Sylvia's Journal

A whole day without a computer! It’s nice to know I can still do that. Yesterday was a perfect Lobster Cove holiday. The Alden shell is nearly ready to get on the water again, just two more coats of varnish on the oars and putting the oar collars at the right distance.

I alternated the sanding and varnishing with my sewing project inside on which I am making good progress. It was my first sewing project since the crash and it took some hunting around the house to find everything that I needed. Although most things are back in their places, some things are not. Axel’s current office is what used to be my sewing/ironing room while his office was in the barn (studio) across the drive way. When Sita and Jim moved in last summer my upstairs project room was dismantled to make place for Axel’s stuff. And although Sita and Jim are moving out this month, Tessa and Steve are moving in as soon as the place is empty. Since last July everything in the house has moved and thus anything we tackle for the first time since the crash requires a bit of hunting. Some things we have not found.

While I was relaxing Axel worked hard on his own to do list, which is partially homework from the brain injury staff at Spaulding, who is working with him on retreading his executive functions and his working memory. He has to do the kind of exercises that I used to give in my very first job as a neuropsychological testing assistant at Leiden University hospital in the early 70s. The injuries must be very localized because he can do some of the exercises as well as the rest of the population while others throw him off completely.

It was again sweltering hot inland and we were once again blessed to be living on the ocean where it is always a few degrees cooler. After mowing a large part of our too-large lawn Axel went for a swim that wasn’t really a swim because the water was too cold for that. I interrupted all my projects and followed him in and out of the water. Sometime in July the winds shift and the warm water is replaced by the kind of cold water that hurts at first. A quick dip was all we could handle.

In the evening our friends Gary who is an architect and Christine who is a music therapist had invited us to a series of music performances. Fancy that, in the woods of East Manchester we listened to arias from a London-based artist, two moving piano pieces from a grey-haired Basque pianist, and to our hostess, a French Canadian, playing Telemann on the flute. The audience consisted of the Latin American offspring of the pianist and other friends who have in common that they are from various Latin American countries, and thus speak Spanish, have discovered Manchester and bought houses for the summer or the year. Although I did not have Spanish in common with the rest, we all appeared to travel a lot to various parts of the world and no one there spoke just one language.

Back home I served Axel and myself the raspberries which I picked in the afternoon from their abundant source. We ate them out of martini glasses with a splash of heavy cream, just before bedtime.