent. They kept the entries short and included the voices of former inmates and experts when possible, and it was also narrated by actor Steve Buscemi (a favorite from many Coen Brothers movies, which my daughter and I are partial to).

The core tour takes you through the history of the prison, but also the history of the philosophy of prisons in general. I never considered the fact that at its root, Penitentiary is – yes – penitent. The belief in the early days of American prisons was that prisoners needed complete silence, solitude, and lots of time (and a Bible which was the only allowed reading material) to contemplate the reasons they were locked up.

The early cells were relatively comfortable and well appointed for cells. Not exactly where you’d be wanting to spend your days and nights for months or years, but the cells included wood floors, a skylight, running water and a toilet that could be flushed once a day. (This is more than a lot of people “outside” had in those days.) Each cell had a small exercise yard reached through a tiny door in the back.

It wasn’t the accommodations, per se, but that complete solitude and silence business that drove prisoners over the edge. Most humans (as lots of people found out during the pandemic) are just not cut out for solitude and silence 24 hours a day. The prison reformers finally decided this was true and got rid of that idea.

Prison accommodations and philosophies did not improve from that point, however. Cramming two or sometimes more than two prisoners in one cell, which in later days had cold concrete floors, less light and more interaction between humans had its own problems. (An excellent timeline of the Prison is located here.)

When the basic tour ends, you have free reign to explore the rest of the interpreted spaces. Some are artist installations, which is interesting use of cell space; a multi-media area with lots of sobering information about the “war on crime” and the ill effects of prison life and prolonged stays; and a host of other interpreted areas with their own audio tour links.

Just when we were ready to exit after thinking we’d seen enough, we saw a sign to the prison synagog, which was located down a narrow alley which also once held craft shops where prisoners made things with their hands. The synagog is a tiny gem which was carefully researched and restored to its 1950s incarnation. It represented, for me, faith and hope amid the grimness that is the rest of the bleak, stony behemoth of the prison complex. A wall inviting visitors to leave their mitzvahs (simply defined here as “good deeds”) was balm after the harsh realities of the prison history and information on prisons today presented in this excellent museum experience.

Here are some photos from around the museum.

Restored early cell. Looks deceptively cozy?
Later wing of the prison when two story cells were added.
They give nighttime Halloween tours and I am sure they are terrifying.
One of the art installations which interpreted victims of murders committed by Eastern State Prisoners. (Just in case you were feeling a little sorry for the prisoners being held here… you are reminded that some of them did commit some horrendous crimes to get in here. )
Another art installation is basically a large mirror placed to reflect the ceiling of the cell making a very eerie effect.
Restored synagog.

The Long View from Longwood

A trip to Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania is always memorable. (Good thing, too, because it has been several weeks since we visited and I am just now getting around to writing about it.) For the uninitiated, Longwood was the home and pet project of one of those fabulously wealthy Duponts, in this case Pierre S., who had a vision to make a very grand garden for family, friends, and eventually, the masses.

Pierre had a special interest in water features, and today one of the biggest draws to Longwood Gardens is the elaborate fountains, programmed to “dance” to music. They are particularly spectacular after dark, and during the holidays.

But, since I am working on a program for the 2022 (hopefully, in person and on the National Mall) Smithsonian Folklife Festival which is all about Earth Optimism, I kept a particular eye out for stories of sustainability and interesting examples of reuse, recycling, encouraging pollinators, growing one’s own food, and all that good stuff. Longwood did not disappoint in that department.

Here, in photos (and one video) is a tour of some of the highlights of examples I noticed during our visit. Good for you, Longwood, although I am sure running a huge garden full of tourists has many unsustainable aspects as well. And, then, there is “better living through chemistry.” But, we won’t get into that right now.

Recirculating water in the waterfall. Well, I guess that’s sustainable right?
The meadow part of the Garden, which is pretty extensive, has some good pollinator information, as well as bee houses and other fun features. I liked their use of recycled wood as a display support.
Speaking of recycling, this sign was in one of the several tree houses at Longwood. It seems sort of funny that the wood came from an old toothpaste factory. Getting it all the way from Canada takes”marks off” their sustainability score I fear. (Is there a scale for sustainability? I am sure there is, or should be.)
This prodigious basil, as well as the other veggies, fruits and herbs in the “idea garden” area (which is supposed to give you ideas about how to grow things in your own garden, but really only succeeded in making me think about how much less bountiful my own garden is) has a higher purpose of supplying a local food cupboard.
Three Sister’s Garden, yay! For more info on those, you should watch our virtual Story Circle from summer of 2020.
Last but not least, the “award winning green wall” (so described by one of the greenhouse info volunteers). If more buildings had one of these, the world would be a much more sustainable place. (In between each wall is the door to a bathroom, by the way.)

