By Peter Landry

When Wendell Berry died this week, I’d like to think that our forests, fields, streams and hills paused to offer a moment of silence in his honor. Berry would approve. He loved the silence between sounds, the peace of calm moments and the unspoken solace of nature.

Berry, who died at 92, lived a rich, long life as a writer, poet, teacher and environmentalist and as a working farmer who didn’t mind getting his hands dirty. Not in the least. In his eyes, there was beauty in that dirt, and dignity, and lessons for living better and more rewarding lives.

He shared those lessons through his poems and other writings and taught us how to be one with the world.

Though I love both the environment and poetry, I have to confess I didn’t learn about Wendell Berry until fairly late in life. And though I was once a member of the National Book Critics Circle, I didn’t learn about him from a book.

I learned about him through a home town connection.

A Maine conservation group I support, and its executive director, have been big Berry fans for years because his views on nature and the environment mesh beautifully with the group’s mission.

The Kennebunkport Conservation Trust, and Executive Director Tom Bradbury, frequently turned to Berry for inspiration in Trust communications. By extension, they inspired me.

Who is this guy, I started asking myself, who always seems to have just the right thing to say about nature, community and almost everything else?

Bradbury, a friend since we were kids, has used Berry’s words and ideas to illustrate a wide range of topics over the years in the Trust’s “Looking Back” and “Thought of the Week” features online (more than 60 times by my count!).

They never fail to enlighten, engage or inspire. And if you can’t find inspiration in Wendell Berry, I doubt you can find it anywhere.

The business of a poet is not only to inform but illuminate. And Berry certainly did that, taking insights and observations to another level, turning observation to inspiration.

He made small things large, and made us see their significance. He found beauty in everything.

“There is indeed a music in streams,” he wrote of a little brook in “A Native Hill.” “But it is not for the hurried. It has to be loitered by and imagined.”

In “A Place on Earth,” he noted that in autumn “The leaves on the branches, and falling, and on the ground, are so golden that going in under the trees is to enter not the shade but a double sunlight.”

He believed strongly in community, and in communal effort.

“Nobody can discover the world for somebody else,” he wrote in “A Place on Earth.” “Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.”

​“A community is not merely a condition of physical proximity, no matter how admirable the layout,” he once said. “ … A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives.”

“The fact is that if the land and the people are ever to be saved, they will be saved by local people enacting together a proper respect for themselves and their places,” he wrote in “Our Only World: Ten Essays.” “They can do this not only in ways that are neighborly, convivial and generous, but also, and in the smallest details, practical and economic.”

He had no use for pontificators and procrastinators.

“If ever we are going to do good to one another, then the time to do it is now,” he wrote in “The Agrarian Essays.” “We are to receive no reward for promising to do it in the future.”

“ … Thought for the morrow is a waste of time, I believe, because all we can do to prepare rightly for tomorrow is to do the right things today.” (“Our Only World: Ten Essays”)

“We don’t have a right to ask whether we’re going to succeed or not,” he once said. “The only question we have a right to ask is what’s the right thing to do? What does this earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?”

In the end, and perhaps foremost, he believed that we all need to develop a sense of place and live through it. We need to feel the ground under us and take strength from it. We need to embrace what nature gives us spiritually as well as physically — and protect it.

“We have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it,” he once said. “And to take good care of it we have to know it. And to know it and to be willing to take care of it, we have to love it.”

“This is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders,” he wrote in “The Agrarian Essays. “We see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence.”

Our lives are connected, with both the land and each other.

“The care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility,” he declared in “The Art of the Commonplace.”

“If we keep faithful to our land and our people, both together, never apart, then we will always find the right work to do.” (“Our Only World: Ten Essays”)

How wonderful to feel that connection with the world we have been given.

How wonderful to have had a Wendell Berry to teach us lessons for living, and to point us in the right direction.

How wonderful to have his insights to give us strength to carry on.

How wonderful to have his poetry to make us see the beauty of the world

He wouldn’t want us to mourn his passing, as great a loss as it feels. He would want us, I think, to come together, shoulder to shoulder, and soldier on. He would want us to live, as he did for 92 years, with spirit and passion and commitment.

What a legacy for a man and what a mission for us all. He would want us to embrace it, not shy away, to make the most of the lives we have.

“You mustn’t wish for another life,” he wrote in his novel “Hannah Coulter.” “You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you can do is this: ‘Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks.’ I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.”

Or as he said in another context, “The world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be home.”

TOP PHOTO: Forests, ponds and wetlands were dear to Wendell Berry. BELOW (1): Wendell Berry standing before solar panels on his farm in Kentucky. (Photo by Guy Mendes) BELOW (2): A beaver dam turned a stream into a pond in Pennsylvania. BOTTOM (1): Islands, shore and coastal waters are now protected in Kennebunkport. BOTTOM (2): Swamp maples brighten a nature preserve in New Hampshire. BOTTOM (3): Late summer Queen Anne’s Lace adorns East Coast meadows.

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A great thanks to the Kennebunkport Conservation Trust, whose archive inspired this column.

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Essays exploring “Simple Pleasures for Surviving” are now available in book form from amazon.com

“I make a point to appreciate all the little things in my life. I go out and smell the air after a good, hard rain. I re-read passages from my favorite books. … These small actions help remind me that there are so many great, glorious pieces of good in the world.” — Dolly Parton

By Peter Landry

When word broke that Dolly Parton had died, I was reading a book about Simple Pleasures that I had picked up online. It’s called “The Walker’s Bucket List,” and it attracted me because it offers “100 Small, Strange and Beautiful Things to Notice — One Walk at a Time.”

Ordinarily, I’m skeptical of online offers, and this one cost just $7 for a download. And I’m particularly skeptical of works whose authors or founders identify themselves with First Name Only. The Bucket List and its sponsoring 100Walks.com/club/ was founded by “Kate” No Last Name, who started walking as a remedy for a broken heart.

I can’t tell you if “Kate” is real or the skillful creation of Artificial Intelligence. But even if she is A.I., her message is a good one if you believe in Simple Pleasures for Surviving. If you read this column even a little, you know I’m a big believer in long walks, living in the moment and taking strength in nature. And like Dolly, I strive to “appreciate all the little things in my life.”

As for “Kate,” I’m all in when she writes “Solitary walks became my safe space to feel everything, without judgment. Even on the hardest days, nature had a way of sparking little moments of wonder. … I found comfort in nature in ways I never expected. For the first time in ages, I had something to look forward to.”

The “Bucket List” book challenges people to make the most of things they see. It’s organized as a kind of checklist that encourages mindfulness and living in the moment. “Find a Feather,” it suggests. “Watch a Bee Disappear Into a Flower,” “Listen to Moving Water,” “Watch a Butterfly Land,” “Listen to a Bird You Can’t See.”

For each, this “Bucket List” suggests ways to enhance connection and increase awareness by offering hints on “What to Look For” and insights into “Why It Matters.”

Consider Feathers. Just days before starting the book, I noticed a barred, brown-and-white feather on the ground on my walk. I was pleased to see it, but I confess my first reaction was “Looks like a wing feather from a red-tailed hawk.” I later went online to confirm the identification.

But “Bucket List” suggests I had things backwards: “Instead of asking, ‘What kind of bird did this come from?’ try asking, ‘What makes this feather beautiful?’”

“Pause before you pick it up. Notice its colors, its pattern, and how incredibly light it feels. Imagine where it came from and the journey it took before finding its way to you.”

That was an eye opener. I’d been concentrating on the What, when the Why and the How were even more interesting and engaging. I knew the feather was beautiful, but I’d never analyzed Why. And I’d never considered How it and the hawk it came from had come to be on my path that morning. Thinking this way made it a richer discovery.

So did the idea of opening your ears when you can’t see something. Just before starting a walk with the dog this week, I paused to “Listen to a Bird You Can’t See.”

Just before embarking, I heard a loud and insistent “PECK-PECK-PECK-PECK-PECK” in an old tree at the back of my yard. The pecks came in bursts, like machine gun fire, tapered off, then stopped. Then they resumed again.

I have only heard a rhythm like this a few times in my life, once in New Hampshire, another time in Maine and once in my back yard earlier this year. But it was so striking it stuck with me

“That sounds like a pileated woodpecker!” I thought. I immediately called my wife, put the dog on pause and set out for the tree at a jog.

In the very top, I could see a woodpecker working. A very large woodpecker. My wife confirmed it was there and not my imagination. And then it flew, swooped really, from its perch to the trunk of a tree in a neighboring yard. It clung to the bark and spread its wings. It was huge, it had a bright red crest, and yes, it was a pileated. It made our day.

It did even more for our spirits. As “Bucket List” explains, an encounter like this “trains our ears and our minds to be more aware. It shows us that there is so much life around us, even when we aren’t looking. … It reminds us to trust what we feel.”

Buoyed by those two experiences, I started paging through the “Bucket List” to see what other experiences I have had on my walks. I am pleased to say I have trained myself pretty well to be alert to my surroundings.

On a trip through a meadow this summer, I noticed a Yellow Swallowtail Butterfly coming in for a landing on a pink Bee Balm flower. In a garden, I watched a bee enter the expanse of a Swamp Mallow blossom, whose stamens look like creatures out of Dr. Seuss.

This morning I checked off other things in the “Bucket List.” I Listened to Moving Water in a creek swollen by rain, and Watched It Choose Its Way. I noted a fallen branch in a park and wondered when and why it had Changed Since Yesterday. I picked up a piece of litter and Left a Place Better than I Found It.

Everyone benefits when we live this way. We all need moments of engagement, introspection and inspiration. We need encouragement to slow down, contemplate … and contribute.

Nature is full of surprises. Appreciating them, in fact, is one of the challenges in “The Walker’s Bucket List,” when it urges everyone to “Find Something You’ll Never See Exactly the Same Way Again.”

Yesterday, I was walking my dog on the nature trail at a nearby college. We had passed the duck pond and were following the trail along a stream. We have walked this path hundreds of times, and when my pooch wanted a drink I let her go down to a spot on the stream she always wants to visit. It was our routine.

Yet not this time. As she started to sip, she jerked her head to the left and let out a pair of sharp barks. A dark shadow rose out of the stream, spread its wings and began to soar. Before I could even grasp what was happening, a Great Blue Heron landed on the branch of a tree barely 50 feet away. It looked scornfully back at us for disrupting its fishing, preened its feathers and settled.

I was dazzled and dumbfounded at this encounter. I was also distraught to discover my iPhone was out of juice and I wouldn’t get a picture. So I just stood and gazed in awe at this modern pterodactyl of a bird.

This was Something I Will Never See Exactly the Same Way Again. And I felt rewarded, even if I didn’t get a once-in-a-lifetime photo.

Such surprises “Shake us out of routine and open our minds,” the “Bucket List” notes. “They spark curiosity, joy, and a deeper connection to the moment. They remind us that the world is full of wonder.”

Or as the wonderful Dolly Parton declared, they are a reminder that there are “great, glorious pieces of good in the world.”

TOP PHOTO: A Yellow Swallowtail Butterfly lands on wild pink Bee Balm. BELOW (1): A honeybee enters a cleome blossom. BELOW (2): The feather of a red-tailed hawk. BOTTOM (1) The “Dr. Seuss” stamens of Swamp Mallow Hibiscus. BOTTOM (2): A mushroom “umbrella” that sprouted overnight. BOTTOM (3): A lone crow mans its post to survey a morning park.

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Essays exploring “Simple Pleasures for Surviving” are now available in book form from amazon.com

By Peter Landry

My wife and I are doing a little down-sizing, and last month she came down from the attic carrying a scrapbook she had found among things I had stored upstairs.

“Do we really need this?” she asked. “Can you take a look? Do you even remember what it is?”

The scrapbook clearly had seen better days. Its green cover was coming apart, and it was held together with white kitchen string tied side to side. I confess I didn’t immediately know what was in it.

But when I opened the cover I realized why I had saved it. Inside were dozens and dozens of hand-written poems by a woman who had been born more than 150 years ago and was legend in the little Maine village where I grew up.

Her name was Helen Ward Nunan, and she was revered for her many talents. She was a businesswoman ahead of her time, a teacher, a journalist, a historian and a poet, and she made a mark in all those fields. She wrote for newspapers all over New England, chronicled the lives of fishermen and celebrated her community in a book of poems she published to benefit her church.

Growing up in her village of Cape Porpoise, I was aware of all her achievements through my parents, and as I got older I grew to love the poems she had published. In the scrapbook, I found poems I had never seen in print, if ever they were published at all.

One especially caught my attention. It was titled “Father Is Watching,” and it recounted the experience of a local fisherman who almost lost his life when his sloop sank in a gale. He was rescued by his father, who was keeper of the lighthouse in Cape Porpoise.

A footnote at the end of her hand-written manuscript revealed that the poem was drawn from real life. “The late Frank Wakefield Sr. was the young man whose life was saved by his father, Lightkeeper George Wakefield, who was watching from Goat Island Light in … 1905.”

On a visit to Maine this month, I met local historian Sharon Cummins of the Kennebunkport Historical Society at a dinner at a friend’s house. We talked about my scrapbook discovery and the remarkable poem of the real-life rescue.

The next day Sharon sent me a message on Facebook. “I couldn’t get this out of my head today, Peter. I thought you might like to have [this] for your Substack.”

Attached was a news clipping from the Boston Post newspaper from August 1906 that confirmed that the lightkeeper rescue in the poem had actually happened.

“ … To attempt a rescue he had to descend from the lighthouse tower, walk the length of the island, get his dory, row up to the village, get some friends to man a boat and then go out. So closely did he grasp the needs of the moment, and so steady was his nerve, that he stopped first to take cross-bearings, so that he could guide his boat to the place of the accident. [Frank] Wakefield kept afloat by clinging to the lid of a fish box until he saw his father’s boat coming. Things got hazy, then he lost consciousness.”

It was dramatic stuff right out of an action movie. But a more riveting account was on the way. A short time later, Sharon sent a longer report from a local newspaper published just two days after the incident.

The account is remarkable for the detail it contains, the knowledge it demonstrates of the fishing industry, and the way it expressed the emotion of both rescuers and friends on land.

Most remarkable of all, it was written “on deadline” in a time long before cell phones, drones, computers or zoom calls. The accident happened on a Saturday afternoon, the rescuers reported they were safe on Sunday and the account was in print Monday evening.

The reporter (or reporters) could only have gotten the facts through shaky phone service or by jumping into a car and driving 35 miles while the storm still raged.

I’ve been a journalist all my adult life, and I am in awe of this effort. This story in the Biddeford Daily Journal should be taught in journalism and writing courses as an exemplar for how to use details and color to drive and enrich a narrative.

I’m sharing it because it illustrates why the details matter in everything we do. They can make all the difference.

