Three Houses Up

Mr. and Mrs. Kinney, Updated

2012-02-13T20:06:00.000-05:00

The other day, as part of my neighborhood history project, I was online studying the 1880 and 1900 U.S.Census records of households on North Street. Charles W. Kinney, a prominent marble dealer, moved to North in 1888, from 17 Summer Street, the house which was the subject of my chapbook, and my family home for twenty-seven years. Kinney and his wife, Harriet, bought the modest 1872 cottage on Summer in 1880, from the subdivision developers Lewis Warner and Lucien Dawson. I titled the chapter chronicling the Kinneys’ years on Summer:”Starter House,” a nod to the couple’s decision to “move up” and build a far grander house on North.

After the book was published, I experienced lingering pangs of remorse that I had not investigated the couple more thoroughly in census and town records. After looking at marriage records and the 1880 U.S. Census, I know now “Starter House” was indeed an appropriate title. Charles Kinney, age 34, and Harriet “Hattie” Anable Lambert, age 28, were married in 1880, the year they bought the house,. It was the second marriage for both. Charles’s first wife, Eva Collins—a name I have a vague recollection of coming across in my original research—was from Springfield; the couple married in 1873 when she 20. By the spring of 1879, young Eva Kinney was dead, having wasted away from tuberculosis. The 1880 U.S. Census for Charles W. Kinney reveals previously unknown, and surprising, details about the composition of the Kinney household on Summer Street. There were two children living in the house—Hattie’s seven-year olds sons, Lewis and Harold, from her first marriage—and an Irish servant, 14-year-old Kate A. Meagher. Kate surely was the first and only live-in servant to reside at 17 Summer.For a picture of the Kinney house on North Street, click here, to the post: “Me and Mr. Kinney.”

Farmer's Market, California Style

2012-02-13T15:51:00.001-05:00

At a Candidates’ Forum last fall, I filled out a lengthy survey that a Northampton committee was circulating to learn the food-shopping practices of local residents and their allegiance to buying local and eating organic. Where did we shop? Why this particular store? How often? Do we cook dinners from scratch? How many a week? How important was buying local? Organic? When asked how often I shop at one of the farmer’s markets in Northampton, I wrote: “Got out of the habit.”

For years, I attended the Saturday market on Gothic Street, and, when I remembered, the Wednesday one in Florence. Bumping into friends and neighbors, greeting the same vendors week after week, carrying home the season’s first crop of spinach or strawberries or field greens—when I lived on Summer, a short walk from Gothic, this was my early Saturday morning habit. And then, one day, routines shift: You retire, money gets tighter and schedules looser; you sell your house, lose your garden (and need to buy plants) and move, to a street not much farther from Gothic, but lugging produce home on foot seems a burden and driving to buy a single bag of spinach, silly. Shopping at farm stands—Golonka’s in West Whatley, the place on Bridge Road opposite St. Mary’s Cemetery, Atkins for apples—becomes the retiree’s preferred, and spontaneous, diversion.

My husband and I are spending our third winter in Solana Beach, a small beach community of 12,000 in San Diego County. There are some fifty neighborhood farmer’s markets in the county, and, they can be found nearly every day of the week year-round. Across the street from our apartment is a regional store called Sprouts (formerly named Henry’s), known for the abundance, variety—and low cost—of its fresh fruit and vegetables. We’re in there nearly every day. Nevertheless, California has re-fired my farmer’s market habit. On Sundays, Mike and I often drive north to Leukadia Farmer’s Market, a big, hugely popular market sprawled on the grounds of an elementary school. Founded by a group of English Spiritualists in the 1870s, Leukadia is the funky section of Encinitas, and a throwback to the California of old when the 101 was new, the big ranches and farms and flower fields unbroken, and trailer parks squatted along the highway. The market captures the laid-back vibe of North County. It has food stands selling a smorgasbord of tasty freshly prepared fare, coffee and smoothies and bread and buns for sale, an ethnic and social mix of buyers and vendors, a playground for the kids, and the school’s lunch tables and big grassy lawn for plopping down, hanging out, and eating al fresco. Northampton can't top that.

Super Sunday, 3:30 pm PST

2012-02-05T19:27:00.000-05:00

Temperature around 70 degrees.Cloudless blue sky.Cardiff-by-the-Sea beach, emptied out.

2012-02-02T19:37:00.001-05:00

“How often do we tell our life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.”

— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

Not Quite Like Home

2012-02-02T14:48:00.000-05:00

Thirty years ago, when I was living in Newport Beach, I stepped into my first Trader Joe’s. At the time, Trader Joe’s was a small upstart regional chain, and shopping at its no-frills store in nearby Costa Mesa soon became a cheap form of recreation for my family.

Clerks in Hawaiian shirts. Cans and packages with odd names, shelves stocked with groovy food, some of which I had never heard of. Cases of wine in wooden boxes. A flyer called Insider’s Report filled with chatty anecdotes on global economic trends affecting the price of brown rice or cocoa beans and tales of savvy buyers tirelessly combing world markets, farms and wineries for bargains to bring home for their hip customers. This was not my Stop and Shop in Northampton or remotely like the old Food Coop on Market Street. This place had personality. This place was California. Yesterday, I was in Encinitas on what I dub my ”Route Nine in Hadley” shopping run—Target and Trader Joe’s. But, in my California TJ’s, you’ll find Two Buck Chuck, plants and flowers for sale outside, doors wide open, and my little Toyota wedged in between a Lexus and a Mercedes.

Minutes Away, Until April

2012-01-30T15:31:00.000-05:00

High Tide at San Elijo

Amtrak Surfliner along Cardiff-by-the-Sea beach

Saturday morning at Encinitas

Painting the Town . . .

2012-01-20T18:39:00.000-05:00

Long Time, No Word

2012-01-20T15:14:00.000-05:00

When I arrived in San Diego two weeks ago, for another three-month respite from winter, I vowed that I would pay more attention to Three Houses Up. I abandoned the blog on a gorgeous October day in the hill towns of western Mass, to take up a more seductive literary relationship, this time with a cast of eighteenth and nineteenth characters at Forbes Library and Historic Northampton. A recent survey of blog writers showed that most of us are content to write for an audience of one, ourselves, and, if we are lucky, a few faithful friends and relatives. So why do we do it?

Sometimes I wonder that myself when I hear from close friends and strangers alike: “I’ve never read a blog and don’t know why I ever would.” I started Three Houses Up nearly four years ago, to provide a postscript to my chapbook A House. A Street. A City. The Story of 17 Summer Street, and a place to park my writing and pictures. After a career as the nameless writer of ads and publications, Lu Stone was attached to words. California has taken me away from the research I’ve been doing in Northampton on the development of two of the city’s oldest streets, North and Market. I plan, however, to post articles related to the research, a warm up, in a way, to the book which I hope will take shape and become a sequel to 17 Summer Street. Shown here, 1853 map of my neighborhood.

October Saturday—Ashfield and Shelburne Falls

2011-10-08T18:52:00.010-04:00

Housespotting along Cherry

2011-09-28T14:39:00.011-04:00

Unlike the immaculately maintained late 18th century-early 19th century houses along Northampton’s lower Bridge Street, 39 Cherry would hardly appear to rate any architectural merit. Yet, this modest gambrel-roofed house is probably the oldest on Cherry Street, and once was the home of a man who fought in the Revolutionary War. According to an architectural survey conducted by the Massachusetts Historical Society, number 39 most likely was built around 1785 as the homestead of Hezekiah Hutchins and his bride, Deborah Clapp. The house was originally located on Bridge Street on a site now occupied by Pop’s Package Store and the Hospice Shop. During the 1820s, St. John’s Episcopal Church bought the Hutchins property in order to build a church, and the house was given to James E. Buckman, who had it moved to Cherry Street. He evidently liked the neighborhood; he lived in 57 Cherry Street until the late 1880s.

Tell-All Books

2011-09-26T17:49:00.013-04:00

I’m a print voyeur, literary snob, some would say, always quick to size up people by the books and magazines they are reading. I can’t seem to enter a house for the first time without glancing at the books, or the lack there of, or sit on a beach, in a doctor’s waiting room or on a plane without wishing people would hold up their books so I can see the covers. Musante Beach in Northampton and long-distance Southwest flights consistently yield titles that win my approval. Populated by people bent over laptops and required texts, coffee houses in college towns like mine remain a wasteland for sleuthers.

Yesterday, I read an article by Bruce Feiler in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times that presented a whole new perspective on my literary nosiness. According to Feiler, “Snooping is more than just an avocation . . .. It’s a burgeoning academic field.” Its “Edison,” he writes is Sam Gosling, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You. Gosling believes that looking at someone’s bookshelf “can reveal far more about them than an entire evening’s worth of chitchat.” He told Feiler: ”Places reflect long series of behavior . . . Your books, your chairs, your wall hangings represent an accumulation over many years . . . A space distills repeated acts. That’s why it’s hard to fake.”

When I read that one’s books can reveal three of the five major personality traits—openness, extroversion and conscientiousness—I thought, “Uh, oh. What do my books say about me?” According to Gosling, books that cover a broad range of subjects can suggest openness. If allowed to leave out spirituality, business, finance, self-help, mysteries, gender, politics, psychology, I’d pass the openness standard, but barely.

I’d flunk the second personality trait because Gosling would find few of my books written by friends, his way of suggesting extroversion. I think Gosling would rate me conscientious, even though my books aren’t alphabetized. I guess you could say I go overboard—for the most part, they’re arranged by genre, century and country or continent, or grouped around a topic like Bloomsbury or the E.B. White-Liebling era of The New Yorker or New England history. It may sound fussy, but my shelving style makes sense to me, and is surely quicker and more logical than putting books in alphabetical order. Still, one cursory look at my increasingly disorganized shelves and my tables randomly stacked with books would tell Gosling that “[I] aspire to conscientiousness but often fall short of [my] goals.” I need a category called: “Don’t Know Where to Put This,” and a vow to stay away from book sales and Amazon.

Postcard from 9/11

2011-09-10T16:32:00.029-04:00

Our suitcases stood by the backdoor, passports, airline tickets, Eurorail passes, camera and ten rolls of film piled on the kitchen table. We’d emptied out the refrigerator, stopped the mail, unplugged radios, TVs and computers, put two lamps on timers. We were about to lock up the house and leave for a five-week trip to Europe; our tickets on Continental read: Logan to Newark to Amsterdam. The date: September 11, 2001.

Our son-in-law was the first to reach us. “You’re going to Europe tonight?” he said. “Yeah,” I said, wondering why he was calling us from work. “Well, not tonight. Turn on the TV.”

By the time he had called, soon after nine, both towers had been hit, two more jets about to be highjacked and headed to Washington. We watched that terrible day unfold, replayed, unfold on TV with the rest of the world. For days, we clung to routine, the ordinary. We shopped for food to keep us going, coffee at Dunkin Donuts, Colonial for wine and beer. Mike painted the kitchen walls, although they didn’t need it. It was something to do.

We decided to go, adhere to our plan to spend five weeks traveling in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Were we crazy, selfish, putting our lives in danger, abandoning our country? The kids gave us their blessing—go.

On Sunday evening, September 16th, I stood by a newsstand in Newark Airport. A postcard collector since childhood, I spun a rack of souvenir New York City cards until I found one picturing the Twin Towers. At 10 pm, we boarded Flight 70 to Amsterdam and found our seats in Row 18, mine by the window. That night, the pilot banked our widebody along lower Manhattan and Ground Zero, a communal salute to the army of people below, digging that very moment through masses of smoking destruction, beneath giant search lights that reached up to the sky; a farewell, above all, to the thousands who had gone to work on an ordinary September morning. As the plane turned to begin its path across the Atlantic, I wasn’t sure what awaited us on the other side or what we had left behind, but, we were on our way, at last.

Broadway Comes to Visit

2011-09-05T17:02:00.025-04:00

When a writer colleague heard I was moving to North Street last year, she pointed out that I’d be moving to the oldest section of Northampton. “Might another project like Summer Street’s be in the offering?” she asked. Fascinated by the late 18th and 19th century housing stock I’d see on walks through my new neighborhood, I decided to begin my foray into local history close to home: North Street. At this early stage of research, I’ve no self-imposed deadline or clear focus for my narrative, so it’s easy to become immersed in the back-stories, the fascinating glints of history one comes upon by chance. They may—and probably won’t—be useful in the long run, but they are hard to turn the page on.

And so it was with the house on North Street, pictured below. Historians call the house the “Rogers Cottage,” named for Rebecca Rogers who bought the lot in 1846, and built what is described as a "Gothic cottage" sometime during the following decade.

The house went through several owners until Harold Kingsley bought the property around 1860. During my investigation of old houses in Historic Northampton’s collections, I came across a 1934 clipping from the Springfield Sunday Union & Republican that featured a number of Northampton houses.

According to the journalist, the “cottage-like house where Market merges into North” claimed a glamorous period of history when “Lotta and other figures of the Big Theatre days of Henry Abbey” visited. Who was Lotta? I wondered, and Henry Abbey? What brought them to the little cottage on North Street? Thus, sped my morning, immersed in Henry E. Abbey’s full-page obituary in the New York Times (October 18, 1896), and other online sources.

Abbey was a successful and daring theatrical manager, director, and impresario and, at his death, the first managing director of New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. And he came to Northampton because he was the son-in-law of Harold Kingsley and his wife, Frances. Abbey married Kate Kingsley in 1876. The marriage would be a short one: Kate died in 1883, leaving a young son Henry, and one-year-old daughter, Kate Kingsley. A few months before Abbey’s death, the Times reported the failure of his theatrical firm, indebted for about $400,000. At the time he was living with his mother-in-law, Frances Kingsley (who had sold her North Street house in 1891), and daughter at the Osborne Apartments in New York.

And Lotta? Her real name was Charlotte Crabtree (1847-1924). She was an actress, comedienne and entertainer whose acclaimed career on the stages of Broadway and across the country, would make her one of the richest and most celebrated actresses in the world. As The Overland Monthly stated in a 1911 issue, “It was the money provided by the inimitable ‘Firefly’ of he ’70’s that started Henry E. Abbey on his remarkable managerial career." And, wasn’t I surprised to learn that a dormitory on the UMass, Amherst campus is named the Charlotte Crabtree House.

Side Trip Home

2011-09-02T18:33:00.015-04:00

Five years ago on the way home from my 50th high school reunion, Mike suggested that we stop by Lembeck Avenue, the street where I had grown up in Jersey City. Our hotel was located in the city’s smartly rebuilt waterfront area, only two exits on the Turnpike Extension from the house my parents and I had left in 1961,Mom and Dad moving on to a new life in southern Vermont, and I, across the river, to an over-priced apartment on East 89th Street.

