So much has happened, Dear Readers, since I last posted on the day my sister died, nearly two months ago now.  I’ve yet to record the extraordinary confluence of my sister’s final days with my time in Miami Beach over Superbowl weekend, attending (as Jane insisted I do) three days of my friends’ acquaintance’s extravagant celebration of his birthday.  Since then my calendar has been filled with the usual busy-ness of a retiree:  medical appointments, meetings of the Friends and Trustees of the Madbury Public Library, a couple of plays at Portland Stage, a memorial for a colleague, a Boston performance by the Takács quartet, several lovely dinner parties, updating advance directives, yoga, book club meetings, and a visit from dear friends come north from Kentucky to spend some time with their new grandson and with me.

Earlier this Saturday I spent a rare sunny afternoon clearing winter detritus from some of my flower beds, cheered by the smell of the damp earth and the host of doughty daffodils that have so valiantly braved our two recent snow storms.  Time flies, and already the two extraordinary events of earlier in the week recede in the rearview mirror.  But both are worth reviewing.

Last Sunday my friend Vicky and I drove north to Averill, Vermont right at the Canadian border to be in the path of the 8 April total eclipse, the first I’ve seen and likely the last I will observe.

The day was spectacularly clear, and the ride through the White Mountains sublime.  We’d rented a modest vacation home for our visit, basically a double-wide trailer, which suited us fine except for the muddy sloped driveway that threatened to get us stuck.  It didn’t.  I had made dinner reservations at Chez Pidgeon, which online gave the impression of a charming country Quebecois road house.  There, alas, we had possibly the worst meal of my life; what I had assumed would be a much-sought-after restaurant where we’d be lucky to get a table turned out to be a place clearly fallen on hard times.  I suspect the one waitress was also preparing the meals, which took two and a half hours to arrive, with the seafood sauce still frozen and the filet too tough to cut.

Didn’t matter.  The big event next day made up for it.  We took a brief walk to Averill Lake on a spectacularly clear, sunny day, perfect for eclipse viewing, passing some other punters set up for enjoying the day and happy for me to photograph them.  The holiday mood was general and abundant; I gathered from the flags this group flew we might not agree on much save for our common gratitude that the day was fine.

We also greeted two other women of a certain age who let me know that the resort-like building we stood before had been owned by Hortense Quimby, who had managed it and the family resort at the opposite end of the lake as long as she could until 1965, when eight families, including these two women, had pooled their resources to purchase the handsome structure and maintain it as a place for their families to gather each summer for the few weeks when they hired a chef and spent time there together.  Each family also bought one of the cottages nearby, formerly part of the Northeast Kingdom Quimby Country Resort that Hortense had managed for 50 years.

I commented to Vicky that here was proof of the good that cooperative enterprise could produce—cooperation so seldom evident in our divided nation.  Some Googling has since filled in more of the Quimby history:  in 1893, Charles Quimby, a local hardware store owner, took on half-ownership of a fishing camp on Averill Lake in lieu of payment for the material used to build it.  Cold Spring Camps, as it was then known, catered almost exclusively to fishermen, attracting anglers from around New England. The earliest guests slept in platform tents; cottages and a series of boardwalks connecting them were added later. This history reminds me of the fishing camp in Bonita Springs, Florida that my grandparents Cecil and Clara Senseman managed at about the same time.

Quimby bought out his partner in 1904. On his passing in 1919, his 29-year-old daughter, Hortense, inherited the property. For nearly half a century, Hortense was the face of “Quimby Country” as she pioneered a new kind of vacation spot for a growing class of Americans who wanted to make more of their leisure time.  Hortense grew Quimby from a tiny fishing operation into one of the first family-style resorts in the Northeast well suited to weary city folks who wanted a Vermont getaway.

Hortense’s success and the loyalty she inspired in generations of families resulted in longtime guests—among them the two women we met—purchasing the property when in 1965 Hortense’s failing health prevented her continuing to manage the resort. 

On this fine Monday afternoon, buoyed by the sunshine, our pleasant encounters, and the imminent celestial show, Vicky and I packed up the car for a speedy post-eclipse exit, and then planted our lawn chairs across the street from our Vrbo accommodation, enjoying the sound of the plashing water as it flowed from the culvert above which we sat into the adjoining wetland.

And then the show commenced.  Prepped with our ISO-approved eclipse viewers, we watched as the big event at last began at 2.16 pm.  The sky did grow darker as totality approached, though not as dark as I thought it might become. But the ring of fire ‘round the sun was most impressive for all 3 minutes and 18.9 seconds of the moon-sun alignment.  Some cheers went up from the folks sitting by the lake, the temperature dropped, and for so brief a time, everyone in the path of totality was absorbed by and marveling at the same natural phenomenon.

We packed up and left Averill just as the eclipse ended, joining shortly after departure the throng migrating south.  The caterpillar of red tail lights was initially amusing as we crept along, but much less so once the interstate was too overburdened to accept more cars and Google maps directed us—and everyone else—onto the hilly washboard dirt roads of Vermont’s back country.  We’d left at 4.30, but nightfall found us barely moving and still far from the New Hampshire border in the dark, in the woods, on a narrow, ditch-lined road barely wide enough for one car, bumper to bumper.  When we finally returned to I-93, we sat ironically still for 20 minutes in the acceleration lane entrance, listening to Terry Gross interview Irish actor Andrew Scott about why he took so many long pauses when acting Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy (answer:  Hamlet’s thinking these thoughts for the first time).

Twice we tried to stop for food and a bathroom break.  The first restaurant offered only a 40-minute wait; the next, a McDonald’s, provided a ladies’ room with a 25-minute waiting line and food available only via app or drive-through.  We made do with the provisions we’d brought—crackers, hummus, oatmeal cookies, peanuts—and finally arrived home in Madbury after midnight early Tuesday morning 8.5 hours later.  The trip north on Sunday had taken only 3.25 hours.

Still, we DID get safely home, and purposefully so, because the next night we had front-row seats for Yo-Yo Ma and his accompanist Kathy Stott’s playing Symphony Hall in Boston.  More driving, yes, but also, once again, a message from the universe, delivered not only by the consummate artistry of the performers in a sold-out house of 2,625 patrons focused intently on every note, but also by Stott’s programming choice of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel (1978) which opened the second half of the concert.  Joking that they were still out of breath after the Shostakovich D minor Cello Sonata, Op. 40 that closed the first half, Stott announced they would “slow things down” a bit.

What followed Stott’s brief introduction was Pärt’s rendering of what Yo-Yo Ma called “a portrait of the universe”:  a single note beautifully played moving step-wise, usually toward or away from the home note, accompanied only by notes of the triad closest (either above or below) the melodic part.  As they played, a screen above Ma and Stott showed a series of phantasmagoric deep space images:  galaxies, cloud nebulae, protostars.

At the end of the piece, Ma identified the photographs as taken by the Webb Space Telescope, evidence of “what thousands of people working together can accomplish when they cooperate.” When they cooperate. Yes.

Copy that.