Sylvia's Journal

It is that day again, departure day. There is stuff strewn across my office, an open suitcase and a nagging feeling that I have forgotten something important. Even lists can’t help. Years ago I made packing lists. I had one for every country I traveled to because each has special requirements. Like malaria prophylaxis for countries around the Bay of Benin but not for Afghanistan; winter clothes for Afghanistan but not for any of the other countries I usually travel to; electrical plug types etc.

The lists were made in the early 2000s and show how much the technology has changed our lives. On my lists featured items such as a phone-flashlight-music player- handheld (remember the Ipaq?) – camera, with different charging devices for each; now a tablet or smart phone will do all of that and so much more. We also had paper tickets which sometimes made for some exciting last minutes, waiting for a DHL or Fedex envelop with either my ticket or my passport with visa stamp, or both. Now, except for the visa part, these days are far behind us. Today I crossed off all these superfluous things; I happily crossed off theTampax as well, I am way beyond that now.

Travel was relatively simple then. There were three classes, First, Business and Economy, with Business only a few hundred dollars more than economy. Our travel policy included a rule that allowed B-class for trips longer than 14 hours. Alas, these days are long gone yet my trips are often closer to 24 hours. I am ecstatic if I get an Economy Comfort seat but by the time my ticket is purchased these are usually long gone.

I also used to travel with toys, gadgets to entertain people or give away as prizes, stacks of quotes printed on large colored papers, poems and what not. All this filled half my suitcase – I brought very few clothes and without all that stuff could have travelled with hand luggage only. I invested a huge amount of effort and energy in creating a ‘space for learning.’ It is not that I don’t think this is important but I am lacking the energy and create the learning space psychologically only.

After a flurry of activities, compressed into a three day week full of meetings, inbox assaults, deadlines met and not met, I activated my out-of-the-office message for Friday and headed out to Marlborough for the third and last 30 hour face-to-face workshop in my coaching training that is nearing its end. Not counting the time spent writing reports and filling in worksheets and reading required books, this will complete 200 hours of study. It seemed daunting at the time I started back in February, and it is still a little daunting since there is an exam still to be taking, but I do feel a sense of accomplishments and feeling tremendously enriched.

We learned some new techniques today and I applied one to the question whether I wanted to be a vegetarian or a mixed animal/vegetable eater. The tool probes for pain and gain (or costs and benefits) of change versus status quo. The answer was quite clear at the end of the exercise: I will remain a combo eater, light on the animal side but not without. This turned out to be a good choice: I was invited along to dine in a Brazilian diner where, had I made the other choice, I would not have been able to eat.

Back at home Fall is approaching. Tonight Axel had a fire going again, barely three months after the last spring fire in June. Our summers are short indeed, but our apres-summer is one of the best seasons of the year.

The vegetable garden is full and ripe. I pulled up the leek and braised them as suggested by Julia Child; the last fingerlings were consumed tonight by Axel – we have been eating those for weeks now. The beans keep producing as if there is no tomorrow and the kale keeps coming back after we cut it bare. The Sungold cherrie tomatoes also keep producing but their skins are more and more fragile and burst before we can even get to them – burst or not burst, they are still delicious. We are in a state of vegetal abundance.

And in the cove there is marine abundance. With a little bit of luck we will be able to harvest oysters in the not too distant future; the mussels are indeed reproducing, and the sea urchins are coming back. We have been a bit lax with the lobster traps, leaving them baitless in the waters where they fill up with the red invasive seaweed, an abundance we are less happy about.

The return to the grid meant an avalanche of emails. I noticed my sense of despair mounting as the emails kept coming in. All this stuff I need to read and many to act on in the next 10 days made me a little nervous, yet I didn’t want to cut my vacation short by getting a head start. All would have to wait until Tuesday.

This week and the next will be short weeks. On Friday I am off to Marlborough for the last of my three coaching face-to-face intensives, 30 hours in 3 days. And then, on September 11 I resume my travel, with Entebbe as a first stop and Jo’burg the next. By the time I come back it is fall; that too depresses me.

All this anticipation drains me and so I am trying as hard as I can to live in the present. This is something I am learning from my grandson, who is so very much present to each moment. His future, at least in his mind, does not yet exist (he’s right on that account) and his past extends only minutes back. Oh, to be able to wander around the world like he does, being enchanted by everything he finds on his way: a leaf, a rock, a puppy, a sea gull, even sea gull poop.

After we said goodbye yesterday we re-arranged the furniture that had been used as a barrier to the non baby-proofed places in our living room and moved all the baby paraphernalia upstairs. Axel cleaned the Small Point mussels and I read the Sunday NY Times, nearly from cover to cover.

