BJWL and I visited the Florence Griswold House on Thursday, house and gallery. I hadn't been in the house since high school but I think middle school, and the gallery is new. I passed it when I walked to my mother's office after being locked out of the house last January, but this was the first time I had been in it. The exhibit was Childe Hassam in Connecticut, though two of the three generous rooms held paintings by other Tonalists and Impressionists in Connecticut's past and present.
We took a tour of the house and looked at the paintings in the new gallery. BJWL might have wanted to stay longer, but she acquiesced willingly enough when I said that was all I wanted to see, that she could visit any time but I needed more lake. So lakeward we went. She sat in the shade and read the paper, and I swam and read my book, and she gave me shit for picking up litter (including a pull-tab from a can that must have lain there 20 years) and I ignored that, and we ate raspberries and blueberries and Fig Newtons. We also saw another snake of the same species (the same snake, so little and half a mile away?) on the path. It was a lovely afternoon.
Me in Uncas Lake.
In the evening I picked up CLH from work and we returned to the lake. When we arrove, there were two women and a bounding labradog whom I got to watch as I blew up the raft. When I finished the body, CLH picked up the still flaccid pillow and asked if I would like for her to do that part. But I did that part too, because camels having very large lungs. Then I became a camel tugboat and pulled her around the water. Staying all the way in was just fine with me, because it was cool enough that being partly in and partly out would be cold. Also stringing the two parts of my suit on my arm was warmer than wearing it: a suit holds cold water against your body. So that was a good last lake jaunt, with only my sister, at sunset, unhampered by stupid clothing.
Hallmark had a line 15 people long so I drove past toward the beach. In September I did more beach than lake for first time in ages, but that was September, warm water, cool wind, and no summer people or jellyfish. This time, we had to get past the parking guard. It was 8:15 and our presence in my Massachusetts rental car hardly deprived a resident of a spot, so the guard kindly let us ("We grew up here!") in. We looked for toenail shells (if they have a proper name I don't want to know it) and seaglass and when CLH suddenly straightened and hastened, I knew her object. When she turned to me with a length of brown kelp in her hand, I agreeably mimicked fear.
I was afraid of seaweed as a child. We have a picture of us on Hampton? Beach in New Hampshire, summer of 1977, me in a Snoopy bathing suit, pretending to eat some kelp as if it were bacon. That was the trip during which I conquered the Great Seaweed Fear. But lakegrass is still icky: where it is, so could snapping turtles be.
And then Hallmark's line was shorter! I felt virtuous because I got only a large serving of fries to my sister's cheese fries. But I also had my third milkshake of the week.
And that was that for Old Lyme bit.
During the Saturday-to-Friday stretch I spent in my mother's house, I went to Uncas daily. That's the important thing. I also gathered raspberries and freed catbirds from the netting around the raspberries. I discovered that, even though she has neither computer nor mouse, my mother has a mouse pad, because she placed it under my iBook's power cord so it wouldn't set my bed on fire. I ate a lot of Hallmark, whose new owners received the previous owner's ice-cream recipes but who now use inferior chocolate chips, though they still make good fries. I ate dinner with my mother and her husband only once. I brushed and pet and snuggled with Kitty, who slept with me a couple of times thereby living up to another of her names, Benedict Kitty. I alphabetized my sister's CDs and cleaned her keyboard and monitor. I didn't snap at my mother. It was a success.