The Biddeford Daily Journal

Monday Evening, April 3, 1905

SLOOP WAS CAPSIZED

James Huff of Cape Porpoise Drowned Saturday Afternoon

FRANK WAKEFIELD WAS SAVED

Men Were Out Fishing When Heavy Gale Was Encountered

THE SLOOP QUICKLY CAPSIZED

Wakefield Almost Dead When Help Arrived

The heavy gale and choppy sea of Saturday afternoon caused a sad accident off Cape Porpoise in which James Huff lost his life and Frank Wakefield was rescued when completely exhausted and had made one last desperate attempt to keep from being carried beneath the waves to never again see the light of day.

Early Saturday morning, James Huff of Cape Porpoise and Frank Wakefield, also of Cape Porpoise, started out fishing. They went out in a small sloop with a dory in tow. They planned to spend the day some distance outside fishing for cod. The sloop that they left Cape Porpoise harbor in was an open boat well known to the fishermen of that place and able to stand the beating of the sea under ordinary conditions.

All went well until noon when the wind sprang up from the north. It was blowing directly off shore and after a time increased in velocity and soon was blowing a heavy gale. The sea was not running very high at the time, but the north wind made it very choppy, which is harder for the fishermen to fight against than a heavy sea when it runs steadily. The two fishermen saw that they must start for the shore and began at once to make for Cape Porpoise harbor

The wind continued to increase and the sea too became more choppy until they soon found themselves up against a hard proposition. The dory filled once and Wakefield got into it and bailed it out. Their progress against the head wind was very slow and the water not only broke over the dory but also over the sides of the sloop.

They were having a hard time and some distance off shore when the two-master in charge of Captain Lemuel S. Sinnett came down the coast from a trip to Portland where a fare of fish had been disposed of.

Aboard the two-master was Capt. Sinnett, and his brother, Austin I. Sinnett, Charles Wildes, Edward Perkins, Victor Hutchins and Winthrop Baston. They sighted the sloop and saw what a hard time it was having in the rough sea. Capt. Sinnett at once made over to it and offered assistance, stating that he would take the dory in tow and lay by them until they got safely into the harbor at Cape Porpoise.

But James Huff, who has been a seafaring man all his life and was a man who never liked to take assistance from others, said they were all right and refused to accept the offered help. He said they could get in all right and didn’t need to have the two-master work back and forth near them or take their dory in tow.

After this refusal of their assistance, the fishermen in the two-master continued their trip from Portland and ran safely into Cape Porpoise harbor. All But Capt. Sinnett left the schooner and went ashore and the captain was about ready to do so when George Wakefield, keeper of the Cape Porpoise lighthouse and father of Frank Wakefield, who was saved, came rowing up the harbor to the landing in great haste. He had sighted the sloop and saw that his son and James Huff were in great trouble. While he was watching their slow progress toward shore, he saw the small sloop flounder, capsize and sink.

He reported what had taken place and without an instant loss of time the lighthouse keeper, Captain Sinnett and Bert Ridlon put out in the two-master in an attempt to rescue the two men. They sailed before the high wind at a rapid rate, but it was a long distance, and from the time that the boat was capsized until they got out there, it is thought that at least three-quarters of an hour must have elapsed and probably more.

After searching in vain for what seemed to them to be ages, they discovered one of the men on the surface of the water. They made down upon him and rescued him in a completely exhausted condition.

The rescued man was found to be Frank Wakefield, son of the lighthouse keeper, and the men then turned all their attention to an effort to find and save the second man. But no trace of him could be found. When the boat had filled with water, it had sunk almost instantly and had taken the dory down with it. There was nothing for Huff to get hold of to float about on as his companion had done until rescued, and he was probably drowned almost immediately after the boat went down. He could not swim and a man of his advanced age would be at a great disadvantage anyway.

Wakefield was taken aboard from a dory thwart, which is used as a seat and had floated away from the dory as it was pulled beneath the waves by the sinking sloop. Fortunately, it had floated near to Wakefield who saw it and seized it with a death grip. He placed it under his arms and being a good swimmer was able to keep on the surface most of the time until saved.

No one can understand how he ever lived in that sea for nearly an hour with the waves breaking over him constantly as they must have done. When taken aboard he was completely exhausted and could have held out but a few seconds longer or at least but a few moments. It was one of the narrowest escapes that any seafaring man sailing out of Cape Porpoise has had for many years.

In making the rescue the vessel had to be hauled to so quickly that the head of the foremast was broken and carried off. Without this it was useless to attempt to get back against the wind, so the vessel was run down the coast with the wind at quarter and a successful run into York Harbor made. Here the two-master tied up for repairs and rode out the gale.

From York Harbor, the party telephoned to Cape Porpoise and announced the death by drowning of James Huff and the rescuing of Frank Wakefield. The telephone message from Capt. Sinnett read:

“Safe in York Harbor; saved Wakefield; Huff was lost.”

Another telephone message was received Sunday afternoon from York Harbor stating that they would make temporary repairs and return home as soon as the high wind would go down and give them a chance. They also said that Wakefield was not nearly as well in the afternoon as he was in the forenoon and his friends and relatives at Cape Porpoise inferred that he was probably unconscious and suffering severely from the great loss of strength and long exposure.

It was thought that Captain Sinnett, the lighthouse keeper and the other two would return today, but the wind has again been strong from the north and their arrival has not been reported.

James Huff, who was drowned, was 58 years old. He was born and had always lived at Cape Porpoise. He is survived by one son, Harley, who lived with him, and by one daughter, Carrie Bell Huff, also of Cape Porpoise. He was a lobster fisherman and had followed the sea all his life. His wife died two or three years ago. Mr. Huff always attended carefully to his business and never cared for town offices and never held any such public trust.

Mr. Huff was a fine man and had a wide circle of friends who were greatly grieved to learn of his sad death. He was such an old resident of Cape Porpoise that his death has caused general sorrow.

While following the sea he had passed through many thrilling experiences. On one occasion he was given up for lost and none of his friends or relatives expected to ever hear from him again.

This was a few years ago. He went out fishing one day with Captain Payson Huff. While they were out, a snow storm came up. Captain Huff got in but James Huff was left outside in a dory. He was searched for in vain the next day and given up for lost. He was out all that night, the next night, the next day and was then picked up almost frozen to death and almost starved to death, by a coasting vessel and landed at Provincetown and later got back to his old home to the delight of his friends. He was a fearless fisherman and this accounts largely for the fact that he refused the offered assistance Saturday and so soon afterward met his death.

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A huge and grateful thank you to Sharon Cummins, whose sleuthing of her history databases brought this amazing account to light.

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TOP PHOTO: Oil on board painting of Goat Island Lighthouse, as it appeared in the 1800s when George Wakefield began his 34 years of service as lightkeeper. BELOW (1): Lightkeeper George Wakefield inside Goat Island Light in the early 1900s. BELOW (2): Two-masted schooners anchored in Cape Porpoise Harbor. BOTTOM (1): Oil on wood painting of Goat Island Light by Woodrow Landry from the 1950s. BOTTOM (2): Dramatic excerpts from Helen Ward Nunan’s poem “Father Is Watching.” BOTTOM (3): The headlines and story of the rescue as they appeared in the Biddeford Daily Journal in April 1905.

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Essays exploring “Simple Pleasures for Surviving” are now available in book form from amazon.com

By Peter Landry

Life is full of surprises, and if you’re alert to them they can be quite a windfall. A windfall is an unexpected reward or good fortune, like winning the lottery or getting an unexpected refund check in the mail.

As an English major, I’ve always liked the visual idea of something good being delivered by the wind. As a gardener, I love that the word dates back to the 15th century and our agrarian roots.

A windfall in the beginning was something blown to the ground, such as apples, peaches or pears. They were easy pickings and free for the taking, if you got to them before the birds and squirrels.

As someone who walks my dog nearly every day, I’m always looking for windfalls. I once found a diamond pendant on the sidewalk outside a doctor’s office and got a $100 reward for posting a message at the office for the owner to call me. Later, I found a $50 bill on a dog walk, and had to look up whose picture was supposed to be on it to make sure it was real (it’s Ulysses S. Grant).

Other windfalls have included winter watch caps, work gloves and even — once — a copyright application for a 1940s song called “I Sprinkle My Ironing with Tears.” That one never made the charts, but I always wonder what inspired it.

This week, on a walk at my favorite park, I got a windfall in the original sense.

On the north end, behind a street of abutting rowhouses, I discovered a peach tree laden with fruit.

I had noticed the tree before, but never had looked closely enough at this time of year to realize it was peach-bearing. Or maybe it never bore fruit before this year, so there was nothing to see.

There was plenty to see this time, both in the branches and on the ground. The peaches were ripe and plump and rich in colors that just shouted “harvest.”

It wasn’t clear if the tree was in the park or in the yard of the nearest house, so I was careful not to pick any peaches from the branches.

But there were plenty on the ground and the birds were already feasting. It was a windfall in the purest sense, so I scooped up several that weren’t damaged too much.

When I got them home, I washed them and cut out the punky sections and sliced them into wedges on a plate.

What a feast for the senses: the rich hues of yellow and red, the inviting aroma and the succulent sweetness of juice oozing onto the plate.

One bite proved these windfall peaches were at peak maturity, if not a little beyond. They were sweet and soft and practically melted on the tongue. They were nature’s bounty at its best, reward for paying attention, a harvest born of happenstance. That made them all the sweeter.

They were — OK, I’ll just say it — peachy.

There are many fruits in the world, but everybody deserves a windfall such as this.

As Roald Dahl put it in “The Centipede’s Song,”

These foods are rare beyond compare – some are right out of reach;

But there’s no doubt I’d go without

A million plates of each

For one small mite,

One tiny bite,

Of this FANTASTIC PEACH!

TOP PHOTO: Windfall peaches worthy of the Centipede in Roald Dahl’s “James and the Giant Peach.” BELOW: Peaches ripening on the tree at my local park. BOTTOM: The color and succulence of fresh sliced peaches.

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Essays exploring “Simple Pleasures for Surviving” are now available in book form from amazon.com

By Peter Landry

While we were away on vacation this month, our town had lots of rain, some of it torrential, and the yard turned into a jungle. The hedge that I had trimmed just before leaving grew nearly 10 inches in 10 days. The weeds that I had earnestly pulled regenerated with a fury straight from science fiction. And the cucumbers, well, they swelled and soared to disastrous heights.

I grow them on an improvised trellis of netting and poles to economize on space. They enjoy their spot, which gets a bit of shade in the morning and then sun all day. But when gushers of rain combined with extra high heat, they went over the top this year— and down.

They became so fat and waterlogged they burdened and bent my sturdy rigging and toppled it to the ground. By the time we got home, the cucumbers were a tangle of wood, net, vines and fruit that was nearly impossible to lift.

Fortunately, I am resilient in the garden and not one to be thwarted. I enlisted my adult son and — watch your backs, boys! — slowly righted the mess and reinforced the poles with sister supports.

But what to do with the crop? The cucumbers were gigantic, fatter than hippos and just as ornery. They were tough to pull off the vines and tougher yet to peel. They filled my antique harvesting baskets to overflowing, and covered the kitchen counter.

Were I a normal person, I would have chosen the best and sent the rest out for compost. I am not, as my wife can attest, a normal person about the garden, and I just couldn’t bear the thought of WASTING something I had grown from seed and nurtured every step of the way.

I turned to my mother’s wicker recipe box, stuffed to overflowing with favorite meals, homespun concoctions and interesting things she thought she would make one day but never got around to. (There were also — so like her — a few poems she had tucked in, just because she liked them.)

I started with the “Vegetables” section, but found nothing but frustration. There were recipes for “Italian Zucchini Crescent Pie,” “Baked Winter Squash,” “Harvard Beets” and a thing called “Garden Special,” but nothing appealing for cucumbers. “Garden Special” intrigued as a spicy salsa, with tomatoes, celery, onions, carrots, peppers, cabbage and string beans, but “Cooked Cucumbers” seemed utterly bland and unappetizing. Inherited from my mother’s brother’s first wife’s mother (really!!), it was nothing but cukes boiled in water with salt and onion and served with butter.

I moved quickly to “Relishes and Condiments,” hoping for something cooler for a cucumber. No such luck. There was a family recipe for “Chili Sauce” and one for “Cranberry Relish,” but nothing for corpulent cukes. Salads were equally uninspiring, though “Orange Perfection Salad” and “Molded Winter Apple” sounded promising until I found they were made with Jello.

Then I saw the section in the back of the box that simply said “Pickles.” Of course! Why hadn’t I had the sense to start there? Cucumbers are the mother of all pickles — matriarch of the *cuke-lear* family.

The motto for pickles could be “no cukes are bad cukes,” and there were loads of recipes to choose from. There were my father’s “Bread and Butter Pickles,” my Aunt Isabel’s “Mustard Pickles” and something called “Pottsfield Pickles,” also from Isabel, which really seemed more like a relish.

I settled on Dill Pickles, because (against my doctor’s advice) I am addicted to Vlasic Dill Spears. The recipe from the wicker box, written in my father’s precise hand, was, like him, direct and to the point: water, vinegar, salt and dill “flowers.” No more, no less.

Is that all there is, I thought, channeling my inner Peggy Lee? Couldn’t there be more?

Why yes, since I now have AI as well as Google. And AI, as we all realize, knows all. What if I wanted a fancier dill pickle, something with a little more zing or zang? Something, in fact, just like the Vlasic Dill Spears I love.

Lo and behold, if you prompt, “How do I make dill pickles like Vlasic spears?” up pops a recipe for VLASIC DILL SPEARS! And it reveals a pair of secret ingredients: smashed garlic cloves and the spice turmeric, which gives Vlasic dills their yellow color,

Best of all, I could do this all in the refrigerator and dispense with the endless and onerous boiling and sterilizing I remember from the pickle days of my parents, aunts and uncles.

All I would have to do is peel ’em, seed ’em, slice ’em and preserve ’em and I’d be in business. The peeling and seeding were a challenge, since my cukes had thick skins and seedy centers. But the spears looked great as they were sliced up and shoehorned into jars salvaged from recycling.

The process was rich in repurposing and satisfying in spirit. I was using old jars and old cukes and stepping back in time with a throwback spirit.

I could picture my mom or Aunt Isabel sliding spears into sterilized pickling jars. I could feel the steam of their kitchens and sense the sweat on their foreheads. I could feel the satisfaction as they lined up their achievements in gleaming Ball or Mason Jars. They pickled for a lifetime (and we actually found some ancient jars in my mother’s cellar when we cleaned out her house).

As for me, I was happy to have been spared the sweat, and the worry there might be a glitch in all that sterilizing, sealing and storing. I’m the guy who thinks “What could go wrong?” as a second language.

