Alison Baker

 

Big changes in your life make...big changes. When My Companion died recently, we weren't taken by surprise; he was old, he had a heart condition and a lung condition, and in the last couple of years he'd gotten pretty frail. But we were taken by surprise. It was too soon, too fast, and too definitive.

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As I write this, the floor under my feet is vibrating, and a low loud rumble and grinding is going on outside. I'm in my office in downtown Orleans, and out front a crew is putting pipes of some kind into the ground, and ripping up sidewalks to put down other sidewalks. When I approached my building this morning a policeman frowned and shook his head severely at me, and when I waved wildly and pointed behind him toward the parking lot that was my destination, he came over and leaned down to say, You can't get there today. Read More 

I went over to Sea Call Farm this morning to check on my tomatoes and squash, which I had not seen for a week or so. After parting the waves of purslane and pigweed, I saw that most of my planted things had so far survived. One pumpkin had only one sad-looking leaf, but just about everyone else – the tomatoes, the beans, the chard, the leeks, the gladioli, and the white pumpkins – was churning out leaves and blossoms like nobody’s business.  Read More 

Summer weather is here at last – intermittently, anyway. The morning walks are chilly for about five minutes, and then I start stripping away my outer layers, until by the time I’ve gotten down to the town landing and stared out over the marsh and bay, and walked back up the incline to our little house in the cul de sac, I am nearly naked. The neighbors kindly keep their curtains closed until a decent hour. Read More 

About ten days ago, two feet of snow fell on the Cape, and a day or two later the temperature came tumbling down right after it. It has barely budged above freezing since then, so that the snow is as hard as ice, and the only paths through it are the ones we managed to shovel out on the first day. Read More