It’s a perfect night for a cookout in Stonington, with some lamb burgers, locally grown corn on the cob, and greens from our little garden.
The temperature is in the low 60’s up here. Appetite-stimulating weather, as they say up here.
During our unseasonably cool Fourth of July weekend, I noticed that many of our flowers were just getting ready to bloom. Having planted a number of them and watered all of them, I was eager to see the splash of colorful blossoms and how the flowers looked in our setting.
Unfortunately, it was not to be. When I left yesterday morning to take my walk, I saw a flash of a white tail in the distance and a deer bounding away through the underbrush. And then when I checked on our flowers, I was disappointed to discover that something had neatly clipped off, and presumably happily consumed, the flower buds that were just ready to burst, leaving only the bristling stalks behind.
I’m guessing that the deer is the culprit. And when I checked on other flowers we’ve planted, I saw that some had also been trimmed of their tender and delectable buds — although some had been left alone. Apparently, the deer of Stonington have discriminating tastes. Only the flowers that are in the fenced-in part of the yard, and the thorny wild roses that grow from the rocks next to the house, were totally safe from the scourge of deer teeth.
I’ve checked into what you can do to discourage deer from eating your flowertops, and frankly the cure sounds worse than the disease. The Better Homes and Gardens website notes that smelly things might work, at least temporarily, and suggests placing odorous objects like mothballs, fishheads, and “processed sewage” that might repel the deer. The problem is that they would no doubt also repel us. The other alternative is to try to create physical barriers like rigging hidden fishing lines, putting up netting or fencing, or hanging shiny objects like aluminum pie plates. Again, this seems like it would interfere with our enjoyment of the grounds, and in any case is unworkable due to the size and nature of the area that needs to be addressed.
The last option is to go for “deer-resistant plants.” But the BHG website page on “deer-resistant plants of the northeast” cautions: “There aren’t really any plants you can truly say are deer proof. And the animals are smart and unpredictable — so the deer in your yard may love a particular plant, but avoid it in a garden down the block.” And it seems like planting presumably deer-resistant plants that hungry deer might decide to eat anyway isn’t going to keep them from devouring the other tasty perennials that I’ve already planted.
So it looks like we’re stuck. I guess I’m just going to have to start appreciating the rare beauty of denuded flowerstalks.
My theory about dreams is straightforward: while your conscious brain is sleeping, your subconscious brain is still at work, sifting through what you’ve read or heard or seen or otherwise experienced recently and trying to organize it into some kind of story — because our brains crave order and are hard-wired to try to put things into patterns. Dreams are strange and disconnected because it’s hard to turn random incidents into a coherent story, but the subconscious brain does its best.
I think the operative plot elements of your dreams all come from the recent brain input, but ancillary characters, background settings, and other details that fill in the inevitable, yawning gaps in the story line are drawn from your vast repository of memories. That’s why you might see a former work colleague who has been dead for years suddenly turn up, sharply etched from memory, as the boatyard attendant in a dream that involves some weird effort to take a boat to meet a friend. And because the settings seem to be based on decades of collective memories, they tend to involve, in some murky, dream-like sense, the world of the past.
That’s why it’s interesting to me that, four months after the coronavirus hit and the world tilted on its axis, I’m starting to have dreams that have some kind of COVID-19 element. Last night I had a dream in which one of the people in the background was wearing a blue paper coronavirus mask — certainly something that would not have been part of any dream I would have before March 2020 — and I’ve also had a dream where my dream self was troubled to see that there were discarded coronavirus masks on a roadway as I walked past.
So far, at least, I haven’t had any coronavirus embarrassment or anxiety-type dreams, where I’ve humiliatingly shown up for some important event without a mask, or in my dream I’m horribly late for something because I stupidly put off getting a mask and now I can’t find one anywhere. I imagine it’s just a matter of time before those kinds of dreams get worked into the nightly mix.
And that’s probably the most disturbing part of all of this. The coronavirus period has gone on long enough to work its way into our subconscious brains. If, like me, you still have dreams from time to time about missing an important exam — decades after your last exam ever occurred — you have to wonder: are we going to be haunted by periodic COVID-19 dreams for the rest of our lives? We may sincerely hope that a successful vaccine is developed, “herd immunity” is achieved, and the world returns to “normal” — but come night-time our subconscious brains may continue to give us a dose of the topsy-turvy coronavirus world of 2020 whether we like it or not.