My dill spears were just as handsome those from the old school, and looked great lining the back of the refrigerator. The turmeric yellowed the cukes to perfection, the jars gleamed with new life and best of all I had beat the heat.

I had found something cool for my cucumbers after all.

•

Bob Dylan once sang that “everything old becomes new again,” and I’m pleased to have affirmed that by doing something new with an old tradition.

Because in all my years growing cucumbers, I had never made pickles until now. It reminded me that you’re never too old to try something new.

We all need to do that every once in a while, whatever our age. New experiences keep us sharp, provide engagement and even make us feel better.

On top of that, psychology experts say, trying new things boosts our brain health, builds confidence and breaks up boredom. It sharpens focus and, more to the point, releases dopamine in the brain — a neurotransmitter that improves our mood, makes us feel happy and promotes positive emotions.

“Doing something new keeps you young … and gives you a broader view of the world,” writes Ph.D. Karyn Hall in the magazine Psychology Today. “… Doing something new is like bringing back that sense of awe that children have.”

“Trying something new forces us to break out of routine, which may lead to new discovery, promote creativity and overall personal fulfillment,” clinical social worker Emma Palmer adds.

New experiences don’t have to be something big or complicated. They can be as simple as trying a new food, joining a new Facebook group or changing your route walking the dog. They can be visiting that new book shop or streaming that movie everyone is talking about. They can be visiting a part of town you’ve never been to or looking for new things in the parts you do know.

Such new activities nurture curiosity, improve memory and provide purpose, the experts say.

They promote social connection and improve well-being.

Best of all, they restore a sense of wonder and bring joy into our lives.

And also pickles, of course. They were delicious, by the way.

TOP PHOTO: Dill pickles, cool as a cucumber. BELOW: A jar full of pickles yellow with turmeric. BOTTOM (1): The cucumber trellis, toppled and tangled. BOTTOM (2): Cucumbers by the basket-ful.

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Essays exploring “Simple Pleasures for Surviving” are now available in book form from amazon.com

By Peter Landry

When I was a kid, summer days spread out endlessly with possibility in the seacoast village where I grew up in Maine. One day we might round up a gang to play baseball next to the harbor. On another we might play “army” in the woods. On a third we might go swimming in the tidal creek next to the fish house that my grandfather built. And best of all, we might get on our bikes and “go down to the pier” to see what was happening with the lobstermen who worked the harbor.

In Cape Porpoise, Maine, the pier was the center of activity for the men who went fishing or lobstering, a source of livelihood for their families and a constant source of entertainment for kids on bikes looking to see what the “grown-ups” do when they get on boats and go out on the water.

Kids have been doing this for generations and would still do it today, if parents weren’t scared they’d get hit by cars riding bikes on roads thick with tourists.

My mother, a self-professed “pier rat,” would go down three or four times a day in the 1930s, and even kept a detailed journal of all the “Pier Gossip” she picked up from Frank Sinnett, Sam Wildes, “Fiddy” Ridlon and the like.

She knew all the boats, how deep their draft, how many knots they could do for speed and how many pounds they could bring in on a good day. She also kept track of visiting craft — where they were from and what were their names and what were their lengths and rigging. She even befriended the outlaw “rum-runners” who used the harbor as a hideout from the Coast Guard during Prohibition and kept track of their comings and goings, even in the dead of night.

In later life, she noted with pride that with her vigilance and eye for detail, she “knew more about the rum-running in Cape Porpoise” than the authorities, if only they had thought to ask. Nobody thought to ask a 12-year-old girl.

On a trip to Maine this month, I took a ride “down to the pier” to see what was happening. I didn’t ride a bike — my knees have ruled that out — but I wanted to check out the latest renewal of this fishing landmark.

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Like the ocean itself, piers and harbors are constantly changing. Things get beat up and worn down and eventually, even in a make-do community, they have to get replaced. They evolve as beaches and shorelines evolve, bit by bit, increment by increment, shaped by weather, or tides or the simple passage of time.

The pier my mother knew was nothing more than bare beams and risky gaps and fishermen mending gear in dories. Later, new decking came in, and new bait sheds, and floats for punts and skiffs.

I can recall at least two upgrades of the pier as a kid, and the latest is the most ambitious yet.

Truth be told, I wasn’t sure I was going to like it. I had seen it under construction a year ago, and it looked disturbingly industrial for an old-school fishing village. It didn’t help that the last major improvement near the pier had replaced a quaint stone causeway with with a bridge that looked like an airport runway in New Jersey.

The under-construction pier seemed to have way too much concrete and a lot of unlovely shapes and forms. Were the town leaders losing sight of the fact that quaint and old fashioned are the very essence of local character (and the reason people come from away to spend money)?

I’m relieved to say that the latest evolution has turned out, in the words of a favorite Maine uncle, “all right” and “pretty nice.”

After all the concrete was poured for ballast, the structures themselves feature wood and shingles and not a little charm. The new bait shed is painted red with smart white trim and the sides even have faux window frames to break up the monotony of the walls. The decking is good and heavy wood planking and a new float on one end has doubled the dock space for tying up punts, skiffs and other vessels. The designers even installed a rugged granite staircase to maintain access to the seaweed and rocks that generations of kids have foraged for green crabs and starfish at low tide.

A local friend, who can be prickly about changes to the town and village, conceded that it looked just fine and “meets the needs of the lobstermen” and those that fish out of the harbor.

Which is exactly the point of a pier in a port that provides safe haven for people who work offshore. With its protective ring of islands and the lighthouse on Goat Island, Cape Porpoise Harbor has been providing safety for hundreds of years. The pier has been the center of that safe haven, and an emotional center for the community as well.

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Even if we don’t work the sea, we all need a home port in life.

We need a place that we can call our own, a place where roots run deep, a place that gives strength in times of weakness and hope in times of gloom. We need a place that says “I am from there” and “this is who I am.”

My grandfather worked the fishing schooners that ran out of Cape Porpoise and Gloucester in Massachusetts. When he retired, he set a string of traps for lobstering and worked them from an oversized dory he rowed standing up. A cousin still has the oars, worn in an unusual spot from the upright rowing.

My grandfather’s children, all nine of them including my father, never worked on the water. Some, my dad included, didn’t even known how to swim, a circumstance that made his service in the Marines more perilous during beach landings at Tarawa and Saipan during World War II.

My father’s generation turned to dry-land professions like teaching and never looked back on the ocean. And yet, it defined them, in the way a pier defines a community.

Because a pier is a metaphor as well as a utility. It reveals how a community grows, how it thinks of itself, and how it strives to provide for its members. It is a metaphor for spiritual growth as well, and spiritual well-being.

A pier is a structure of support, a base for going forth in life and a place for safe return. It is a place of challenges and achievements, and a place of comfort after disappointment or danges.

Piers may change physically, but they’re steadfast emotionally.

We all need that in an uncertain world. We need a place to tie up to keep us from going adrift. We need sturdiness and strength when ill winds blow. We need a safe place to ride out storms and an anchor for our emotions. We need the ballast of a shared history and the underpinning of heritage.

We need the security of knowing who we are and where we came from.

Down to the pier, or anywhere.

TOP PHOTO: The refurbished harbor pier at low tide in Cape Porpoise, Maine. BELOW (1): New floats have doubled the space for tying up punts and skiffs. BELOW (2): Wooden lobster traps stacked on the pier in November 1977. BELOW (3): Loading traps and bait barrels in the summer of 1970. BOTTOM (1): Mont Sinnett and Silk Etherington mending gear in the 1930s. BOTTOM (2): Nets drying on the pier in 1918. BOTTOM (3): The 1930s pier was a jumble of timbers, tanks, pilings and floats.

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Essays exploring “Simple Pleasures for Surviving” are now available in book form from amazon.com

By Peter Landry

One of the things I like best about vacationing in Maine is that it gives me a chance to get re-acquainted with lobster. And not just casually re-acquainted. Intimately re-acquainted. Intricately re-acquainted. Nooks and crannies re-acquainted.

There’s nothing like local-market, cooked-on-a-flame, up-to-your-elbows eating on a handmade table looking over a lake.

But I’m not talking the rip-off-the-claws-and-tail approach, which we all do from time to time. I’m talking PICKING — the slow, day-after excavation of the center bodies for every last morsel.

This is the meat that ends up in stews and dips and lobster rolls, made all the sweeter by the fact (like the old investment ad) that you got your reward “the old fashioned way … you EARNED it.”

The reward is not just meat itself.

It’s the beauty of the process, the patience it requires and the calm that patience brings.

In an all-too-hectic world, we need the calm of things that can’t be rushed.

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I’ve been picking out lobster bodies since I was a boy growing up in the harbor village of Cape Porpoise, and I learned early that every nook had a nugget.

Our family lived two doors down from the famous Lobster Hut restaurant founded by George Nunan, and every summer he would offer us bins of bodies that were too fussy to be used for stews and chowders.

George was a crusty old guy, and a fierce competitor on the water (it’s said his competition drove a rival out of town). But he actually was showing a soft side when he’d call us up on our black rotary phone and ask “would you like some lobster bodies?”

To him they were “garbage” that would be thrown out after removing the claws and tails. But to us they were a meal or two, eaten straight from the shell, or stewed or put into sandwiches.

The kindness was that his offers started when my father had had surgery and couldn’t work and my mom was at home without a paying job. He was offering assistance to a neighbor, though he never called it that. We were grateful for the assistance, though we also never called it that.

It was good food and good for everyone — even though I was 10 years old before I learned lobsters had claws and tails. My ignorance was bliss, because l learned to pick bodies to perfection.

Everyone has their own method, and I’m no exception.

First you pull off the bright red shell (the “carapace” for all you scientists). Then you check to see if there is a layer of meat next to the opening where the tail was attached. Then you break off the head, just before the joint where the claws connect.

Next I pull off the legs, a throwback to childhood when I couldn’t wait a moment more to get a taste. Snap the legs at the middle joint, and pull lightly in hope that a strand of meat will come out. If not, break the legs at the next joints and squeeze the meat out with your thumb and forefinger.

Then on to the body itself. Break it in half lengthwise along the center curve. Then separate each compartment, one by one, and flick out the meat with a paring knife (a flat knife is more effective than a pointed picker)

You can eat the meat as you go, or stash in a bowl for sandwiches or stew.

This was the Landry Way, or as my dear, dogmatic Aunt Fran would put it, “the right way.”

Today I say, to each his own. Whatever works. Bon appetit!

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What I love about picking lobster bodies is that you can’t rush. There are no short cuts and no amount of hurrying will help. It’s a methodical process, slow and steady. Gains are small but they accrue like simple interest at the bank.

There are not enough activities that are unrushed by design.

We need them in a frantic world. A world where everything moves at the speed of text and rush hour is every hour.

When something can’t be rushed, it forces us to tap the brakes, downshift and get over in the slow lane.

A week on a Maine lake is one way of doing that.

Woodworking might be another. Or quilting, embroidery or caning a chair.

And picking lobster bodies, of course.

When I settle into the task, the world slips away.

The nerves calm and the brain drains. The pulse slows and breathing eases. Repetition is relaxation, focus is the task at hand.

It is meditation and prayer, all in one. And mindfulness embodied (full pun intended).

There is beauty in slow things.

They bring calm and quiet to a world that needs it.

They make us live in the moment and savor the moment.

They make us better people, inside and out.

Make time for them whenever you can.

They are the pace of peace.

TOP PHOTO: The humble lobster body, waiting for harvest. BELOW: The process of bodies and legs. BOTTOM (1): The reward (and refuse) of lobster picking. BOTTOM (2): A body and legs, primed for attention.

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Essays exploring “Simple Pleasures for Surviving” are now available in book form from amazon.com

On that blessed morning, clouds will disappear;
We shall see the King some day.

By Peter Landry

When my Uncle Justin Landry was getting on in years, he liked to reminisce about days gone by. Many of his memories focused on baseball, his one passion in life, but also on his childhood.

One day I sat him down with a tape recorder, and got him to talk about things he remembered. His recollections soon circled back to the little Methodist Church on the Cape that he (and I) attended in the village of Cape Porpoise, Maine.

He recalled how he started Sunday School at age 5, sang a song about dropping pennies “every one for Jesus,” and how children and adults gathered together in front of the pulpit for the closing exercises.

“They always sang ‘We Shall See the King Someday,’” he recalled. “We sang that every Sunday for a long while. I always wondered what a ‘kingsome day’ was. I didn’t find out for a long while that it was a ‘King someday.’ It’s funny I always remembered that.”

If Uncle Justin were alive today, and living in Philadelphia as I do, he would finally know what a “kingsome day” is.

It was last Friday, when news broke that basketball superstar LeBron James was taking his talents to the City of Brotherly Love and signing with the Philadelphia 76ers.

The 41-year-old icon has been known as “King James” since he was a kid in high school, and Philly fans couldn’t have gone more ga-ga embracing the royal news.

The Philadelphia Inquirer devoted its entire front page to a photo of James with the gushing headline “It’s a Philly King.” The governor of Pennsylvania declared Friday to be “LeBron James Day” and meme-makers went into overdrive creating images of James looking regal in a variety of Philly poses.

My adult son, who has been a Sixers fan since childhood, raced in from the yard to shout the news, his excitement hovering somewhere between levitation and genuflection. One local blog gave James the ultimate Philly coronation by renaming him “LeJawn” in homage to the city’s all purpose slang. (A “jawn” can be any notable person, place, thing, or event.)

I found it curious that all this celebration of King-dom came just days after the city celebrated the rejection of the last American king in America 250 festivities. I guess no Kings are good Kings unless they are your King.

Sixers fans can be forgiven for welcoming King James with open arms. The team hasn’t won an NBA championship in 43 years and hasn’t made the league’s Playoff Finals in 25. In recent years they have been a Franchise of Futility under a lose-to-win strategy known as The Process. The Process mastered the losing part but has not yet brought much winning.

James meanwhile has won four NBA championships with three teams and has appeared in the Playoff Finals 10 times.

At an age when most players have retired, he remains a formidable talent, a fierce competitor and a force in the community as well as the arena.

Yet he also has a huge ego, and I always thought he embraced the “King James” persona a bit overmuch. It was a huge turnoff years ago when he staged an elaborate media announcement to tell the world he was leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers to “take my talents to South Beach” in Miami. And he was at it again this summer, when he did a month-long striptease dragging out his decision to play for the Sixers instead of several other teams.

Still, hope springs eternal for a beleaguered franchise, and Philadelphia has decided that is a small price to pay. Or is it a Kingly price?

My Uncle Justin wasn’t a basketball fan, but he was passionate about baseball.

He lived and died for the Red Sox, and at 85 years old could still recall the details of the first game he ever saw.

