The weather yesterday was very much like my mood – wild swings – from sunny and warm to squalls, rain storms, thunder and lightning, and even, 90 miles west of us, a killer tornado. I revel in the warm summer weather and then get all depressed when I see the warning on my delta reservation that my trip is only 6 days off. I want to hold on to the days so they move slowly but they slip by too fast while we try to do everything we can with friends and family, enjoying ourselves and vacationing.
I try not to think about the possibility that I will return alone – it is sitting like some undigested nut in the pit of my stomach. Today we will know whether Axel comes back with me or not.
After a thunder and lightning storm squall had passed over our town in the early morning, we were ready to execute a plan that we cooked up the night before of a kayak trip through the Audubon park in Ipswich and Topsfield. But first we had to sort out the challenging logistics of getting four people, two cars without roof racks and four kayaks to two different places (one upstream, one downstream). We started our slow paddle down the Ipswich River at 12:30.
For more than three hours we paddled lightly and leisurely down the river, carried sometimes by the current and a cool breeze. Except for two other humans in a canoe, with a blue-eyed Siberian Husky, we were alone with nature and ourselves.
We admired the yellow and blue irises, yellow water lilies, grey and white herons, red-winged blackbirds, frogs, and even a beaver sticking its head out of the water to see who was coming. I missed the dead fish eating water snake that grossed Tessa out so much that she didn’t dare to stick her feet in the water anymore after that. Suffice to say we did not swim.
Sore from paddling for that long we dashed off to Boston to see the Dale Chihuly exhibit at the FMA – a dazzling display of glass blowing mastery and colors.
We celebrated Tessa’s graduation and the couple’s engagement at the Melting Pot with various fondues – Mexican cheese, Bourguignon and finally chocolate – violating all the strict rules I had learned in my childhood about cheese fondue:
1. There is only one kind made with Emmenthaler and Gruyere
2. There can be nothing else on the menu (Bourguignon was another meal for another day and I had never even heard of chocolate fondue)
3. It has to be stirred in one direction only (8 shape) on medium heat until the cheese dissolves smoothly into the white wine.
4. You can only drink white wine with cheese fondue
5. Dessert can only be slices of canned pineapple served in their own liquid and with a splash of Kirschwasser.
I never had dared to find out what would happen if you violated these rules but the punishment (having to throw out the fondue because the melted cheese would not dissolve into a smooth mass or large balls of congealed cheese in your stomach causing unbearable pain) was enough to discourage me. But now I know. Another myth shattered.
Sylvia's Journal 
0 Responses to “From the river into the melting pot”