Hope and Change

 Remember back in a different political time when Sarah Palin mocked the Obama followers, saying “How’s it going for you, that hopey-changey thing?” How irritating that was and how good it felt to be on the side of hope and change. But how painfully accurate those snarky Palin sentiments feel today. Most of the people in my close circle have stopped following the news, finding it too depressing and alarming. They are taking a break. Eventually they hope to figure out what to do next.

I have a niece who has a job in creating hope and change. Her job description has always seemed so vague and made-up and some of the cynical folks amongst us (me included) sort of discounted her job as not being real.

I stand corrected.

A few months ago, my niece Ella sent a message to her father Charles, my sister Anna and me, telling us that she had signed us up to participate in an all-day workshop at Oberlin. This was something about dialogue. We were meant to represent our various professions, and to talk about how dialogue is useful in our work. Or that’s what I understood. 

I didn’t think about it much, and I couldn’t quite believe that Ella had the chutzpah to just tell us what we were going to do on a November weekend. But, because we love Ella and Charles, we ended up going. She asked and we went. In my case, my whole crew had to prepare for a Saturday without me. That was not a big ask, but it was definitely an extra effort from everyone.

We drove straight through on the so-familiar route that the three of us have taken so many times in our lives – as children of alumni, as students, as alumni, as parents of students. And now, apparently, as parents/aunts of an alumna. We slept in Ella’s one bedroom apartment – me and Anna in a small double bed that was something of a hot dog bun, Charles on an air mattress, Ella on the couch. Already this story shows how passive we were about the plan. We let Ella invite us to sleep in her small apartment. We didn’t even behave like normal adults and stay in a hotel room with two double beds. We were thinking like Oberlin students, not like grown-ups with jobs.

The workshop was called a Summit.  This is the third of these annual events. There was a keynote speaker, there were break-out sessions, there was good food, and the setting was professional and lovely. It was held at the recently built Hotel at Oberlin, which replaced the dumpy and dark Oberlin Inn of our era. This one has Maya Lin’s name on a plaque, so she had something to do with it. Everything about the space was perfect for this event – scale, architecture, lighting, catering.

This was a voluntary workshop and students didn’t get any credit. They chose to come on a Saturday morning and spend a beautiful day indoors, listening and engaging in dialogue with adults of various professions from the outside world.

The content doesn’t really matter, and it’s not all that interesting. We learned about what Ella has been doing at her alma mater – she has been hosting a regular series of meetings, feeding people at each gathering (a huge task, cooking for 45 people three times a week, by herself as far as we can tell), and facilitating their learning of how to listen and speak in groups. There are groups that talk about gender issues, or racism, or other social justice topics. There is something called Inter Group Dialogue and something closely related called Barefoot Dialogue. Essentially, when you are in dialogue, you are not trying to convince anyone of anything. You are listening closely and learning about other people’s perspectives, trying to understand their experiences and views. There are silences to digest the information. There is no effort to reach agreement.

It seems like this might not end up with any evidence of progress, and yet it does change the conversation between people who disagree with each other, or who come from very different places. We sat at a table for meals and breaks with the same group of students. Most of them participate in these dialogues.

One of them is the facilitator for the Israel/Palestine dialogue. He comes from Pennsylvania, a Jew with a conservative background. He says at these gatherings they learn how much people care about the well-being of people in Gaza and Israel. The dialogues are fruitful.  I had been wondering why we never heard anything about Oberlin during this past year of protests and violence on campuses. Perhaps this is why. Maybe these dialogues have created an alternative to mindless chanting and unreasonable expectations. Maybe students and teachers have a place to listen and be heard about so many painful and important issues. Maybe there is learning that yields understanding, instead of closing down the school.

When we were presenting in these panel discussions, my siblings and I found ourselves ending up in some dark places as we talked about the future of this planet, or about the work of dealing with trauma patients. But the students were so earnest and attentive, and because of the framework of the dialogue method, we were all vulnerable, even with strangers. Charles and I both brought ourselves to tears at different points as we talked about what was scary and important about how we all make choices. This surprised us, but we forged on.

