Spending My Tax Return, Part Two

Another very groovy thing that happened in April was getting my tax return before I left for Providence. Not only do I not consistently get money back, but I usually have some financial hole or other that the money must fill. Two years ago it was medical bills, for myself and Ben. This year, there was nothing pending, and so we enjoyed a full week of not checking the bank balance once or twice a day - or before we ordered dessert.

Not that I bought anything of note. Lots of good meals, some clothes for Ben, some tea at Tealuxe, a very cool pencil from RISD, and a new candy dish for my desk:

How cute is that! I'm sure it is meant for small children, but I reject conventional limits.

Speaking of RISD, I spent one morning at their museum while Ben was at work. Their galleries are spread over at least five floors, including a museum that was built to look like a wealthy merchant's Benefit Street home, and some niche spaces like gardens and terraces and bridges. The exhibits were beautifully curated and less pompous self-conscious than most museums. One exhibit, of "everyday" design, had five Little Black Dresses interspersed with more industrial objects.

Karl Lagerfeld upfront.

This exhibit also included a gorgeous Italian typewriter from the Sixties, which was a very early example of all lowercase design in the logo and name. The sample typewriter actually had no upper case letters to type with, but of course Olivetti added them to the models they sold.

The valentine.

But enough about my adventures. You want to see the Boy! Lets start with his mailbox.

I'm not sure why Ben is an elf in this drawing.

You don't want to see, or even hear me describe his apartment, so here he is on the shores of still-frozen Blue Mountain Lake in the Adirondacks.

So handsome, working his Spike look. I keep telling him he should go platinum blonde.

A Real Vacation, Part One

This April, I spent a week visiting Ben in Providence, including a weekend jaunt up to Indian Lake to visit Mom, who just celebrated her 90th birthday. She says she is very wise now.

I left Des Plaines after an overnight drenching rain, which turned the area into a disaster area, as the already overfull Des Plaines river crested at a new record (over ten feet) and drowned every bit of land near its banks. I was lucky to get out at all, and ended up spending most of the day at the airport, and flying into Boston at 10PM instead of Providence at 5PM. I then caught the last Peter Pan (no lie) bus of the evening into Providence, and arrived about midnight downtown. THEN I took a cab to my hotel. I was so happy to be on vacation that none of this bothered me in the slightest. "Look, the bus has outlets at each seat! Awesome!" 

Providence was in full bloom.

It was 70 degrees on my first day there (it snowed back in Illinois, if only flurries). This is the view heading up the hill toward Brown's campus. At the park by my hotel, I noticed these pretty manhole covers:

Nautilus-shaped!

The day was so beautiful that we decided to rent a car early and drive down to Newport. There wasn't a car to be had because of the train stoppage to and from Boston (intended to prevent Tsarnaev's escape), so we waited an hour or so and were rewarded with a brand new Ford Escape! This was one of the cars on my shortlist to buy next year, so I was pretty thrilled to have such an extended test drive. More good travel karma.

A very scenic drive south to Newport, and over a bridge that rose 400 feet in the air and disappeared into a fog bank. It was beautiful and eerie and possibly full of leprous ghost sailors. Newport itself is wildly touristy on its main drag, but charming everywhere else. It was getting cooler and mistier so we ran to the Gap to get Ben a pullover, and drove down to the Cliff Walk.

You wander along a rugged shore, on the petticoats of grand mansions, and imagine the lives of their owners. Name a commoditiy, and these people owned it: railroads, coal, steel, whale oil, timber.

The Breakers, built by the Vanderbilts

I was going to Photoshop out the white van, but you know, it gives the picture SCALE.

It eventually got too rainy and cold for us to pretend any longer that we were hardy fisher folk, and we got back in our luxurious cockpit and drove back to Providence, where we had a fiery Korean hotpot stew that I had just seen on Anthony Bourdain the night before. Ben's pot was full of kimchi (I am not a fan) and mine had calamari and clams. After dinner we met Ben's pals at Trinity Brewhouse, where young Ben has his own tankard, and had some excellent Hefeweizen. THEN we moseyed across the street to a Providence Bruins game!