“It was in 1928. My father took me to Boston on the train, and we went to a doubleheader with the Red Sox and Philadelphia Athletics. Connie Mack was the manager [of the A’s]. That was in old Fenway Park, when they went around with a megaphone and gave the lineups. They had no loud speaker system, and they didn’t have numbers on the players or anything. All you had was a number on the scorecard and the number would come out on the scoreboard so you would know who it was at bat. I saw Ty Cobb. He was playing his last year with the Philadelphia Athletics. He came up as a pinch hitter.”

And he remembered the lineup! “Oh yes. Phil Todt played first base. Billy Regan played second base and Red Rollings played shortstop. Jack Rothrock was at third. Douglas Taitt played right field. Tom Oliver played center field.”

I may not be the fan he was, but I have to admire the feelings he had for baseball. The passion, the commitment and, yes, the love. As the mythology scholar Joseph Campbell often noted, he “followed his bliss” from childhood through adulthood right to the end.

At his funeral they played “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

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Which brings me back to LeBron James and the passion he has unleashed in Philadelphia.

“King James” may not be an actual king, but he is a bonafide hero. As a society we long for heroes, Joseph Campbell said, and even need them.

We need them because they connect our individual lives to a greater human experience. They teach us how to face obstacles and inner fears. They offer models for personal growth and they teach us lessons of passion and commitment.

They create an emotional bond in which their challenges are our challenges and their successes our successes.

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life,” Campbell once said. “I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being … so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

There certainly is great rapture in our celebration of sports heroes. And a feeling of triumph and redemption. And the inspiration of perseverance and courage.

I have never been a great LeBron fan, but I worshiped Bill Russell as a child and young man.

The Boston Celtics star was a champion among champions, winner of 11 NBA championships in 13 years, an Olympic champion before that, college and high school champion before that. He was the first African American to coach a major pro sports team and he was a champion at that as well.

He was much more than a sports hero, however. He was a heroic man, who fought for dignity and civil rights, endured racial epithets and threats, did it on his own terms and never bowed to pressure or intimidation.

He personified Campbell’s definition of a hero as someone “who gives their life to something bigger than themselves.”

I’m not sure LeBron James has done that — at least not yet.

His hero’s journey — from Cleveland to Miami, back to Cleveland, to Los Angeles and now Philadelphia — has always seemed to me a journey about himself not beyond himself.

Yet there is no denying he has experienced “the rapture of being alive” and brought that rapture to the fans in each of the cities he has played.

Philadelphia may be his biggest challenge yet. The city is passionate about its sports teams, and a notoriously tough place to play.

With the addition of James and Celtic star Jaylen Brown, the bar has been set exceptionally high for young talents Tyrese Maxey and V.J. Edgecombe and the chronically brittle Joel Embiid.

They will hear it if they do not play as well as expected — in the stands, on the street and especially on the city’s relentless sports radio stations.

King James may hear from fans in ways he has never heard before.

But what is life if there is no passion? Can passion bring the rapture?

For the sake of our city, I hope so.

We all need to feel part of something bigger than ourselves.

We need reason to strive and aspire.

We need inspiration and celebration.

And something to hang our hope on.

TOP PHOTO: One of the instant Internet memes putting LeBron James in the uniform of the Philadelphia 76ers. BELOW: The front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer celebrating the arrival of “King James.” BOTTOM: Celtic hero Bill Russell and my Uncle Justin, Red Sox fan. (Wikimedia Commons photo.)

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Essays exploring “Simple Pleasures for Surviving” are now available in book form from amazon.com

Hello Swiss Chard, my old friend

I’ve come to talk to you again …

By Peter Landry

If you like to garden as much as I do, you’re constantly getting tips from gardening groups and experts on your Facebook feed. Click once on messages like “5 Things Gardeners Overlook in June,” and suddenly you are Best Friends Forever with accounts like Sow, Grow and Harvest, Pennsylvania Gardener and the BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine. Not to mention the Old Farmer’s Almanac, which — Praise the Lord — is still around and quirky.

In the middle of a stressful week recently, a post from Rural Sprout came to save me.

“On a bad day,” the post declared, “go pull some weeds. Stressed, go water something. Can’t think straight, go stand in the garden and stare at a tomato for a while. It’s not a cure for everything, but it’s a cure for a lot more than you’d expect.”

It was too nice a day to stay indoors, so I got up from the chair and went outside. The weeds, I discovered had been making inroads while I stewed over uncertainties I couldn’t resolve right away.

I put those big questions aside and decided to concentrate on some small stuff.

The purslane was spreading. Creeping Charlie was creeping. A giant dandelion was bulking up as if on steroids. Galinsoga was popping up everywhere, and Virginia Copper Leaf was branching out like a family tree.

I bent over and started pulling. It was mindless work but satisfying. Inch by inch the soil came clean. And after a while I realized my mind was coming clean, too.

Those Rural Sprouters were on to something.

So were the folks at Garden Tabs, who detailed in another post “What … Master Gardeners Do that the Rest of Us Skip.”

THAT got my attention, since I’d like to think I fit that category.

Number One on their list?

Walk the Garden Every Morning.

“The single biggest difference between a successful gardener and a struggling one isn’t time spent weeding,” the Tabs folks advise. “It’s time spent looking.

“Experienced gardeners notice the pale vein on a leaf before it spreads, the first chewed edge before the caterpillars multiply, the patch of soil that holds a footprint a little too long. …

“You don’t need an hour. Five minutes with coffee, walking the same loop, will catch most problems while they’re still small.”

I’ve been a Garden Walker for as long as I’ve been cultivating the soil. I do it for the health of the plants, of course. But I do it for my own health, too. My mental and emotional health.

It’s my Moment of Zen, as Jon Stewart might say. It’s living in the moment. And it’s a Simple Pleasure for Surviving.

“Spending time in the garden can do more than just help your plants grow,” the Cleveland Clinic notes. “It can help you feel better, too. … Gardening encourages mindfulness, requiring you to slow down and focus on the moment.”

I’m all about slowing down in the garden (and in the rest of life, too).

It allows you to concentrate and focus, notice intricacies and complexity, see how little things are part of bigger things. It allows you to absorb and affirm.

I don’t just like to observe, however. I like to talk out what I’m seeing.

It’s well known people learn in different ways. Some learn best by reading and writing. Some by watching and observing. Some by working hands-on. And some by speaking and listening.

The last is called Auditory Learning, and in the garden I like to use it to enhance the Visual Learning of observation.

I like to describe what I’m seeing and give voice to how it makes me feel. Its affirmation and absorption, like an actor speaking his lines aloud, or a singer singing her songs.

Hearing is believing.

I may not actually say “Hello, Swiss Chard, my old friend,” but I often talk ABOUT the Swiss Chard in its presence. It helps me appreciate it more. “The Rhubarb Chard likes that spot,” I might say, or “The Fordhook is ready to pick.”

Sometimes observation brings concern — “Why is that tomato wilting?” “What cut that kale?” — but for every downer, there are uppers.

“The goldfinch already has discovered the sunflower!” “That portulaca seeded itself in a crack!” “The Swamp Mallow bloom is 10 inches across!”

Sometimes I give myself a “Well done” for one thing or another. On other occasions I prod myself to “Get on top of that.” Sometimes I just smile or make up silly songs.

“Hello Swiss Chard, my old friend. …” (Sorry, Paul Simon.)

My wife smiles at my garden dialogues. My daughter chides that I’m “cultivating eccentricity.”

All know is that I am communicating … expressing something I feel … to something that makes me feel it.

It’s a simple, straightforward equation. It’s good for the mind and good for the soul, and we all should do more of it.

Too often we keep our feelings bottled up, unspoken and unexpressed. It’s the curse of screens and social isolation. We live in silos and communicate electronically, if at all.

We forget what it is to speak from the heart, and we all are poorer for it.

We were given voices for a reason, and they can improve our well-being.

Speak out for your health … to your plants, to your pets, to the things and people that make you whole.

Communication is good for the soul.

Hello Swiss Chard, my old friend

I’ve come to talk to you again …

TOP PHOTO: There’s a lot to talk about in a backyard garden. BELOW: Virginia Copper Leaf invades the cornflowers. BOTTOM (1): The gigantic blossom of Swamp Mallow, a kind of Hibiscus. BOTTOM (2): The bees love the Cleome. BOTTOM (3): The persistent Galinsoga pops up everywhere. (It’s also called “gallant soldier.”)

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Essays exploring “Simple Pleasures for Surviving” are now available in book form from amazon.com

By Peter Landry

Summer is a time to get together with old friends, and last weekend I got to see one I haven’t seen in years. We go way back. I first met him when I was in high school, drifted apart in middle years, and reunited just now on the village green in the town where I live outside Philadelphia.

It was as if we never had lost touch, and there was a bit of a miracle in that.

He’s 85 years old, for goodness’ sake, and still active.

He’s also a poet, a storyteller and a pretty darned good musician, even now.

Jim Croce once asked what it would be like “If I could save time in a bottle,” and last weekend I got an idea when I went to see Tom Rush in concert.

Rush was a folkie favorite when I was young, questing and just sorting out my musical tastes. He was the Troubadour of Time, a Poet of Passages and a Chronicler of Change.

He still is, I’m happy to say, and a calm voice in a time of chaos.

The voice was what attracted me in the beginning, when he covered Joni Mitchell songs like “Urge for Going,” “Tin Angel” and “The Circle Game.” I spent many a night as a soulful teen falling asleep to his baritone ruminations on change, loss and the passage of seasons.

In a tourist town that closed up each fall, I felt especially attuned to the loss of summer friends who left “When the meadow grass was turning brown / [and] Summertime was falling down and winter … closing in.”

On the verge of college, I was increasingly aware how “We’re captive on the carousel of time / We can’t return, we can only look / Behind from where we came.”

Tom Rush’s voice was a comfort then and is still a comfort today.

And he is still plumbing the emotions of passages, from his sweet “Siena’s Song” about his daughter to the faux sea chanty “One More Time Around the Sun.”

“It’s one more time around the sun, / The lookout cannot say what lies in store. / So off we go, a-spinning blind … / To one more year, and many more.”

There’s something inspiring to see a guy in his mid-80s still touring, still singing, still following his passion “in his 58th Farewell Tour,” as he put it on stage last week.

There’s something reassuring, too, in the commitment and continuity of such an effort.

Sure, there are concessions. He sits during breaks when his sidekick Brendan Cleary plays solos. His hair is white and he walks with a hunch. But he’s still working the tousled look and has the same droopy mustache. He’s still a funny storyteller having fun with his yarns. And the voice remains rich.

The difference is context, and perspective, and experience.

He has lived a full life, and his life informs his art. On our town green, the introductions to his songs were as interesting as the songs themselves.

Like how he met Joni Mitchell.

She came to a club he was playing in Detroit and talked the owner into letting her do a set to try out material. Rush was impressed and asked her if she had more songs.

“A little while later I got a packet of about six songs in the mail,” he said. “On the last she said she was almost embarrassed to send it because she had just completed it.”

“It was so good, I named an album for it,” Rush said. It was “The Circle Game.”

That was a song for the ages, and remains — especially for any parent — poignantly ageless. I sang it for my kids as a bedtime song. Rush, with his kids long grown, is singing it at advanced age.

Age, of course, changes perspective for both the singer and the audience.

I first discovered this when I saw Bob Dylan perform “The Times They Are A-Changin’” for the “MTV Unplugged” TV series. Dylan had been 23 when he released the song in 1964. It was full of youthful idealism, energy and assertiveness about how to change the world. Dylan was 30 years older when he appeared on “Unplugged” half a lifetime later at age 53.

In both tone and experience the song was different. Instead of looking ahead with challenge and certainty, he was looking back with weariness and awareness. Especially in the last verse when he sings:

“The line it is drawn / The curse it is cast / The slow one now / Will later be fast / As the present now / Will later be past / The order is rapidly fadin’.”

That is the difference between a young man predicting and an older one assessing, the difference between looking forward and looking back.

I feel the same way with Tom Rush’s “Urge for Going,” which he still performs (though not last weekend). In this Joni Mitchell classic, words sung by a young man take on greater gravity when sung at age 85. It’s the difference being predictive and reflective, with metaphors like the coming of winter.

What older listener doesn’t identify with:

“I’ll ply the fire with kindling / Pull the blankets to my chin / I’ll lock the vagrant winter out and bolt my wandering in / I’d like to call back summertime / And have her stay for just another month or so / [But] She’s got the urge for going and I guess she’ll have to go.”

If there’s a lesson in that, it’s that we all need to make the most of the time we have. Every moment is precious, and no one has any to spare.

As the years advance, a future that once seemed endless seems more and more finite. I don’t lament that. It is what it is. I have “No Regrets,” to quote another Rush song.

But if we’re paying attention, we should cherish the time we have. Live in the moment, be mindful, be appreciative.

Look for simple pleasures and embrace joy.

Find beauty in your surroundings and in your relationships.

Live well, and fully.

Celebrate your roots and the strength they give you.

Heed Tom Rush on the “Glory Road” of life.

“Sing hallelujah … get on home … you been gone too long.”

TOP PHOTO: Tom Rush is older and grayer but still playing and passionate. BELOW: Rush is still a pretty good picker. BOTTOM (1): Tom Rush albums through the years, including “The Circle Game” and his latest “Gardens Old, Flowers New.” BOTTOM (2): Rush still has time to chat up fans after shows.

By Peter Landry

The community where I live outside Philadelphia has just launched a new program to collect kitchen food waste and send it off for composting to renew the Earth.

The goal is to reduce reliance on incinerators and landfills, and I’m all for that.

And with this new initiative, I feel I’ve come full circle. Or “cycle,” rather … as in “recycle.”

That’s because one of the first things I did after we bought our Pennsylvania home was to set up and operate a composting bin in the far reaches of our back yard.

I’d been living in a tiny studio apartment after getting a newspaper job here, and was anxious to “get back to the Earth” after a stretch of cramped city life. My wife, who had been living in similar quarters with a newspaper in Connecticut, was equally eager to get her hands dirty once again.

With a yard to care for, I went to the lumber yard, bought a roll of chicken wire, some hook-and-eye hardware and a batch of 1-by-2 lumber (which I learned are called “furring strips,” if you really want to know). I brought them home, dug out the staple gun, hooked the corners together and — voila! — I had a flexible cube of a compost bin that I could break down and move at will.

That was “Yankee Engineer-ity” at its best, as a New England old timer once put it, because its form was a perfect match for its function. A break-down frame was just the thing for breaking down plant material.

On top of that, I decided I wanted a “hot” compost pile, in which I mixed brown and green organics, watered regularly and turned them every few days with a pitchfork to aerate.

