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| Sunrise one day last week. |
Last week this computer gave us a scare. It started crashing repeatedly. It looked like it was going to die. Now that I write that, it seems strange to me that I think of this machine as a living thing capable of dying. This computer is old by tech standards. Geoffrey built it for us in 2011. I was lost last week without access to it. I do so much with it and depend upon it for so many things – news, information, family history research, communication, entertainment. Finally after several days of Josiah consulting via Skype (on Josiah’s phone) with Geoffrey and trying various tests, a problem was discovered and corrected. It still is having some trouble, but it looks like this old computer will serve us yet a while longer. What a relief! I almost feel ashamed that I rely on it so much. I don’t like to think of myself as a tech addict, but maybe I am.
We had some mild weather during the week, a welcome change after the Polar Vortex we endured the week before. It felt like spring, which was exhilarating and a bit depressing at the same time. To have the snow melt and the ground soften and to smell the aroma of the thawing earth was thrilling. I even saw the first tiny tips of the crocuses and daffodils poking from the ground. But I realized that it would not last, that there are weeks and weeks and weeks of winter still to come, and that sent me into a slump again. And, true to form, winter came howling back later in the week. And it did howl. The wind arrived with terrific force on Thursday night and kept up its howling for two days. I watched the thermometer plunge from 47° to 9° in just a few hours.
We had some mild weather during the week, a welcome change after the Polar Vortex we endured the week before. It felt like spring, which was exhilarating and a bit depressing at the same time. To have the snow melt and the ground soften and to smell the aroma of the thawing earth was thrilling. I even saw the first tiny tips of the crocuses and daffodils poking from the ground. But I realized that it would not last, that there are weeks and weeks and weeks of winter still to come, and that sent me into a slump again. And, true to form, winter came howling back later in the week. And it did howl. The wind arrived with terrific force on Thursday night and kept up its howling for two days. I watched the thermometer plunge from 47° to 9° in just a few hours.
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| Hard, cold morning. |
On Tuesday I took advantage of the nice weather to prune the orchard. I worked all morning at trimming the fruit trees. At noon Josiah arrived home early from work and he helped me for the rest of the day. We almost finished the job. We only have the two biggest, oldest, most difficult apple trees left. They will have to wait for another mild spell.
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| Frost at sunrise this morning. |
One winter years ago, when I was bored with the cold and the snow, I picked up a book at the library, A Thousand Days in Venice by Marlena di Blasi. It immediately appealed to me because it was about Italy and food. It was the perfect book to let my brain escape the winter blahs. After that, I read the author’s other books and loved them all. In preparation for our trip, which commences tomorrow, I read two of those books again, A Thousand Days in Tuscany and The Lady in the Palazzo. They were as good as I remembered them being. Marlena di Blasi’s writing style, like her cooking style, clothing style, and everything about her, is dramatic, full of lush descriptions and intensity. Just the thing to get me ready to finally see places I’ve only dreamed about before.
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| Frosty, frozen beaver pond this morning. |
February is not my favorite month. It’s the shortest month, but always seems to me to be the longest month of the year. It just drags on and on. The weather is usually miserable. By then my tolerance for winter weather has run out. It is a nasty month. But there are a few things that redeem it to a small degree. I was born in February. Tomorrow, the eleventh, I will be 61 years old – an age I never considered arriving at that seems an impossibility to me. So I do have some happy memories tangled into the misery of the month. There are a few other birthdays in February, an exclusive group of people my Aunt Esther used to call the February Birthday Club. I was privileged to belong to it. My Aunt Esther (born on February 24th), my Aunt Joyce (the 23rd), my cousin Micki (the 8th), and my great-grandfather Theodorus Howe (Esther’s father, born on the 14th), comprised the club’s membership. She also added George Washington (the 22nd) and Abraham Lincoln (the 12th) as honorary members. Washington was actually born on February 11th (the same as me) in 1731, but the calendar changed in 1752 and eleven days were added to the year so it was officially moved to the 22nd, but he celebrated it on the 11th and I like sharing a birthday with him.
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| Members of the February Birthday Club: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Theodorus Howe. Aunt Esther, Aunt Joyce, Cousin Micki, and me. |
Because their father’s birthday was on Valentines Day, my aunts Esther and Eleanor used to send out cards every year as a remembrance of him and a celebration of the day. They were homemade cards assembled from other cards and bits of this and that. I used to get one and for many years when my children were small, they each got a Valentine every year from my aunts. Living in the house where they lived, we decided to carry on their tradition. Every year we gather at the table with piles of red and pink and white paper, paper doilies, heart stickers, colored pens and pencils, and we make Valentines. When there were seven children living here, it was quite a production. This year Hannah and Miriam did most of the work. They took over my work table upstairs and spent several days creating cards. I only made two cards, one for my Howe grandchildren and one for my Thayn grandchildren. I’‘m sure the Aunts would approve.
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| Our Valentine work station. |
So our Great Adventure begins this week. Tomorrow evening we will drive to Newark, New Jersey, a five hour drive from here, and catch a flight on Norwegian Airlines to Rome the next day. I will admit that as the time for our departure approaches, I’m excited to go, but I’m also very nervous. I’m (almost) sure things will be okay at home. Our friend Bob Jones is going to take care of my chickens for me. I plan to give all my houseplants a good soaking just before we leave, that should get them through the days I’ll be gone. We’ll have the house ready in case the weather gets cold enough to freeze pipes. So I should be calmer about it all. But I’m not. The weather on Tuesday looks ominous – freezing rain over most of the area. We are leaving earlier than planned to try and get to Newark before it gets icy. Then there is flying. I don’t like flying. Being 6' 3", the seats are very uncomfortable for me with no leg room. I will try to sleep for as much of the flight as I can, but we’ll be over the ocean the whole time and that makes me nervous. Great adventures should have some element of risk to add to the sense of excitement, I guess. I will be with great people the whole time and that will ease my mind somewhat. Like my mother, I am a worrywart and a homebody, but this is an adventure I could not miss. Next Sunday there will be no Potter County Journal, but the week after that, I will write and tell you all about my time in Italy. Until then, arrivederci!
