2025 Life Logs, Day 284: Quiet Saturday
Date: Saturday, October 11, 2025
Weather: Sunny, Warmer Than Yesterday; High Temp 64 Low 54 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
Every Saturday I go to the standout for democracy held on the Village Green. I go for many reasons, but one of the most important is that every week I connect with people I have never met and those new relationships, as well as connecting face-to-face with people I do know, have led to a myriad of networking opportunities. I call it ‘community building’, and right now, I can’t think of a better use of my time. All of us, versus just one of us, is always a better way to solve problems. And me, oh my, do we ever have a lot of problems to solve.
Another reason it was a quiet Saturday is that the Goldstones headed to Vermont this morning. So no adventures with them today. Since it is a long weekend with no school on Monday, they took the opportunity to go camping in Smugglers’ Notch State Park near Stowe. They go to Stowe to snowboard in the winter, but the scenic 3.5-mile narrow, winding road through the Notch is closed due to heavy snowfall in the winter. The boys have wanted to see it, so this was their chance before the road closure at the end of October. Heather sent some photos of the state park. It looks dramatically beautiful.
I was curious as to how Smugglers’ Notch got its name. So, I Googled it and found that during the early 1800’s and then again during the Prohibition era, this remote mountain pass was used to move illegal goods across the border from Canada, about 40 miles to the north.. The dense forests and natural caves in the Notch area provided ideal hiding places for the ‘goods’ and the treacherous terrain kept authorities away.
I spent my afternoon after the standout working on the nonviolent resistance film series. Now that we know what films we are showing and when and where, we need to plan the follow-up discussions. That requires watching each film multiple times to become familiar enough to come up with questions to guide the discussions.
Tonight, I had a long phone conversation with one of my first cousins named Harry. He called to tell me that this sister, Sara Jane, passed away. My mother had five brothers. One brother had no children. Two of them had only one or two children each. But the other two had ten and eleven children each. Counting myself and my four brothers and sisters, there were 29 first cousins on my mother’s side of the family. Now there are only seven of us left, of which I am the youngest.
