Sylvia's Journal

The partnership, first called 4337P and then 8369A, has been dissolved. It had been an eventful and rather expensive partnership with one nearly fatal accident (the end of 4337P) and a deer strike (the end of 8396A). I met yesterday for the last time with my three plane partners and we divided the insurance money – not enough to buy another plane. My share was even smaller than the rest because I owed quite a bit of money on the expensive Garmin GPS that we put into the plane and that I could not afford to pay at the time. It was, in hindsight, an example of bad financial decision making that cost me dearly.

Bill generously lets me hitch rides on his plane until I have saved up enough to buy a share again. Yesterday we went for a long flight. It was the first time in nearly 2 months that I took the controls. I piloted us out to Ticonderoga, a tiny airstrip nestled at the top of Lake George in Upstate New York. The route took us over a winter wonderland with close ups of a few of Vermont’s ski area. We could see the skiers not far below us.

Bill monitored local weather reports as I flew south over Lake George to Glenn Falls airport for a stop and lunch. Fearing that we might not get out of the airport and fly back east over the mountains while staying below the clouds we made the decision to forget about Glenn Falls and fly back to Rutland where I did my first landing in 2 months. I gratefully accepted Bill’s coaching, which I needed. Bill flew back so we both got to log a few hours.

Back home we found Sita and Jim who had joined Tessa and Steve for a walk at the beach with Chicha. Sita and I finally played our ukuleles together and I had a teacher. I had already gotten into some bad habits that needed correction. I marveled at Sita’s musical skills.

She also gave us a blow-by-blow account of her Davos experience and illustrated this with pictures of herself with various luminaries. She is now ‘into economics,’ she told us, and reads the Financial Times with interest. She received a dose of reality in Switzerland and with it little reassurance that the cast of characters on our world’s stage know what they are doing. She and her scribing buddies are kicking into action to contribute their own rather unique set of skills to bringing people together and have them talk about how we/they can learn ourselves out of our current mess.

While the men in the household were doing whatever it is they were doing, we girls had a beauty treatment with chocolate masks. We decided that Sita looked the scariest and Tessa, as one would expect, very professional and beautiful even with gunk on her face. After the treatment we all had soft baby skin faces.

We had not known about everyone coming home and had accepted a dinner invitation in Ipswich, and so we missed the spontaneous steak au poivre dinner that Jim cooked with such intensity that the whole house participated in the experience and the vent hood nearly caught fire during the ‘light the brandy’ part of the recipe. The result, which he had seen on a TV cooking show, turned out perfect and we were sorry to leave the four kids around the table at their gourmet meal.

We had our own gourmet dinner that our friends Carol and Ken had prepared with Louisiana rather than Indonesian shrimp. Over dinner we reviewed all the things of importance and interest with our hosts and fellow invitees Edith and Hugh until I practically fell of my chair from sleep. I think I am now back on Eastern US time, having slept till 6:30 AM.

Yesterday I was carried by wings, then music and finally by Morpheus. First there was the flying. Weather along our planned route to the south included northern winds gusting from 14 to 28 knots. This is not a huge problem – just hard work – except when the runways are at right angles to the wind and short. This is the case in East Hampton and on Block Island. For a brief moment we contemplated going west to Ticonderoga and fly the length of Lake George. Finally we decided to stick to the initial plan and postpone our decisions to land or not once we were in the vicinity of the airport. We had enough fuel to return without landing.

I took the controls on the way out and Bill was the return pilot. It was a crisp, cold and clear day and you could see for miles. We flew west around Boston and then southwest to Groton and from there crossed the waters to Long Island. On our right was Plum Island which Bill told me we would not want to land, even if we had to. Their website explains why: “We’re proud of our role as America’s first line of defense against foreign animal diseases. We’re equally proud of our safety record. Not once in our nearly 50 years of operation has an animal pathogen escaped from the island.” After reading more I agree with him that a landing in the water would be better. It is the stuff of horror movies.

