August 29, 2026-The sturgeon moon (because they were easy to catch in the moonlight.)

August moonlight recalls an evening long ago when I met my mother in the living room, two sleepless, moon-drenched creatures, headed toward the frig. My mother always said that August wasn’t hot in Los Angeles, California. Yes, well, we tell ourselves so many things, don’t we? It was a still, heavy evening with a full moon that filled every corner of the house and the garden. The weather was on the edge of turning. I was leaving for my senior year of college, not momentous, just my last summer living at home. My mother said she was awake with anticipation of the year to come. For school people, the year ends in August and begins in September. I was beginning an 18-month hitch of student teaching, the home stretch. We spoke of this and of that, never taking our eyes off this moon of anticipation and wondering what experiences we would catch in the coming year. Conversations I took for granted and will never come again.

For me, it is a moon of reflection and awaiting. For David Roberts, he waxes on about a memory of enrolling his baby daughter into pre-school in Manhattan. Dave and I often read his essays aloud, one of us to read and one to laugh. We trade off.

David Roberts || Sparks From Culture

The Manhattan Nursery School Gods

I read an excellent expose this week in New York Magazine about the nutty world of youth travel sports and how parents of very young children are seduced into sacrificing loads of time, money, and familial life to a mostly pointless pursuit…

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3 days ago · 51 likes · 23 comments · David Roberts

This entry touches everyone I can think of in some way. Do enjoy it and have a good laugh. I see my nephews, solid Millennials, 25 years ago, my grandchildren, and the daughters of a dear friend, Gen Z, for example.

Generation

Birth years

Baby Boomers

1946–1964

Generation X

1965–1980

Millennials (Gen Y)

1981–1996

Generation Z (Gen Z)

1997–2012

Generation Alpha

2013–present

There are universals, of course, but perhaps the differences between Baby Boomers and Gen Z, as they reflect setting off for college, are as different as growing up on Planet Pluto as opposed to New Jersey. What I hear at present is far closer to Pluto. Bless them. Happy School Year.

What music do I hear that is as evocative as the power of the August moon?

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The languid, gracious days of Second Summer are about to begin. Shadows are longer, days fade sooner. The sun is lush and warm, with occasional rainstorms, and the autumn gardens, bright with daisies and rudbeckia, claim the edges of my garden.

The Screen Door Festival is about to begin.

I heard Conrad Tao play Rachmaninoff’s Daisies on Friday, and languid summer will never be the same. At the end of my driveway, Conrad Tao played in the elegant, accessible Hammer Hall on an August evening.

Tao connects with his audience in such an intimate way. When weaving a spell connecting Rachmaninoff to jazz, he is seamless and suspending. This is Improvisation on Variation 15 from Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini by Rachmaninoff.

He noted that Rachmaninoff didn’t write a great deal of music after he moved to New York in the 1930’s, but the Rhapsody was an exception. Can you hear the jazz idiom? Tao, as a young teen, says he would create variations on the introduction. It is as though he is in conversation with Rachmaninoff, bridging time with the influence of jazz on the Russian composer and himself.

The concert was peppered with the sublime work of Billy Strayhorn and others. We were treated to Tao and Lush Life, a Strayhorn piece. Of his work, Duke Elliston would say,

“....Billy Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes
in the back of my head, my brainwaves in his head, and his in mine.”
Again, this theme of weaving time seamlessly. No one sings Strayhorn like Ella; her voice and the piano are smoke and dust and vapor.

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Or maybe…"...it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness..." also, Charles Dickens…

My, there is so much. In my wee town, there is much consternation over paid parking and over whether to revisit a mandate voted on by the town to take the damn dam down. There is a restless vibration as the great hordes, who drive like gerbils, descend onto the streets to eat, to shop, to wander. Bless them! They are on holiday, so can’t really imagine that rear-ending anyone could happen on their holiday. My darling neighbor’s daughter hit a deer and got rear-ended within 17 hours. She would have done well to stay in bed. The car looks like…well, it is a mess…

and yet, there is music in every open space and in the sublime music center that lives at the end of my driveway. There is the College of the Atlantic that offers a speakers’ series that is 1)free and 2) the most superb opportunity to hear great thinkers wax on about great things. There is the monumental, in some stratospheres, the godalmighty garden tour, that is often best viewed in the rear view mirror as in, “Wasn’t it delightful and so successful!” …after months of planning and angst and ageda.