These students are so young and so earnest. A high proportion of them were international students. Many of them were athletes – their coaches had encouraged them to get up and spend the day doing this. There was a kid at our table who barely said a word, except for the obligatory introductions (name, pronouns, area of study, etc.) but when Anna asked him, “what’s your distance?” he perked right up and talked about his running. It sounded impressive – Anna told me later that he is running at the speed of four minute miles for his distances. He seemed like an unlikely person to participate in Barefoot Dialogue, but he stayed for the whole day.

The three of us left Oberlin feeling better about lots of things – the school, how it is putting resources into this kind of teaching, the students, the future. The whole day, there was no mention of the current political situation. I think it was a given, in that setting, that we are all feeling panic and distress. But we were there to practice listening with interest and compassion, and to find ways to better solutions, maybe, eventually.

This is not new, I know, but it was encouraging to be with some thoughtful people who are still holding hope for change. Go Ella.

Happy Birthday to Me

Today I turned 65, a ripe old age -- old enough for Medicare, and I successfully completed my enrollment early this week. Very satisfying.

From the very beginning of the day, I was noticing things because it was my birthday and it only happens once a year. I took note that loading the three market trucks, while a sweaty job, went smoothly and easily and everyone rolled out on time or early.  And then it was only 6:30, not quite light out, and I needed to do a few things. It was foggy and still too early to see colors, but I could see the roadway as I headed off to Parents on my golf cart. I took delight in picking beautiful bok choy as the shapes emerged.  Then I went back to the house to get the pig food from the counter, and I had a bowl of cereal while I had a minute. Fed the pigs and headed out in Dooley. Had to stop at the Reston Farmers Market to drop off the sign box that was inadvertently removed from the truck the week before.

I was on the way to Cox Farms to get cider jugs that they had retrieved for us. I didn't have a specific plan for how to find them, so I parked in the middle of the road and walked into the complex of buildings and pumpkin arrangements and refreshment stands. Found Eric Cox unloading bins of pumpkins with a fork lift. The place is immaculate, ready for the weekend crowds that descend on this agri-tainment mecca.  Eric hopped off the fork lift and gave me a hug. We walked further through the maze of storage buildings and employee break rooms and I commented on the expansiveness of this enterprise. He asked if I wanted to go up in the cherry picker to have a look.  I didn't say that I never go on carnival rides or climb up on ladders -- this seemed like a unique opportunity. He asked if I was afraid of heights, and I only said I don't like shaky ladders. So we climbed into this platform that was about the size of a playpen and he used the remote controls and we went so far up into the air that I just didn't even look straight down. We could see to all the edges of the 100 acre property, over all the buildings and corn mazes and tractors. It was amazing. I don't know how high we were, but it must have been 50 feet up. I didn't ask. He pointed out the half acre (at most) plot where they grow vegetables during the summer (they run a produce stand on the corner of their property), and said that on August 15 they plow it all in and plant it in grass again because it is in the middle of the parking lot.  The main parking lot is 20 acres, over to the west. Insane.

I got the jugs and headed to Loudoun to pick beans. I stopped to see the guys who are working on the Stone House and to admire their latest project, breaking a doorway through a stone wall. Not many people have those skills.  They are having such a good time.  I had told Stephen before that I would be there in the morning if he had time to pick a pony with me. He came out and we picked together for about two hours.  It was muddy and hot but the beans were nice. Stephen was supposed to be working with the guys on the house, but he told them he needed to pick beans with me because it was my birthday. So true. It was a nice gift.

                                                                      

Got home to find that we had not had a very good market day (too much rain in the last week, too muggy today, who knows,  not too many people needed vegetables) so we have plenty of food in the coolers for tomorrow and beyond.  Baked a loaf of sourdough that was rising in the fridge and then the family Zoom call went longer than I expected and I was late for my next appointment. But it was good to see Benjamin and Yael and to see how unruffled they appear to be about living in a country that is waging a war on two fronts.  Schools are closed in Israel, and that changes everything for everyone, even more than the sirens and the news. They know we would rather they were here, but traveling this far is too disruptive, and they will only do it if things get really terrible.

Had a lovely birthday visit with three girlfriends. We used to meet every Sunday in the year before covid and then that schedule was disrupted, but the foundation was laid then. Now whenever we get together, we fall right back into easy conversation about everything from politics to the people who are walking past us and what they are wearing to travel plans and family reports. 

