Asakiyume mita

Waking up this morning was like waking up in the Amazon, and I AM HERE FOR THIS. Out my back window, a northeastern jungle, so many shades of green, dappled sun, morning mist. An aural bouquet of birdsong and small critter sounds. Right now there's a scent of wood smoke.

I love the way the medium of humid air makes you intimate with every other thing. The way everything is right on your skin and in your lungs. The glass of water sweats, you sweat. Time dissolves, sound travels nonlinearly, odors are more vivid. I love the lassitude, the exhaustion.

Yesterday mallorys_camera and I went for a walk in a location more or less equidistant between the two of us (more or less... it was closer to me, though). After a couple of false starts that included infiltrating the high school bathrooms during a soccer tournament (we blended right in: "How's Dustin enjoying soccer, Sandy?" she asked me. "Oh, he's loving it, Lisa. He'll be playing for Real Madrid one day, you just wait"), we found ourselves at the entrance to the Housatonic Flats Reserve.

The gate was shut but the fairies had left a garland--our invitation.



The area used to be a dumping grounds, but people cleaned it up, and in the last days of September, it has an ethereal beauty.



Here, old man's beard climbs skyward.



Sadly, the Housatonic River was poisoned for decades by General Electric, which dumped PCBs into it. North of this site, in the city of Pittsfield, remediation has been undertaken, but not yet for the town of Great Barrington, where this reserve is, though any day now... As a consequence, there is this sobering warning as you begin your walk:



"No coma" is Spanish: Don't Eat. But at first I saw it as English and was very confused. No coma? Sounds good to me! I don't want or intend to fall into a coma!

I am happy to report that we ate no frogs, fish, or turtles and fell into no comas. There was a tasty green feral apple, however.

One day last summer, I attempted to bring an injured catbird to a wildlife rehabilitation center. Sadly, the bird died in transit, but on the way, I discovered the existence of the Willard House and Clock Museum.



The plaque outside the house contains this thought-provoking statement:

"The realization that time could be spent rather than passed marks a profound change in the way Americans think--and work."

How magical: a whole museum of clocks! I resolved to go as soon as conditions permitted it.

This week they permitted it, and Wakanomori and I went. Our docent, Sarah Mullen, was a fountain of knowledge--literally any question we asked her, she had information on. Including how the original Willards got their land: Apparently the son of an important Nipmuc man wanted his son to have a European education and sent him to school in the Boston area. When the term ended, the school asked for six pieces of silver, and when the boy couldn't pay, the school extracted 300 acres of land from the father. Some of that land was then sold to the grandfather Willard, whose four grandsons (Benjamin, Simon, Ephraim, and Aaron) became the clockmaking Willards. Ah, the colonists. Covering themselves in glory, as usual.

(Interestingly, Grafton, MA, where the Willard House and Clock Museum is located, has land that has remained continuously in the hands of the Nipmuc people.)

The clocks though! Benjamin, the oldest brother, was the least skilled clockmaker, and he limited himself standing clocks. These are less difficult to make because there's more space for all the moving parts.

The face of a Benjamin Willard clock


Cool clockmaking fact: all the gears 'n' stuff inside the clock are called "the movement." The person who makes "the movement" is different from the person who makes the case, who's different from the person who provides the ornamentation and so on. The clockmaker makes the movement, sometimes out of wood, sometimes out of brass (maybe other metals too, but Sarah only mentioned brass).

Simon was the clever brother. He patented a method of fitting all the movement of a standing clock into a clock that could hang on a wall ("It looks like a banjo," Sarah said). He got a patent for this, and these clocks go by the name of "patent timepiece".

Simon Willard's patent timepiece


I asked why they were called "timepieces," and Sarah told me that technically a thing is only a clock if it chimes the hours! And in fact, something can lack a face and numbers, but if it chimes the hours, it's a clock--but if it doesn't chime the hours, it's a timepiece.

Most wall clocks--er, timepieces--had to be wound once a day, whereas the standing clocks only needed to be wound once a week. Here's Sarah setting the time on one.



Aaron Willard made some of the clocks I thought were prettiest. The thing that looks like a smiling peach is not the sun but the moon. The continents rotate up to cover various parts of its face in alignment with the phases of the moon:



Loved the 18th-cent. nomenclature for the places--Barbary, Tartary, and the Great Sea:





( more pictures )

And the house itself was fascinating--a table laid with heavy pewter cutlery; a desk with reading glasses and a tiny book of psalms, a device for rotating a joint as it hangs over the fire, so it will be evenly cooked, a bread oven beside the main fire ... It was a great way to spend an afternoon.

I have always wanted to walk through a corn maze, and yesterday Wakanomori and I did! We visited Mike's Maze in Sunderland, MA, which every year has a maze that, when seen from the sky, is a picture or a message. (Here you can see pictures of previous years' mazes.)

