The last time we had to evacuate for a storm was for Hurricane Bob in 1991. Before that it was Hurricane Gloria in 1985. Right now it looks like we might get to stay put, unless it strengthens to a Category 3 or higher when it makes landfall here, probably Sunday morning… Stay tuned!
Back on July 14, Tim won some tickets from a radio station to one of the performances of the Amherst Early Music Festival, The Passion of the Italian Baroque, at Evans Concert Hall at Connecticut College. (The same place we saw Vusi Mahlasela perform solo in 2005!) This was an opportunity not to be missed, so we brought my cushion and propped me up in a seat so we could see and listen to the delightful Amherst Baroque Soloists play.
The Amherst Early Music Festival is the most comprehensive early music workshop in the world, with classes for amateurs and pre-professionals, a music and instrument exhibition, and a professional concert series. We offer programs of classes at all levels in Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music and dance taught by an international faculty of well-known performers and teachers.
~ Marilyn Boenau, Executive Director
It was a beautiful concert with a soprano, viol, violin, violone, recorder, flute, two oboes, cello, and three harpsichords. Tim’s favorite piece was the opening number, Chamber Concerto in D Major, by Antonio Vivaldi, performed with the flute, oboe, violin, cello and harpsichord. I was especially enchanted with Canzona La Pighetta, by Tarquinio Merula, a composer previously unknown to me. It was played with the recorder, viol and harpsichord and it was mesmerizing!
The finale, which seemed have all the musicians on stage at once, was Venti turbini from Rinaldo by Handel. The exquisite soprano, Julianne Baird, sang a lovely refrain which was translated for us in the program:
Winds, storms, lend
Your wings to my feet
Heavens, Gods, take up arms
Against the one who gives me pain!
I like to think her request had been granted on behalf of my pain! 🙂 Although perched quite gingerly on the edge of my seat with cushion and rolled up sweatshirt for support I managed to stay seated for the entire program with minimal discomfort. Phew!
Because Tim is more into classical music than I am, I’m hoping he will leave a comment and elaborate on the comedy involving a couple of the harpsichord players, among other things…
Tim is still here in the hospital, but doing better each day. He’s progressed from clear liquids to Rice Krispies, bananas and yogurt. No estimated date of release yet… He’s napping (and snoring) at the moment so I’m seeing what mischief I can get into with his laptop, between my hot flashes… We’re supposed to get a winter storm on Friday.
This hospitalization has been easier for me to cope with than when Tim had his heart attack. The hospital is local and smaller, making it easy for me to get myself here and back home each night. I deeply appreciate all the healing energy being sent our way and I’m happy to report that I’ve gone two days without a migraine trying to get a hold of me.
In recent weeks we’ve discovered that we enjoy preparing food together, so today we’ve been planning what new recipes we’re going to try out when he gets back on his feet again.
I made a trip to the bookstore this morning looking for some science fiction books Tim wants to read. They didn’t have the ones he requested, so I’m lending him my Kindle. He can order them and read them while he’s here. He was starting to explore on the Kindle when he fell asleep in the recliner. This hospital has some pretty nice amenities… 🙂
This month is the snowiest January on record in Connecticut. In fact, it’s the state’s snowiest month in history, period. As if you couldn’t have guessed.
~ Ed Stannard
(New Haven Register, January 26, 2011)
It snowed most of Tuesday so I put off the food shopping expedition again. Wednesday morning my sister happened to be here so we decided to clean the snow off the car and do errands and shopping together before the “big” storm due that night. It was still morning, and I was standing in a very long line at the check-out with an overflowing shopping cart in the midst of folks on a quick errand for two or three items, pre-storm batteries, milk, bread, eggs or water. Even let one or two of them cut in front of me as there was no express line open. Happened to look out the window and commented to Beverly that the storm looked imminent, even though it wasn’t supposed to arrive until late afternoon. Sure enough, the first flakes greeted us as we exited the store.
When we got home Beverly took off for work early, to get a good parking spot, while I put my groceries away and then settled in front of the TV with a cup of coffee to see what the explanation might be for another inaccurate forecast. Meteorologist Dr. Mel was grinning from ear to ear as he announced that this month was now officially the snowiest month ever recorded in Connecticut history. This was before the big storm, and two more little storms predicted for Friday and Saturday. He simply couldn’t hide the delight he felt in offering this remarkable fact to his colleagues and television audience!
Then he got to the matter of the snow falling in the morning. It turns out it was another storm, an unexpected low pressure pocket formed off the coast and surprised everyone with a few inches to contend with before the big one. Unbelievable!
