The Only Good Reason to be Awake at 7:00 AM

The Only Good reason

To Be Awake at 7:00 AM

Catmandoo enjoying a good book; Charley Freiberg photo

The Sailor got me up at 7 am last Saturday to go to the 5 Colleges book sale, which takes place at the end of spring vacation week every year in the Lebanon high school. For the week when students aren’t there, volunteers take over the school and set up long tables in the halls, in the cafeteria and gym, and in several smaller rooms where very special items are located. For the two days when the sale happens, hundreds of people lugging cloth bags, cardboard boxes, pull-along luggage, backpacks, milk crates on dollies, even carts with crates on them, all line up and jostle for space close to the tables to check out the thousands and thousands of used books that can be purchased for a dollar or two, or if it’s a very special book, maybe ten dollars or so. Spend $300, get a discount. Day 2 is half-price day.

The volunteers must work non-stop for days, sorting books into categories, putting special books – first editions, old and unusual books, potential gift selections or selections for collectors – aside for the specialty rooms and tables. In the halls, there are videotapes, DVDs, CDs, sheet music, play scripts, school yearbooks, books on sailing, books that don’t fit into other categories, books for dummies, or tables of books by one or two authors. One of the big rooms is all non-fiction: travel, art, sports, history, science, electronics, philosophy, religion, NH and New England interest, cookbooks, photography, biographies, comics and graphic novels, books about animals, medicine, raising chickens, woodworking, gardening, and so on. In the other big room is fiction, divided up by author’s last name, children’s books over there, sci-fi and fantasy over that way, mysteries in the middle, historical fiction and gift books along the wall, foreign languages near the kid’s books, and don’t forget to look at the hundreds of titles in boxes under the tables waiting for space so they can come up onto the tables. There will be dozens of copies of last year’s best sellers, and one or two copies each of older volumes. Mother West Wind stories from my father’s childhood? There was a whole box full. Miss Read’s Fairacre and Thrush Green series? Yes, a dozen of those for $10! There are tables of books that won the Pulitzer Prize or Newberry Awards, books that are part of series, books illustrated by famous artists, books signed by famous authors or illustrators.

We got there this year just before 8:30, and didn’t have to hunt for parking space – come much later than 10 and you’ll be walking a distance. Keep that in mind, because bags full of books weigh a lot more than the empty bags you’ll be happily toting on your way in!

The doors didn’t open until 9, and there was already a line of eager readers (and used book dealers) snaking from the door, down the sidewalk, and part-way around the side of the building – and the line got longer, and longer, and longer as the minutes passed. I later asked Someone Who Knew how early you’d need to be there to be first in line: 6 a.m.!! Which explained the several campers we saw parked nearby the door. The Sailor noted that it was a lot like a line for a rock concert – folks had folding chairs and stools, everyone was pumped, and the dealers had impressive weight-moving equipment. It is the rock-concert of used book sales, for sure.

It’s amazing how well-organized the sale is. Someone came out and handed out maps this year, showing where the different kinds of books and other items were located. This year, there was also a small Farmer’s Market set up just outside the doors, maybe 5 vendors, doing a pretty good business in honey, maple products, canned goodies, pies, frozen meats, and so on. We went home with a bag of several kinds of pickles as well as the bags of books.

Oh, the books! In spite of how many people were there, as soon as you got into the hall room expanded, somehow, so you could look and select, and everyone was very polite. I filled my backpack full and had started filling the giant cloth bag I’d brought, when I discovered the box full of Miss Read novels. Clearly couldn’t carry that and the bag and the backpack, and just then I bumped into The Sailor, who’d already filled three of his cloth bags. We decided to haul our treasures out to the car, then come back and start

The plot requires a moment of reflection; Charley Freiberg photo

again. My load cost me $41 dollars; his cost him about $50. The checkout line we’d chosen turned out to be pretty close to where we’d parked, so it wasn’t long before we’d unloaded and were back in book heaven, me carrying my giant cloth bag that’s as big as at least two good-sized normal cloth bags (note to self: too heavy!! Bring a 2^nd backpack and smaller cloth bags next year!) and The Sailor with another two cloth bags. About 40 minutes later I was sending him a pitiful message: “I can’t carry this bag it’s too heavy! I’ve got to get out of here where are you?”

He, and his two quite full bags, soon arrived. This second load cost me $76 and him another $45. Then I headed off to check out (taste-test) the Farmer’s Market, and he went back into the school, emerging before I’d made it completely around the taste-testing pickle table with – yes! another armload of books!