Poking Around Point Pleasant

On a recent trip to West Virginia, my friend Arlene and I spent a whole day sampling the small town pleasures of Point Pleasant. Situated at the confluence of the Ohio and Kanawha Rivers, the town has many (well, several at least) historic and folkloric sites to explore.

Upon arriving, we checked into the Lowe Hotel. We had noted that the hotel is rated #1 of 1 hotel(s) in the town by tourism sites, which did not at first inspire confidence. But we were delighted to find a well preserved/restored property with lots of charming decor, and a chatty and helpful proprietor.

Next, we checked out the murals depicting historic events and people, which are painted on the wall that runs between the town and the river. They started out peaceful enough, with Native Americans going about their (historic) everyday lives, but in just a few mural panels morphed into the bloody Battle of Point Pleasant fought in 1774 between the Shawnee and Mingo tribes led by Shawnee Chief Hokoleskwa (or Cornstalk as he was called in English) and the Virginia militia (West Virginia did not exist at this point). Some guy named Lord Dunmore had a role in this mess too.

Unfortunately, the murals have minimal text interpretation, so some of the historical doings are left up to one’s imagination. As you traverse down the row of murals, you also encounter several historical personages fashioned out of tin. Daniel Boone (who lived near Point Pleasant in the late 1700s) gets this treatment, as does a feisty woman dubbed “Mad Anne Bailey” who gets her own set of murals depicting her interesting life.

At the end of the mural trail you enter Tu-Endie-Wei State Park. (The name means “point between two waters” in Wyandotte, apparently.) This is where Daniel Boone and American Ginseng tie in – though not commemorated on any murals or historic markers as yet. The confluence of the Ohio and Kanawha just might be the place that a quantity of ginseng Boone was transporting to market got dumped into the Ohio in 1788. Though every version of the story has this ill-fated ginseng being dumped in a different location…

All of that walking around town made us pretty hungry, so we headed for one of the only two real sit-down restaurants in town within walking distance we located which were not pizza purveyors. This happened to be a very respectable Japanese restaurant, Ichiban II. (The other restaurant, located on Main Street, is Mexican, Rio Bravo 2 – we went there for dinner.)

We were saving a visit to the most famous Point Pleasant “native” for the afternoon. Mothman is one of several cryptids (mythological creepy humanoid beings) haunting the West Virginia landscape, and his most famous siting took place just outside Point Pleasant. The World’s Only Mothman Museum is located right across from the Lowe Hotel (and was visible from our room even), and the twelve foot tall tin Mothman Statue is a photo magnet for the masses.

After thoroughly overdosing on Mothman information at the museum, we strolled leisurely down Main Street and read the markers about the historic homes lining the street. We also paused to reflect upon the Silver Bridge Disaster of 1967 (marked by another mural and several historic plaques) which took the lives of 43 people. We ducked into the local art gallery and an expansive antique/doo-dad mall on Main Street as well.

By the time we settled in for the night at the Lowe, we had done pretty much all of Point Pleasant that you could do easily by foot. We downloaded the 2002 movie, Mothman Prophesies, starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney, for our evening entertainment/research. Having done our homework, we recognized the huge “poetic license” they had taken with the film – including how different the river town they actually filmed the movie in (Kittanning, PA) was from our Point Pleasant.

At the beginning of the mural trail, a depiction of the Three Sisters (corn, beans and squash). Very literal indeed.
Daniel Boone as The Tin Man in Buckskins.
Mad Ann(e) Bailey, who was apparently not “crazy” but just had a temper. She’s buried in Point Pleasant.
View of Mothman Museum and statue from our hotel room.
The infamous Mothman Statue.
Another depiction of Mothman. My daughter said he looked “very cheerful” when I shared this photo with her.
Though the Mothman Prophesies was not actually filmed in Point Pleasant, the museum ended up with several props from the movie. Such as this blanket which “came into contact” with fame.
The makers of the Mothman Prophesies also managed to weave the Silver Bridge Collapse into the movie plot. While visiting this spot, we encountered a local who told us his Dad was almost headed across the bridge that fateful day, with Christmas presents in tow, but due to a change of plans, he was saved from a possible watery demise.
There used to be a River Museum in town too but a fire put it out of commission. They are building a new one, so we may need to visit town again!
Lobby of the Lowe Hotel, showing balcony, faux marble columns and other features.
One of the common rooms of the hotel, this one dubbed “the peacock room” because of the collection of peacock art collected by the proprietor’s mother. This was the site of our watching of Mothman Prophesies because the wifi was coming in better than in our room. Very atmospheric and fitting especially when we turned off most of the lamps.

