Old Lyme, Connecticut (USA)
This is the place I still call home
even though I now reside in Denver. What I at first dubbed a lame tourist
site is defunct and I haven't found a new one. Anyway, once it had good
(and earlier, bad) photographs of the Congregational Church and other
landmarks, but not the Bee
& Thistle Inn (go figure). Here I was born and grew up and frolicked
at my beautiful beach and swam in my beautiful lake and occasionally fell
into summer rivers (or was rescued
from falling into winter rivers) and walked in my beautiful woods and read
every (ahem) book in the Old Lyme-Phoebe Griffin Noyes Library (photographs
to follow one day).
I have constructed a page for my high school class, Lymen
1986. I suggested to Bruce and Kim Gray Abraham that we do something
in August of 1996 for our ten years and we did. Well, they did, because
they're there, and they did a great job. I only did the page, which I thought
would be a good way to reach out to people, and a way for those who can't
just drop in on the locals to find out what's new with their former classmates.
If you're from the Lyme-Old Lyme High School Class of '86 and would like
me to add a bit about you, just email me
and tell me the scoop. When I get brilliant with CGI, I will maybe do a
form.
Denver,
Colorado (USA)My husband, RDC, and I moved to Denver in
August of 1995 with our cockatiel, Percy, for RDC to start working toward his
doctorate in English at the University of Denver.
If you want to know anything about dragging your entire life behind you in a
truck trailing a Tercel and trying to entertain a bird along the way when the
driver is recuperating from a broken clavicle and Jerry Garcia dies, just ask.
Denver and Colorado have a lot to offer. We have become members at the Denver
Art Museum so c'mon over for a visit so we can use our guest passes; flown kites
in Sundial Park for the international One Sky, One World Festival; and spent
as much time as we could in Aspen, where my sister, CLH,
has lived. There is also a zoo and a bunch of other stuff we haven't explored
yet, some of which Denver Arts to Zoo
covers. The best things about this city are some of its libraries and all of
its views of the mountains. If you can be in a library looking at the mountains,
why, that's even better.
Denver is flat. When it does snow here, which allegedly it can do more than it has done since I've been here, the city doesn't plow. It has an image to maintain and leaving an inch or two of snow on the roads boosts that image. When it does snow here, it snows dry and squeaky. You can ski on it and it doesn't freeze to your car in a crust, but snowfolk rarely live here. The flatness means that the sledding in town disappoints, but you can drive an hour into the foothills and get some serious droppage.
There aren't many trees and many of those here are non-native, and too young to be good climbing trees. The cottonwoods are native and provide excellent climbing, if you can get high enough into one to reach branches.
There are fewer mosquitoes, no deer ticks, no poison ivy, and no underbrush. In New England, Europeans loosed hogs into the forests native Americans had maintained with fire, and they clearcut a lot of other forest, so now regrown woods have a dense layer of tough, pig-proof undergrowth, most of it with prickers.
By "fewer" mosquitoes I mean that unless you deliberately go where there is water, and you have to go deliberately since Denver is arid, there are no mosquitoes. You can hang out in the yard without torment. If you choose to give blood to the cause, there are plenty of canals and creeks for your bleeding pleasure.
Boston, Massachusetts (USA)CLH is now back in Boston, living near the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and managing one of the best Italian restaurants in town, on Newbury Street, and probably taking her constitutional along the Esplanade and generally being a lot closer to the ocean than I. In the Public Garden are set two superb children's books, The Trumpet of the Swan (E.B. White) and Make Way for Ducklings (Robert McCloskey). Louis the Swan does not have a statue, but Mrs. Mallard and her children have, right at the corner of Charles Street. I should find a link to the Citgo sign for this page. CLH went to Boston University, whose students get cultish about that sign; and when I spent a summer in Boston, at night I would take my journal out to the balcony and write and watch the moon on the Charles and the Citgod go through its patterns.
Provincetown, Massachusetts (USA)The ocean, the dunes, whale watches, artists, theatre, tranquility, unrest: what a perfect place. A WWW design firm with the good luck to live there has this to say about Provincetown. I went for the first time when I was 20 and fell in love with the dunes and the town, plus I loved the ego-stroking of having the attention of both sexes. RDC and I went there on what turned out to be our first date and we were engaged there also. In the summer of 1996 when I was home for a week I made RRP go with me. My solace: Race Point with my best friend and my kite. And the Tillermans lived here too.
Aspen, Colorado (USA)Besides "Don't Californicate Colorado," another rallying cry in Colorado is not to "Aspenize" the rest of the state, particularly the other ski areas. Denver is my first experience with not being a native of the area and I know I'm part of the problem. But Aspen doesn't seem so bad to me; in fact I like it a lot. Everyone is friendly, which isn't always the case even in Denver; it's beautiful; it's expensive but has lovely things like lots of public gardens, trails, parks, free buses, free newspapers, and a terrific public library. However, I do know the income disparity is such that all the service workers live downvalley and have to commute in every morning. And I suppose if I just toured there instead of staying with my sister and meeting all of her friends, perhaps I wouldn't find it so friendly.
Rocky Mountain National Park (Colorado,
USA)Rich and I have been trying to get to the Park at least once a month since we've been here. I can't believe all this is only two hours away. Unfortunately it's only two hours away from a lot of other people too; but no matter how far they travel, it seems at least 50% of them think it's their obligation--or their right--to feed the animals! Schmoos. In case you don't know, feeding animals in the Park is illegal and harmful to the them and to their environment. The word "park" as in our National Park System does not connote "a place to be just as much of a schmoo as you are everywhere else" but actually a preserve of nature, for nature's sake. Birds that eat human handouts don't do as good a job reseeding the forest; animals that expect Twinkies (yes, I've seen people feed Twinkies to chipmunks) become malnourished on that diet when it exists and then starve when it doesn't exist (in the winter).
If you do know and you don't care, you don't belong on the planet, let alone in the park. Go away.
(The desire to feed wild animals is a part of the sentiment some humans have that humans have dominion over animals, and that we are all-powerful and therefore ought to husband everything else, and also, seemingly contradictorily, that (much like a single vote) "this one little bit can't make any difference." These ideas are not contradictory because they both are part of a larger whole: human (particularly USAn) short-sightedness.)
LeMans, FranceMy favorite stop in my trip to Europe, home of my bestest bud DEDBG and her husband SPG. Sometime I will be brave and ask him to take me rock climbing.
Last modified 20 November 1997
Speak your mind: lisawherepenguindustdashcom
Copyright © ljh