by Judy Handley | Jun 14, 2022 | 2022 Life Logs |
2022 Life Logs, Day 165: Moving a Little Faster
Date: Tuesday, June 14, 2022
Weather: Sunny; High 76, Low 59 degrees F
Location: At Home in the Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
Slowly, slowly, I am coming back to a normal pace of life. Today I was moving a little faster than yesterday and I actually got a lot of gardening done. I went to my monthly book club meeting this morning and after listening to one member talk about her garden, I decided to head home and get to work. I spent way too much time trying to fix a leak in my drip irrigation system. The leak was at the faucet end and what I eventually discovered was that a hose washer was missing from one of the main parts. Once I put in a new washer, things were good, but I had spent almost an hour getting to that point and in the process had to go to the hardware store to get a new pipe wrench to tighten things. I know I once had one, but it was nowhere to be found today. I also spent time online looking for a dinghy for Heather and Jed. Tomorrow I will take Heather to Providence so she can catch the train to New York City for a meeting and I will get a chance to talk with her about dinghies.
When I was in Virginia, I got word that my niece Jennifer who lives in the Charlotte area was having emergency brain surgery. Jennifer is one of my sister Patsy’s two children. Patsy and I are the last of our generation. She is almost 89 and is living near Jennifer in an assisted living facility. She moved there from Nashville last June, but she has never really settled in. Jennifer has been with her almost every day to keep her company, and otherwise she really doesn’t go out of her room. But Jennifer has cancer and last week a brain tumor had to suddenly be removed. Jennifer is doing great, but it will be sometime before she will be able to visit with Patsy again. So I have been spending a lot of time on the phone trying to encourage my sister to at least go to the dining room for lunch and dinner. She has been having food delivered to her room, but that means that she does not get out to meet people. Today was a success. She went to lunch and dinner in the dining room. I am so grateful for small victories.
by Judy Handley | Jun 13, 2022 | 2022 Life Logs |
2022 Life Logs, Day 164: Slow Re-entry
Date: Monday, June 13, 2022
Weather: Thunderstorms Early, Mostly Sunny Day; High 76, Low 59 degrees F
Location: At Home in the Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
Slowly, every so slowly, I am getting back into my normal day to day life after my wonderful week in Virginia. Today I finished cleaning the refrigerator, took Shadow to the vet for a shot, watched some of the congressional hearing, planned a Newcomers field trip, went to Sullivan Tire to get help taking my old, rusty bike rack off the back of my car, went to the library to get a new book to read, and took Jonah and Sam to music lessons. I didn’t get any gardening done. Maybe that will happen tomorrow after my book club meeting.
by Judy Handley | Jun 12, 2022 | 2022 Life Logs |
2022 Life Logs, Day 163: Lost Day
Date: Sunday, June 12, 2022
Weather: Mostly Cloudy, Some Rain; High 72, Low 63 degrees F
Location: At Home in the Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
After returning from my week in Virginia, I was full of energy yesterday. But today I crashed. I felt exhausted and had absolutely no desire to do anything. I pushed myself to do some yard work and plant a few things in the garden, but that was it outside. Inside, I cleaned the bottom half of my refrigerator and hope to complete the job tomorrow. The refrigerator is almost empty, so before filling it up again I decided to start the cleaning process. I also had to deal with a hacked Facebook page. That seems to happen every time I travel. Sure hope I wake up a little more energetic tomorrow!
by Judy Handley | Jun 9, 2022 | 2022 Life Logs |
2022 Life Logs, Day 160: Monticello, UVA, Evening at Roberts Mountain Retreat
Date: Thursday, June 9, 2022
Weather: Sunny, Beautiful Day; High 83, Low 55 degrees F
Location: At Home in the Gate House at the Monroe Institute, Faber, VA
Ziggy, Coco, and I spent our morning and early afternoon at Monticello in Charlottesville.