Alissa was putting the finishing touches on my birthday cake when I got home this time, and I got to taste the cake and the pudding filling before dinner. Scrumptious. Family dinner at Anna's house was about 20 people or more. We couldn't hear the conversation at the far end of the table, but we had Odessa and Zephyr to entertain us at our end. 

I had to leave the table after blowing out the candles but before we cut the cake because it is Selichot and I was supposed to be in my choir seat by 7 PM. This particular service is attended almost exclusively by people who have been part of the congregation for many decades -- because no one else knows about it, or thinks it's important.  The choir almost outnumbers the congregation. But it feels familiar and home-y and it starts the holidays off by reminding us of all the things we should be thinking about.  The themes of the next two weeks are established. The tunes are in our heads. The choir is more ready for the High Holidays than anyone else but the clergy since we have been singing these prayers for weeks and weeks now.

And that was my birthday. Jon and Rebecca are in Boston, but Alissa is here tonight. I had a great day, going from bok choy at dawn to a cherry picker ride to bean picking to tea time at Tatte to family dinner to temple. Without having a real plan, I probably saw or talked to about 50 people today, one way or another. It was a treat to see the stars this morning and the sun most of the day.  We have been so saturated all week, with wet socks and shoes all the time.

Many thanks to all for a memorable birthday. I have had a lot of them by now. This one will last me until next year.

Dancing Through Life

In the last months of high school, she went to evening square dance classes with a girlfriend. On Wednesday nights, they arrived at a poorly lit elementary school cafeteria and inserted themselves into a motley group of dancers who were 15 – 65 years old. It wasn’t clear to them how this group came to be, but they were welcome. She didn’t look anything like the dancers who wore Western clothing, but she loved the dancing and she learned to allemande left and promenade all around the ring, listening to the caller and smiling at each partner as they met, balanced and passed by the right shoulder. String ties and cowboy boots and crinolines were a fine costume for the other dancers, but it was the moving together to music that made her heart sing. She didn’t have enough background to mind that the music came from a record player.

After that, she was most interested in young men who could dance well. She met her first boyfriend at college, first semester. They took a swing dance class in the evenings at Talcott, a romantic old stone residential hall with a small dining room.  On the outside, the boyfriend looked like a ruffian. He wore a black leather jacket, black jeans, had long stringy hair, and he was very handsome. No one who knew her before would have predicted this pairing, but it was dreamy to have a partner who liked to dance as much as she did, and who could stay on the beat.  She was seventeen and in love for the first time – dancing was just as good as kissing, and kissing was better than she expected. She liked that dancing allowed for plenty of body contact and hands touching hands, without long term meaning, and it wasn’t scary.

 The next summer, a friend who had worked on the farm included her in the group that he gathered up to go to Elkins, West Virginia for a week of contra dancing.  It was a scorching hot week, but she loved being there with nothing to do but dance.  Every morning after breakfast they went to the hall and danced until lunch.  At lunchtime the bank thermometer in the street said 102 degrees and they went back to the air conditioned motel room, stripped off their sweaty clothes and lay on their backs on the bed, putting their bare feet up on the wall, gossiping about all the other dancers and the amazing musicians.  Then they danced all afternoon and into the night.  She fell in love with Rod and Randy, the fiddle player and the pianist.  They were tall, gangly brothers with large hands and kind eyes and they made effortless, beautiful music.  There was an easy connection between them as they had all gone to Oberlin.

Paul, the farm worker, was a strong dancer with a low center of gravity.  Swinging with him was so nice – they did not need to worry about pulling each other over.  He had been dancing much longer than she had so he got to be the show off and the teacher.  He liked that and she soaked it up. She was still seventeen and bedazzled by a dance partner with strong arms who could land on the beat, do an extra twirl, flirt and smile, and spin without missing a step. It helped that they were traveling with his girlfriend, so there was no extra layer of expectation. He was young, blonde, handsome, and off limits. Perfect.

Two years later, her parents had invited farm friends to a barn dance at the end of October and Paul was coming from Chicago for the week.  By this time they had been waltz partners for six months and she was still completely abuzz when she thought about him.  Passing the window of the Moutoux barn on her way back from the field, seeing her reflection – she locked that memory into her brain for the rest of her life. After the barn and the orchard were gone, in middle age she still remembered her young face in the window.  The memory was of the intense feeling of anticipation, of looking forward to Paul’s arrival that afternoon, and how important that moment felt.