Fall Fests: Risky Business?

Last weekend, I helped out at the National Folk Festival in Salisbury, Maryland. My role was quite small – coordinating the volunteers in the Maryland Traditions Folklife area (featuring some really cool MD-based artists). But the effort was made so much more complex, and to me a bit edgier, than anticipated back in the Vaccine Optimism days of the spring and early summer.

The festival crowd was a microcosm of America’s current response to COVID’s Delta variant surge. People wearing masks diligently. People wearing masks half-heartedly (down around their chins somewhere or hanging off their ears). People not wearing masks at all – and leaning in a bit too closely for comfort. There was a well-intentioned scheme to hand out free masks to the maskless – which didn’t go over very well. There were also designations of where to stand within tents for social distancing – which no one paid the least attention to.

The Eastern Shore of Maryland is a mixed bag of humanity, and add to that the wide variety of people that free folk festivals attract. So, many people attending the event could have been vaccinated. But then again, many – for whatever their reasoning – were probably not.

I felt uneasy the whole weekend, which put a damper on what should have been a celebratory time. Back outside with hundreds of strangers, sharing folk traditions with the masses…this is my milieu after all, having worked for over 30 years on our Smithsonian Folklife Festival. I’d missed it, but still, it was not exactly a carefree return to (semi-)normality.

The potential for disaster – personally, a break-through infection for me or one of my vaccinated friends and colleagues, and worst yet turning into a super-spreader event – was ever present in our minds. A week later, and so far so good.

The whole thing reminded me of our own Festival in 2002, after 9/11, when Fourth of July on the National Mall with thousands of people seemed to many to be a big red flag. This time around, the “potential terrorists” are microscopic bugs. More subtle, and in many ways, more deadly.

Still, I feel the need to cautiously go forth into the world. Here are some pictures to remind us what we will miss if we don’t.

The Das family from Delmar, MD (originally from West Bengal) created beautiful rangoli art with rice, lentils, and spice seeds, which took shape during the two days of the area.

Quilters Sylvia and Stephanie Stephens of Hyattsville, MD filled a tent with the handiwork of five generations of family needlework. Sylvia went head to head with many interested visitors, speaking quite effectively through her mask.

My friend Dorey and were sitting in the tent of the Salisbury Area Filipino Community group while they prepared to take the stage, which was across the way a bit. It was really fun to be “on the inside” of this excitement.

Dorey and I swapped selfies with our colleagues working on the North Carolina Folk Festival in Greensboro. Fellow soldiers in the Folk Festival battle for normality.
Comical sign in the downtown Salisbury visitor center bathroom evokes local culture, but also our necessary, COVID fueled obsession with hand washing and sanitizing. Did plenty of that over the weekend.

Following the Flood

Water. It gives life, adds beauty to the scenery, and it’s great to kayak on. But, when it comes at you in a 40 foot high wall…you’re doomed.

Earlier this summer, we visited the National Park Service’s Johnstown Flood Memorial, and viewed the terrifying video which begins and ends, in otherworldly detail, with images and narration centering around the Grandview Cemetery, where many of the 2,209 victims who were confronted with a deadly wall of water on May 31, 1889 found their final resting place.

On later visit to Johnstown, we decided to visit the cemetery and pay our respects to those victims. We expected some sort of interpretation (a brochure maybe?) to be available, but since none was, we drove around until we found a sizable (over 700 it turns out) number of small white unmarked graves.

That many plain white gravestones with no inscriptions is rather unnerving, but also mesmerizing. I found I had to break my eyes away from their undulating pattern. After viewing the mass site from various angles, we walked around to see where other victims might be buried.

We found whole families of known victims, which was also disturbing. Seeing the same death date on five or six family members’ gravestones brings that day of horror home.

The water tooketh away. From this vantagepoint in history, we can only imagine the reality — as with many disasters, man made or natural. (The Johnstown Flood was some of both). And honor those who were lost.