The humidity is low; the sun, though late in arriving on the coast, has been a joy, wistfully reminiscent of days gone before the constant fear of global warming and 500 fires across the Canadian heartlands. My beloved neighbor commented that there is no place in town to buy anything of use, like underwear. Yes, that may be true, but when did we last buy undies in a boutique on a High Street? My personal experience would be Penny’s in 1958, but never you mind; this observation adds to the complexity of the coastal invasion. We have 10 more weeks of more, more, and more visitors from away who shore up the economy of a coastal seaport village that also hosts a 6- to 7-month winter…but who’s counting?

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Thanks to Thomas Elliot and Unsplash

Is this my garden? Are these my Monarda, commonly known as bee balm? The answer is a resounding NO. If you have ever wanted to clear a room, unless you are in a garden club, talk deadheading, or discussing the plant that is now thriving that once was as moody and unresponsive as a French coquette, pouting in a Paris cafe.

But it is true, plants do have personalities. They speak to you, prosper in one area and not in another. They are very communicative in their own way. They can be moody for lack of personal attention, lackluster due to poor light, sanguine as they nestle in for the long haul, thrilled to pieces to be near old friends. But this kind of “jammer” is not everyone’s cup of lemon verbena herbal tea. Not everyone sees a garden in the same way. If you are a bee balm person, every day you look for big bee bottoms wiggling into an open flower. Gardens are sensual in the extreme. Surely, Gertrude Jekyll subscribed to this.

Here is our Gertrude, commonly called Mrs. Bumps by Vita-Sackville West. Vita modeled many ideas in her garden at Sissinghurst after the famed Gertrude Jekyll, of whom she wrote with deep affection and reverence. Vita described her as someone whose understanding of color, planting, and seasonal succession had transformed English gardening.

Sissinghurst-Compliments of the National Trust

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La Rue Montorgueil, à Paris. Fête du 30 juin 1878, Claude Monet, 1878

Before we celebrate this pivotal French moment, let’s return to the last days of the American Revolution. Oui, mes amis,12,000 French soldiers and 22,000 naval personnel fought directly in the American Revolution. During the decisive 1781 Siege of Yorktown, for example, there were roughly 7,500 to 8,000 French troops fighting alongside about 6,000 American regulars. I like to imagine the thoughts of General Cornwallis as he turned to face those French ships in the harbor at the mouth of the Chesapeake.

French depiction of the Siege of Yorktown circa 1781, artist unknown.

Early in 1781, the war had finally come to Virginia firsthand. Lafayette led a small group of Continentals into Virginia to wreak a little havoc and report back to Washington.

I had to live in and around the rich bounty and physical beauty of North and South Carolina and visit early intellectual strongholds of Virginia before I truly understood Cornwallis’ committed intention to route the American presence and break the back of Virginian patriotism.

First, an invading force under the command of the traitor Benedict Arnold had overrun much of the eastern part of Virginia, destroying valuable supplies and cargoes of tobacco. Much to Governor Thomas Jefferson’s dismay, the state’s militia units, the only men available for defense, were not able to stand up to the professional British soldiers. The state’s plight deepened in the summer when British General Cornwallis abandoned his unsuccessful attempt to subdue the Carolinas and instead decided to join the British forces already in Virginia. With an army now numbering nearly 7,000 men, General Cornwallis began a wide-ranging campaign of economic and military destruction aimed at ending Virginia’s important contributions to the war effort. Lafayette could not prevent the British from rampaging through the state, burning the capital of Richmond, and nearly capturing the legislative assembly in Charlottesville. By early August, Cornwallis began setting up a fortified base at Yorktown, with the expectation of reinforcements.

Washington thought the French should press all their efforts in taking New York. Au contré, returned Rochembeau with his 4,000 men and de Grasse with his fierce navy, who were ready to strike into the heart of Virginia against the well-established Cornwallis.

Without the direct and indirect assistance of France, it is doubtful that Americans could have won the war for independence. From 1776 to 1783, France supplied the United States with millions of livres in cash and credit. France also committed 63 warships, 22,000 sailors and 12,000 soldiers to the overall war effort. These forces suffered relatively heavy casualties as a result. The French national debt incurred during the war contributed to the fiscal crisis France experienced in the late 1780s, considered to be a strong factor that brought on the French Revolution. In the end, the French people paid a high price for helping America in its efforts for freedom.

There is no America without France. There is no America without the negotiations of Benjamin Franklin and the Marquis de Lafayette. On August 30, 1781, de Grasse entered Chesapeake Bay with 28 warships; 24 were ships of the line and the remainder were smaller frigates and support vessels. He also escorted about 3,000 French troops under Claude-Anne de Rouvroy, Marquis de Saint-Simon.