Full disclosure: of the dozens and dozens of used books I bought, probably 15 were bought either to give to my grand-nieces or nieces, and to several friends who I believe will enjoy them. Of the rest, I accidentally bought three I already own. Oops! It happens, but the mistake cost me a grand total of $5. Those will go into the pile to pass on to someone I know will enjoy them. Of the rest – well, one was for The Husband, and the rest will keep me happily reading for most of the next 12 months. Most will be passed on when I’ve finished them to other readers I know who enjoy some of the same types of things I do, or I’ll donate them to the New London COA booksale, or maybe even sell them at a yard sale, or put them on the “free for the taking” bench in the Tiptop Building. They’ll get read again and again, or maybe turned into artwork.

This was an excellent morning, and well worth grumpily discovering that the world actually functions earlier than 10 am. I wouldn’t want to do it often, but, hey, I stayed awake and upright. 

The Sailor and I were dancing joyful dances of glee over our full bags, but our day wasn’t over yet. Next up: the Chinese buffet restaurant, another thing we love and our spouses have no interest in. We love the Chinese buffet. But even that wasn’t the end of our very excellent day because it’s April, and the Norwich Bookstore had sent me a coupon worth 20% off one item (note that: one item, not as many items as you’re sure you can’t live without) during my birthday month.

Who needed to go to a real bookstore after the indulgent morning we’d just spent and all the books that were weighing down the car? We did, of course. And the Norwich Bookstore is one of our favorites. There are comfortable chairs…and music…sunlight pouring in several windows…and ambience. All you have to do is sink into one of those chairs, and within moments you discover at least three books you need to own, cards for all the people whose birthdays are coming up soon, gorgeous postcards (I send mail, real mail, actual hold-in-your-hands mail) and a couple of gifties for those upcoming birthday people. Two hundred dollars later, I was impressing on The Sailor that he needed to get me out of that store before I totally bankrupted myself. And reminding him that next month is his birthday and he’ll be getting his birthday month coupon in the mail soon and we’ll need to go experience the ambience again…

Which reminds me…I’ve never taken him to the used bookstore in Claremont…

This was a full day, and we even managed to get a few errands run. We got home just in time to hear the wood frogs begin their very first concert of the season, and time for me to take the Barkie Boy for a short walk before dark.

Must have been a bodice-ripper! Charley Freiberg photo

And then time to spend a couple of hours hauling my haul up to the bedroom, sorting it into piles, then arranging the part I’ll be reading in two very large baskets that are easy to reach. And to start one of Miss Read’s charming stories; and remind myself I have two final partially-finished books from last year that I should finish first; and then start yet another of the new old books…

You’re probably wondering if I’m out of my mind. I read pretty much constantly – while I’m brushing my teeth, while I’m waiting for the coffee to make itself, while I’m waiting for pretty much anything to happen, before I get out of bed in the morning, before I turn the bedroom light out at night. A reason to call AAA is unexpected bonus time to read the book I carry with me literally everywhere I go. If you have a book, almost anything is bearable.

And at the moment, I have a few books…

Is Spring Here? Update: Monday the 23^rd – peepers started their carols late this afternoon in the vernal pool on the far side of the back 40. Yep, spring is officially here.

Written for the blog, 22 April 2018: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com

GPSing My Roots

April 18. My front yard and the back forty are still all white – they had mostly turned brown-dead-grass color, and then we had weather again this week, and as far as my eye can see, I see white. The giant snow piles are lower, though. And it’s cold. Abu and I tried a stroll late this afternoon and half-way to neighbah Eddie Bear’s pond, he stopped, gave me a searching look, then turned around to high-tail it back to the house. Even dressed in full winter regalia: winter jacket, winter vest, sweater, shirt, scarf, polar-fleece gloves, and hat, the wind was stinging my face and I was pretty uncomfortable, so I didn’t argue with him. And when we got home, I cranked the heat up to 68. I’m sick of being cold, dammit, and the woodpile’s just about non-existent, at this point.

Today’s my 62^nd birthday, so I took it off from work, and tomorrow, too. The original thought was The Husband and I'd escape the country for a day, which would have been a very long day and I’d need tomorrow to sleep much later than usual, but the cold and continuing weather (please read all the cusswords that apply into that rendering of the word) convinced us that driving to Montreal and then walking the streets there would be no treat. So instead we headed toward the coast, to put me back in touch with my roots – well, some of my roots. Montreal is part of my roots, but I don’t know those, so well.

