fish on

because the original nephew's new home is just down the street from a creek and a pond, there is nothing to do but take the worms out of the fridge, coat ourselves in bug spray and take the whole family down to the water.

the sweetie, the original nephew's father and i have scouted out the area for fishability already, finding a shallow creek full of little fingernail fish and a drought-stricken pond the locals insist is full of catfish no matter what it looks like and it looks for the most part like mud. while the sweetie wisely stays on clearly marked park territory, the brother-in-law and i roam into uncharted territory and find the trail neighbors have promised goes right from the creek on up to the house. we manage to wade ourselves into a pile of chiggers somewhere on the trail and pay dearly for our recklessness. if you don't know what these beasts are, consider invisible frankenstein creatures cobbled together from ticks, fleas and mosquitoes with a little chicken pox sprinkled in. they are larval parasites. they live in colonies. if you find one, you've found hundreds. but this is a story for another day.

it is at least 95 degrees when we head out, an hour or so before dark, the parents, all three sisters, all three husbands, two little boys. the women in my family are, none of us, fisherfolk, but we are willing to sit ourselves at the edges of water and smell the evening air and watch the bats and lightning bugs while other folks try to trick fish.

there are varying levels of success in terms of the fishing, including two fat catfish caught one after the other late in the evening, the first by the sweetie and the second a minute later by the original nephew's father.  the sky gets deeper and deeper but the heat does not give in to darkness. nobody says much that late in the evening. i have been fishing many times and have come to believe that above all else, this is what fishing is.  the sound of the cicadas and the bullfrogs. the smell of the water and what's left of the day's heat. the quietness of standing there with people you know are yours and the promise of fish.

ice cream

this is the first of several adventures in the homeland.  it is not the first one that happened, just the first one i got pinned down.

if you are not from the homeland, anderson's ice cream means nothing to you, but i will tell you now that mr. john f. kennedy, among many fancy folks, thought it was good ice cream. i spent a fine part of my ice-creamy childhood summers sitting under a photo showing dennis weaver, cone in hand, laughing with a scoop-wielding ray anderson. you can't argue with john kennedy and dennis weaver.

until well after i left the homeland, anderson's lived out on main just past the giant bass at southtown and while they offered cones of soft-serve ice cream in vanilla, chocolate or swirl, you could also find just about an fancy flavor hard-packed ice cream you could want and the folks at anderson's had the ability to pack more ice cream into a cone than anywhere else. dense, dense stuff, that ice cream.

as children, we went there most with the grandparents, people whose job it was to spoil us, people who would say yes to any hot fudge sundae request. ray himself, son of the original owners, would hand over a cone, smiling, paper hatted. he always seemed thrilled to be offering up something that made people happy.

in college, we went there in clusters of ten or so when we were feeling unmoored, lost in our attempts at adult life. we'd wrap ourselves in the familiar- the huge glass windows under carnival neon lights, ray's white hat and apron, tubs of ice cream that never wavered- the same chocolatey chocolate and pistochioey pistachio my senior year of college as they were the last summer days before i went to kindergarten.

when anderson's closed more than ten years ago, i felt a tug, a little emptiness, even though i hadn't had that ice cream in a very long time. many of the anchors of my memory disappeared while i was gone away and i did not always notice at first. we are like that, all of us. raring to grow up and get out of a place, but expecting what we leave behind to stay still for us, waiting, like a photograph. we are indignant when our old world moves on, grows up, too.

so when the sisters begin sending photos of their children with ice cream and they put the word anderson's there with the photo, i am suspicious. when they say someone has taken ray's recipes and his old soda fountain and machines and has started making ice cream out at the candy house, i nearly faint. because when i say candy house the image in your head of a gingerbready little place out past town where you know elves are living and working is exactly what i mean. the place has been full of chocolate in all forms forever and huge jars of hard candy- rootbeer sticks and cherry sticks and wax tubes full of sugary colored liquid. imagine the source of all your childhood chocolate and the source of all your childhood ice cream moving in together. that's right. the sisters promise we will all go.