In the compost world, this close attention greatly speeds up the process, generating heat that cuts the composting time in half or even more. In short order, I was turning yard and kitchen wastes into rich, dark soil for the garden. And a home for worms.

At the same time, I was getting therapy, both physically and mentally.

My upper body never felt better than when I was turning my “hot” pile and getting hot and sweaty myself. I also never had a better release for tension, angst and stress.

At the time, I was working as an editor putting out a daily newspaper. I headed a crew that put the final touches on headlines, captions and stories, while racing to make deadlines for getting the presses rolling.

Deadlines were serious business back then, because every minute cost money, with hundreds of pressmen and drivers waiting to work and getting paid no matter what. The heat was always on the last editors in the process and some nights it got very hot indeed.

Turning and whacking a compost pile, I discovered, was an excellent way to unwind and decompress — even if I didn’t get to do it until the next morning.

That prima donna columnist? Whack! That nasty floor foreman? Whack! That lead paragraph that made no sense whatsoever? Whack!

Boy that felt good, even if I hadn’t done the whacking in real time.

Looking back, I realize this was one of my first experiences realizing there are Simple Pleasures for Surviving in this world.

Composting is a simple and satisfying pleasure.

It is elemental work, both literally and figuratively.

It takes one set of materials, reduces them to their roots, recombines them and produces something new.

For the scientists among us, it’s the Law of the Conservation of Matter, which declares that while matter can undergo physical and chemical changes it can never be destroyed.

For the religious, it’s a spiritual exercise in renewal, not quite resurrection but close.

For the literary, it’s a metaphor for life.

It starts at ground level, quite literally. It requires effort and commitment. Its advances are incremental but move you forward. And in the end it gives us a chance to grow.

Chris Pieretti, founder of the Kitchen Harvest operation that will handle composting for our town, certainly believes that.

“In life and nature, there is life and there is decay,” he says. “They are the counterparts of each other and both are equally necessary. … Composting … brings life back into the soil.”

It’s transformative in the purest sense of the word.

And “it’s magical,” Pieretti says, waxing poetic on his website. “It’s a miraculous, amazing thing … when you turn a banana peel into zucchini, or asparagus, or green beans.”

There are of course, practical benefits.

According to Haverford Township, where I live, 43.8 percent of local trash is made up of organic, compostable materials. That is more than paper and plastic combined (24.1 and 16.7 percent, respectively). Getting those organics out of the trash stream is both an economic and environmental benefit.

Haverford’s program will take fruits and vegetables, grains and baked goods, coffee grounds and filters, paper plates and napkins, nuts and eggshells, cooked or processed foods, flowers and plant trimmings, hair, pet fur and even cold fireplace ashes.

Collected and composted, all those things turn into “black gold” to enrich the Earth, as one composting commissioner put it.

There’s beauty, even poetry, in that, and we need more of both to lead satisfying lives.

We need to cultivate the magical and embrace the miraculous.

We need to encourage enrichment in all its forms.

We need to find beauty in small things and in simple ways.

When I was backyard composting, my young daughter did just that.

She liked to help, and when I was working the flower beds one day, she ventured back to the compost bin to rummage around.

As I was cultivating and freshening the soil, I saw her approaching out of the corner of my eye. She was carrying something.

I straightened as she got nearer to get a better view.

She held out her hands and proudly declared, “I’ve brought you a bouquet of worms.”

That was so squirmingly wonderful, I’ve never forgotten.

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To learn more about the Kitchen Harvest program outside Philadelphia, visit www.mykitchenharvest.com . To see Haverford Township’s model of municipal composting, visit

https://www.haverfordtownship.org/News/Havtwp_Curbside_Composting_Program.html#gsc.tab=0

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Essays exploring “Simple Pleasures for Surviving” are now available in book form from amazon.com

TOP PHOTO: A wide variety of food wastes can be composted to enrich the Earth (Photo by mykitchenharvest.com ) BELOW: The new municipal composting program launched by Haverford Township outside Philadelphia. BOTTOM (1-2): Food wastes can be composted to create nutrient-rich soil for use in gardens and farming. (Photos by mykitchenharvest.com ).

By Peter Landry

Whenever I feel harried or overwhelmed in life, I compose myself by thinking about calm, beautiful and peaceful things. As often as not, my thoughts in those moments circle back to the Maine village where I grew up and the natural beauty provided by the islands of its shoreline, the forests of its inland and the streams that connect the two.

The mindfulness of those moments never fails to calm me down, raise my spirits and replace stress with serenity. I am comforted to remember how blessed I was to have grown up in such a place and how my roots there are the anchor of my emotions and sensibilities.

In a lifetime as a writer, I have written many times about little Cape Porpoise and how it connects me to the greater community of Kennebunkport. Many of those pieces have been for the Kennebunkport Conservation Trust, whose work has inspired me for more than 50 years. The Trust embodies the best of active citizenship and exemplifies doing well by doing good.

This summer I was asked by the Trust to reflect on how that benefits communities, benefits individuals and leaves all the world a better place. The assignment for the Trust’s magazine fit perfectly with my goal to promote peace and positivity in a world that has too little of either.

It wasn’t hard to collect my thoughts. A thing of beauty, after all, is a joy forever.

•

The back cove and marshland are mine,

In spite of the stroke of a pen

Which holds not the skill to define

By law, nature’s gift unto men …

— Helen Ward Nunan, “A Birthright”

When Cape Porpoise poet Helen Ward Nunan wrote those lines in the 1950s, she was looking out over the tidal marsh that stretched behind her home and store in the building that later housed the Wayfarer, Musette and the Caring Community Cuisine restaurants on the Cape Square.

It was also the marsh that stretched out behind my childhood home at 5 Mills Road, and as such it helped launch a lifetime love of nature, diversity and community in my home town.

My mother, who looked out on the marsh every time she washed dishes at the kitchen sink, often declared that her view was prettier and more varied than the splashier ocean attractions of beaches and rocky shores.

It had personality, subtlety and changed with the seasons, she said — green in spring, golden in summer and russet or brown in the fall.

Helen’s poem published in the “Cape Ways” collection to benefit the Church on the Cape had a wistfulness about it that made its observations all the richer.

She could lay claim to her view, yes, but beneath her words was an acknowledgement that owners ultimately controlled what could be done with their land, and individuals who loved nature could only hope that beauty would be preserved.

More than 70 years and so much change later, Helen I think would be both astounded and delighted that preservation of nature’s beauty is no longer just a hope and a dream.

It is a reality made real by local visionaries who recognized the risks of development at a key moment, pulled up their suspenders, banded together and moved a community to seize the day for conservation before it was too late.

I’m talking, of course, about the founders of what became the Kennebunkport Conservation Trust, and the individuals who have kept hope alive for 53 years and counting.

With Tom Bradbury’s leadership, the Trust has protected 12 of the harbor’s islands, Goat Island Light, access to Goose Rocks Beach and 3,000 acres of woodland, connected by a network of interlocking trails.

What, on earth, would Helen say?

Maybe a thank you, as she wrote in her poem “The Cape,” for

The breath of pasture pines so sweet

With island fir and ocean’s spray

[That] are blended in an air that gives

A strength renewed from day to day.

•

People come and go, buildings rise and fall, but always in the end the land endures. Geography is eternity, rich and everlasting.

No less an authority than Melville Freeman acknowledged as much, writing in his “History of Cape Porpoise” that “geography has always had a profound influence on human beings, shaping their characters and the activities of the places where they have lived.

“This ‘Cape,’ as it is called, is not really a cape in the common meaning of the term,” he added. “… It is actually a group of outward-reaching islands which have the effect of a cape on the contour of the coast. Had it been otherwise, the story would be very different.”

Had it been otherwise, the story of the Kennebunkport Conservation Trust would be very different as well.

The Cape islands, which defined the contours of the harbor, were what brought the Trust to life and propelled a generation of conservation and achievement.

It started, of course, with Vaughn’s Island, saved from a development plan. It continued with the acquisition of Cape and its dramatic cliffs, Trott’s with its picnic rocks, and in a pinnacle of achievement, control of Goat and the lighthouse that has been a beacon and inspiration for nearly 200 years.

But the achievement hasn’t stopped there.

Success with the islands led to acquisitions of places that speak to heritage and history: the River Green, the Clem Clark Boathouse, Ganny’s Garden honoring former First Lady Barbara Bush.

And then there are the trails, 30 miles of trails that allow families to walk the paths long traveled by foxes, moose and bobcats and perhaps indigenous people as well.

•

Real estate is the elephant in the room for Kennebunkport’s future.

Prices have risen into the stratosphere, and familiar, modest homes — once the dwellings of fishing families — have been transformed and enlarged as if on steroids.

The cozy, dormered 1840s house I grew up in last sold for more than $1 million, and the new owners put more than $350,000 into a renovation on top of that.

Waterfront properties on the Langsford and Pier Roads have been “modernized” and supersized to stunning degrees. The home built by my grandfather on Paddy Creek has been luxuriated to the tune of a $3.8 million valuation.

It would be easy to wring my hands (or smack my forehead) and lament all that has been lost in the Kennebunkport I grew up in.

But at the same time much has been preserved, and that is cause for celebration.

Helen Ward Nunan’s store is the same shape it was 100 years ago. The Garrison House is still the Garrison House. Bradbury’s Market still looks like Bradbury’s. And the Main Street house my mother grew up in still boasts the chestnut tree planted when HER mother was born in 1889.

More significantly, the land is still the land, permanent and forever, from the Grist Mill Property to Timber Island and Goose Rocks Beach.

I once wrote a piece about a high school romance in which I noted how I could revisit all the islands where I had kissed my girlfriend and find the spots just as they were.

“There were the picnic rocks of Trott’s, the sunset site on Folly. There was the stony beach on Vaughn’s and the rocky ridge reaching back to shore from Green. There was the weathered summer cabin on Bass, long since tumbled into ruin. I imagined I could find each spot right now, and, except for the cabin and the kissing, re-create each moment just as it was.”

With the trail system created by the Trust, I could likewise re-create other moments from my past: skating on the pond near the Bradbury Trail just up from the store, hiking land farmed by Jim Steele back country, checking out the dam on Batson’s River and following the water to the sea at the west end of Goose Rocks.

That is the beauty of land. Unless it is assaulted by backhoes and graders, it remains the same as it always was.

I’d like to think that when John Smith or Bartholomew Gosnold first visited Cape Porpoise, the rocks on Trott’s were the same shape they are today, the cliffs on Cape hard to maneuver, the gap between Goat and Folly tricky to navigate at the mouth of the harbor.

Stage Island still was pounded by surf on the ocean side, Vaughn’s had that pond back from the shore and Timber Point and Island provided a shoulder of protection for Goose Rocks Beach.

The inland rivers and ponds still supported peepers and fish, and deer found refuge and food in lush, dense thickets.

With care and conservation, the land endures, timeless and beautiful.

It connects past generations to those of the present and reaches out to those of the future.

It speaks of history and heritage and what defines a community.

Like the islands of the harbor, conservation protects us, supports us, enriches us.

That’s trust in every sense of the word.

For Helen Ward Nunan and us all.

•

Peter Landry is a writer, essayist and former journalist who grew up on the Mills Road in Cape Porpoise. He is author of an online Substack column “Simple Pleasures for Surviving” and a book of the same name.

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To support or learn more about the Kennebunkport Conservation Trust, visit the website kporttrust.org or follow the group on Facebook.

TOP PHOTOS: Helen Ward Nunan’s Cape Porpoise marsh in two seasons. BELOW: The opening spread of my essay as it appeared this month in the “Trust in Our Town” magazine of the Kennebunkport Conservation Trust. BOTTOM (1): Rainbow beauty over Stage, Fort, Redin and Trott’s Islands in Cape Porpoise, Maine. BOTTOM (2): The parallel universe of pleasure in the harbor.

By Peter Landry

The Fourth of July falls on a Saturday this year, and if my mother were still alive I’d like to think she would be holding story hour at the Cape Porpoise Library in my Maine home town.

And because it is America’s 250th birthday, she would probably bake a cake, top it with blue and white icing and stick a flag or red geranium on top for good measure.

I can speak with some authority on this, because she did exactly that 50 years ago for the nation’s Bicentennial. And probably read Longfellow’s “Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” for good measure.

Mom ran story hours on Saturday morning for years after retiring as a teacher. She felt it was a way to give back to the community and a way for her to keep active as an educator.

She loved kids and often said they kept her young.

She had a flair for bringing big things down to a child’s level, whether it was a national milestone or a story about snails. She was patriotic in the best sense of the word and was all in for the Bicentennial. She loved the Founding Fathers (especially Ben Franklin), the contributions of people from many backgrounds and the dictum printed on our money of E Pluribus Unum (from Many, One). One of her favorite books was Carl Sandburg’s 300-page poem celebrating “The People, Yes,” which declares … “the people is Everyman, everybody. Everybody is you and me and all others.”

In a teaching folder she kept a cache of materials for story hours or other special occasions.

For the Bicentennial, she used a wide array of artifacts to stitch together a story worthy of children and the nation.

When I looked through the folio while cleaning the attic recently, I found a full-sized Norman Rockwell poster illustrating “Freedom of Speech,” a yellowed cover of Harvard Today featuring Ben Franklin, a handmade montage on construction paper showing the famous “Spirit of ’76” painting and the stamp it inspired, and an “America’s Bicentennial” coloring book distributed by the Kennebunk Savings & Loan Association.

E Pluribus Unum, indeed … From Many, One.

The local kids loved her eccentricities and enthusiasm. And on that Bicentennial morning, I’m sure they were as charmed by her history celebration as the star-struck third grader who once asked her “Was Ben Franklin a personal friend of yours?”

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At the time my mom was having a birthday party for America in Maine, I was living in Vermont and writing for a weekly newspaper based in Middlebury.

Located in the middle of the Champlain Valley, the town is home to Middlebury College, which enriched life there enormously. One way was the Bread Loaf Writers Conference the college ran each summer at a former mountain inn in the nearby hamlet of Ripton. The conference brought in prominent writers to speak, and for the Bicentennial, they featured the venerable poet Archibald MacLeish.

MacLeish, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry and one for Drama, was 84 by then, at the end of a long and sometimes controversial career (he had been accused of being a “fellow traveler” to communism for his lefty politics).

He was also a librarian, the ninth head of the Library of Congress and a favorite of both my mother and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

MacLeish’s long and varied life in art and politics made him a perfect speaker to celebrate the long and varied life of the nation.

He even dressed for the occasion.

