I’ve talked about learning to sew for years. I want to be able to make clothes in the colors and styles I like rather than forcing myself into procrustean fashions.

This pandemic and the stay-at-home orders (and my lack of work and ensuing free time) has been a boon to me, a self-learner. I’ve been learning Swedish since February–that would be project number one– and am still loving the great puzzle that is a foreign language. When the cold weather forced me out of project number two, the garden, I began spending more time at the piano and got my singing voice back into shape.

All that was pleasurable and none of it scared me. Sewing does. I actually did learn to sew fifty years ago and still shudder at the experience. Part of it was because my mother was an adept seamstress. Without getting into the psychology of me and my mother (See 99 Girdles on the Wall), I’ll just say every session ended in tears. I took a class at Singer and managed to put together a lovely shirtdress, which actually fit, but which my mother criticized for being too short and showing the tops of my fishnet stockings.

My neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything was, in her working life was a dressmaker for a tony boutique in Seattle called Opus 204. Asking her for help with sewing would be kind of like asking Bill Gates to come over and show me how to turn on a computer. Also Gwen is not a teacher. She’s told me this and I know it. The endless patience I have for students she has for machines. The only times I’ve seen her Wisconsin reserve slip is when she is over here trying to figure out what I did to a machine. (Did you take a picture of the way it’s supposed to look? Did you take note of how you took it apart. You did WHAT with a file?)

The Old Majestic

But Gwen was excited about me learning to sew. She brought over a beautiful old Majestic machine for me to mess around with. It was hard to thread and the bobbin wouldn’t wind because the tire, the little ropey gasket thingy, was broken.

“You can wind the bobbin by hand. I’ve done it a thousand times.”

As horrifying as this sounded to me it did bring with it the reassurance that Gwen was not put off by machines and their quirks. There was always a way to do something. But after many trips over here to see what the hell I needed now, she finally declared the machine more beautiful than workable. She found me a refurbished Singer at a steal of a price and I ordered it.

“Tell me when it comes!!!” she said.

“Yeah, fine.” Someone was excited. I was actually a little excited but the travails with the old Majestic had brought up memories: broken needles, seams wrong sides together, blood, the frustration, the tears.

The machine came, I unpacked it, set it up, fiddled around with it, tried some seams. Gwen came over and did a fancy hem and left the needle placement to the left. I was several projects in when I realized the needle should be in the middle. I had been peering around and under and over, trying both pairs of glasses and then no glasses to set the needle in the right place.

Jag syr. I sew.
Combining one learning experience with another.

When I want to learn something, I dive in head first. When I run into difficulties, I asked questions. As a last resort I read instructions. If I determine I have bitten off more than I can chew, I back up. I get there in the end, enjoying the ride. This is the crucial part: I have to enjoy the ride or I will never get there.

With sewing I went right to what I wanted: clothes. I found some lovely green broadcloth and a pattern for a shirt that said “Very Easy—Beginner.” Uh-huh. Never mind that it had a collar and fitted sleeves and buttonholes.

“Lay it out but don’t cut it until I can see it,” Gwen said.

Gwen came over and rearranged all the pattern pieces, asking me questions about checking the cross grain and measuring and marking all the dots and arrows.

“Don’t you just line the little thingys up with the selvidge?” Selvidge was the only Big Important Sewing Word I knew.

Gwen thinks with her hands. She looked at me wordlessly and re-did everything.

I cut out the pieces for the shirt. I learned how to do fusable interfacing, something that didn’t exist 50 years ago. I sewed the long seams. After a dozen trips across the street to Gwen’s house, I managed the placket up to the point where it had to join with the collar.

Then there was the day I sat for a whole hour (I know this because I had bread rising at home) watching Gwen correct the collar. “You should be taking notes,” she said. “You’ve been asking the same question for three days. Take a picture of this.”

“I could,” I said. “But I don’t understand what I’m looking at.”

To myself, I thought, “This is not fun and oh my god, now I’m afraid of Gwen.”

She and I had a conversation involving the phrase “skill level.” I realized that I didn’t have one. Sewing was not just taking a class and sewing seams. There were basic techniques, apparently starting with the words cross grain,that I didn’t know. There were levels of skill. I wasn’t even in kindergarten here.

It’s like singing. Everyone seems to think they know how to sing because hey, they sang in the church choir, they learned guitar in the 60s and they sing along in the car. A lot of people sing just fine without a single voice lesson. But there are complexities to singing, there are skill levels and there is always more to learn. I’ve been studying singing for 50 years and I still have times when I’ve discovered something new in my voice and I think, “Wow, what did I think I was doing all this time if this is singing!”

I couldn’t sleep that night but I got up with a resolve. I folded up the shirt and the pattern pieces and put them out of my sight. I went to Seattle Recreative and bought a beginner’s sewing book. A Next Door request for scraps of fabric brought me sack loads from women who were clearly cheerful sewers (unfortunate word) who didn’t sob over their machines.

I told Gwen, “You’re off the hook. I am going to start from the beginning and do every Girl Scout project in the book until I achieve a Skill Level.”

Gwen said, “I am so relieved. I hate having to be nice for so long!”

I started with mitered corners on a table runner. I got three out of four corners mitered before I almost cried over the fourth one. I folded up the runner and put it with the green shirt.

Mitered corners

I found a beginners project on the Singer website. It was all straight seams. This was fun.

Project Straight Seams

I moved onto fabric boxes. The first one I made could have belonged to the crooked man who lived in a little crooked house. Still the boxes seemed doable and there were skills to be mined from it. I kept making boxes, getting better with each one. That’s where I am now, still making boxes. Still having fun.