we walk in through the front door of the candy house in evening, when the cicadas are at their best, and the smell inside, indescribable but immediately familiar, covers everything. there are smells of chocolate and caramel and nuts and raisins and sassafras and smells i have always known but still cannot name. the smell is of candy you can't buy at a grocery store or at the mall. we walk through a side door and i am standing in a place i would have given anything to get to in my childhood. the ice cream lives in the room that used to be part of the chocolate making, glassed in for viewing. the glass, once smudged with the noseprints of thousands of children, is gone, and an ice cream counter stands where the chocolate making apparatus once waited for us. and i stand there, too, with my sisters and their husbands and the sweetie. we are right there in the chocolate factory. there, behind the low glass case, sit neat rows of ice cream tubs, chocolate, coconut, a glowing blueberry lemon, butter pecan, bubble gum.

the sisters have been telling me this ice cream is the same as they remember. they remind me one of the new owners worked at the original anderson's, that he uses the old equipment and the same ingredients the andersons fed to our grandparents, but i know how people are. they showboat. they can't help it. they will take something simple and lovely and will add to it to make it sassier. they will diminish it. so i walk the length of the counter. i look at every flavor and take my time but i know, even though i look twice, then a third time, slowly, at every tub, what i will get.

and when the man behind the counter asks me, smiling like ray, what i would like, i say i would like a coke float with vanilla ice cream. because there is little else in the world so plain in construction that is also so perfect. he hands me the tall cup heavy with ice cream and the coke foam at the top continues growing in a sparkling column after i take it so that i have to slurp the foam and slurp it again to keep it from overflowing. this is how things should be.

i scoop up some of the vanilla ice cream and the coke has already begun to turn it to crystals. we walk out into the hundred degree evening, three sisters, three husbands, and we sit at a round table filling ourselves with ice cream. and the sisters are right. it is the same ice cream. and maybe i am in college sitting on the curb at the south end of town with a pistachio cone and a skinny bunch of longhaired boys and black fingernailed girls on our way to a pool hall. mabye i am ten, holding the hand of my grandpa while he says the precious words hot fudge sundae and ray nods. maybe i am small enough to be sitting on my dad's shoulders wearing seersucker pajamas my grandma made, the only clothes wearable on such a hot night. it is all the same. i know where i am. i am home.

scout

the original nephew decides to come with us the second time we go to the shelter. he is a lover of dogs, surely, but there are also only so many days we are in the same town. he is excited to have us all to himself and so we take him with us to walk through the crates of dogs of all sizes. most are in cages alone but some are two or three to a cage, whole families of animals waiting. the place is suffocating and the nephew is uncomfortable, asking why the cages are so small, why the smell is so overwhelming. he knows his own great grandmother helped start this place along with a friend, two women in heels and fancy hats who were not above stealing a dog staked out in a yard without food or water. he knows very little about my own grandmother except that she stole dogs. and picked up wounded owls from the side of the road. that is enough for him. he knows where he comes from and why we are here right now.

the dogs whimper and bark and leap at the bars of the cages. i want them all. the sweetie points out several and the nephew points out most but when we go to a room of dogs off to the side, i see the dog i saw the first time we went to the shelter. she is small and white with black ears. she is alone and silent but her eyes are everywhere. the barking of all the other dogs spreads out into her cage and she sits. this is the one, i say. she is not the one i really wanted the first time we visited, but that dog, a black hound with a wing and claw where a front paw should be, is already spoken for. she is a second choice. but just like the sullen brown dog waiting at home, a runt and a leftover, i know she is mine before i even pick her up.

someone from the shelter hands me the dog and takes us all- me, the sweetie, the nephew and the dog, to a small room with a chair and a table and a tennis ball. the dog curls up into me and when i put her on the floor she is so unsteady on her legs she looks like a newborn cow. the sweetie is already worried. maybe she is sick. it looks like she is broken. there is something not quite right. she is just too small. but he can tell already there is nothing we can do but take her home so he goes to the front desk to put our names on papers and make her ours.

the nephew and i stay with the dog. she gets her bearings and begins to understand her legs. she picks up the tennis ball, nearly the same size as her head, and brings it right to me. she wants to be held. she wants to play. she goes so fast her back end legs go past her front end legs several times. she rolls over herself. she slides. the nephew says to me, several times, this is the right dog. he knows things like this. you made the right choice, he tells me and then, holding the dog close, he promises her that she's part of our family, that we're taking her home. he is reassuring all three of us. she believes him and so do i.

