sledding
We’ve had a sparse cover of snow for 10 days now, enough to sled down the hill outside our door. Jakobi is always up for this and she corralled Ambiana and me this past weekend to make a few runs.
Jakobi has no fear and goes way up the path to begin her descent.
Ambiana is brave too and starts high up!
I being more experienced in the world having suffered broken bones and such am wary of those concrete blocks stacked along the run and don’t start quite as high but still manage to make it the farthest across the lawn.
winter walk
We have a beautiful walk just out our backdoor that takes us past 3 cascades. The one in the picture being the 2nd one. It then climbs a short steep ridge above a small oxbow in the creek that has carved an impressive amphitheater in the mountainside which leads us to a high point in a clearing on the neighbor’s property which has a beautiful sunset view over the pond and across to the Worcester Range and its foothills. The walk then crosses over to the top of what we call Treehouse Hill and descends steeply through a hemlock forest to the treehouse where one can either continue down to the road or just East and cross the creek via a 12′ plank and return home.
fty
Here I am outside the FTY truck in Lexington MA. This picture was taken by our site host Lucia whom I love. I almost supplemented my work at FTY by becoming a liftie at Stowe and went so far as to be hired and complete all the online paperwork but when it came time to actually drive to Stowe and finalize my employment I had 2nd thoughts. Actually it was more like 92nd thoughts unable to sleep the night before weighing all the pros and cons. In the morning the cons won out and I called and withdrew my application. The cons were: Working 6 days a week between both jobs and only having Wednesdays off, the hour commute each way, the early morning starts that would mean waking up at 5:30am Thursdays through Mondays, the lack of anytime to ski as well as any free time during the week. I can’t even remember what any of the pros were with the exception of $200 more dollars a week but that didn’t seem worth it for all the above mentioned reasons.
Gamma Update
I spoke with Susanna who just returned from visiting Gamma. She went because she thought Mom was on her deathbed but when she got there Mom had rallied and over the course of the time Susanna was there was doing much better. She asked Mom if she was ready to die and Mom said NO! and Susanna, not being a doctor mind you but an extremely empathic person does not feel like Mom is going to die in the near future. The thought of a Montana road-trip is still in our heads but most likely pushed back until Spring or Summer when it will be easier, safer and more fun to travel.
Kevin
What I am Listening to
Van Morrison is my favorite rock star, musician, singer songwriter. His music has been around my whole life; sometimes in the background, sometimes in the 90’s on my Sony Walkman cassette player, these days on my Bluetooth speaker during my Sunday Night Bath Ritual. The first song I can recall hearing that I knew was Van Morrison must have been Brown Eyed Girl or maybe Domino. In my late teens when I worked as a lifeguard at Bowman Pool in Toledo Ohio one of the maintenance guys who was 5 or 6 years older than us was the drummer in a local band in called Loved By Millions. We had just turned old enough to go out to bars and we loved to go see them play and the songs I remember most were raucous covers of both those songs which always got the crowd all rowdy on their feet, dancing and singing along.
My favorite bands in my youth were Van Halen, Kansas, Foreigner, The Eagles, Billy Squier and U2 …mainstays of classic rock. When I graduated college in 1987 I took a trip to England to join my girlfriend Marcy who was there with her family on business. When that wrapped up we had 3 weeks to ourselves to travel the UK. We visited Oxford, Stratford-On-Avon and Bath and on a whim bought tickets for the Pilton Pop Festival better known today as Glastonbury. We stayed in a B&B and took a local bus to the festival each day.
This was my first big outdoor musical festival and we wandered the festival grounds between the three stages taking it all in; the camping, the partying, the wending, the food and of course the music. I remember best the set by Los Lobos because they played La Bamba which was also a movie just released at that time. We had to catch the last bus back to our B&B at 7pm each night which meant we missed the musical headliner on both Friday and Saturday nights.
I remember the Saturday evening we left early to catch our bus vividly. We had gotten some Indian Food (probably my first time ever) and it didn’t sit right with me and as we made our way out the long lane to the road where we would catch the bus I had to make a detour into a field to relieve my bowels. Van Morrison was onstage at that time and as we left and I shat in a field he opened his set with a 30 minute instrumental version of Moondance which followed us as we made our way by lane and field to the bus stop.
Van Morrison next came into my life in 1991 when a friend gave me a copy of Van Morrison’s Greatest Hits Volume II to take with me as art of my Sony Walkman’s musical collection on my 4 month backpacking trip in New Zealand. This was a solid collection of tunes that kept me company on nights in some of the most scenic places I had at that time ever been.
Upon returning from New Zealand I came across 2 LP’s by Van Morrison at a used record store, Toucan Records on Central Ave, in Toledo Ohio and bought them. That summer I embarked on a romance with a coed at Bowling Green State University and these albums provided the soundtrack for many memorable nights of passion in the East Toledo basement where she lived. The songs “I’ll Be Your Lover, Too” from ‘His Band and The Street Choir’ and “Wavelength” from ‘Wavelength’ spoke to the yearning romantic in me and under the spell of these songs and the others on these LP’s I believed I was forging an unbreakable bond with my lover which would sweep us both out of Ohio into the wonders of the world that I experienced both in the music of Van Morrison and in my backpacking journey through New Zealand the previous Winter.