Little boxes

I’ve been trying to get back to writing for six months. Nothing propels me so much as the need to confess a scorching embarrassment or to shapeshift something painful into something funny. So here goes.

My story starts about a month ago when I took my octogenarian friend Kay to what I call the Green Cross store—one of those marijuana/CBD shops about which governors in red states frown at our governor. I took her to the one I go to regularly to get a tincture of CBD for nerve pain. It looks like a candy store in there and all the edibles look like fun. But I only ever get the CBD tincture. On the day I took Kay to the Green Cross store, there was a sale on fudge, which sounded appealing to both of us.

After we picked out a tincture for Kay, she announced, “I want to see the fudge.”

The counter guy plunked down a jar of a dozen pieces. Enough to send unsuspecting innocents to the emergency room. We hesitated over it.  Counter guy said there were singles. I exhaled and we each bought one tiny piece of fudge.

A month went by. “Have you tried your fudge yet?”

“No, I’m afraid to.”

“Me, too. I think I’ll wait for a draggy day and then have a nibble.”

The other night I didn’t get much sleep. When I got up, I declared it a draggy day and I would try the fudge. At 1:00 I was leading “A Zoom Variety Hour” for people with memory loss and their caregivers and later I had a few students to teach. It’d be nice to have a little boost. Green Cross counter guy said when his partner ingests the fudge, she cleans the entire house. My house could use a clean, too.

I bit off a piece the size of a pea. An hour later, I had not started to clean the house. I bit off a piece the size of a cashew.

It was 12:30. I needed to set up for the Zoom. For the Variety Hour, I perch my computer on a music stand next to piano and train the camera on the piano keys. I have my water bottle handy and my piano glasses on. Before any of this, I would have warmed up my voice, laid out my music and played through all my songs.

For this particular Variety Hour I had dug out “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” per a request. It’s not a difficult piece but I only knew the last line and something about Brown’s Hotel. I had gone over the words a few times and had played the accompaniment a few times before the fudge.

So anyway, as I said, it was 12:30. I stood up and went to the bathroom to brush my teeth and put on my eyebrows. By the time I got there I was pitching around like a ship in a storm. I grabbed the sink and tried to concentrate on why I was in the bathroom.

“Teeth,” I said aloud. “Make-up.” I looked at the clock. “Time. I think.”

I moved the computer to the piano. Then I sat for the longest time trying to think what I needed to do. I couldn’t remember where I kept the address to the Zoom meeting. I lead the sessions but I don’t host them. When I finally found the address (where it has been for eight months), I stared at it, thinking, “That’s not the right thing. That’s for the other thing. Where is the thing I need for this thing?”

Then the computer told me I had no internet. I banged the wifi icon over and over until it released its opinion that I did have internet.  The modem looked fine. I hate when this happens. I looked at my watch. I had 5 minutes. I was sweating. In my sedation, I reset the modem and restarted the computer and sent a cryptic, apocalyptic text message to someone (the person who hired me and pays me) to say I was having computer trouble, didn’t have the host’s phone number and couldn’t find the zoom address. Only it wasn’t nearly so coherent.

I got my internet access back and finally got clear that the thing that I needed was the thing that I thought I didn’t want and I clicked on the Zoom address. After some connection whirls I was thrust into the Hollywood squares where every last person in every last box was grinning at me. Why were they grinning? Why were their faces so big? I heard the phrase “fearless leader.” They scared me.

I spit out an apology and an explanation that heavily favored blaming the computer. I said hello to everyone, one at a time, trying hard to be normal. Inside I was screaming, “Stop, just stop, the less you do, the better off you’ll be, sit still, SHUT UP.”

For the Variety Hour, I play and sing the welcome song (Zippa dee doo dah) and the goodbye song (Happy Trails) and a handful of standards, folk songs or showtunes that people have requested. Other people lead a couple of songs each so we get a nice variety of voices and songs and instruments.

I was okay on “Zippa dee doo dah” because I don’t need the music. But when I had to play and sing “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” the notes swam on the page, the pages danced around and the keyboard moved back and forth so the keys weren’t where I needed them to be. My voice came from somewhere on the other side of the room.

The fudge had apparently made me thirsty and I regularly gulped water throughout the hour. It crossed my mind that everyone thought I was drinking gin and that I was drunk. Through the entire hour, I waited for my own denouement when I would have to explain that I was stoned.

I shoved all my songs to the end so I didn’t have to do them because we ran out of time. While each performer was singing, I tried to craft a non-crazy response to the song and the singer. This was an arduous task and I was not best qualified to do it.  Every time I opened my mouth to respond, my voice moved around and came from a different part of the house, a neat trick that I didn’t appreciate.

Finally we were saying goodbye and they were grinning at me again with big faces and big teeth. When I finally got out of the Zoom Variety Hour, I crept to the couch and lay in torpor for a few minutes. Then I texted Kay and told her I had eaten a third of the fudge and was stoned and she should stand down until we could talk.

The next day I called two people who had been on the Hollywood Squares Zoom to ask if I had seemed off. Both of them said they hadn’t noticed that I was in any way different than usual. This is not comforting.

Entering our third month of Sheltering-in-Place here in Seattle, I locate myself in the week by when I last showered: I showered today, I showered yesterday, I can’t remember when I showered or that’s really a funky smell. My hair has entered a new length division where it now looks reasonably good.

I love hearing what projects people have embarked upon to stay sane. Puzzles are popular. A friend brought over a bag of eight. I have a box of six to go out. Thousand piece puzzles. We aren’t slouches.