My mother’s parents, and my mother too, come from Dover, NH. Her father was a second-generation Irish-Scot, and her mother was a second-generation French-Canadian – the only one amongst her many siblings born in the States. Grampa Breen was a carpenter/contractor, and besides building the house my mother and aunt grew up in, built a lot of the fine buildings in Dover that went up in the 1940s-1960s. He would have built more, but died unexpectedly in the mid-1960s, when I was only 9 years old. 

The houses from that era were well-constructed, and had a certain style to them, and a certain smell, also. It’s hard to describe that smell, but it wafts through my memories of my grandparents’ house, and I’ve smelled it again in houses from the same era, including one down in CT where the crazy beloved friend who lives in Florida now used to live, and a couple in Maine and elsewhere in NH that I had passing acquaintance with.  The house, essentially a center-stair Cape with flourishes, had a breezeway – all the houses from that era had breezeways, which sometimes were used just as elaborate mud rooms or garden sheds, maybe holding the chest freezer and garden tools and outdoor toys, sometimes, like at my aunt's house, morphed into little snugs, complete with an old couch covered in many layers of old quilts, maybe a picnic table, and a second tv (rabbit ears!), along with the wet beach clothes and towels and the chest freezer and garden tools and muddy boots, and a ratty throw rug on the floor. And sand – lots of sand.

Those houses also had 2-car garages, which is interesting, because most folks then didn’t actually have two cars. My grandpa, being a contractor, had a car and a truck; the breezeway or the garage also held his golf clubs in season, and stuff to take to the beach, like coolers and lawn chairs and life vests. Their breezeway was a narrow one – more of a mudroom than anything else, but not a sandy breezeway, and not a messy breezeway.

On the opposite end of my grandparent’s house, there was a screened-in porch, with giant wall-sized screens that came down every fall and were stored in the garage until summer.

The house sat on a hill above Dover, and when I was a kid, you could see the lights of downtown Dover twinkling at night from the second-floor windows.  At the end of the road nearest my grandparents’ house was a farm, with cows, where my mother had played in the barn with her grade-school friend whose family farm it was; and at the other end of the road was a triangular piece of land covered with tall pines, which the neighborhood had turned into a park for children – it had a slide, and swings, and we were allowed to walk that far by ourselves when visiting.

The address is pretty much burned into my memory, from years of addressing cards and childish letters to my grandparents, and then my grandmother alone: 10 Fairview Ave. Could we find it? Would I recognize it if we did?

As it turns out, in spite of the weather we’ve been having, beginning about half-way from here to Concord there was no white stuff on the ground; and from Concord to the coast, it just got sunnier and warmer every 10 miles. By the time we hit Dover, we’d peeled off winter coats, scarves, gloves, hats, and turned on the air conditioning. Maybe we should consider moving to warmer climes in our retirement years, back to my roots.

Through the magic of GPS, we found Fairview Ave with only a few side-trip-ups. And the farm was still there – no cows that we could see, but the fields are clearly regularly hayed, and the barn was in fine shape. 10 Fairview Ave looks like it did back in the day, except that now it’s not white, but a grayish blue, and a big front tree has been cut down. And there was a truck in the driveway, appropriately. The breezeway was still there, and the screens were out of the porch. And – unexpected miracle – the little park at the other end of the road also was still there, with its slide and its swings!

We went around twice, and took pictures. Then we headed down hill, to downtown, hunting for lunch. We went into Harvey’s – flashback! Flashback! Boy, I’m sure I’ve been there before; and it’s been around long enough that I probably have been. The bakery part’s been there even longer – I’ve got to remember to ask Mom if that was the bakery that made her wedding cake. We chatted up a couple of the waitresses, one of whom was a local, and she told me the big Irish church is still there, but the French church was torn down a year ago. We had lunch with a big serving of nostalgia, and best of all – free desserts with lunch on Wednesdays!

More research and another trip to find church, cemetery, Great-grandma’s house, and the mills where Meme worked as a young woman are in order, but all in all, it wasn’t a bad way to spend a cold, nasty birth day. And I was warm until we got north of Concord again!

Soooo --- here’s my biggest question of the day: how does GOOGLE know it’s my birthday??

For the blog, April 18, 2018.

Postscript: I asked Mom about Harvey's. She doesn't remember if that bakery made her wedding cake, but she told me that when she was 16 years old, it was her first job, ever. She imagined she'd be out front wrapping up lovely goodies for ladies to take home, but instead she was put out back to wash the giant cooking pots and pans. Mom isn't that big now, and at 16 she would have been tiny; and she said the constant smell of sugary things baking would make her nauseous. So the owner of the shop fired her!

