We went blackberry picking in the back woods, ate them on quinoa.

Early in the morning, my arrangement of poppies against the sunshine.

This morning I will be sewing heads for soft-sculpt dolls to present at the Cumberland Craft Fair in mid-August. This afternoon I have a voice lesson. I have memorized Hugo Wolf’s Begegnung. After that, Nadia wants to paint.

This is the North Truro cabin where my family stayed on the Cape in the summer of 1950 or thereabouts. The photo was taken in 1990.
Author Robert Nathan wrote me that he often noticed the cabin as he drove toward the mainland from Provincetown. Nathan wrote the novel Portrait of Jennie in 1940, the year I was born. I am holding a first edition copy in my hands as I write. The book tells the story of an artist. It opens in New York City with the words, “There is such a thing as hunger for more than food…” and culminates with a hurricane scene set near Truro. I first read the story in the 1960’s, and my letters to and from Robert Nathan date from then.

The Truro cabin no longer exists. I seem to recall that it blew away in a storm but that may have been The Outermost House. I have heard that condominiums now overlook the Bay where our cabin once stood.

I write this entry as the remnant of another hurricane soaks our New England landscape, a storm that today took the life of a young girl at Thunder Hole in Acadia.

Mother wears the dark skirt and stockings in the photo with her cousin.  In the family photo, Mother is on the left, in the white dress. Please click on the photos to see them in larger format.

I was a year and a half old when this photo was taken.

The photo on the left is of me when I was about ten. My mother is wearing dark stockings in the other photo, taken in 1919 when she was eleven years old. Please click on small photo for a larger view.

This is the photo I sent my mother for her 70th birthday.