Cornwallis could not be reinforced or evacuated by sea. Washington and Rochambeau were able to surround Yorktown on the ground. The French fleet sealed the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay.

After the American victory, Lafayette would return home, on fire to create some of the same rights for the citizens of France. Together with Thomas Jefferson and modeled on The American Declaration of Independence, influenced by Virginia’s Declaration of Rights and the Enlightenment philosophers John Locke and Montesquieu, the French National Assembly reviewed the Rights of Man, with additional influence from figures such as Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès.

• Natural rights

• Freedom of speech

• Freedom of religion (though the French declaration speaks more broadly of freedom of opinion)

• Equality before the law

• Protection of property

• Due process

• Limits on arbitrary government

Lafayette felt he could influence his mother country. Just days before the Bastille fell, he presented a draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

On July 14, 1789, when the Parisians stormed the Bastille, a medieval fortress that had become a symbol of royal absolutism, Lafayette was not with the crowd. The fortress fell after several hours of fighting, and its governor, Bernard-René de Launay, was killed by the mob. The fall of the Bastille marked the beginning of the French Revolution in the eyes of much of Europe.

Two days later, on July 15, 1789, Lafayette was appointed commander of the newly formed National Guard. He was charged with restoring order in Paris, protecting both the king and the National Assembly, preventing further mob violence, and supporting constitutional reform rather than revolution…or rise from the dead or walk on his bath water… impossible feats even for a man of intense loyalty to both his countries.

All this and he also proposed the famous blue, white, and red tricolor cockade, combining the traditional colors of Paris (blue and red) with the Bourbon monarchy’s white. This became the basis of the French national flag.

Perhaps Lafayette’s most famous connection to the Bastille is the key. After the fortress was demolished, its main key came into Lafayette’s possession. Believing the Bastille’s fall symbolized the triumph of liberty, he sent the key to his friend George Washington in 1790 as a gift.

Today, that original key is displayed at Mount Vernon, Washington’s home, where it remains one of the estate’s most treasured Revolutionary artifacts.

The Bastille symbolizes not only the beginning of the French Revolution but also Lafayette’s hope that France could achieve liberty through constitutional reform rather than violence, a hope that was beyond realization. The French do not love Lafayette the way we do. He was a man among men, the adopted son of George Washington. He was driven by the call of liberty.

What music do I hear when I think of Washington beholding the key to the Bastille, given by a brother at arms that he would never see again, or when I can visualize Admiral François Joseph Paul, Comte de Grasse, sailing into the Chesapeake, a majestic rescue with the meeting of some brilliant minds? I hear Holst… an English composer and great friend of Ralph Vaughn Williams. The Planets was written from 1914-1916. This will be a topic for another day. His magnum opus, The Planets, is a seven-movement orchestral suite, deeply influenced by Holst's fascination with astrology, mythology, and the occult rather than traditional astronomy. Movements like "Mars, the Bringer of War" and "Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity" are considered staples of classical orchestral repertoire. [1]

It is the leitmotif of Lafayette, his devotion to duty, his love of family, and his many sacrifices to preserve his belief in the liberty of man. Here is another rendition from the LSO. With Pappano conducting, I can see Lafayette’s life go by as he lived it in orchestration.

Here is where the merriment begins.

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By the 1930s and 1940s, both Aaron Copland and Ralph Vaughan Williams were major figures in the English-speaking musical world, they attended many of the same festivals and international musical gatherings, and moved in overlapping professional circles. There is evidence that Copland knew Vaughan Williams’s music well and commented on it. One famous (and rather sharp) remark attributed to Copland was:

“Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes.” Why would this be bad? (After the last two weeks I’ve had, I’d be grateful to watch a cow swish flies from her haunches for 45 minutes.)

Whether he said it exactly that way has been debated, but the quotation has circulated widely among musicians. Copland doesn’t seem to have a mean bone in his body. Maybe he meant it as a positive. Just listen to the Third Movement of the 5th and see what you think. The woodwinds backed by sweeping strings will tear your heart out…nothing bucolic here. The music is stormy and restless.

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A friend says that June is Maine’s secret weapon. I’d have to agree with her. Dave and I took a walk this week, enjoyed the dappled, tree-lined pathways with vistas out to the Atlantic. I couldn’t help thinking about Aaron Copland with his quintessential American idiom. I had just read an article about the celebration of his 100th birthday, which, of course, coincides with America’s 250th birthday. That was enough to send me right down the rabbit hole for a look at this man who so loved America.

Outside of having a torrential, Light of the Iguana storm the night before last, the weather has been pure Maine, old Maine, in the 60’s and 70s, no humidity and sunlight that breaks your heart. It reminded me of the incidental music from…Our Town.