My friend Kay has been sorting her house from top to bottom, something she’s been talking about doing for years. The difficulty with sorting is that you have to be willing to get rid of things. That’s been her problem. I told her I’d take the cookbooks, look through them and then put them in my Little Free Library. She and her daughter turned up, masked, with a hand truck and 12 boxes and bags of books. I hauled them onto the parking strip until it rained.

I thought that by now I would have improved my piano technique and learned to sing whole operas. I’ve instead been spending hours in the garden—that’s what gets me out of bed in the morning—and apropos to nothing in my life–learning Swedish.

It all started with the Kavanaugh hearings last fall, which left me disheartened, depressed and disgusted. I wanted to go somewhere far away from everything that is American. I subscribed to MHZ, the international streaming service that provides foreign language films to Americans who never mastered a second language and need the subtitles.

I watched all the French films and television series first because French is the language I know best after English. I watched a lot of the German ones because I had been trying to up my German in order to sing lieder more easily.

Then I discovered Swedish television. It was the peculiarity of what I watched first that gave me the sense of Sweden being a place where everyone is blond and outdoorsy and it’s always mid-summer. Beyond that I loved the sound of the language. It was musical. It had soft edges unlike German. It had less mouth noise than French. Its vowels were Italianate.

For months, I went through all the Swedish films on MHZ. I’d tell my neighbor Bill I was watching Swedish films and we’d smile. Both of us remember a time when a “Swedish film” putatively meant pornography in the U.S. (Remember the pother around “I am Curious Yellow?”)

Enter Karin. I first knew Karin when she brought an elderly charge to sing with All Present. We began trading my watercolor class for her Rubenfeld synergy work. Then private music for Swedish language lessons.

Karin is a retired physician from Sweden; she wasn’t sure she could teach the language. That didn’t matter to me. I learn best when I can just ask questions. So that’s how we started. How do you say hello, thank you, I am, you are, what’s your sign? That sort of thing.

Karin grew up in a small Swedish town called Nora. I looked it up on Google maps. It looks a charming little place up country from Stockholm. In my research, I learned that a woman named Anna Maria Roos wrote a little poem about Nora in 1909 that became a well-known children’s song: Tre Små Gummor:

Tre små gummor skulle gå en gång
Till marknaden uti Nora.

The song says that three little old ladies once went to market in Nora.“We’re going to have fun, ride the carousel, eat caramel and frolic all day in Nora.”

I thought how fun (roiligt)! I would learn the song and surprise Karin with it. I found the music and was confronted with more Swedish than “hi, how are you.” So I found children singing it on YouTube. For two days I listened to Swedish children, puppets and farmors with guitars singing about the tre små gummor, which are the three little old ladies, but for the longest time existed in my mind as three small goobers. I’d get on the trampoline my friend Eileen gave me and put on the three small goobers. Or out in the garden, I’d say to myself, let’s see how much of three small goobers you’ve got memorized.

Finally I sang it to Karin and she was (appeared) delighted. The song has become my reference point for pronunciation. I know how to pronounce the e in tre, the u in skule and the o in Nora. If I can keep my wits about me I can pronounce other words with those vowels. Any sound from the three small goobers transfers. It’s one of the wonders of music

I do find the language musical. I draw quarter notes and eighth notes above syllables to help me get the emphasis in a word or the melody in a phrase.

Which reminds me of another reason I am attracted to the language. All the Swedish religious songs are about nature and the beauty of the world and the tunes and melodies are beautiful. Swedish people sing about the stars in the winter. At the end of April they sing goodbye to winter and welcome the spring. They don’t appear to be washed in the blood of the lamb as I was growing up. It’s aways mid-summer and they are always eating caramel and frolicking in Nora.

My garden is keeping me sane. I’ve been out there for several hours a day since the middle of March, grubbing in the dirt and blowing my nose on the inside of my t-shirt. Maybe that doesn’t sound quite sane but without the garden I feel certain I would have gained 100 pounds and would have no trouble sheltering in place because I wouldn’t be able to get out the door. As it is, I’m eating Nutella with my fingers straight out of the jar.

“We’re living like animals,” I told my neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything, which makes it sound like Gwen has inside knowledge about living like an animal, which is not my point. Gwen and I have watched a movie together every week for 15 years. Usually we are cozily ensconced on the sofa in her tiny “plaid room” but since the room itself is barely over six square feet, social distancing has nixed this tradition. Now Gwen and I watch movies via Zoom. The movie is on the full screen and there’s Gwen in a little box up in the corner. If she talks I can mute her. (n.b. to Gwen: I haven’t yet.)

The consensus among women these days seems to be that we are never strapping on a bra ever again. That goes double for heels. Heck, work from home, you don’t even have to get dressed. On one late afternoon Zoom piano lesson I saw pajamas and slippers walking away from the ipad .

“Is your dad still in his pajamas?”

“No, those are his ‘house pants.’ ”

That’s what we’re calling them these days.

Laundry is a cinch because I wear the same clothes all week. And showers? In what decade did we get the idea –from Madison Ave- that we had to shower every day? I scrub my knees and ankles when I come in from the garden and call it good.

Just before the OK Chorale’s weekly Zoom, one of the sopranos (OK, Nina rhymes with Dinah) told me she wouldn’t be joining us because she didn’t want to comb her hair. This was hilarious because we all looked like a collection of stray cats except for Don (bass) who had cut his own hair and he looked like Mia Farrow.