This year, the maze is a giant exhortation to VOTE! You can see the design on the front of the kiosk. I also like the corn T-shirt the employee is wearing. She gave us a map--imagine giving Theseus a map!--and also a little pack of marbles, because inside the maze we would encounter opportunities to vote on various questions, and we'd use the marbles for that purpose. There were also periodic starred history points that shared history of advances and setbacks in the franchise.



( many, many photos below )

Because we were late finishing, we didn't get to try out the potato cannons, which apparently fired at voting-related targets:



We did, however, get a free mini-pumpkin, such as these two patrons are modeling as headgear:



It was a lovely afternoon.

I don't remember whether I've talked about Beautiful Day here before--it's a Rhode Island nonprofit that helps refugees gain job skills through working making granola. Granola, you may ask? Yes, granola. But now they have a youth refugee program:

"Trainees attend weekly classes where they learn the ins and outs of succeeding on a job. This is not as easy as it may seem. The American work world is complicated, even for those who were born here. It's not always easy to know how to respond to a demanding boss or a troublesome colleague. What do you do if you have to miss a day? What is the appropriate way to dress? Is it ok to ask questions or to admit you don't understand? How do you make friends, respond politely, ask for a raise? These are challenging questions and if you have spent most of your life in a refugee camp and are not familiar with American work culture, they are even harder."

Here's their first graduating class


The young people come from Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Congo, and Malawi.

And here's their instructor, Maliss Men-Coletta, a former refugee herself:

"Maliss is a former refugee herself, coming to America as a child from a refugee camp in Thailand after her family fled Cambodia to escape the genocide that resulted in the deaths of 25% of the population. Maliss can relate to what these young people have been through. This is one thing that makes her such an extraordinary teacher. The other is her extensive teaching background. Before coming to Beautiful Day, Maliss worked at the International Institute of Rhode Island as a case manager and teacher where she assisted immigrants and refugees to become self sufficient."

You can donate to Beautiful Day here, or just bop around the website and find out more about the organization. (Quotations are from a newsletter I receive from the organization.)

I pass this veggie stand on the way to work every day, and I always contemplate stopping, but until last Tuesday, I never did.



A big old tree provides shade, and two elderly white guys sit in outdoor chairs by it, every day. Tuesday was a steamy hot day. I bought some green beans--"first of the season," one of the old guys told me--and a beautiful eggplant. I was able to see their rambling garden back behind the stand. Wonderful.

As a goodbye remark, I told them to stay cool. "I love the heat!" the other guy proclaimed. "I changed my shirt once already today! Love it! Love being out in the garden!"

I love the heat too, but it's rare to find others who do. I left charmed and delighted. I'm going to buy more eggplant there.

(There's a more sturdy farmstand right near my house; I go there too. What a blessing.)

This cabbage white butterfly looks like the protagonist of a fairy tale. Her beauty is matched by her fearlessness and her creative thinking.



This is a public planter. I like it! I particularly like the yellow vine flowers, which I discovered are Thunbergia alata, "black-eyed susan vine." I saw them first--or, well, noticed them first--in Colombia, cascading down walls. They're apparently native to East Africa, but naturalized in places like Brazil and Puerto Rico (and maybe Colombia?) I want to grow some, so I ordered a packet of seeds. It'll be late by the time they get here, but maybe if the plants once start, I can have them indoors. We'll see.



And here is some sidewalk art from Amherst, MA:



The third season of She-ra is out! So we can watch that now. Meanwhile, we've been watching Evangelion (I've seen it once before, but long ago), which means having the theme song ALWAYS IN MY HEAD.

I subscribed to a local newspaper, a physical paper that comes to the house, for the first time ever, and it's a decision that delights me. Even the ads delight me. If it weren't for the ads, I wouldn't have found out about a place nearby called the Strawbale Café (built with straw bales, but then plastered over), which, at this time of year, makes its own maple syrup.

We went for a visit this past weekend.

The bottom part of their evaporator dates from 1959.



Here is the main line, reaching up into the sugarbush. (Isn't that a great name for a stand of sugar maples?)



And here you can just about see the much thinner piping that goes to each tree. In the past, people would collect sap in buckets and then carry it somewhere to boil it down, but now they generally use piping like this.



When I used to tap maple trees, I gathered the sap in old milk jugs:



But back to the present: This apparatus pumps water back up the line at the end of the season to clean the lines and (somehow) help seal things off (I didn't really understand that part).



And here are the sap storage tanks.



Last but not least, inside the Strawbale Café, where everyone was enjoying fresh maple syrup on pancakes, and the manager was urging people to come back in the summer, when they have a much more extensive menu.

