First Warm Day

The sun was so strong this morning that we opened the door to the porch to get some air during breakfast. By 10 a.m. the porch had warmed up enough to invite me outdoors for an inspection. There was the usual detritus: the slashed off branches of the Christmas tree; the skeleton of an ornamental tree, now deceased; and a clivia exiled to the porch for the winter on grounds of ugliness.

Instead of dealing with the former vegetation, I scrubbed down the porch chairs which were grimy with dirt blown over from the cornfield next door. Then lunch al fresco with the cat for company. The pitcher and the antlers on the table above live outdoors all winter. The coffee cup lives indoors with me.

Google and the Search for Facts

Above are the two volumes of “The Reader's Encyclopedia” published by T.Y. Crowell. Back in the day – the previous age not long ago when our fingers held the pages of books instead of skittering across content-providing keyboards – these books were bibles. Who was Gregory of Nyssa? What's an oboe d'amore? Or a good definition of pandemonium? I found the last one by opening up at random, often dangerous because bookies like me just keep on reading.

Google has removed the necessity of having the RE close at hand. Type in a phrase and it's all right there, or nearly. A friend who spent some years back in the 1970's researching and writing a book about her German family has begun working on the project again and finds that Google does in five minutes what it used to take her three years of letters, calls, library visits to discover.

Here's my question: If data/information makes it to the first “page” of a Google response does that make it “true” and the things on the second, third....infinite pages less true? More important, will this lesser information disappear? What happens when the lights go out? I'm keeping my Reader's Encyclopedia in case.

The books on my bedside table

The photograph is of my mother, Elizabeth Hubbard Lansing, who wrote 45 children's books with wild imagination, hard discipline and great respect for her readers. Sometimes they had to look up a word in the dictionary, an activity I expect the current publishing world would find onerous. She was the champion reader of all time.

Always Books

I've lived my life among books. Every room in the houses I've lived in has had at least one wall with a bookcase against it. We all read. My Uncle Gordon faced family visits by settling in a distant room with the battered copy of “The White Company” he read all the time. (There's Gordon on page 42 of a 750-page book, his sisters teased) My sister Lydia ate up books, literally. As she read down the page, her fingers worked at the edges, balling up the paper then popping it into her mouth. Our copy of “Gone with the Wind” was harvested this way so thoroughly that it had to be thrown away, something that never happened in our family.

When I was eight I resolved to read all the books in the children's room of the Providence Atheneum. Chapter books that is; I don't recall spending much time with picture books and indeed there weren't that many around when I was a little kid during the Second World War. The vow in the Atheneum lasted until the middle of the first row of A's when I encountered a book with a cover I didn't like the look of and a first paragraph I couldn't understand. I skipped it and don't remember feeling upset about it. There were so many more books to read. There always have been.

A High Wind

Everything's moving today. The wind has been from the northeast for over 24 hours as the big storm that dumped snow on the east coast moves off shore and curls down on Eleuthera. The sea is licked with whitecaps and the sky changes every 10 minutes. Outside the house, which hums and sings with the wind, the trees are bowing and dancing. The palms lean into the strong breeze, their tops streaming back.
Winslow Homer stayed here for a time and dashed off a series of watercolors that jump off the paper. The red flowers snap back and forth against a stucco wall, the sea visible just beyond. Objects, clouds, trees -- all look pulled and pushed about by the wind.
The flowers above look serene but they were fussing and wriggling around so much that I was certain the colors would all melt together. The camera's eye stopped it all in a blink.

Sea Surround Sound

We hear the sea all the time where we are staying. It becomes a sound like breathing, the intake up the white sand beach and the sighing release back into the bright turquoise water. Today we made an expedition to Lighthouse Point, 4 miles or so down a rough unpaved road to moonscape rocks and caves at the edge of the sea.

The colors are hard to explain in words or even in photographs. Here's the sea shimmering over the shallows at the point. It seemed like molten green glass, moving over the pale rocks.

Going into Paradise

I'm all for new places and adventures. But it's hard to beat the familiar pleasure of arriving in south Eleuthera for a mid-winter break. It was 28 degrees when we left Long Island (JFK) last week and anything but when we got here just over four hours later.

This is a peaceful, orderly place. One of the Bahamian “family islands” Eleuthera discourages flash and gambling which has been mostly limited to New Providence and Grand Bahamas. This makes life here peaceful, to be sure, but jobs aren't plentiful unless you teach or work for the local government and in the utilities offices. This is what my visitor's eye sees; there's more to understand. The kindness of the people we have met here is lovely and welcome.