I texted my beloved hairdresser (Ross): “As soon as you can work again, put me down in your first slot. Then just tell me when it is, I’ll be there.”

As it is I’ve cut the sides of my hair twice. I’ve been pin-curling my bangs. I go out in the garden with a scarf over the pin curls and feel like my mother going to the grocery store in the 1950s.

I miss the small routines of connection. I miss my painting friends, Susan and Madelaine, with an ache. We have painted together every Tuesday morning since 2007. Susan isn’t allowed out of her building. Madelaine came over last week to pet the cat. We sat 6 feet apart in the sun room and had coffee while Artemis lolled all over her. It was a pleasure for all three of us.

I miss my neighbor Bill coming over almost every day to chat and bring me another section of the New York Times. He does come over and we do chat but at 6 feet apart. Not the same.

I miss Kay. Oh god, I miss Kay. She’s my token non-wired friend. In some ways, she’s non-wired. Her partner says the two of us together are dangerous. We have drinks and gossip once a month at her house. She provides the scotch for me and the vodka for her, Hershey bars and potato chips. I bring the Muenster cheese. It’s a ritual. Who knows how it evolved to Hershey bars and Muenster, but it did and I love it. Kay is not on the computer and secretly (or not so secretly) resents everyone who is.

In some cases, the connections have been reconfigured: Andrea and I have found a way to have our monthly happy hour on Zoom. Nancy and I still walk around Green Lake every Friday afternoon, sucking our masks into our faces.

The aforementioned Nina and I have been doing weekly laps in the cemetery behind my house on Saturday, also sucking our masks. This in lieu of monthly dinners at Saffron using the monthly coupons from ValuePack. We review the “six things” Nina does every day: take a shower, put on clean clothes, spend (at least) ten minutes tidying up, get some exercise and two others I can’t remember.

“Who says we should do these things?”

“I read it in an article somewhere.”

The shower and clean clothes seem a bit excessive unless we are talking about more filth than one can acquire lying on the couch watching Netflix.

cartoon by Hilaire Squelette aka Madelaine Ramey

There are two Marks and Spencers in all of Cornwall; we stopped at the one in St Ives to get whatever we might need for the last evening of the holiday. We had to choose food for two meals, use the toilets and have tea in the café– one always has tea in the café when travelling with Sue and Wendy—and then use the toilets again.

Wendy had booked us into a caravan park in Pentewan (pronounced Pen-chew-an) because the favored B&B in Megavissey was unavailable. This was to be a contrast to a week in a stone holiday cottage on the west coast of Cornwall. Remembering a caravan park in an episode of Inspector Lynley, I was disappointed that ours wasn’t tackier –for the, you know, full experience. To make up for that, tho, it was charm free.

Caravan Park, Pentewan

A caravan is a mobile home. If it’s planted somewhere, that’s a static caravan. The ones on the go are called touring caravans. They are both basically sardine tins. Our caravan purported to hold as many as six people but only comfortably if they were tiny children or supermodels. The bedroom doors all opened into each other so we could only come and go one at a time. Just moving in for a night was a French farce.

My matchbook room held two bunks, each the size of half a twin bed. I had to walk sideways to get to a bed and once actually in bed, I could have passed for a mummy. When I wanted to turn over I moved in installments, first the top half, then the bottom, then the nightshirt and always bumping a wall or headboad. Around midnight I was awakened by explosions of fireworks down near the Megavissey harbor. Fireworks! Wendy and Sue got up to watch them but I wrapped my head in my pillow, which knocked over the lamp, and groaned.

The next morning we went into the little fishing village of Megavissey. Sue chatted up the proprietors of the favored B&B while Wendy and I walked along the quay. I remember Wendy’s mother, Pamela saying, “Megavissey is a lovely little village.” She and Mervyn would come from Harrowbarrow of a Sunday, have tea, have a wander, have an ice cream and sit together on a bench.

In Hurley books I had a long talk with Emma (“I’m Emma with the scarf. I’ve worked here for 20 years, always wear the scarf”) about tracking down used and out of print books about the French resistance.

at Hurley Books

Wendy found a café called Tea on the Quay. While we waited for Sue to join us, I used a toilet around the corner and had what Wendy later referred to as my “toilet experience.” I was seated and ready to unseat when I couldn’t find the toilet paper. Then someone started to enter the room and I had to reach forward and push the door shut. When I finally located the toilet paper, I couldn’t figure out how to flush the toilet. Finally I pushed open the door where a man and woman stood waiting.

“I’m so sorry,” I brayed in my crass American accent. “First I couldn’t lock the door, then I couldn’t find the toilet paper and now I don’t know how to flush and I don’t want you to have to come in.”

The woman was very nice. She stood in the doorway and pointed at things that might be the flush until we found it. I slithered past her companion as he looked politely at the boats in the harbor.

Megavissey. photo by Wendy

Sue joined us at Tea on the Quay where I ordered for us at the counter. When I sat back down, I found myself facing the couple from my toilet experience so I shaded my face and made everyone move. We had a splendid view of the harbor and I had the best gluten free scone there ever was.

Tea on the Quay

After Megavissey we drove through Gorran and High Gorran to Gorran Haven, which seemed to be all pretty much the same place. One narrow road winding around cottages until it got to the beach.

Sue, looking at the map: “When we get there the car park is on the left at the top of the hill.”

Wendy: “Is it?”

Elena “Is it?”

Sue: “We parked there the last time.”

Wendy: “Did we?”

Elena: “Did we?”