We started with a Highlights Tour of the house and gardens, and we all found things we loved. Coco loved the flowers in the garden,
Ziggy was amazed by the number of tadpoles in a small pool in the gardens,
and I loved it all. The house tour was short enough for the kids to enjoy it and be awed by many of Jefferson’s inventions. We entered through the East Portico into a room filled with artifacts. The only remaining artifacts from Lewis and Clark’s expedition are in that room.
From there we entered the library. At one point Jefferson had 6,000 books, the largest personal collection in the United States at that time.
But during the War of 1812, many of those books were donated to the Library of Congress. Later Jefferson started adding books again. He always said, “I can’t live without books.” The next room was his most private room, his bedroom. His wife died before the main house as we know it today was completed, so she never shared that bedroom with him. He liked alcove beds, but Monticello didn’t have a wall suitable for that. Instead, he converted a doorway into what I would call a “cubby hole: bed. The head of the bed is against one side of the doorway and the foot against the other.
These are the types of beds at the Roberts Mountain Retreat which was a point of interest for Ziggy and Coco. From the bedroom, you enter the parlor or living room and the dining room. The dining room was painted a bright yellow, the most expensive paint at the time, to give a bright feeling to the room no matter the weather.
There are too many details and inventions of Jefferson’s to mention, but they were impressive. The flower gardens on the expansive front lawn were beautiful and Coco took close up photos of most so she can draw them later.
Along the outside ground floor on the south side of the house is where the impressive kitchen, the most modern in its time, is located,
along with the dairy, the smokehouse, and the rooms where some of the enslaved house servants lived in very cramped quarters. We wondered Mulberry Lane to where the slave quarters were located,
the stables where the carriage horses were kept,
and the beautiful vegetable gardens.
Thomas Jefferson was a brilliant man, a man of many talents and achievements, but hanging over this is the dark side of Jefferson. He wrote the famous words “all Men are created equal” and in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, in soaring, damning, fiery prose, Jefferson denounced the slave trade as an “execrable commerce…this assemblage of horrors,” a “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberties.” But he inherited land and slaves from the generations before him and kept slaves throughout his life. And as the Virginia abolitionist Moncure Conway scornfully remarked, despite Jefferson’s enduring reputation as a would-be emancipator, “Never did a man achieve more fame for what he did not do.” At the end of our visit, we had a twenty-five minute question and answer time with an acting Thomas Jefferson. He was in period dress and was so convincing that I felt like I was listening to the real Thomas Jefferson.
He answered questions addressing his anti-slavery rhetoric and his lack of action. Listening to his point of view was informative.
We drove from Monticello to the University of Virginia to have our picnic lunch under a huge, old ginkgo tree, my very favorite tree, right next to the Rotunda designed by Jefferson.
And then we headed back to Roberts Mountain to spend some afternoon free time with Justin and Jo. Then Ziggy, Coco, and I headed back down the mountain to the Gate House to pack and do a little clean up before going back to the Retreat Center for dinner and a final gathering around a fire where the Retreat participants shared their music.
.
Tomorrow morning Jo, Ziggy, Coco, and I head to Richmond for our flights home. We will leave Justin behind as he has two more weeks of work here. It has been a wonderful seven days here for me—quality time with Ziggy and Coco that I have never had before. We have all found Roberts Mountain to be a very special place in this world. Hopefully we will get to return for a repeat performance.
by Judy Handley | Jun 8, 2022 | 2022 Life Logs |
2022 Life Logs, Day 159: Enjoying Roberts Mountain
Date: Wednesday, June 8, 2022
Weather: Mostly Sunny with Periods of Rain; High 85, Low 66 degrees F
Location: At Home in the Gate House at the Monroe Institute, Faber, VA
Today was our day to enjoy our home base here on Roberts Mountain. Ziggy, Coco, and I started our day with a nature walk. On our first day here, Justin discovered a patch of black raspberries growing across the road from the Gate House property, but the berries were not quite ripe. When we walked by them today, Coco immediately saw that many had ripened, so we picked what we could without climbing through the poison ivy surrounding the bushes. Each kid got only a handful and I only a taste. Oh, so good! We also looked carefully at the leaves from some of the trees. There are about four trees that all have similar leaves, leaves arranged in rows on either side of the central stem.