We didn’t take the detour. No. I wasn’t interested. I’d heard the street had gone down hill, the old place was looking shabby, the neighborhood unsafe, windows boarded up, nobody we knew was still on the block. Why take the time?

I should have gone that day. But, I realize now that I wasn’t ready to return to the place that had given me an extraordinary gift—material to write about. My writing teacher at Mount Holyoke once said to me, “How fortunate for you to grow up in the place you did rather than Scarsdale or Rye.” I wasn’t sure how to take her elitist-iced statement, but I knew she was right. I had the stories to tell.

The gritty public high school I attended could claim its Blackboard Jungle elements and a Girls Room that was best to avoid. During my junior year, to my surprise, a course in Creative Writing was offered. I’d never kept a diary as a kid or written much beyond book reports for school and thank-you notes to aunts.

Lembeck and home, late 1950s...

I signed up because I liked the teacher, Miss Irving. Toward the end of the year, she encouraged me to enter a prose writing contest which NYU was sponsoring for high school students in the New York area. I entered “A House, A Street, A Life,” a piece based on the changing character of Lembeck Avenue and my intimacy with its every maple tree, cracked slate sidewalks, little yards and the cast of characters who lived in its frame houses and stone apartments on the corner. My piece was awarded a first place prize for northern New Jersey, and later published in a chapbook that NYU put out for the young winners. For the first time, I thought of myself as a writer, a real writer. My life was set.

Last month I was in New Jersey again, visiting family down the shore, and this time, Mike insisted that we stop by Lembeck Avenue. I protested; he insisted; I protested; he grabbed the wheel and we headed north. It had been fifty years since I’d last set foot on Lembeck, and, maybe, I’d acquiesced because I was curious to see the old neighborhood and put my life there to rest. When we turned on to Lembeck from Garfield Avenue, I had trouble recognizing the street; most of the trees were gone and nearly every house appeared to be encased in yellow plastic siding and protected by ornate fences and gates from Home Depot.

If the numbers 69 hadn’t been by the front door, I never would have recognized by family’s house. Stinking garbage rotting in the front yard, every shred of gingerbread, stained glass window, picket fencing, vegetation, lawn torn off and up and trashed, it was painful to see.

Minutes later, I bumped into Paul, a former neighbor who had remained in his family home; he remembered my family and me. “It’s still the nicest street around,” he said. I nodded and smiled to myself. “The nicest street around,” we always said that about Lembeck Avenue; some things never change. We chatted a while about the old days and he filled me on in what had happened to our neighbors. We shook hands, and Mike and I drove off. I didn’t look back.

The house today, with Paul

Half Off Sale

2011-07-25T16:45:00.003-04:00

On my walk home from downtown this afternoon, I spotted a For Sale sign on the lawn of 7 Market Street, the frame house pictured above. Last month at Historic Northampton, when I was poking into the history of my Ward 3 neighborhood, I learned that 7 Market Street may be “one of the oldest houses in Northampton” (c. 1700) or, more accurately, one of the oldest half houses. Once known as the Williams House, the house was sold in 1912 and the new owners promptly tore down its northern half to make room for a new building in the rear. Joseph Poleto, who went on to own a neighborhood grocery store farther up Market street for many years, gave 7 Market’s southern half to his daughter and son-in-law, the Tomeos. The house is listed at $200,000; it’ll be interesting to see what the new owners have in mind for the property.

Plum Delicious

2011-07-08T16:39:00.009-04:00

Hamburgers on the Weber, pasta salad, Hadley corn, Mike’s tomatoes, and Mom’s plum torte. It was a favorite summer menu for dinner on the deck, back on Summer Street in the days when we all lived in the same time zone. Recently friends were coming to our place for dessert, and I thought of that torte when I spotted rows of plums ripe for plucking in Stop and Shop. It was 1989 when I clipped the recipe, which was one of the most popular ever printed in the food pages of the New York Times.

The recipe calls for late summer plums, but earlier varieties seem to work as well and will require fewer halves. Here’s a helpful YouTube clip on how to pit plums. It had been so long since I’d made the torte, I had to do a Google search to remember. Click twice to enlarge the Times recipe.

No Going Back

2011-07-05T16:15:00.031-04:00

I forget the name of the show that once ran on HGTV, but any new homeowner who can’t wait to tear out the kitchen cabinets—horribly dated, tacky taste—or pull up the wall-to-wall shag carpet—hideous color, so Sixties—could relate to its format. And so could anyone who has sold a house, particularly one where they have raised their children. I’ve been the buyer and the seller twice in my life, and, lately, when I drive by 17 Summer, the house my husband and I sold last year, I think of the homeowners on HGTV.

My family and I have played the role of new homeowners. Fierce on our renovation mission, we knocked down, ripped up, stripped, painted, built, chopped, tore off, planted, decorated. Only the size of our bank balance limited ambitions, a constraint apparently not experienced by HGTV’s renovating couples.

The HGTV sellers had a different role. At the end of the show, they returned to their former homes to inspect the changes wrought by the new owners. The visits yielded few positive comments and only grudgingly extended approvals. The sellers’ gasps of disbelief, typically by the female spouse, were understandable. Earlier in the show, the couple had taken viewers on a tour of the very same house to proudly point out the updates and do-it-yourself projects and decorating they’d done over the years.

Yes, I could relate to the new owners and their zeal for wanting to take down the wagon wheel ceiling fixture or rip out the paneling in the living room or ditch the vintage Sears kitchen cabinets or chop down the tall pine trees Grandpa had planted. But, the sellers’ returning to their former homes to look over the changes? That role wasn’t for me and never will. Memories suffice.

Top photo: 17 Summer, October 2010; bottom photo, on Closing Day, November 2010.

In January 2010, I blogged about visiting—from the sidewalk—my old house in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. I hadn't been back since moving to Northampton 35 years ago. Click here to read.

Northampton Salon, 1890s

2011-06-14T20:51:00.024-04:00

I was meeting friends for dinner at Mosaic on Center Street tonight and stopped to take these pictures. It's the Hestia Mural depicting the History of Women in Northampton which was painted by a group of local artists in 1980, and restored eight years ago. I'd always wondered who the prominent woman at the easel was, and while researching late 19th century local history recently came upon her name. The artist is Susanne Lathrop, who with her sisters Clara and Bessie, had a studio on Main Street where they taught classes, and ran what was known as the Northampton Salon. Bessie was a furniture designer and woodcarver, and Clara, a painter and illustrator who studied at the Art Students League in New York, Pratt Institute, and in Paris. Her work was exhibited in the 1893 and 1912 Paris Expositions, the Chicago Institute and other art exhibition halls. A representative work of Clara Lathrop is shown here. to be continued ...

Click top photo to enlarge.

Open and Shut Solution

2011-06-12T18:19:00.007-04:00

For two writers who had their own home offices back on Summer Street, the move into a four-room apartment posed a problem. Where would the computers and printers go? The worktables inevitably strewn with notes, toast crumbs and coffee cups? Was our new home going to look like a 24/7 work zone? How could we each create a “private” area in such a limited space?

We immediately ruled out setting up an office in the apartment’s only bedroom—too cramped, too dark. My desktop went into the windowed-alcove in our middle room, a second living room, to us. And Mike chose to set up shop in the front living room. Its octagonal shape, however, along with five windows and large covered radiator left little wall space for placing furniture. So Mike decided to go in the corner closet.

At first he worked at the small table we’d brought from the Summer Street house, but now has a triangular desk of plywood neatly cut to fit into the corner spot. He does his blogging from his new office, but has outsourced his creative writing to a shared space in The Writers’ Mill, housed in the old cutlery building up in Baystate. And I've found a second venue for writing, too—a table in Forbes during the library's twice-weekly Writer's Room.

Open House at the Cottages

2011-06-06T11:34:00.000-04:00

The chance to see how other people decorate their houses is one I never pass up. And when those houses are seven cottages at Laurel Park, the historic community in Northampton, that’s all the better. Last Saturday’s House Tour at Laurel Park presented a fascinating view of how seven homeowners managed to make the most of their cottages’ tiny footprints.

This new apartment dweller was especially impressed by the clever ways owners coped with lack of storage, particularly in the kitchen, and the variety of approaches owners took to renovating their interiors and furnishing their homes. One of the interiors was absolutely stunning, a chic, contemporary makeover worthy of a spread in a shelter magazine or apartmenttherapy.com.

For the history of Laurel Park, click here.

Sticks and Stories

2011-05-26T19:03:00.009-04:00

“How objects are handed on is all about story-telling. I am giving you this because I love you. Or because it was given to me. Because I bought it somewhere special. Because you will care for it. Because it will complicate your life. Because it will make someone else envious. There is no easy story in legacy. What is remembered and what is forgotten? . . . What is being passed on to me with all these small Japanese objects?”
—from The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss by Edmund de Waal

A few years before my mother died at age 89, she wrote down descriptions of some of the items she was passing on to me.
“White pitcher with flowers, gift from friends in Scotland upon sailing, 1881 . . . Little girl, very old from Barr home . . . 1 pr tall brass candlesticks, 1 brass kettle, from old brass cellar in Scotland.”

More written on backs of church programs:
“Grandfather Barr’s oak bookcase, bought with his first paycheck in America, to hold the books he won at school in Scotland . . . very old red apple pitcher used for iced tea . . . 3 soapstone pictures of scenes from Robert Burns . . . cherry furniture bought when first married at Wanamaker’s department store, Greenwich Village, New York, 1925 . . .”
the bits and pieces of family keepsakes, the modest hand-me-downs, the acquisitions polished and dusted, awarded provenance in her distinctive hand, someday to find a place on my windowsill, cherry sideboard, kitchen shelves, oak bookcase.

It seems I got sidetracked from writing a blurb about de Waal’s marvelous memoir, The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss. A friend so enthusiastically recommended this highly original—and meticulously researched—book that I would have felt a lapse in our friendship if I hadn’t read it. de Waal, a world-class ceramist and curator at the V&A in London, tells the story of his family legacy: a collection of 264 Japanese wood and ivory carvings— netsukes—that were acquired by a great-great uncle in Paris in 1870, and handed on to family members through world wars and political and social upheavals and across continents to become the author’s inheritance.

Weather Report, 1879

2011-04-28T16:46:00.009-04:00

On this rain-swept windy afternoon, I came across this 1879 New York Times clip while researching the history of my new neighborhood.

WORK OF THE TORNADO IN THE

CONNECTICUT RIVER VALLEY . . .

Northampton, Mass., July 17 — “The town is almost despoiled of its beautiful shade trees, mostly large elms, for which it is noted, there being some 15 uprooted on Elm-street alone. The horse cars to Florence cannot run for some day, there being many great trees across the track. On Main-street awnings and signs were blown down and the fronts of several stores blown in, the rain and broken glass damaging the stocks within. The Mansion House lost its tin roof and several chimneys, and the slate roof of the new First Church was badly damaged. The furniture house of W. L. Smith Co. lost its tin roof and chimneys, while the stock in the house was heavily damaged by the rain. Several tobacco barns were demolished, and a man named Dumpacy is reported to have been buried in the ruins of one of them. Mr. Edwards, President of the Northampton Bank, suffers a great loss to his fine lawn and shade trees.”

Visiting Crystal Cove

2011-04-24T16:47:00.007-04:00

We were planning a day trip to Laguna Beach, and a family member suggested we stop at the Beachcomber Café in Crystal Cove State Park for lunch. “You might enjoy seeing the historic cottages. It’s a place where movie stars once hung out.”

Our guidebook confirmed that as early as 1918, Crystal Cove was a popular location for moviemakers seeking secluded coves, wide sandy beaches and tropical-looking backdrops. Scenes in Treasure Island, The Wreck of the Hesperus, Rain, To Have and Have Not, Herbie Rides Again, Beaches, among others, were shot here. I’m not a movie buff, but any chance to see “historic cottages” grabs my attention.

As Mike and I headed north on the Five, I pictured a California version, circa the roaring 1920s, of the Vineyard’s Cottage City, minus the gingerbread and Methodist hymns, or maybe, an enclave like Laurel Park, this time,

with palm trees and patios. How had we missed this tourist spot when we were living in Newport Beach, thirty years ago? Mike had driven past Crystal Cove everyday on his way south to work in Dana Point. The vintage signs, we’d later see in the park’s store, beckoning day-trippers and vacationers to its seductive shores had obviously been taken down by the early 1980s.

As we discovered on our visit last month, the Cove is still easy to overlook. To reach its Historic District, where the cottages are located, visitors must park in the lot on the other side of the Pacific Coast Highway, then take a shuttle ($1 each way) or walk through the tunnel.

We decided to overlook the Closed sign at the tunnel’s entrance and take our chances sidestepping puddles from a recent rain’s runoffs. Suddenly, we found ourselves in a noisy construction zone. A forklift blocked our way. A makeshift wooden sidewalk steered us over mud. Tyvek on half-finished projects and temporary fences sheathed with green plastic confronted us. Where were the “historic cottages,” neatly lined up for review?

We had walked into an ambitious restoration project, which, we later learned, was a collaborative effort between the State of California and the non-profit citizen group, Crystal Cove Alliance. The goal is to restore the 46 cottages—dating from the 1920s to the 1950s—that had once sheltered a unique community of beachlovers. About half of the dwellings, both individual and dorm-style, have been rehabilitated, and are now available to the public for short-term rentals. A House Museum and educational center are in the works

Starting in the 1920s, Crystal Cove became a vacation destination for Southern Californians. They pitched tents and parked their homemade trailers, found shelter in thatched-roofed leftovers from movie sets, slept rough on the beach. During Prohibition, rumrunners also found the secluded beaches and coves to their liking. A free-spirited seasonal beach colony sprung up and soon, a quirky array of dwellings took shape. Hand-crafted in many cases, they were for the most part, simple shacks and bungalows, each within steps of the beach. By all reports, the Crystal Cove crowd was a fun-loving group, sporting a Bohemian flair. At one point in their colorful history, a Martini flag was hoisted on the beach every day in the late afternoon, signaling the arrival of happy hour.

Eventually, The Irvine Company, which owned the land (as well as huge tracts throughout Orange County), granted long-term leases, and some of the sturdier cottages became year-round family homes.

In 1979, The Irvine Company sold Crystal Cove to the State of California. Based on an agreement with the State, residents moved out in 2001, leaving their houses behind, and the Cove became a state park. A major uproar ensued when former lessees, local supporters, environmentalists, and other interested parties learned that the State had contracted with a private developer to build an exclusive upscale resort on the site.