The quay at Gorran Haven

The tide was in and the brick quay was wet and slick and without “namby-pamby guard rails” as Wendy observed. It would have easy to topple in, that not being a fall my nurse friend Susan would have anticipated when she exhorted me: “Don’t fall!”

I was much more comfortable on the sandy beach where a game of fetch was going on: two terriers chasing a stick into the water and bringing it back together, each with an end in its mouth. They dropped it in the sand and danced and barked until it was thrown in again. Two little mates, Alfy with a deep bark and Ruby with a high yip. Over and over they fetched the stick and pranced back with it. On one trip they dropped it at my feet and shook water all over me.

Wendy drove us home through Harrowbarrow, the village of my great- grandfather. It looks so different from when I was there in 1980 and 1991. It seems like less of a village and more like a bunch of cars parked along a narrow road and obscuring a few cottages.  The cottage I stayed in with Hazel, the first member of my English family that I met, looked unloved. It broke my heart.

We arrived home late Sunday. I was due in London the next morning. I didn’t want to leave and because of this I didn’t want to pack so I stuffed everything in my suitcase figuring I would sort it out in London because god knew there wouldn’t be anything fun to do without Wendy and Sue.

Covid-19 (and my own laziness) has interrupted my travelogue of last September’s UK adventures.  I’d been a week on Islay in Scotland, then drove with my cousins in Somerset to Morvah, Cornwall.  It seems a very long time ago and it has done me good to revisit my journal and remember. Here is installment thirteen:

Towards the end of the very windy day wherein a pirate mended my glasses, we went on a search for the Merry Maidens, a circle of standing stones the guidebooks all say are in a field indicated by a stone marker and a wide area for cars. We found a Celtic cross near a stile and a sign that said Public Footpath. I salivated at the public footpath sign and was eager to climb the stile and look for stones in a field.

Over a stile

“I think this is it,” I shaded my eyes to make out something at the far end of the field.

Sue came over the stile. “I think that’s a gate.”

Wendy came over the stile. “That’s a gate.”

But, but. My footpath.

I always want to walk the footpaths, which in many cases just means you are allowed to walk the edge of the field, which is not going anywhere notable like a magical well or thousand year old merry maidens.

We got back in the car and drove slowly around two joyless hikers, the man with his nose in a paper map and the woman looking resigned. A quarter of a mile down the road was a stone marker, a wide space along the side of the road and a huge sign that said Merry Maidens. One could even see the standing stones from the road. The guidebooks couldn’t have told us all this?

Merry Maidens standing stones

Merry Maidens

Over the stile we went and approached the circle of nineteen stones. An officious man had his camera and his patient lady-friend in his force-field. A few free-spirited women danced. We all tried to give each other a chance to photograph the maidens without being tacky tourists in the background.

The most elegant maiden

The joyless couple arrived. The man, his nose still in his map, stopped obliviously in the center of the stones. He was skinny and wrinkled, his back straight, his neck curving forward like a shepherd’s staff. A Dickensian undertaker had wandered into the scene. His resigned wife stood outside the circle and we all waited for him to get the hell out of our photos. After a long study of his map, he and his wife moved on without having even looked at the Merry Maidens.

When we had the Merries to ourselves, I watched Sue take photographs and then stood in her place to take my own. Wendy sat on a rock, thinking her own thoughts.

She photographing the Merry Maidens

“Wendy, you are like Patience on a monument,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. It’s something from Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, I think.”

“Pithy on a rock cake,” Sue said.

“What’s that?”

“You know rock cakes? Pithy are the little curls of lemon or orange rind on the top that everyone flicks off because no one eats them.”

“So you’re saying that Wendy is superfluous?”

“Isn’t that what you said?”

“No, I said she was patient.”

Wendy, through this whole exchange, remained the Head Teacher, not taking this nonsense seriously. She knew she was the only one who could drive.

From the Merry Maidens we went to Lamorna Cove. I felt immediately that this was the place I wanted to be left alone for three days to watch the surf, take walks and write. A small beach with a few houses and one café, it’s hidden away at the end of a narrow wooded road flanked with thick hedgerows. The Dickensian undertaker and his wife clomped past us as we headed for the café, apparently still not the least bit interested in their surroundings.

Elena at Lamorna

We arrived back in Morvah late afternoon in time for Sue and Wendy to get a short rest before packing themselves off to a concert in St. Ives. I was never so glad in my life that I elected to not get a ticket. I craved a quiet evening.

I was watching an episode of Silent Witness when Sue, of Alec and Sue, the owners of the cottages came in clutching her guest book for us to sign. Sue is gone during the week so this was only my second time seeing her. She’s in the medical field; we thought a nurse. She certainly has a bit of the head nurse about her: cheerful, bracing, interested, no nonsense and always with the catch phrase, “Well, I’ll love you and leave you.”

She asked me about our stay. We reviewed the various appliances and devices Alec had been called in to fix. She loved me and left several times before the front door closed on her. I went to bed and didn’t hear Sue and Wendy return.

In the morning we made a shopping list for our last port of call, one more stop on our tour before returning to Butleigh. We needed milk. Three different kinds of milk: lactose-free for Sue, skimmed for Wendy and whole milk for me. To go with our two different kinds of tea.

As a goodbye, I bought all the catnip mice in the church across the road. I found the graves of the sisters who had built Trebeigh cottage: Maude and Laura Annie Noye, may they rest in peace.  I was mooing at the cows when Sue joined me.

“That’s not a very English moo,” she said. “You’re not getting the vowel right.”

We delivered the signed guest book to (the other) Sue where we found her, Alec and James cleaning a cabin and watching a soccer (I think, I don’t care) game on the telly. I told them that a pirate had mended my glasses.

