Reading: Antarctic Navigation, a novel by Elizabeth Arthur.

Background courtesy of
Ace of Space

Make a Wish

9:35 a.m. I'm sitting out here on Mom's deck watching the boys at play. The deck is beautiful and was designed and constructed entirely by Jake. He built it onto the side of the house, where it overlooks the backyard. The boys are standing at the lattice-bordered half wall and throwing their balsa wood airplanes down onto the grass, then scampering down the spiral stairway into the yard to retrieve them.

I'm also watching the birds clustering at Mom's birdfeeders at the edge of the yard. I've seen numerous chickadees (Maine's state bird), a male goldfinch, and a purple finch, along with various sparrows and other indeterminate birds.

It is very peaceful here. Mom and Jake live on a quiet street, and behind their yard is the town cemetery, where some stones date back to the late eighteenth century. My niece, Courtney, is buried there. In the evenings we like to walk around the cemetery. The circuit is about a mile long. I've always been fond of cemeteries, so I think Mom is lucky to live so close to one.

When we first planned this trip, a week seemed a more than sufficient amount of time for everything we wanted to do. We've been here less than three days, however, and now the remainder of our time suddenly seems too short, with nearly every remaining day scheduled. We were planning to go to the Skowhegan State Fair on Wednesday but have decided to switch to tomorrow since we've heard it may rain Wednesday. Tab and I also want to take a trip to Freeport (home of L.L. Bean) and Portland one day. My sister Monica has invited us over for swimming and dinner, my sister Lori has invited us to her camp on Lake Wesserunsett for a boat ride, and Daniel is supposed to go fishing with my father out on North Pond either some morning or evening. Tab and I also discussed a possible trip to Belgrade, a cute little town on the shores of Great Pond. I'm not sure how we're going to fit this all in.

This morning I tried to upload yesterday's entry from my Zaurus to the Princeton server so I could email it to my notify list as I have done with the two previous entries, but for some reason my Zaurus spazzed out on me. (That's the technical term for it, but the way: spazzed out.) The screen filled up with vertical lines and the keyboard froze completely. I had to remove the batteries and replace them in order to get it back to normal. I tried several times, and got the same result every time. I don't know if there was a problem with the phone lines, or what, but it is intensely frustrating, especially since it had worked before.

10:45 p.m. Back again at the end of a busy day. Since it was the first sunny day we've had since we've been here, we decided to go swimming at Aunt Monica's this afternoon. She lives in Embden, a tiny town about 35 miles outside of Skowhegan. She has a very large aboveground pool. The water temperature was about 75 deg., but felt colder to me as I gingerly descended the ladder. Daniel happily paddled about on the "noodle," a long, cylindrical flotation device made of high-density foam, but the twins were very nervous about the water, even though they were wearing life jackets. They wanted either to be held or to recline on the inflatable raft.

While we were cooling off in Monica's pool, poor Tab was getting hot and sweaty back at Mom's back yard, where he was digging a long, narrow, three-foot deep trench. Jake has built a workshop out in the back yard and wanted to run phone and electrical lines from the house to the shop. When we returned, I admired the neatly dug trench and asked Tab, "What sort of equipment did you use to make that hole?" He answered, "Shovels."

After a tasty dinner of steaks done on the grill, Tab and I drove to Farmington to meet Dad and Bunny at the Narrow Gauge Cinema to see The Thomas Crown Affair. We all liked the movie very much. I like Rene Russo, and I was especially glad that in this movie she played a worthy adversary to Pierce Brosnan's character and not just one of those typically superfluous wife or girlfriend role which are all too common in movies.

Driving the 35 miles home to Skowhegan after the movie, I marveled once again at how dark the night is when there are no street lights or city lights, no lights at all, in fact, except the headlights of our car. For the first night since we've been here, the night sky was cloudless, and the stars shone out brightly. Directly in front of us, both Tab and I saw the sudden white flash of a meteorite. Even if we missed the Perseids, we did get to see one falling star.

"Make a wish," said Tab.

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