The airport in East Hampton was deserted except for one jet and a bunch of prop planes. In the summer it gets as busy as Nantucket with jets flying their owners to their summer homes, which we could see from the air with their pools and tennis courts covered for the winter. It is not a place I would want to fly to then. How the jets land on the short runways is a mystery to me. Inside, the tiny terminal looked like an ad from a Better Living magazine, everything painted white, patio furniture, a large flat screen TV with its own channel showing ads for luxury goods; only the fireplace was missing. We paid our fees (it is rare to have to pay fees on small airports like that in the winter), used the facilities, planned our return and headed out again.

On the way back I was a tourist, occasionally doing radio work but mostly taking pictures. We tried to fly straight north to Beverly, requesting permission to fly over Logan but that was denied. Bill has done it once and was anxious to show me, but most of the time air traffic control prefers to have us little guys out of their hair; we are too slow and fly too low. And so we returned west around Boston which allowed for some glorious views east and north, after a brief stop in Taunton.

Seeing the parking lots of the various shopping centers around Boston from the air makes it hard to believe we are in a recession. I think Christmas Shopping has nothing to do with reality and is simply a reflex that has been bred into our genes. And so, even though the North Shore Mall’s parking lot looked entirely full from the air, I could not help myself and went to buy something which took me as long as flying to another state.

Back home I prepared enough of my favorite Dutch winter meal (Boerenkool met worst) for the entire week my. We had an early meal so we could listen to the North Shore Chorus’ annual Christmas concert in Ipswich. It included among others J.S. Bach’s Magnificat in D which is Mary’s prayer – after she learned she was going to have a child that was a little different from others – set to music. It was indeed magnificent. Other pieces were sung by the (rather professional) children’s chorus and made me cry. Some of the tears were from yawning; it was long after my jet lag bedtime and luckily it was a short concert. I was driven home in a semi sleep state and was whisked away on my final journey of the day by Morpheus the moment I put my head on the pillow.

I woke up to a glorious view of the cove, framed by brilliant fall colors. I rushed out and took a picture, trying to capture what I know is fleeting, but will also come back in a year.

I now know which of our systems are attached to the great atomic Mother Clock (DVD, coffee maker, alarm) and which are not (radio, microwave, stove, cars, watch) because Daylight Savings Time ended and time changed back to normal. My internal clock was not fooled and thus, when I woke up, it was 5:30 instead of 6:30. For about an entire day we will all be saying, well, it really is [an hour later] and then we move on.

Yesterday was for flying, mostly. Bill and I had planned a trip to Martha’s Vinyeard and Nuha, having missed our last trip, would board an 8:30 train from North Station and be picked up by me in Beverly at 9:03 sharp to join us. But then she called that the train had pulled out of the station in front of her eyes. Rather than declaring defeat she took a taxi to Beverly which ended up making her trip to Katama cost about as much as a commercial flight might have been. After many cell phone exchanges between Nuha, her driver, myself and the flight center she finally made it. At 10:00 it was wheels up for Katama.

It was a glorious fall day, though hazy if you looked ahead. The picture shows Boston in the distance, over our left wing. Down below us everything was clear and crisp: the maize maze at Connors farm just north of Beverly airport, the rusty fall foliage, the grey spots where the leaves had been blown off, the green of the pines, the ink black ponds and the slate-colored ocean, all this against a deep blue sky.

Bill flew out and I flew back. We flew around Boston rather than down from Cape Ann. Flying for 40 minutes over the ocean is not interesting and generally not a good idea in the winter. We flew via Bedford airport , Mansfield, and New Bedford, over the Elizabeth Islands (Naushon, Cuttyhunk), which lay forlornly in the slate-grey sea. From there it was a small hop, right through MVY’s airspace, to Katama, a small grass field airport that is a favorite spot for a beach fly-in but now lay deserted and empty.

We circled over the airfield a few times to see the lay of the land and set up for a good landing. This gave us a good view of the breach that was created by a winter storm in 2007 and that made neighboring Chappaquiddick an island. It also gave us a good view of the multi-billion dollar homes that are scattered across the costly land and that look so very vulnerable from the sky.

I took Nuha home and we had lunch outdoors and did some photo shoots because all these memories have to be captured for later, when Nuha is back in Riyadh. All the while we talked about culture, relationships, marriage and love – what else is there to talk about? It is sad to see how we self impose rules on life’s most important bonds that set them up for failure, rather than success; and worse, that women themselves are sometimes the worst perpetrators.