After a two-year review, the historic district was formally recognized and public use of beach and cottages ensured.

After an excellent lunch (and beer) at the Beachcomber, we strolled around the Cove and checked out the “cottages.” We hoped the rehabilitation project wouldn’t drain away the rakish, offbeat history of the Cove. We agreed that it was remarkable that this coastal stretch of Orange County had remained intact, and not gone the way of the nearby house-laden hills that had been undeveloped thirty years ago. Still, Starbucks, Trader Joe's, the Gap, Banana Republic and the usual retail suspects were just up the highway, in a shopping center called Crystal Cove Promenade. The yellow cottage pictured near the top was the place where moviemakers came to negotiate leases for using Crystal Cove.

Farewell, Solana Beach

2011-03-30T22:58:00.000-04:00

Ikea in Pieces

2011-03-30T22:48:00.004-04:00

It's getting to be an annual winter drill in the Kirby-Stone household: Put together the Ikea furniture in early January and three months later, take it apart. Today, we're packing up, hoping everything will fit into a 5' by 8' storage unit tomorrow morning. Wish we could take apart our apartment pool and deck, and ship it home to Massachusetts.

January 3, 2011

March 30, 2011

Aboard the Pacific Surfliner

2011-03-29T22:53:00.003-04:00

We treated the Grandchildren to their first trainride Sunday, climbing aboard Amtrak's famed Pacific Surfliner that runs from San Diego to San Luis Obispo, north of LA. We boarded at Solana Beach, a passenger hub for our part of North County, for the 45-minute ride to San Juan Capistrano. As the line's name claims, a good part of our leg came with terrific views of the Pacific. Shown here is a patch of Dana Point's pier and long stretch of beach. The row of molded bicycle covers caught by eye when we stopped at the Oceanside station. Returning to Solana Beach that afternoon, we piled off with droves of university students pulling their wheeled suitcases and hoisting their daypacks. As we headed to the parking lot, they crossed the bridge over the tracks to the 101. A few minutes later driving home, we saw them waiting for the southbound bus, heading to the UCSan Diego campus in La Jolla. Seeing that large gathering of students reminded me that next week I would be home.

No Passport Required

2011-03-13T21:02:00.008-04:00

The San Diego Botanical Gardens in Encinitas is like many “local attractions” near your home. Every time you drive by, you make a promise that one day you’ll visit the place. Yet, that day seldom seems to arrive. Last week, prompted, no doubt, by the need to grocery shop at Trader Joe’s which is located near the gardens, Mike and I finally paid a visit. We wished we hadn’t waited so long.

The gardens cover 35 acres, and thanks to San Diego’s mild climate, more than 3,300 species and varieties of plants from around over the world thrive here. There are upwards of 30 discrete gardens, each arranged by its geographical setting or variety. Spend a few hours, and you’ll find yourself in a tropical rain forest, a palm canyon, or a subtropical fruit garden, in Africa, New Zealand, Mexico, the deserts of Asia.

and the world’s largest collection of bamboo. The setting is so peaceful and artfully arranged that it is easy to forget that the freeway is only a few blocks away, and beyond the tall cacti, banana and coffee trees, the Mexican topiary mariachis, are the built-up neighborhoods of southern California.

Pride of Madeira

Dragon tree and trunk of cork tree, in Canary Islands Garden

Mysore fig tree

Rain forest waterfall

Tsunami Saturday, Solana Beach

2011-03-11T17:40:00.002-05:00

Unplanned Visit

2011-03-11T14:59:00.006-05:00

—by Lu Stone and Mike Kirby
We were on our way to a hiking expedition in nearby Elfin Forest last Saturday morning when we stumbled on the planned community of San Elijo Hills. At first glance, we thought we’d landed in an updated stage setting for “Our Town,” or a dislocated Disney attraction.

After leaving the freeway, we’d driven east along Leucadia Boulevard, and once we’d crossed Camino Real—a multi-laned, souped-up version of Hadley’s Route 9—the road began to climb. The neighborhoods of sand-colored houses became newer and newer, the din of Camino’s traffic and the sign of any places to buy gas or a paper or a gallon of milk, left behind. As we came up over the crest of a hill, the road curved and leveled out. Suddenly, to our amazement, we were driving through a small town.

A row of stores and a corner building that looked like it should be housing a frontier bank lined one side of the road. Across the way in the center was an expansive expensively landscaped park complete with a babbling fountain and trellised area outfitted with chairs and tables. Beyond stood a clock tower and rows of two and three story houses and condos, their colors and accents vaguely Mediterranean laced with a shot of Victoriana.

Intrigued by this orderly place, we decided to stop for a cup of coffee at the eatery across from the town center and walk around. The scope and pace of the town’s development were stunning to observe. San Elijo Hills seemed to be the epitome of what planners are talking about when they talk about a walkable community. Residential units housed on top of “Main Street” stores, and a network of subdivisions leading to the center; a supermarket chain around the corner; two brand-new public schools a short walk away. Wide sidewalks, bike racks and pedestrian-controlled crossing lights. And just a block from “downtown,” a huge town recreational area, which includes a “Bark Park.” The place resonated of the hill towns we have visited in Italy and Spain, that same sense of harmony, and the same near-empty streets. Wouldn’t it be interesting, we thought, to come back in five or ten years to see how San Elijo Hills had evolved.

A San Diego County Sheriff’s Deputy we stopped to chat with explained that the town’s first residents began moving in around 200l. While you’re here, he said, you might want to go up to Double Peak, go straight up the hill and turn left after four lights; the views are very nice. We drove up. Our friend down below had steered us in the right direction: the views from the park at the top of Double Peak of the coastal towns and snow-capped mountains were outstanding on that relatively clear day. From here, the Pacific appeared to be almost next-door, yet is about 20 minutes away.

We noted the signs of rapid development racing up the San Elijo hillsides, the sprawling clusters of new townhouses in the town of San Marcos below. Double Peak, we later learned, rises 1,627 feet above sea level (about 400 feet higher than Mt. Tom back home), and that modest elevation provides the development’s promotional materials with the perfect sales line—“San Elijo Hills The Highest Point in Coastal North County.”

We ditched our plans to go hiking, ate our picnic lunch on the hilltop, and drove back to Camino Real, where Target, REI and Trader’s Joe were waiting for us.

Neighborhood Views

2011-03-02T21:13:00.004-05:00

Winter stormed into east San Diego County last weekend, bringing a view of snow-capped mountains from the top of my street.

4:15 p.m., early rush hour on the Five

Zooming In

2011-02-28T19:18:00.015-05:00

It doesn’t fit in a pocket, it’s heavy to carry, some of its parts have stopped working, and it doesn’t sport a 12x optical zoom. But, my six-year-old Kodak has one feature my slim new digital camera lacks—a viewfinder. For the past week, I’ve been going out every day to take shots under various conditions to get the hang of my new Panasonic DMC-ZS5.

California’s abundance of sunshine and sandy beach and desert landscapes, however, often cause the LCD monitor to go black for outdoor shots. And, that can be a problem for someone like me who loves to frame and fuss over her pictures. Nevertheless, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see a couple of halfway decent looking photos come out of my frameless efforts. I know from experience that it takes time—and a lot of awful pictures—to feel comfortable with a camera, and to understand and appreciate its capabilities beyond the “point and shoot” category. Nevertheless, I plan to keep my Kodak handy. It still takes great pictures, when it works.

Photos: Blogger behind viewfinder, Kroller-Muller Museum, Netherlands, 2004; shots from Panasonic’s test runs to Del Mar, Elijo and Leucadia Farmer’s Market.

Nothing Like Home

2011-02-22T17:59:00.005-05:00

Call us the snowbirds of Solana Hills, three retired couples—Betty and Hal from New Hampshire, Phil and Jeanette from Washington State, Lu and Mike from Mass—who one day woke up to a deep freeze or blizzard and decided they did not want to take winter anymore. Like the swallows of Capistrano, we’ve returned to our California habitat, a sprawling apartment complex off Lomas.

When chatting with my fellow seniors in the laundry room, I discovered we chose this place for the same reasons. The rent for a one-bedroom fit our budgets; it’s possible to get three- or four-month leases here—not a common practice in North County; when apartment-hunting, the place appeared well managed and cared for, (which it is); and, the location? That sealed the deal; it’s close, but not too close, to our children and their families. I’ve decided Florida is the place where the parents move to and the kids visit, and Southern California is the place where the kids move to and the parents visit. Spend enough time at a Southwest gate at Bradley and you’ll find nearly all of the grey-haired couples carrying “A” boarding passes and healthy snacks are off to see the grandchildren in San Diego, LA or Orange County.

There are 123 units in the complex. A homogenized over-55 community this place is not. I doubt any of my fellow seniors could find on a single block or apartment complex back home a community as diverse as the one they’re living in now. I certainly wouldn’t find one in Northampton.

This is the kind of place, where you’ll see in the parking lot a brand-new BMW, Volvo or Acura MDX along with a fleet of old Toyotas (like the one we left behind in Northampton); a paint contractor’s ageing pickup, a van plastered with Lasik ads, a sedan with a Baja California license plate, an SUV with a Penn State or USC license plate holder. We have U.S. Marines, Navy guys, DOD employees, surfers, snowboarders, babies, school kids, Asians, college students, military families, young couples, single middle-aged men, recent émigrés from Mexico, girls in bikinis soaking in the hot tub. We have a ding-dong ice cream wagon that stops by in the afternoon, a step-up van that comes every Thursday night to sell produce and groceries to our Mexican neighbors, and water heated by solar panels that date back to Jerry Brown’s first term in the governor’s chair.

Of course, our “affordable” apartments in 92075 carry a caveat: They’re unfurnished. Our senior contingent, nevertheless, has managed to piece together ad-hoc homes without running up their cards. This morning, Mike happened to be in the parking lot when he spotted Phil and Jeanette trying to wrestle a huge couch they had bought at a used furniture store.

He wanted to know if he could help with it, they said no, but he decided to force the issue and help anyway. It was a long trip down the complex’s narrow paths, Jeanette and Mike on the front, Phil on the rear. They had to stop a couple times because Phil’s hands were cramping up. The final leg went easier when a young Latino neighbor saw them struggling and lent a hand. Once the couch was set in place, Phil and Jeanette asked Mike which storage place we used in Solana Beach to store our things last year. They had made the decision, or the couch had made the decision; they were coming back next year.

Sleeping Under Cal's Roof

2011-02-21T18:28:00.001-05:00

In honor of President's Day 20ll, here's a post from the Three Houses Up archive, fall 2008, offering a page from our 30th President's Northampton days.
Click here to read.

On the Beach in La Jolla

2011-02-15T15:41:00.003-05:00

It’s pupping season for the harbor seals on La Jolla’s Casa Beach (a.k.a. Children’s Pool), and the protective rope is up to deter the overly curious. Last year, more than forty pups were born here, the only natural rookery and haul-out spot for harbor seals in southern California. (I guess I didn’t time my visits to see the harbor seals right.) The harbor seals seen snoozing and sunning have been a source of controversy since the 1970s when they began to claim a small patch of beach known locally as the “Children’s Pool.” What had been a place for kids to swim and play in the sand for decades became the year-round landing pad, 10 to 14 hours a day, for a colony of 200 harbor seals. Years of legal maneuvering, litigation, legislative wrangling, hearings, sidewalk protests followed, with one side, the supporters of Children’s Beach, advocating a shared use of the beach; the other, called La Jolla Friends of the Seals, urging a permanent rope line. On May 15, when birthing season comes to an end, the rope, a compromise move by the municipal powers, will be removed. And as the waters off Casa Beach warm up for swimming, the advocacy efforts of both sides are sure to get hotter.

Inside Orange County

2011-02-03T23:33:00.022-05:00

The time was thirty years ago. I was on a ten-month leave from my job in Massachusetts, living in an apartment off Balboa Boulevard in Newport Beach, when I saw the ad in the UC Irvine student newspaper. A new babysitting agency was hiring schoolteachers for part-time work. I could use the money, but babysitting? Why not, I thought. They’d be no stress, no deadlines, no bosses barking out last-minute demands. How could I miss? I’d never been a classroom teacher and the last diaper I’d changed was cloth, but surely the agency would find a 40-ish mother of two who worked at a college and had once been a tireless leader of playgroups, an attractive prospect. I called for an interview.

The next week, I drove over to Costa Mesa to meet the agency owner, who was a retired teacher wearing a 1980s dress-for-success tailored suit and cream-colored blouse topped off by the required bow. My lack of teaching credentials did not seem to bother Betty, the owner, and, I wondered, whether her “babysitting teachers” claim was merely a marketing gimmick and a way to hike up fees. I was hired that day, and soon sent out on my first job. What Betty didn’t realize was that she had unleashed a field investigator from the East Coast who had been dying to get inside all those fancy houses she’d been driving by for weeks and see what the people inside were like. Babysitting would be my welcome mat to the houses of Orange County.

By choice, I sat during the day so my charges were mainly infants and toddlers, the easy ones. While they napped in their cribs or played with their Fisher Price toys and board books on the family room’s plush wall-to-wall carpet, I had plenty of time to check out my surroundings. I evaluated the parents’ decorating tastes (expensive, but disappointingly bland), choice of magazines and books (more of the former than the latter), food-buying habits (heavy on snacks), and appointments on the kitchen calendar. I was surprised by how many of my mothers went to Bible Study classes. The only fathers I saw while babysitting were in the framed family photographs hanging on living room walls. Click here to continue reading . . .

Top photo: the tan stucco building with the flowering red bush in front was the student rental where I lived; the houses on the left faced the beach. Bottom photo: Balboa Peninsula, spring 2007.

2011-01-26T19:34:00.003-05:00

134 steps up.

Mine was a red '68, with Pennsylvania plates. Wonder where it went from there.

Surf Saturday

2011-01-23T15:25:00.004-05:00

“Wow, look at them waves,” the surfer exclaimed as he trotted down the stairs at San Elijo yesterday afternoon. Word was out, the swells were up, and the surfers pulled in off the 101, to line up in the distance and wait for the next one. Kids, guys, girls, the long-haired dudes, the skinny, the barrel-chested, the bald and the grey, the exec and the stock boy, stepping into their wet suits. Years and life stories washed away.

Click photographs to enlarge.

