A state park right in our small city set upon Moose Island has some marvelous side trails. And to think, the site nearly became a stinky oil refinery. Hats off to citizen action!
As if there would be a calm after the storm
The two weeks before Christmas got more than a little frantic around us, even without all of the holiday buildup. The renovation tradesmen were on a collision course. The spray foam crew gave us a date they would be in town for a bigger project down the street – they would dovetail us into the afternoon – but that meant the windows on the back half upstairs would have to be framed and the electrical outlets along the exterior wall would have to be in place before they arrived. We would also have to be out of the house for 24 hours afterward while the toxic vapors subsided.
Our contractor and his accomplished accomplice worked through the weekend to meet deadline.
We also had a plumber on-site – you don’t try to reschedule those guys, do you? It’s hard enough to get them at all. First, he was moving a cold-air duct for the new wood-burning stove and its metal chimney, accompanied by moving the water heater to make way for that metal chimney. As long as we were dealing with the water heater, we advanced our anticipated shift to a heat-exchange unit, which should drastically reduce our monthly electrical bill. While he was at it, he replaced the old sump pump and its precarious hoses. Some of those photos have already appeared in this series. We were delighted that the new stove and chimney were in place and working by Christmas Eve, when the rest of the family was visiting.
What I haven’t mentioned is the hurricane-force storm that hit a week before Christmas, pushing back the foam-installation crew by two days – along with our Airbnb reservation. (The tempest hit right after my choir’s two concerts, as if I needed any more activity.)
And then there we were, welcoming family and putting up the tree on Christmas Eve, this time in front of a warm fire.
The region sustained two similarly intense storms, back-to-back on January 10 and 13, along with widespread power outages. Having a wood stove meant we wouldn’t be freezing.
Our roofing held, front and back, unlike many of the others around town. Asphalt shingles popped up in our yards and along the streets like dandelions in springtime, but few of them were ours. Even new buildings suffered. Not that we could sit back smugly. Our front roofing was still precarious, awaiting the next big step of transformation come springtime. And here the insurance company had insisted three years earlier we had to replace it pronto?
With the windows framed and now outlined by the foam, we had a much clearer idea of how the upstairs was shaping up. In looking at the space, we found ourselves wondering if maybe we should just leave it as one big room. We let that dream give way to more practical thoughts, including gaining a second bathroom.
We did, though, decide to have the new ceiling rise with the roofline rather than be flat. It’s not quite as step as a cathedral, but who’s quibbling? It means the new bedrooms will be more like a tent or small pavilion rather than bland boxes.
If you like people-watching and eavesdropping, check out this
Today’s the release date for Hamlet: A Village of Gargoyles, and I’d love for you to check it out.
The 200-plus off-beat poems of my collection were composed well before I relocated to a real-life village and, by then, many of the pieces had appeared in literary journals around the globe. What I’ve seen since comes as confirmation.
And now they’re together in one volume, as originally intended.
The pages present candid, surreal, often humorous confessions by various community members who span the generations and occupations of an imaginary locale. They’re the kind you may chance upon in a comic strip, support group, or while walking the dog in your own neighborhood.
Opening the book can be like opening their door, for that matter.
You can find it in the digital platform of your choice at Smashwords, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, Sony’s Kobo, and other fine ebook retailers. You can also ask your public library to obtain it.
Scratch that, add this
Back when I was a summer camp counselor, I had one of Phil Donahue’s kids among my assigned campers. On parents’ night, he advised me to revise, revise, revise, as he was doing as a newscaster. And then he turned into a hot syndicated talk-show host.
It took me a while to appreciate his counsel, along with the adage, “Talent goes into the first draft, genius goes into the revision.”
Originally, my feelings about revision were like those regarding playing musical scales, relegating the practice to a secondary status nay nuisance. It took me a long time to appreciate doing it as a practice in itself rather than as a prelude to the primary action.
Indeed, more than once I’ve discovered a better novel buried under the first draft. Or perhaps lurking in its bones, waiting for release, akin to Michaelangelo’s block of marble.
It’s never easy, though. Thorough revision takes longer than the draft did, and that’s for each sweep. The fact remains that multiple deep revisions will be required.
One of the places it engages me is the use of synonyms. I’ve come to rely on a thesaurus more than some other writers, and doing so comes with a caution. While it increases the vocabulary count and possibly adds words a reader doesn’t know, I feel it allows me to unpack dimensions of a central word or phrase that keeps repeating in a long work. In my case, there are usually 20 or so in each piece, and I find them cloying. Take the term “revision,” which turns out to include amendment, reconsideration, modification, adjustment, alteration, change, correction, improvement as its shadings. It’s much more thorough than typical editing.