All photos of 10 Fairview Ave taken via phone from the car! Deb Marshall photos

It's April!

A new birdhouse; and snow. Deb Marshall photo

 It’s April! And we seem to have weathered the full moon and April Fool’s Day with nothing worse happening than what’s been happening all along the past year-plus – no one believes anything anyone says unless it’s inflammatory, we don’t trust anyone and can’t tell who’s trustworthy,  we’re loathe to give even our own folks the benefit of the doubt, we’re all incredibly grumpy, the energy’s bad pretty much everywhere, the full moon made everyone crazier and crankier than ever, and we’re all afraid – mostly of partially-imagined bogey men but also that our world could suddenly end or change radically, in a really bad way, with an ill-advised tweet – and boy, do I miss the days when a friend and I regularly intoned, as a joke, “It’s all Obama’s fault.” 

One of our biggest problems is that when we somehow got stuck with the current regime, the idiot-in-power still insists it’s all Obama’s fault. 

And yet, there are signs of good stuff, or at least better stuff happening, at least in my small world. The Actress and her husband are back from their winter’s long trek down south, the Tall Dude is back from his equally long ski trek out west, and the Guy With The Accent showed up unexpectedly for supper about a week ago. We hadn’t seen him for more than a year, maybe two – he’s been traveling the country, with some quick European trips, for his job, which puts him in touch with farmers on both sides of the Pond. His observations are pretty interesting, but he’s kind of homeless at the moment, rarely getting a chance to get back to his old digs on our western border. 

Out in my yard, the snow suddenly mostly left my garden this past weekend, though there’s still plenty of it in the field beyond. One brave crocus has bloomed next to the raised bed closest the house, and some jonquils are starting to pop out next to it; Mom has a bunch of stuff up and growing in her protected back yard next to the back wall. The birds are starting to ignore most of the seed I’ve been putting out (and removing at night, sorry, Bear!) and there are at least four woodcocks peeting away under the bright moon on our little island – one in my field, one across the street near the marsh, a third two neighbors down next to their pond, and a fourth that seems to be either in our corner field or in the field across the street – it’s hard to tell, there’s an echo  in that area, so maybe there are two. I’ve heard their whistling flight a few times during the last few nights.

A view down the fence line - and more snow. Deb Marshall photo

Abu and I have finally been able to walk down the driveway without losing my boots into the endless sucking mud, so we’ve had a few moonlight walks lately. Old as he is, he’s always ready for a stroll, but he prefers the night-time adventures – apparently there’s better sniffing at night. 

We headed out into the garden for the first time today, eager to dig up the over-wintered parsnips. Over-wintered parsnips are an eagerly-awaited spring treat – they turn sweet and incredibly delicious after being frozen into the ground for several months. So out I went, hand-trowel in hand, basket on arm, and found --- nothing! Well, nothing but a whole lot of underground tunnels and a few sprouting greens attached to a quarter-inch of parsnip that had been neatly snipped off down below. Some critter – maybe chipmunks, maybe mice, maybe both – apparently had a fine winter feasting on my parsnips!

All one can say is, Oh, Well. Actually, I had a lot more than that to say about it, but mostly cusswords, so fill in the blanks for yourself. 

I decided to hang out the two new bird houses I got for Christmas since it was a fine day today. One’s attached to the side of the arch where a different house was last year, the other is  three fenceposts down, setting on top of the post and attached to the wire fence that runs up it. I’ll try to surround both with vines this summer, to give the birds some shade and privacy. I also hung the onion bag into which I’ve been collecting hair from my hairbrush and cat and dog fur from their brushings for the last couple of years; it amuses me to think that some lucky eggs will be nestled into a cozy nest lined with cat fur.

New birdhouse on a fence post; and yes, snow. Deb Marshall photo

Hard to believe with the temperatures still as chilly as they are, and snow predicted overnight, but when I lifted the base of the bird bath from its winter prone position this afternoon, what did I find but a slug! And somehow, that’s a fitting commentary on the state of the larger world, as well as my small world – there are some creepy, slimy things that managed to survive the winter and that have emerged early to cause as much mayhem as possible. 

Sigh. Slugs can be unhinged with beer; I wonder if that would work on the other slimy things in our world?

The brave crocus; Deb Marshall photo

For the blog alone; 2 April 2018