Look

Some sights just take my breath away. Jay and I were standing out in front of the house in the late afternoon on Thursday watching the big flock of geese that has been munching their way back and forth across our hill. Fred and Ethel had their goslings with them, hard to count as they were in constant motion and easily lost in the tall grass. A couple of the visiting geese had goslings as well, perhaps 30 in all, and Jay counted 29 adults. It was a lovely sight, with the occasional honk for background music. Suddenly, a young deer bounded across the slope between the geese and the road, headed towards the pond. And then another. So graceful, so quick, I could almost think I had imagined them. The geese, the deer, the green grass, the perfect evening – I cannot imagine a better life.

It’s over a month since I last wrote. I came back from my lovely visit with Liam and Dawnea and Shane in D.C. with a bit of a toothache. By the next day, I was in agony. The dentist started me on antibiotics right away which helped a little, and I got an appointment in Utica with an endodontist for the end of the week. It was a week lost to the balance between pain and drugs. But in the end, the endodontist did a flawless root canal and I was almost instantly fine. It was a small reminder of what fragile beasts we are, and how much depends on wellness. I got nothing done all that week.

But the beavers were busy, as predicted. The town road crew had been back over and over to clear their dams. Then there was a lull – perhaps they had trapped them. But they are back (or perhaps a new family has moved into the vacant lodge), damming the culvert again, and raising the level of the pond substantially. Looking through the woods as we drive south on Gulf heading towards town, we can see where the beavers have added another dam to the stream on the west side of the road and created yet another pond and marsh. It’s just visible between the trees from the road, but not near enough to the road to be a problem. That piece of property is uninhabited, and no one is bothered by their transformation of the landscape there.

We showed four year old Jonah Bailey the work of the beavers at our culvert when we were out for a walk. A little further up Gulf we passed another culvert and Jonah remarked casually that the beavers hadn’t gotten to it yet. Jonah is a delight, the 4th of Mom and Dad’s great grandchildren. He was visiting with his parents, Zavi and Chris, over the Memorial Day weekend, staying with Peter and Aviva. Tamar and Ryder came up too and stayed with us, so we were nine at the table the afternoon we walked out with Jonah. I miss my west coast family dreadfully, but it’s lovely to get to see more of the east coasters.

Tamar and Ryder left early on Memorial Day and we had a few quiet hours before the Augusts arrived, the first of our west coast pals to visit. It was lovely to have them here, to show them our new life, full of beavers and geese and big open space. Their visit was the occasion for our first trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame. The museum was interesting. Baseball is so deeply woven into American culture that even someone (like me) who doesn’t care about the game will find it a useful window into the last century and a half of the country’s development. The early baseball clubs were rural social clubs, but the game, like much of the country, quickly became urban, and eventually, painfully, integrated. The museum is a microcosm of the miserable history of racism that still distorts and impoverishes our country.

After the museum we went to Peter and Aviva’s beautiful home on Walnut for a lively dinner. The next day we went out to P&V’s lakeside cabin and then on for a drive around the lake down to the Fenimore Museum. It’s an amazing jewel in a town the size of Cooperstown, sustained by baseball tourists and by the great generosity of the Clark family. We saw an exhibit of Herb Ritts’ rock and roll photographic portraits. Many were familiar from magazine covers, but seeing this whole amazing body of work together was just stunning. Ritts had a way with his subjects, a way of getting them to reveal themselves to his camera, a way of finding the drama in their faces and bodies. There were a lot of musicians and singers I barely knew or didn’t much care about (Brittany Spears – really), but their portraits made me feel I’d missed something important about them. And the musicians I did care about, Joan Baez, Sting, Bob Dylan and many others were revealed at their best – not necessarily their most attractive, but somehow their truest. It was lovely to share the experience of the exhibit with our old friends.

And now it’s mostly quiet again on Sunnyhill. We had been looking forward to the Memorial Day company and the Augusts’ visit for weeks, and there’s a little lull now with that excitement behind us. Jay and Mike are putting in their second day of working on the new garage floor, laying concrete pavers. It looks fabulous, and will be nearly halfway done by the time they quit today. I can start to see the garage finally orderly and usable – we’ll be parking inside this winter. It’s a huge improvement. So the guys are busy, working hard, but I have a little quiet time, with my chores caught up; a little time to think about the beauty of rock and roll portraits, the beauty of family and old friends, the beauty of geese and deer.