They could be black walnut, hickory, ash, butternut, or ???. The kids weren’t really interested in deciding which, but they did start seeing the details and noticing that they have trees in Puerto Rico with the same growing pattern.
In the afternoon, we met Justin, Jo, and Caz, a young woman attending the conference from England, at the lake. We all jumped in, and all but Coco and I swam most of the way across the lake.
It had rained earlier but was sunny when we got into the water. But before the crew swam back to the dock, Coco and I started hearing thunder. Just as they got out of the water, the sky opened and it poured. By the time we walked back out to the van, the rain had slowed considerably. We decided we could dry ourselves off enough to put dry clothes over our wet bathing suits and go to the main campus to the bookstore. We did that and then we walked to the top of the observation tower attached to one of the buildings and walked down to the once again hug the huge crystal sitting in the expansive lawn behind the main campus buildings.
Then we hurried back to the Retreat Center so Justin, Jo, and Caz could attend the 4 pm session. Ziggy, Coco, and I went home, took nice hot showers, and wrote in our travel journals before heading back to the Retreat Center for dinner and more time with mommy and daddy. Justin will not be leaving on Friday with the rest of us. He is here for two more weeks and the kids, particularly Ziggy, wants to spend as much time with him as possible.
While at the Retreat Center tonight, I took advantage of having cell service to make some phone calls. My niece, Jennifer, in North Carolina, had emergency brain surgery yesterday morning and I needed to talk to my sister. Jennifer came through the surgery just fine and seems to be doing well. I was supposed to go visit my sister on Friday, but due to my flight screw up on the way here, I have to fly home on Friday. I will wait to see how Jennifer is doing before planning my next trip down to see my sister. My thoughts are with her and with Jennifer.
by Judy Handley | Jun 7, 2022 | 2022 Life Logs |
2022 Life Logs, Day 158: Caverns and Mountains
Date: Tuesday, June 7, 2022
Weather: Overcast, Afternoon Rain; High 75, Low 63 degrees F
Location: At Home in the Gate House at the Monroe Institute, Faber, VA
The weather forecast for today was right on . . . cloudy all day with afternoon rain. I drove to the Retreat Center at the top of the mountain first thing this morning to pick up Ziggy and Coco after their overnight with mommy and daddy. They were having breakfast on the patio when I arrived, and we discussed plans for the day. We would be able to come visit with Justin and Jo in the afternoon, but for the morning we decided to take advantage of the cloudy weather to go underground. We went to the Grand Caverns, discovered in 1802 and opened for tours in 1804. Their claim to fame is that they have been open for tours for longer than any other caves in the US, and maybe in the world. We walked a mile and half in 70 minutes and saw a massive array of fantastic formations.
We then drove home via the Blue Ridge Parkway that we visited yesterday. But today the wind was whipping the trees limbs and we were driving through the clouds. It was truly dramatic.
As was the shortcut Google Maps suggested. It was 9 minutes shorter, so I took it. It was Turnpike 610—a one-way gravel road straight up a mountain. It was quite an adventure, but it did come right into the Parkway. We got back to the Retreat Center to visit with Justin and Jo for a couple of hours and then came home to make a taco dinner. Later in the evening we drove up and brought Justin and Jo down to spend time with Z and C. Justin and I started talking about the Monroe Institute and about the conference he and Jo are attending. I felt guilty keeping him away from the kids, but really enjoyed learning about his work with the Institute and the interesting people I have met attending the conference. Ziggy, Coco, and I have set tomorrow as our day dedicated to exploring Roberts Mountain afoot, so Justin and Jo drove the van back up the mountain tonight. We will walk to meet them at the lake in the afternoon.