A Visit to Louis Kahn's Salk

2011-01-18T15:02:00.024-05:00

It was at Clark Park in West Philadelphia, circa 1967, when I first heard the name, Louis Kahn. I was one of the young mothers—most of us had husbands who were grad students at Penn—who’d bring our kids to the playground along the trolley tracks on Baltimore. A couple of my fellow park denizens’ husbands were in the architecture program at Penn where Kahn was on the faculty. The Richards Medical Research Laboratories on campus was his design, an architecturally significant building, but one not without faults according to my Clark Park sources. One husband, I recall, had landed a coveted summer job in Kahn’s firm downtown, and whoever happened to be sharing a park bench with his wife would hear of the long hours and intensity the workaholic Kahn expected from his employees.

I remember the shock that morning in 1974, when I saw the front-page story in the New York Times that Kahn had been found dead in a men’s room at Penn Station, his body unclaimed for three days. World famous architect, yet alone and bankrupt, here was a mystery. Not until his son, Nathaniel Kahn, wrote and directed the documentary My Architect A Son’s Journey in 2003, would I discover the domestic story behind the man: Louis Kahn had three different families with three different women, concurrently. (The Times obit had mentioned only his wife, Esther, and their daughter—his “first” family—as survivors.) Nathaniel, the son of Harriet Pattison, a landscape architect who had worked for Kahn, was 11 when the father he had known only in snatches died. I highly recommend his deeply moving and revealing documentary; I’ve seen it four times.

So, all of the above randomly leads to a sort of pilgrimage I pay to Kahn when I am in San Diego—a visit to the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Kahn’s magnificent research facility on the edge of the Pacific. (The day I shot this picture, the fountain was in repair, hence the orange cones jarring the serene power of the place. Click photo to enlarge.)

Admissions Tea

2011-01-17T18:35:00.002-05:00

—from “Just Marion,” a poetry/prose biography of poet Marianne Moore’s girlhood years in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, that I wrote in a pre-Northampton lifetime. The excerpt is based on a recruitment trip Moore’s mother, a teacher at Metzger, took with the headmistress around 1901. Much of the language comes from Metzger’s own student prospectus, which I came across when researching Moore’s high school years at the school. As a once-prolific writer of admissions view books, ads and websites, trying to sell schools and colleges to prospective students, I have to admit, whatever I had to say had all been said before.

ADMISSIONS TEA

Newville, Harrisburg, Mount Joy, the Poconos.
The headmistress and the English teacher
are on the road
drumming up
prospective students
for ailing Metzger College.

The doctor’s daughter,
worried she’ll miss her dressmaker appointment,
the bankers’ daughters
giddy from summer at the shore.
The girl whose father owns a brewery,
she’s promised a seal coat from Wanamaker’s for Christmas.
Arrived with their mothers
to a tea arranged by an alumna
to hear the advantages
of attending a school dedicated
to a thorough education,
to train the mind and heart of woman
for usefulness and happiness
whatever may be her work in life.

The main building?
An imposing structure of solid brick,
with commanding views
of valley and mountains,
the fairgrounds.
A pleasant town within walking distance.

Our students come from several nearby states,
live in heated, wall-papered rooms
and eat in a spacious dining hall.
The library: 2,000 valuable and carefully selected volumes,
the best magazines and periodicals of interest to young ladies.
A large art studio filled with casts,
a teacher whom the girls adore
who went to the Art Students’ League, New York, New York.
These courses of study may be elected:
Classical
Latin-Scientific
Literary or Modern Language.
Chapel every morning,
social events with invited townspeople
who among them number many clergymen, judges, active and retired;
professors, educated people of great refinement.

Our students go to the finest colleges.

Not Missing What I'm Missing

2011-01-13T16:29:00.001-05:00

Thanks, Adam for reminding me why I'm here.

Talk Radio

2011-01-11T16:08:00.008-05:00

Some nights she gets up and goes into Eddie’s room. They still call it that though it’s years since Eddie left home to get married. His Field Day ribbons and All-State jackets, his half-filled stamp albums and high school trophies abandoned in the attic. Maybe, his next trip up from Texas, he’ll get around to going through the boxes. Decide what to keep. What to toss. If Jack had his way, the whole mess would be in the landfill by now.

Jack never hears her get up. Even the delivery trucks at the corner store couldn’t wake him.

She pulls back the quilt on the twin bed by the radio, and listens in the dark. Steve from Melrose is on the line. He’s a regular, tends to go on too long, especially about the old days in Revere. . Next, Bill from Fitchburg. Another regular. He’s blind. A bit of a know-it-all she hates to say. Greg the limo driver on his car phone, Aggie from Quincy—she was a salesgirl at Jordan Marsh for forty years. Mabel from Woburn, teasing Barry, the host, joking around and really having absolutely nothing to say, Mel the 7-11 guy from Delaware, John in the mail truck on his nightly run to Bangor, a man somewhere on I-80 in Pennsylvania hoping to get home by daybreak.

Voices in the faceless night, coming on waves from darkened bedrooms and front halls, from half empty double beds and guest rooms where sheets never seem to need changing, from shuttered buildings and all-night stores on highways, from inside trucks and cars, so many people biding their time until their turn—or sleep.
. . . Click here to continue story.

Mixed Clouds and Sunshine

2011-01-08T22:40:00.010-05:00

This morning, for the second time in six days, AAA of Southern California came to our rescue. Last Sunday morning the trip to Ikea got off to a late start because our ’05 Kia Rio rental needed a jumpstart. I’d forgotten to turn the lights off when I parked late Saturday afternoon in the apartment lot. This morning, the tow truck arrived to carry the Kia—and Mike—fourteen miles back to the rental agency in San Diego. The night before, the Kia when put in reserve and drive had let out a loud knocking sound—somewhere between a screech and ominous rumble—from its front end. It sounded serious. It turned out a piece of plastic—not visible until the mechanic put the car up on a lift—was lodged in the wheel well and causing the screech. By noon the car was back, by three the sun was out and it was time to hop in the Kia and take a walk on the beach.

Sunday at Ikea

2011-01-05T22:01:00.006-05:00

I sometimes wonder whether Ikea pumps a scentless mist called ”Acquisition” into its stores. I’m convinced The Container Store does it, too. It’s hard to get out of those two emporia of seductive goods without a cart—and receipt—that’s fuller and steeper than the shopping list you walked in with would have warranted. And so it was on Sunday when Mike and I drove down to the Ikea in Mission Valley to buy a few essentials for our apartment. We’d researched the items online the night before and drawn up our list: 1 white three-drawer Malm bureau (on sale), 1 white Vika Amon/Vika Curry work table (on sale) for Mike and a 7-piece starter set of Snitsig pots and pans (tagsale-cheap).

Fortified by the Ikea .99 cent-breakfast and two cups of coffee, a Kirby-Stone routine before launching any Ikea shopping assault, we slowly meandered along the winding sales floors, and, of course, arrived at the checkout with a full cart in addition to the push carrier holding the flat boxes containing the bureau and table. A four-pack of Elly dishtowels, a Bolmen toilet brush/holder, a set of plastic bowls, a pair of white 300-count pillowcases, one light bulb, plastic clips for cereal boxes and bread bags, Marit placemats—how did all this stuff get in there? Was it the perky Swedish names even the lowliest of goods carry? The hard-to-resist prices? The thought that driving to any Ikea store is a hassle, so better buy now? The sense of global bonding from knowing people in Abu Dhabi, Beijing and Bucharest are leaning back in their comfy Poang chairs, drying their dishes with Marit towels and cleaning their toilets with Bolmen brushes just like me? Or was it something Ikea had sneaked into the bacon in that .99 cent breakfast?

We hauled our bounty back to our little apartment, where the put-together bureau (a time-consuming task performed by Mike) and table settled in with our Ikea buys from last winter—two Poang chairs, another white Vika Amon/Vika Curry computer table for the Mac desktop, a Leksvik dining table, a Lack side table and Orgel floor lamp, all bought on sale or at prices befitting an unfurnished three-month rental. Our Ikea apartment inventory, however, could never compete with the fruits of Lisbeth Salander’s shopping spree at the Ikea in Stockholm. In the second book of Steig Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy, The Girl Who Played with Fire, Salander brought home a truckload. Click here to see her Ikea shopping list and an excerpt from the novel as featured on apartment therapy's website.

Happy New Year from apt. 55

2011-01-01T20:38:00.004-05:00

During the bleakest days of last summer’s house-selling saga, a return to southern California for another winter seemed less and less likely. Money was flying out of our checkbook and savings—for an apartment we weren’t living in, for a parade of painters, electricians, plumbers, helpers, for trips to Foster Farrar, the dump, Home Depot, plumbing supply houses, Northampton Lumber, to Joe’s for take-out pizza and Dunkin’ Donuts for caffeine and sugar boosts. By the time, the house was under contract and the inspection ordeal was in full swing, I felt like I had landed in Jail on a board game called “17 Summer,” and would pay anything to get my release.

Well, it all worked out, and here we are back in Solana Beach. Our one-bedroom apartment this year may be a little smaller and within earshot of the freeway, but the beaches and views along the coast are as beckoning as ever. I think we earned our place in the sun.

Me and Mr. Kinney

2010-12-04T16:38:00.024-05:00

When I began blogging two years ago, I was living three houses up from King Street in an old house that had been the subject of the chapbook I had written for Northampton’s 350th. After the book was published, readers passed along stories and recollections about the house and neighborhood that I wished could have gone into the book. “Three Houses Up,” I hoped, would provide a place where I could continue the Story of 17 Summer, and, and not incidentally, chip away at a writer’s block that had been hounding me since I retired from the business of writing. Little would I have imagined back then, that by November 2010, Summer Street would have a new owner, Mike and I would be renting an apartment three blocks away, and my new home would be next door to the very house to which Charles Kinney, who owned 17 Summer in the 1880s, moved.

For Kinney and his wife, Harriet, a brand-new, spacious frame house with a big backyard must have been a step up from their starter home on Summer, more befitting, perhaps, for an up-and-coming business and civic leader. Had the house-painting equipment Mr. Weaver, the Kinney's next-door neighbor on Summer, stored outside his barn become too much of an eyesore? Did Harriet pine for something grander—crown moldings, walnut woodwork, more bedrooms, a gracious entrance hall? Certainly, living across the street from the town cemetery, repository for grave markers cut and carved by Hampshire Marble Works, the Kinney family business, would be quieter than being right off King. Somehow I could relate.

When I returned from a four-month sojourn in California this spring, the idea of selling suddenly made sense. It had become hard to ignore the huge hole in the roof of a neighbor's falling-down garage whenever I looked out the door to my back garden, or the mammoth flat bed tow truck painted neon lime-green sitting in the driveway of the recovery house directly across the street or the sound of its back-up warnings beeping at all hours. As much as the neighborhood had meant to us over the last 27 years, as comfortable a place 17 Summer had been for my family, it was time to move on. By the time a buyer for 17 Summer appeared in late September, the "Jolly Green Giant" and the garage were gone—not without some forceful lobbying on our part.

In the early 1920s, Charles Kinney made one last move—heading west across King Street and up the hill to 23 Massasoit Street. In one of those odd, unexpected connections that seem to crop up while doing research, I happened to be living at the house next door—21 Massasoit, the Coolidge house, when I bought 17 Summer. Been there.

The Kinney house today is pictured above.

End of the Season

2010-08-08T16:04:00.005-04:00

My heart hasn’t been in gardening this summer. The heat and humidity squashed any desire to leave airconditioning and muck about my flowerbeds. The expense of whipping the house into shape to sell ruled out a favorite spring pastime—shopping for perennials at plant fundraisers and farmers markets. Meanwhile, as prospective buyers troop through the house, I try to keep up 17 Summer’s “pleasant gardens” (as my realtor describes them in ads). Staking. Weeding. Deadheading. Cutting back delphinium and echinops for second growth. Watering, (but not often enough). Still, my efforts don’t seem, or look, good enough. This will be my last season gardening on Summer, and that explains, I suppose, my lack of enthusiasm. The platycodon, lady’s mantle, the stately spike speedwells, a splurge at the now closed Blue Meadows, will bloom next summer without me. When I moved here 27 years ago, the backyard was covered with weeds and clogged with brush. At least, I’ll be leaving a “pleasant garden” to the future owners of 17 Summer. And I will leave with the hope that they, too, will find the simple contentment, as I have over the years, of sitting on the deck after dinner and admiring the flowers out back.

Thinning Out, Catching Up

2010-07-17T16:55:00.010-04:00

The For Sale sign on the front lawn and impending move to a two-bedroom apartment have forced me to perform literary triage on my books. Keep. Sell. Give Away. The disowned have been boxed and carted off to the garage, while the chosen sit neatly arranged and remarkably free of dust. I decided not to follow a “Staging your house for sale” web site that advised purging the living room of books and leaving only one or two pictures on the walls. I’ve also eschewed an eye-catching tip I saw in a shelter magazine for grouping books by the color of their jackets or bindings. The task of preparing the house for sale now behind me, it’s time to dust off the Book Shelf.

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
I knew very little about this wonderful novel by a doctor— a terrific prose stylist, too, I would soon discover—that’s set mainly in Ethiopia and follows the lives of conjoined twins Shiva and Marion and their extended families. From the first sentence on, I was swept into this powerful story whose characters I would grow so close to, I hated to come to the end. Vergese’s seamless ability to meld medical terms and surgical procedures into the story line was amazing. I adored this book.

Carver A Writer’s Life by Carol Sklenicka
This meticulously researched literary biography, a revealing study of Carver’s short stories and poems—and the daily gist from which they sprung—is probably more than most people would ever care to know. As a long-time Carver fan and self-anointed disciple back in my short story writing days, I’ve been wanting to get my hands on this book since reading Stephen King’s review in the Sunday New York Times last year. In January, I attended a reading by Sklenicka at a California bookstore (click here for post.) I finally found a copy at Forbes, alas with a two-week return date. As I galloped through the nearly 500 pages of this brilliant, engrossing biography, I think that I have discovered for good where Carver “was calling from.” I decided to re-read some of his short stories, and, although I understood that, of course, his works were autobiographical, nevertheless, I was stunned just how intimately and chillingly they mirrored his life.

Looking Good After All These Years

2010-07-07T14:29:00.012-04:00

“We plan to be the owners of 17 Summer who stay the longest.”