As I wrote back then, “The white-haired man, dressed in a red jacket and tie and a blue shirt, stood quietly at the podium. The voice floated out across the room over the hushed gathering. The audience seemed to hang on each phrase, each word, each syllable. …

“It was billed as a lecture, but it was more than that. It was also a poetry reading, a philosophical seminar, and, as MacLeish put it, the chronicle of ‘the central passion of my life, save one ... the relationship of a man to a republic. …

“‘This lecture was to be a courageous return to the Bicentennial,’ MacLeish told the gathering. ‘And I felt the best way I could do that would be to go through a number of poems which bear upon the fundamental question of the relationship of a man to a republic. I had an attitude in the ’20s, a very different attitude in the ’30s, another in the ’40s, ’50s, ‘60s and ’70s.

“‘America is a metaphor, but really two very different metaphors,’ he continued. ‘One is the metaphor of Spanish America, the metaphor of gold beyond the sea, of cities beyond the mountains, of wealth. …

“‘The other is our American dream … not a dream of wealth ... but of a future to be discovered.’”

•

And what have we discovered in the 50 years since MacLeish spoke at Bread Loaf? Like the old poet, America has had “a different attitude” almost decade by decade, swinging from right to left and back again.

When I started this column, I had planned to end with a section drawn from a patriotic education package my wife and I had syndicated to newspapers after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

The section, which won a bunch of awards, was called “Strength of a Nation.”

Its premise was that “history is a great teacher,” and in the wake of 9/11 it sought to re-assure students that America has faced and overcome many challenges since it was founded in 1776.

“History is the story of people … and how they responded to challenges,” I wrote back then. “It is a living, ongoing thing.

“In the last few years, the United States has written important new chapters in our history. … And it has learned a lot about itself.”

Twenty-five years after the attacks of 9/11 — can it really be a quarter century? — I could easily write the same thing today.

America has indeed learned a lot about itself in recent years.

But not all of it was what we might have expected after the nation came together following the first terrorist attack on American soil.

Certainly some chapters have been inspiring, but some have been unsettling. Some have celebrated unity but some have sown division.

And today, how Americans view each chapter depends on where they’re coming from.

As Archibald MacLeish noted 50 years ago, we have dueling definitions of the American dream, what it means to be an American, what constitutes greatness in a nation.

Is it wealth and power and influence? Or is it something more elusive, a dream of aspiration and inspiration? Are we the toughest kid on the block, or the “shining city on a hill,” as Ronald Reagan famously put it.

I’d like to say we can be both, but that would be delusional at this time in this place. We are divided into camps, with rigid views and strident words. We are either inspirational or transactional and never the twain shall meet.

We view the future as a mathematical debate over addition, subtraction, multiplication, division.

I’m no math genius, but even I know that doesn’t make the whole greater than the parts or add up to strength over time.

So what can give us the Strength of a Nation?

On the eve of America 250, I’m going to go back to that education package I produced long ago.

“Strength of a Nation is not just the courage to face crisis or tragedy as it unfolds,” I wrote back then. “It is also carrying on our lives in the face of worry. It is caring for people who have suffered. It is taking on difficult tasks, and vowing to see them through to the end.

“Strength is looking for things that unite us, rather than divide us. It is the belief that every person can make a difference. It is listening as well as speaking.

“It is the reward of responsibility and the satisfaction of service. It is being an active and informed citizen.

“… Many things combine to give us the Strength of a Nation,” I wrote back then. To which I would add, “And the most important, come from within us.”

At the end of the introduction to that educational effort, I asked students to share their thoughts about strength — and gave them spaces to write them.

“Strength means different things to different people,” I said. “Write out what strength means to you as an individual and what you think it means as a community.” And, I might add, as a nation.

As we celebrate America 250 this weekend, we would all do well to take a moment and answer those questions for ourselves.

The Strength of Our Nation depends on each of us.

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The “Strength of a Nation” educational package used events from American history to demonstrate how the nation has overcome challenges in the past. Supporting activities explored the topics further by asking students to use contemporary news sources such as newspapers, magazines and online news sites. If anyone would like a copy of the original teaching materials, send me an email at peterlandry757@gmail.com and I will send you a free pdf.

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Essays exploring “Simple Pleasures for Surviving” are now available in book form from Amazon.com

TOP PHOTO: My mom sharing a Birthday Cake for America at a Story Hour at the Cape Porpoise Library. BELOW: Poet Archibald MacLeish delivering the Bicentennial Lecture at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont. BOTTOM (1): A handmade montage showing the “Spirit of ’76” painting and postage stamp, plus Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech” painting. BOTTOM (2): The “America’s Bicentennial” coloring book distributed by the Kennebunk Savings & Loan Association; Harvard Today featuring Ben Franklin on the cover.

One year ago this week, I wrote and published what turned out to be the most popular column I have ever written on Substack. It was a reminiscence about the house I grew up in, how change comes to us all and ways to look forward as well as back. I’m sharing it again, because some of you weren’t with me back then, I believe there’s something universal in my experience and I still like it as a piece of writing. Cherish your family history. It’s you are.

By Peter Landry

In my sister Amy’s novel “Independence Day,” the first chapter gets off to a raucous start in the house where I grew up in Cape Porpoise, Maine.

In the scene, a newly empowered woman is making a statement about the life she wants by throwing the clothes and possessions of her husband and children out a second story window into the yard.

Everyone who knew my sister, who wrote under the name Amy Frazier, recognized the 1840s house, and the attached barn, as our home on the Mills Road just up from the flagpole in the village square.

That house and barn — especially the barn — provided a lot of fun and adventure in the years of my childhood, and later in my years as a young parent.

The barn was packed with stuff my mother couldn’t bear to throw out, from diaries of her mother, to antique baskets hanging from the ceiling, to family photos from the 1800s, to trophies I had won for football and track in high school.

My kids described it as “an archaeological dig” when they ventured up there on rainy vacation days.

I got thinking about the barn this week, when an old Cape Porpoise friend sent me photos of a major renovation going on in the house I grew up in. The barn is gone entirely, replaced by a similarly shaped, two-story structure that will offer expanded residential space overlooking the graceful tidal marsh behind it.

The house itself has been totally stripped. All that is visible inside are support studs and old wood.

The floor-to-ceiling antique windows that graced both the first and second floors have been removed, along with their wavy 19th century glass that turned outside views into wobbly abstract paintings. The windows, I’m sure, were hugely inefficient for energy conservation, but I hope they found their way to an architectural salvage dealer instead of a landfill. They were nearly 200 years old, for goodness’ sake.

When friend Tom Bradbury sent me pictures of the renovation, I didn’t recognize the place at first. The fanciful carved overhangs for the front and side doors had been removed, for starters. And the shrubs and trees had grown significantly in the 15 years since my mom died and my sister and I decided we couldn’t manage the place long distance.

Adding to the confusion, I was expecting photos of Tom’s own renovation on the road to the village harbor, not my own home stripped down to the 19th century planks from which it was constructed.

That was good wood, as the husband of my mother in law would say, and it has stood the test of time.

Yet time passes, and generations change, and even in the most familiar places the new replaces the old.

“It’s the end of an era,” one cousin proclaimed.

“Wow wow wow!!! OMG!” said another.

“It makes me feel wistful,” said my daughter , who spent many a fond summer visiting her Grammy, and remained in good graces even after tying up the one phone line by hooking up to AOL to do her homework. (I can still hear the grind of the dial-up).

You never really outgrow the home you grew up in. The memories are always with you, good or bad, and the images of every spot in every room. I was fortunate my memories are all good ones.

Though I moved away just after college, I visited regularly as my mother morphed from Mom to Grand-Mom. I’d go up to wash those big windows for spring cleaning, and again in the fall to “button up” the place for winter. For many years, that involved installing the “banking boards” along the granite foundation to create an insulating buffer of straw against the winter cold. It was an old-school technique — VERY old school — and I never really knew how much insulation it actually provided. At least it kept the wind from blowing through the cracks in the granite, and provided a winter home for mice.

My kids loved visiting Grammy and thought of her house as a little museum of a time gone by. Grammy in turn loved having an audience for all the things she loved to have around her, and for her favorite family stories. On one visit my daughter had the inspiration to use our new video camera and record her telling those great old tales — with EXPRESSION, as she liked to say. The highlight was provided by one of her cats, who climbed up behind her in the chair and started nibbling her hair on camera.

“Now, Ginger, cut that out!” my Mom exclaimed before continuing seamlessly with her tale.

Mom lived in that house for 62 years, from the year she was married in 1947 until she moved to an assisted living place near us just before she died in 2009.

It surely needed upgrading in some basic ways, and it underwent several renovations with subsequent owners. But it always seemed essentially the same to me.

This renovation seems different, however.

The thoroughness of going down to the bare bones, the demolition of the barn, the new construction seem more the start of a new era than the changes before.

Like my daughter, I am wistful that it is not the same place I lived in and remember. Yet I am buoyed by the fact my mother was not one to dwell in the past.

Right until the end she was making new friends, enjoying new things, engaging with efforts to make her community better and more welcoming.

She believed that change can make you young, even as you age. She liked making friends with new people who moved to town “from away.” She liked how the community mixed and matched old and new.

We all should embrace that philosophy, even if we are amazed at the pace of change.

The pace — and price — are astonishing right now in little Cape Porpoise, perched as it is on the edge of the ocean. Houses like hers are selling for more than a million dollars, with thousands more going into rehab.

She likely would cluck at the prices paid for familiar real estate, but she would like that the renovation of her home preserves its shape and profile in the village she loved. She would like that the effort will bring new life to it, and to the community.

Her spirit will be in the place, whatever the changes.

As her sister-in-law exclaimed when I shared photos, “That’s quite a renovation! Hope she approves!!”

I hope so, too.

TOP PHOTO: The renovation under way at my childhood home (Tom Bradbury photo). BELOW: 5 Mills Road in earlier times. BOTTOM: View through the wavy glass of the antique windows.

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Amy (Landry) Frazier wrote four books in the romance genre based on her home town of Cape Porpoise: “Independence Day” “The Secret Baby,” “A Bundle of Miracles” and “The Trick to Getting a Mom.”

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Essays exploring “Simple Pleasures for Surviving” are now available in book form from amazon.com

On the road again

Like a band of gypsies, we go down the highway

We’re the best of friends

Insisting that the world keep turning our way.

— Willie Nelson

By Peter Landry

Last weekend, we got the band together again, and headed out for the mountains.

We were off once more to Snake Hunt, or as it’s formally known, the Noxen Rattlesnake Round-Up.

We’ve been doing it for more than 25 years, and though it’s not exactly religious, it’s a pilgrimage sacred to us.

Three guys getting together once a year to celebrate familiar sights, familiar foods, familiar traditions and familiar weirdness in the back country of Pennsylvania.

And as a bonus this year, we brought two young ’uns along, to initiate the next generation.

Despite the name, we don’t actually get to round up the rattlesnakes at the Rattlesnake Round-Up. That’s left to the outdoorsmen who live in the Endless Mountains west of the Poconos in Pennsylvania.

They catch them in the wild and bring them in for judging and set them loose in the judging pen for visitors to admire. Volunteers take turns manning long metal crooks to keep at the snakes from biting the judges in the butt.

Prizes are awarded for such things as longest snake, heaviest snake, most rattles and more, and the competition brings thousands to a fairground next to the fire house in Noxen village.

The Round-Up is a fund-raiser for the Fire Department and draws fire equipment from all over Wyoming County for its famous parade. God forbid there should be a fire during the event, since most of the equipment is rocking downtown Noxen.

George, Darrell and I first started going to Snake Hunt as a lark. George had grown up in nearby Wilkes-Barre and pitched it as a back country event like no other.

“You won’t believe the people who come to see rattlesnakes,” he said.

Seeing is believing, we said, so we agreed to check it out. Well, seeing IS believing and soon we were true True Believers.

Part of the attraction was the history. They used to have snake-bagging contests, but they had to give them up because too many people got bitten while competing drunk. On top of that, wildlife officials declared it was cruel to the snakes, though they were the ones doing the biting.

Those same officials decided that snakes brought in for judging had to be microchipped, to keep overzealous hunters from fattening them up over the winter to enter in the next year’s contest.

And then there was the promise of Rich and Charlotte’s.

“You won’t believe this place,” George said, and he was right.

When we first checked it out, it was a hole-in-the-wall bar on Harvey’s Lake, known for chicken wings and an ambiance best described by the sign facing the front door.

“We don’t call 911,” it declared, and the faces of the regulars explained why.

The chicken wings were, in fact, delicious, and the regulars softened on us after we had visited a few times. It always helped that George opened with “I grew up around here” and knew enough local names to drop.

The regulars all had their spots at the bar, and we learned it was local etiquette to ask “Is this someone’s seat?” before taking a stool.

Especially if it was Whitey’s seat. He had a place at the corner of the bar next to the half gallons of hard liquor turned upside down to be served “on tap.”

Whitey worked in construction and had a casual relationship with the law. When asked if he had helped build some of the larger homes, he answered, with not a little pride, that “I built ’em or I robbed ’em.”

Discretion being the better part of valor, we didn’t ask for details. But we later charmed him by informing him he had been mentioned online — with a picture! — by a travel blogger writing up the region.

He was incredulous, so we called it up on a phone.

“Look at that,” he announced to the room. “I’m on the Internet!”

Whitey, like many of the regulars we first knew, has passed on, but a photo Wall of Fame keeps their memory alive.

The past is truly a presence at this bar, as it is with so many things about Snake Hunt.

“It’s like stepping back in time,” my son declared on this, his first visit.

And it’s not just the history and tradition of the event itself.

It’s the history and traditions we have made with our yearly road trip — and the friendship they represent.

All friendships are valuable, but long ones are the most valuable of all. They are the foundation of life.

They give you strength when you need it and support when you seek it. They anchor you when you feel adrift and ground you when you fly off course. They give you stability and reliability, perspective and perseverance. They are commitment and continuity. And of course, a lot of laughs.

No one has a lot of long friendships, but we all need them, especially in times of turmoil.

They are calm in the face of chaos and continuity when you need connection.

They are history in the making.

We now have gray in the beards, but we’ve made a lot of history with this annual outing. Personal history that matters.

Make time to make yours.

You don’t need a snake pit to do it.
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Essays exploring “Simple Pleasures for Surviving” are now available in book form from Amazon.com

TOP PHOTO: Snake Hunt road trippers at Rich and Charlotte’s. BELOW: The next generation joins the fun. BOTTOM (1): The author at this year’s event, in a vintage 2002 T-shirt that marked the attack on the Twin Towers. BOTTOM (2): Snake Eyes (Temu Nana Photo).

Time passes slowly up here in the mountains

We sit beside bridges and walk beside fountains

Catch the wild fishes that float through the stream

Time passes slowly when you’re lost in a dream.

— Bob Dylan

By Peter Landry

In a quest for peace and a change of scene, we’re spending a week with our daughter and grandson in the mountains of New Hampshire. Ever since we got here, I’ve had the lyrics of that Dylan song in my head. The words never seemed more true than in the shadow of Mount Monadnock.