Monument marking the unidentified victims of the Johnstown Flood buried at Grandview.
Most of the Hochstein family met their demise on that fateful day.
… as did the Hoffmans.
Although bodies kept turning up according to one account as far away as Cincinnati and as late as 1901, some were never recovered at all.

The Boldt and the Beautiful

During a recent visit to the farthest north portion of New York State, our old high school buddy Elaine, her friend Gordy, and my trusty travel companion Debi and I took a scenic boat tour of the “American channel” of the St. Lawrence Seaway. One achieves such a tour from the small tourist town of Alexandria Bay, on an Uncle Sam excursion vessel.

First off, getting reliable information about these boat tours is not an easy task. Both Gordy and I called them and got no or very misleading information. (Maybe it is “due to COVID” but customer service is not what it used to be, it seems.) We decided to just show up and get the story from the horse’s mouth, and ended up on a two-hour narrated tour, well worth the mild anxiety of not being able to really plan ahead. Hey, we had nowhere else to be and it was a superb day, so whatever.

This excursion ends up with a trip to Boldt Castle, a humongous stone estate which takes up its own small island. (One could also take a different trip to Singer Castle, but that is a whole other story and maybe trip in the future.) The story of the “castle” is a sad and terribly romantic one.

Mr. Boldt, an enormously wealthy sort of guy, was building the summer getaway for his wife when she suddenly (and we would guess unexpectedly) died. Though apparently she had tuberculosis, so how unexpected could death from that disease have been in the early 1900s? Nevertheless, there is was. Dream vacation home tragically scuttled.

Over three hundred workmen, including many a skilled stone and woodworker who had hoped for a long and fruitful employment completing this project, were immediately commanded to put down their tools and cease their labors.

The unfinished castle was left to the elements, and the vandals, within swimming distance of Alexandria Bay. (Well if you are a strong swimmer; at least within tantalizing view from shore, and a short row, paddle or motoring in any kind of water craft, or even a walk on the ice back in the day when the river froze over in the harsh winters.)

In the mid-1970s, after over 70 years of neglect and ruination, it was decided that the castle should be completed and opened for tourists. The Thousand Island Bridge Commission accomplished this feat, and today for a reasonable fee of about $12 you can take a self-guided tour.

The signage is all couched in “would haves” since this reconstruction is based on what the property would have been like had the ill-fated Louisa lived and held forth as mistress and hostess of the grand home, garden, and “children’s playhouse” (a separate big old stone edifice with a bowling alley, etc.).

The whole effect created very mixed emotions on my part, and I am sure on the part of many others who tour the house and property. Sad that Louisa and her family and friends never got to enjoy the sumptuous estate. Glad that the Bridge Commission did such a good job of reconstruction and interpretation. Mad that vandals had defaced and disrespected the property (which is still evident on the unfinished third floor).

It was a worthy adventure, if unsettling in many ways. Here are some photos that tell some more of the story.

Approach to the Castle. The Island is called Heart (formerly Hart) Island; Boldt apparently wanted to restructure the whole island in the shape of a heart but didn’t quite accomplish this.
The Children’s Playhouse. Not totally restored but you can see where the bowling alleys were and get a sense that these kids had quite a playhouse indeed!
Louisa’s bedroom and sitting room on the second floor opened up to a balcony overlooking the gardens and water. It “would have” been a lovely retreat for one very rich lady, but not to be…
Unfinished and very ghostly third floor where generations of curious visitors left their marks. I suppose they felt it was not hurting anyone in this abandoned shell, and it is a sort of historic record maybe. But just sad anyhow.

Poking around the PA Parks

Last year, as I might have already reported, my husband and I purchased a Pennsylvania State Park Passport, a chubby little guide to all the state parks and state forests in the state. It cost $10, and as we always want to get our money’s worth, we’re now determined to visit as many of the parks as possible.

We set out to visit three parks over the July 4 weekend, both within an hour and a half’s drive from our vacation home near McConnellsburg. The first one, Memorial Lake, was a bust since just as we were exiting our car for a scenic picnic, it started pouring! Nevertheless, we did get our passport stamped, and also got some good advice from one of the park rangers.

Without her enthusiastic recommendation, we would never have found “the cabin” which she assured us is a must-see at the other nearby park, Swatara. Why, we asked? Because it has a waterfall behind it, she reported. It is also not on the trail map which we picked up, but she marked it’s location with an “x” and we went on our way with hopes the sun would come back out.