So reads the last line of the chapbook I wrote six years ago to mark the city of Northampton’s 350th anniversary—“A House. A Street. A City. The Story of 17 Summer.” At the time, I could not imagine ever selling the sturdy little cottage we loved and had poured so much time and labor into making a cheerful home. But joints get creaky, backs problematic, the snow shovel heavier, weeds peskier, fixed incomes smaller, dreams deferred too long. One night, soon after returning from four months in Southern California, we sat at the kitchen table, and surprised ourselves with the ease and sureness of our decision: “Let’s sell.” Painted and spruced up, the house went on the market; the For Sale sign pounded into the front lawn. And, of all the people who have owned 17 Summer over the last 138 years, Kirby and Stone have stayed the longest—27 years. We outlasted the Cohens who lived here from 1915 to 1938.

Signs on Parade

2010-06-04T17:07:00.015-04:00

In February I posted “Signs of the Times” about my upcoming Mount Holyoke College reunion and my role as Wordsmith for the Class of ’60’s parade signs. My Fiftieth has come and gone, the signs now stored in the Alumnae Association attic, and this retired freelancer has packed away her ad-writing beret one more time. The "Ivies" and "Moon" signs, shown here, are my favorites.

House Hunting in Pennsylvania

2010-05-01T15:32:00.012-04:00

After their tornadic car episode in Oklahoma, our traveling couple deserved a peaceful excursion along the back roads of Pennsylvania’s Cumberland Valley.

While in California, I decided to rework parts of “Just Marion,” a prose poem I’d written ages ago about poet Marianne Moore’s early life in Carlisle, Penn. The opening section covers the Craig wing of her mother’s family. Their late-18th century homestead was called Locust Hill, and stood in the tiny hamlet of Welsh Run, near the Maryland state line. Although the area is only about 60 miles down I-81 from my former home in Carlisle, I had never tried to locate the house or get a feel for the countryside where Mary Warner Moore had grown up, and later, visited with Marianne and son Warner. This winter I discovered online a scanned copy of a book I had not known existed, Five typical Scotch Irish families of the Cumberland Valley (1922). Craig, not surprisingly, was one of the five families featured. I knew I had to swing by Welsh Run on the way home from California.

Once off the interstate and past a clump of would-be McMansions, we found a road called Locust Level on the old Mercersburg Pike. Now, that looks promising, we thought, and wasn’t this land, this valley, lovely; the scale of mountains and wide green fields and meadows, gentle, orderly. Save for the tall gleaming silos and abundance of outbuildings, William Craig who brought his bride to Locust Hill in the 1820s might have been in his fields pitching hay.

My research materials, including a picture of the homestead, were buried beneath suitcases and boxes in the trunk of our car. Mike, bolder than I at knocking on strangers’ doors, pulled into the yard of a classic Pennsylvania stone farmhouse, each stone freshly re-pointed. A young woman wearing a Mennonite cap came to the backdoor, and upon hearing our tale, waved her father away from his barnyard chores to answer our query. Yes, Craig was a familiar name in these parts, and the person we should see was John Stauffer, who liked nothing better than to talk local and family history. He would know where to find Locust Hill. Try catching him at Conococheague Institute. He started the place; it was nearby.

When leaving the farmer’s yard, never would I have imagined that soon I’d be touring Welsh Run and Locust Level with a cousin of Marianne Moore at the wheel—Dr. John Craig Stauffer. I viewed Locust Hill (pictured above) from the roadside; since it was milking time, John felt we should not disturb the farmer. The farm, he said, practically sits on the Mason-Dixon Line and its acreage spreads into Maryland. On our way back to the Institute, he pointed out the Presbyterian Church and schoolhouse members of the Craig family had attended.

The next morning, we stopped off in Carlisle to see the plaque that John had told us the Pennsylvania Historical Commission had erected in front of the Moore family home at 343 North Hanover Street. The modest townhouse (the grey house covered with fake stones) was the Moore home from 1896-1916. I had thought my revisions of “Just Marion” were just about completed—until climbing into John Stauffer’s car last Thursday afternoon.

Oklahoma. Not OK.

2010-04-17T22:02:00.007-04:00

by Lu Stone and Mike Kirby
A funny thing happened to our plan to be in Russellville, Arkansas last night. We were driving east on I-40, the cruise control set on seventy, the green fields and hills of eastern Oklahoma flying by, when God smiled on us and said: “You’re tired, Kirby, time to give Lu the wheel.” So we pulled off at the next exit, 237, in the middle of nowhere or what we foolishly thought was nowhere, and left the car in idle while we switched drivers. Then, a disturbing unfamiliar sound came from the engine, something akin to breaking plates. We knew we weren’t going to be bedding down in Arkansas that night. Welcome to Henryetta, Oklahoma, population 7,100.

We headed cautiously to a convenience store on the other side of the interstate. Next door, the Pig Out Palace beckoned hungry travelers. When Mike turned off the engine, he discovered coolant, quite a bit of it, on the ground. Quickly people came over to offer sympathy and various diagnoses, the last of which made sense and lifted the sense of doom that had enveloped us. Just a seized-up water pump, not the main seal. Engine temperature normal, no need for a rebuild.

AAA was called, and about a half hour later we had a new friend and confidante, Dave, who had gospel music playing in the cab of his truck. The lady at the convenience store knew a mechanic, and Dave approved the choice, and soon we were off at about ten miles an hour, bumping along the back streets and roads of Henryetta. We learned why the two unsightly junkyards on Main Street had never been able to be cleared up, what happened to wreck the old train station, where to stay and where not to stay, where to eat and not to eat. Then, we met Jason, who seems to be the mechanic with the heart of gold; his daughter, his mechanic, Dave's boss and Dave's boss's wife, who also showed up at the garage looking for advice on their squeaky struts.

Jason told us the story of a New Yorker fleeing the city and a marriage that had self-destructed. Heading to California, his car broke down in Henryetta, and he spent a week here while Jason rebuilt his engine. The guy took off for the coast, and then about six months later, returned to Henryetta to settle down, saying that it was the nicest place he had ever been. He spent seven years here, before moving on.

Once our Camry had been deposited at Jason’s shop, we checked into a motel endorsed by our new friends as being “clean and decent.” It’s called Relax Inn and owned by a couple from India. A double with WIFI, TV with a zillion stations, microwave and refrigerator goes for $44.55.

It’s Saturday morning and raining buckets. A few minutes ago, our cell rang and it was the mechanic. The new water pump arrived and it was the wrong one. The supply house is now promising the right part on Monday morning, first thing. We’re looking forward to three, possibly four days here. Maybe, tomorrow we will go to that little church down the street and pray. Meanwhile, the $5.99 dinner, egg roll included, at the New China Restaurant across the parking lot from our room was quite tasty.

Another Day on I-40

2010-04-15T00:07:00.004-04:00

California and Arizona yesterday, New Mexico tonight, and 11 states to go.

Parting Shots

2010-04-05T20:07:00.004-04:00

Photos
Top four, views from Torrey Pines State Reserve, La Jolla;
bottom, peaks from Del Mar

Farewell, Solana Beach

2010-03-29T01:55:00.003-04:00

With our three-month lease up in Solana Beach, we're packing up and heading two exits south to housesit, keeping the California dream alive a little longer.

Familiar Territory

2010-03-28T21:38:00.004-04:00

Kitchen table. Laptop. Buttered piece of toast. Different time zone, kitschy ceiling fixture, hummingbird out the window—but this writer sure looks like he’s home.

First Right off The Five

2010-03-19T21:06:00.016-04:00

"Stuccoed" ceilings, wood-grained Formica countertops, blocky white exteriors, faded red-tiled roofs—the seventies-era apartment complex I’ve lived in the past three months has seen a lot of renters come and go. By California standards, the 122-unit complex is “old,” the two speed bumps in the parking lot a little worn down, the odds and ends on balconies a bit unregulated. Any place newer would have been out of the Kirby-Stone price range.

Over the years the owners have, as my mother would say with an approving nod, “kept the place up.” Our 620-square feet has been a happy home for us, providing a sunny, quiet spot to plug in our computers while enjoying the novelty of not worrying that every step outside the front door might lead to an orthopedic appointment. And, to be honest, we like the real estate cachet of living west of The Five, 1.25 miles from the beach, in an enviable—so we’re told—zip code, and, best of all, not a porn shop in sight.

Given our hometown location of three houses up from King, is it any surprise that Mike and Lu would find an apartment in a “walkable” California neighborhood. Located right across the street is everything we need to avoid a trip on the freeway—Panera, Starbucks, CVS, Henry’s (a regional supermarket specializing in produce), Marshall’s, Staples, Carl’s Jr., Golden Spoon Yogurt, Dixieline Lumber Home Center, Discount Tire, Jamba Juice, Panda Express, and many, many more stores and services, some even locally owned. What would the anti-Big Box crowd back home think?

Sunday in the Park

2010-03-16T17:58:00.018-04:00

The painted wooden pencils lined up outside the trailer park had intrigued me since I first spotted them from the Sunday Farmer’s Market across the road. The cleverly colored and “sharpened” pencil stakes hadn't come from Home Depot and the trailers parked near the entrance had never rolled off an assembly line of manufactured homes. Was this place a low-ahead artists’ colony? Affordable housing in San Diego’s North County? I parked my bag of avocadoes, lemons and beets in the car and wandered in.

“Oh, the owner of the park wanted this to be a happy place,” a woman who was sitting in the sun outside the laundry shed explained. “So he put in the colored pencils.” My curiosity somewhat satisfied, I wandered around the neighborhood, admiring the ingenuity of its resident artisans, the variety of their do-it-yourself additions and fences, potted gardens and decorative touches. It was hard to find the trailers in this so-called trailer park.

Pictured here is the “trailer” of a retired tango dancer and teacher who invited me inside her dazzling home to see her uniquely decorated living room and updated kitchen and bath. Since purchasing her trailer seven years ago, she has festooned her home with buttons, beads, stones, found objects, game pieces, family photos, newspaper and book clippings, stuffed animals, and finds from thrift stores and rummage sales. As we used to say in the retail ad business: Nothing Quite Like It. [Click photos to enlarge.]

Summer Jobs from A to Z

2010-03-08T21:55:00.027-05:00

While browsing in a used bookstore the other day, I came across a clever little book called The Writer’s Block 786 Ideas to Jump-start Your Imagination. For anyone experiencing a creative drought, and lord knows, my family and friends have heard about mine, it’s a real find, filled with what writers workshops call “prompts”—a word, a phrase, a situation, a what-if to stir up sentences. I flipped through the book this morning, and came up with: “Write about the most boring job you suffered through.”

The year was 1954. I had just turned sixteen, and, with New York State working papers and a brand new social security card proudly in hand, I reported to my first summer job—a file clerk in lower Manhattan. I was thrilled to be a real working girl, a commuter who knew how to fold her New York Times into narrow columns and where to find the best spots on the ferry for watching the great transatlantic liners of the Fifties sail into New York Harbor. I was thrilled to be a lunch-hour denizen of Wall Street, Maiden Lane, the old foot paths laid out by the Dutch, prowling the crowded noontime streets and sidewalks, munching apples bought off pushcarts, You Can’t Go Home Again under my arm in this my summer of Thomas Wolfe.

For a salary of $20 a week, I sat at a metal desk in the home office of America Fore, a big insurance company, and alphabetized 3” by 5” white file cards bearing the names and addresses of agents. As I watched the hour hand on the office clock creep with excruciating slowness to quitting hour, I did this task all summer long, and I did it surrounded by more than a dozen women—each an America Fore lifer—alphabetizing their own pile of cards. Miss Schmidt, a strict, skinny spinster who never smiled, was our boss, and she sat at a desk facing us, the better to keep an eye out for chatters, shirkers, and too-frequent restroom users. Every morning, she offered a cheery morale booster: “Good morning, girls. Another day, another dollar.”

That summer, Miss Schmidt taught me how to alphabetize: Begin by sorting into three piles, A to H, and so on, then, if needed, break down into smaller piles—a timesaver I’ve used throughout my life. By the time Labor Day freed me from my little cards, I’d vowed that when I graduated from college, I would never work in an office with metal desks or a place where I could not freely move about.

My part-German genetic work ethic sentenced me to America Fore for another term the summer of 1955. This job was a slight step up on the boredom scale: alphabetizing and sorting credit reports. The reports documenting husbands running up debts on the sly in Mexico or dying or fleeing town under mysterious circumstances made for juicy reading. Full bosomed and amply rouged, the boss enjoyed chatting with her girls about their plans for the weekend or the bargains they'd picked up at discount stores. Every Friday she took a long lunch hour over cocktails with her female America Fore peers.

The following January, I graduated from high school, and a few days later returned to America Fore, this time, promoted to the enviable post of secretary to a financial officer. (In my Jersey City public high school, two graduations are held: January and June.) My boss was a charming man in his fifties, a frequenter of the club car on his ride home to the suburbs, a company man passed over to sit in an isolated office with a girl outside who really was a girl and who could barely touch type. I never needed an internship when I was in college—America Fore taught me all I needed to know about work and the workplace. And In my forty years of working, I never had a metal desk or a job that made me sit.

Two Terrific Novels

2010-03-05T14:40:00.011-05:00

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
“…a high-
wire act that manages to work as an addictive page-turner, as a rigorous dissection of a period —and man— of history, and as a stunning piece of writing as spare and muscular as it is rich and allusive…” I’m not going to attempt topping this brilliant assessment of Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall that I found online this morning. In one sentence, writer Anna Murphy conveys the power of this stunning novel that swept me into the early sixteenth century world of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and Thomas More. Mantel’s witty, poetic voice—boldly expressed in the present tense—made me feel that I’d been ushered into the same room, the same London streets, the same royal chamber to stand by Cromwell’s side and eavesdrop. I loved this book, and can’t rave about it enough. Read Murphy’s wonderful interview with Hilary Mantel here.

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
A literal high-wire act—Philippe Petit’s amazing tightrope walk between the World Trade Center Towers on August 7, 1974—is the catalyst prompting Colum McCann’s terrific novel Let the Great World Spin. In this deftly plotted novel, we follow a group of New Yorkers, as random a group as the people who walked the streets of the city that day, rode the subway, went to court, got in a fatal accident, answered a ringing public phone, stopped on the way to work to look up at Petit. McCann’s ease in shifting voices and points of views—from a Park Avenue matron to mother and daughter prostitutes, an Irish worker-priest and grieving mothers to partied-out artists and hackers—links this disparate crowd in surprising and profound ways. This is the kind of novel whose characters are so real, they stick in your mind and you wonder how they are doing.

For more reviews, click here and here.

On a Clear Day on Point Loma . . .

