Yard Sale!

Funny: It feels like I am making money.

The summer is officially on! The calendars call it the Memorial Day Holiday. Unofficially around here it’s also known as Yard Sale Weekend. Just after dawn the tarp-swaddled card-tables appear in the dooryards. By breakfast, all over town, small printed signs flap like loose scales on the stakes, stumps and roadsigns to which we have stapled them. Too small in fact to read from a passing car, the signs are easily deciphered by their clustered profusion and positioning alone. 9 AM is a magic hour. The tarps come off, the cashbox is dosed with change from the night-stand, and up and down the North Country, Vermonters turn out their old junk for its annual airing.

Items have their seasons: battered paperback copies of Steig Larsson’s two published thrillers (“Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and “The Girl who Played With Fire”) move briskly this year; the third in his trilogy is due later this summer. Other items self-deposit like glacial till — crockery, dusty silk flower ornaments, children’s games — creeping passivley and persistently, year after year, back and forth between the households lining these highways.

Our Morning Routine

Mmmm...Swamp water!

Just about every morning Tucker & I leave the house around 8:15 or so and hike the half-mile trail through woods and up the hill to my parents’ for a cup of coffee and a breakfast visit. On the way we pass the frog pond, where Tucker rousts the natives and stomps around in the tall grass for a bit.

At the top of the hill I take his leash off and he makes two or three rounds all the way to the house and back to me while I slog up past the veggie garden, the raspberry patch, the pool and the back/front lawn. He has short little legs, but covers more ground in less time than I can, by orders of magnitude.

Once inside, he breaks straight for the living toom. He doesn’t even bother with the formality of greeting anyone who might be sitting just inside the kitchen door. He bolts for the big plate glass window before my dad’s armchair, and takes up his sentinel post on lookout for doves, chipmunks, robins, juncos, hummingbirds or whatever might be out there. He clocks in at various positions along the window by pressing his nose prints into the glass.

Tucker watches for doves, chipmunks, robins and juncos.

This is Tucker’s idea of heaven.

46 Years Ago Today…

Forty-six years ago today was a Friday. Not a rainy day in Beverly – but I was indoors. In Mrs. Knowlton’s room, I think. Fourth grade, at Shore’s Lower School. It was afternoon. Not all the usual people were present. We weren’t in class, but we were doing something “schoolish” and organized,

One times 10 to the 9th power

Watched Beijing with the fam last night. And was seduced, like most I imagine, by the spectacle of the Opening Ceremony, the genuine exuberance and the evident pride of the Chinese. I had blasphemous thoughts: that the poverty, the oppression, and even the emblematic domination of Tibet were all — for a nanosecond — beside the point. Even for the poor. Even for the oppressed. Even for the real Tibetans.

Meanwhile, on the same planet

Now, watch this:

Peter Schumann is the founder of the Bread & Puppet theater…at home for nearly 40 years now on a farm right next door in Glover, Vermont. Unfortunately the Radical Jesters’ video interview of him has been taken down.

Bread & Puppet‘s Cheap Art Manifesto reads, in part: “Because art is food…”

Cheap Art Philosophy

The Cheap Art movement was launched in 1982 by the Bread and Puppet Theater in direct response to the business of art and its growing appropriation by the corporate sector. With this fact taken into account art becomes: “political whether you like it or not…”

Cheap Art hopes to reestablish the appreciation of artistic creation by making it available to a wider audience and inspire anyone to revel in an art making process that is not subject to academic approval or curatorial acceptance.

LHC Rap!

Hey, look:

Thanks, Dave…And ALPINEKAT at USLHC, who made this.

OneTwoThreeGO!

Forget your stupid little Wii games and your World of Warcraft and your boogie boards and your iPods and all that what-have-you. You want excitement? Be 8 or under …in the woods, by water, with two new friends… pull a twig off a cedar and, on the count of OneTwoThree, scream GO!! …and fling it upstream, off a little wooden farm bridge. Then race to the other side of the bridge …and drop in unison onto your bellies… and the three of you hang your heads under the roadway to watch, upside down, while all the leaves bob on the water til the current takes them. When it does, at the top of your lungs, yell I’m winning!! I’m winning!! even if you’re not… because during the month of August, leaves adrift pick up speed in the presence of soundwaves. This is a known fact. Squeal when your little sister’s creased blackberry leaf inches up to and past your friend’s stalk of golden-rod…and groan so the second balcony can hear you when your maple-nose turns lazy in the water and hangs up on a cedar snag. Jump up and down and make the bridge shiver like a plucked string when the leaves set adrift by the other two kids collide and drift off into a bankside eddy. …Inspire your Aunt Margaret to tell you to stop… but also to laugh and not really mean it… An hour or two of that, mister, will exhaust you — happily. You might then come back in… dragging your sandy feet across my clean kitchen floor …and have a bit of homemade raspberry icecream to recharge your summer batteries.

Orange Blossom Special

My friend Mary Rowell turns 50 this year. We celebrated last night in her yard/garage/barn in Craftsbury, Vermont where we all live some of the time. It poured down rain outside, and the light was terrible — too poor for video. But this didn’t hinder the audio a bit, as you will hear if you click below. You might just set her going and kick back and close your eyes, but for those of you who cannot tolerate TV without pictures I have tossed in a few stills. The music — provided by friends and neighbors (any guest, really, who brought or borrowed an instrument) — was awesome:

In the giardino degli aranci

“In the giardino degli aranci.” Zoë pronounced it slowly and deliberately, her gaze inward, her head bobbing to count off each syllable. Then she looked up and smiled. Our chorus erupted around her. Oh! Oh! we cried. So perfect! So romantic!

She extended her left hand; the ring is a black pearl, set in a tiny frond of white gold.

Oh, Dylan! Oh, Zoë! Oh!, everybody went nuts.

Generalizations Decay

This summer I am reading Haruki Murakami. Reading is perhaps not the word for it. If I could melt his collected works, I would dunk myself and drown there. No, I wouldn’t: I would grow gills and rejigger my metabolism so I could breathe below the surface. I am besotted.  His writing is spare and redolent. It is also lyrical, almost sentimental, and full of magic. He writes about singularities. I suppose everybody does.