6.15.10 visitors to 5 Fern Hollow

 

Go west, young people

I found some letters I had written to my family in 1968. My first husband, Gene, and I traveled across the country as a scouting trip of possible future vacation places. He was in his second year of law school and real life, as we called it then, was going to be happening to us the next summer. We left Concord in early June, 1968, in a Volkswagon, with a huge, Sears canvas tent, and the top tier of our wedding cake as we would be someplace "out there" for our first anniversary on June 17.

The first missive is a post card of the Rutherford B. Hayes Libary in Fremont, Ohio.
Dear Folks,
As you can tell we made pretty good time today. We would have done better but I messed up on the navigation and we went right through Cleveland. Tomorrow we hit Chicago-hope I do better. We stopped at about 8:00 after a 15 hour day and 725 miles. You should get a map and keep track of us.
Will write again tomorrow.
Love
Bonnie & Gene

The following Tuesday this letter was written from a Holiday Inn in ALbert Lea, Minnesota.

Tuesday
Dear Mom, Dad, and Beth Ann,
This will be our last night in a motel. Tomorrow we will be in good camping country. I hope it cools off a little bit, 95 degrees at 8:00 in the evening is a little too much!
I've been watching birds just to keep from going into a trance. Dad, you should have seen the Ring Necked Pheasant I saw last night. It was huge and the sun shining on it made it look like shiny copper.
I did very well guiding us through Chicago today. (Gene added, She sure did!). I could feel the ole acid bubbling around in my stomach after that traffic.
We saw some beautiful farmlands today in Minnesota. Hopefully, we will get to the Badlands to camp.

Wednesday
We just heard about Bobby Kennedy. That's really awful.

love
Bonnie

Tune in next time for news from the Badlands

1968

My next blog will be letters to my family that I wrote in 1968. I was 22 and had just left home in 1967. stay tuned.

A good news day

It was a good news day and it isn't over yet. I got a call from the GI doctor who did mom's colonoscopy and it's an adenoma, not cancer. It is the type that will turn into cancer but what he biopsied was not yet malignant. I went to Concord after work to talk to her about this and was glad to see that she has returned to her alert but sometimes forgetful self. I explained the situation to her and what I understood her options to be and asked what she would want to do and she said she would want to have surgery to prevent a cancer from developing. The next stop will be an appointment with a Nephrologist to see how her kidneys will hold up.

The other good news is that the Great Blue Herons are back to the nests visible from I89 in Springfield. It looked like there were three in the further nest. I e-mailed the photographer, Geoff Howard so he can get down there and chronicle their nesting activities.

A good day, indeed, in spite of the rain.

Breaking up is hard to do

Well, we didn't actually break up, it was more a drifting apart and I can't say that I'm sorry as I wasn't finding the relationship all that entertaining any more. We were each going in different directions and the future we were each choosing for ourselves didn't accommodate the other.
We met in 2005 when I was home recovering from surgery. I had a lot of time to devote to this relationship at that time and that's always fun in the beginning. I guess I should tell you now that this was not a person but a TV network, The Food Network and I was mesmerized. There was Rachel and Sandra, Ina and Giada, Bobby and Tyler, and Of course, Alton. It was TV on an intelligent level for the time, even the ads were a cut above, and there was cooking being presented in a manner that seemed possible for the time impaired. Rachel could do it in thirty minutes ( as long as everything was prepped before being put into the refrigerator and if you didn't mind carrying half of everything in your kitchen from one side to the other and all in one load). Sandra did it by opening bottles, jars, packets, cans, and any other type of prepared food packaging known to man but with a little bit of effort (that 30% homemade part) stirred in a bit of vanilla extract or whatever to make some chemical laden food taste like the real thing.
There was an incredible amount of information being tossed about with the vinaigrette and new-to-the-home-cook utensils that had yet to find their way into our kitchens. I now use my microplaner, spider, mini scoops, and tongs regularly and wonder how I managed without them. It was food as entertainment. Chefs were the new Rock Stars.
I don't remember exactly when disillusionment started to seep in. It may have been when I couldn't tune in without Rachel being in nearly every time slot, back to back to back Thirty Minute meals and then, whoops, there she is telling me how to eat on forty dollars a day in some upscale location and then, jeez, she has her own show a la Oprah and/or Martha Stewart. Too much, too often. Her motto should be "I'm talking and I can't shut up". This saturation of the airwaves, one chef at a time is very puzzling. Why would anyone want to watch Guy for four hours doing "Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives"? All that manic talking and eating is like like being made to eat only one food for days and days. Everything blurs together and with no variety there is no interest. There are enough chefs and formats on that network to schedule an infinite variety of program so why saturate my viewing with one chef at a time until I can no longer stand the sight or sound of him or her.
It's not easy to be "just friends" after such an intense relationship but we have come to an agreement that we'll restrict our contact to "Iron Chef America" and it seems to be working.