2010-03-04T19:41:00.026-05:00

We visited Cabrillo National Monument Park, located atop bluffs at the tip of San Diego’s Loma Point, for the first time this week. (Have you ever noticed that when you know you're about to leave a place, as we are, you suddenly become a last-minute tourist?) The visibility that day was excellent, allowing views stretching from the San Bernardino Mountains in the north to Baja California, Mexico in the south and to the west, the Pacific. Point Loma is a peninsula shaped liked an elephant trunk which forms a natural protective barrier at the entrance of San Diego Bay. About 45,000 people live here. The park is named for Portuguese explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo who landed here in 1542, and became the first European to set foot on the west coast.

Signs of the Times

2010-02-23T21:20:00.013-05:00

My 50th college reunion is coming up in May, and I’ve been drafted wordsmith for the signs the Class of 1960 will carry in the traditional Alumnae Parade. For a dozen or so signs, the goal is to come up with short, witty phrases that “tell” our class story and capture life at Mount Holyoke in the late 1950s. Generations of alumnae sign writers have set the creative bar high, so I’m feeling a little pressure to not let my class down.

When I was growing up, I loved to look at a photograph in the Jaeckle family album of my Aunt Miriam carrying a sign at one of her Class of 1926 reunions. I thought the copy quite clever: College Broadened our Minds—and our Waistlines. Aunt Mir was a loyal Mount Holyoke alum throughout her life, and, whenever she was in South Hadley for a reunion or Alumnae Council, she would send me a postcard with a pretty picture of the campus and the message: “Hope you will come here some day.” That day would come, and she would drive mother and me to my admissions interview with her good friend—Mount Holyoke’s legendary Head of Admissions Miss Harriet Newhall.

I can’t help but think there is a certain irony in my reunion sign assignment. I began my career as a sign writer and junior copywriter at Lord & Taylor in New York. Each sign, I must hasten to add, was actually a mini ad, positioned by displays on the sales floor or in the windows. And here I am fifty years later back where it all began, still wondering when the words will begin to flow.

The photos: My class's 35th reunion parade and a Lu Jaeckle whose yearbook photo has grayed as much as she.

Succulents and Swami’s

2010-02-15T15:00:00.015-05:00

Yogi Paramahansa Yogananda chose wisely when selecting a site back in 1937 for his Self-Realization Fellowship Retreat and Hermitage. The center sits high on the bluffs of Encinitas, ensuring spectacular views of the sea and the sandy, sometimes, rocky, beaches running up and down the coast. Whenever I drive north on the Coast Highway—past the crowded outdoor cafes, the surfers running barefoot across the road to the beach, the packs of cyclists sporting the colors of tropical plumage, the power walkers hitting their stride—that first sight of the Hermitage’s gold lotus domes never fails to surprise me. All of a sudden, there it stands, an island of serenity in earshot of the 101, beckoning passersby to enter. And sometimes I park the car and go in.

The Hermitage’s Meditation Garden is open to the public free of charge, and I’ve stopped by a number of times during my visits to San Diego. Situated on the cliffs, it’s a popular spot for people seeking a quiet place to meditate, to drink in the ocean vistas and watch the surfers below, to wander through the lushly landscaped grounds along flower-lined paths. A short walk south along the 101 is another place I love to visit—Swami’s Beach, famous among surfers for its powerful reef break. At any time of the day, Swami’s little parking area fills up as the surfers come and go, and among them they’ll often be two generations of a family—mother and son, father and son—carrying their boards down the long flight of stairs to the beach and those powerful waves.

Esther's Hearts

2010-02-09T14:38:00.011-05:00

Every February when I worked in the PR office at Mount Holyoke, we’d dust off a story bound to win the hearts of reporters searching for a Valentine’s Day angle. Esther Howland—an 1847 Mount Holyoke graduate—was the young lady’s name, and she’s credited for popularizing (some even say, introducing) Valentine cards to America. Inspired by an ornate English Valentine her father had received from a business associate, Howland decided to make her own and sell them from her father’s stationery store in Worcester, Massachusetts. The cards proved to be wildly popular, and soon Howland found herself running a thriving business, employing a fleet of young women to assemble the Valentines in the attic of her home. She sold the business in 1881, to the Worcester greeting card company George C. Whitney, and lived a comfortable retirement until her death in 1904. She never married.

Sidetrip in Pennsylvania

2010-01-31T14:32:00.017-05:00

On the way to California late last year, I decided to pull off I-81 at Carlisle, the town in Pennsylvania I called home for eight years. I hadn’t been back since the July morning in 1976 when I left South West Street in a bright yellow VW bus, my daughter by my side. All the way to Massachusetts, we would tail the U-Haul-It van carrying her father and brother. The sold sign on the front lawn was the last thing I saw.

I was curious to see how the house—a sturdy brick 1910 semi-attached, located close to the college that had brought the Stones to town—had fared over the years. (In the top photo, it’s the one on the left, behind the pole.) How I had loved that house and my neighborly street, where only a narrow side yard or single wall separated us from each other. An indigenous preference for the tightly built street: the row house, the semi-attached, the big Victorian tucked in a small lot, front porches and stoops right to the sidewalk—guaranteed a high level of sociability and, in South West’s case, hospitability.

To my critical, albeit, sentimental, eye, my old place looked unkempt, forlorn. It saddened me that the owners had not kept it up like the young faculty couple that had once lived there. I was glad to see that the rest of the street looked as well scrubbed and cared for as it did nearly forty years ago.
I did wonder, however, whether a Benjamin Moore color chart had been passed from house to house, with varying degrees of success; a few, to their owners' pride, worthy of a Country Living spread. When I moved on the street in 1968, newcomers inherited a tacit understanding that had long prevailed on South West and elsewhere in town, particularly between owners of attached houses—white was the only acceptable color for painting trim and gingerbread. Something else was different here: the number of cars lining the curb. Years ago, people parked behind their houses, off the alley, giving the neighborhood a more residential feel. The elderly women who came every week to have their hair set at Edna Smiley’s Beauty Salon (housed on the other side of my wall) rarely had any trouble finding a place to park their commodious American-made sedans.

“Do you want to see if you can go inside? Someone may be home,” Mike asked. No, I’d seen enough. I took some pictures to email the kids, and after a few familiar left turns, we were back on 81, heading southwest, only 2791 miles left to go.

Words at the Dinner Table

2010-01-28T23:18:00.007-05:00

We’re a family that loves board games, particularly ones involving words—anyone for a couple of rounds of Boggle? Newcomers to the family have been known to steer away from our competitive play, our tendency to gloat over high point counts, clever moves, to toss verbal jabs at the opposition. For every Boggle game, there will be one senior player who swears she would have had found more words if the board had faced her the same way as it did her junior—and winning—opponent. Such an exchange has now been going on for more than thirty years. from Northampton to California.

Over the holidays, our family added a new game to its after-dinner repertoire—Bananagram. It’s a brilliant word game, with Scrabble roots. The rules are so cleverly thought out, the whole family—in our case, ages 7 to 72—can play together and be on equal footing. Check out Bananagram here. It's addictive.

Report from the We.t Coast

2010-01-22T18:54:00.005-05:00

The locals tell us it's all El Nino's doing. They haven’t seen anything in years like the string of winter storms that’s been battering California for the past five days. Even Legoland and Sea World, two stalwarts of local tourism, have bowed to the elements and shut down until the weekend, when the sun is expected to stay out longer than the short flirts it has been teasing us with all week, just as it did when I shot these photos at Fletcher Cove in Solana Beach this morning. A little bit later the sky was dark and the winds had kicked up, again.

School Books

2010-01-15T19:19:00.005-05:00

Without a Cumby’s around the corner for the morning paper, I’ve been going to the Solana Beach Branch Library, a short walk from here, nearly every morning to read the Times and Xerox the crossword. (True, I could find the Times for sale at the Starbucks across the street, but I'm on a money-saving break from my East Coast print habit.)

The Solana Beach branch is located on the campus of a middle school, an arrangement I'd not previously encountered. Opened ten years ago, the facility was designed to serve the 500 seventh and eighth graders at Earl Warren (a school built in the 1950s) as well as the general public. This unique partnership, which, to me, is a very sensible one, was developed between the local school district, the county library system, the City of Solana Beach, and the Friends of the Library. Until 2000, Solana Beach’s public library was virtually homeless, forced to scrounge for space in stores and shopping plazas around the city. I like the way its permanent home encourages a relaxed intermingling of ages and generations, and for one Times reader, an ongoing runway of southern California’s middle school fashions. Uggs are still in.

A ’99 Camry, 3,168.3 miles, 16 states, 13 interstates, endless cups of coffee—and 80 mph in Texas

2010-01-10T01:02:00.006-05:00

This trip, things were different.
No tent,
no camp stove,
no sleeping bags,
no all-nighters through Kansas,
no National Parks to visit,
no children in the back seat,
no “American Pie” on the radio,
no McGovern for President bumper sticker on the VW bus,
no sleeping in the car,
no midnight cups of coffee at truck stops,
no no-name motels.

This time, our traveling couple—heading to San Diego on their first cross-country road trip in 27 years—
carried:
a GPS,
a Trip Tik from AAA,
a cell phone,
directories for Hampton Inn and La Quinta,
AARP card for motel discounts,
an i-Book,
audiocassettes of the Diaries of Samuel Pepys,
arthritic joints,
limbs with tendency to stiffen when cooped up in car too long,
reaction times requiring greater vigilance,
improved tolerance for the other’s need to stop at rest areas,
and the excitement of hitting the road and feeling young again, of knowing the Pacific was waiting at the end of the road.

Solana Beach, 92075

2010-01-07T20:42:00.004-05:00

The return of my perennial writer’s slump; a triple load of Learning in Retirement seminars (History of the Arabs, The Scramble for Africa, Irish Poetry)—this fall; the task—and tension—of planning a four-month winter furlough in California; the final packing up and long 3,145 mile trek to the coast. Excuses, excuses. I neglected “Three Houses Up.” So it’s time to get the blog up and running again. I’m reporting from a cheerful, little apartment off Lomas Santa Fe, while sitting on a sturdy ladder back chair picked up at a Salvation Army in Escondido. Here are shots of Solana Beach and Del Mar, the town next door, taken this week on my daily walks.

Local Color

2009-10-18T12:34:00.015-04:00

Foliage close to home: the bike trail heading to the Connecticut, North Street sunflowers, old fence on Prospect, and along Paradise Pond at Smith.

Sign Wars Stake Out Summer Street

2009-10-07T19:13:00.019-04:00

Latest tally, as of Monday, October 26:
Bardsley 5—Higgins 4, for Mayor;
Vidal-McNair 4—Carney 2, for Ward 1 City Councilor;
Adams 1—Narkewicz 2—Silva 1, for Councilor at Large;
Mike Flynn 1, for School Committee at Large

A Tree Grows on King Street (once upon a time)

2009-10-04T15:09:00.007-04:00

Where the Armory building now stands—and across from Dunkin Donuts—grew the country’s most celebrated elm tree, which, according to local lore, a young Yale graduate named Jonathan Edwards started from seed in 1726. By the time the famous old elm fell to the ground in August 1913, it topped 100 feet with a trunk nearly 20 feet wide. The New York Times noted the landmark’s loss in a lengthy obituary. Today, I may not have much of a view from my front porch across the way at 17 Summer, but I like to think that the Kinneys and Cohens, who owned my house around the turn of the century, enjoyed coming out the front door and seeing the famous Edwards elm and the handsome Whitney house behind it.

Memorable Markers

2009-10-04T15:00:00.004-04:00

A few dozen local history enthusiasts turned out on a near-drizzly Saturday morning to join award-winning writer Susan Stinson on a walking tour of Bridge Street Cemetery sponsored by Forbes Library. Entitled “Jonathan Edwards in Northampton,” Stinson’s lively commentary drew from her seven years of research on the brilliant 18th century theologian who was minister at what is now First Churches in Northampton from 1727 to 1750. She's been at work on Spider in a Tree, a novel based on the life and family of Jonathan Edwards.

Vermeer Show

2009-10-02T20:38:00.041-04:00

Vermeer’s 17th century masterpiece, The Milkmaid, has long been a favorite of mine, and it's currently the centerpiece of a special exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, drawing a raft of media coverage and crowds. I’ve been collecting postcards since I was a kid, and every time I visit a museum I bring home a batch as souvenirs. Pictured here are postcards of Vermeer’s stunning View of Delft, from the Mauritshuis in The Hague, the The Milkmaid and The Little Street from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and Girl with a Pearl Earring, also in the Mauritius, which I shot from a postcard for an iPhoto slideshow of the trip. Click photos to enlarge.

Political Boost

2009-09-27T16:18:00.014-04:00

Last night while driving home from a rousing-good party for a political candidate, I thought back to my early years in town when I didn't know one candidate from the other, and had little time or interest in caring. Think what you like of my civic truancy, but at some periods of our lives, there are a lot of us out there operating off the local political grid. The following excerpt from an earlier blog post fills in the story. Click on photo to read..

"The other day I came across a clipping I’d saved from an August 1980 issue of The Sunday Republican. “Tell Us About Your Town” the headline urged. “What makes you think it’s such a great place?” Four people—drafted, no doubt, by their institutions’ PR departments—had been asked to flex their civic pride in 700 words or less. The attractions of living in South Hadley, Southwick, Springfield and Northampton shared editorial turf that day, with the latter town’s booster being a brown-haired Lu Stone. [I don’t know what is tougher: To come upon unexpectedly—28 years later—a photo of yourself at 42 or a piece of forgotten prose.]

I was a relative newcomer to Northampton when I wrote the article, still smitten, I suppose, by the brilliance of my decision to adopt this city. At the time, I was renting a house on one of the city’s leafier streets and commuting to a job on the other side of the river. Caught up in family activities and demands of work, I paid little, if no, attention to local politics or the town’s social or political intrigues. I could not have told you the name of the mayor or the Ward Two city councilor."

By the summer of 1983, I was remarried, and my husband and I bought a fixer-upper on Summer Street, three houses up from King . . . Right from the start, we loved our house and street; we became Summer Street loyalists, quick to defend it at any slight. it would not be long before I knew the name of my city councilor. He was my husband, Mike Kirby."

Part II: One Misstep, One Unexpected Side Trip

2009-09-16T12:07:00.017-04:00

For Part I, see August 18th post: National Health Care—One Tourist's View

So there we were, a non-Portuguese speaking Mike Kirby and Lu Stone, his equally non-Portuguese speaking wife with a broken leg, in a remote Azorean village so tidy and still it might have been lifted from a model railroad layout. It was late morning on a Monday; the next flight to Logan would not take off until 6 pm the following day.