Consider our first morning. We were up at the proverbial crack of dawn and got to see the sun come up. The light and shadows were dramatic, but the stillness was what impressed. The silence was scarcely broken by the murmuring of mourning doves and the breeze in the trees.

The quiet spoke volumes about the day we were about to have.

Eventually, our reverie was broken by our dog whining for her morning walk and our 3-year-old grandson, wheedling to come along.

After another cup of coffee, we headed to the trails of Meetinghouse Pond.

These were logging roads once and groan with the weight of boulders wrenched and rolled into stone walls. The walls have been there for eons it seems and are heavy with history and moss.

I once asked a local who works the land how they got there before engines, hydraulics and front-end loaders.

His answer was memorably New England: “Horses, chains and lot of pissed off sons!”

There’s more calm than pissiness in them today. They fit together like granite puzzles, with the odd shaped stones balanced on top. There’s magic in that balance, as Robert Frost famously declared when he urged them to “Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”

Today the stones aren’t walling things in or out, as Frost also observed, but they provide wonderful natural pleasures. Our dog Karma likes nothing more than leaping them to careen off into the woods, and grandson Orion is perpetually questing to find “the biggest rock” to scale as a mini-Everest.

On our walk, the woods were elegantly quiet with early light slanting low under the pines. You could hear the woodpeckers working for breakfast and calling to their mates. And when our dog barked for joy, the echo barked back from across the pond.

With the ease of slowness, the calm of curiosity took over. We shifted seamlessly from climbing to creation.

“Let’s make fairy houses!” our grandson declared, and soon we were collecting materials. There were wide, white swatches of birch bark, moss and lichen and, of course, rocks.

“I want these for my rock collection,” grandson declared. And soon they were migrating from his pockets to my own. By the end of the walk we were both laden down, with pockets that looked like the cheeks of chipmunks stuffed with seeds.

When he brought the last one-pounder to my side — “it could be the foundation,” he declared — I knew the end was near.

Turning round mid-hike, we made our way back to the car.

It was time for snacks, first one, then another. And a drink of water from the water bottle.

In the car, grandson asked for another snack.

“No … It’s almost lunch time,” we responded.

It was 9:04 A.M.

Time … passes … slowly.

And when it does, it gives you MORE time.

Time for calm and serenity. Time for reflection, deep thoughts — or no thoughts at all. Time for living in the moment and assessing the essential. Time for being one with the world.

On this day, we made the most of time. We sought out a mountain pond and swam with loons. We picked flowers and read stories. We took naps to rest up and attended a musical show performed by local children. And we looked for fireflies under the stars.

It was a full day, but a peaceful one. It never felt hurried or harried. One thing led quietly to another with plenty of space between.

There’s peace in space, and we all need it in a raucous world.

But we need to slow down to achieve it.

We need to unwind our clocks to unwind ourselves.

We need to lessen our pace and savor the moments.

We need to stop, look and listen.

We learned that as children, and it’s even more important now.

Time is precious. We need to make the most of it.

TOP PHOTO: The dawn of a new day over New Hampshire’s Mount Monadnock. BELOW: Into the woods with an exploring 3-year-old. BOTTOM (1): The “biggest rocks” were the best for climbing. BOTTOM (2): Fanciful fairy houses grew from nature’s bounty.

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My essays exploring “Simple Pleasures for Surviving” are now available in book form from Amazon.com

By Peter Landry

We’ve been eating lettuce from the garden this week, and all is well with the world. Because in the rhythms of spring, the first harvest is always the best.

It feeds the soul as well as the body, and indicates the stars have aligned properly, the Earth is spinning happily and the elements are in sync with the spirit.

It means hope has prevailed, optimism is alive and effort has been rewarded.

The Matrix is intact, as it should be. Whoa.

I have been a gardener my whole life.

I got the bug from my parents, who were fervent in diverse and opposite ways. My Dad was all right angles and straight lines and efforts to improve his yield each year. My Mom, shall we say, was more fluid in her approach, prone to wildflowers, irregular plantings and such observations as “don’t pull that weed; let’s see what it turns into.”

I am a mix of the two, someone who plants vegetables in straight rows but shows great mercy to “volunteer” plants just to see “what they turn into.”

Lettuce is always my first planting, because it’s easy to grow and gives early reward. I chose two types this year — Burpee Bibb and a Heatwave Blend to get me through Philadelphia’ summer. But true to my roots, I let a lush, red lettuce “volunteer” survive and got a gleaming bush of a plant for reward.

I grow other greens, of course. This year I added two types of Swiss chard — a Rhubarb Heirloom with red stems and a Fordhook Giant that is all green — plus a new kale called Kaleidoscope by the seed folks for reasons that escape me. (It is green. How is that kaleidoscopic?)

Chard is rich in minerals, iron and roughage, but I like it for one of my fondest childhood memories.

When I was encouraged to eat it because it was healthy, I startled my parents by turning it into a game. “It looks like worms,” I declared as I hoisted a strand to my mouth. “And I’m a little bird.”

I’ve stopped eating chard with my fingers, but I still like the wormy simile. I liked it even more when my daughter turned worms into a game of her own as a toddler.

Eager to help as I worked my little plot, she retreated to the compost pile at the back of our lot. Soon she returned with a handful of squirminess to add to the garden.

“I’ve brought you a bouquet of worms,” she declared, a metaphor that still makes me smile.

I smiled then, too, and we quickly added them to the soil and put them to work.

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Gardening IS work, but it is therapeutic work. It’s elemental in the purest sense of the word.

It takes earth, water and light and feeds us with food or beauty. It forces us to slow down and live in the moment. It is a source of awe and wonder. It gives us strength and peace of mind.

It certainly did that for my Dad.

He loved gardening all his life and was really good at it.

It fed his talents as well as his family, and sustained him emotionally.

It helped him cope with a world that had been shattered by his experiences as a Marine in the Pacific during World War II.

He never talked about the War, and with good reason. He had landed on Tarawa, fought the brutal campaign of Saipan and was in the battle of Okinawa.

His family said he was never the same after coming home, and from what we know now, he clearly suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

For his generation, however, there was no therapy or counseling, nor would most men have sought it. He channeled his angst into gardens.

He turned the yard of our 1840s house into a showcase of flowers and vegetables. And when he had filled things to capacity, he searched for other spaces.

Throughout my childhood — and beyond — he talked friends and neighbors into letting him use land they weren’t using for growing.

There was the field of a back-country friend, where I got my first tractor ride. There was the empty lot of our neighbor across the street next to the fire station. There was an acre behind the home of an aunt who had lost her husband. And the sloping back yard of a teacher friend of my mother’s.

In Maine, he always planted on Memorial Day and harvested first crops by the end of June. In July and August, he would fill the back of his little white Datsun pickup and travel from relative to relative with bounty.

“Why don’t you sell it?” I once asked him.

“Because the growing is what is important,” he said, “not money.”

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For people who garden, the growing IS what is important.

It is a miracle, really, to turn a seed into a plant, to see what each needs to survive and how they have adapted over time.

When my kids were little, I learned that the leaves of pumpkins are actually funnels channeling rain to the vines on the ground below. I learned that flowers like cleome produce millions of seeds so that a few can survive. I learned that birds and squirrels can perpetuate crops year after year.

Most of all I learned that there is a pace to the growing season, with flowers and vegetables coming to fruition in their own time.

I learned that the secret of gardening is to balance planning with expectation, so that crops are rewarding, but not overwhelming. I learned that the rhythm of plant life is something you can follow, but not always lead.

I learned that if I got the snap peas in by the first week of May, I could harvest them on my daughter’s birthday on the Summer Solstice June 21. I learned that tomatoes will come in August and last until October.

And I learned that sunshine, rain, heat and cold can derail even the best made plans.

That is the beauty of gardening. It gives you control, but not complete.

It is rewarding but also humbling, reminding us that we are all part of something bigger than ourselves.

There’s calm in that, and serenity, and security, too.

We all need that in turbulent times.

Inch by inch, row by row.

TOP PHOTO: The first harvest of lettuce from the backyard garden. BELOW: My father’s expanded garden plots included a back country field (with me on a tractor) and a lot next to the fire station. BOTTOM: My daughter still loves to pick snap peas on her Summer Solstice birthday.

By Peter Landry

I’ve been wrestling with America 250. And not just with the mega-mouthful of its official Latin name. Did we really need SEMI (half) QUIN (fifth) CENTENNIAL (100) to name the thing?

The math adds up, but not much else does in this milestone observance.

I am reluctant to use the word “celebration,” because half the country doesn’t feel like celebrating, the other half is saying “celebrate, dammit” and we seem more divided than at any time since the Civil War.

If this is a more perfect union, I’d like to see what imperfect is.

To continue with the Latin, the observance seems semi-baked, semi-witted and, with a nod to my Maine roots, semi-assed.

The grounds of the White House look like a scene from an apocalypse movie, artists have bailed from the America 250 concert, martial arts guys are lining up for body slams and there seem to be as many protests planned as parades.

A Certain Somebody is the core of discord in all this, and America is as divided about him as about everything else.

So what can a nation, or communities, or individuals do?

With no national consensus, we need to think small. Get back to the basics. Celebrate the simple things that give us pleasure and bring us together.

I’ve been preaching this for more than a year in this column, but now is the time to really apply it. It’s time to bring it on home and let the big stuff slide.

Make the celebration heartfelt and home grown. Put the common back in community and neighbors back in neighborhood.

These truths really are self-evident.

To remind myself, I got to thinking how the nation behaved the last time it had a celebration like this.

I was around for the nation’s 200th birthday and had the good fortune to celebrate with small towns in Vermont.

My wife and I were not married yet, but we were working together in a mom-and-pop weekly newspaper called The Valley Voice. It served the Champlain Valley from Burlington to Rutland, and it went all out to cover the Bicentennial. The paper ran photos of almost every community, and my wife and I picked two to showcase.

In the interest of peace and positivity, I offer them here as a road map for bringing America 250 back home.

RIPTON MADE THE MOST
OF FIRST FOURTH PARADE

By Kim Reiland

The mountain hamlet of Ripton honored the nation’s 200th with a “first” — the first parade the tiny town has ever hosted.

The route was short and the floats were few, but with a bit of Yankee ingenuity the townspeople made the most of what they had.

As the parade neared its finish at the barn-red Ripton Country Store, the marchers decided to do it “once more — with feeling.” They turned the troupe around, doubling back to double the pleasure of the onlookers.

As the parade passed by for the second time, fans took heightened joy in having been among the few who have seen a parade from both sides.

The sun finally broke through to add dazzle to the calm, bucolic setting.

A crowd lined the route, tiered back from the road so all could get a good look. Grandmas sat in lawn chairs on the road shoulders, and dads stood behind them with toddlers on their human shoulders.

Everyone who owned a camera brought it. The quiet clatter of shutters provided erratic background rhythm for the clamor of applause. Residents clicked to capture the historic event for posterity, and tourists snapped to show they’d been there.

The marchers waved enthusiastically. Everybody knew everybody. The waves were not the bland flappings of politicians, and beauty queens.

Instead they were the sincere “Hi, Aunt Sally, look at me” variety. All the paraders were on stage and loving it. Candid pictures of children were virtually impossible. The kids searched the throng for pictures-takers, and smiled triumphantly into each lens they spotted.

Ripton’s first fire truck sang its sour song, and a Dalmation puppy wagged from the truck’s shiny back. The truck is “our new fire engine” to the children, though it’s a 1945 model.

Horace Beck giddy-upped from the cab roof of a pick-up truck turned covered wagon. A group of girls, festooned in attic trunk salvageables, climbed into a paper maché kettle adorned with the message “America the Melting Pot.” And one colorfully outfitted child dragged a wooden cow from the back of his tricycle. The cow’s wooden stand carried the insignia: “Land of Milk and Honey.”

It was homey, and heart-warming.

There were no big banners in Ripton proclaiming the dawn of our third century as a nation. Only a cardboard poster listing the town’s oldest living residents. There were no inflammatory patriotic addresses. Only a quiet dedication of the renovated Community House by Governor Thomas Salmon.

Next to the parade itself, the biggest attention-getter was the governor’s helicopter as it circled the blue sky above the village. One woman was heard to remark, “What’s the governor look like? I’ve never seen him.”

The governor apparently had never seen Ripton, either. As he emerged from a gleaming black Thunderbird, he paused for a few minutes to question an aide about the nature of his visit. But the governor’s speech was charming, and the hundred-or-so spectators snuggled in close to get a good look at him.

The scene was reminiscent of an era the people had come to commemorate. The townspeople gathered ’round in colonial costume on the dirt lot in front of the 19th Century Community House.

As their governor spoke of Thomas Jefferson and the Virginian’s dream of a country of self-sufficient farmers and small towns, he spoke of Ripton.

“This is the type of town Jefferson imagined. Here, small really is beautiful,” Salmon said. “The very great heritage of Vermont was founded in its small towns.”

After snipping the crepe paper to dedicate the Community House, Salmon praised the residents for “raising in your own independent and unassuming way the money to make it happen.”

The crowd was proud and appreciative.

Living in Ripton breeds independence and self-sufficiency. Isolated on the edge of the Green Mountains the town is too far from anywhere to allow for dependency. The people of Ripton put on a good show Sunday, a humble one, an honorable one. They should be proud.

PROCTOR PARADE
A FULL-FLEDGED
COMMUNITY FEST

By Peter Landry

Bicentennial Sunday festivities began quietly enough in Proctor — almost too quietly for an outsider.

À scant 40 minutes before the town’s Fourth of July parade was slated to begin, there were only a couple of floats and a passel of squabbling Little Leaguers in sight.

The parade route seemed disappointingly barren — particularly for a Fourth of July in a Bicentennial year.

A few cars had pulled up along South Street and the town’s famous marble bridge to discharge camera-toting pedestrians, but for all you could tell it was just like so many other quiet Sunday afternoons in a postcard Vermont town.

But as the 1 p.m. starting time drew nearer, the village green — a swatch of shade nestled between the hills on one side and Otter Creek on the other — began to stir.

It started with a trickle of Proctor Band members, then a few more Little Leaguers, more floats, fire engines.

Then something happened. Almost as if by magic, the parade entourage was up to full strength, and the route had its full quota of spectators.

Nobody seemed to mind that the green still bears the scars of road construction — the tire tracks, the veins of excavation, the slabs of un-installed curbing. All of a sudden it became what history books tell us village greens are supposed to be — a gathering place for the community.

At five-to-one the entourage was ready to roll. Sounds of parades-in-the-making wafted through the trees — staccato trumpet scales, saxophone warbles, the feisty murmur of antique cars getting ready to embark.