Woke up at 4 a.m. this morning – no official totals for the overnight storm yet – it’s still snowing. Dr. Mel says a good 10-15 inches fell so far in about 5 short hours over the state. (Does he ever go home and sleep?) There is a truck ban on the interstates until 10:00 a.m. Amtrak has suspended service. No city buses running. And of course schools are closed. Looks like Tim will be working from home this morning.
Took a picture of our Yankee weather rock in the dark. (A whimsical gift from Nate & Shea many summers ago…) Can’t see the word rock!! I’ve always loved the energy and excitement of storms, and taking this picture revealed a couple of orbs! I’ll be outside shoveling for a long time… And loving very minute of it until I get cold or tired or both…
It was 4°F when I got up this morning. A year ago in January it wasn’t this cold when we had visitors for a weekend, Tim’s youngest cousin and her three children. Allegra is 18 years younger than Tim, who is the oldest in that group of cousins. (The span between the oldest – Nate – and the youngest – Lizzie – second cousins is even greater – 30 years! But they are not part of this particular story.) I hadn’t started By the Sea yet, so I’m remembering this wonderful day here now.
So… on one day of the visit we decided that taking a long cold walk at Bluff Point would be an invigorating way to release some pent-up energy…
Bluff Point is a 1½ mile long peninsula here in Groton which juts out into Long Island Sound. It is part Connecticut State Park and part Coastal Reserve. The trails meander through the woods and open areas and finally lead to the bluff. The main trail is a four mile loop.
Winter is an etching…
~ Stanley Horowitz
The Poquonnock River (above) is on the west side of the peninsula, and on this day we followed the river. Cold as it was there were lots of people out and about, walking dogs, riding horses, and jogging, as well as walking like we were.
The winter sun is striking… Families who come outdoors find some satisfaction for the hunger to connect with nature and with each other, in any season.
A glimpse of a beach in the distance helps to encourage us forward, in spite of very rosy cheeks!
We didn’t make it to the bluff because we took a detour to Bluff Point Beach, which faces the sound and stretches into a barrier between the sound and the river, Bushy Point Beach. The Great Hurricane of 1938 (aka the Great New England Hurricane) washed away more than a hundred cottages here, which were never rebuilt. (Mother Nature doesn’t have to tell the typical New Englander twice when rebuilding would be a bad idea!) The storm surge also breached Bushy Point Beach which created an island at its western end.
We endured the wind a little while to explore the beach, and Allegra found a whelk egg case.
We were so cold by then that we decided to retrace our steps back to the car. So in the end we walked almost four miles, according to the pedometers. We came home to a round or two of hot cocoa…
Maybe our family will come see us again in a different season, and perhaps then we’ll make it to the bluff – we were so close! – and finish the loop on the other, eastern side of the peninsula!
Each of our lives is a path. To know this requires intuition and trust. If we are true to the steps we take, the travel makes sense and the journey confirms itself.
~ Lin Jensen
For Tim, from deep in my heart… Thank you.
Hear the mating call of the mourning dove
Like Romeo angels in the roof above
Rains will come sweet and clean
Let the tears of God keep the mountains green
Roll back the covers, raise the shades
We don’t want to miss out on the best part of the day
You’re my best friend, you shared my crazy ways
Now we don’t want to miss out on the best part of the day
~ Bernie Taupin & Elton John
♫ (The Best Part of the Day) ♫
Yesterday my heart and mind were out on Cape Cod, watching and waiting to see what Hurricane Earl would do as it passed by. It was also the day my grandmother died, fourteen years ago, at the age of 90. It was a good day for lingering over pleasant memories.
Grandmother was a typical Cape Codder. As far as I know, all of her ancestors lived out their lives on Cape Cod, or were lost at sea, all of them descending from passengers on the Mayflower and other early English settlers on the Cape. Except for her great-grandfather, who came from Norway, and his wife, her great-grandmother, who came from Ireland. Both of her grandfathers and her father were sea captains, like their fathers before them. Grandmother told me all the time that the sea was in my blood.
Thankfully New England was spared Earl’s fury as the storm kept veering off to the east and weakening. We were very happy to make do without any more excitement! We went down to the beach during a break in the rain and there was some minor flooding from a little storm surge. Normally there is about twenty feet between the life guard chair and the water’s edge, but now the breaking waves came right up to the chair. (See photo above.) We were wondering about the line of birds hunkered down on the rocks in the distance. Couldn’t make out what they were. The breakwaters were almost covered with water.