I took my car to the mechanic's yesterday, all dressed in my running gear, because I planned to run a back route back to my house. The mechanic's dad drove up just as I was about to set off and offered me a ride home--he's such a gent; he's given me a ride home in the past. I told him no, this time I was going to get my exercise, but we chatted for a few minutes anyway. The mechanic is about my age (maybe slightly younger... everyone who is about my age is actually slightly younger), and his dad is about my dad's age--with many fewer teeth but more high spirits.

I love the dad--I love talking to him about his past in this town, when it was really a tiny rural farming community. I told him I'd seen a community TV interview with him about going to the one-room schoolhouse they used to have in town. "Oh yeah," he said. "No heat, no running water. Just a wood stove. If you were bad, you had to split the wood for it, so guess who had to split a lot of wood?"

He told me one time he put another kid's boot into the fire! ... Pranks are different when you have a wood stove in the mix!

I was thinking about how different his school experience was from my dad's. My dad went to school in Lexington, Massachusetts. Running water, heat in winter, no splitting wood, no outhouses. Same state, different worlds.

Yesterday afternoon this dramatic sky was up above the Aquavitae portion of what's known as the Great Meadow of Hadley, Massachusetts.



I had always wanted to go down Aqua Vitae road--I remember when last the Connecticut River rose and flooded it. Some of the houses down there are on stilts (wise move).

While I was there, I noticed the narrow fields. You can see them clearly in this satellite shot, courtesy of Google maps:



The whole Great Meadow is laid out that way--a style of farming known as open meadow farming. It was common in eastern England in the 1600s, and the earliest settlers in New England brought it with them, but by and large it disappeared as a land-use pattern in the 1700s. But it survived in Hadley--in 2007, 136 parcels of land in the Great Meadow were farmed or maintained by 87 owners.¹


(Image from Patricia Laurice Ellsworth, Hadley West Street Common and Great Meadow: A Cultural Landscape Study, 2007.)

Just think: 350-plus years, these fields have been tilled. Can you see the different colors of the ground? Those are the different fields.



Back in the earliest days, the Aquavitae area was planted in hay, and other parts of the Great Meadow were planted in wheat, oats, rye, and corn, as well as peas and barley. As you can see from the cut stalks, corn is still grown there. Tobacco, a crop that caught on in the area in the 1800s, is still grown there, too.

These horses haven't been here anywhere near as long. See the Connecticut River behind them? The horses were frisking with each other until I came up.



¹Patricia Laurice Ellsworth, Hadley West Street Common and Great Meadow: A Cultural Landscape Study, 2007, p. 10.

When I left the possums with the woman at Medicine Mammals, she invited me to come to the Pocumtuck Homelands Festival, on the banks of the Connecticut River in Turners Falls--an old mill town where once I heard Anaïs Mitchell perform. Yesterday, wakanomori and I went, and it turned out to be a wonderful time, full of connections, synchronicity, and good news about the possums.



We happened to arrive at exactly the moment that the Akwesasne Women Singers, featuring Bear Fox, were singing songs in Kanienkaha, the language known in English as Mohawk. Bear Fox appears in the film about the Akwesasne Freedom School, a Kanienkaha language-emersion school, that I've written about here. She's also a major force in the documentary Skydancer about Mohawk (Kanienkaha:ka) iron workers. And I got to see her perform! Here are 40 second of that performance:



Later on we went to buy a CD, and I was able to tell her how great I thought both documentaries had been. (The CD I chose was this one. "That's the best one," one of the other women told me."My fingers must have known instinctively," I said.)

Further along, we found Medicine Mammals.





I asked Loril, the rehabilitator, how the possums were doing. "They're doing great," she said. "The two you brought in, plus the other three--they're all together now in a flannel pouch." She said she and her group were about to do some drumming for a woman who was going to perform a hoop dance, so we stayed for that.

Near the end of her performance, the dancer passed the hoops to kids and led them in a weaving dance, then asked them to pass the hoops on to others. Meanwhile the singers modified their chant: "Teeeenage Ninja Muuuutant Turtles . . . They are powerfulllll," and so on. It was very fun.

After we left, we went for a stroll by the shores of the river at a point where its waters were mainly being diverted.





The area was girdled round with danger signs, warning that the water level could rise suddenly, and indeed, above our head, the full power of the river was being diverted away to generate electricity. Photos are inadequate for capturing the roiling, whirlpooling, bubbling, turbulent--how many more adjectives can I add??--power of the river in the narrow(er) channel. We walked over a railway bridge above it and got dizzy looking at it.

Last but not least, in the parking lot I collected data for a new Tumblr: Prius bumper stickers (by which I mean, bumper stickers on Priuses, not bumper stickers featuring Priuses). At least in this neck of the woods, they definitely have themes in common... If you happen to see any good ones, send me a picture, and I'll upload it--crediting you in a form you desire!