Our cabbie took the shore route out of Sete Cidades, providing his hapless fares one last—and strangely intimate—view of the lakes and hills that had appeared mysterious and aloof from our earlier perch along the volcano’s rim. At the end of the narrow road, he stopped and pointed ahead to two signs bearing the names of towns that meant nothing to us. One pointed left, the other right.

We shrugged. He nodded, a firm nod of approval, and turned left. This was not the steep, twisty farm road the bus from Ponta Delgada had plied that morning up from the coast. As we cruised along the high ridge, fields and forests suddenly gave way to a breathtaking view, the kind tourists take a detour to see: A parade of villages strutted up the coast for miles, their white buildings dazzling in the sun, the waves rolling off the wild Atlantic, crashing against the rocky shore. Our cabbie slowed down so we could appreciate the sight. Sitting in this makeshift ambulance in need of a painkiller while oohing and ahhing over a view bordered on the absurd. I would have reached for my camera, but by now we had discovered it had been left behind during our scramble in or out of our rescuers’ car.

About a half hour later, around one o’clock, the taxi dropped us off at the door marked, Urgenica, of Hospital do Divino Espirito Santo, a big up-to-date facility in Ponta Delgado. “Do you think they take credit cards?” I asked Mike as an attendant pushed my wheelchair into a crowded waiting room. The meager amount of Portuguese I’d picked up on earlier trips to Portugal had vanished somewhere back in Sete Cidades. But, hadn’t I read every schoolchild in the Azores takes at least two years of English.

I soon discovered that Hospital do Divino Espirito Santo was not my hometown Cooley Dick, where spouses and loved ones are allowed to tag along into the ER, and patients await care in little examining rooms, with chairs set up for the worried family, and squadrons of health professionals rush in with monitors and machines. Here, I was going to be on my own; no husbands permitted beyond the swinging doors. Here, I’d do my waiting in the hallway.

I waved good-bye to Mike who had a busy afternoon ahead: call the kids back in the States, talk to referrals at Valley Medical Center, wrestle with a SATA airlines rep to cancel the flight to Lisbon and rebook our homeward trek, hit the nearest ATM for a wad of euros. I joined a gang of about two dozen people lined up outside the x-ray room. I waited nearly an hour until my name was called, and during that time I decided to try to forget the stabbing pain in my leg and my sense of helplessness—and anger at allowing a measly piece of gravel to cheat Mike and me out of two weeks on the Algarve—by viewing this whole crazy adventure as a fascinating side trip, one tourist’s inside view of the Portuguese health system.

For more than an hour, I chatted with a young woman on the gurney next to mine about Katrina, George Bush, the diversity of the Azorean people, her stress-related headaches, and the logistics of Portugal’s tax-funded public health care. Neither of my roommates in the orthopedic ward where I spent the night spoke a word of English. For one night at least, our triple became a hangout for a group of curious schoolboys on the mend from broken bones, a gathering place for anyone wishing to practice their conversational English skills at an American’s bedside. The cup of Sanka served each night at nine o'clock to patients; the tea and biscuits, coloring books and crayons thoughtfully distributed by a staff member every hour or so to the waiting room; the starch-less white cotton coats that looked like dimity aprons worn backwards sported by doctors. There was a lot to see, to help pass the time, so much to tell Mike on our way home.

In the end, the doctors and nurses and aides of Hospital do Divino Espirito Santo took good care of me. They set my leg, painful as that episode was, with near perfect anatomical accuracy, dressed its wounds and applied a temporary cast that would hold until my return to Boston where I’d seek treatment. They administered shots and meds to kill my pain and avoid complications, followed the protocol for x-rays, kept me overnight for observation, armed me with meds and warnings for the five-hour flight home, and arranged an ambulance to transport Mike and me to the airport.

Just as I was about to leave, the ward's team of nurses, doctors, aides, technicians piled into the room and gathered around the bird-like old woman sitting on the edge of her bed. A nurse whispered that my roommate was about to learn she would not be going back to her home on the tiny island of Santa Maria; she needed a nursing home. I was impressed by the number of hospital staff that had come to break the sad news, to rally around her, hold her hand. Somehow I knew my spry little neighbor who had loved to hop out of bed and socialize up and down the hall, stand at the foot of my bed and smile, would never be going home. She began to cry. I went over and hugged her. There was nothing I could say, but I think she understood.

"I'll Take Paper, Please."

2009-09-07T18:17:00.005-04:00

Sometime in the 1960s or 70s, The New Yorker ran a cartoon of a man, spiffily clad in bathrobe and slippers outside his apartment door, hugging a thick Sunday paper to his chest. Tears of joy ran down his cheeks, his smile as wide as the hall of his pre-war building. No caption needed: the New York Times was back. The strike which had shuttered newspaper pressrooms all over the city for weeks had been settled.

I remember that strike and earlier blackouts at the Times and the other big city dailies, and how bleak mornings were with no New York Times to scoop up from the apartment doormat or front porch, to pluck off the pile at the subway newsstand or corner store, and then, hungrily spread open on the kitchen table the pages with the dependable typeface and layout or, read, folded according to narrow subway requirements, on the bus or train.

My allegiance to the Times began freshman year in high school when student subscriptions were 25 cents a week, copies delivered to our homerooms every morning. Carrying the Times around Henry Snyder High School in Jersey City rated us as sophisticates, or so, we thought, our admission ticket to the city only a PATH ride across the river. Meyer Berger and Gay Talese became my favorite reporters, their prose style, sense of narrative carefully studied; the crossword a daily, and lifelong, ritual. Fifty-five years later, my addiction to the morning Times shows no signs of abating. [And have you noticed that the Times, albeit punier in size, has been publishing chewier, longer articles, ceding “the news” we read online hours earlier to the electronic outlets?]

In the last few years, my household has opted for a paperless Boston Globe and Daily Hampshire Gazette, reading the two dailies online, but even at two dollars a day, and a budget-busting six dollars on Sunday, we cling to our paper New York Times. We’ve already experienced a “paperless” New York Times more than once in our lives and that was enough, and Jacquie and David at Cumby’s around the corner would miss us every morning.

National Health Care—One Tourist's View from a Hospital Ward in Portugal

2009-08-18T19:12:00.038-04:00

A recent spate of newspaper articles (two in Sunday’s Times, alone) reports the encounters of American ex-pats, journalists and visitors with nationalized health care in Europe. Their experiences dealing with the medical establishment overseas were overwhelmingly positive, and may even temper a few recalcitrant attitudes toward public plans in the U.S.

So, maybe, it’s time to add my experience as an American tourist who one day found herself swept into the national healthcare system of Portugal. It was late March 2006, and I was in the Azores—staying on the main island of San Miguel—with my favorite travel companion. From there, we planned to fly to Lisbon, and take the bus to the Algarve, for a two-week stay.

But a nasty patch of loose black volcanic gravel tripped up those plans, and landed me in a Portuguese hospital with a broken leg, or in orthopedic-speak, a closed fracture of my left distal tibia and fibular.

We saved a visit to the Azores’s most spectacular setting—the scenic sister lakes of Sete Cidades—until our last day on the island. Lagoa Verde and Lagoa Azul are set in the center of a volcanic crater, their names literally reflecting their special attraction. On a cloudless day (not a common occurrence way out in the Atlantic) when the sun shimmers upon the waters, one lake appears green, from the surrounding hills; the other, blue, from the sky.

We spent a glorious morning meandering along little-used paths high above the lakes. The weather was cool and sunny; the lakes shimmered in greens and blues, the lush hills and fields, a rolling show of Pantone greens. By now, it had been hours since we had seen a living soul, a farmer hauling hay to his fields far ahead.

As we began to head downhill and begin the long trek into the nearest village, where the bus from Ponta Delgada had deposited us earlier, I slipped, twisting my left leg on the hard volcanic litter. I instantly knew that I’d broken something and, given the acute pain and the big bump beneath my left sock, that I would not be walking out of Sete Cidades or sunning on a beach in Algarve anytime soon. Stranded on a remote cowpath a long walk from telephone, transportation, painkillers, human beings, a helpless 60-something woman in tow, was definitely not the memorable holiday excursion Mike Kirby had planned.

I will never understand the forces at play behind what transpired next, those serendipitous strands of our lives linking people, time and place in stunning, unexpected ways. Call it a miracle, we have, because not five minutes after that fatal step, a tiny car, the sort hired by tourists, merrily bounced down the path. How did these people get here! On a narrow footpath, no less! Could you believe it! What’s the chance this would happen!

Our good Samaritans turned out to be a Norwegian couple touring with a male friend from Sweden. They stopped, quickly made room for us and our packs in their car, and five tourists, two of whom had never been more astonished—or relieved— in their lives and three who spoke little English, took off for the next village. Our driver cruised through empty streets, hoping, in vain, to find a police station, clinic, town hall, any sign of help. Sensing that our rescuers would rather be sightseeing than hauling their needy American cargo around on a beautiful day, we suggested they drop us at the café/bar where we had stopped that morning for coffee. “We’ll get a taxi here,” we assured them.

Despite the café patrons telling us there were no cabs to be had in the town, ten minutes later, to our amazement, a big, spanking new SUV pulled up. Now, where did he come from! We hadn’t the foggiest where we were headed; the driver spoke little, if any, English. but we were on our way at last, and that’s all that mattered. Little did we know, our smiling cabbie was about to give his two American fares the ride of their lives.

click here for Part II . . .

Yes, We Have No Tomatoes

2009-08-11T13:10:00.006-04:00

Our resident vegetable gardener was bereft—he’d just spent the afternoon tearing up the tomato plants he’d grown from seed and fussed over for weeks. Sadly, his ample crop of Romas, Big Boys and Grapes had become one more victim of the Tomato Blight of 2009. The annual ritual of cooking up batches of tomato sauce was not to be. This winter, the freezer wouldn’t be holding dozens of plastic containers, filled to the brim, ready for quick, tasty meals.

The rest of the seedlings fared better. Snap peas, squash, greens, white radishes, peppers took off and landed on our dinner plates and salad bowls. Zinnias started from scratch also thrived. On the flower front, the thinning out and transplanting I had done last fall of perennials like Shasta daisies, speedwell Veronica, coneflowers, bee balm and coreopsis paid off handsomely. For my neighbors and me, one of the great rewards of gardening on Summer Street is seeing—and chatting with— the many passersby who stop to admire our hard work. And it’s especially gratifying to watch the renters on the block catch the gardening spirit, adding swatches of color to their temporary turf.

Calming Influence Needed

2009-07-28T17:00:00.015-04:00

Every time I come back to Northampton from visiting family in San Diego, I prepare myself for digs about crowded freeways, fast drivers in flashy cars, and, of course, the last word: “I wouldn’t want to live there.” Admittedly, driving the I-5—instead of pokey Route 9—to get to Target or Trader Joe’s may not be everyone’s idea of a thrilling afternoon excursion. But, once you get off the Five and land in, say, La Jolla, Del Mar or any of the towns along the Coast Highway, you’re in the slow, or, at least, slower, lane.

Welcome to the wonderfully sane world of roundabouts, speed bumps, generously timed and cleverly lighted pedestrian crossings, and, best of all, four-way stops galore and bike lanes. The nifty red signs are not only found in residential neighborhoods, but in shopping districts and along highways, as well, and, I might add, those maligned California drivers actually come to a full stop. I lived for eight years in a busy market/college town that was a county seat in central Pennsylvania. Four-ways stops were on nearly every corner. I saw how effective they were at slowing down traffic on my street (a direct route to a mall about a mile away) and creating safer passages for walkers and bikers, especially the kids on the block.

So, why, I’ve long wondered, the hue and holler in Northampton whenever some sensible traffic calming measure like the roundabout on Route 9, at Look Park and Bridge Road, or the traffic light for the new bike path on King, comes on the scene. The obvious suggestion of putting four-way stop signs at ugly intersections like Finn and State, Trumbull Road and State, or at other unsafe crossings throughout the city brings out the inevitable naysayers or municipal procrastinators.

I read somewhere that living in the city helps to keep seniors at the top of their game. Part of the reason is the challenges they have to negotiate the minute they step outside: tricky, unsafe street crossings, aggressive drivers, skateboarders and bikers on sidewalks, broken sidewalks, pedestrian lights that go red too quickly, a cast of street characters. Well, I guess, I need not have any worries as long as I call the city of Northampton “home.”<

Fourth on the Vineyard

2009-07-05T14:24:00.000-04:00

Lawn Goes to Seed

2009-06-20T12:54:00.004-04:00

Apartment dwellers Angela and Carl turn their tiny urban patch at the foot of Summer Street into a colorful show of wildflowers. One packet of seed, and all that spring rain, is all it took.Click here to see their summer of 2008 spread.

Road Trips Scrubbed

2009-06-10T16:34:00.015-04:00

It wasn’t the reduced income or a car odometer that never seemed to inch up that made me realize retirement had set in. While packing for a vacation, I was shocked to see my bathroom stash of hotel-size shampoos was gone. Never again, would I come home from a business trip with a fresh supply of the handy freebees, lifted from the Fairfield Inns and Econo-Lodges of America. When you freelance for academic institutions, nonprofits and budget-conscious agencies, as I once did, a stay at a Hampton Inn or Marriott Courtyard is considered a step up.

Not every place where I bunked replenished my horde of shampoos, conditioners and lotions. Girls boarding schools, I soon found out, especially liked to keep their visitors under their wing, putting them up in a guest room, where the headboard was invariably wicker, the bed skirt flowery and the reading lamp weak. At a Catholic girls’ school in southeast Indiana, I stayed in a convent, in the suite reserved for the bishop, and ate dinner with the sisters at the ungodly hour of 4:30 pm. A sleep-over in a Head of School’s house meant work-chat over drinks, a drafty bedroom with no TV, and breakfast in a dining hall swarming with teenagers. This arrangement I tried to avoid, with little success.

Three years after I closed up shop, I still feel a twinge for the work assignments that took me farthest from the leafy campuses of New England. I think of the places where I once contentedly bedded down, in parts of America that never land on a cross-country route mapped by AAA—towns like Xenia, Ohio and Pikeville, Kentucky; Winona, Minnesota and Central, South Carolina; Cochran, Georgia and Belton, Texas. They remind me of Bill Clinton’s campaign stops during Hillary’s presidential run. Twenty years of road trips sprung me from my home office; showed me sights I never would have seen otherwise; introduced me to an amazing array of people, from line workers in a Tennessee car plant, pizza chain tycoons and Super Bowl champs to ranchers, missionaries and arms dealers. And, the most amazing part of this odd sort of sightseeing was that someone was paying me the whole time, with free lodging, meals, rental car, and airfare thrown in.