In the evening we motored in and out of Gloucester Harbor on a sunset and evening cruise to celebrate the 50th wedding anniversary of friends. We calculated that we have 17 more years to go before we get to celebrate our 50th. Our friends told us happily they plan to be there. They will be close to a 100, which will be, by then, the new ‘old age.’ And so we think they will.

And now Labor Day is upon us. It is morning and everything is possible still, leaving me with so many delicious choices: knit, read, bake, a harvesting trip into the garden? We are now awash in produce and fruits, the blackberry bush heavy with juicy black fruit and the garden full of red tomatoes and greens that call out ‘harvest us please!’ It rains, making for an easier easing in and one less chore, the watering of the garden.

On our last full vacation day we visited our friends at Small Point which has the biggest sandy beach Faro has ever seen. He could dribble anywhere he wanted, including into the tiny waves that rolled for miles over just inches of depth. By the time we loaded him into the car he was covered head-to-toe with the fine grains of sand, mica and shale. It made a nice contrast with his pale skin and his blond baby hairs.

Saturday was packing up and cleaning up day. We squeezed in a last breakfast, an art show before cleaning the house and then drove back to Lobster Cove. As we entered Manchester Axel and I pretended we were going to a new B&B called Lobster Cove B&B, commenting on the cute town and all the things it had to offer and what we’d be doing in this town. When we arrived at our home we found Faro already in bed, Sita selecting a good mystery to watch and Jim off to get pizzas.

I woke up on Sunday morning with that in-the-pit-of-my-stomach-knowing that all good things must come to an end, combining the end of vacation-feeling with the end-of summer feeling that makes Labor Day weekend a little melancholic. We squeezed in a few more vacation activities. Starting with Zumi’s lattes we headed off to Todd’s Farm in Ipswich, a place where people come to buy and sell stuff, some of which I didn’t even know was worth anything. It is a place where the contents of our basement would not be out of place; we are also painfully reminded of all the stuff we threw out when Penny died, and things we are periodically throwing out when all our stuff creeps up on us.

The first buyers show up, according to Sita, at 5:30 AM. By the time we got there closer to 10 some were already packing up as dark clouds were gathering. We were much too late to chance upon the kind of treasures featured at Antiques Roadshow. I nearly managed to leave the place without buying more stuff except I couldn’t leave without getting a set of starched linen dishtowels and a trivet that we call in Dutch ‘asbestos-plaatje’ which is probably illegal these days. It was the Dutch scene that clinched the deal, a boy and girl in traditional Dutch dress, tulips, clogs and windmills. All for three dollars and 50 cents.

I had one last time with Faro on the beach while Sita and Jim took advantage of having two free and willing babysitters at home. And then they drove off to their Easthampton home, leaving us sad and teary eyed waving as the car turned the corner. I think the old set up of intergenerational living in the extended family compound had something going for it with its built-in care for the very old and the very young. We could start a compound here at Lobster Cove.

Axel and I are indeed entirely off the grid because our mobile service provider is T-Mobile. The girls have Verizon and AT&T which does cover our neighborhood, even the boat to Monhegan Island. But I don’t mind. Being off the grid makes this the vacationest vacation I have had in years. I used my son-in-law’s iPhone hotspot to cancel my three phone calls this week that are part of my coaching program, and that made the vacation complete.

I am passing my time reading, knitting, teaching my grandson as many Dutch words as he can hold and checking out interesting places. One of those was the most wonderful Maine Botanical Gardens, the tiny State of Maine aquarium that is the size of our living room, and on Wednesday it was Monhegan Island. I only know about this island because of Rockwell Kent with his hauntingly beautiful pictures of this miniature Maine in the middle of the ocean.

On the boat to Monhegan Island I recognized J, who decades ago, was a colleague of mine at MSH. We had a lot to catch up with. She’d become an emergency room physician and then decided that rehabbing houses was more what she liked to so. During the 90 minute boat ride to the island I learned more about emergency medicine than from watching ER for years.

On the island we enjoyed the views visible between fogbanks, the history of this place, carefully preserved in the small museum with photos and artifacts; followed by a cold pint of dark ale at the new Monhegan Brewery, and a crab burger. We sat at the beach, sharing a table with an artist from Gloucester with her sherpa husband (sherpa because he carries all her equipment to pictoresque places). Artists go to Monhegan to paint and I can understand why, it makes you want to paint even if you can’t.

Tessa and Steve have left, sharing half our vacation and his entire allotment of days. They camped outside while the dogs slept inside, leaving the tenters a little more space. Faro is endlessly fascinated with what he calls puppiedogs. They like him when he drops food. Now it is just the four and a quarter of us.