From Sunrise County to the Universe
Rather than making most of our charitable contributions ad lib during the year, we’ve adapted a new strategy since moving Way Downeast.
This is the time of the year when we decide what we’re supporting and then make those payments.
The process means deciding between giving smaller amounts to a wider range of organizations or instead sending somewhat larger amounts focused on a few recipients.
Mailing those checks off always feels good, though we also wish we were sending more.
Roseway in port
a place
as beautiful
as anywhere
on this planet
Looking at the news of Vermont’s flood damage, I’m seeing places I know and have traveled. Towns I pass through on my way to and from Quaker Yearly Meeting sessions at Castleton University, for instance, all now heavily hit. I wonder about some of the covered bridges I anticipate visiting or places I stop for a stretch, too.
I’ve been waiting to hear from a dear friend, especially, though I know his home is high above the stream running through town. Still …
My wife and I retain strong impressions from seeing the devastation from Hurricane Irene nine or ten months after it delivered its wallop. You wouldn’t believe the extent unless you saw the evidence.
The mountains become a funnel for the falling water, and many of the roads have nowhere to go but beside the streams. People, of course, live along the roads … many of them at the foot of natural chutes from the hillsides.
It’s not just water, either, but the boulders and gravel it unleashes.
There are real stories that will unfold long after the TV cameras and breaking news headlines have moved elsewhere.
But it does make a difference when events do somehow seem to reflect home for you. Or when you look for what I think of as “slow news.”
People used to walk down our street in Dover just to admire our garden. They told us how much pleasure and peace it gave them. It also attracted a range of wildlife, including hummingbirds, butterflies, or the occasional turkey or fox.
Throughout the year, the garden also led to many photos you can still find here at the Red Barn.
It was, by many standards, funky. The weeds were never completely controlled, but it was prolific and made good use of what we sometimes called the Swamp, after its mucky clay soil in late spring and early summer. Our pet rabbits delighted in much of what we picked there, too.
The new owners, alas, have bulldozed all that. The strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, currants as well as the raised beds and shrubbery screens – gone. Twenty-years of reclaiming the once tired soil and then dining well as a result – gone. Naturally, we’re lamenting, knowing how much more they must be spending on groceries that won’t be as fresh or tasty.
We have to recognize, of course, that we’ve left all that behind and no longer have a say in the matter.
But we still feel sad or even a tad angry. Ahhh!
Dover’s third minister, Hanserd Knollys, no doubt laid a foundation for the Quaker message two decades after his brief tenure in the town pulpit. He was beset by controversy and even a physical skirmish or two, but he organized the church as a Congregational society even as his own theology was evolving into Particular Baptist.
Some of New Hampshire’s early Baptists did relocate to New Jersey, where they named a town Piscataway, in honor of Dover’s Piscataqua River. And Knollys himself became the pastor of London’s first Baptist church, once he had fled New Hampshire and the New World.
By the way, the number of colonists who returned to England from America still amazes me. How could they even afford it, much less the time involved?
Some of his challenges to conventional Christianity, like rejecting the baptism of infants, opened the way for Quakers to build on, once they arrived.
Still, I couldn’t get a clear picture of the existence of the Baptists as New England’s other dissident denomination in the colonial era. Was it all down in Rhode Island, where they contended with the Quakers over the governance of the colony?
My own book, Quaking Dover, concentrates on Dover Friends Meeting and its families, once they’re established, but the Baptists seem to be largely invisible until the Revolutionary War or so.
Carla Gardina Pestana’s Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts now provides an understanding of the faith north of Rhode Island. Essentially, it was long comprised of one church in Boston, and its members were scattered across the region, rather like a network of solitary souls. The church underwent an evolution over the years, from lay ministry to ordained pastors, and ultimately presented less of a threat to the Puritans/Congregationalists than did the Friends.
Still, their insistence on a separation of church and state and their view of a church being comprised of fellow adult believers rather than a place one had to attend regardless of one’s heart and thinking were liberal and revolutionary.
Pestana’s description of the impact of the Great Awakening on the Baptist movement gives me a clearer understanding of why so many of its churches appeared in and around Dover – and the rest of New England – in the early 1800s.
While I had heard that these stretches of a surrounding blur of dense gray could linger weeks here, I assumed folks were talking about March or maybe late November, not the height of glorious summer.
And then a friend told me of one summer in Lubec, a few miles over the water to our south, where it hit every day, often without any splash of sunshine.
It does dampen the emotional wellbeing of many.
As much of the nation – and world – suffers under recording-breaking heat, we’re having many days when the day’s high has barely reached much above 60, as in Fahrenheit. Only a few readings have even broken as far as the lower 80s. I’ve worn my beloved Hawaiian shirts only three times, and my shorts are still in the bottom drawer of the dresser. If you’re wondering, unlikely as that is, I’m not one of those guys who goes bare-knees in January, believe me.
Much of this has been accompanied by weeks of fog – morning and late afternoon through the night, especially – but sometimes without break during the day as well.
I’ve stopped reminding people that Seattle experiences something like this six-months straight every year or that San Francisco is accustomed to watching the ground-hugging clouds return every afternoon.
We do live on an island, so the temperatures just seven miles away on the mainland traditionally run ten degrees warmer, but those are still much more reasonable than the hellfire raging elsewhere.
None of the wider extremes should come as a surprise. True prophets had forecast them a half century ago, and we are running on those projections, contrary to the decades of denials and resistance of capitalist naysayers and their puppet politicians. Remember, too, it was “climactic instability” rather than mere “global warming.”
So, on a more mundane level, on those partly-cloudy to partly-sunny days in the forecast, we jump onto running the laundry early and then getting it promptly out on the line to breathe, and I attack the lawn with the mower as soon as the grass dries sufficiently. Not that I’m the only one, not by a longshot.
When I did live in the Pacific Northwest, I was in the interior desert with dreams of escaping somehow to a writing life somewhere along the coast, maybe in a cabin in British Columbia or Alaska.
Something like this, perchance.
Only a block from our house.
Sailors who visited Eastport for the Fourth of July voiced their amazement at the pilot who guided their U.S. Navy destroyer vessel at the Breakwater pier in some very dense fog.
They could hear the conversational voices of humans on the pier and shoreline but couldn’t see a thing. We could hear them but not see them, too.
And then they were landed, gently and safely.
They told us he was a magician, and from my angle of observation, it was true. Even the commanding officer was most amazed, in what became a memorable experience.
“I’VE NEVER BEEN TOUCHED,” meaning love.
“My sisters have. They all have husbands and family, but I’ve never been touched.”
TRAVELING IN A TERRAIN LIKE the orchard country of Washington state – Naches or Cowiche, especially – in the car, we come across the top of a hill and find ourselves facing a band of four tornadoes, which we manage to drive past, after great fear and trepidation.
She’s no longer a goddess, but a traveling companion. Do the tornadoes reflect engulfing, destructive, and self-destructive figures of love?
ON A BOAT, THE RUDDER WORKS in the opposite direction of what feels right. Often seemed to have no effect, whatsoever.
In both cases, a sense of something important remaining unfinished.
Jnana's Red Barn 