| June 4, 2006 | Shows | Recipe Calendar | Archives |
 On Memorial Day, the official beginning of summer here, and not a holiday down south because it started as a memorial to Union dead after the Civil War, I saw this tractor along the road to Waterville. People are always surprised when I want to take a photo of their extraordinary ordinary objects. Like that lady with the all-time greatest clothes line in Burnham (perfectly straight Ts, glass insulators, the incredulous old lady in clean worn apron with hearing aids in both ears putting her hands on my shoulders so she could look at my face from a foot away and watch me say slowly May I Take A Picture of Your Clotheline) We got the dock in that weekend, put it in ourselves for a change, fiddling with it being a great excuse to hang out in the water. 
It has rained all weekend, but the rain stopped for a few minutes while we did an opening of the Triplet Park trail which connects the park to the old Grammar School building and from there joins the Bartlett Shore trail that goes to Brier's Beach at the lake.
None of these names existed when we moved here. But most of you will remember the origin of that park in a tragic fire in January 2000. There was some attempt to call it "Memorial Park" or similar things, but it will never be called anything but Triplet Park. In the group picture are the grandmother and aunt of the triplets.
Don and Patricia Newell created the 200 feet of "floating boardwalk." Melissa worked on it too.
The best thing about it and the paths through the wildflower meadows of the park is that they curve. It's not easy to make a boardwalk curve, but it's magic how not being able to see all of a picture at once creates mystery. Like a child's imagination. That was Don's idea and I would not have thought the businessman capable of it. But he did and it works.
Bartlett Shore is the name of an assisted care facility concept that started over monthly breakfasts in our dining room at the Heron when Bob Fordyce stayed there once a month. His land has since been donated to the project and more land including the lake frontage called Brier's Beach has been acquired. The project is in the feasibility study stage. 
After being out in rainy weather for much of the day, it was such a pleasure to come home and settle into a quiet evening in a warm, dry house. That is the thing so many people in the Katrina wake cannot do. They cannot go home after a busy day and nest. A FEMA trailer is not home. A rented place in another town is not home. The May Mix is influenced by our JazzFest visit.
Coupla weekends ago we did an overnight to Boston to visit with Jinx & Peg and walk a few miles with Jinx in the Avon breast cancer walkathon. We take to bus from Portland to South Station and run around on the subway. Jinx walked 26 miles in two days. The cool thing about these city walkathons is that they are tours of the city on foot. You get a feel for a neighborhood walking through it. But the hard pavement gave me wicked behind the knee pain after 5 miles; I wimped out at 8 miles. But great fun to play in a city with old friends. |