As was the case in many communities, Stonington cancelled its annual Fourth of July fireworks show due to coronavirus concerns. Of course, that didn’t stop people around town from setting off strings of firecrackers, with their familiar staccato explosions, now and then.
And if you like the color of fireworks, you’re not going to be deprived in Stonington, either. With the arrays of brightly colored lobster buoys that you see just about everywhere — even in the back of bright red pickup trucks — you can get your fireworks colors fix just by keeping your eyes open.
It’s Independence Day. As we recognize our oldest national holiday, dating back to before the country was even formally founded, no doubt many people are thinking that these are strange, difficult times, and are wondering just what the future may bring. We’ve experienced significant protests across the country — with “Black Lives Matter” signs being seen even on a small road in this remote corner of Maine — and in this presidential election year political passions are running high.
The spirit of unbridled protest has always run deep in this land. We’ve fought two civil wars in an effort to define and structure concepts of liberty and freedom, and we’ve experienced other periods where the vein of protest pulsed strongly. The country has seen the mass civil rights marches and Vietnam War protests of the ’60s, the women’s suffrage movement, the Prohibition and anti-Prohibition movements, and the organized labor movements in the late 1800s — and that’s just scratching the surface. Each of these protests has changed the country in some meaningful way, and there is no doubt that the current protests will, too. The spirit of protest is so important to this country that we have codified our right to protest in the very first provision of the Bill of Rights and specifically stripped Congress of the ability to make any law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” People who wring their hands about protests simply don’t understand our history, or our institutions. In reality, protest is as American as apple pie.
We often think of the “Founding Fathers” as gentlemen with powdered hair in fancy dress who secured freedom just by signing the Declaration of Independence — the execution of which gives rise to the holiday that we celebrate today. From our vantage point, more than 240 years later, we tend to forget that country’s first civil war, which we now know as the Revolutionary War, was a harsh, bloody fight that occurred in a bitterly divided land — and the Founding Fathers in their silk stockings were the rebels.
Courtesy of a present from Richard, I’m reading an excellent book about the first part of the revolutionary period by Rick Atkinson, called The British Are Coming. One passage had particular resonance with me, in view of the period we are currently living through:
“John Adams, never taciturn, later would be quoted as saying, ‘I would have hanged my own brother had he taken part with our enemy in the contest.’
“Few were hanged, at least not yet; incivility rarely turned to bestiality. But no one could say how brutal the war would become. Conformity, censorship, and zealotry now flourished. Even small sins, such as ‘speaking diminutively of the country congress,’ might be punished with forced public apologies, boycotts, ostracism, or property confiscation. A mild word of praise for the British government–or simply being suspected of thinking loyal thoughts–could provoke a beating. Militias served as a political constabulary, bolstered by the Continental Army. When Queens County, a loyalist stronghold on Long Island, voted 788 to 221 against sending representatives to the provincial congress, the names of those in the majority were published in the newspaper; they were forbidden to travel, hire a lawyer, or practice a trade. More than a thousand militiamen and Continentals then swept through Queens, arresting opposition leaders, seizing weapons and extracting allegiance oaths–except from the 250 obdurate men who fled into the swamps to await General Howe’s arrival.
Such measures spread.”
In short, there is nothing new under the sun, and we’ve been through these kinds of challenging periods–in fact, much more challenging periods–before. Reading accurate histories of America would provide reassurance on that point. Unfortunately, airbrushing history has also been a tradition in this country. How many of us who went through the American school system were taught of the horrendous Tulsa, Oklahoma race massacre of 1921, or of lynchings, or the role of the Ku Klux Klan in subjugating African Americans — or for that matter the egregious history of lies, broken promises and mistreatment of indigenous Americans, Chinese immigrants, or other ethnic groups, or the Japanese internment camps that were created during World War II? Those terrible racist episodes are as much a part of American history, and our ability to gain a true and complete understanding of our country, as the lofty pronouncements in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Emancipation Proclamation. Those of us who were taught that America’s history is an unbroken story of freedom, liberty, and fairness in service to the world were not told the whole story. We deserved the truth, but we didn’t get it.