“Oh you mean that guy over at Land’s End?”

“I don’t think he takes that costume off when he goes home,” our Sue said.

“Oh he does,” said James. “I saw him on the cliff path with his lady-friend and he looked normal.”

We loved and left everyone, loaded up the car and headed into St Ives for a final stroll and shop before heading to our last destination, worlds away from Trebeigh Cottage. Next up: a night in a caravan park.

At times when I have been seriously depressed and feeling like nothing short of oblivion is going to help, I have engaged in the homely task of listing anything I could scrape from the quotidian to appreciate. In this surreal time, optimism can be in short supply. So as a public service, I offer the following small pieces of life to savor:

A person who has a wonderful college roommate who has introduced her to the utility of the word quotidian, can now throw it around in a blog post.

A person can safely make a Fu Manchu with facial depilatory and be reasonably certain her neighbor won’t be recycling his New York Times her way in the next ten minutes.

A person can go to Trader Joes at first light, find the line stretches three blocks down the street, get in line and spend five minutes getting her phone and earbuds organized when a staff person comes along and says senior citizens are allowed to go to the front of the line.

Since all the TV talkers are working from home, a person can see Claire McCaskill’s kitchen, Stephen Colbert’s dog and Chris Hayes’s two small children.

A person has permission (finally, after being raised by a Mother Who Went Through the Depression) to throw away tissues after one (or two) uses and doesn’t feel obligated to re-use them until they are the consistency of wallpaper paste.

Even though a person misses her beloved hairdresser, she owns a pair of scissors and will do penance later.

The streets are safer for bicycling than any time since the late 1970s.

If one is the director of the OK Chorale and has a stack of different colored bandannas for use in chorale performance, she can saturate and contrast balance her face mask with her wardrobe.

Everyone in one’s neighborhood is nice. Not that they were un-nice before but now they are saying “good afternoon” to one’s butt as she works in the front garden.

An endless parade of families, children on bicycles and dogs on leashes stroll past a person’s house at all hours. It’s as though everyone is rediscovering life.

These are all good things.

I thought of my mother the other day when I went to the market and realized that planning a meal meant starting with what I could find on the shelves, not with choosing a recipe from a niche cookbook. Women in my mother’s generation cooked whatever was on sale.

I’m not being snarky when I say my mother would have relished the current Covid-19 crisis. One of her most quoted Bible passages was from Matthew 24 (I had to look up the address but there was a time when I knew it by heart): “there will be famines and plagues .  .  . you will hear of wars and rumors of wars.” This was a signal that the end was coming and the end meant Jesus was coming. Plagues and wars and rumors of war. Plagues and wars and rumors of war. It was a mantra.

The wars and rumors of wars have actually never stopped in the 2000 and some odd years since the book of Matthew made the cut as being the word of God, according to some ancient males on the other side of the world, adjudicating in an ancient language. But this Co-vid 19 outbreak would probably qualify in my mother’s mind as an End of Time indicator. As a plague or as a “rumor of plague” if she wanted to go that route.

When she was feeling angry and thwarted by our ebullient mischief, my mother used to say “What you kids need is a good depression.” By this she meant we needed to experience some deprivation until we came down from our high horse. She had been there and done that herself in the 1930s and as a result my mother always had enough toilet paper to supply a public rest area for months. She had a basement packed with food past its sell date, which I would starve rather than eat, but where toilet paper is concerned, I grew up in a house of plenty.

When I heard that people were toilet-paper-panic-buying, I wondered if they all knew something I didn’t. Was there a shortage? Maybe I needed to lay in an extra supply. At Bartells in Edmonds, the toilet paper wasn’t even being unpacked onto the shelves. It was in warehouse boxes by the front door with a sign limiting you to four packages. I bought two even though being my mother’s daughter, I had plenty at home. Thus I came to understand how panic buying (or selling) happens.

I doubt there was any panic going on, however, on St Patrick’s Day when I got an email from Licorice International promoting a one day special: a box of Irish Potatoes with every order over $30. If you don’t know what these are, Irish Potatoes are not Irish or potatoes. Neither are they licorice. They are wads of coconut and cream cheese shaped like tiny potatoes and dusted with cinnamon. I knew of them but didn’t know if I would actually like them. And here was a “free” box of them.

I occasionally order Salmiak Rocks (salty/sweet Dutch licorice) from Licorice International, hence the email. I was currently more into bubble gum cigars and just wasn’t feeling the licorice. But the free box of Irish Potatoes that I didn’t know if I would like! Let’s see $30 worth of licorice. That’s 2.2 kilos of Salmiak Rocks, what would that be, one pound? Three? I wasn’t sure which way the ratio went. And $30. Now? When I have no income because I can’t have students in the house?

Blog Reader, I ordered five pounds of Salmiak Rocks and got my free Irish Potatoes. They are creamy and taste buttery and it makes me smile to see them. It also makes me smile to know I have all that licorice in abeyance.

Oh and by the way, I am teaching on Zoom. Tell all your friends.

Still at Zennor ( see previous post) we had lunch at the Old Chapel Café. I discovered Cornish crab, which I afterwards ordered every chance I got. As we were leaving I got engrossed in seeing how an old iron ship part functioned as a doorstop. I pulled it away and watched the door swing in. Then I settled it back and joined my cousins in time to hear Sue say, “She’s playing with the doorstop. Next she’ll be doing a video and saying ‘Gwen would love this.’”

St Senara’s Parish Church is known for the Mermaid Chair.