Then at one o’clock sharp — right on schedule — the parade began the climb from the green to the bridge road above.

There was no fanfare to speak of. No whistles, no scurry for position, no calls of command. The band simply burst forth with “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and the show was on the road.

Eighty-one-year-old Herbert Johnson Sr., erect as a colonial ramrod, set the pace for the group with a brisk gait perfectly timed with the drums and music.

Johnson was followed closely by the band and a knot of Sunshine Nursery Schoolers bedecked in red, white, and blue. One youngster towed a paper maché Liberty Bell in a red wagon. Another promenaded as Uncle Sam, complete with red top hat and white cotton beard.

The parade route wasn’t packed. Far from it. Latecomers had no trouble finding choice spots, and even at the peak of the show there were distinct gaps in the rows of spectators.

There were as many people in the parade as watching it. And that was the charm of it — the community participation, the simple enjoyment, the bond of friendship that pervaded the town as it marked the anniversary of a nation’s founding.

There were 4-H-ers and Little Leaguers, musicians and bicyclists, floats and fire trucks, horses and antique cars.

The parade was as diverse as the townspeople themselves. It was Proctor on display.

The parade itself didn’t last more than 20 minutes from start to finish. But the festival atmosphere didn’t end when the final marcher reached the break-up point at the junior-senior high school.

Spectators lingered on, chatting with neighbors and friends, renewing old acquaintances, remarking on the fun of it all.

It was the kind of day memories are made of.

TOP PHOTO: Colonial marchers in Brandon, Vermont, for the Bicentennial in 1976. BELOW: The front page coverage of the celebration in The Valley Voice newspaper in Middlebury. BOTTOM: A Bicentennial celebration in my Maine home town re-enacted the Battle of Cape Porpoise, in which locals rebuffed the British.

By Peter Landry

I love living a full life, but sometimes events, commitments and diversions pack the days so full that I feel they could burst at the seams.

I’m coming off a month like that, in which the calendar became so loaded that I thought my head might explode.

There were social events and family events, civic events and business events, and events I couldn’t even categorize.

There was travel and bustle, hustle and stress, departures at dawn, tight connections, a ball game in Philly and a wedding in Santa Fe.

When we came home, our house was torn apart, wrapped in plastic and covered in cardboard for a roof-to-basement rewiring project.

And did I mention we threw a 40th birthday party for our son amid the mayhem?

I’m all for living fully, but when full becomes frantic we need a release valve.

For the record, the wedding in Santa Fe was beautiful, intimate in an art museum and full of personality and panache.

And the city gave me my release valve — in plants of all things.

Some were famous and some were not, but all gave the peace and serenity I needed in a schedule too tightly packed.

They were respite from overload and refuge from over-commitment.

The famous plants came courtesy of the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, whose intimate flower portraits put her on the vanguard of modernism in the 20th century. The not-so-famous were the gift of the Santa Fe Botanical Garden, whose plantings showcase the spare beauty of the New Mexico landscape.

The O’Keeffes were in a museum founded in her name to celebrate her longtime residence in the Santa Fe region.

Her flowers, of course, were prominently featured. They are provocative for imagery that many find sexual, but impressive for their intimate detail.

They are an exercise in mindfulness in the purest sense, and an avenue to well-being.

“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment,” she once explained. “I want to give that world to someone else. Most people … rush around so, [that] they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.”

Paintings like “Petunia No. 2,” “Blue Flower 1918,” and “White and Blue Flower Shapes” draw you in by making small things large, magical and irresistible.

“I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty,” O’Keeffe said.

To appreciate it, as with other things, you need to slow down, look closely and breathe in the details.

“I made you take time to look at what I saw,” she said at one point. At another she advised that “… to SEE takes time — like to have a friend takes time.”

Slowing down and looking closely were at the heart of the peace found at the Botanical Garden as well.

Begun 20 years ago and opened in 2013, it is small and spare compared to showier places like Longwood Gardens outside Philadelphia and the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina.

But its specificity and mindful arrangement make up for size.

Santa Fe Botanical showcases the natural plant life of the New Mexico deserts and encourages close observation by limiting the number of plants in each grouping. While Longwood dazzles with volume, Santa Fe focuses your attention by careful selection.

With this approach, starburst Yucca plants stand out against the red desert soil, and flowering cactus sparkle with surprise. Scented Penstemons spike in pink and purple, and Golden Cholla Cactus burst yellow on spiny stems. A whole section features the remarkable Piñon pines and Juniper evergreens that provide greenery in the desert with scarcely any water.

Even with such attractions, the garden seems understated at first glance. But strategically placed benches position visitors to encourage study and introspection.

With whiptail lizards scurrying among the plant life, and the Santa Fe Mountains to the east, the Botanical Garden focuses attention and delivers serenity.

“Nature has a wonderful power to both calm our minds and ignite our imaginations,” the Garden declares in the introduction to its Poetry Path. “These guidelines are meant to help you … think more deeply about the plants and environment around you.”

As a release valve, this was exactly what I needed in a hectic month of activities. And it is what we all need as we navigate the demands of everyday life.

We all need to slow the pace when it gets out of hand.

We need to strip down our schedules and get back to basics.

We need to embrace the things that give us joy and step back from things that don’t.

We need to take pleasure in small things and the peace in our surroundings.

We need to tune out noise and channel inner quiet.

It happened for me in a city that’s a continent away from home. It could happen to you in your back yard.

We all need peace and serenity in a chaotic world.

They are available wherever you are.

Collect yourself and find them.

TOP PHOTOS: Georgia O’Keeffe’s “White and Blue Flower Shapes”; a starburst Yucca plant at the Santa Fe Botanical Garden. BELOW (left to right, top to bottom): O’Keeffe’s “Blue Flower 1918”; a spiny Golden Cholla Cactus against the desert; the flowering spikes of Scented Penstemon; O’Keeffe’s “Petunia No. 2.” BOTTOM: Evergreens, clouds and the Santa Fe Mountains at the Botanical Garden.

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My essays exploring “Simple Pleasures for Surviving” are now available as a paperback or eBook from amazon.com .

By Peter Landry

I know I’ve been around a long time, but I didn’t think I’d become historical. Yet history caught up to me this weekend, thanks to something that popped up on my Facebook page.

Among a flurry of posts on local pride, the Springfield Township Historical Society included a message extolling the hometown virtues of Flourtown.

“Downtown Flourtown could be Main Street, U.S.A.,” the post began. “Bethlehem Pike runs wide and prosperous through the business district. The straight white spire of the First Presbyterian Church is a beacon of inspiration on a blue-sky day.”

I liked that image of a white spire on a blue-sky day, so clicked on the link to enlarge the story.

It was a page-one article from the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1992, and the byline startled me.

At the top of the first column, clear as day, I learned that this piece of Americana was “By Peter Landry, Inquirer Staff Writer.”

I confess, I did not remember writing this story. But it came from a period I was roaming the towns of Montgomery County outside Philadelphia looking for feel-good material after two years covering night police in the city.

After I got over the shock of finding myself in a historical society post, I plunged in to see what I had to say about good old Flourtown.

The “hook” was a holiday bazaar at the local fire company, but in search of greater meaning I reached out to academic experts for social and historical context. They were from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Penn State in Happy Valley, and they informed me that bazaars had their roots in the “jumble sales” of 19th century Britain and the “sanitary fairs” that were run to raise money for sanitary conditions for Civil War soldiers.

“They’re not unlike the bees and the frolicks on the frontier,” noted the UPenn expert, who was a professor of folklore.

I was delighted to see I had once been able to incorporate the terms “jumble sales” and frontier “frolicks” in a single piece unearthed in suburbia.

I loved the wealth of detail I gathered for this one story, and was pleased to have made the observation that “A volunteer [fire] company is a community writ small — or family writ large.”

I was even more pleased with the overarching sensibility of what I had to say. Thirty-four years before this column, I was already looking for the Simple Pleasures that give us enjoyment, connection and a sense of belonging in a fractured world.

I was identifying with the continuity and community found in places like the village I grew up in. And I was celebrating the little things that make life richer and more meaningful.

At bottom, I was seeking peace and positivity and ways to share it.

I don’t know if that’s historical, but it’s my history and I’m still happy to share it.

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BAZAARS REFLECT HOME-TOWN SPIRIT

A full year ago, Audrey House knew what she would be doing the Saturday after Thanksgiving. For 12 months, she would fill the days of her retirement with needlework, woodcutting, painting and puzzles, and by the end of November, her stone Flourtown house would be brimming with crafts just waiting for release.

“I had to work extra hard,” she said of her effort, but now it is time for reward and satisfaction.

And on Saturday, she and 40 other artisans will get just that in the four big bays of the Flourtown Fire Company hall.

The occasion — the company’s annual ladies’ auxiliary crafts fair — will celebrate the holidays with an array of handmade items. It will draw crafts aficionados from miles around to the doors of this Montgomery County institution.

But most of all it will renew — just in time for Christmas — a tradition of community and volunteerism and hometown spirit.

For the holiday bazaar is as American as apple pie, traditional as Norman Rockwell.

For more than a century, it has been a staple of the church, the temple, the firehouse — of countless community groups. And it endures.

Defying the demographics that tell of an impersonal society, it preserves old tradition in a new age.

“We all look forward to it,” said House, whose husband, Bill, has been chief of the Flourtown Fire Company for 25 years. “It’s something the whole community waits for. People say, ‘Put the coffee pot on, we’ll be there early.’”

“It’s a nice get-together,” she said. “You see old friends you haven’t seen for a while. You make new friends. . . . All fall, people come up and ask ‘When is your fair now? I don’t want to forget!’”

In this season of the bazaar, let us pause to consider a bit of its past — and its present.

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Downtown Flourtown could be Main Street, U.S.A.

Bethlehem Pike runs wide and prosperous through the business district. The straight white spire of the First Presbyterian Church is a beacon of inspiration on a blue-sky day.

The Acme and the Wawa are in perpetual motion. Cisco’s Bar — “Est. 1876,” according to its sign — offers steaks, hoagies and libations. John L. Campbell, tree surgeon, has plunged ahead and strung garlands of green for the holidays on his building.

In the middle of the 1500 block sits the Flourtown Fire Company, grand and utilitarian, with tall brick walls, a white clock cupola (dedicated to former company president Walter H. Rohrbach) and four windowed doors showing the gleaming red engines within.

Next door is Mount Airy Auto Parts, with its sloped asphalt sidewalk that was once a ramp, a feature that reveals, to the close observer, its former life as the home of the Flourtown fire fleet.

The company, founded in 1910, is 100 percent volunteer, its modern Pierce pumpers and American LaFrance ladder notwithstanding.

Despite the shifting commitments of a town’s people, it remains a community center for the 48 men on the active company roster — a place where training sessions are held Monday nights, save holidays; a place men come with wives or dates to socialize around the fireplace or TV; a place where recreation means cobbling odd hours together to work on the company’s project, a 1936 Hahn pumper coming back to life behind the rescue unit in the fourth bay.

A volunteer company is a community writ small — or family writ large.

“I’ve lived in Flourtown all my life, and I’ve been in the company 50 years next year,” said Chief Bill House, 66.

“My father was in before me, and he was chief for a while. I was assistant chief under him, and then I was elected chief myself. My son Steve is a captain and my son Bill is a member, and my grandson Bill is active, too.”

Not to forget wife Audrey and her work in the auxiliary.

The auxiliary, with a core membership of about 20, runs flea markets in spring and fall, and a craft fair each November to benefit the company.

Last year, the auxiliary raised close to $5,000, said Patricia Valentine, auxiliary president and head of this year’s crafts fair. Nearly $1,500 came from the Christmas sale.

“They really are an asset to us,” Chief House said. “They are one of the more active auxiliaries in the area. A lot of companies don’t even bother with it.”

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The holiday bazaar — church, temple, grange or firehouse — has its roots in the volunteer activities of women philanthropists of the mid-19th century and in the “jumble sales” held in the 19th century by British churches.

“Bazaars arose, as did other consumer institutions after the Civil War, and even before with the ‘sanitary fairs’ run to raise money for sanitary conditions for soldiers,” said Simon Bronner, a professor of American studies at Pennsylvania State University’s Harrisburg campus and a specialist in folklore and cultural history. “Women would get together and sell things for the benefit of some charitable organization.”

“They are not unlike the bees and the frolicks on the frontier, where people got together and dramatized their neighborliness,” said Roger Abrahams, a professor of folklore at the University of Pennsylvania. “What made America great was its volunteer associations. . . . The real way American values were put in place was that everybody joined a lot of organizations.”

The concept of running bazaars as fund-raising events was adopted by a wide range of groups and organizations in the last century. Holiday bazaars became a way to help the needy at a painful time of year.

Now, any weekend from mid-October through December reveals how thoroughly communities have embraced bazaars: Dozens are scheduled each weekend for groups ranging from temples and churches to the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf (which had its holiday bazaar last weekend) to Christina Cultural Arts Center (which holds its affair Friday night and Saturday in Wilmington).

Beyond mere commerce, they serve as touchstones to a community’s roots, in the same way a Pig Stomach Dinner might speak to Pennsylvania Germans.

“The function of bazaars is related to suppers where the food they make represents the community because of their folk or cultural nature,” Bronner said. “And bazaars are intensive social experiences.

“People come together in a very intensive period, gather materials, price them and put them together not for personal gain but for some communal goal.”

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At the moment, Pat Valentine isn’t worried about the big social picture, or individualistic environments or intense experiences.

She will be happy if the 41 crafts people show up on time Saturday, and there are no problems with their assigned spaces inside the firehouse. She wants to make sure the cases of soda are cooled, and the coffee is brewed properly, and the finger food isn’t so goopy it gets on the crafts.

Friday night she will have crew members on their knees marking spaces with tape and put firefighters’ brawn to work moving tables.

“Everybody pitches in, in one form or another,” she said.

And everybody is looking forward to the array of crafts, from Audrey House’s needlework to Marge Wood’s painted miniatures and landscapes to Joyce Fetterolf’s personalized Christmas ornaments.

“And there will be a clockmaker from Allentown, a beekeeper with honey and bee’s wax products, a gal who makes chocolate who has done a chocolate sleigh and chocolate carousel this year,” Valentine said.

When all is said and done, she will know the auxiliary again has added to the funds the fire company needs to keep the community safe, or help those in time of need, or ease the anguish of a tragedy.

“Many a Christmas we have spent Christmas Eve with husbands out fighting a working house fire,” she said. “Or we opened presents in shifts as they went out on calls. You never know when something like that is going to hit.”

TOP PHOTO: The Flourtown Fire Company from its Facebook page. BELOW: The original Philadelphia Inquirer story about the Fire Company’s holiday bazaar.