Not-So-Idle Days, Idyll Evenings

The view from Snake Mountain, the lake in the background

Much of our time has been spent doing chores of one kind and another.  Well, for me, two kinds, mostly:  painting, and weeding.  The painting that relates to the porch is now pretty much done. The weeding, I’ll admit, will never be complete.  In the long garden it’s a battle against staggering odds.  A hike up Snake Mountain, the mountain we see from our porch to the southwest, was a break from all this.  It was hot, but Harry, thirteen now, managed quite well.

Harry admiring the view

The days have been warm and warmer, interrupted somewhat regularly by thunderstorms, and the nights, soft and balmy.  A picnic supper and swim with the Huston gang at Kingsland Bay on Lake Champlain marked the official beginning of summer as far as I was concerned.  The night of the fourth of July (well, actually it was Sunday, the 3rd) was one of those summer days.  After a dinnertime downpour (which downpoured inside the screened porch as well as outside, thanks to a long-awaited but still-not-completed roof covering, and the rain had Ken scurrying to keep the kebabs on the grill, and himself, from getting soaked) the fireworks went off under a cloudless sky. A good display for a small town, with the same kind of starbursts I oohed and aahed about in the Boston version.  A brass band–the one that plays in the gazebo on the Vergennes Green from time to time–played every piece of march music known to man, ending at last with “The Stars and Stripes Forever” while the rockets got fired up.  It felt very intimate; there were acres of space available for laying out blankets or setting up chairs, not a single thing to block anybody’s view, everything happening directly in front and overhead, and the wind blowing all the smoke in the opposite direction.  In other words, it was just right.

The night before had been just about right too.  A night of music (rocking blues) on a sweet summer’s night.  The event was indoors, though, at the Vergennes Opera House.  Headliners were a couple of musicians from New Orleans (including a blind keyboard player who looked like Stevie Wonder; we have been very into the music of New Orleans after watching a season of Treme on HBO).  Leading off was Panton Flats, a local five-man group that got the place jumping.  It was easy to get moving to this music.  The place was sold out, but there weren’t enough chairs for everyone (most of us were sitting around tables that took up a lot of space), so about a third of the audience was standing, making it that much easier to dance or just move to the beat.  Besides the 30-somethings and 40-somethings I figured would be there, we saw plenty of children, old people (that’s us, I guess), and very old people.  Dancing, too.  A local bar was selling everything from cokes to whiskey.

Nights are beautiful.  Last week I woke around 3AM for no particular reason.  At that moment it occurred to me that I didn’t really know this place at night.   So I got out of bed and wandered downstairs without turning on any lights.  I realized I know the house well enough now to navigate it in the near dark, my way lit by the myriad green and blue and red equipment gear–the TV, stove, smoke alarms, clocks, etc.  (Is any house ever completely dark anymore?)  Outdoors there was a kind of monitoring light too, the meager shine from a slit of moon, the distant glare of a farmyard light, and among the grasses:  fireflies.  Looking at this through the screen door wasn’t good enough, so I got myself a glass of wine (at 3 AM!), went onto the front porch and sat in one of the Adirondack chairs.  I listened to the tree frogs and the bullfrogs and other unidentifiable sounds.  But for these, all was still.  This was just right.