Antique Alley

Today we took a ride to Northwood, NH, and browsed the antique shops.

Ken was looking for an antique Model T seat for the speedster he's building. No luck, though: the shop where he'd seen Model T parts on previous trips is now out of business.

That didn't stop us from visiting several shops and ogling the lovely antique items. I always check out the china, glassware, linens, furniture and books.

Ken goes for the furniture, too, but also the wrenches and other tools, auto parts,  and things like that. 

I bought nothing today, although I had my eye on a large Blue Ridge plate, a Watt Ware bowl, and a pedestal cake dish. None of it was essential to my happiness, I decided, so I kept my money in my pocket.

Ken's big purchase was a brass hinge which he plans to spruce up and use on the tool box of his Model T speedster.

We stopped at a store for Haagen Daz ice cream bars (sinfully good. Wish I hadn't read the calorie count on the side of the box), then came on home.

Montsweag Flea Market and Wiscasset

This past Sunday was a picture-perfect day here in Maine, and that's something I haven't been able to brag about often enough this summer. Ken and I had watched the forecast all week with an eye toward going to the Montsweag Flea Market between Bath and Wiscasset.

The day dawned sunny and warm, so we were on the road by 8:00 a.m.

Ken looks for antique tools and anything having to do with antique autos when he goes to flea markets. I look for handstitched items, china, children's books, and anything else that strikes my fancy at a bargain price.

My niece Cheryl joined us for browsing. In fact, she arrived before we did. Later, my sister and her husband stopped by, too. We practically had ourselves a family reunion right there at the flea market, for crying out loud.

I mentioned to one vendor that I buy like-new children's books to donate to Camp Sunshine and to our local food pantry. He promptly dropped his price for me. That was kind of him, especially since his prices were already extremely reasonable.

I found a strange crocheted doily in that it's covered in flowery "knobs," but the colors and stitching are so beautifully done that I had to have it for $2. It now adorns the bureau in one of the guest rooms.

I spotted a few pieces of Old Ivory china (It's the bottom plate on the website listed here.)at unbelievably reasonable prices, and I intended to go back to that table before I left and part with a few dollars. I managed to forget this promise to myself, though, and I've been kicking myself ever since. That was the closest I'll ever come to owning some beautiful Old Ivory.

No trip to Montsweag is complete without driving a few miles farther on to Wiscasset, which calls itself "the prettiest village in Maine," and I suspect it's right.

We got lobster rolls at Sprague's because the line at the famous Red's Eats was just too darned long for us. We enjoyed sitting at a table on the landing and observing a black Labrador wearing purple nail polish, courtesy of the owner's grand daughter.

After our huge lobster rolls, a tasty lunch topped off with Gifford's Moose Tracks ice cream cones, we waddled past several of Wiscasset's interesting antique shops, then we headed back home.

1. It was a good day, despite my forgetting that Old Ivory china.

A loss

We've lost Frank McCourt, the author of Angela's Ashes.

News of the deaths of two writers have made me stop in my tracks over the years. The first was E B White in 1985. How I loved E B White's writings! He was best known for his children's book, Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web, and The Trumpet of the Swan, but it was his essay collections which I loved best: One Man's Meat, Second Tree from the Corner, The Points of my Compass. I taught a Maine Writers unit for many years, and E B White's One Man's Meat was at the heart of that course. This essay collection is mainly about his life on his salt water farm in Brooklin, Maine. The essays are touching and thought-provoking and humorous. What a writer. He chose words carefully and used them well.

One summer when we were camping at Acadia National Park (Bar Harbor), Ken and I drove over to Brooklin so I could see E B White's farm. I was a bundle of nerves as we drove to Brooklin, excited at the possibility of seeing EB White with my own eyes, and scared to death that if I did see him, I might have to speak to him. I wasn't sure a sensible word would find its way out of my mouth.

We stopped at the local post office for directions to the farm. The post mistress told us White was out of town for a few days. I remember standing beside E B White's mailbox to take a picture and thinking "E B White has stood in this very spot!" 

I once wrote to E B White, telling him how much my students (and I) enjoyed his essays. I almost passed out the day I found a reply from him in my mailbox. It was just a short note, thanking me for my note, but it was typed and signed by E B White himself. 

Last evening I heard on the news that Frank McCourt had died. This was tough news to hear. His Angela's Ashes is  one of my favorite books of all time. I read it one summer as I was preparing to teach my Advanced Placement English course that fall. Coincidentally, my sister was reading this book, too. We had so much fun e-mailing back and forth as we reacted to various passages. I remember my sister and I read the last few chapters slowly because we hated to see the story end.

Some have told me they didn't like Angela's Ashes because they found it too depressing. While the McCourt family's life was unbelievably difficult in Limerick, Ireland, I found the story to be a wonderful account of survival and optimism. In addition, it contains a great deal of humor. When we were in Ireland a few years ago, we made a point of spending a night in Limerick because that was McCourt's childhood home.

My Vermont niece's husband had Frank McCourt as a creative writing teacher at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. Jim told me a course in creative writing was required his junior year, and he was lucky enough to get Frank McCourt as his teacher. Jim was a math/science student, as are most who attend Stuyvesant, I guess, so a course in creative writing had not been something he'd dreamed of, but once he'd sat in McCourt's class, he signed up to take another writing course from him the next year. Jim said McCourt required each of his students to submit a piece of writing for publication before they could get credit in his course. The "ticket" to getting the credit was either an acceptance or rejection slip from a publisher.

We're lucky enough to have the writings of these two exceptional authors, but still, it's hard to lose them

Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

Breakfast at Cracker Barrel, of course, minus the grits and gravy.

The ill-fated fingerless glove.


 

It really was a good trip to North Carolina, a 16-hour drive, give or take, each way, with a stop on the way down with friends in NJ and a stop in Lancaster Co., PA, on the way back, as you've already heard.

The purpose of the trip was to attend the international convention of Alpha Delta Kappa, an international honorary organization for teachers and retired teachers. I'm halfway through my two-year term as Maine's state president of A∆K, so it was mandatory that I attend this conference. My friend Lynn serves as state historian, which means she has to chronicle my term and take photos when and where possible. Our husbands were kind enough to agree to drive us to Greensburg, NC, for this big event. (We owe them big-time for this.)

Lynn and I sat in the back seat down and back and knitted like women possessed. Occasionally we did a little back-seat driving, but we honestly tried to keep that to a minimum. SOMETIMES, however....

Anyway, we loved our visit to the South and agreed you just can't beat Southern hospitality. There's a kindness and a gentleness to Southerners that you find nowhere else. 

One late afternoon we drove out to McLeansville, NC, to Replacements, Ltd. Oh, my word. If you like china (and I LOVE china, and so does Lynn), this is the place for you. I came home with a new, totally unneeded cake plate, and Lynn found a butter dish to her everyday china.

Oh, and the convention itself? It was excellent. I'm really not the convention type, and it always takes me awhile to get into the spirit of an event like this, but the A∆K convention was first class. I enjoyed meeting so many members whose names I'd heard frequently. The next convention, in 2011, is in Chicago....There were 1800 members present, from all over the US plus Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Australia. Six of us attended from Maine.

Our hotel, despite its having the slowest elevators in the world, couldn't have been more hospitable. And the food? Oh, mercy.

NOW, for what went wrong:

1. I do wish I hadn't sat on a wasp or bee outside a restaurant in downtown Greensburg. That little bugger stung me something fierce on my buttocks, if you'll excuse my frankness. (No photo available. Sorry,) I promptly ran inside the restaurant and told the bartender my plight. He went into the kitchen and found someone who smokes, and that person generously gave up one of his no-doubt cherised cigarettes so I could apply tobacco to the sting. It helped.

2. When we left the hotel at 6:00 Sunday morning, why did I bolt out of there as if the place was being evacuated, leaving behind the following: my bag of make-up, my vitamins and two prescriptions, my hair wand, and various other necessities to daily life.

I didn't notice this until Sunday evening, in Lancaster, PA, when I was getting ready for bed. Ken searched the car, even empying out the trunk, but the items simply weren't with us. I phoned the hotel the next morning...and received my belongings via UPS yesterday.

3. How could I knit the second glove of a pair of fingerless gloves and screw up the pattern so badly? I finally admitted defeat, turned to Lynn as we rode in the backseat homeward and said "Watch this," then proceeded to ravel out the entire glove, which I'd been knitting for a good 5-6 hours. (See photo.)

