Driving to Maine, We Begin

We were not in a hurry.  As we left the City on August 4, the N.Y. Times ran this story and I remembered how Grandma Moses once said she would have raised chickens if she had not started painting in her seventies.  Not an early fan of her work, I moved toward it as I aged, began art-making myself.  Chicken-raising would not have been my alternative to art-making.  What would I have done?

August 5, my 73rd birthday, Ron saw Swiss Army knives in a Cambridge, Mass. shop window and remembered how I'd lost my much-loved red one a few years ago.  Loaning the scissors to someone in the Starbucks knitting circle.  This beautiful blue one shines a small red beam when the logo is pressed.  I'd bought my first pocket knife when our daughter Rachel was a baby.  The town of Oberlin had one of those iconic hardware stores.  We had no sense 38 years ago that these would soon be rare.

The idea of having my own pocket knife was very liberating for me in 1968.  And so practical:  knife for cutting up apples for baby on car trips, scissors for yarn work.  Lately I've met other mothers who followed patterns in Woman's Day for "knit bathing suit for your little girl."  The result:  an embarrassing family moment at the lakeside as water dragged suit to Rachel's knees.  I think she's forgiven me this and other funky ("...that's your kind of thing, Mom") notions; she surprised me with a comment on the previous post.

Comments

[writerdd]

Good thing you are not flying. Right now, 60 year old woman is being held because she had the nerve to bring hand cream on a flight from London to the US. They diverted the flight because the pilot declared an emergency over this terrible faux pas.

What a load of horsesh*t.

Donna