I hope that that will be one of the positive impacts of these current protests. We can only fully grasp the meaning and complexity of American history, and the true importance of crucial historical figures, if we take an unvarnished view of their lives and understand their faults, flaws, and failings as well as their successes. I hope that the exercise of First Amendment freedoms that we are seeing in these protests ensures that American history is never sanitized again and the full story — good, bad, and ugly — is told from here on out.
The exercise of our freedoms is something worth celebrating. Happy Fourth of July, everyone!
Once, not too long ago, I had an extensive bathroom collection of little bottles — the kind that hotels give (or used to give) to guests that contained small portions of shampoo, conditioner, body wash, and hand lotion.
I had dozens and dozens of the little bottles stored in various places in our bathroom. I would go on trips for work and faithfully bring the unused bottles back from from my travels so I could use them at home. Waste not, want not, my grandparents taught, so why go out and spend good money on a bottle of shampoo when you can supply your needs through the little bottles the hotels hand out? It’s not like my grizzled mane needs the kind of luxurious concoctions featured on shampoo commercials, anyway.
When I was traveling regularly, bringing home more bottles every week and month, it seemed like the vast collection of little bottles would supply my shampoo and body wash needs forever. But over time the little bottle collection shrank a bit, as hotels transitioned to big push dispensers of shampoo and conditioner to protect the environment from plastic bottle waste, and then the coronavirus pandemic hit, all business travel vanished in the blink of an eye, and the opportunities for replenishment of the little bottle collection abruptly ceased. And now, after going almost half a year without any business travel of any kind, we’re down to only a few of the little bottles left — a mere fraction of what the collection once was.
This coronavirus period has been strange, for sure, but one of the interesting things about it is how quickly we can adjust to and accept the “new normal” of masks, and spending more time at home, and steering wide of people on the street, and the other changes in behavior that become accepted. You’re going along, living your life in the new way, and then something — like some little bottles in your shower stall — reminds you of just how much things have really changed.
Coastal Maine is a scenic place, and Stonington has its fair share of photo opportunities. Sometimes, if you keep your eyes open, they just appear in front of you, the result of a combination of weather, viewpoint, circumstance, and just plain luck.
I caught this picture of a lone boat at anchor just off the shoreline east of the mail boat dock during my early morning walk yesterday. The calm waters allowed for a clear view of the floating seaweed and the huge rocks just below the water’s surface. At the same time, the fog in the distance left the boats farther out in the harbor shrouded in mist. while totally obscuring the islands beyond, making the top of the picture look like a kind of unfinished artist’s canvas. The colors are subtle and subdued.
Against that backdrop, I was struck by the sharp image of the lone boat — which I am pretty sure is called a dory — all by itself on the placid water. The scene seemed to perfectly capture an almost mystical feeling of calmness, and solitude, and quiet.
Yesterday’s constant rain and drippy, overcast conditions brought the snails out of their normal hiding places and onto our driveway and other wet surfaces. I took the picture of the little guy below just outside our front door.
Snails are common in Maine — so commonplace that the University of Maine has a web page entitled “slugs and snails” devoted to helping gardeners deal with the little creatures, and people have written entire academic papers about the “slugs and snails of Maine.” Snails are interesting creatures and actually kind of fascinating to watch, as they move slowly but surely ahead. Little boys are supposed to be made out of them, in part (“snips and snails and puppy dog tails”) so it’s worth knowing a few facts about them.
Terrestrial snails are part of the phylum Mollusca and the class Gastropoda and are closely related to slugs. The name of the snails’ class comes from the Greek words for belly and foot, because snails move through the progressive expansion and contraction of one large, muscular foot under their shell. The snail’s foot has a gland that secretes a coating of mucus, and the snail then glides on that coating of slime. The fact of a single foot and the need for slimy mucus generation helps to explain why snail movements are so deliberate.
