Into the Green Mountain State

This has to be one of the most beautiful lake scenes I've set eyes on in America. This is Vermont, home of cows, cheese, maple syrup, the Von Trapp family and Bernie Sanders. Remember Alistair Cooke's Letter from America? And how often his relaxed and hypnotic tone would eulogise Vermont, the quintessential rural paradise? Exquisitely pretty it is too - I get the feeling that the cows in Vermont are cleaner than the muddy ones in western New York. They're probably house-trained and take showers before they go out into the fields. Solar-powered showers, of course, as Vermont is very green - in every sense. Vermont is not quite the fairytale, particularly where economics are concerned but never mind about that now, it's the summer holidays and hubby and I have been there for a wedding, followed by a short trip to lands beyond on which more later. Meanwhile, the above lake must be a contender for the most unpronounceable lake in the western hemisphere. It glories in the name of Lake Memphremagog and the Canadian border runs right through it, so you need your passport if you go boating.
To be continued....

Off to the Ballgame

   My American husband had been saying it for a long time, “You really should go to a baseball game”.

“But”, I said, “I have been to a baseball game.”  On my first visit to America, way back when,  a friend dragged me to see the Los Angeles Dodgers. I fell asleep.

  Hubby was insistent. I’d frequently said that, while I’m not the world’s biggest cricket fan, I do like the  idea of traditional cricket on an English village green. 

 “So”, he said, “Let’s find the equivalent. A local game, not too commercialised,  where we can get close to the action.”
  So off we went to the ballgame.

   There is no equivalent of an English village green in our western New York small town. Instead we headed for the town stadium, with a rudimentary  grandstand at one end and an uninterrupted view over the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains at the other.

 We paid five dollars for two tickets and found ourselves a vantage point.

  The local team are called the Oilers, from the town’s oil-producing origins and were big in the 1950s. After a gap, they were recently revived  by a community-spirited lawyer, who’d gone to the local high school and Franciscan university and wanted to encourage college students with professional aspirations to come and spend the summer playing baseball,  getting plenty of practice and possibly attracting the attention of a talent scout.

  The Oilers were playing the Dodgers – not the LA ones but a team from the next county.  I’ m not going to pretend I entirely understand the rules of baseball, although there are some similarities to cricket with a bowler ( sorry, pitcher) and batsman ( sorry, batter)  and innings and runs. The batters run from one base to the next  in a square – or “diamond”. If they do it all in one go, it’s a “home run”, though, as they are constantly caught out, this doesn’t happen too often.   

   And a bit like cricket, baseball is swathed in nostalgia and dreams of a golden age,   a “pastoral” game, according to hubby. Having said that,  it’s a very American sport – though it’s hugely popular in Japan. 

 

   Some of the Oilers,  who, I was disappointed to see,  were wearing long  white trousers rather than the traditional knickerbockers,  came from as far away as Florida – they were probably enjoying a slightly cooler summer.  In a nice touch, one player from Rhode Island had a grandfather who’d coincidentally pitched for the Oilers in the good old days. There was a stand selling drinks and merchandise and while it wasn’t exactly commercialised,  the tannoy intermittently boomed out plugs for local businesses – the  owner’s law firm,  a dental practice promising  “that hometown smile”,  Primo Limo  and its “professionally attired chauffeurs”.

 The small crowd clapped and cheered politely,  not unlike a village cricket crowd, though with  occasional transatlantic exuberance,    “C’mon Oilers, let’s go!”, shrieked a woman beside me,  “I’m not having a very interesting day!”  

As teams switched – and they frequently did – from fielding to batting,  kids ran up for autographs. Our town is proud of the Oilers. Until the very last innings, I couldn’t understand why. Then I did.

  With the teams level at 2-2,  our lads suddenly gained momentum.  In a moment of glorious inspiration, the batter hit the ball right out of the ground, the Oilers got a home run and finally won 4-2. 