Not Much to Look At

2009-05-23T16:47:00.009-04:00

It’s been two months since my house downsized to Comcast’s “Basic” cable. Click here for story. To Rachel, Keith, Chris, Anderson and the rest of the 24/7 news gang: I’m not missing our evenings together one bit. I am mournful, however, about missing Jason Ellsbury’s amazing steal of home, a feat my Little League grandson was happy to recount on a recent visit to California. But neighbors Greg and Deb up the street have generously offered a front-row seat in their family room whenever I'm experiencing Red Sox withdrawal pains. Thankfully, I didn’t need “Extended” service to catch the season finales of three shows I’ve followed for years: The Amazing Race, Lost and American Idol. Dare I admit, I voted for Kris four times after last Tuesday’s final round.

Spring Around Summer

2009-04-24T13:52:00.008-04:00

Flowers, A to Z
A favorite stop on my neighborhood walks is Smith College’s hidden gem, Capen Garden. It’s located on Prospect Street behind the big white building with the stately columns and curving driveway. Today, I checked out a feature of the garden that I love, the A to Z border of perennials. It starts with achillea, proceeds alphabetically through dozens of perennials and ends at yucca. [Zinnia, unfortunately, had to be an annual.] My humble urban patch contains a sizable portion of Capen’s alphabetical arrangement. At this time of year, I’m always pleased to see that my astilbe or baptisia or campanula or Shasta daisies look as good as the pedigreed cousins up at Capen. Go back in a month, now that will be a different story.

Beavers Back on Barrett
Two US Census workers were spotted on Barrett yesterday verifying addresses for the upcoming 2010 national head count.
A beaver lodge was one residence they did not expect to find.

Postscript to 4/3 Post

2009-04-04T10:25:00.005-04:00

A front-page article in today's New York Times—"Some Raise Alarms as Google Resurrects Out-of-Print Books"—caught my attention this morning. It seems not everyone is as thrilled as I about Google's unprecedented and wide reaching adoption of a library's neglected orphans.

One for the Books

2009-04-03T13:05:00.006-04:00

It wasn’t until I joined Five College Learning in Retirement last year did I appreciate the astonishing depth and range of Google’s book-scanning project. LIR’s peer learning format involves making an hour-long presentation in one of the two dozen seminars offered by fellow members each semester. For the seminar American Transcendentalism, I chose to research George Ripley, the Unitarian clerical drop out, and Brook Farm, the short-lived utopian community he and his wife, Sophia, founded in 1841.

I had not done any serious research, in a library or on the web, for some time so imagine my amazement to discover that I could sit at my Mac and read memoirs—in their entirety and in the original book format—written by people who had lived or studied at Brook Farm. Thanks to the age of library digitization someone had pulled off these obscure late 19th century volumes from their seldom-touched shelves and given this 21st century reader a trove of eyewitness accounts of daily life in one of our country’s earliest communities.

And who would have thought that a bureaucratic publication like the Annual Statistics of Manufactures by Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, for the year 1897, would turn up during a Google search and verify a fascinating nugget of information I’d heard from Susan Warner Dreyer and Jennifer Warner Carter, the great-granddaughters of the Northampton banker/embezzler Lew Warner. [See postings, “A Story Not Quite Laid to Rest” and “The Rest of the Story,” March 1] Both cousins had told me during our chats over the phone that their grandfather, Lewis E. Warner, had invented the electric car. I was a bit skeptical of the family’s claim, but there it was in the 1897 document, under the city of Northampton, “Lewis E. Warner invented motor carriage built of bicycle tubing, equipped with pneumatic tires, and run by electricity.” I would, however, change “the electric car” to “an electric car.”

Bus Stop in Ireland

2009-03-15T17:44:00.008-04:00

“Oh, we’re right next door to the inn. The bus from Dublin stops practically at our door,” Mrs. Murray assured Mike when he called to reserve two nights at her B&B. “I’ll be on holiday in the States when you come in early December,” she said,” but my husband will be here. He’ll take care of you.”

Mrs. Murray’s village of Stradone in County Cavan doesn’t rate any mentions in tourist guidebooks, but it does in Kirby family history. It’s the town where Grandmother Kirby came from, and Mike, who had spent three weeks here in the early ’70s, hanging out at the local and schmoozing with the oldsters about his Brady roots, wanted to go back. Click here to continue.

A Story Not Quite Laid to Rest

2009-03-01T11:56:00.009-05:00

Last August, I posted “The Rest of the Story” describing my reaction to an unexpected phone message from a great-granddaughter of Lewis Warner, the banker/developer featured in A House. A Street. A City. The caller said her name was Susan Warner Dreyer, and her genealogical hunt for information about the Warners had led to Historic Northampton that afternoon—and. once there, to the surprising revelation that someone had written a book about her great-grandfather. Click here to read post.

A few weeks later Susan and I had a long chat by phone about her Warner forebears and their connection to Northampton. The information she shared, particularly about her grandfather, Lewis Warner Jr., stirred my narrative bug. [When “last seen” in the chapbook, Lew Jr. was visiting his father, a convicted bank embezzler, at the old Union Street Jail; the year was 1899.] I thought what I had learned from Susan and from a few research forays at Forbes would make an interesting follow-up article, but never got around to writing it.

Then, in early January, I noticed a comment posted at the bottom of “The Rest of the Story” article. It was from a Jennifer Warner Carter and read, in part: “Well, this is truly amazing to find this post. Susie Warner Dreyer is my cousin, and I also am a great-granddaughter of Lewis E. Warner. I have not spoken to Susie in many years and lost track of her. I too have been looking for family history relating to Lewis Warner for many years, and come up almost empty-handed.”

Later, Jennifer and I exchanged emails and talked by phone. She told me that it was a Google search that had unearthed the startling blog post, and “equally amazing was that my cousin Susie Warner had been in contact with you during this past summer regarding LEW.” She went on to explain, “Susie and I are related through our fathers, Charles, my Dad, was the older brother to her father, Frank.” She also mentioned that Thomas Warner—he would be the cousins’ great-great-grandfather—was a ”well-known munitions maker and inventor.” Well, that was news to me, something I wished I had known when writing the book, and so was the news that Lew Warner, Jr. had invented the electric car.

It’s time to write that article.

Big Mac Bargain

2009-02-18T15:51:00.003-05:00

One of the best deals I’ve found in a long time is down at the Apple store in the Holyoke Mall. It’s called One to One, and for the price of $99 you can schedule up to 52 personal training sessions a year with members of Apple’s Creative team. [For a woman of a certain age, having a twenty-something give you his undivided attention and hang on your every word for an hour is an opportunity hard to resist.]

I signed up for the sessions about eleven months ago after bringing a new iMac into the house. Although I‘ve been a contented Mac user since the early nineties, I had to admit there was an awful lot I didn’t know, never used, underused, avoided, was intimidated by (and too embarrassed to admit). Lu Stone needed an upgrade.

My string of One to One sessions over the past year did just that. It introduced a whole new bag of computer tips, strategies and capabilities—such as creating and designing the web sites linked to this blog’s posts—into my life and my husband’s. [A spouse or partner may occasionally tag along.] The trainers were smart, personable and lots of fun. I’m thinking of signing up for another year when my membership runs out next month.

Does anyone ever use all 52 sessions? I doubt it. Only one appointment may be scheduled per week and no more than a week or two in advance. Apple knew what it was doing.

John Updike

2009-02-02T14:38:00.012-05:00

It must have been 1957, my freshman year in college, when I sat down—no doubt, in the dorm smoker—with a copy of my new New Yorker and read a short story by a young writer I’d never heard of. His name was John Updike. Somehow, I knew that this fellow, whoever he was, would be part of my life for a long time.

When I heard of his death last week on NPR, the first thing I did was to go into the living room and take Pigeon Feathers off the bookshelf. This early collection of short stories has always been one of my favorites, toted across state lines and in and out of houses since the day I bought it on my lunch hour at Scribner’s. Written in the upper right hand corner of the flyleaf was: Lu Jaeckle 1962. Soon, I would marry and write Lu Stone 1963 in The Centaur. By the time I wrote Lu Stone 1968 in Couples, I was living in Pennsylvania—the city of Reading close enough to drive up and search for the likes of fictional Olinger.

I wanted to go back to early Updike to lessen the jolt of what I now know: the last three things I had read by him, The Writer in Winter on the AARP website and The Full Glass and A Desert Encounter in The New Yorker were among his last works. And I wanted to put aside, at least for a moment. this fact: our birth years are only six years apart. Rabbit Angstrom, the Maples, the young marrieds in Couples, the Olinger folk, I knew them all because each of them carried not a little part of me. I was sure that I could go into their houses without knocking, and find a cup of coffee and my favorite chair waiting.

Count Us In

2009-01-23T16:40:00.005-05:00

Sitting by our woodstove these mornings, we’ve thought about reenlisting. We saw online they’re recruiting and have set up a test site at Forbes, couldn’t be more convenient.

It’s been a while since our last tour of duty, and, although our joints have carried us more than a few miles, we’re ready to receive our marching orders and snap back into action. This, after all, could be our last campaign.

No recruiter need hype the benefits of serving to this household. We enjoyed them all: guaranteed travel and plenty of exercise, handy paychecks and team camaraderie; meeting people from all over the world; the challenge of the daily hunt and thrill—and relief—of mission accomplished.

We realize competition for openings will be stiffer than in previous campaigns, given the dismal shape of the economy. So, we can only hope that we could be among the seniors who pass muster and are invited to take their places in the great foot army of the 2010 U.S. Census.

Hard to Warm up to Northampton

2009-01-20T19:54:00.005-05:00

. . . when you come home from California.

Sand in Your Skates

2009-01-10T17:17:00.005-05:00

Ice-skating takes a whirl in San Diego, at storied Hotel del Coronado, in late December 2008. Beachside rinks are catching on in Southern California, and, while toes and fingers may not freeze under palm trees and sunny skies, ankles still get as achy and wobbly as ever. Our two visiting New Englanders opted to let the younger generation lace up and show their stuff.

Happy Holidays to All from Mike and Lu!

2008-12-19T19:47:00.004-05:00

Stone's Appleseeds

2008-12-03T17:53:00.017-05:00

Two book reviewers for the New York Times came up with a clever twist for their annual year-end list of “best” books. Each chose to recommend the ten books—out of the nearly 100 each reviewed this year—that were personal favorites, the ones they “went out and Johnny Appleseeded” and bought for friends and family.

I’ve read only two books on the reviewers’ lists, and both happened to be “appleseeded” to me by close family members, who, much to my benefit, did not wait for the book to come out in paperback. The first came from the Boston branch. It was Netherland by Joseph O’Neill. Like my literary compatriot, I loved this book and wish I could relive the thrill of reading its elegant prose and of meeting the Trinidadian dreamer and banker from Holland for the first time. The second book came from the New Jersey wing. It was Barbara Walters’s autobiography, Audition. I ignored my kids’ snickers when they spotted this book on my coffee table, and went on to enjoy a terrific (and yes, dishy) read by a woman working in a business I’m fascinated by (the media), and with whom I’ve lived quite a few decades, albeit, on the other side of the screen.

In the hope of sowing my own literary seeds, I pass on some of the books I enjoyed in 2008. Continue reading here

Sidewalk Protest

2008-11-28T16:07:00.006-05:00

We were leaving Subway down on King Street the other day, and just as we were about to step outside, a man on a bicycle whizzed past. “Whew,” we said to each other, “that was a near miss.” If the door had been fully opened, our renegade biker could have been knocked out cold or worse. Or, just as likely we could have taken the brunt of the collision and ended up in the ER.

Okay, I understand why some bikers may prefer the sidewalk to a heavily trafficked street like King or a narrow one like State. I’m willing to cut these pavement usurpers some slack—as long as they know their place, slow down and display a bit of courtesy to proprietary pedestrians like me.

And when did Northampton bicyclists start thinking they have the right of way on sidewalks? Lately, I’ve been running into this increasingly arrogant bunch all over town, and according to the Gazette’s Talk Back posts, so have other wary walkers. On sidewalks too narrow to allow two people to walk side by side, it’s downright scary to have a biker come up from behind without warning or to face you down until you have no option but to step aside. Almost as annoying are the bikers, typically women, who flash a weak smile without yielding one inch of pavement as they merrily go on their way.

Wish I’d known . . .

2008-11-22T15:31:00.009-05:00

[when writing 17 Summer Street] that a photograph of 17 Summer, as seen in 1980, existed. It was in that year’s Architectural Survey conducted by the Massachusetts Historical Commission. Except for the funky Dodge van at the curb and the oak tree that once graced the front lawn, the house looks pretty much the same after nearly thirty years. Click here for photo.

Housekeeping

2008-11-16T14:54:00.008-05:00

Leaves from next-door neighbor’s maple tree raked and bagged, waiting for next trip to landfill.
Back deck’s annual sealing, too late now.
Four cords of wood dumped in driveway, ready for stacking.
Perennial beds untended.
Storm windows, doors carried from cellar, wrestled into place accompanied by swearing.
Gutters, rain spouts clogged, overflowing.
Air conditioners lugged from bedrooms to attic.
Garden debris tied up, waiting for next trip to landfill.
Flowerpots, trellises, fencing, deck furniture, umbrella, Weber grill rounded up, toted to already-full garage.
Rain barrel, garden hose emptied, stowed in garage.
Downstairs toilet valve, needs looking at.
Work gloves for stacking wood missing, trip to Foster Farrar.
Downstairs bathroom sink slow to drain.
Ashes in wood stove getting high, better empty.
Light by kitchen door out, another trip to Foster Farrar.
Monthly overhead not counted on, rising.

Which is why . . .
we’re beginning to wonder what we’re doing in an eight-room,
136-year old house.

Wish I'd Known . . .

2008-11-07T18:53:00.006-05:00

[when writing The Story of 17 Summer Street] that a young law clerk by the name of Calvin Coolidge once lived two blocks from Summer Street. The year was 1896-97. His home in the neighborhood represents one of those quirky facts you come upon while doing research; they really don’t fit your story line, but you can’t resist finding a way to drop them in. In her excellent lecture at Forbes last Saturday, Susan Well revealed that Coolidge’s first home in Northampton was at 162 King Street, where he rented a room in a house owned by Charles Lavake, a shoemaker, and his wife, Rhoda. The Lavakes’ large tract ran from the southerly corner of Spring Street, which is now called Finn, up toward State. The Lavake house was moved from its King Street site some time ago, and can now be found at 12-16 Carpenter Avenue.