I drove Nuha back to Cambridge because there are only a few trains to Boston on the weekend, and so we had a chance to continue to talk and hatch some plans about how Nuha might spend her travel money that comes with her scholarship.

By the time I came back home Axel had returned from his all day Community Preservation Act (CPA) conference in Middleton and Tessa and Steve were cooking dinner.  

Bill and I flew to Lebanon in a straight line from Beverly, which took us over Lawrence, Manchester, past Concord and over Lake Sunapee. As predicted by the briefer all the clouds had moved away eastwards over the Atlantic. I flew the outbound leg at 4500 feet according to visual flight rules (VFR). The air was calm and we had the best seat in the house to see the fall foliage shift from mostly green to mostly yellow, orange and brown.

We circled over the small airfield and then came in from the West, flying very low over the colorful woods. The terminal building is small and feels like a ski lodge, with a large fieldstone fireplace dominating the arrival hall. A fire was smoldering and the coffee was ready. We arrived just ahead of an executive jet that disgorged somber looking men with briefcases. I imagined they were going to discuss how to weather the financial crisis and avoid losing their jet, somewhere nearby in their golf course condo.

Bill flew back and I was passenger, occasionally punching in radio frequencies and checking our position using VORs. He had to work much harder to keep the plane level and hold our altitude because the wind had increased and was gusting from 6 to 12 knots. I had forgotten my camera and regretted it; the colorful quilt below us was magnificent. By the time we landed in Beverly the clouds were back and dotted the sky. We had managed to fly during the cloudless portion of the day.

Back home, with forecasts of temperatures dropping close to freezing, there was no more delaying bringing the plants in. The most successful plants in our household have gotten quite heavy and sit in large clay pots that are hard to carry. Two of those plants have been with us for 26 years, frequently pruned back, survivors from that first batch of plants that I bought when we settled in our first apartment in Brooklyn in 1982. The hibiscus is 40 years old and was brought into our household by Axel. It used to live in the Magnuson greenhouse during the winter, receiving expert care from his father and uncle Phil, all long gone, including Axel Magnuson Florists. Axel was not available for help as he was installing a new dishwasher next door with Ted. By installing the machine themselves they were saving money, but not time. Twenty-four hours later it is still not installed (but close they say).

I finished my fifth batch of mustard and started the sixth, not knowing what the rest of the fall will bring in terms of travel. It is beginning to look like the trip to Tanzania will not be happening, and others, planned later may happen earlier than expected.

In the later afternoon we went to a picturesque farm in Essex where friends of us live who got married a week ago. The view from the road is spectacular with the farm nestled in rolling hills, made up of a series of yellow clapboard buildings, a greenhouse against a background of colorful foliage with a pond and tiny matching clapboard duck house in the front. The view from the barn, where we celebrated the marriage with tons of people we did not know, was just as beautiful. The bride is French, so it was no surprise that several languages were spoken. I met a Moroccan woman who is married to someone whose Dutch forefathers settled in New Amsterdam but who had lost their mother tongue over the generations. I also met a young woman from Brazil who lives in Manchester and cleans houses while she learns English. It gave me an idea.

I was finally able to compare scars with Andrew who had his wrist slit a week before me by the same doctor for the same condition. He is one week ahead in the healing and warned me that eventually the numbness of the area around the scar will wear off and start to hurt. That happened last night – lifting the heavy pots probably did not help.

We stayed up late to watch Sarah Palin on SNL play herself. We were a bit disappointed although the scenes created around her were funny. They were also of the in-your-face variety, which Sarah took in gracefully. I imagined that she was fuming inside, I would have. We did not quite get the point of having her there and wondered whether she had played along or not. We also wished we had been a fly on the wall in the McCain camp discussing this as an opportunity and whether it was seen as a defensive move or just the opposite. The campaign is heating up and people do desperate things to get the vote.

