Summer into Fall

Dinner before the play overlooking the Hudson

What do I remember of mid-summer? Players from the Shakespeare on the Hudson striding in 17th century costumes towards us on the meadow between the theater and the river. Eleanor Roosevelt's home nearby. The Chester ferry. Huddling with my fellow poets at our now annual Chester Conference. Gilmanton, Loon Pond, always the same. Kayaking across the center of the lake.

Lighthouse near Mukilteo ferry landing

Before we knew it, fall had arrived. I volunteered for my 45th Stanford reunion as co-social-media-coordinator (Holly and I monitored the Facebook page!), and wrote a memorial poem for the class book. We decided to "add on" Seattle and Portland to our trip west for the reunion. Stayed with Cindy and Doug in Bellevue, got to see Corinne and walk the UW campus with her, stayed with Peggy and Bill in Portland. When we got to Palo Alto I discovered it was the night of our old poetry group's workshop, so I went to that, too. Holly had us Branner 3C corridor mates to her home for cocktails, and the dinner I arranged at Vaso Azzurro for Italy XIV went off splendidly.

Morristown Presbyterian Churchyard

Got back to Lawrenceville and soon my sister arrived! Lots of planning on my part to figure out just the route we should take--she appreciated how we avoided the major highways, stuck to the countryside. Lunch at the Bernards Inn, stops in the Mendham and Morristown churchyards the first afternoon, and dinner at the Madison Hotel where we stayed. The next day we found our great-great-great grandmother's tombstone in Fairfield, stopped in at the Van Ness house and the Sandford-Stager house (the latter is for sale!). Earlier in the day we went to Montville, saw two houses there (Hyler and Parlaman), both owned by our ancestors. Lunch in Montclair at the Red Eye Cafe. Found great-grandfather Fillmore's home on Roseland, across the street from the Robison house, both in good shape. All our relatives found in the Prospect Hill Cemetery (Fillmore, Ida and Everett, Stephen J. and Catherine, Charles S. Simonson and Emma Winans, Henry Winans and Mary Hotto, Ann Sanford and Isaac Simonson. Don't think I'm missing anyone. Couldn't find anyone at the First Presbyterian Churchyard, graves too hard to read, although our folks were listed in the books they had in the office. Mother's house looked great, the owner was just leaving or she would have shown us around again as she did for me a few years ago. Russell's house still there, and their father Charles' and the store with "Simonson 1909" in the brick. Also Fillmore's older home on Bloomfield, Everett Field, Overlook Cottage. Back home in traffic on the Garden State, but in time for dinner with Bill at the Blue Bottle in Hopewell.

Handel and Virginia Woolf

Berwick Church

Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum

Our early summer trip to England and Germany was delightful. Our themes were music, art, literature. We visited the homes of Handel (1 in London, 1 in Halle), Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Horace Walpole, Goethe (his home in town and his cottage in the park), Paula Modersohn-Becker, Heinrich Vogeler, Max Liebermann, and Bertolt Brecht. We went to lovely churches: Berwick church in Sussex (with paintings on the walls by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant), St. Martin-in-the-Fields (where we heard a noon concert), St. Peter and Paul in Weimar where Herder preached. We went to museums: The Brighton Museum, The National Portrait Gallery, The Foundling Museum, the Kunsthalle Bremen, the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, the Goethe Museum, the Duchess Anna Amalia Library, the Weimar City Museum, the Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle, the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Wannsee Conference House. We strolled along the Downs above the chalk cliffs at Beachy Head in Sussex, we travelled by ferry overnight from Harwich to Hook of Holland, we took the old-fashioned Moor-Express train from Bremen to Worpswede, and we went on two river boat tours, one in Halle and one in Berlin. And then there were the concerts: at the Town Hall of Lewes, Jordi Savall at the Handel Festival in Halle, and the Akademie für Alte Musik in Berlin. And best of all we got to see my great-nephew Tyler in Berlin, where he is studying at

Humboldt University.

Happy New Year

View of NYC from top of Frick Library

In autumn we took some great short trips, really enjoyed Open House New York with tours of the Frick Library and City Center. A short visit to Drew Farm with its fall colors as we attended the burial of our friend Heather. We heard Fretwork perform at Corpus Christi Church on the upper West side in November. We went up to Buffalo for Thanksgiving, just enough snow there to make it pretty, made sentimental stops at Spot Coffee and Betty’s for lunch. Phil’s parents and most of his sisters and their families were able to come to Thanksgiving dinner at their house. And we were joined by Chris as well, who drove all the way down from Gilmanton to drive us to Buffalo!

In December we went up to Guilford to see friends at the Guilford Poets Guild reading and the Guilford Preservation Alliance Christmas party. On the way home we stopped in NYC to hear Dark Horse Consort at the Park Avenue Christian Church. Bill thought the duo of Robert Mealy and Julie Andrijeski (violins) playing Schmelzer’s “Pastorella” was an exquisite experience. A little snow before Christmas was just the beginning of winter…

Ah, then on Christmas we got on the train for DC to join Karen and her family for a few days. Family included new members Biscuit and Jazz (their new cats). On New Year’s Eve we attended the Lawrenceville annual bonfire, and threw lists of all the bad things that had happened in 2013 into the fire! A few days later it snowed in earnest. Followed by some low temperatures that seemed a little excessive. Time for our annual winter break in California.

In front of Batchelder House in Pasadena

And California was all we expected, lovely weather in Laguna Beach with my sister, and at the track (Santa Anita) with Mimi, touring the Arroyo with Fran and Roger. The only low point...was the level of the pond at the Arboretum in Arcadia, more pond scum than water. California is in a terrible drought. But onward, Melinda cooked us a lovely dinner, with salmon en croute (and S ♥ B on top!). One day Bill played bridge and I hung out at  the Los Angeles County Art Museum. At the end of our trip we went to San Diego and attended the 98th birthday party of our friend Janet Richards. Her three children were there, so it was nice to catch up with old friends. We especially liked visiting the new Central Library in downtown San Diego, a marvelous building, 8 stories high, with state-of-the-art features.

We came home via Baltimore (our original flight to Newark had been cancelled) and were greeted with lots more snow, then ice, then a power failure (mercifully only one full day). But the year has begun with some lovely surprises. A publication of my poem "Caryatids"online in Cider Press Review, two poems in California Quarterly, and then in the mail arrived the new issue of Off the Coast with three of my poems (two of them can be read using the link). A nice surprise was the title of the issue, “Ice Fishing,” which when I turned to the back cover I realized came from a line in one of my poems--and there was the quoted line and my name right there on the back!