But all in all, Hurricane Earl was a non-event.
I love this picture of my grandmother’s father, Capt. Martin F. Thompson (Pop), and her granduncle, Edward E. Swift (Uncle Ed), who lived to the age of 102. It was taken in Woods Hole in front of the hardware and ship’s chandler’s shop they used to run behind the Swifts’ house.
The sign used to read: “Edward E. Swift, Dealer in Hardware, Cordage, Paints, Oil, Glass, and Galvanized Nails and Specialty.”
Uncle Ed used to build and race 13-foot spritsail boats. After Uncle Ed died in 1964, my grandmother donated one of the spritsails he built to Mystic Seaport, a living history museum here in Connecticut, where it is still exhibited.
After spending many years caring for her children and then her parents and Uncle Ed & Aunt Flora, Grandmother spent the rest of her life pursuing her interests in nature photography and entomology. The little picture of me on the beach (in the sidebar on this blog) was taken by my grandmother. My grandparents were founding members of the Cape Cod Viewfinders Camera Club. The subjects of most of Grandmother’s photos were, of course, bugs…
While she was an artist and I have several of her watercolors hanging on my walls, more than anything she loved capturing perfectly composed photographs of butterfly eggs, caterpillars, chrysalises, and emerging adults. Grandfather was a land surveyor and Grandmother would go out with him on surveys and find the butterfly and moth eggs of various species and bring them home on their leaves and then put them in outdoor aquariums in her back yard. She made sure each one had the right leaves for its diet, and they were free to fly away after they emerged. Each time I visited I got a grand tour of her latest collection.
Often she would warn us as we sat down to dinner that someone was due to emerge from its cocoon or chrysalis at any moment and that we would have to excuse her if she had to dash away from the table to photograph the event. She was very proper, but also very mischievous. Once when my father was teasing her at the breakfast table, she got him back by impishly buttering the back of his hand. She never lost her sense of wonder and curiosity and I loved her so much for bringing lots of magic into my childhood.
It was so much fun having my grandmother as my first and best pen pal. Even though we made the trip to Cape Cod to see my grandparents about once a month, we’d exchange letters once or twice a week. We both loved reading and writing… I still have her newsy letters, and later was delighted to discover that she had kept all of mine.
The picture to the right is of my great-grandmother, Amanda Eliza Hamblin (Mum) and my grandmother, Emma Freeman “Thommie” Thompson. Amanda’s father was a sea captain, too. Thompson was the surname chosen by my ancestor, Martin Thompson, who was born in Brevik, Norway in 1818. At birth his name was Ingebrigt Martinus Hansen, and he was the son of Hans Tønnesen. He Americanized Tønnesen to Thompson when he arrived in America, a month before his 19th birthday.
My sister illustrated (with little sailboats and seagulls) a poem I wrote at a very early age, which we gave as a gift to our grandmother, who framed it and kept it hanging in her breakfast nook. It went something like this:
I love Cape Cod
Oh yes I do.
The sea, the sand,
Grandmother, too.
I love the Cape
So much, don’t you?
The mixture of the calm with the storm is not haphazard. Quite the contrary. My growth is at the center of each. I will trust its message.
~ Karen Casey
(Each Day a New Beginning: Daily Meditations for Women)
It’s been an unsettling week, to say the least. We’ve been keeping a wary eye on Hurricane Earl since Sunday, hoping it stays on its predicted course and brushes past us to the east tomorrow with minimal damage. The tropical storm watch was upgraded to a tropical storm warning today at noon. Cape Cod is now under a hurricane warning and for some reason I have a desire to go there.
Sometimes it seems that all there is to talk about is the remarkable weather. Yesterday and today we’ve had a heat index of 100º. Today many towns nearby are letting their schools out early because of the heat. The weed pollen levels are “very high.” And there is an air quality alert to boot. The advancing storm should be eliminating all these problems when it arrives. I don’t usually watch the news at noon, where I learned all these bits of information, but I was curious about the hurricane.
Any threat of hurricanes stirs up frightening memories for my father and his sisters. The Great Hurricane of 1938 descended on my father without warning as he was walking home from high school in the afternoon. Fierce winds were snapping branches off trees and other trees were being uprooted as he struggled to keep walking. According to Wikipedia it “remains the most powerful, costliest and deadliest hurricane in New England history.”