The Mermaid Chair at Zennor

Wendy and Sue mentioned it so many times I was expecting to see a statue of a mermaid lounging on a giant throne in the center of the nave. But it was a quiet little wooden bench about 400 years old with a carving of a mermaid on one side. St Senara is a Celtic saint like St Just and St Erth and I believe St Bridget of Sweden.

The legend

This particular church is obviously well loved and well-tended as evidenced by the needlepointed pew cushions, each one unique and as of our visit, gently used.

Pew cushions, St Senara

We had an afternoon cup of tea at our lodgings. Alec and James, a tanned, piratey-looking, hippy handyman, came to fix the light that wasn’t working in the kitchen.  I chatted with him while he fiddled with the light, which he could eventually not fix.

When the men left us with our cups of tea we started pretending to be gossipy old ladies. (Wendy is on record saying we weren’t pretending.)

“What’s Alec do all week when Sue’s at work?”

“Don’t know. He’s just around. He’s got his cow.”

“Does James come every week to fix stuff?”

“I think he comes once a week but he’s been here twice because you complained about the light.”

“There’s Alec, getting in his car.”

“Where’s he going, then?”

“There’s a BT van. I wonder who called them.”

“Must have been Alec because he and Sue own all the cottages but the one that belongs to that couple in Switzerland who never use it and won’t sell it.”

“Well Alec just left. Looks the BT guy is getting out.”

“What’s he doing, then?”

“Now he’s back in his van.”

“Is he just going to sit there?”

By the time we had wound up all the gossipy bits I was laughing so hard I was crying. Sue, especially, says her lines with a kind of indignation that she hadn’t been informed in the first place.

By late afternoon we were at Godrevy Beach waiting for the seals to put in an appearance. It reminded me of deer watching on Whidbey, waiting for hours and only having a brief sighting, then going inside and finding later that six of them were out and about and never bothered to let me know. We saw so few seals on this particular day that I’m not convinced I saw any at all.

The Ice Cream Van

I waded (paddled.) Sue got her Kelly’s ice cream cone from the van that parks at the beach until the end of the day or it runs out of ice cream, whichever comes first.

Much later after I returned to Seattle, I learned (from a Doc Martin episode)that the lighthouse at Godrevy is the lighthouse that Mrs. Ramsey was trying to get to in Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse. Had I known that, I would have paid better attention.

Mrs. Ramsey’s lighthouse, Godrevy

Wind whipped up as we drove home and continued on through the night. As people never seem to tire of telling me, these winds begin in America and pick up momentum until the hit their first obstruction, Cornwall. They said the same thing about Islay when I was there.

None of us slept well. I was awakened by a continual bumping sound. At 1:00 I went outside to investigate because I thought it might have been the recycle bin. It wasn’t. But it was deliciously spooky outdoors across the road from an old churchyard in the wind at night.

In the morning Sue said she’d been up at 2:00, thinking the church had caught fire because she saw lights around it.

Wendy said she had lain awake, wanting to make a cup of tea but afraid she would wake somebody up.

We went to Land’s End where the winds were close to 50 mph and I was seriously afraid they would blow my glasses off. When I visited Land’s End in 1980, the only building on site was a small, decrepit snack shack where one could buy a postcard, a stick of rock and an ice cream with a flake. Translation: a stick of rock is a thick hard candy stick with words embedded all the way through, in this case “Land’s End.” Ice cream often comes (or did then) with a piece of Cadbury flake chocolate stuck in the side.

Elena at Land’s End

Land’s End

orginal Land’s End tea cottage

Today Land’s End is practically a theme park. All kinds of video crap, exhibitions and flashing lights, none of which have been particularly successful. Quite right. There are still plenty of trails and scenic views, which is truly all you want when you come to Land’s End. It’s the tip of the boot if you envision Cornwall as a boot. Or a drip on the witch’s nose if you envision Cornwall as a chauvinism inspired idea of a witch.

We lunched at the restaurant as the cafeteria looked a little seedy and the guy behind the buffet looked like he might have drooled in the food. I ordered for us at the bar. Sue and I wanted the leek and potato soup. I asked if it came with a side salad. The young woman behind the till looked as though I had asked her if she would just get someone to urinate into a bowl for me.

“A SALAD? With soup?”

I guessed not. Back at the table Wendy and Sue said they’d never heard of soup and salad. Soup and sandwich, maybe. Or salad and coleslaw.

“COLESLAW? With salad?” I asked. “How do your figure that?”

“Well they go together, don’t they?”

“Coleslaw most certainly does not go with salad. Coleslaw is salad so that’s redundant.”

I loved the leek and potato soup. It was leeky and green. You gotta love green soup. Sue hated hers because it was thin and not potato-y enough. Too much leek.

Down the road from the restaurant I met my pirate. We passed a petting zoo where for 10 GBP you could pet a llama to get to the Greeb craft cottages where I struck gold.

Edward Williams is a silversmith with a workshop and a cat names Felix who used to wander all over Land’s End until he found a home on a blanket in a box with a sign that says “Please do not pet the cat.”

Edward (Eddie the Snake) was decked out like a pirate with plenty of pirate stories to tell in a pirate accent. He was still a master craft metalist and he took on the challenge of my broken glasses.

A Pirate mends my glasses

First he flattened the two broken ends banging them with a lethal looking hammer. He broke several drill bits trying to drill a rivet into each end.

“It’s hard metal, you see. Probaby titanium,” he said making me wonder if it was so hard, how did I happen to snap it in two.