tripping down memory lane

Beth and I have had to go to that time capsule on Perry Avenue known as our mother's house to find things she's needed or wanted. The last time there I found a newspaper from 1952 with a front page report of the annual Doll Carriage Parade at White's Park. There's Beth on the front page, above the fold, in her crepe paper dress and her crepe paper decorated doll carriage after having placed first, receiving a shiny, silver dollar. Our winning was as annual as the event because of Edythe and her amazing talent with her Singer Featherweight sewing machine and all that crepe paper from Woolworth's. We always got prizes, Brian with his decorated tricycle and Beth and me with our crepe paper dresses and decorated carriages.
She was amazing with that sewing machine. Every Christmas there was a doll with a complete homemade wardrobe under the tree. She cried when we were too old for dolls anymore. I still have all the doll clothes she made and all the knitted sweaters and hats made by her able assistant, Madlyn. All my school dresses sprang from that machine and many of them were hand smocked. I remember the day the dresses stopped. Raymond gave Edythe a new Singer sewing machine with a zigag attachment and my Easter dress of that year became it's maiden voyage only to never reach the shore of "ready to be worn". It began life as plain yellow cotton and became a sampler of all the stitches that zigzagger could do in all the colors that Coats and Clark thread had to offer. Something happened and it's fate came to be that of permanent resident of the back hall closet for the rest of its unfinished life. The next time I had a home sewn dress it was made my me, using the Featherweight Singer. It was a sweet machine.

It's New England. What did we expect

I'm as happy as anyone talking about the weather so I haven't shut up for three days. It seemed that we didn't have any weather for three weeks but only the foolish would think that Spring was going to arrive early. My feeling is that it was all being held back for a delivery with bigger impact. Why would we care if the wind was blowing at 10 mph for several days? Collect 6 or so days of that and clump them together you can make the wind blow 60 or 70 mph for a day or so. Much more impressive.
I fell asleep Thursday night with the sound of the Montreal Express roaring through my head and awoke with the sound of the generator having come on. While I'm very grateful for an automatic generator I'm unable to sleep while it's running. My heart and blood pressure seem to want to match it's frantic pace and I just keep telling myself that "it's saving the house, it's saving the house". Suddenly, the power came back on and I felt that I'd dodged a bullet only to be powerless a few minutes later.
In spite of a sleepless night it was a relief to go to work in the morning. We all shared our war stories while yawning and were all grateful to be going home to power of some sort. I was still on generator power until Friday evening. Less than 24 hours this year compared to three days last year.
Wednesday, before all this started, I was signed up to take a Zentangle class at Wingdoodle in Warner. I had taken the day off and was looking forward to doing something creative. Life had other plans as the class was cancelled. I went to Wingdoodle anyhow and bought the Zentangle kit and decided to home school myself. I've done a couple and am fascinated by the process and will be sharing more about this as I get on with it. I will be taking an advanced class in March so must keep practicing.

I found myself and Amanda found me and next I'll see if Trish can find me and I'm ready to roll.
Until I created this blog everything I knew about blogging I learned from "Julie and Julia" and "Ugly Betty". "Julie and Julia" showed how it can change your life sort of the way that winning the lottery could and "Ugly Betty" showed how it can come around and bite you in the butt. I'll be aiming for the lottery type life change.
I'll be writing about what I'm reading, listening to, watching, and what I find interesting and/or funny about the activities we call daily living. My goal is to find something to make me laugh everyday and share it.
I suppose the first laugh I can share with you is that I was trying to set this blog up last night and not having any luck finding it on the internet. I had composed a whole blog and pressed the wrong button and lost the whole thing. Learning from failure is quite effective.
My subject last night was micro greens. I've seen them on the Food Network where they get heaped on top of a chef's creation making the whole pile look totally precious. I thought the whole thing was quite pretentious, especially when I saw that a small baggie cost $4.99 at the local Winter Market. I did some research on the internet about these tiny leaves and found the idea of eating the first sprouting leaves of all kinds of vegetables to be an interesting one. I bought a bag the next week and I am a convert. They are delicious and a little goes a long way. They are the food equivalent of down in that they rapidly expand when removed from confinement. So far I've used them as a replacement for lettuce in sandwiches making sure to anchor them in the mayo. I am also looking into a grow light and seeds to grow my own. Sowing to harvest is 10 to 15 days and I think scissors are used for picking, as it were.
I'm going to close now as I'm quite curious to see how I look in print.
bonsoir
Bonnie B.

a test

my first laugh will be trying to find myself on the internet.