I am now friends with Julian on Facebook. Julian is the son of friends, a teenager who is still willing to accompany his parents to dinner. He came along because he thinks Axel is cool. Axel has that attraction of coolness among kids that age and we consider it the utmost compliment. Julian also likes our cluttered house, the fact that we make our own mustard and the tiny silver demitasse spoons that are perfect for eating whipped cream out of small cups, a delight I share with him. And best of all he likes that I have flight simulator. It wasn’t installed yet on my computer and that took about 30 minutes away from his flying time. He never quite finished his flight, but unlike mine, his ended in a perfect landing; maybe because flight instructor Rod took over. His parents now know what he wants for Christmas. He also wants to fly for real with me but that is a decision that requires some talking at home.

I was no help with dinner preparations for our guests because of too many deadlines and complicated tasks. I stayed glued to my computer all day, except for a short walk with Tessa and the puppy that was held on a short leash and trained to heel with the help of many treats. “It’s all about the treats,” our friend Joe claims, when discussing organizational change and we concluded that people are not all that different from puppies.

Axel was in charge of dinner and preparations started long before my workday was done with wonderful smells coming from the kitchen. It was our first fall/harvest meal: roast pork, roasted potatoes, applesauce and mashed squash with apple pie for desert. The apples came from our neighbor’s apple orchard; they don’t look as nice as the apples from the store but they taste so much better and there is an enormous supply left hanging in the trees.

Just before the guests arrived I planned my flight to Lebanon in New Hampshire. Nuha had wanted to come along but this morning I found a message from her, written during a sleepless night, that she may not be able to join us on our trip.

It is time to do the final planning for our trip and get weather and TFRs (temporary flight restrictions). Large dark clouds are passing by my window; luckily they are drifting towards the Atlantic. According to Martin Lockheed’s flight briefer all will be well along the route and it will be a nice but cool day for flying. Planes perform better on cool days.

We went flying, finally. It was a plan that hatched in my BU class in July where Nuha was a student. When she first told me she wanted to jump out of a plane, I told her that when I am up in the air I keep the door tightly shut and she would not be able to jump, but that I’d take her up. Nuha was not fazed by the fact that I had crashed a plane 16 months ago.

I picked her up at the Manchester train station in the early afternoon, just when the cloud cover began to thin out. We walked back to our house, admiring the trees, blazing in their oranges, yellows and greens along the way. It is nice to experience the New England fall with someone who comes from the desert. Our neighbors have an apple orchard that borders our driveway. I took Nuha there to pick an apple, straight from the tree, and then we ate it, another miracle.

At Beverly Airport I showed her my own damaged plane, waiting forlornly in a corner of the airport for the adjusters’ reports to come in. We got to fly in 3152K, one of the newer airplanes, which is much less noisy than mine. We first flew to Manchester and circled above the house where Axel was trying to attract our attention with a mirror. Everything looks so much different from above. Nuha had asked me why I wanted to go up and fly each week. I told her to wait and see and that she would understand once we were up in the sky; and she did. After we landed she did not need to ask the question again.

We flew over Plum Island and admired the pattern of the Ipswich wetlands with its meandering creeks that drain the land at low tide. We circled over the Topsfield Fair, still crowded on its last day, and then back via Essex to Beverly for a perfect landing.

Back home the clouds had cleared entirely and we had tea and a late lunch on the beach. We picked more apples and Nuha took the camera trying to capture all the amazing vistas and colors, to take back home with her when she leaves for Saudi Arabia in January.

We cooked a Bangla dinner together and Nuha got to cut the chard straight out of the garden and prepare the homegrown potatoes. It was a delightful dinner preparation for me as everything was new and out-of-the-ordinary, nothing taken for granted (“what, you are getting the lettuce for my sandwich from the garden? Can I come?”).

After dinner I drove Nuha back to Cambridge and we talked about how unsettling it can be to find yourself in a current that takes you away from the familiar lands into a vast body of water with no land in sight for a long time to come. I had bought the book The Peabody Sisters for Nuha some time ago, a challenge and a half to read with its 500 or so pages. But I thought it would interest her to read the story of a woman who, at exactly her age, 100 years ago and growing up in a place that has some characteristics of Nuha’s current hometown, managed nevertheless to put her stamp on a field that is close to Nuha’s heart, education, especially for girls.