 And two years after that, she met the dancer she would marry. He was not obviously her type, as her friends said, but he could dance. He was a quiet, serious guy – he seemed shy but not when they were dancing together. Like all the good dancers, he had a sideways smile and a tilt to his head as he looked into her eyes when they met for a swing, arms quickly locked around each other, pivoting on their right feet together.  He danced with confidence and flair, always perfectly in time with the music, and he held her firmly. His growing-up years of skiing and ice skating made him a graceful and balanced dancer. It amused her always that he cared what he looked like. He was vain for such a funny-looking little guy. They were not the same weight – he was a string bean – but he could match weight when they swung.  That was all that mattered to her.

She began to fall in love for good when he taught her to dance the Swedish hambo at the Concord Scout House on a Monday night in January. During the break the musicians always played a hambo and couples would hop and spin and bounce around.  It looked lovely and impossible – in ¾ time with the hop on the first beat.  With patience and care, he showed her the steps.  In a hambo, each partner has steps that are independent, coming down hard on the heels at a different time from the other, sliding and twirling in rhythm but not in parallel.   They became hambo partners and waltz partners.  Later she learned what a talker he was, and how much they had to talk about.

A hambo is a fair metaphor for a long marriage.  Partners must stay in time as they progress in the same direction, but there is a lot of other independent dancing to do in between the times when they meet to look into each other’s eyes, smile and continue.  If there are disagreements or distractions, you still need to come back and get back in sync. And a partner who is a good talker and a good listener can be a partner for life.

Forty years and three full grown children later, dancing is mostly a memory for them. At weddings and rare parties, they still dance together. Their children are dancers now, and the story of their parents’ first dance is family lore.

 

 

 

The Demise of Candi

 A few years ago, I wrote a piece called A Tale of Two Kitties, about Pogo and Candi.  Today Candi died, and this is what my sister Anna wrote this morning.

Dearly Beloveds:

It is with great sadness, and not the ironic kind, that we share that Candi has been taken from us, literally. As you all know, Candi has experienced a great revival in the last couple years. Her life has been one long journey of looking for a home that fit her simple needs, accommodated her quirks, and loved her for it. It has not been a simple search for her, but in the end we think she found it.

Born the summer of 2007 in a chicken house where she and her litter mates lost feet and toes, Lani name her “Handi” (2 front paws, none in back). Jesse eagerly asked to adopt her and renamed her “Handi Cat” or “Candi” for short. But when it appeared that Jesse’s Oberlin landlord would not allow cats, and the Bradford house had allergies, the Groissers took her on, and eventually her littermate, Pogo. When I lived in the Groisser basement (2010) she chose to hang out with me - her favorite activity was waiting patiently for me to finish showering so she could dash in and lick the floor dry. 

In 2011 I brought her and Pogo with me when I moved into my own house, but when a dog moved in she developed a terrible habit of peeing on couches and carpets. Plus she was also a little needy and irritating at times. In 2013 I somehow managed to convince Michael to take her, and he tolerated the peeing better than I. When Michael and Candi and Devon moved to the yurt together it turned out to be a bad fit - Candi didn’t get along well with Devon’s cats. In '21 she was carted back to the Groissers who reluctantly received her. They hung in with her for over a year as she gradually declined. Rebecca was not a Candi fan, but still put great effort into trying to address her issues with lots of vet trips, special meds and foods, and a litter box that subsumed the living room.

Finally, in 2022 as Jon faced a bone marrow transplant, we dutifully accepted her onto our porch, and gradually began to invite her into our house. You all know the stories of us nearly killing her many times as we attempted to keep her safe but not inside the house - stories that included soaking rain, starvation, fire, and survival. In the end, she lived inside during the day, and tucked into her warm house on the porch at night. We kept her litter box outside, but because of a night-visiting raccoon, her food stayed indoors. She had typical kitty routines, and she patiently trained us to adore her as she joined us for yoga, showers, dinner, and zoom meetings. Somewhere over the last couple years she had shed all her irritating qualities and replaced them with a calm self-assurance and warmth.

