Sylvia's Journal

I took an entire day vacation yesterday. I never checked my email until it was time to go to bed. I worked some more on my Alden shell, finished three coats of varnish on the seat and footrests and started work on the oars. While the varnish was drying I worked in the garden.

I looked for, and found the missing asparagus spears; now all nine are showing their feathery foliage or the shoots that precede it. Next spring we will have our first harvest according to Ann who planted them for us in May with her sons and husband. She came by to check on progress a few days ago when no one was around and left a long message on the phone that we haven’t responded to. There are other phone calls to make or return that are piling up but we are both too overwhelmed, for different reasons, to respond to them.

I weeded around the tiny lettuce plants that have been kept from growing up by nightly bunny visits. Now the inch-tall month-old seedlings are protected from the bunny by a wire fence so we can stop buying stuff trucked in from California at considerable cost.

The raspberries are ripening fast and provide at least a handful for consumption each day; the blueberries are nearly changing from green to purple; soon we’ll see who gets them first: the birds, the chipmunks or us. There isn’t yet enough for everyone as the bushes as still very small and one has only produced five berries. We don’t expect to get any of these.

I played around some more with water color and when I got tired of that I read. All this kept me busy until Axel returned from his memory assessment at Spaulding and a bunch of errands that took him far afield; he was gone most of the sweltering day.

We sat on the low tide beach, sipping Pernod, with our feet in the ice cold water watching the sun move towards the tree line and realized there was enough time and sun shine for a short kayak trip. We paddled out of the cove along the coastline, across enormous swells that lifted us up then down. These were the distant ripples from hurricane Bertha who is losing her strength rapidly over the Atlantic.

It was a lovely short holiday from the intense work in Ghana and Haiti; but It was not much of a holiday from the crash aftermath which continues to haunt me as the anniversary has come and gone and put the whole thing squarely back into view. It is leaving me mildly depressed and even though the birds are greeting me and the day with enthusiasm, I feel like curling up into a ball and going back to sleep; there are other fantasies of escape from being ‘on’ today at work.