He kept at it while telling pirate stories to Dutch tourists who I silently willed to go away. He twirled my glasses while building up to his punch line while I had visions of me groping my way through Gatwick airport because my glasses had been smashed or the lens had fallen out and were now the property of a cat I wasn’t allowed to touch.

Eddie the snake

He ended up super gluing the two ends and wrapping the whole business with hot silver wire. One arm was a little shorter than the other but the glasses fit much more securely.

“What do I owe you?”

“Oh, nothing at all. But you could leave a donation to the cat.”

Nothing could have pleased me more except to have been able to give Felix a scratch under the chin. I put 10 GBP in the bucket and gave my pirate a kiss. My silver-wrapped glasses were my favorite souvenir of the trip.

Wendy and Sue, by this time, were long gone to find the toilets and to wait with the eternal patience of the English in the car. I was able to run up the hill, texting them at the same time to say I was coming. Five days of Fat Camp was paying off.

Our Celtic Spirituality Morning gave way to lunch at The Cook Book in St Just. Once a bookshop/café, now it’s a café with books for décor. I ordered a plated salad after it was explained to me that a plated salad is salad on a plate. I had an image of latticed and braided vegetables but it was just a salad—a good one—with about a pound of cheese on the side.  I ate one hunk and we put the rest in an omelette in the evening. In conception an omelette but one that turned into scrambled eggs as mine so often do.

On the way back to Morvah I announced I was going to take a nap the minute we got home.

“You have to bring in the washing first, “Sue said.

We all brought in the washing and we all had a rest before the omelette cum scrambled egg and frozen potato waffle, which are like French fries (chips) only waffled. We had a time figuring out the broiler for the waffles. I dropped out early and went for Alec who wasn’t home.

“He won’t know. He’ll just come in and tell us it isn’t working.” Sue again.

Someone (not me) found the right buttons in the right order to get the thing to heat.

Finally we set off for the Minack Theatre where I would be collecting on part of this year’s birthday present, the other part being the most gorgeous box of artisanal chocolates I had ever seen. The Minack is an open air theater built into the Cornish cliffs and looking onto the Atlantic Ocean. It was built by Rowena Cade in the early thirties. For two years, she and her gardener moved granite boulders and earth from the cliffs below her garden to create terraces. Since then it has become a celebrated setting for plays, recitals and entertainment of all kinds.

The Minack Theatre

The play we saw, Stones in His Pocket by Marie Jones uses two actors to play all the characters. They moved quickly from one character to another by use of a gesture, a turn or in the most obvious of cases –to everyone but me—switching between blue and a red cap. Wendy was later incredulous that I had missed the significance of the red and blue caps as (apparently) the entire plot hinged on them.

In my defense I must say that the setting of The Minack was distracting. Sitting on the headlands on the edge of the sea, I watched the waves and gulls and the sinking of the sun into west, muting the edge of sea and sky until everything was dark except for the stars and of course the stage lights, which didn’t seem all that out of place. With all the external drama, my wandered in and out of the play.

We were bundled up though it was a mild night for mid-September. A group of young German women, in their late teens, sat in front of us. Before the play started we saw that one of them was crying and her companions were rubbing her arms and talking earnestly to her.

Suddenly Wendy up and offered them one of our blankets. “Is your friend cold? Would you like a blanket? We can share.”

I thought, “Wait a mo’. I don’t want to be cold.” In truth I was positively sweating with four layers on top and two pairs of socks, a scarf, a hood and a blanket , which I felt compelled to share with Wendy as the price of sitting next to someone so thoughtful. She also got half of Sue’s blanket so for her kindness she got double warmth. Quite right.

When the subject of the young women came up on the way home, Sue said “She probably cries all the time and whines about everything and they’ve figured out how to humor her,” which made me burst out laughing.

An enormous harvest moon guided us home and a tailgater lit us up from behind.

The next morning Sue popped her head round my door to say, “Oh Elena, you’ll want long pants. There are stinging nettles” and I had that sense of being a seven year old with my parents. We were to walk the cliff path that begins with the public footpath next to the church and hooks up with the Cornish Coastal path. The rugged coastal path extends from Minehead up in Somerset all the way around Cornwall to Poole in Dorset. Parts of it are easy but parts have huge boulders to negotiate and an unforgiving rocky path. Wendy has walked a good deal of the coastal path. Her assessment of our little bit was that it was of middling difficulty.

St Bridget’s Church, Morvah

I told Wendy and Sue about my nurse friend Susan who looked me straight in the eye and said “DON’T FALL.” We laughed about it but there was method. I didn’t lark about on the cliffs and I walked carefully on the paths and over the boulders, her words in my mind.

Coastal Path, Morvah

We were working our way along when into the beauty of the stark blue sky and the rugged black headlands strode a man wearing nothing but hiking boots and briefs. Brief briefs. Practically a cod piece. He paraded past us at the intersection of the foot path and the coastal path. Before we’d recovered our surprise another man came into view from the north.

“Here’s another one,” Sue said.  “This one has clothes on.”

The second man passed us chuckling.

We walked a different piece of the trail when we visited Zennor and this became my favorite walk. My poetry for this trip was Rilke’s Duino Elegies. I never got past the first elegy and I puzzled over the words. Standing near Zennor Head watching the dark of the sea burst into white spray against the black rocks, astonished by the colors in the carpet of wildflowers and gorse, hearing the fierce wind, feeling the warm sun, I thought I understood Rilke’s words:

Beauty is nothing but

The beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear

And revere it so, because it calmly disdains to destroy us.

Zennor Head

Wildflowers, Zennor

Path at Zennor