This morning she was not waiting quietly outside the house to be let in, as she did every other day. The blood on the porch and disturbed bedding gave us a clue that we should check the woods for evidence. Weirdly, our first expedition revealed Candi lying next to a cluster of burrows, lightly covered in sticks and leaves. Beside her lay chicken remains - those stolen from their house just the week before.

We share Candi’s story with you because we know you knew her and would appreciate how she somehow grew into being her wise accepting adorable self despite some unstable years and a lot of physical and medical challenges. We sense there is a lesson here somewhere - not that Candi was trying to teach us something because I’m not sure I believe in that - but that there is the possibility of learning something even so. We are surprised how very sad we are to lose her - we had no intention of getting attached. Gordon is coping by engaging in a deep cleaning exercise involving vacuums and washing machines, bleach, and trips to the trash enclosure. I am coping by writing about her.

Thank you for listening. I’m now going to go look up how to assassinate raccoons in their dens.

The Tractor Shed, 1967 - 2022

More looking backward in time...

In 1966, our parents purchased a landlocked five acre lot, in a stream valley, with steep hills on all sides.  It was densely wooded with tulip poplars and locusts and oaks, very tall trees. The stream ran down along one side of the lot, heading for Difficult Run. There were lots of salamanders and frogs, poke berry bushes on the edges of the woods, and poison ivy vines crawling up the trees. In some ways, I can't understand why they chose that piece of ground. Almost no sun, no utilities, no view, no easy way to get there.  What it did have was a shared border with some good friends, and you could walk uphill through the woods, across the neighbor's orchard and get to our grandparents' house in about ten minutes. We immediately created a footpath that connected us to civilization -- a swimming pool, hot baths, dinner around a table, lots of electric lights, Grandma.

The Laughlin family who sold the five acres owned three more five acre lots, plus a little triangle of land that had about 200 feet of frontage on Leesburg Pike, a two-lane highway. From the highway, the Laughlin's driveway  went past the flat triangle of land, then climbed a hill -- on the right side of the driveway was a fifty acre field owned by the Thompson family and on the other side was a  ten acre horse farm owned by Bobby Groves.  At the top of the hill the woods began, and there was a large level area  with a ranch house and a small cabin in a clearing. The rest of the 15 acres was all trees on slopes -- our place was past the house, down the hill. No one would think of that as potential crop land, but when our parents eventually purchased all 20 acres of woods plus the road frontage plus the Groves Field, they had a home base with open fields and a spot for a roadside stand.

Today, almost 60 years later, all of that stream valley property is valued at almost nothing, for tax purposes.  It is too wet and steep to build on and it has been re-zoned so that the taxes on those acres are a few hundred dollars a year, in one of the most expensive counties in the state.

The first thing our pioneer parents did was clear a little space in the woods for a Picnic Shed -- an outdoor pole barn kitchen with a roof, a dirt floor and a wall to install some electrical outlets and a telephone. I can't quite imagine how the electricity got down to the Picnic Shed, or where the telephone wire started. Did they talk the Laughlins into letting them run a long wire down the hill? Probably.  Those two amenities were quickly installed. You could hear the telephone ringing from a long way away, and we would have to run from wherever we were to answer it. We never wore shoes during the summer, so the soles of our feet were like leather and we could sprint across rocks and sticks to try to get to the phone before it stopped ringing.

We lived in DC during the weeks back then. Dad went to work, riding his bike down 17th Street to the Old Executive Office Building and on the weekends we all came out to the farm so our parents could continue their adventure. There were four of us kids by then -- I was 6 1/2, Lani was 5, Anna was 2 1/2 and Charles was about 1.  Charles was the only one who needed steady attention, but he did have three older sisters to help to watch over him when our parents were busy. I do remember cloth diapers and diaper pins and plastic pants. But I also remember that Charles stopped wearing pants altogether when he learned to walk. He wore a T-shirt and nothing else during the summer.