After eating our picnic in the car while waiting for that illusive orb, we set forth on a rail trail toward the mysterious cabin-with-waterfall. It is actually a well-preserved but now open (as in, no glass in the windows, by design) sort of shelter for picnics and, by arrangement, overnights. And, yes, there is a waterfall behind it which makes for a very dramatic view from the back windows.

The cabin was built in the late 1930s by a local “shop” teacher named Armar Bordner. It wasn’t inside a state park then… it was just a hideaway he built with the help of his students – which was legal and perfectly okay back then it seems.

Eventually, the park was planned and eminent domain threatened to take over Bordner’s retreat. He cut a deal to stay until his death, then bequeathed it to the state (with some Boy Scout deal in there too as I recall). Through the magic of YouTube, we can hear Bordner’s voice and get some further details of his history, if you are so inclined. Swatara State Park also includes a fossil pit where you can search for the state fossil, the trilobite. We didn’t get to do this, though, because it started raining again.

The next day we met a friend for a picnic at Pine Grove Furnace State Park. This park has a lot to offer – access to two lakes, the Appalachian Trail, and the Appalachian Trail Museum, as well as a historic iron furnace and associated buildings.

I went kayaking on the larger of the two lakes, Laurel, which was a treat. The water lilies were in bloom, and it was acceptable, it seems, to kayak right through them. I worried a little that I would be harming them, but apparently they just bounce right back.

Two days, three parks, three new stamps in our passport. And the adventure shall continue…

The cabin.
View of waterfall from back area of cabin.
It’s always a thrill to walk even a tiny bit of the Appalachian Trail!
Kayaking among the water lilies.

Memories of My Father

My father passed away when I was 13. It was a bright spring day in April, and I had been on a 4-H trip to a furniture factory or something. I suspected something was wrong when some friends of our parents came to pick me up at the parental meeting point after the trip.

The days leading up to the funeral are a blur, but at the viewing or after the service (not sure which) I remember sitting next to a schoolmate who had also lost her father. The only thing I can recall about our conversation was speculating together about what they did to tomatoes to make ketchup thick. Was it flour, other thickener, some kind of cooking magic? We couldn’t decide.

I like to think my father would have enjoyed that conversation. Not only did he love food (which one can see in the photos) and my mother’s cooking, but he enjoyed discovering things. No one could not disturb him, or even get his attention, when he would sit down in his easy chair to read the Reader’s Digest or another monthly publication.

Many of my best memories of my father revolve around food some way. I remember his pride in growing vegetables, first in our expansive New Jersey backyard and later when we moved to Vermont and had an even bigger space to plan out and tend. I hated pulling weeds and picking beans, but I learned a lot from those early gardening days, and honor that practice with my own vegetable garden, though it is not nearly as large and productive as my memory of his. But my husband and I are particularly fond of growing tomatoes.

He also loved hunting and fishing, and brought wildfowl and fish back to my mother – a city girl who did not always appreciate trying to figure out what to do with the spoils. If I am remembering this correctly, in the fall there would sometimes be dead ducks hanging upside down on the clothes line.

I’ll have to ask my mother (who in her early 40s had to become mother and father, and has been a widow for over 50 years). My sister, college-bound at the time, also had to grow up a lot faster than she might have, and chose to attend a college closer to home. We’ve never talked about that period right after my father’s death much. We should someday.

One of my favorite memories of my father was one night, after he and my mother had purchased one of those gadgets that sliced vegetables, probably “as seen on TV” or advertised in the Sunday paper or a magazine. It purported to slice anything with neat, picture-perfect precision, even ripe tomatoes.

I’d gone upstairs to bed, but was woken by very loud laughter in the kitchen. My mother and father were putting the slicer to the test with ripe garden tomatoes, and it obviously was not living up to its hype. I am not sure if I snuck downstairs to see what all the hilarity was, or if my mom told me about it afterwards, but apparently tomato mush was everywhere. Being frugal, I am sure my mom made tomato sauce out of it the next day.

She could have made ketchup, I suppose, but that was the job of the Heinz company. And, if she had, there would have been no mystery to discuss, to soothe my profound loss.

Our family in our New Jersey living room. I’m the little one on the right.
My father in his young, non-double-chin days on the left, and with my mom at some beach or other on the right. That’s a (backyard) farmer, or fisherman’s tan if I ever saw one!