the sweetie is gone a long time and the nephew starts to get restless, to get worried. he heads out of the small room and to the front desk to find out what's holding things up. he wants to be out of this place. he wants this dog to start her new life right now. he comes back and holds the dog. he gets very quiet, scratches her ears, then asks me what will happen when we go to new york. i do not understand the question the way he means it and i say something about the car ride back or about house training, but that is not what he means. he knows these are her first moments as part of a family and he wants to know how she will feel when he stays where he is and we go home. i tell him she will miss him, but that it won't be like where she is now. i tell him we will all visit, that she will know who he is.

when the sweetie comes back and motions us to the front desk, the nephew is relieved. we sit on chairs by the window out front and a man takes the tiny dog to put a chip in her. in case she's without us ever again she can be scanned like a can of corn and people will know where she belongs.

it seems to take forever and the nephew wanders around the front of the shelter, looking at plaques and photos. he is still worried and cannot stop fidgeting until we walk through the door. but then she is ours, all ribs and sharpsharp teeth and shining eyes. we take her to the nephew's vet who scans her for us to see, then weighs all five pounds of her. and that is it. she will meet the small brown curmudgeonly dog. she will ride in a car all the way to brooklyn. she will listen to honky-tonk music like the rest of us.

the seventh of july

 all photos taken by the sweetie.

we spend the fourth of july in brooklyn. that's right. a dry borough in a dry city in a dry state. the days leading up to the fourth the tv spews out reports of illegal fireworks rings and massive fireworks smuggling busts and detailed information on what will happen to you if the city of new york finds your filthy self with a weapon of mass celebration. i understand, though. in a city with more than eight million people, random drunken explosives detonating is probably not the best idea. understanding something falls surprisingly short of being at peace with it.

i have never, not once, spent my own best holiday without something to light, without the smell of brimstone curling up into my nose. even in strangely explosives-conservative maine, we had sparklers on a dock. even there. but this year the holiday falls smack in the middle of a week when the sweetie, who has a civilian job, is not on vacation. so we cannot escape. wait, you say. there's the macy's fireworks extravaganza out on the hudson river. surely you can see those. but if you say that you are probably one of those folks who cannot imagine a fat slice of the eight million people who live here streaming down to the water, cramming themselves precariously onto piers ten hours early just to say they saw fireworks in america's finest city. well, look at some footage of dick clark on new year's eve. think 100 degrees. imagine it. 

i hope for the massive thunderstorms the tv has been warning about, the ones everyone out on those piers hopes will pass by. i don't care that i am selfish. i want the sky to explode. nothing happens. instead we lie on the couch with the window a/c blowing full force on us because it is too hot to be outside without a reason. me, the sweetie, the dog. we get burgers to go from down the street and enough fries to bury us. we do not even watch the fireworks on tv. i am an adult. i am surprised how broken i feel missing bits of spark in the air.

but in my self-pity i have forgotten. i have forgotten the catskills, forgotten the margaretville fire department and the carnival. i am a fool. because the margaretville fire department is celebrating their 125th anniversary just a few days after my own best holiday and they're doing it with a carnival that lasts most of a week, a parade down main street and fireworks that promise to be "giant". i don't really think there's much more to say. just look...

stamford f.d. band

andes f.d. has serious uniforms

you can lead a horse to water

you have to know two things here. first of all, when the hurricane ran itself inland last summer and pushed a river through the freshtown over in margaretville, i knew that store would come back. i say this because when it happened we were a month or so past a visit to the homeland, to tornado alley, to joplin. and what i know about that place is that the most important promise anyone made was to come back, to rebuild. no matter what. because people have enough to do without having to drive forty miles each way for food. so when i see that highwater bear welcoming cars into the parking lot again, i am not surprised. there is always something unexpected happening in that parking lot.

the second thing, maybe more important to this story but not more important to the larger world, is that horses and i regard each other with a healthy distrust. not the big old belgians, the draft horses bred for work and gentleness, but the horses bred for prettiness and cantering and riding fast. i am suspicious of their huge round eyes that always seem on the verge of rolling insanely back into their heads. i am uneasy around their hoof stomping and teeth gnashing and their constant nervous motion. they are equally suspicious of my timidity around them, my own nervous motion. they know i do not know what i am doing. this has led, several times in the past, to me clinging to a rearing, angry horse, to me tearfully clutching to the saddle of a runaway animal while someone else leaps onto the horse behind me, cowboy style, to steer the monster. this has led to my avoidance of mounted police, certain stalls at state fairs and some parades.