In some of my manuscripts, the revisions demanded I change the tense throughout, as well as the point of view – third person to first to second, for example. The genders of key characters even flipped.
With ebooks, I’ve even replaced the titles and characters’ names.
~*~
While I had done major revisions on Subway Hitchhikers from its inception to the breakthrough publication, the manuscript had also grown blubbery with backstory and detail in the in-between stages. My revisions occurred in sweeps in my moves from Ohio to Indiana to Washington state back to Iowa and another corner of Ohio and finally Baltimore, adding backstory and explanation before landing on the butcher block that produced a lacy, playful ride through the imagination.
Still, that process was nothing like what happened after my move to New Hampshire and had a computer to work from. I can’t imagine trying to retype so many pages on paper, nor did I have the funds to hire a typist for the pile of drafts in front of me. Remember the poor starving artist image?
When Hitchhikers came out, I had been in New Hampshire three years.
I had all that excess from its intervening years and saw promise for several new books in those pages. I took them back to the drawing board.
Emotionally, I was going through a long recovery period, including therapy – self-induced depression, as I quipped. In the process, I was learning to take feelings more seriously, and that extended to my revisions. What was the underlying feeling in a particular line or scene, rather than simply the action or physical detail? That sort of thing.
At least I once again had mountains at hand, abetted this time by the Atlantic, and even a boss with a sailboat for some of my initial outings.
With a pile of drafts already keyboarded, I could pick up a section in any available time and work away to make it somehow better.
This was when I really began to appreciate the importance of deep revision. Not just the superficial polishing to make a story read more clearly, but transformations to probe into underlying events. I was examining much that I had experienced in my life without fully seeing what was happening at the time. Some of these were shared by many in my generation. Some by kindred spirits who were simply somewhere out of the spotlight. And some were essential unique and personal.
~*~
As I reflect on the revision process here, I ask about what was going on in the background. Remarrying grounded me, for certain, and gave me a sounding board for troubling passages. As I’ve joked, everything before that now became ancient history, including the substance of the lingering novels.
What, if anything, was playing in the background as I worked in the top-floor next, my not-quite Fortress of Solitude? Kronos Quartet, late Miles Davis, or the Shostakovich preludes and fugues might give me a different ambiance than Bach organ works or Beethoven – some inclination for edginess or gravity, depending. If someone was in the bedroom on the other half of the top floor could have an impact, too, if only by limiting by space to pace within.
The view outside, the weather, even the season of the year?
So far, I haven’t heard any discussions about the practice of revising, certainly not along the scale of drafting. I’m coming to think of it as living with a project, the way you would with a kid in the household, knowing vaguely that at some point they’re going to grow up and leave.
Low tide, high tide
This Coast Guard cutter at the Breakwater demonstrates just how much our waters can change in five or six hours.
All politics is local
Measures will too often be decided according to their probable effect, not on the national prosperity and happiness, but on the prejudices, interests and pursuits of the governments and people of the individual States. … The great interests of the nation have suffered … from an undue attention to the local prejudices, interests and views of the particular States.
James Madison in Federalist No. 46
How I slowly became aware of Greek-Americans
Back in high school, my best friend’s mom was buddies with a Greek neighbor who used to proclaim, “Athens! She is beautiful! The rest of the country?” A spitting sound I could never ever spell out accompanied by the open palms of both hands coming down side by side from overhead.
His other best friend was Greek, too. A kind of philosopher, in fact.
My civics teacher was Greek, as was the drama and debate coach.
In college, a landmark restaurant just off campus passed into a new generation much the way the one in my fictional Daffodil did. Somehow, the details stayed vaguely with me.
Off in the Pacific Northwest, I became fond of souvlaki and spanakopita on our forays to the University District of Seattle.
On my return to Ohio, there was a delightful Greek bakery in a small storefront on a quiet residential street six or seven blocks east of our house.
In Baltimore, “All the pizza’s made by Greeks,” seemed wrong – where were the Italians? And out on the road, “All the diners are owned by Greeks.” Little did I know about flatbreads.
In New Hampshire, the Athens restaurant in downtown Manchester – popular but, to my senses, bland and tired – in contrast to one of my favorite takeout places where we ordered for the office – the menu that introduced me to gyros.
Add to that the cathedral’s big Glendi, which sent food to the newsroom in gratitude for our coverage, or the little frame St. Nicholas I’d pass on one route to and from the paper.
One of our older coworkers, a photo lab tech, was Greek – kind and smiling, though I got to know little else.