There are dozens of different species of snails in Maine, some of which were actually brought to the state from Europe. (Why Europeans did this is anybody’s guess.) Because of their need for slime, snails avoid direct sunlight and wind and prefer moist, damp areas — like gardens, where they are commonly found. If you’re trying to get rid of slugs and snails, which can cause harm to some plants, the U of Maine webpage helpfully notes that “removing boards, rocks, logs, leaves and dense growth helps” and that it “is also wise to minimize shaded areas, rock walls, rock gardens, or forested borders and leave bare ground or close-cropped grass next to vegetable or flower beds.” No stones, or rock walls, or rock gardens, in Maine? Good luck with that!
Interestingly, the snails of Maine all are supposed to have shells with whorls that move from the center in a clockwise direction. Nobody really knows why.
Snails don’t bother me, and I try not to disturb them when I’m gardening. I don’t think they are doing much harm to our flowers and plants, and I figure anything that is living in slime with only one foot deserves a break.
The flowers in our front bed seem to like the rain, too.
It’s been dry up here — so dry that even the most taciturn Mainers have actually remarked on it. We might get the light spritz from the morning fog, or a very heavy dew, but real rain has been rare over the past weeks.
Until yesterday, that is. Yesterday, we got one of those long, soaking rains, where the clouds seem to be especially low to the ground and just hover overhead, content to drop their watery contents onto the ground below. It was the kind of incessant, day-long rain that knocks a few leaves from the trees and produces big puddles on rocks and gravel driveways. And today and tomorrow we are supposed to get more of the same.
You can’t overstate the value of a good soaking for the plants. Watering is nice, and even essential when it has been especially dry, but it is a limited form of relief from the dryness. The best thing about a good soak is the continuous nature of the rainfall, with the earlier rain moistening the soil and making it more receptive to the raindrops to come. That’s why a good soak always leaves the plants looking better than a passing thunderstorm that might deposit a lot of rain that simply sluices off the hard-baked ground. With a good soak, you know the rain is really reaching the deeper ground and plant roots.
And another good thing about a good soak is that it means there’s no need for repeatedly filling up the watering can and hauling it to those remote places that are beyond the reach of your hose.
As a kid, I hated the good soak days, which seemed to unfairly cut into summer vacation. Now, as somebody who’s just working from home anyway and is interested in seeing some plants do well, I welcome the good soaking days. I’ll be interested in seeing how the plants have fared when the rainfalls end and the sun comes out again.
Many of us are familiar with the German word schadenfreude. It refers to the pleasure you feel from observing another person’s misfortune. Think about the guilty but nevertheless real surge of joy you get when your arch-rival sports team loses a big game, and you’ve captured it.
Schadenfreude is a very useful word. So why does a specific word for that sensation exist in the German language, but not in English? What caused the Germans, at some point in the past, to identify that very particular feeling and coin a term for it, and why didn’t somebody in merry old England do likewise? You can’t tell me that, during the period of one of their countless wars, the British weren’t happy to see the French take a pratfall. Why didn’t they come up with a word to capture that specific unseemly yet nevertheless real surge of pleasure?
Schadenfreude doesn’t stand alone. In fact, the Germans have been pretty good at creating lots of words that capture unique feelings or circumstances. Here are some:
Futterneid — translated as “food jealousy” or “food envy,” it refers to the feeling you have when you go out to dinner with someone and they order food that looks much better than what you ordered, and you then suffer through the meal wishing you’d ordered their dish.
Fernweh — translated as “distance sickness” (the opposite of home sickness), it refers to the overpowering desire to be traveling, preferably to somewhere far away.
Fremdschamen — the uncomfortable feeling of embarrassment you experience when watching someone else go through a personally humiliating experience, like telling an unfunny joke to an audience or having way too much to drink at a work-related function.
Kummerspeck — translated literally as “grief bacon,” it refers to excess weight that is put on by emotional overeating.
Torschlusspanik — translated literally as “gate shut panic,” it identifies the fear that certain opportunities or activities are being closed to you as you get older.
Weltschmerz — the sensation of melancholy and resignation that you experience when your hopeful expectations about what will happen in the world fall disappointingly short . . . again.
We could use such words in English, so the word creators need to get cracking. And isn’t it interesting how many of those German words describing unique, very precise feelings or conditions can be applied to what we are experiencing in 2020?
