Whose Woods These Are

Even after 30 years+,  the red clay soils of VA never were truly in my bones.  This lack of connection to the environment around me was a non-trivial part of what motivated me to move back North.  Last weekend I took a couple of hours to wander through Ravenswood, a Trustees of Reservations site on the North Shore.  This park is a terrific 600 acres of woods heavy on evergreen species, ponds, boulders, brilliant blue sky, and a lovely view of the water off Gloucester harbor.    This topography, this habitat does feel like home to me.  Is it just my imagination?  And if it is, does that matter?  I hope you enjoy these images of my walk.

Inviting, no?

Indian Pipe

The Hermit of Gloucester

Glacial erratics

Vernal pool

Ferns galore

Music, sweet music

We devoted a significant amount of our time in Arlington singing, or engaged in activities related to singing.  So it was evident early on once we moved to Swampscott that we had a big gap in our lives without singing.  Fortunately, the Boston area offers plenty of opportunities to sing and we are taking steps to fill that gap with song.

The first thing we did was to attend a couple of summer sings with Chorus Pro Musica, a choral group with a rich performing history in Boston, taking the commuter rail and T to Old South Church.  Even though I’ve sung the Bach Magnificat several times, the Chorus Director Betsy Burleigh pointed out a number of things about the piece that I hadn’t heard before.  The Spring concert is Britten’s War Requiem for which a cast of thousands is needed.  Maybe I’ll have the guts to audition.

The Unitarian Universalist Church of Greater Lynn is right up the street from our house, and is blessed with a terrific music director, FrancesFitch, who teaches at several local universities and is a world renown harpsichordist .  The choir is small, about a dozen singers, but appears really focused on making listenable music.  Trudi and I sang for the first service of the Fall, an outdoor service under a crystal clear late summer sky.

Trudi has joined the Marblehead Little Theatre for its fall performance of the musical Oliver.  She is both excited and relieved that her need to perform on stage has an outlet.  I hope this will be an ongoing opportunity for her, as she sorely misses her beloved Chalice Theatre.

Recently, I joined the Concert Singers of Greater Lynn that rehearses at the UU church, a local group that required no audition.  The group will be offering a Christmas concert of music by John Rutter and Stephen Paulus.  The group does not charge admission to its concerts and apparently makes a lot of its income from fall and spring lobster roll sales.  Now that is my type of fund raiser!   Not to be outdone, Trudi attended an open rehearsal of a chorus based about a half hour from here called Cantemus, and is planning to audition with them. 

What is it about choral singing that has so much appeal for me?  It is a variety of things, including getting a sense of the structure and mechanics of the compositions we sing, and the reward of hearing from others that they enjoyed something I participated in creating.  But most of all, I think it is the feeling of working as a team (albeit at times a large team) to cooperatively produce something beautiful.

We also hope to take advantage of the Boston as a place to hear music performed.  The first week here we drove up to Newburyport to enjoy a sold out solo performance by Leo Kottke at the high school auditorium.  And last week we saw the acclaimed performance of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, a revised production of the original starring Audra McDonald in Cambridge’s A.R.T.  The performance was amazing and I was in tears at several points.

Très Riches Heures of the Family Olivetti

For the last 8 years or so we have been empty nesters with our offspring taking up residence 400 miles distant. We would end up getting together with one or both daughters three, maybe four times in a good year, for a few days, as their busy lives and our permitted. Once we had retired, this paucity of face-to-face contact began to seem more and more absurd, a void that couldn’t be filled by phone, email, Facebook, or Skype.

And then with the birth of our first grandchild, the need to establish ourselves as her grandparents added weight to the argument that the little family that is us be closer geographically and temporally. (I realize this last sentence is a more than a bit awkward, but you get the idea).

In my life I have had some strong images of the importance of family. As far back as I can remember, my mother would drive an hour and a half each week to spend the day with her parents. And when my granny got too old to live alone, she moved into a retirement home a few minutes drive away, and Mom would visit her every day without fail. While my father left his homeland as a refugee to come to the US, he spent every vacation he took without exception, back in Italy with family. [Now that I think of it, as I write this posting, Adella and her folks are visiting my Italian cousins, and hiking in the same mountains my Dad did as a young man.]

We have been here about 6 weeks now, and have been together a number of times, both at our home and theirs. We have celebrated two birthdays, tended to Adella’s needs while her folks worked, hung out on the beach with Jolie on her day off, loaned a car in support of a trip to the Newport Folk Festival, and had a three generation hike on Mount Monadnock. Here are a couple of photos from that wonderful hike. Truly very rich hours spent with family.