Adirondack arrival

sunrise: 5:25

Today was my sunrise reconnaissance mission. I am here on a lake in the Adirondacks of upstate New York where I’ll be for two weeks, and I am very happy.

I cannot find the right adjectives to describe this place. This little lake in the region of Tupper Lake, New York is far more to me than an idyllic setting of natural beauty. It holds a part of my soul. Sorry for the melodramatic phrasing, but I can think of no other way to describe it.

Every summer of my young life was spent here, sometimes for well over a month. I was here for many winter vacations, fall weekends, and a Christmas or two as well. My great-grandfather, a lumber man, bought the lake about a hundred years ago and my grandmother and her two sisters camped out and had their riotous fun on these shores.

He sold plots of land to various friends and family. Two of the lots went to two more great-grandfathers of mine. And so – my parents both grew up spending their summers here. As I grew and played and swam and developed my being around this lovely lake, I was surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, great aunts and uncles, cousins once and twice removed – and a rich sense of history and family.



Mostly, though, it was just heavenly. We had total freedom (at least we felt that we did). We have plumbing and electricity, but until I was grown, and largely (though not entirely) still today, there was no TV, no high tech toys, chipmunks that sometimes shared our kitchen, and a couple of miles drive before hitting a paved road.



We spent the day in and around this 3 mile long, mile wide lake. It has a few small islands, lots of hiking trails, a community area with a big old log building, a sandy beach and two tennis courts called the club, cold springs, lean-tos, and lots of moss, trees, underbrush and wildlife.



Here is where I learned to be in boats, spend hours in the water, associate, negotiate, imagine, laugh, and compete with my peers, concoct adventures, battle deer flies, hang around with older relatives, face my fears of the dark woods, watch the stars from a canoe, sleep outdoors, go berry-picking, stand up to lots of scrapes and bruises, climb really high and dive really deep. This is where I learned how to be.



It has been two years since I was here. It’s nice to be back.

at home and on the road

sunrise:  5:01

Finally a bit of blue sky to greet the dawn.  

For those of you who follow regularly, take note:  For the next two weeks I will have spotty or even no internet connection.  I'll still be writing sunrise posts every morning, but they may accumulate on my desktop until I can get to a place where I can find a signal.

It's good to shake oneself out of routine now and then by traveling away from home.  This trip hardly counts, since I'm traveling to a home away from home that I have known my entire life, but still, it's away from my own kitchen, my piles of mail, my computer room, my perpetual to-do lists, my broken washing machine.

There have been periods in my life when I have ached to travel, get away, see the world, explore the new.  Other times I want nothing more than to be in my own home, in my own comfortable space with everything that is familiar to me.  Some people seem to be all one way or the other.

I had a neighbor in Rochester, NY once who had never been more than about 80 miles from home, and lived next door to family.  She aspired to nothing more than that for her future or for her own son - that he move in next door, perhaps, into his grandparents' home, after they have passed away.


 

Then there was this boat captain I met 25 years ago.  He took J and me and two other couples in a 44 foot boat on a Virgin Islands trip that we won in a fundraiser auction.  He owned a boat of his own, which was his home.  He loved it because he could take his home with him anywhere he wanted to go.  "I can't imagine waking up with the same view out the window every day."

I love roots and consistency, but I squirm at the tyranny of routine.  Once in a while we have to get away, or at least rearrange the furniture.  So I guess I fall squarely in between those two extremes.

It will be nice to leave for a while, so that I may have the pleasure of returning to my lovely home.

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By the way - here is a really funny blog - hyperbole and a half

sunrise sunset

sunrise:  5:00

Isn't it weird how you feel so exhausted some mornings when you had plenty of sleep, and then other mornings you get up after 4 1/2 hours and you feel pretty great?  Today feels great, maybe because I had such a nice yesterday.

Okay - full disclosure:  This is not my back yard, and it is not a sunrise either.  I am guessing that if you are as tired of gray mornings as I am, you might enjoy the break from the usual routine. 

This is what today's backyard outing had to offer...

now we'll go back to last night in Bar Harbor.

J. finally has a couple of days off.  We took a little trip down to Bar Harbor yesterday to visit T's workplace, where she is still happily thriving.  Any work that brings you home saying, "I LOVE my job!" three or four times a week is pretty darn good. 