but donkeys are another thing altogether. donkeys, like draft horses, have been bred to work, to carry weight without tiring. they have sturdy legs and soft eyes and round bellies. and unlike horses, donkeys are eye level with me. which is why, when we pull into the freshtown parking lot, i see the donkey first. because of the grand re-opening of the store there is a stand selling locally made soap and another for a nearby produce farm and then, over at the corner by the water that looks so innocent and low these days, there's a pen with a donkey, two white chickens, something that looks like a baby yak and a horse. the animals are milling around in hay and a little girl stands with her father outside the bars of the pen, reaching through to touch the animals.

i am halfway there before the sweetie is even out of the car.  i reach out to the donkey and make a clicking noise i've heard people make around big animals. horses and donkeys do not ever make this sound as far as i can tell, but they seem to like it. i suspect they connect the sound to food. the donkey hears me and looks up a bit from the hay. i hold out my hand, steering clear of the horse that hears me, too. the donkey puts its stubby neck over the bars and i scratch its ears. if you've never been up close to a donkey i can tell you they've got the best attributes of a good dog in a size and shape you can ride. this particular donkey goes by beauregard, although his red halter is stitched in white with the word jack.

the chickens ignore me, ignore the little girl. we are of a similar mind, both of us unsure about animals so large but willing to risk losing a limb to touch the soft monsters. a man comes out of the grocery store with a large box full of produce. bruised peaches, scarred pears, a dropped apple, brown bananas. he hands me a green apple and tells me to hold my hand out flat. i put my hand over the bar and hold it flat, trying not to think about the slabs of teeth moving toward me. my hand stays steady and i look at the donkey but it is the horse that pushes its nose up to me and gobbles up the apple. the man hands a peach to the little girl and she cautiously feeds the donkey. the man hands me a pear. the horse leans over the bar and i offer the pear. he chews slowly and stays where he is so i scratch along the sharp bone of his jaw.

i know this animal is standing here because he is waiting for more food. i know this. but when the horse finishes the pear he stays where he is a moment, then leans toward me, resting his heavy jaw on my shoulder. his giant eye is right there next to mine and he stays there, the weight of his jaw holding me to the ground. no horse has ever been this still. no horse has ever chosen to do anything other than try to kill me. but this horse leans against me like the small brown dog tends to do, like he doesn't even care about food. and i am not afraid at all. not even a little bit.

lens, with occasional kayak

of course it's blurry. it's a flying bird.

one frog

we've been taking the kayaks over to a fat part of the east branch delaware river the last few weekends. the water is slow and wide and shallow, full of green waving plants that tickle the bottoms of the kayaks. overhead there are hawks, herons, red winged blackbirds, eagles and the occasional osprey. underwater are pickerel and not much else. roaming around at the edges are the best of animals. frogs and turtles. 

because the sweetie trusts me more than he should, given my track record, he has encouraged me to bring along the pretty new birthday camera. it lives in a very nice waterproof bag that clips onto the edge of my kayak and it is safe as long as it stays there, sealed up and still. but that is not the point of a camera.

two frogs

this is where the struggle begins. taking the camera partway out of the bag, slipping the neckstrap over my floppy-hatted head, getting the camera the rest of the way out of the bag, removing the lens cap without dropping it into the water (i've only dropped it once) and remembering to turn the thing on takes up enough seconds that most of what i want to take pictures of has already flown, hopped or swished on past by the time i get the focuser focused.

that's just fine, though. there's enough wildness out there that something else always makes its way in front of the lens if i just sit there a minute or two. and that is what i do, mostly. paddle along a while, then sit back and float with a camera pointed at nothing in particular. it is the sort of kayaking i like. it is the sort of photography i like, too.

one more frog

the sweetie fixes himself in some spot he determines is attractive to fish and he casts and reels in, casts and reels in. he will do this for hours if left to his own devices. and while he sits quietly i paddle around, eyes peeled, looking for wildness and trying to make it stand still.

forget-me-nots

what you need to know is that i am not at all skilled at wildlife photography. i cannot believe the animals i see don't want to sit themselves still and pose for me. i take hundreds of photos each time we go out, insisting that somewhere in all that volume will be a perfect photo of a dragonfly resting on a twig. i have, at last count, close to fifty photos of dragonflies. none are in focus.

the sky in the camera

but i do not care. i press on. i am the sort of person who wants to touch and hold and cuddle up on all the animals i see and this is my compromise, keeping them in this fashion, slightly out of focus, not quite properly composed, unevenly lit.