By the second summer, a motley crew of high school kids and friends of our parents had started the next big project: building a two story structure in the woods, on the other side of the stream. But in order to cross the stream with machinery and lumber, they had to build a dam first. Again, it is so hard for me to imagine how they got all this done. They didn't have the equipment we have now. How did they create a dam that would stay in place? Maybe they rented a bulldozer. Dad always wanted a bulldozer and he always had projects waiting for the next bulldozer opportunity. A nice little pond filled up, and they built a road for tractors and trucks to get to the clearing. They cut down trees, saving nine straight locust posts. They leveled the construction area, but left a dirt floor. They made a big pile of brush after chopping the branches off those posts, and they dug nine deep holes.  They maneuvered those long logs into those holes, tamping them in thoroughly.  That was the beginning of the Tractor Shed.  The wood was green and the trees had not had time to dry out -- little green branches grew out of the locust posts long after the building was finished. The area all around the Tractor Shed was chewed up and disturbed by this project -- vines and branches and little scraps of wood were scattered all over the dusty, uneven ground. It took years for the forest to cover up that wound.

That second summer, Charles was 2 years old, and he often ran around unsupervised, but within hearing distance of people. No one saw him do it, but he ran through the area where they had burned the brush pile a week before. They had raked it smooth and it looked like the fire had burned everything, but Charles started to cry really hard, and no one could figure out what was wrong until that night big white blisters appeared on the soles of his feet where he had run over some hot coals. Our wise pediatrician and our grandparents shook their heads. Our mother held Charles' feet in an ice bath. Our grandparents worried, the pediatrician was calm. We all survived our childhoods somehow, and she had great faith in our parents and in the resilience of farm children (she had been our father's pediatrician too..).

The Tractor Shed had a big bay on the left for parking tractors and a smaller bay on the right for a tool shop. There was a steep ladder in the middle that led up to the three rooms on the second floor. One big room over the tractor bay and two smaller rooms over the shop.  Our family lived in the Tractor Shed for about two summer seasons before buyng the house and property at the top of the hill.  We moved out of the woods and into a house with plaster walls and glass-paned windows and real wood floors. But the house had small rooms, the walls were painted a terrible putty color, it had low ceilings and it was dark and airless, compared to the Tractor Shed with its huge, open windows and floors that you could see through between the planks. It did have an indoor bathroom and a furnace, though, and we moved out of DC to the farm for good in 1970.

For the next 10 or 15 years, the Tractor Shed was summer housing for a long series of workers, all of whom probably have memories of snakes dropping from the ceiling and roommates peeing out of the windows. There was a time when we were reported by a remote neighbor (Barbara Wilson, wife of Edwin P. Wilson... he is worth a glance in Wikipedia)  for having people living in the woods and the inspector came to inspect, finding only a building with stacks of wooden baskets showing through the upstairs windows (if he had thought for just a few minutes, he would have wondered why a farm would stack its baskets so far from the sorting and packing areas behind the stand).

When we stopped housing workers on the Vienna farm when the mansions started to be built on the Thompson Field, that space was abandoned except for the occasional neighborhood trespasser teens who could not resist exploring a rickety building. After the orchard next door was sold and even bigger mansions were built just a few yards uphill from the Tractor Shed, one of the closest neighbors requested -- through an intermediary -- that we tear down that attractive nuisance. I responded, through the intermediary, that we had not requested that they tear down their eyesore buildings, and that was the end of that brief interaction.

But, in the end, a big tree fell on the Tractor Shed and smashed it flat, saving all the local children from danger. There it lies, crumpled under a big tree, a mysterious pile of tin and rotting lumber. The dam washed out long ago, and the stream valley is dotted with archaeological mystery, with no hints about the purpose of those collapsed buildings (there was a bath house and a tent platform with stories of their own, and they have long ago melted into the forest floor).

Sometimes I think about the civilizations that lived here before us, and how their stories have melted into the woods, or been scraped off with the topsoil and replaced by gigantic mansions. At least this particular stream valley is of no use to anyone, and will probably stay just as it is, way beyond our lifetimes.

