Sylvia's Journal

Sita’s bad luck got my entries out of order. This predates the panic call.

On Saturday we drove out for a lovely breakfast somewhere on a pig and peach and apple farm. This is Western Massachusetts at its best. We stocked up on juicy white peaches, apples, jellies and more. Faro’s other oma and opa arrived midway through the morning and we hung out in the local park, watching dragon flies skim the water and birds dive for fish.

After lunch we sat in the garden, the other oma having first dibs on Faro, since I will have him for 10 days in a row, soon. Sita and I weeded the zinnia plot, overgrown with grab grass. It is a dirty but very satisfying pastime, weeding. We drove back in the late afternoon.

We are going through some 10+ late summer days. Sunday was one of them. After a very quiet Quaker meeting, where we welcomed Carole back from 3 weeks at an orphanage we support in Kenya, I pedaled back to Manchester.

We had a lunch date with Alison and Carry, two ex-colleagues and dear friends, accompanied by their mates. While Axel went to get the lobsters (only our 2^nd time this summer), I prepared a Martha Stewardesque table for 6, in spite of the cracked plates and mismatched glasses, under the tree looking out over the cove.

Axel made us poblano-cucumber margaritas, a concoction that may well be our all-time favorite summer drink. After lunch Alison and Mark ventured out in the kayaks while I swam behind them to the sentinel rock at the mouth of the cove from where I could just see Alison’s kayak as it was turned over by a wave.

I swam back to shore to get my kayak for a rescue maneuver but she was already being towed into the cove. The unexpected swim was wonderful because of the unusually warm water. By the time we arrived at the beach we discovered one thing that tends to come along with unusually warm waters: a dark red and translucent jelly fish the size of a dinner plate and thousands of small ones, the size of a finger nail. Suffice to say we did not go back into the water.