the sky looking like it does in real life 

i am, after all, taking photos from a moving craft. from a moving craft powered by mostly me and a little bit the most sluggish current in the entire catskills. i do what i can but when the paddle is lying still across the kayak and the camera is squished up to my eye, the water makes its own decisions, floats me by swamp irises just starting to bloom, by masses of forget-me-nots standing knee deep in still water. i snap and snap and snap pictures until the sweetie says how many pictures of forget-me-nots does one person need? all of them, i think.

the sweetie suggests i try the polarizing lens. i am supposed to turn it while looking at the sky to grab those clouds and make them look real, to bring out their ominous glory. it is one more thing to add to the whole routine that starts with balancing the paddle across the kayak and ends with a blurry photo. i cannot convince the sky and the land to work together yet, but i like parts of every picture.

lens

click and enlarge. the camera wants you to.

the sweetie got us a new birthday camera. because our birthdays are right up next to each other. now, i love the cameras and we have most forms of the technology from start to finish. pinhole to digital. but i am a lazy photographer. i have been uninterested in learning light and shutter speed and apertures. the sweetie does not believe this at all and so the birthday camera arrives with enough dials and buttons and lights to maneuver a space shuttle through a fairly sophisticated obstacle course.

he tells me about all the camera words, about how to make a dark room light and how to slow down a speeding bird. i do not listen. i set the button to auto and the camera rears up like an angry horse. this is not what cameras do and i am surprised. the camera is unhappy. it refuses to cooperate. my photos are dull. uninspired. mean. i recall something the sweetie said about opening the eye of the camera. letting in more light. making decisions about things. i try it, reluctantly. petulantly. i sigh and use the viewfinder which does not give me an automatic practice version of my photo before i shoot. my face is up against the little rubber eyepiece and there are numbers in there all along the bottom. the camera tells me things. it wants to help, but i have to do a little my own self.

i am not perfect and this is disappointing. all my photos are a little soft. i take countless pictures of swimming ducks and floating ducks and flying ducks. all of them are just smudges against sky and water.

 the sweetie changes lenses. he gives me an old lens from a real live film camera. i now point frankenstein's monster camera at everything. the two pieces communicate in broken images. halting. unsure. everything becomes a guess and attempt and another guess and attempt. the sweetie says i will get a feel for it.

he gives me a lens longer than my own arm that pulls birds right out of the sky and turns water droplets into whole worlds. at first i cannot see anything through the massive lens. i cannot take a picture of any object in the same room with me. not even in the same yard. i try to show the massiveness of mountains and get three trees huddled together. i do not understand the lens and its awful grabbiness. until a snail moseys by. slime-bellied and slow-moving, he is trying to figure out a flower. and the camera does what it does which is let me see right up inside the snail. it scoots up so i can see the dark lines of the thing's blood or maybe his optic nerve. stalk inside a stalk. 

i learn about depth of focus. i learn that the long lens has a very short depth of focus. probably. that is likely what i learn. two scraggly weeds living right next to each other cannot both be in the same shot at the same time with the same focus. no way. i learn that it is pretty to have one tiny thing sharp as a needle in front of the rest of the soft focus world. 

the sweetie shows me how to use the pretty lens. he catches two bees considering the same flower. he gets one of those same bees seconds later shaking grains of pollen- actual grains of pollen- into the air. each grain flying loose on nothing. floating out there. all of them separate dots of honey. 

i try to do things the camera doesn't understand. it is upset when i try to focus on a fish hook dangling in front of some roses but after twenty seven attempts, the lens bends to my will. and then i run wild. i capture every flower, every snail, every butterfly and bee in my little section of the world. nature is no match for me. i capture things i can't even see.

but my photos still are a little soft. i am not yet able to frame an image, think about light, dial everything in and then click without something slipping a little. something gives every time. birds still fly just a bit faster than my finger can hit a button. i am better with unmoving flowers and slow-moving snails. but the sweetie, as always, is right. i am smitten. i click the shutter when i exhale like a sniper.

i will not throw over the pinhole camera sitting on the kitchen table in front of four packs of polaroid film. i will not always want so many choices. but this new camera, with so many lenses and gadgets and buttons and dials is not what i thought it was. it is not a set of rules. it is not a new pile of ways to be wrong. it may be more choices than i'm ready for just yet but i will figure it out.  i am learning to see things with new eyes.