The game was fantastic fun; Skating! Fights! Goals! Sweet Caroline! in between periods they brought out Peewee hockey teams for mini-games. And then, about halfway through the second period, the game stopped abruptly, and the announcer came on to tell us "The Boston Police have captured the second bomber!" The crowd went nuts and I got chills. Providence is like Boston's little sister; the Providence Bruins are the feeder team to the Boston Bruins, and it was a full house of Boston fans. For many reasons, it was a special time to be in this lovely city.

And that was just the first day of my vacation.
 


 

Pig, Turkeys and a Fisher

Last week I visited my mother in Indian Lake, New York, unofficially known as the Middle of Nowhere, just north of Forever Wild. Every time I travel there, I re-visit my childhood haunts, at least those that still exist.

Every summer (and the occasional Christmas school break), my family drove from Akron, Ohio to the Adirondack Mountains, specifically Indian Lake (12842). Indian Lake is in a little hollow at the confluence of three lakes; Abanakee, Adirondack and Indian Lake. It was a long, boring drive, even when you were allowed to do 80 MPH on the thruway in a Chrysler Newport.

By the time we reached the border of the park it was always dark, so we kept our eyes peeled for the first official landmark of our vacation, The Rock Pig:

Freshly painted, 2012

The Pig has been there since I can remember, and means we are only about 15 minutes from our destination. I have no idea who keeps up the paint job.

For many summers, we rented a cabin or house owned by a particular family, the Chamberlains. Violet Chamberlain cooked a mean apple pie. The story goes that she left one on the window sill to cool, and a bear took it. Her husband was named Shirley, which made my brother and I giggle. A favorite location was Forest House in Blue Mountain Lake, just north of Indian Lake, with a handy restaurant next door. One summer there was a friendly doe who came to the yard at twilight and let us feed her windfall apples. Behind the house were sunny boulders and blueberry bushes, picked by us and occasionally black bears.

Sorry about the glare.

Eventually my parents bought property in Indian Lake in the early 70s, a three bedroom house and a garage with a full apartment over it. After my father passed away in 1977, my mother moved here permanently.

My rental car at right.

There have been bears in the yard here, too. My mother stopped filling the bird feeders after she looked out the window and saw a bear licking one clean (this is a true story). She also has a fox family, and one spring looked out into tall grass (not mown yet) and saw a sleeping fawn. 1 2 3 awwwww! This is the view from her deck:

My dad could name every one of those peaks.

We drove into Speculator on my first day there, right past a flock of wild turkeys. Apparently they are becoming a nuisance, like disrespectful teenagers, hanging out in parking lots and on the side of the road. The drive to Speculator is really beautiful, going south along the shores of Indian Lake.

One day I had lunch at this scenic overlook.

Of course, I stopped to visit the Indian Lake Public Library. No flies on them, they have ten public PCs, which is a ratio of one computer to about 90 people. My library has one computer per thousand. Their hours are limited, but their selection is great! I got the latest issues of Vanity Fair and the new Kurlansky bio of Clarence Birdseye. And a Dennis Lehane novel that I didn't have time to read.

Mom and I had a really good visit. It always takes me 24 hours to slow down to Indian Lake velocity, but it was made easier on this trip by my mother's new-ish PC, and wifi in the house, thanks to good-looking Bill, the Frontier.net technician. She is a news junkie, and kept asking me if I wanted to watch Rachel Maddow with her. We read and walked (she more than me) and ate. I cooked, she washed the dishes. I wore jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt every day, and took off my Smartwool socks only to bathe (it was COLD there).

It was a great thing to see her, and know that she is feeling well, and living well, in that remote area. Indian Lake doesn't have much of anything, but she doesn't desire anything beyond cable news and email and the beauty of the natural world.

Oh, the fisher. I went to Blue Mountain Lake, to visit the Arts Center (where my mother's Steinway now resides), and of course all the summer residences are now closed up for the season. I walked along the lakefront.

We swam here sometimes - brrr!

I spied a beautiful dark-pelted creature, bounding along the water, too bouncy to get a picture. I thought it was a pine marten, but my mother's friend (a trapper long ago) told me it was a fisher. 

Photo courtesy Wikipedia.

Thank you for coming on my wilderness journey with me!