Calendar pages turn, stop

 

The year turns. At least calendar pages do.  I equally rely on a pocket calendar and my iphone.

Before I tossed last year's paper calendar into deep storage, I copied several pages, which illustrate that we have been building an addition to our house. Deciding takes time.

Some good reasons to build:  be prepared for nursing care, have a downstairs bath for guests.

Some reasons not to:  why enlarge when I need less space now than I did with a family of four.  Would it be good money after bad?  I am not a family budget philosopher.

 Is blogging for me?  We'll see.

Going back in the blog archive to October 9, 2014, I noted the sweet potato harvest that fall eight years ago, by the renter that year of my small field across the road, one Amos M.  This year Amos and Fannie S. rent. They planted the whole acre in squash--delicatas, acorns, and butternuts (in photo above).  They line them up shoulder to shoulder, all the easier to pack into crates.  The crates are stored in their basement, and sold off in lots over the fall and winter.

Why did the blogging stop? The blogs petered out with two perfunctory notes in 2015. One in 2018 and one in 2020.  The genesis for that last one, I guess, was ennui--the pandemic isolation was getting to me and I was reaching, I guess, for delight in the past--in that case a vacation in Montreal in 2009.

Is blogging for me?  Is it a thing, even? Maybe.

Montreal vacation

August 9 through 13 Dorcas and I took the Amtrak Adirondacks to Montreal, clutched our passports tight while we waited and waited at customs and enjoyed three fabulous days there.  Take a look:

Going to France again, after 52 years

Enough about Monterey for a while.  Leaving Sept. 3, Dorcas and I will travel to France for ten days.  In a half century, this is a first for me.  Put another way--it was 52 years ago, almost to the day (it was August 15, 1966), that I flew from New York to Brussels.  The flight was on a Boeing 707, the biggest passenger jet at that time.  The airline was Sabena, Belgium's airline.  That flight was the launch of three years overseas with Mennonite Central Committee.

So, in fifty years it is a first.  In my life it is the second time I fly east over the Atlantic Ocean.  Here's what that day before looked like at Monterey, getting photos of the family and me on Sunday after church, before I left the next day, Monday the 15th.  House in background is neighbor's, since razed.  I stand beside my mother and father, bending my knees, I guess, to say I'm still their son, not taller than them.