Woulda been even more enjoyable at 7-something than at 5-something. Thanks for nothing, eccentric axis!
A frosty cold night
A windshield, a lattice fence
And then a sunrise
Samirah Evans
On a recommendation from the guys at last Wednesda’s open jam at the VT Jazz Center, we went to Samirah Evans‘s autobiographical show last Friday at the library.
So how did a New Orleans jazz singer end up in Brattleboro? I appreciate a long story, and she told us one, but I’ll cut to the chase. She was flooded out by Hurricane Katrina.
Accompanied by piano and bass as she was, it might have been a nice evening of music, perhaps a little too low-key and heavy on the slow songs. The comically white, sporadically arrhythmic, but earnestly well-intentioned backup singers lent a whiff of farce.
Unfortunately, I thought the sharing of her personal stories went a bit far… more than I needed to know, and, I suppose like anybody’s unembellished personal story, without any discernible point or lesson. Good shit happens, and bad shit, and unexpected shit.
Someday I will go to a regular Samirah show for drinking and dancing, and I think it will be more fun.
A dark night,
a masked, ring-tailed bandit, and a stash of birdseed.
Seriously, there’s a certain kind of overfed sheltie you see at trailer parks, and this raccoon was fatter.
Needless needles
Not what you want to see on your morning walk.
Stuff I Missed
Nicole and Kevin’s Harry Potter party
The season’s first little snow
Back home
Just in time for no trick-or-treaters
Peak Foliage
Early in the year, I heard some predictions that the drought-like conditions we have experienced would cause a lousy leaf season.
Instead, it has been spectacular. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been daily wondering whether we had hit the peak… it’s a tradeoff between having the most leave is still on the trees, versus having the most leaves at their most dramatic colors. Often, a storm will come along and knock some leaves down early, so if you are waiting and waiting for the most color, you might miss it.
On Thursday, we snuck out for a nice lunch at the Four Columns Inn in Newfane. The Newfane Square is about as picturesque as you can convenient we get, and the colors were amazingly vibrant under the perfect blue sky.
Henrietta Frankenstein
For obvious reasons, Henrietta is a well-known figure in the Retreat Cemetery, which has been newly spruced up thanks to a recent grant.
I had to go look up what the “Æ” means in this context: it’s an abbreviation for anno aetatis suae, which in this context means that she died in the 67th year of her life.
Tower Power
On Sunday, Sherri recruited someone who really knows their way around the Retreat Trails to lead us a short hike. The tower is always locked, but we ended up finding a view that let us imagine what must be like if you could get in there and go up the spiral staircase up to the roof.
Unsafe at any speed
Happy Halloween!
TGIF
After a hard day collecting souls it feels good to sit down and have a beer.
Happy Birthday Moo
I stole some of your creepy dolls
From your room and strung them up
On the retaining wall so you’d see them
And know I love you.
Let them eat flowers
Birthday week continues with a beautiful cake from Amy’s and an effulgence of homegrown nasturtiums. They are more peppery than we realized, especially the stems, but somehow it worked with the cake anyway.
Thanks, honey!!
Brattleboro Adventure – the Auckland Edition 