Still in the plane I immediately called Axel after I landed; I knew he had mixed feelings about this trip, actually no different than mine. It was nice to tell him I had succeeded and that my confidence was, once again, one notch up from what it was before I set out on my own. He was having a late fried clam lunch at Woodman’s in Essex, something he craves a few times a year, an indulgence I don’t care that much about. He took his cousins Ben, 88, and his son Clark who had flown in from Florida for the family reunion. They had the same kind of craving.

When I came home I prepared a mega version of my Manhattan (Kansas) potato salad from a recipe that I learned from our friend Pam who hails from Manhattan, while we both lived in Dakar. It is a recipe that dates from the time when sugar, eggs and butter were considered good for you and so I rarely disclose the ingredients list (it has all of these in large quantities – ask me if you really want to know). I still have the 28 year old yellowed and by now brittle piece of paper with her handwritten instructions tucked in the front of my Joy of Cooking cookbook. I have created a reputation for the best potato salad; Axel’s bragging landed me the job of making such a salad for some 45 people for tomorrow.

Tessa and Steve and several friends congregated at our house on their way to a wedding of one of their own, one of the first I believe for her cohort. I never see these kids dressed up and it was quite a sight to see them in their Sunday best; except Steve who simply chose a tuxedo tee-shirt – this in sharp contrast to Tessa who loves to dress up. She had traded in yesterday’s shoe selection for another pair, with a wedge that was even higher, lifting her up to the length of a basket ball player.

When everyone was gone Axel and I donned our swim suits and sat by the high tide’s water’s edge, enjoying the view and the quite time, appreciating our luck to be living in the most beautiful place in the world, with the emphasis on ‘living.’

 

 

On a clear day like today, If you don’t wake up early you miss it: the cove bathed in pink light, backlit by the sun rays that bounce of the houses and windows across from us. They turn the cove into a magic place, where you would expect a coming and going of small dragons with gauzy wings. If the tide is very low, as it was this morning, you can still see the remnants of the old Indian fishing pier, where the forerunner of Masconomo Street ran straight into the Bay.  And then humans with dogs show up, the light changes and everything becomes normal again.  If the weather holds I will get to see this a lot during my vacation.

 

Yesterday was another weird weather day that nearly messed up our flying plans. Despite the considerable and low cloud cover we managed to fly all around Boston and back, though not to Martha’s Vineyard as we had hoped. We hang around the flight center with lots of other pilots or would-be pilots, hitting the breeze for about an hour before the clouds were high enough for us to venture out, through and over them. The tops and the bottoms of the clouds were lower than last week. We did not need to go as high up to stay above them but I still got unnerved by a wall of white fluffiness moving fast in our direction. Once again I handed the controls to Bill.  I watched in awe (and a bit nervously) as he turned and ducked to stay clear and legal. If you are with someone who knows how to fly in these situations it’s more exciting than a Disney ride and you don’t have to go to Florida.

 

We made it as far as New Bedford and gave up on our plan to continue to Martha’s Vineyard; flying with low clouds over open waters is not a good idea. We landed, got out for a drink of water and watched the clouds intently. On the way back we stayed below them, trying to keep our assigned altitude while gauging how much room we had to maneuver. I am having my share of new experiences in these intense cloud-filled cross county rides, each time getting a few notches closer to taking the plane out on my own for a cross county.  I landed and taxied back to the flight center with great satisfaction but also exhausted.

 

The electrical storm that rushed in a few hours later is one reason why I would not attempt any trip that is very long or goes very far. I was glad to be safely on the ground.

 

I started my on-the-ground vacation with more sewing projects, a perfect activity during a rainstorm, working my way down the half-finished project pile and enjoying the anticipation of new ones. But those will have to wait until Wednesday next week as we are off to Maine today for three days with Katie Blair at Small Point. We have decided not to bring the kayaks, only water colors, books and good walking shoes that can handle any weather.

 

We will be staying at a small cottage named Isaiah’s Head. Its phone can only receive calls and cell phones don’t work out there. We will find out how addicted (or not) we are to our computers and the internet. One consequence is that the blogging will happen off line, or not at all, and nothing is likely to be posted until late Wednesday night or Thursday morning. I have never missed three days in a row. This is my one regret of being out of touch.