I USUALLY remember to post something here on the day the light turns, but when the equinox went by we were in Maine enjoying the launch of Summer 2023, the very thing the turn was all about.
Pam and I got home Thursday after five days with the family in Kennebunkport. Ten of us rented a house near the beach. It was our three girls, their significant others, the offspring, and a surprise visit from Pam’s cousin, Jody. She was in New England visiting family. Her flight home to the Pacific Northwest out of Portland had been canceled so we all invited her to stay with us instead of waiting around at a hotel.
What a great time! So much fun to see Jody again.
D1D1 and D1D2 had fun romping in the surf. I doubt they’d begin to tire of it in a month at the beach.
Here at home, the wildflower gardens are in bloom.
Bees and butterflies are everywhere in the milkweed.
Rabbits are busy keeping the clover mowed, if not the lawn.
We’ve always had northern flickers but never in such numbers as we’ve seen this year.
When rooting for bugs they stick their beaks in the ground and work them like jackhammers.
Our tulip poplars were in bloom until just recently.
I’ve got the 650 piglet bike all but ready to run. There’s the little slip of a thing trying to be a big girl like iron piggy.
Two weeks ago we had another construction weekend in Vermont. I rode up Thursday morning, Jonny drove up in the travel van after work Friday.
It was a glorious ride up. I rode with the windshield stowed behind the seat. Put it back up front for the rainy ride home Sunday. A cold ride home for June.
Jonny dragged the rain up with him that evening…
Late-night reading in my tent…
I must have been reading too much easy material, found I was craving something a bit more al dente. So in recent weeks I re-read Isaiah Berlin’s The Crooked Timber of Humanity and A.O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being. They chart the history of ideas that have shaped western thought; ideas manifesting across disciplines, in philosophy, literature, astronomy, biology, religion, politics, concepts of nationhood.
Not exactly the kind of books that fly off the shelves. A reader who doesn’t already think in a particular way won’t be interested enough to work through them. If you’re feeling masochistic, read Lovejoy first. He’s writing in the 1930s, Berlin follows in the 50s. The intervening world war was a major driver of Berlin’s critique. He’s most interested in how authoritarian regimes underpin their ideologies. Timely reading in our own day.
Berlin’s chapter on the authoritarian Savoyard thinker Joseph de Maistre is the best of the crooked timber volume. He’s the better writer. Lovejoy’s more academic, sounds like a late-19th-century man, but he’s especially good on the roots of ideas seen as axiomatic, those deemed too commonsense to be questioned even if they do happen to be upside down; ideas unquestioned not by dummies (or not only by dummies) but by thought-leaders in major historical movements.
Eh… wandered off on a tangent… completely neglected the breaking news on laundry day in the lean-to…
I hauled a bucket of culvert water up from the road and did the wash. Not sure why, the air was too wet to do laundry. Two days later everything went into my backpack wet for the ride home.
Got a little mechanical work done yesterday on the ’49 truck. Two of the exhaust gaskets had blown out of the header on the driver’s side. The truck was obnoxiously loud without them.
While losing track of the weeks, the months, the equinox & all that, I’ve also missed a few opportunities to say something about Jeff Weigel’s Sunday Phantom story. It’s been in serial publication for over a year now and is just about to wrap up. I’ll aim to write something about it here tomorrow.
Jeff’s art has been astonishingly good since day one. Just remarkable.
On the daily side, Mike Manley’s story, the Dungeons Undone chapter of the Wrack and Ruin series, is on the cusp of events not to be missed.
I’m eager to see what Mike does with the next eight to ten weeks that cross his drawing board. We’ve spent not one but two years leading up to this narrative turn in the road.
I’ll likely edit the final chapter in the series and file it with King Features Syndicate around the middle of next month.
Tony DePaul, July 1, 2023, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA
