Bonjourno:
“It is June. I am tired of being brave.”…………………………………………………………………………………………………….Anne Sexton
“May my heart be kind, my mind fierce and my spirit brave”……………………………………………………………….Kate Forsyth
“I’m Hangry!!!!!!!!!”………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………Berry Family vacation mantra between meals
“Beyond Valium,
Peace is knowing one’s child
Is an internist.”……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….Haikus for Jews
We hear from our friends that it has been sultry and steamy in the Midwest and down East this week, but it’s mainly been a steady mid 70s in the Greens- rainy and cold early in the week and very nice last 4-5 days….but Monday is a scheduled high of 49 degrees….go figure. The wet/cold to warm/sunny has produced the desired greening effect and all is now in full bloom across the valleys and foothills and the snow is gone from the ridges…well, hell, it is June.
This has all led to a burst in gardening activity- often from dawn to dusk- for our master gardener. Plants, mulch and assorted yard tchotchkes have become our bread and butter. Apparently ,we are signed up once again for the Mt. Holly Annual Garden Tour, which will lead to a frenzy in July ….culminating with a host of gabardine clad folk traipsing across our property with cameras and comments. We also had to mow and trim twice this week- what is up with that….maybe there can be too much Green?
The new dishwasher is now in and and running after our experiment in learning hard-wiring…only resulted in several minor jolts…none requiring the defibrillator….
It was a pretty slow week, overall, with the only things moving pretty much the grass…while we hung about and considered home improvements, pickup trucks, garden tools and baskets and what to eat three time a day that does not have carbs or sugars… I think chocolate counts ok?
We went out to The Chop House in Ludlow for the early bird dinner special, which has a very giant salad bar that is very nice…but the real treat was that the mains came with either rice pilaf or garlic mashed….oh man, oh man….how good is that shit?
And, we went to dinner mid-week at our friends’ Beverly and Rick’s down in Chester. They are my mama and papa folks who feed me three times a week at Java Babas for my post gym lunch (limited these days to small plates of vegetables and scoops of meat salad). We drank too much and we certainly ate too much, ending with key lime pie and chocolate cake…which led to ‘Jen passing out on the way home from sudden toxic carb/sugar overload. I was fine but gaily stayed up until four in the morning, prowling the house in search of projects to accomplish (let me just rewire that dishwasher). We were early for dinner so took a short drive into Chester, where we hit a stalled traffic construction zone (really) and so headed north up some dirt road. This led us to an area we had not seen before, which appeared to be primarily inhabited by some brand of survivalists (one house boasted eight cameras in blood red Charles Manson writing on the barn). We did not get lost and made it to dinner on time.
Friday, our first guest of the Airbnb season arrived…a nice woman computer nerd from Boston visiting her son for parent weekend at our local neighborhood treatment center. Which led us to genuinely clean the house for the first time this year, since we have been mostly living in three rooms. Since we have to appear to be straight out of better homes and gardens, this required a full day of cleansing and hosing…. which I guess gives us more rooms now to hang out in and consider carbs. Our guest coming seemed to throw us off schedule kilter, and we were up and ready to go at six am on Saturday morning. So, we headed up the next mountain to Shrewsbury to make out annual pilgrimage to the Throne of the Trout King. The King now has 28 trout ponds and three buildings of holding tanks. We had been trying to pin him down for weeks to get our Pond Bacteria in before I have to get out in the kayak with my strainer…..but he is quite busy and pretty wired to boot. Check out the pond foxes at his estate…and harken whilst he regales us with a half hour of enchantment on his pending colonoscopy. This is what I’m talking about when I mention the fun times in the mountains.
We also came home with a bucket of crawfish and 20 brown trout…so Ya’ll are welcome to come up and fish and have us a N’Awlins boil……that is, if the 40 year old snapping turtle (who reappeared last week) does not eat them all first…
After the Tout King extravaganza, and the fish deposited back in our lovely Pond….we drove down to Rutland for farmers’ market day. The Market is back in full swing…and many of the vendors were thrilled to see their friend, Lucy, again…..who thinks this is the best place in the world, with dogs of every size and persuasion and scraps of food under all the market stalls…..and then she gets to go to her second favorite place, the next door Walmart, to sniff out the bottom shelves and make the yellow vested staff’s days…never knew a dog who loves shopping as much as she does. Loaded down with a trunk full of yet more plants, we returned home to more planting and more searching the fridge for something sugar free to eat…
And that is all she wrote….Dear John…I’ll send your saddle home…
Go Cavs….happy June….take a whiff….
Stu-ber
