Picture Meme



I was looking around for one those picture memes that sometimes go around on the internet--the kind that goes 'open the eighth file on your computer and choose the 23rd picture in it and explain what it is' or something along those lines--but I couldn't find one so I decided to pick a few numbers and do my own. I got lucky with the results, insofar as being able to explain the pictures and also for their comparative quality.

1. Late Last Summer (Probably August), Camp in Brattleboro



This camp in Vermont was my wife's grandfather's house. He died about 20 years ago but it has been kept to this point in the family mostly as a weekend getaway. There is a pool there that this grandfather dug out and poured himself back in the 1970s. The house itself is small and still has something of a 1970s time warp effect, though occasionally a piece of furniture is updated. There is no internet service or cell phone reception, and there was no television there until a few years ago, when some basic service was installed. I actually buy newspapers and magazines when I go there, and I enjoy this, especially in the summer when I can sit out on the patio and read them. It reminds me of some of the parts of my childhood that I like. Anyway, we are very lucky--privileged, really--to have this old place to go to, and we usually have it to ourselves, especially outside of the summer months.

2. Last April Vacation--Acadia National Park, Maine

We went back to Acadia last April after having finally gone there for the first time the summer before. There are so many wondrous places to go just in New England, and I am pretty conscious of this, but time slips by all the same, and especially with six children now it is tough to coordinate more than a couple of outings beyond an hour or two from home in a year. But as I noted on the site I think previously, I was very excited to go to Bar Harbor and Mount Desert Island on that first visit, and I enjoyed our second trip also, though it was out of season and a little less glamorous as far as places being open and the crowd around town and at sites goes. The real travellers, writers, etc would have liked the spring trip much better, or claimed to, but I am kind of mesmerized by crowds, especially if they seem to be from the expensively dressed and educated segment of society, and are not overwhelmingly large, which I almost never feel to be the case in North America as compared with the famous tourist centers of Europe. It was much more the regular Maine people on the spring trip, though as I went to high school in that state I still feel some emotional affinity for the place and the people.

I think this hike was on Gorham Mountain by the way.

3. Just Last Week. New Baby Daughter.  

In her Easter costume. It is hard most of the time to get a clear look at her face in real life, because she is either thrashing her head around, or crying, or has her eyes closed, or has a pacifier in her mouth.