But it was a good, safe trip from start to finish, and for that I'm grateful. The bee/wasp sting still reminds me it's there, though.

How many degrees of separation?

We decided to visit Pennsylvania's Amish country on our way home from North Carolina.

After eating dinner at Plain and Fancy, we headed back to our motel rooms in Bird-in-Hand, PA, to sit on the front porch and enjoy the warm, peaceful evening.

Soon after Ken, our friends Jim and Lynn, and I settled into our porch chairs, three motorcyclists pulled up to the room two doors down. We watched them unload their bikes and chat. Suddenly we heard one of the two females in the trio say, "It's 9:00 p.m. at home. I guess I'll give them a call." Jim pointed out that they must be from east of our time zone, since it was 8:00 p.m. to us.

This got me curious, so when the three had gone into their room, I wandered over to the motorcycles to peer at their license plates: New Brunswick.

Just then the man in the trio stepped outside, so I asked him what part of NB he's from.

"Fredericton," he replied. 

I said, "Really? My aunt and uncle used to live in Fredericton. They're both gone now, but I used to visit them often.

"What were their names?" the man asked.

"Harry and Jean H.," I replied.

"You're kidding!" he exclaimed. "Harry and Jean lived next door to my parents."

"On Sunset Drive?" I asked in disbelief.

"Exactly," he said. The two women then came outside to join our conversation. One of the women lived in the house in front of Uncle Harry and Aunt Jean.

We talked about what wonderful people Uncle Harry and Aunt Jean were, and what a shame it was that they'd both passed away within the past four years. The man said he'd expected Harry, who seemed to be in the poorer health of the two, to die first, so he was surprised when Jean passed away first. I said my family had said the same thing.

When the three motorcyclists made statements such as "Harry hated to move from that house, but Jean wanted a smaller place," and "I miss seeing the wooden glider that Harry made, sitting on their lawn," and "I saw Whitney just a couple of weeks ago. She's a pretty girl," I knew these three complete strangers were telling me the truth.

They did know Uncle Harry and Aunt Jean, and they knew them well.

I'm still marveling at the coincidence. If one of the women hadn't mentioned the time zone they were from, I wouldn't have gone to check their license plates. It took going to Lancaster County, PA, to meet friends of Uncle Harry and Aunt Jean from Fredericton, New Brunswick.

So that's that.

As we drove home from No. Carolina on Sunday and Monday, I kept mentioning the baby robins and how I couldn't wait to see them. I knew they were scheduled to hatch last weekend.

We got home last evening. The first thing I did when I got into the house was make a beeline for the dining room window so I could peer out at the baby birds being fed by their mother.

What I saw instead was the ficus tree knocked over. I ran outside to figure out what had happened, and there I found two of the baby birds, dead. The mother and the third bird were nowhere to be found, but several feathers littered the porch floor.

Ken says a predator got them, probably a fox or maybe a raccoon.

So that's that.

The robin's nursery: an update

Now there are two eggs in the robin's nest, maybe more. I discovered the second one as we were using the front door entrance to move some furniture into the house last Friday. It killed me to disturb Mama, but the furniture had to come in through that door and not the kitchen door. At least that's what Ken insisted.

Perhaps a female robin lays one egg per day until she's  got the number she was shooting for? I don't know, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are 3-4 eggs there now. Whenever I've seen pictures of a mother bird feeding her babies, there have been 3-4 mouths open wide and desperately begging for food.

I've stayed away from the nest until just a few minutes ago, when I had to go onto the front porch to break the mildewed, rotting leaves off my precious geraniums in the window boxes.(Yes, it's still raining/misting/drizzling here in Maine. We have the distinction, now, of the third rainiest June since the late 1800's. July has started out on the same note.) Killed me to have to disturb mama, but she tolerated me extremely well this time, stayed in her nest (glaring at me) and, if I'm not mistaken, actually posed for this photo update.

Since I'm soon to become the godmother of a nestful of baby robins, I decided I'd better do some internet research on the nesting/hatching procedure. According to what I read, Mama will sit on the nest for about 14 days, which makes her due date on or about July 9. The fledglings will leave the nest about two weeks later, or about July 23.

Then I'll get my porch back.

P.S. This is a neat site. I just learned lots about robin eggs, the mother, the father, the hatching, you name it.