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My own garden and the Maine coastline sound like this. Vaughn-Williams captures the breathtaking surprises that take place each morning, ever-changing and unfolding.

He composed Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. The piece was commissioned for the Three Choirs Festival and premiered on September 6, 1910, at Gloucester Cathedral, with the composer, age 38, conducting. The music opens with dark, sweeping chords and the full ensemble. He parallels the original Tallis melody introduced in its stark, beautiful entirety. Vaughan Williams tears the melody apart and rebuilds it in a series of shimmering, complex contrapuntal variations, utilizing rich polyphony to capture a sweeping, timeless vastness. The piece builds to a luminous, radiant climax and then descends to a final note. To me, it is the long-awaited garden that suddenly, after a long sleep, arises in its brief glory and then is spent. No wonder we garden. The whole life cycle is just beneath the earth.

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The last few entries are about me letting go of Paris through her composers. Walking with the Impressionists of French music through their beloved city.

Dave and I have been home in Maine for two months after a four-month trip to France. It feels as though we never left, and at the same time as though we still have a foot in Paris and in France. One truism remains: certain pairs of socks or a favorite scarf are lost in the internal workings of our house. It is the house’s way to punish us for being gone so long.

This week has been about the gardens that snuggle up together on our small patch of this coastal paradise. It was a hard winter, and I had to wonder what would survive. Safe to say, with a little bit of additional replacement, all is thriving. I would love to show it to you. Dave has lovingly worked his magic to replant a deep garnet rhododendron that has been as miserable as a scorned woman, stuck in a place where she can not thrive and living on the largesse of relatives.

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Walking through Montmartre with Claude Debussy, you’ll find that certain places seem almost written into the music. The year is 1909, Debussy is writing Des pas sur la neige. The Passage Panoramas was the ‘hood for many avant-garde musicians and artists at the beginning of the 20th century. Though Debussy studied at the Paris Conservatoire, his people were here: Eric Satie and Maurice Ravel. The neighborhood had long been Bohemian. The passage, as it was in 1867, is described in chapter VII of Émile Zola‘s La Verité novel Nana. in 1867. While you listen to this four-minute work, remember the gritty working-class plight of Nana, who is caught by her own conditions. You can feel footsteps in the Des pas sur la neige.

1909 is a year that has fascinated me. Egon Schiele is expelled from the Angewandte Kunst, the school of applied art in Vienna. Hitler was denied entrance to study in the same year. Arnold Schoenberg wrote Five Orchestral Pieces. Stravinsky was commissioned to write The Firebird. Gustav Klimt painted The Kiss…

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This recording is sublime. The work was premiered in Paris when he was studying at the École Niedermeyer de Paris. Faure was 19.

École Niedermeyer de Paris

This famous choral work, The Cantique de Jean Racine, Op. 11, featured Fauré as the organist with string accompaniment on August 4, 1866. It won Fauré his first prize. There was no turning back in his brilliant career.

The text was written by Jean Racine in the 1600’s, but the original work is from the monastic Book of Hours. In this case, Matins, which is sung just at dawn. Matins…from the Latin matutinus ("of the morning")

Start here with our walk. I would find a place on the Right Bank with on the river, the Eiffel Tower, the Invalides, and the Mosque within view, and listen to this intoxicating work.

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Jardin du Luxembourg

a view of the Invalides at the end of the garden

What would you do with a slow walk through Paris without time constraints? What would you do with 10 days? What if you had 10 free days of an intense experience with Paris and some of her most beloved citizens?

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Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924), John Singer Sargent, 1888

My traveling companion and I have returned from four glorious/vain glorious months of decadent travel in France, Italy, and England. Let me say that it was the easiest reentry ever. In the entries to follow, I will hook up to a fabulous “How To” travel Substack that has made life so much more convenient for this traveler.

I had the cold that could have felled a Sequoia this week, so I took to my bed with Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner by Natalie Dykstra. My stars, how can I know so little about Isabella? As always, I can’t wait to tell you my every thought about her. If you already know, act surprised; otherwise, write to me and tell me what you think.

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Left: Vanessa Bell Self-Portrait c.1915. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund © estate of Vanessa Bell. All rights reserved, DACS 2025 Right: Duncan Grant Self-Portrait 1920. Scottish National Portrait Gallery, purchased 1980 © estate of Duncan Grant. All rights reserved, DACS 2025

I look at Vanessa in 1915. She has come into her own by then. Divorced from her formal training and the influences of John Singer Sargent and J.M. Whistler, she entered the world of Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso. The wisdom in her eyes reveals the end of an affair with Roger Fry, the art critic. She is her own woman.