A Walk in the Neighborhood

This morning I started out in the Moutoux Shed Patch and headed down Groves Hill, then past the School Patch and the Route 7 Hillside.  Walked past the stand and out the driveway and took a left on Route 7. Headed west toward Thelma's, not really knowing how far I would go, but I walked along the northern edge of the Front Field until I got to the furthest point of the Thompson property before turning off of Route 7 and heading back through the most northeastern corner of the Thompson Field, where the road to the stand used to be at the top of the hill. I cut across the whole back end of the field, making my way diagonally back toward the front of the farm. It tickled me to look down into the woods and see that the irrigation pipes that extended to the Brooks Field were still on the slope on the other side of the stream. I don't know if those pipes ever really got put together (doesn't seem like it) but those forty foot lengths of aluminum have stayed in those woods, undisturbed, for about 50 years. When I got back to Route 7, a little bit west of the driveway, I headed back east toward Beulah Road. Took a right on Beulah until I got to the Moutoux driveway, decided not to go to Parents to look at the field since we haven't seen any geese yet this winter, and headed down the driveway back toward the top of Groves Hill. 

This was a two mile walk through memory, on my two good knees and two not great feet. But it was the first walk I have taken by myself in the extended neighborhood in well over five years, I am guessing. My new knee is going to take me back to all the trails and sidewalks that I knew so well, and they will seem new to me after all these years. Except not really.

So, here is where I really went, even though that first description is entirely true. I walked out of our house at the top of Blueberry Hill and headed past the Common House and down the road, through the deer fence and onto the farm property.  Went past the School Patch and Rt 7, past the stand and then headed left onto the brand new bike/pedestrian path that is on the highway side of the monolithic sound wall that separates the stand from the road. Went west on that path until I got to a sign that said "Sidewalk Closed" so I took a left into the road that dead ends at the end of the path that goes through Middleton. Crossed someone's yard, quietly, went across the swale full of big rocks that is part of the storm water retention pond and marched along on the paved path to Middleton Ridge Road. From there I could see between some houses, down into the stream valley that is the back of our farm, and I could see the pipes on the hillside that made me smile. Back to Route 7 and up toward Beulah Road, passing the farm and the latest incarnation of a school and up to the corner where I took a right and noted that where there were once two narrow, winding lanes, there are now four lanes because of all the various accommodations for turning.  Took a right on Maymont Drive and then a right onto Newcombs Farm Road and I was home again.

I have written about this topic before, how there are maps overlaid on other maps everywhere I go, since we still live on the same property and drive on the same roads. Sort of. Chip told me there is a word for this. I will have to ask him to remind me again. But where other people see a six lane highway heading towards Tysons Corner, I still see the cornfields that were on both sides of that road less than 50 years ago. Between here and the Springhill Rec Center, we pass the Weissman Field directly across the street, E.E. Thompson's, Bradley Thompson's, Hazleton's, the Berry Field, the Hawkins Field (that one just took me ten minutes to remember), then the Jewetts on the left and Howard Lowe's and Paul Lowe's on the right, then Odricks, then the Duck Pond and finally Charlie's.  There are still people alive who would remember all of those names, but there is no real reason to remember them. There is no reason to keep track of this sort of detail. And yet I do.

So how did I feel as I walked on these paved surfaces, passing these monstrous houses, looking at the unimaginative landscaping, feeling a little bit glad about the way the deer had eaten a band around the middles of the arbor vitae? I felt okay. I have been here the whole time. I have watched all of it. I would not have chosen these houses and these roads, nor would I have wished that all the overgrown fields had stayed the same. There were certainly better choices that could have been made, but no one who is trying to make money off of developing land is going to make the best choices. We who built Blueberry Hill made better choices, but we still took out steep hillsides and lots of trees, rearranging the topography. And next door, they erased the Moutoux Orchard and put gigantic houses right next to each other. If you use up your emotional energy on grieving those changes, you make it hard for yourself to keep moving forward.

I am always amused and glad that the stand looks just as it did about 50 years ago. It is such an anomaly. It was weird when it was built and it is still odd and we have 300 CSA customers who pull into the parking lot each week and probably don't think about how strange it all is because they are focused on walking back to see the beautiful vegetables. But they are looking at something that doesn't have any layers of maps on top of it. It is one place that still has the same function as it did two generations ago. This makes me happy.

Detour

There are stories being posted almost daily right now on the other blog: hanajonramblingon.blogspot.com. We are driving across the country and back for the month of January. If you need some bedtime entertainment (nothing scary, nothing too exciting, just reports from the road, mostly about friends and family).