What a fantastic evening on multiple fronts.  After watching the Germans win third place in the World Cup (congratualtions to my German friends!), we got ready to go down to Mt. Desert Island, home of Acadia National Park, Bar Harbor, and other really cool sites and sights, sounds and sounds (well - one sound, Somes Sound, the only fjord in North America, or something like that).

Bar Harbor was bustling but not oppressively crowded.  It may be a mob scene next weekend with people headed to the area hoping to catch a glimpse of our First Family on vacation.  The Obamas clearly have exquisite taste in vacation locales.  I hope they see Maine's coast at its best.

T. did a great sales job in her element.  We tasted just about every vinegar and oil in the place and left with many bottles. 

We stopped in a local book store and J. heard someone mention the title of a Rachel Field book.  I asked about their interest, and it turns out they are ancestors of Captain Samuel Hadlock, the old Maine sea captain that Rachel wrote about in God's Pocket.    Now I have their contact information in case they might have something interesting to add to my research (and they might buy a book some day!)
 
 Dinner at the Bar Harbor Inn, serenaded by my spectacularly talented piano teacher.  It is like magic, how music can soothe the soul. 

He played a few of our requests, and a song that he helped me arrange a couple of years ago, and when everyone was ogling the sunset, he broke into "Sunrise, Sunset" from Fiddler on the Roof.  The piano is like an extension of his fingers - they seem to just fly in an effortless dance.  So amazing.  That song about children growing and time passing particularly reached me since I've been feeling the hollow ache in my stomach lately.  I am struck by how much I'm going to miss my dear little girl, my laughing buddy, my household companion who's going off into the world.

Crab stuffed sole with lobster hollandaise helps.  Glass of wine.  And then that sunset out the window.  I was a happy camper.

T. joined us as we finished up, just in time to hear our piano playing friend playing a Beatles medley.  In fact, he was playing "In My Life" as T walked in, the song she played for her Dad at the spring Cabaret this year!  She was sure we had orchestrated it, but I think the piano man must just be psychic.  It was all as perfect as it could have been - and just the thing for a work weary and laryngitis-fighting husband.

The hour and a quarter drive each way was worth every minute.  

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I don't usually eat before posting, but I had to sample a few of these black raspberries as I walked by this morning.

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correction:  TODAY, the second 5:00am sunrise,  was the last repeated sunrise hour, not 4:57am from a few days ago.  oops.

reading the signs

sunrise:  5:00 

This is a hard one to transmit with a photo, but the leaves on this tree are blowing in a particular way.  Can you see how a lot of them are being blown upside down, so you can see their undersides?  When I was growing up someone taught me that that is a sign of bad weather coming in.  It's another gray, thick sky.  A lot of leaves are showing their undersides this morning.

I have been thinking about the phenomenon of reading of signs lately.  Once again, I am inspired by my dogs. 

The other day I sat at the computer in the afternoon.  I thought, maybe I'll take the dogs for a walk.  Now, I get up and down from the computer many times in a day - use the bathroom, get some food, make a phone call, go upstairs.  This time I got up, used the bathroom, and when I emerged, the dogs  danced at my feet in waggy expectation.  How did they know? 

I have no illusions about dogs reading my mind.  If they could read my mind, I am quite sure that they would not get it.  What they read beautifully are non-verbal clues that I don't even realize I am giving.  I must have a pattern, a way of moving, a kind of look about me that generally precedes an outing.

When it comes to humans, some people are pretty good at detecting those non-verbal clues.  Many detect them only in an unconscious way, and a third set remain entirely clueless.   Part of the problem is our overlay of imagination, suspicion, fear, and superstition - often followed by an intellectual analysis that attempts to deconstruct our own imaginings.  It's no wonder we second guess ourselves all the time.  Our minds are so inventive that they often obstruct our instincts.

Reading each other, too, is challenging because we are performers.  Most animals can't pretend.  If a dog is angry or fearful it's not hard to notice.  If they are happy, that tail wags no matter how they try to restrain it.  I have often felt the world would be a better place if humans had tails.  Then you would know when to approach and when to stay the hell away.

Part of the trick is to do two things:  1.  Open your mind to it  2.  Trust your intuition

When you meet some people, their charisma fills a room.  They have that je ne sais quoi,  something you can't put your finger on, but you feel it in their presence.  Other times someone makes you squirm with discomfort.  There must be ways to learn how to read people scientifically, but really, most people have the innate ability to sense things if they just turn on their antennae.  We have the ability, I believe, to recognize signs in each other, lack of tails notwithstanding.

