There and back again

O my! That overnight in the Berkshires was absolutely wonderful! Taking the Fitchburg line was a brilliant idea (thanks, movingfinger  ): I could pick it up from the open-air platform at Porter, and outside of commuter hours, it's a huge train, sparsely peopled. I pretty much had the car to myself.  Compared with the bus, this is a mere fraction of the time, hassle, and exposure.  And L. could pick me up at Wachusett (the end of the line) without too much trouble. 

Above all, I love talking with my friends in their own spaces, and L.'s house is as much hers and as splendid as Mr. Badger's. It was built by a blacksmith in the mid-18th century: a great cage of chestnut timbers round a mighty chimney stack, running from a Roman-like brick vault in the cellar up to the bats in the attic. I love the way the attic stairs are embedded in the stack, like a vine round a tree. There is, of course, an old sitting-room-kitchen with an open hearth, and floorboards over a foot wide. There's a paneled dining room with an inbuilt spice cupboard, and ranks of famille rose (butterflies and bok choy) ; there's a brilliantly sunny, perfectly Austenian parlor that will be subtle soft grey-green. L. comes from a long line of flea-market haunters, so there are collocations of amazing oddments: oil lamps; bedroom china; a row of inch-high Shakespeares; prints hand-colored by herself; bowls and boxes of extraordinary marbles. There is the most perfect screened porch with white wicker furniture.

Outside the cabinet of curiosities, there's an acre of wetland, blazing with winterberries. I came too late for the fireflies, but L. is longing to dig a frog pond, a sanctuary for the tadpoles and a barracks for mosquito slayers. She's already built a tump and planted it with rare evergreens, carpeted with mosses and with painstakingly propagated four-leaf clovers . The annuals, well blanketed at night, were brilliant still; the roses, spilling over. An antique lilac had re-bloomed.

There was this.



That made up for the full moon whiting out the milky way.

But not quite for the sad leafage. Other years, there has been blaze and glory. This soggy year (it rained nearly every day in July), the maples have spot. Though we drove north in search of color, we got nothing but sad faded browns, and pale lemons, under a glorious sky.

We had lunch on a riverside terrace in Brattleboro, watching the sparkles on the water. Then we took a long walk up and down the riverbank. As you see here, lovely weather, shame about the anthocyanins.





I wish I could post this as a video: the runnels of water on the rockface glittered like ice. It felt like a metamorphosis about to happen.



This tree was corseted by a vine, since cut away by foresters. It looks like an awful warning in a Victorian dress reformer's woodcut.



There were turtles catching rays.



And a giant squid turning into a pine tree. Or vice versa.



Gorgeous rockface.




Really, only the sumacs had turned properly.  All of the mountains should have been that bright.  A great wave of scarlet and vermilion should have flowed down from Canada.




Just after we got back from Vermont, rushthatspeaks , bless him, came to pick me up.  He got to meet L. (whom he has known on paper for many years), and of course got a tour of the domain, encountering a bat and a butterfly.

Then the two of us talked all the way back to Cambridge, where we picked up some terrific Taiwanese  (Salted Crispy Chicken!) to eat on a park bench, and then (O joy of joys!) went to our beloved Tosci's, where I waxed ecstatic over a dish of Belgian Chocolate. I was practically speaking in tongues.  All was glorious until I went to show rushthatspeaks  a photo from Fox's birthday party, and—

—discovered that my phone was gone.  Dismay and panic, though which rushthatspeaks  upheld me like a hero.  Thank heavens, it was found by some good citizen who turned it in at a police station, from which I picked it up unharmed the next day.  But not before a tragicomedy of errors had ensued:  a panicky individual who shall remain nameless tried to call me, got the police, and decided I'd met with foul play....

Other than that, this was an utterly delightful sojourn, and amazingly restorative.

Nine