Duncan Grant in 1920-He has been living with Vanessa for four years at Charleston House, a medieval, underheated, beautifully painted, whimsical cottage, where he would live, off and on, for the next 60 years. He is survived by Vanessa’s son, Quentin.

Quentin Bell (1910–1996), Reading; Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) National Trust, Monk’s House

And here is Quentin, who will survive them all and live with the ghosts of Charleston House until his death in 1996. He is Vanessa's surviving child. Her elder son died in Spain in 1937, Julian Bell, the son of Clive and Vanessa Bell. The artistic circle of Conscientious Objectors who came and went from the house would lose an offspring. They would survive WWI, losing a generation of school friends and now would lose kin at the dawn of WWII.

.Julian Bell, 1930, Vanessa Bell

Before we look at the chapel that Vanessa, Duncan, and Quentin painted together, I want to share a portrait of Vanessa that we found in London at the Tate Britain.

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We’re coming to the last of this wander begun on December 1st. 80,7720 steps later, 480 miles, about 4 miles a day, endless train and bus rides, 4 taxis, 1 ferry, a round-trip airline ticket for two, 25 towns, villages, and cities, 120 days, and we are homeward bound.

…We finish in London, where we began 48years ago…seems fitting.

A week of favorites- pl…

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We took the bus from Seaford to Alfriston and walked out of town…

…on a sunny March afternoon. We were walking to Firle Manor. The Gage family has owned Firle for close to 500 years, but the country roads are much older, some pre-Christian, dotted with 12th century Ango-Saxons cum Norman that stand on settlements. It is quiet in a deep, in-the-bone marrow way. There is bird song in the hedges, 15-16 different birds, Wrens and Blue-Tits, Dunnocks and Chaffinch, stately pheasants, even herons.

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from september 29, 2025 by outthedoorandontheroad,

Firle Manor in the Early Evening on March 20th, 2026

Mrs. Thomas Gage, by John Singleton Copley, 1771. Timken Museum of Art, San Diego, California.

Pensive, not content but not unhappy…. A foot in each world, by the time this painting is created in Boston, Margaret Kemble Gage is waiting for her ship to England, to London. She is not a Tory. She is a fourth-generation colonist, a New Yorker.

She was pursued by Thomas Gage. He had been an excellent administrator in both Montreal and New York. British officer Thomas Gage courted the beautiful, ambitious, and independent-minded Margaret Kemble during the French and Indian War. He was a guest at the Kemble home in the winter of 1757, and even though he was less than dashing and rather straight-laced, she admired his gentlemanly nature and perseverance in his chosen career, and he admired the gregarious, confident, socially adept young ingenue. It is a love story.

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There is an immediate story here about this wonderful trompe-l'œil mantel and floral painting. Julian and Quentin Bell, the children of Vanessa and Clive Bell, were playing ball in the living room. The wayward ball hit the mirror over the fireplace and broke it. Rather than replace the mirror, Duncan Grant decides to paint a pot of flowers in a gold frame. Problem solved!

Charleston House is a universe set in a natural landscape. It is the coming together of like minds, who pursue their “inner life” and forsake the noise of the 20th century. It was an act of self-protection. By creating a mock-medieval life by painting their creed all around themselves, the Bloomsbury tribe quite simply walked out of the noise of their century. The dichotomy was that every creation was deeply rooted in a powerful message of change that birthed Modern British Painting.

Quentin Bell, as a young man, painted by his mother, Vanessa Bell, and again, a photo taken at the end of his life. He moved to Charleston House with his mother at the age of six and lived there off and on of the next 80 years. He is the keeper of the flame, writing a biography of his mother’s sister, the author Virginia Woolf, and many other books concerning the lives of the Bloomsburys.

Dave and I laughed at the thought of Quentin, pictured here, pudgy and adolescent, chucking a soccer ball in the tiny, lower-ceilinged living room and breaking the mirror. He is with Duncan Grant, the love of his mother’s life, and his half-sister, Angelica, the child of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.

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March in its purest form, a wind as cold as ice, a cerulean sky with dollops of cumulus clouds, here is Lewes. Two train stops away, almost like a kiddie ride, we arrive in the early afternoon, anticipating a visit from a long-time friend. Do this day when you come to Lewes. I found it magical.

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We walked the back way from Cuckmere. It was an easy mile and some. This way we could sneak up on the Seven Sisters when they were not looking and behold them.

But they saw us and hid in a cloud.

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