The old year now away is fled,
The new year it is entered;
Then let us all our sins downtread,
And joyfully all appear.
Let’s be merry be this holiday
And let us run with sport and play
Hang sorrow, let’s cast care away—
God send us a merry new year!
—English, 13th century
It’s hard to believe that our baby girl turns fourteen today. The chubby-kneed toddler has evolved into a slim, graceful long-legged young lady. However, she’s still her sweet, smart, funny, and beautiful self—and Bunny still sleeps on her bed.
Eileen
On Veterans Day my son and daughter and I made a visit to my father’s gravesite, a beautiful setting in all seasons but especially poignant in fall, when we recall those who have been willing to risk their lives for something larger than themselves. Veterans Day following so close upon Halloween, we took candy corn—one of my father’s Halloween favorites, which he enjoyed every year from the bounty of his children’s trick-or-treat bags—and tucked them invisibly into the grass, an offering which perhaps only birds and beetles will appreciate, but an offering nevertheless.
This coming Sunday, October 28th, is the last day that Fletcher’s Boathouse will be open for canoe rentals. I had hoped for an end-of-season family excursion gliding up the Potomac River to gaze at autumn color, hawks and herons, and lichen-covered boulders reflected in the leaf-sprinkled water. However, it looks as if all will be rained out (or possibly snowed in) with the approach of Tropical Storm Sandy, which is already wreaking havoc further southeast. Let’s hope it’s short-lived.
Here is a poem for this bright and watery season.
Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,
the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back
from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere
except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle
of unobservable mysteries—roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This
I try to remember when time’s measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn
flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay—how everything lives, shifting
from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.
—Mary Oliver
Eugenie
Aunt Mary
It’s the weekend of our church community’s annual retreat in Orkney Springs, Virginia, and, 2012 being the 50th anniversary of Vatican II, which helped drag the Catholic Church from the Middle Ages into modern times (well, at least into the 20th century), this was a natural subject for discussion. There were reminiscences by grandparents of growing up in the “Catholic ghetto”: gloomy churches, scary sermons about sinfulness and hell, and nary a non-Catholic to be seen… gradually replaced by Mass in the vernacular, greatly expanded participation by lay people, and reaching across the aisles, so to speak, to people of other faiths. What might be accomplished in the next fifty years? I’m sure MY to-do list doesn’t match that of the current Pope.
Accommodations at the retreat vary, and families with children are generally housed together, but rarely in Maryland House, pictured below. I learned this weekend that it’s an Adults-Only House, to which parents graduate when their children go off to college. Aha! That explains the singing, the clinking of glasses, and the boisterous laughter drifting across the lawn after the rest of us have put the kids to bed and crashed ourselves. And I thought it was coming from the Teen Camp.
Emma
Megan
Exploring Seattle.
Our room at the Seattle B&B. Over many years of traveling I’ve developed a habit of sketching a rather skewed bird’s eye view of rooms where we stay. I apologize for the upside-down-ness, which is easier to view in a sketchbook than on screen. But maybe you have an iPad…
Trish & Jason
Coincidentally, this is also the day that Julia Archibold Holmes became the first woman to reach the top of Pikes Peak, in 1858. But Pike Street in Seattle is named for ditch-digger Harvey Pike, not explorer Zebulon. For a sketch and a story, please see Mountain Woman.
By sheer chance I stumbled across this B&B in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, a lovely old house run by two friendly, welcoming, and helpful women who, when they weren’t making delicious breakfasts or tracking down useful information for guests, were cleaning and vacuuming like crazy. I love B&Bs because (among other reasons) there are always interesting people to meet and talk with at the communal breakfast table.
