Sylvia's Journal

After a week of rain and overcast skies the weekend was glorious. We had friends over on their way down from Castine (Maine) to their home on Long Island and took a break from the horrendous vacation traffic up and down the Maine coast.

When we have visitors in the summer we enjoy our beach and waterfront more than when we are alone because there are always so many chores to do. We like having people over and enjoy our place. What we take for granted becomes very special when visitors come and stare in disbelief at our earthly paradise.

Early in the morning I facetimed with Faro to see him ride on his walking bike – in two months he has grown enough that he can now reach the ground with both feet. After that I facetimed my brother who has finally moved in with his love in a lovely house after waiting patiently for their respective children to leave the parental home and selling their two houses. He gave me a facetime tour of the house and it felt as if I was walking through it with him. How wonderful we can do this now so easily.

The son of my friend Lydia showed up with his family (to enjoy the beach) and a friend (to go spear fishing). They wriggled into their wetsuits and then departed with the red and white diving flag floating in tow to keep them out of harm’s (i.e motor and speedboats) way.

They swam all the way from Lobster Cove to Singing Beach, spearing a view tautogs and cunners (bottom dwelling fish I had never heard of) and flounder along the way. They like these fish because they hang out on the bottom and are, I was told, more easily speared than the fast moving fish at the surface. They also make for good dinners. But it does require you hold your breath, that is part of the sport and the challenge. They returned hours later with their catch and filleted it on the beach, leaving us with some of the fish by way of thanks.

While they were hunting, we did the same in a more relaxed manner looking for oysters. Mother nature has deemed it necessary to compensate for the loss of our mussels after she realized that the green crabs, as ingredients for crab bisque, wasn’t appreciated as much. Turning crabs into bisque requires much effort and wading into the cove to empty the trap twice a day. It has been sitting on the floor of the cove for weeks now, serving more as a playground for crabs than a trap. They have figured out how to go in and out with ease.

Axel snorkeled in the emptying cove to places I pointed out from my kayak. The water was very clear and I could see the oysters clearly. We had seen some shells on the beach lately which gave us the idea of taking a closer look. We harvested about 10.

Still, we haven’t given up on our mussels. We transplanted more mussels from Ipswich Bay and expanded the colonies of last years’ transplants. They seemed to have fared well except that the baby mussels keep getting eaten by something, green crabs or, what we learned yesterday, maybe the tautogs and cunners which have sharp teeth and can easily pierce the brittle shells.

Good news awaited us inside as email and phone messages alerted us to progress in Faro’s potty training and Tessa and Steve house buying saga. The poops are landing in the toilet and Tessa and Steve will become homeowners on August 28, becoming residents of New Hampshire, the state where people want to live free or die.

Axel is now 68 and one week. I used to think that 68 was ancient but now of course I think it is young. However, I am acutely aware that my father died when he was 69 and my mother became a widow at the age of 67. Now that we have arrived in that neighborhood it seems unthinkable that suddenly there would be The End.

When we are with others in our age cohort we cannot help talk about this or that ailment. We have become our parents, something we didn’t want, and laughed at, way back. But now of course we understand. Health is the most precious thing we have, to do what we most want to do. Maybe this is why youth is associated with impatience and old age with patience. We have to accept and do things slower than we used to do them. Except my older brother who seems to be in a reverse trend and at age 67 bikes from Holland to Finisterre in Basque land and then does some more with his son(s) to other destinations in Europe that take them out of the flatlands. I am impressed and humbled.

We celebrated Axel’s birthday last week for two days, the second at a Castle Hill picnic enlivened by a salsa band. We danced and ate and met friends. Then Tessa presented a birthday cake fit for a king or queen. She had made it with unmentionable amounts of butter and sugar. I knew that but Axel did not. He surely would have received some demerits from Weightwatchers if they had found out. I was told that when you know the ingredients of something it affects how you digest it. Empirical evidence showed this to be true – I felt like I had a brick in my stomach while Axel felt just fine – we had consumed the same amount.

It seems silly to take a break from Lobster Cove during the height of its best season; to leave on a Friday afternoon with everyone else from Boston, on a sunny day while moving towards rain and dark skies; to sit in traffic and do a one hour trip in 2 hours. But we did it for a reunion of former colleagues who I have known since 1983.

We used AirBnB to find a room during the Beacon to Beach race and Maine’s busiest time, when all other places were either full or very expensive. To our big surprise we found a room for a very reasonable price and a delightful hostess.

After a fabulous dinner, the first one is to re-acquaint and get updates, we are getting ready for the second which is when we can all pretend to be 30 years younger and hold our rowdy/raucous annual general meeting and decide where we will meet next year and call members of the group who can’t be with us, even if the time zones don’t match and people get woken up. It’s punishment for not being present. Another punishment for not being present is being the object of gossip.

Saturday everyone roams around freely until it is dinner time again. We went with Alison to the Shabbat Day Shaker village where the last 3 shakers in the world live. Some of our misinformed stereotypes about he Shakers were corrected. We got to see several of the hundreds of patented inventions (the circular saw, the flat crib brush, permanent press fabrics) that came from this industrious, god fearing, egalitarian and very entrepreneurial community that is now on the brink of extinction.