I don’t often plug products on the blog, but it’s such a pleasure to find a well-conceived, well-designed product that delivers what it promises that I feel I need to say a few words about my Skullcandy Indy wireless headphones.
I like listening to music when I take a morning walk or work in the yard. Previously, I used the standard iPhone earbuds that would connect to my phone with a cord. After a while they started to bug me, for two reasons. First, it was hard to keep them in your ears. And second, if wasn’t unusual to snag the cord on something and yank the earbuds out of your ears, which was supremely annoying. And don’t even talk to me about the issued posed by cord connection with you’ve got a leaping, oblivious dog in the vicinity.
So I decided to go cordless and wireless. But, what to buy? I’d heard good things about Skullcandy products, so I decided to buy their “Indy” product. It turned out to be a great decision. It’s easy to sync the earbuds with your phone, even for a technophobe like me, and the product delivers great sound quality. You charge up the earbuds in a little charging station and remove them when you are ready for use. They turn on automatically — with a great, authoritative “Power On!” statement delivered by a female voice with a faint accent that I inevitably try to mimic — and have a kind of foam insert that allows you to place them securely in your ears to prevent slippage. And best of all, there is no cord to be tangled. They are ideal for walking, gardening, or otherwise sitting outside and listening to your favorite music.
I admit it: I’m a Skullcandy fan.
The fog bank is out there. You can see it on the water, lurking and looming, just beyond the little island in the middle of the harbor. The fog bank is so thick that it totally obscures all but the highest hilltop on Isle au Haut, wiping it clean from the photo.
It’s been pretty foggy here for the last few days, and for the native Midwesterner the speed — and seeming perverseness — of the fog movement is breathtaking. You might see fog in the distance, and the next thing you know it has barged into town and your bare skin is covered in moisture. On other days, the fog might wait out on the horizon, keeping its own counsel and deciding if, and when, to roll in and blanket the sun. And on other days, the fog is simply gone, and you can see for miles out into the harbor without a hint of fog to be seen anywhere.
Dr. Science would tell you that fog is a natural condition caused by a process called advection, when warm, moist air passes over a cooler surface — in this case, the bracing waters of the Penobscot Bay and the Atlantic Ocean just beyond the islands in the bay — and water vapor in the air condenses to form water droplets that make the fog opaque. That’s a very scientific explanation, but it doesn’t quite capture the almost human, unpredictable qualities of fog.
Because we know the fog is out there . . . waiting.
The official welcome sign outside of Stonington says the town is Maine’s largest lobster port, and the visual evidence around here supports that assertion. You see the paraphernalia of the lobster business pretty much everywhere, from the lobster boats at anchor in the harbor to the brightly colored buoys, coiled ropes, and stacked rows of lobster traps seen on the properties around town. Especially traps. More traps than you can imagine!
And it appears that the younger generation is embracing Stonington’s traditional occupation. According to statements from this year’s graduates published in the local newspaper, a number of the 2020 graduates of the Deer Isle-Stonington High School — both male and female — are planning on “lobstering” as their career. It’s the kind of future plan you wouldn’t see from a student in, say, Columbus, Ohio.
My hat is off to the kids who are going into the lobster trade. It’s a tough, physically demanding job that requires you to get up before dawn and spend your days on the water, going from buoy to buoy, hauling traps up from the ocean floor, removing any catch, rebaiting the traps with yukky objects that lobsters like, and winching the traps back down again. But it makes a living, and you get to be your own boss. From the decisions of the local high school kids, that’s still an attractive option.
Russell has the proverbial green thumb. He’s been growing his own vegetables up in Detroit for some time, and before we came up to Maine he gave us some plants to bring along.
We’ve replanted the vegetables into a little bed I’ve created among the rocks, with some garden soil and cow manure mixture added to the native Stonington soil to give them a kick start. I’ve been attentive to watering as do weeding, and I’m happy to report that our Detroit transplants are thriving in the cooler Maine climate and are growing like crazy. They are pretty to look at, too.
Our little garden plot includes broccoli, celery, kale, lettuce, and Brussels sprouts. We’ve already eaten some of the kale, which was quite good — but I suppose it’s natural to think that when the food is fresh and something you have grown yourself. Now, if only I liked broccoli . . . .
