In high winds last week a major limb of the neighbor’s tree broke off, grazing another’s garage. (If you look carefully you can see the stub in the middle left) Wisely afraid that another limb would likely hit one of three houses, the neighbors hired a tree service to take the tree down. It is always sad to lose a very old tree which has come to be like an old friend. But I guess trees too have a life span, and this one had reached the end.

Even the cherry picker bucket couldn’t reach high enough, so the man used spikes to climb still higher. Because the limbs were so large they were lowered down on a complicated set of ropes he put in place. It took all day and a crew on the ground to remove the tree, put small branches through a chipper, forklift big sections to a truck and grind the stump. I know it was an expensive, if necessary, process.

The birds and squirrels are scoping out new houses. Fortunately many are available and I expect an abundant number of babies in the spring. Maybe they, like us, need to be shaken out of complacency now and then!(Thoughtful minds might make the connection with living in the United States at the moment.)
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In our sixties we constantly received offers for free dinners. Sometimes they were to listen to condominium sales pitches. Sometimes for time shares. Sometimes to discuss “wealth management”(proving they didn’t know much about us!) Eventually those offers dried up replaced with offers for free hearing tests.

Now that we are well into our seventies the latest postcard(no fancy brochures any more)we found this in the mail this week. Apparently they have reduced their incentive for this one. It’s down to lunch and a quick sales pitch for cremation. Even the lunch looks minimal, perhaps just a cup of soup.

I am struggling to imagine someone thinking up this promotion. I would prefer not to munch or sip away while we discuss cremating the same body I am fortifying with the free meal.

I was reminded of the old saying from my college years “there is no such thing as a free lunch!”

In the foreground is what is left of a ten foot tall branching sunflower which first emerged as a volunteer in June. Since then it has been visited by a series of creatures. In the beginning it attracted the interest of goldfinches, but they soon left. Then hundreds of bees feasted on the nectar throughout the ensuing weeks. As the flowers dried out they became the food source for downy woodpeckers, hovering carefully as they ate. Eventually the squirrels showed up. Some clambered up the sturdy main stalk, chewed off the flowers, took them to ground and devoured them. With little left of the largest blooms at the top the squirrels and woodpeckers have left leaving what remains to the bees and butterflies.

As you can see in the rest of the photo the trees are just starting to lose their color. The summer has been unusually dry so the change is coming sooner. The weather has been lovely, temperate and no humidity. Just right for Charlie’s late summer tasks of painting and repair of the deck and fences.

As for me, this time of year is a feast for the eyes! Time in the porch swing trying to just savor the season. Trying to stay out of politics. Occasionally succeeding.

On our walk today on the grounds of the local college, Charlie and I came across two benches like the one pictured above. Examining it close up, we could see that it has USB ports on the end, powered by the solar panels with electricity stored in the attached battery.

It seems an ideal amenity for both students and neighbors. An adjacent horseshoe pit, barbecue pit and picnic table allows people to play, eat, and charge their phones. We passed a neighbor who said he loves the idea but keeps forgetting to bring along his charging cable. For those of us who think we must always be doing something, we can now say that we aren’t just resting. We are being productive!

Thanks Goodwin College.

Perhaps it is because all of us who survived measles are well on in years. Perhaps it is the prevailing anti-authority mood that has swept the current national government. For whatever reason, the top official in our country responsible for overseeing vaccinations(the agency formerly responsible for putting out this notice) has decided that he(with no medical training)is the arbiter of what children need. So far he has promoted false cures for measles and downplayed its seriousness, claiming “herd immunity” should be sufficient.

I had measles when I was six. I was desperately ill, confined to a dark room, running a high fever of 104 and hallucinating. My little brother, then three, similarly suffered hallucinations. Except for rubbing us with cool wash cloths, there was nothing my mother could do to comfort us. When my daughter was born in 1975 I couldn’t contain my joy that she could be spared not only this but also rubella and mumps. All with immunizations.

Yes, shots were unpleasant, more for me watching sometimes than for her. Yes, she was often fussy after each one. But she never had to endure the measles or the mumps. She never had to be kept out of public places in the summer risking exposure to polio, which my generation contracted before the vaccine. She never got smallpox, diphtheria, whooping cough, or tentanus as had those in my grandparents’ generation.

These diseases are in fact a very big deal. I am heartbroken that “officials” are discouraging the vaccines that prevent them.

