Sylvia's Journal

The night brought the much needed rain amidst thunder and lightning. This morning all the colors are brighter and everything looks fresh and healthy. We are eating breakfast in bed, which includes cereal with raspberries that still have dew drops on them. We are harvesting about a pint every other day and the end is not yet in sight. The blueberries are keeping us in suspense; they appears to be stuck in their current green-turning-blue state with an occasional one succeeding into blue; that one is, of course, eaten on the spot.

When Axel came down yesterday morning he mentioned there was a kayak adrift in the cove. He said it with the same worried face with which he had announced that a whale had drifted into our cove just over a year ago. That turned out to be a dead 47-foot Sei whale which was good for a day long spectacle in the cove of watching the dismantling of the behemoth by an army of peppy young volunteers armed with sharp kitchen knives under the supervision of the state’s chief endangered species biologist.

Yesterday’s event was less spectacular and more worrisome as it turned out to be my kayak which was adrift. Someone had taken it out for a joy-paddle in the night until something happened. It had been a wonderful night with a full moon over a mirror-flat sea and Axel had contemplated going out for a paddle but we were too tired. Someone else had had the same idea.

I walked out towards the kayak which was stranded on the other side of the cove and brought a spare paddle along, not seeing my own paddle. As I was walking towards the kayak I was mentally preparing myself for lots of empty liquor bottles and puke; instead I found the kayak full of water with a bottle of diet ginger ale of a cheap brand, and three teabags tied together, and indeed, no paddle. Later Axel walked around the cove trying to find the missing paddle. Instead he found a bag with a soaked pick nick lunch, uneaten. We tried to piece the story together: someone planned to have a midnight moonlight pick nick out on one of the islands, had found my kayak conveniently close to the water, with paddle inside it, took it out, then capsized right in the cove, panicked and ran off. The tea bags and ginger ale made me think it was a girl, not a boy, who was the perpetrator. I tried to think like Hercule or any of the chief inspectors I watch on TV who are so clever at deducing things from just a few clues. I’d make a lousy detective. We reported the incident, just for the record.

Last night I dragged all our boats up to their usual storage place, removed the paddles and life jackets and now I hope everything is still there. We have been robbed of one more illusion which is that we can leave everything out and no one will take anything that doesn’t belong to them. Katie-Blair who came for a swim, escaping the 90 degree hinterland, said, indignantly, “this is soooo not right!” And then we got over our indignation and swam some more, dried up, swam some more, while Katie-Blair regaled us with stories about traveling by car with two mad cats and an elderly dog to Maine.

Scattered around the swimming were more project activities, I am making good progress on both the varnishing and the dress, and preparing my teaching next week at BU as part of our month long MSH/BU course.

For dinner we drove to Katy-Blair and Andrew where we joined the Lashes for a summer meal of grilled swordfish, stir fried chard from our garden, corn (not yet local) and desert made of wonder bread, blueberries and whipped cream; a politically incorrect but cherished fifties recipe that came with lots of memories of people and places now gone.