From The Road: Tour du Connecticut

Arundel, Maine July 19, 2007

You have probably noticed that the posts here lag behind the postmarks. This is partly due to Peachy's delivering me occasionally to phone company "terra incognita", and partly because Penny is visiting too much with her new friends and exploring new places instead of tending to her computer. We will catch up someday!

From New York City Peachy and I traveled up to Connecticut and had a visit with a beloved aunt and uncle. It is always a gift for me to arrive in some of the old towns (some now celebrating their 300th birthdays!), and appreciate anew the beauty of the old houses - their graceful proportions, and the way they look so comfortable nestled into the land under huge old, gnarled trees. New owners have generally done a fine job of restoring some of the more dilapidated examples, and many ancient stone walls are looking quite put together after much hard work lifting and thoughtful rearranging of the lichened boulders.


The gardens of New England also charm me with their exuberant growth and bloom after having survived the long, cold winter. They seem to know that they need to take advantage of the short summer, so they pour all their energy into billows of color along those stone walls, in window boxes, perennial borders, and in civic beautifications alongside the streets. In general these are harmonious, but one intriguing example made me wonder if two committees, perhaps one from the local garden club and the other working for the town, had not communicated with each other before planting mauve and pale pink petunias in a bed interspersed with red geraniums. Humm.

Hartford, CT was the next stop, and what an extravagant welcome that was! Penny attended the United Church of Christ Synod celebrating the 50th birthday of the U.C.C. Exciting speeches by Bill Moyers and Barak Obama were high points among a wonderful array of talks, workshops, and concerts held in several venues. It was a great experience, and even included thousands of dozens of cookies, every variety you can imagine, circulating around the Hartford Civic Center, where more than 9,600 people gathered from all across the country.

It is affirming to find so many extravagant welcomes along this journey. Everyone seems to be interested in the news about water crises in various developing countries around the world, and beginning to be aware of the very real possibility of our rich country suffering from a similar fate not so far in the future. To give a couple of examples, in Frederick, Maryland there was a new-house moratorium for almost three years not too long ago, imposed due to lack of water, and in Maine there is some public outcry currently about companies sucking water out of the land to sell in plastic bottles. We are all connected, and whether a woman walking a mile to carry water home for her family, or a dry aquifer in one of our own states, we are all affected. To close: "To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival". Wendell Berry

Shalom until next time, when the New England journey continues.