They are still recruiting and it occurred to me that they offer an interesting alternative to our hectic life. They are living in the world, so it would not be a retreat. Like the Buddhist monks we saw in Sikkim, there is internet, they do online sales of their branded products and you can communicate by text. The only thing that may give some people pause is the ban on the intermingling of the sexes and their very deep faith. But maybe that is exactly what would be attractive to some. axel, who we nearly lost to the singing monks in Vezelay (France) more than a decade ago, was not interested.

We had Sita and family over for a few days. She and her friends are preparing a memorial of their friend Shelby next week that includes an extensive show of her artwork.

We benefitted from having Faro over to watch up close his amazing development, especially his linguistic progress. Faro, in his turn, benefits from being at a house that has its own beach and a shallow, self- cleaning, pool – no matter what the tide is – with all sorts of interesting stones and critters.

It was a beautiful day on Saturday. We went to Rockport for its charming Farmers’ Market and got a good supply of maple syrup and pickles; the latter from a company in Salem that makes the best pickles (Maitland), in a spicy and medium spicy version. The juice is a key ingredient for a wicked good dirty martini.

We had our picture taken at Sweet Remembrances, a dress up portrait studio where Sita worked during a summer some 15 years ago. You can pick a style and then the props to match (or not) your theme. We had done this in the past, using clothes from the roaring twenties. Since the choice of clothes for a 2 year old was a little limited we agreed on a mixed Pilgrim/Native American theme. It was quite a production and Faro managed remarkably well, primarily because he had free access to lots of interesting props to play with while we dressed.

In the afternoon we checked the lobster traps and pulled in two lobsters. The crab trap was empty. The crabs have figured out how to escape if we give them enough time. We were told to check them twice a day but we don’t. The carcass of the 40 pound striper caught during Tessa’s party, was eaten clean. The full-bellied crabs were grazing somewhere else in Lobster Cove. Only a handful of tiny hermit crabs remained in the trap. We are actually not that motivated to catch them because the preparation of the crab bisque is a little cumbersome. We should be more diligent as they continue to eat the baby mussel population, offspring of the mussels we transplanted from Ipswich Bay.

Tessa, Steve, his sister and boyfriend and the dogs joined us on Sunday for a glorious morning on the beach. When it started to rain everyone left and we withdrew into the New York Times Sunday edition and the New Yorker for some quiet time after the invasion.

You may not believe in Mercury retrograde, but three plane crashes in one week, two of them from cities I frequent (Amsterdam and Ouagadougou)? Although they have nothing in common with each other (seems two were weather related), I do fly through some bad weather occasionally and the Sahara is famous for its unstable air.

People who do believe in this phenomenon point out that it is about magnetic fields. I know, from putting my hotel key card next to my cellphone in my pocket or purse, that magnetic interference disables the card, requiring a trip back to the reception to reset the card. So why would this not happen on a grander scale. Has my internet connection been off a bit these last few weeks?

I am recovering from my pneumonia in fits and starts; it is definitely not a straight line up. Still, like the rates of stocks seen as a graph over time, the trend is overall upward.

I have started to do some work, adding about an hour every day; one a program that is part of a local foundation’s interest in advancing leadership skills for women in Japan – the brainchild of a former MSH executive (and my boss) who passed away unfortunately. But in this initiative her influence continues. I was asked to be part of this because of my work in Japan. It’s exactly the kind o work I love.

I was supposed to have been furiously writing this week about our work with ministries of health around the world on such things as good governance, leadership and management. A series of meetings took place which I missed, making the writing task a little harder as I am missing a lot of context. All this is now postponed till next week. I may do the writing from home where distractions are less than when I am in my cubicle in our ‘office garden’ in Medford.
All

I have been convalescing at Lobster Cove since Sunday afternoon. Axel fed me the healthy diet the doctor prescribed: sun, fresh fruits and vegetables. He didn’t prescribe the lobster that Axel had caught on Sunday morning but we had them anyways. Axel has been catching a lot of lobsters lately and so we eat a lot of lobster.

For the fresh vegetables and fruits, the garden is providing us in abundance: lettuce, kale, bok choy, raspberries, and herbs. The blueberries and tomatoes we get from the farm stand as our own crop is not yet ready for harvest.

Today is a day of mourning in Holland as most of the bodies are transported to the town of Hilversum where the identification will take place. In that town two entire families got wiped out. When 200 people fall out of the sky, for a small country like Holland, it affects just about everybody. I followed the Dutch news and saw the memorial at Schiphol. One of the messages read ‘klootzakken’ which literally means the plural of scrotum; a name you give to people you are very angry with.

And then I read this morning about the coup in the DRC with attacks on the airport in Kinshasa, and other strategic points. The attacks came out of left field and took everyone by surprise. One of my colleagues is stuck in a guesthouse. She has a one year old and a husband who are no doubt anxious to see her home. Scary, and a reminder that things are a bit topsy-turvy in the world at the moment.

This reminds me of the day of our plane crash, now exactly 7 years ago. We were told that these kinds of accidents and untoward events happened because of Mercury Retrograde. This is what I know about Mercury Retrograde: Sometimes the other planets appear to be traveling backward through the zodiac; this is an illusion. We call this illusion retrograde motion. Mercury’s retrograde periods can cause our plans to go awry. However, this is an excellent time to reflect on the past. Intuition is high during these periods, and coincidences can be extraordinary. When Mercury is retrograde, remain flexible, allow time for extra travel, and avoid signing contracts. Review projects and plans at these times, but wait until Mercury is direct again to make any final decisions.

So I continue to stay at home and lay low, avoid travel altogether and don’t sign any contracts.