Every summer of my childhood we would make a pitcher of Kool-Aid, pour it into a metal glass and feel true contentment. My favorite flavor was root beer, my brother’s cherry, one sister’s grape, the other one’s orange. But we would drink whatever was there. Of course it was artificial everything except for the sugar. We couldn’t have cared less. It was easy, it was cheap, and we could make it for ourselves. It fueled bike rides, swimming, and long walks to friends’ houses. Sitting around bored was an open invitation to do chores. So we took our drinks outside.

The cups were similar to the photo on the right, though ours were pretty scratched up on the outside. Just seeing the image brings back the exact sensation of the cold glass in my hand, the slightly curved edge on my lip, and the clank of teeth on metal. They were pretty indestructible, unlike our usual glass ones, so they could survive being left in the yard, dropped from a tree or thrown. Who would throw an empty Kool-Aid cup? Don’t ask.

We never had soda pop. Ginger Ale was only for stomach bugs. Cola, soda and quinine were for adult drinks. We didn’t care. We had Kool-Aid and the colorful mustaches it left every time.

My mother always had a basket of clothes next to her chair waiting to be mended, hems let down, hems taken up, and buttons added. Each of us had hand-me-downs, either from our cousins or from each other. Most needed to adjusted a little for the second or third wearer. Clothes were expensive, but they lasted a long time through sequences of kids. I don’t remember anything unusual about the practice.

What struck me in the photo above was the depth of the hem at the dress bottom. Here was a hem ready to be “let out” to allow a child to grow. If the hem had been in place a long time, sometimes a white line showed that it had been lengthened. I am convinced that rick rack was invented just to camouflage that line!

Sometimes clothing had room to grow features. Snowsuits had sleeves that could be lengthened by snipping some threads, for instance. Sometimes my mother bought my brother jeans he could grow into. Many photos of him show the pants legs rolled up in anticipation.

I thought about this when reading about the mountains of used clothing piling in a Chilean desert. Somehow clothing has became disposable instead of reusable.

There was never a time in my life that I didn’t bite my fingernails. As a nervous habit it worked pretty well, at least for my nerves if not my fingers. I accommodated for this nail deficit and never really missed the usefulness they provided. At one point in fifth grade I decided to stop the habit and bought Thum, a nasty tasting brush-on treatment said to use aversion therapy to stop the habit. It didn’t.

But one day my ten year old granddaughter looked at me quite intently and said I should quit biting my nails because it was unhygienic. In all my nail biting years I had never even considered that. (Denial is a powerful thing!) She was right and I told her I would stop. And I did.

It took many months for my nails to heal. Even after eight years, two of the nail beds are damaged a little. Still they did grow back. Inspired by my daughter I began to get manicures from a local Vietnamese salon. When my nails grow too long to type easily, I sit down with Julie(a truly Americanized name)for a trim and gel polish called Bubble Bath. Above is a photo of the results.

While it turns out fingernails are quite useful for things like prying lids, I still have to find alternative methods. It turns out those same tasks destroy the lovely newly regrown gel covered tips!

Charlie snapped this picture for me when he was loading up on sweet cherries, our favorite, at the local supermarket. Fortunately for us the cherries are in plastic bags. Otherwise I guess we might have found pits in with the cherries!

Somehow this sign seems to capture some generalized disregard for other people including who have to clean up after them and those liable to slip and fall. It also tells us that people are munching on cherries they haven’t purchased. The store seems to have given up on that battle. In a similar way shoplifters are breezing out of stores knowing the clerks have been told not to confront them. As I wrote recently drivers increasingly see red lights as suggestions, not mandates.

Why should we behave? Why should we regard others with compassion? Why should we care about anyone else? For a very long time we all have benefitted from the remnant of religious teachings. I see signs that suggest that influence has diminished. Too much attention has been given to the unique, the extraordinary, and rare. I can only hope that we can reclaim the common: common good, common sense, common courtesy and common compassion. We are stronger together than apart.

I remember hearing in a Shakespeare course that a classical comedy begins in chaos and ends in order. In his plays people frequently fall in love with the wrong people, disguise themselves and use clever tactics to try to outsmart their circumstances. But in Twelfth Night, As You Like It, and other plays, things are indeed restored by the end.

Moira Macdonald in her delightful summer read Storybook Ending pays silent homage to the plot pattern. Set in a bookstore with the requisite handsome nerd, Goth would-be writer, anxious owner and others, the story involves a series of notes sent and received by the wrong people. All we know for sure with our knowledge of classical comedy and the hint in the title is that all will come right.

Sometimes, as with Shakespeare, watching how chaos comes to order is its own reward. Such is reading this novel. Sure we know where it’s heading(see the title), but what a fun ride.