Sylvia's Journal

Our first day at Camelot, which is the name the Californian owners gave the small cabin, we were fogged in. I never got out of my pajamas. I knitted for hours on end, sitting in a comfy rocking chair by the hearth, unlit, listening to The Light We Cannot Seen, or may be The Red Badge of Courage. Both providing backgrounds of war and suffering that stood in sharp contrast to our vacation in the land of plenty and peace. The fog and rain were nothing to get worked up about, even if they stayed with us all week.

We had brought Heather Atwood’s new cookbook (In Cod We Trust) and experimented some interesting dishes. We slept late, went to bed late and had no exercise, other than picking blueberries which were everywhere for the taking. One day we went to Rockland to the Farnsworth Museum, admiring the art of three generations of Wyeths, but mostly Andy Wyeth’s masterful watercolors.

During one brief interlude of sun we explored the cove down the street for mussels. We found only very few. Axel discovered a few small green crabs hovering around the pockets under the seaweed where the mussels must have lived in great quantities. He was ruthless in eliminating them, as there were few left. It is not in accordance with our Quaker principles but they are the enemy, having decimated Lobster Cove’s mussel population.

We had oysters in empty Boothbay Harbor. When it was dry we walked in the other direction to Newagen, at the end of Southport island or we visited Southport’s stunning public library to check out their book sale tables or to get a brief moment of connection with the outside world through their free internet . I used it for downloading audible books and jigsaw puzzles rather than checking email. I had found myself weaned quite quickly from that habit.

We sat on the Newagen pier trying to pierce the thick fog with our eyes. Somewhere there was a famous lighthouse on a small island nearby. Occasionally tourists stopped by and asked about the lighthouse. They must have thought we were locals, and asked about the lighthouse. Axel had memorized the plaque at the entrance of the pier and pointed into the whiteness saying that is about ‘about there.’  They left, their cameras unused, shrugging their shoulders, some lighthouse. We stayed for hours. I knitted. When we left to walk home we each had a thin layer of tiny droplets  on our heads, from the soft wet wind.

We learned later that the lighthouse keeper’s cottage is for rent. For a minimum of 2 nights it costs around one thousand dollars. I can just imagine the brochure with its photos of an attractive place with 360 degree views. I hope no one was staying there that first week because the views would have been missing most of the time and the rain kept coming back.

We started our first day of vacation in Maine with rain pouring down on the thin-planked roof over our head in the simple cabin that has been our off-the-grid destination for the last 3 years.

I never got dressed. We lived on the products of our garden and the contents of our refrigerator in Manchester, all packed in a large cooler that stands outside on the wet deck.

We listened to The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, a Victorian mystery read by several great actors. I listen while knitting a complicated Aran sweater for myself, my vacation project, while Axel learns how to turn handwritten lines into typed text on is phone. We may be off the grid but we are not off our devices.

We had some ambitious plan to be all packed on Friday night and then cast off to Maine early in the morning for our first day of vacation. But then other things intervened. We had dinner Friday evening on the other side of Boston with current and ex-colleagues from long ago. We indulged in multiple trips down memory lane and lots of gossip, mostly of the benign kind. By the time we got back home packing was out of the question.

Then I learned about the appearance of no less than two ‘Strandbeests’ at Crane’s Beach, a warm up for the Peabody and Essex Museum’s upcoming feature of the Dutch creator of these wind-driven installations. Axel  learned of a childhood friend’s death and memorial service also on Saturday morning. No early cast off thus.

The Strandbeest demo on a real beach rather than on videos or in a museum seemed too good an opportunity to pass and worth postponing our departure. I was disappointed. As underwhelming as the demo (and creatures) were, the success of the PR strategy which had included traditional and social media had  overwhelmed the small roads leading to the beach. The ride from Manchester to the beach parking lot, usually a 20 minute ride, took one hour and a fifteen dollar parking fee, discounted because I am a PEM member.

Thousands of people were already on the beach and thousands more streaming in, to see the installations in motion. They were not as large as the Strandbeest I had seen in action on the long Dutch beaches on video, and their walk was limited to five meters forward and then being dragged back again from the edge of the water onto the beach – that’s how the wind was blowing. The ‘beests’ weren’t as alive and lively as the one I had seen in the videos.

Axel’s experience had been more moving than mine, celebrating a life that had braided New England and Sicilian families into a tight knit community of mourners. He came home with a deep appreciation that we all make our own lives in the company of others, rather than being individuals who happen to have had good luck or bad luck in life.

We packed till mid-afternoon and finally set off when Sita texted us with the question whether we had arrived. As it turned out, the late departure was smart. The traffic of holiday makers had eased and we were in Boothbay four hours faster than last year when we had left in the morning.

This week turned out a bit different than I had expected. I had expected to go to work but there was not much to do in Medford. Aside from the fact that I had no billing code, I already had done my required 80 hours during my Philippines assignment and so I would essentially be working unpaid overtime.

I happen to have a great friend as a supervisor and she agreed that it made no sense to drive in and out and spending my office hour on unimportant tasks and chitchat.

And so I took care of health and beauty needs such as teeth, hair, shoulder and ankle. The latter had acted up during my last few trips and the nerve damage that probably happened during surgery got worse. I decided to try acupuncture to calm the upset nerves and open the way for whatever blocked energies had accumulated.

Bill is our acupuncturist in Gloucester. He is a friend of Tessa and I trust him with my life, or any body part. Acupuncture doesn’t actually deal with body parts, unlike our health system, and this is what I like about acupuncture.

Bill observed that I was quite stressed. I tend to deny such assertions nearly as a reflex, but then he got me thinking.  It took me about 24 hours to realize how very stressed I was, and that this might have something to do with my poor sleeping pattern and how I feel after eating just about anything.

Since mid-May, or maybe I should go back to January, I have been ‘on’ without much of a break. The only breaks may have been the brief vacation with Axel in Chiang Mai and the hours I spent in forced idleness inside planes. But even that idleness wasn’t very idle, writing reports, studying assignment documents and finishing the embroidered wall hanging for Saffi. And then there was the arrival of Saffi, also not altogether stress free.  And then the complete overhaul of our organizational structure, lay-offs and funding shortfalls and my wondering where my next assignments (read: employment) will come from if not from overseas work.

If I needed to justify my high stress levels, I think I have just done so. Now the cure. I subscribe to something that can be called an ‘electronic cutting service plus.’  May Popova, who I heard interviewed on NPR some months ago, produces a wonderfully eclectic newsletter Brain Pickings.

I promptly subscribed because I liked how her brain worked. Her latest newsletter came at exactly the right time. She writes about the tyranny of work/life balance and assembled some great thinkers about leisure, then added her own wisdom, which is remarkable for a person much younger than I am. “[…] And yet the most significant human achievements between Aristotle’s time and our own – our greatest art, the most enduring ideas of philosophy, the spark for every technological breakthrough – originated in leisure, in moments of unburdened contemplation, of absolute presence with the universe within one’s own mind and absolute attentiveness to life without, be it Galileo inventing modern timekeeping after watching a pendulum swing in a cathedral or Oliver Sacks illuminating music’s incredible effects on the mind while hiking in a Norwegian fjord.” Amen to that! I am taking her collected wisdom about leisure with me off-the-grid when we go to Maine this coming Saturday.