25-April-99 A Slow Sunday

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In contrast to all the things we did at the NE Folk Festival yesterday, today was particularly quiet.

We had a long slow breakfast with Elizabeth and Daniel, hearing lots of stories about Elizabeth's growing up in Florida in the 30's, when times were so tough that her father couldn't afford the $7 a month rent for the shack they were living in, but was allowed to stay on for three more months in exchange for his roofing the shack with tarpaper, and the time while they were living in the chicken feed storage shed on another farm that a hurricane turned the shack around in the middle of the night and Liz slept through it.

I spent a lot of the morning stamping sixty prints of some of my eraser carvings for an overdue swap. This is something done by, believe it or not, snail mail, with actual paper copies sent in by sixty participants, to be bound into an accordian book, one of each person's prints per book of course, and sent back. It was just supposed to be a sampler of each person's carvings, so it sounded as though it wouldn't take a whole lot of planning or specific carving. I ended up using a “Honk if you Love PostScript” slogan in PostScript syntax, a violin that we have in our catalog (but I stamped the original carving), and four fragments of guitar from my “Homage to Picasso -- Stamp a Cubist Guitar” series. When I looked at the stampings later in the day when I packed the whole thing up to mail, I was pretty well pleased with how they looked.

Arlene called me outside to help carry home some hosta plants the neighbors were digging up -- personally I'm hostile to hosta -- well, not really, but it sounded too good to pass up, and the neighbor said, “Mr. Bandes [he always calls me that when his kids are around, to encourage them to treat me like a grownup], take a look in the cellar.” I wasn't sure I'd notice whatever wonderful thing there was, but it was tough to miss -- a gorgeous mahogany plywood flat-bottomed skiff under construction, taking up half the cellar. He's been working on it since the fall. He has measured the boat and the door time after time and is pretty sure he'll be able to get it out, but it's going to be close.

The bottom line on gardening around here is that the built up part of New England is all a huge clearing in the forest. The forest is there, waiting to come back any time the human beings forget that. Fifty maple trees I pulled out of the lawn this afternoon made that clear. Well, maple seedlings, but it's really just a matter of size.

Oh, and the rocks. I hit a thirty pounder while digging a hole to put the hosta in, and moved it to the rock garden. It gives me an excuse to tell my favorite story about the geology around here:

A stranger traveling in northern New England had been curious about all the stone walls separating the fields, and finally found a farmer to ask. “My good man, where did all the stones in those walls come from?”

“Glacier brought 'em,” replied the taciturn local.

“Glacier? I don't see any glacier” said the puzzled visitor.

“Went back t' git more rocks,” said the farmer resignedly.