Alas it was not to be and I left Ohio by myself on a Greyhound bus bound for the West Coast and Alaska consoling myself with another Van Morrison cassette, “Saint Dominic’s Preview” given to me by my older brother Chuck. “Almost Independence Day” and “Listen to the Lion” got me through the Long Alaskan Night that is Winter and helped me see the immeasurable beauty in 3pm sunsets,. 18 hour moonfilled nights in forests of snow covered trees and 10am sunrises.
In the 13 years I spent calling Alaska home I, among other things, dived deep into the local music scene of open mic nights, disco dance parties and the incomparable local outdoor music festivals that sprouted like mushrooms in the brief but intense Long Alaskan Day that is Summer. There was the Cantwell Music Festival, The Girdwood Forest Fair, the Fisherman’s Love Ball,The Kasilof Music Festival, Girdstock and the grandaddy of them all the Talkeetna Music and Blues Festival. There were plenty of local bands like the Sportin’ Woodies, Jammin Salmon, The Denali Cooks, Gangly Moose, Nervis Rex, The Soulsearchers, Yukon Ryder, Pambuya and The Photon Band/Photonz to fill out the roster at these festivals.
Van Morrison did not come back into my life again until I was preparing to depart from Alaska in 2004 for Ohio to be near my son Gaelen who was two years old at the time and living with his mother in Lancaster Ohio. The plan was to drive down the AlCan Highway to the lower 48 in my recently purchased 1993 Ford Ranger which had a tape deck. I was stocking up on tunes for the journey at the Goodwill on Dimond Blvd in Anchorage when I came across a cassette of ‘Poetic Champions Compose’. I played that cassette everyday on the trip South along listening to the radio and my audiobook of Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain’.
Even to this day when I listen to “The Mystery” or “Alan Watts Blues” from the album I am taken back to those long, beautiful and cold days (the heater in my truck failed at the beginning of the trip) traveling the empty highway south through the mountains and taiga forests of Alaska, The Yukon and British Colombia. I experience again those drawn-out days of bright blue skies, endless rolling white landscapes, mountains both near and far, the stunted spruce forests and even the lynx crossing swiftly the road on a big bend just outside of Tok. That tape became the soundtrack to that trip.
Was it a coincidence that Poetic Champions Compose was the album Van Morrison released in 1987, the year I was at Glastonbury with Marcy? Our relationship was one sided and dysfunctional. We fought a lot on that trip and our relationship dragged on for almost another year. As my life changed in the following years and I became a backpacker I often fantasized that instead of continuing down the lane to the bus stop I instead turned back and walked into that 30 minute Moondance. How would my life had been different if I had just cut my losses and thrown my lot in with my fellow festival goers? At the least I would have seen an epic Van Morrison concert performance even if I did slink back to the B&B the next day.
When I found myself in Boston that summer of 2004 I visited Nuggets, my favorite record store while in college at BU and found a double cassette copy of Hymns For The Silence which was added to my daily dose of Van Morrison. I realized at that time that Van Morrison was still releasing albums and when the next one, ‘Magic Time, came out in 2005 I bought the CD. Since then I have acquired his albums as soon as they are released.
2006- Pay The Devil,
2008- Keep It Simple
2012- Born to Sing No Plan B
2015- Duets: Re-Working The Catalogue,
2016- Keep Me Singing
2017- Roll with the Punches
2017- Versatile
2018- You’re Driving Me Crazy
2018- The Prophet Speaks
1n 2018, over 30 years since that 30 minute instrumental Moondance in Glastonbury, Colleen and I went and saw Van Morrison at the Harborside Pavilion in Boston. Click on the underlined link to read my post about that night.
2019- Three Chords and The Truth
In addition to getting every Van Morrison album as they were released I have in the ensuing years also acquired Van Morrison’s entire back catalog and am working through them in order of release immersing myself in the songs as if hearing them for the first time. It is a slow process and I am currently at Tupelo Honey released in 1971 when i was 6.
I have all of Van Morrison’s albums on an old IPhone6 which I use exclusively as an MP3 player. During my weekly Sunday Bath Meditations I light a candle, add some lavender and epsom salt to the bathwater, smoke a bowl, (apple pipe, wooden match, fine Cali Bud grown by my sister Sue), put my Van Morrison catalogue on shuffle and let what songs come as may steep themselves into my consciousness while I float upon the thoughts that emerge into being as I soak in the hot water of my own private ocean. Through heat and sound, music and water my mind, body and being are cleansed and rejuvenated. The songs serve as an aural tarot reading, searching them and the thoughts they evoke for meaning and answers to current situations in my life both conscious as well as unconscious.