Reading the natural world is not unlike reading other mammals.  It is something we were born to do, but modern society has diluted our abilities.  I read about an old islander in the Pacific who navigated 1000 miles of open sea in a canoe, just by reaching his hand in the water and feeling the currents.  And there was that community of people on an island in the far east who fled in anticipation of the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean.  They knew, somehow, and all survived.

It is a lot darker now at 6:18 than it was when I was out walking at dawn.  Something is in the air.  It's not always that hard to read.

micro beauty

sunrise:  4:59

One of the small challenges of my daily walks at dawn is to find beauty in the every day.  I confess that on some mornings it is harder than others. 

Those days where there is not a hint of color in the sky other than a vast, monochromatic gray are hardest for me, especially when there is a weight in the atmosphere of impending weather.  

However, the air is soft and caressing, a light breeze dancing around the body in a tantalizing way.  This was one of only two days this year that I have gone out in the morning without a jacket.  Being somewhat intolerant of heat, cool summer mornings are one of the things I love about Maine.  Still, a sultry morning now and again is a nice novelty.

The birds and frogs are happily singing away, as usual.

And when the macro-view of the world is gloomy, I go for the micro-view.  Beauty is out there.  Sometimes you have to stand still and look more closely.

canopy

sunrise:  4:58

The summer trees are in their prime right now, creating cascades of canopy underneath which we diminutive humans walk.  I was thinking about how much I have loved creating hideaways under canopies of trees all my life.  I'm sure I'm not alone.

A snow draped pine bough makes a perfect secret hiding place in the winter time.  When a low hanging curtain of oak or maple leaves creates a tent-like hallway, who can resist walking underneath it?

It is one of those inclinations that makes me imagine that we carry a deeper connection to our collective ancestry than we imagine.  Or I suppose it could just be the survival instinct of our species to be attracted to a useful shelter.

For my tenth birthday my mother gave me a canopy bed as a surprise gift.  I had wanted one for a long time, and when I walked into my room and saw the lacy white shelter under which I would sleep, I raced downstairs to hug my mom.  I had always had problems with "scared of the dark."  Something about this canopy over my head made me feel safer.  What could possibly be deterred by a tent covering of light cotton?  Who knows.  But it felt reassuring to me.

Food.  Shelter.  Clothing.  That is what it comes down to.  That is really all that we need, that our instincts insistently seek out for our well being.  That is why children love to crawl into a tent, or create a fort out of an old refrigerator box, or set up house under a table.  When we grow up, the shelters we create get awfully elaborate, and sometimes we surely get carried away.

It's a nice thing to ponder when you get caught in a light rain and walk underneath a canopy of trees.  Nature has got us covered.

the importance of silliness

sunrise:  4:57

Today is the last day this year that the sunrise minute repeats the day before.  Starting tomorrow we will gain a minute or two every day through 2010.  I'm looking forward to getting back on the other side of of 5am.

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One of the things I really miss about having small children around the house is the excuse to be silly.  This morning reminded me of a little rhyme that I used to recite to my kids as they grew up.  It finished with three very big handshakes that made them giggle.

'Twas a misty moisty morning,

and murky was the weather,

when I spied a small man

all dressed in leather.

He began to compliment 

and I began to grin - 

How do you do, 

and how do you do,

and how do you do again!

After a time of course, all it took was the first line to get them grinning in anticipation.  What does it mean?  What is the point?

My dad used to tell us an anecdote:

"Don't forget rule number 5" 

"What's rule number 5?"

"Don't take yourself too seriously."

"What about rules 1 through 4?" 

"There are no other rules."

It always confused me, but I think that may have been the point.  Knowing all the details and all the rules is often less important than perspective on the whole process.  It is akin, in my mind, to something my father-in-law apparently used to do with his kids when they were growing up.  If they were getting a bit high and mighty - too big for their britches, as they say - he would march them outside and make them look up at the stars, the vastness of the universe.  Now how big and important do your preoccupations seem?  Not a bad exercise for any of us.

Weighty seriousness has its place, but we have to remember that we are a tiny blip in time.  Part of making the most of our brief stay here in this earthly incarnation is frolicking a little bit.  Laugh, dance, tell a joke, make faces, pretend, perform antics.

What is the point?  To be here and now and filled with the joy of the moment, before it all passes us by.  Little children are facilitators to that state of mind, and embrace it beautifully.  Good to remember.

How do you do,

and how do you do,

and how do you do again!