When Dad got home he discovered that his mother wasn’t home, only his father, two of his sisters, and a baby nephew. At the height of the storm they were all trying desperately to keep walls from crashing in on them, bolstering them up with heavy furniture and the weight of their bodies. Still, the hardest part was not knowing if his mother was safe, and his sister’s husband, too.
After the storm passed by Dad’s mother returned home. She had decided it would be safer to stay at the neighbor’s house where she happened to be when the hurricane struck. Auntie’s husband was caught at work in New London which had flooded with the storm surge, so he stayed there to help rescue people. Not knowing what had become of him for several days was hard for the family to endure.
Well, thanks to modern technology we can worry a little less about the storm coming tomorrow. And modern technology was at work for Tim’s family this week as well.
On Monday Tim’s younger brother, age 51, had a heart attack. He lives overseas in Luxembourg so we found out about it on Tuesday. It was such an emotional jolt. Since Tuesday Tim’s been trying to make contact with him at the hospital using Skype and finally this morning they connected and had a long conversation, comparing notes, etc. This is still more evidence of a genetic factor at work here, their maternal grandmother died of a heart attack at age 54 – the age Tim was when he had his – and their great-grandmother died of a heart attack at age 52. Tim has four more younger brothers and it’s pretty sobering contemplating the possibilities, although we can all be very grateful for the advances in medicine that no doubt have saved two lives so far.
Our inner selves understand the journey; a journey destined to carry us to new horizons; a journey that promises many stormy seasons. For to reach our destination, we must be willing to weather the storms. They are challenges, handpicked for us, designed to help us become all that we need to be in this earthly life.
~ Karen Casey
(Each Day a New Beginning: Daily Meditations for Women)
This morning when I woke up I told myself, okay Lazy Bones, you are not turning that computer on today until AFTER you get some work done. Since the house got a real good cleaning last weekend I decided that weeding the garden would be a good project to tackle. Problem was, it was still dark, early bird that I am. So I decided to read until the sun came up.
A couple of weeks ago we saw the movie Eat Pray Love, and I enjoyed it so much I bought the book the next day and started reading. The spiritual journeys of other people are always of great interest to me. Many critics panned the movie, but I loved the subject matter and didn’t notice all the supposed faults the critics picked out. So be it! The book is even better than the movie because Elizabeth Gilbert shares her internal thoughts more intimately than can be done on film.
The book (and the movie) is divided into three sections, the first (Eat) focuses on Pleasure and tells of her experiences in Italy. The second (Pray) focuses on Devotion and tells about her time in an ashram in India, and the third (Love) focuses on Balance, and how she found it in Indonesia. This morning I finished the Pray portion and took some time to meditate on what she had learned about spiritual seeking. Then a phone call from Auntie woke Tim up and the day was beginning, so I headed out to the garden.
Tim left to do a couple of errands (coffee, newspaper, organic free-range farm-fresh eggs) and I started weeding with gusto and great determination. The moon was still out in the blue sky – welcome company. I filled one laundry basket with weeds and had another half filled when I happened to notice the huge insect in the picture above. He was six inches long!!! Not wanting to disturb him, and frankly, quite awe-struck, I stopped weeding and then realized it was a praying mantis! The synchronicity of a creature with this particular name appearing in my garden when I was immersed in thoughts about prayer filled me with wonder.
Tim came home to find his over-excited, hot, sweaty, filthy wife jumping up and down on the porch urging him to get the camera, get the camera. It was all I could do to point with my blistered finger at the cause of all this delirious joy! He went inside and got the camera and tried to hand it to me but I said my hands were too dirty he was going to have to get this picture for me! And I think he did a fantastic job capturing the well camouflaged creature with our undependable little camera!
Earlier this summer while sitting outside with Dad on his porch, I spotted what looked to me like a tiny green inch worm with legs. Next time Beverly passed by I showed it to her and she said it was a baby praying mantis! It was so tiny the pictures didn’t come out…
And back in 2006 we found a praying mantis (pictured above) on the side of Dan & Fran’s house in Virginia.
There are about 2,000 species of these carnivores world-wide! They eat insects and spiders so I hope ours will be staying in the garden – perhaps I should leave a few weeds for him to hide in. By the time I cleared away all the tools and swept off the porch he had moved backwards down the iris leaf he was on, but he was still there. Will be checking on him every time I leave the house!
So, here I am at the computer again, after a nice long shower, of course. Step away from the computer now, Barbara, you still have laundry to do. But maybe a little Scrabble first… Starting to keep an eye on Tropical Storm Earl – it might be around here as a hurricane mid-week if it keeps to its present course… Step away…