 The crowd erupted. I didn’t quite grasp what had happened but I joined them. I’m glad we stayed till the end. And I didn’t fall asleep once.

Spotted in Buffalo Harbour

 Is that what I think it is? The zoom doesn't work too well but yes...

It's a dog. In the background, the USS Little Rock and some of Buffalo's more attractive housing. Well the pooch looks happy enough. Perhaps he should be driving the boat.

And The Inexorable March of Autumn

What a surprise! Last time I struggled through the jungle to reach this particular apple tree, it didn't seem to be offering anything. Now it's positively groaning. But there's something sad about little green apples getting rosy. The nights are drawing in. I used to feel that way about the Edinburgh Festival and the Glorious Twelfth (12th August - the start of the grouse season in Britain for the uninitiated. That's the start of what my American friends would call the hunting season.) The chipmunks are already laboriously stuffing the peanuts I throw them into their cheeks and scurrying them off to their burrows.  We'd better get the snow shovels out.

The Stealthy Return of the Foggy Morning

 And our innocent lane turns into a journey to fantasy land.

 While the early morning light effects make for a spooky forest.

And rays pierce the mist like the dawn of time

This isn't a sinister crop of some futuristic superfood but just the ubiquitous weed, goldenrod, getting ready to bloom.

While grasses wave far from any beach

And trees morph into monsters.

 But wait, what's happened to my wooden friend? He's twisted his head round to look at something.

Whatever it was, I was too late to see it.

A Politically Incorrect Sign?

My friend with his stone hoover, along with various other assorted machinery, have moved further up the lane, probably engaged in some flood-prevention ditch-dredging. But I'm surprised you're still allowed to say "Men Working". Even if they did look like men to me.  Do they still have those "Men at Work" signs in Britain? Or do they now say "Persons at Work"?  It reminds me of a friend, years ago, who offered to "man" a stall at a very PC charity fair and was soundly told off. She was a woman, actually. Here they do have a lot of women manning, oops, sorry, personning, the flags that tell you to stop or go before the roadworks, so a woman might well be employed to person a stone hoover. As I write, there's probably some bureaucrat in the Highways department being paid to think that one through.

A Peaceful Summer Turns Fearsome

The garden was in the midst of a glorious, endless summer, Not quite Garden Walk standard but looking pretty chipper, though I say it myself.  Here's Jack the Clematis showing off

And some brazen lilies I'd forgotten I planted

The monarch butterfly for once agreed to pose and wait while I ran for the camera

 My only grumble - I had to get up early to water. It's been a very dry summer. Hubby remarked that there's been no sound of insects chirping at night. All those biblical hordes of cicadas - the kind that emerge only every seventeen years - which we'd been threatened with never materialised either.

Well, as they say, be careful what you wish for. The weather forecast warned of "severe thunderstorms" and something called "small hail". I didn't like the sound of that. This morning was close and muggy, almost suffocating - like trying to swim through cotton wool. Then all hell broke loose.

Niagara Falls had changed location and was descending from the gutters

Right onto my poor flower bed

 While the garden path turned into a lake

Quite impressionist - it just lacked a water lily or two

And when the sun came out and I ventured out back,

to find thst yet another calamity had befallen our hapless sumac tree

Which had already been struck by lightning once. Old sayings obviously don't apply here. Except it probably wasn't lightning that did for it this time. Maybe it was small hail.
Meanwhile, a horrendous noise started up on the lane outside. I noticed a flash of yellow going back and forth, back and forth and that infernal beeping of a reversing heavy vehicle. Eventually I had enough and marched out to protest - to see the vehicle joined by a chap with a handheld device that looked like a large hoover. "Just clearing the stones off the road", he said. I looked and couldn't see much except a lot of tiny pebbles. The sort you see on most unmade roads around here. Anyway he didn't have much success in hoovering them up and departed soon afterwards, probably to warn his friends that the British were coming. Your tax dollars at work, as hubby would say.