A sharp-tongued but very competent colleague in the composing room was also Greek. Named Pericles after his grandfather, though it was shortened for us.
All of this was fleeting and fragmentary but came together in Dover and its annual, free-admission Greek festival.
And then confirmed at Davos in Watertown Square, Massachusetts, a block down the street from our weekly choir practice. The food was great, though run by Hispanics.
Now I can tell you there are Greek-Americans almost everywhere. Opa!
Boon Island lighthouse
The 135-foot-high lighthouse, the tallest in New England, sits remotely on a treacherous, tiny island seven miles off the coast in York, Maine.
The rocky outcropping was the site of a 1710 shipwreck that left the stranded sailors resorting to cannibalism to survive the winter before their rescue.
The current cylindrical tower was built in 1855 after earlier ones had been washed away.
As one of the most remote lighthouses in New England, it has a wild history.
No, tomatoes don’t all taste the same
The first year I witnessed the gardener in our household sprout and then transplant a dozen or so varieties of tomatoes, I was perplexed. Foolish me, I thought tomatoes were pretty interchangeable. Not so by the end of summer, when I had discovered how much each variety had its own identity. Some ripened earlier than others, a major consideration in our short growing season. Some were firmer while others were juicier. Each variety matured in its own size and shape. Trying to describe the range of flavors could soon sound like a wine tasting commentary. So far, we’ve had nothing that has delivered a hint of slightly warm asphalt, which seemed to be a plus for one wine critic. We’ll save you our own take.
Also important to us is disease and blight resistance. New England can be a difficult region for tomato growers.
Here’s a sampling of what we’ve cultivated, eaten, and even dried, canned, or bagged frozen.
- Goldie: A large, deep orange, slicing beefsteak fruit. “The perfect tomato,” as I blogged back on August 26, 2021, touting it for its starring role on my beloved sandwiches. This heirloom variety is one of the last to blossom and bear harvest for us, but it’s definitely worth the wait.
- Pruden’s Purple: Valued as being one of the first large tomatoes to mature (72 days), this firm wonder has a distinctive deep pink, ridged appearance. It also contains few seeds. The flavor is described as nicely balanced between sweet and tart.
- Brandywine: A very popular large heirloom, this one generally matures in 80 to 90 days. Many folks consider it the tastiest of the lot. Its leaves resemble potato plants more than tomatoes, and the heavy fruit means the plants need a lot of support.
- Yellow Brandywine: A gold-yellow variation created in 1991 from the famed Brandywine heirloom, this beefsteak weighs in at up to two whopping pounds a globe.
- Sungold: These tangy sweet golden orange cherry-size tomatoes are among the earliest to arrive for us – within two months, supposedly, though for us that meant early August last year – yet continued to deliver through September. Harvesting at peak can be tricky, though: a shade too early misses the glory, but a shade too late and they start to spoil. Their flavor is described as intense and sugary-sweet, a delightful addition to salads. They form in clusters of ten to 20 tomatoes on a vine. Add to it the red Glacier, another cherry tomato that arrives early and continues valiantly into autumn.
- Juliet: This small, elongated, prolific paste tomato has been a true workhorse for us. It freezes well, providing a foundation for soup and sauces throughout the winter. Lately, we’ve augmented this one with Plum Regal, primed for the end of the season; Amish Paste, a larger elongated plum tomato that also works well for soup and sauces; and Roma, an egg-shaped three-incher prized for making paste and sauces.
- Opalka: At the larger end of the paste tomatoes, this Polish entry grows up to five feet tall and has irregularly-shaped fruit up to six inches long. Tasters at Fedco Seeds described it as “an oasis of flavor in a desert of tomato hell,” “a pleasing texture and good aftertaste lingers,” “round and mellow flavor… full-bodied.” As I was saying about critical taste analysis?
- Cosmonaut Volkov: Back to the one-pounders I love for tomato-and-mayo sandwiches, this slightly flattened beefsteak is named for a Russian astronaut who died returning from space. It can go mushy if overripe, though.
- Omar: Or more accurately, Omar’s Lebanese, which was introduced in 1996 via a Lebanese college student named Omar Saab. Typically weighing in at up to 1½ pounds apiece, the fruit sometimes ambitiously reaches three or four pounds. The flavor is described as “multidimensional sweet.”
- Copper Beauty: An elongated and very tasty small tomato, this one still has lots of green in its skin when ripe, augmented by orange streaks, along with a dark red interior when sliced.
And we haven’t even touched on some fine “black” tomatoes.
Moody Dog digs
Food truck, Belfast, Maine
Jnana's Red Barn 