Village Walks

Burt's Turkey Coop and the Coolidge Mansion

2008-01-09T15:01:00.000-05:00

Tine and Rubob took a short walk yesterday, up No Outlet Lane so Tine could see where old John Coolidge once lived.

"In the wintertime, you can just make out the house in the trees," Tine told Rubob. "It's right over there. How about that?"

Rubob looked over to where Tine was pointing, across Diamond Glen to where a Georgian brick mansion was just visible in the woods on the hilltop.

"That's where he lived, Rubob -- John Coolidge himself, son of Calvin," Tine said. "He started a business in the next town over, making business forms. What an enterprising soul he was, to be sure -- just like his dad. Then he moved back to his father's place in Vermont and ran the cheese factory there."

Rubob gazed upon the distant site with wonder, as Tine had hoped he would.

"I wouldn't mind making business forms myself, if I had a head for such things," Tine said. "We could build a grand mansion, and we'd be the folks who live on the hill."

As they made their way down No Outlet Lane, Tine sang to herself:

"Someday we'll build a home on a hilltop high
You and I, a shiny and new
Cottage that two can fill,
And we'll be pleased to be called
The folks who live on the hill.

"Someday we may be adding a wing or two
A thing or two;
We will make changes, as any family will,
But we will always be called
The folks who live on the hill."

"I think I'd prefer a cottage to a mansion, Rubob," Tine said as they passed a tiny house on Mad Hatter's Lane. "It'd be just the thing for us."

"Burt of Burt's Bees was content with just a turkey coop," Rubob said. "Maybe we could live in a turkey coop. "

Tine looked behind a house at what might make a nice turkey coop.

"Who's Burt when he's at home, Rubob?" Tine asked.

"Burt of Burt's Bees -- I told you that," Rubob said. "There was a story in Sunday's paper about him. In the early 80s, a woman was hitchhiking in Maine, and Burt was driving by and picked her up. She was down on her luck, and she moved in with him. He lived in a turkey coop and tended beehives. From those humble beginnings, he and she started a business that grew into Burt's Bees."

"Never heard of them, Rubob," Tine said.

"You know -- all-natural lip balm and stuff. It's twice as expensive as ChapStick because it's all natural," Rubob replied.

"Anyway," Rubob continued, "she bought out the business in the late 90s for some nominal amount, and the two parted ways. Then she sold it to Clorox for $300 million. She gave Burt $4 million, but he still lives in his turkey coop. He likes it there, Tine."

Burt

"He would -- it'd be ideal for us, too, I'll be bound," Tine said, borrowing an expression of Rubob's.

"Burt said, somewhat foolishly, 'The magic of living life for me is, and always has been, the magic of living on the land, not in the magic of money,'" Rubob said.

"That doesn't sound foolish to me," Tine replied. "That sounds like a good philosophy to live by."

She was backtracking now, heading up Diamond Glen toward the driveway leading to old man Coolidge's estate. Rubob wasn't pleased by this because he was eager to return home, where he had a pumpkin pie in the oven. Tine, however, knew exactly how many minutes were left until the pie was ready.

"We've never been up here, Rubob," she said.

"There it is," Tine said. "Just think of the sights on our walks. And yet John Coolidge's father, thirtieth president of the United States, said -- well you can guess what he said about walking, Rubob."

"I have no idea, Tine."

"Well he said, 'Four-fifths of all our troubles would disappear, if we would only sit down and keep still.'"

"We have to get going, Tine," Rubob said. "We have to get back home."

"That's exactly what Calvin Coolidge would have said," Tine replied. "'Never go out to meet trouble. If you just sit still, nine cases out of ten, someone will intercept it before it reaches you.' He said, that, too. You and Calvin Coolidge would have been fast friends."

"It's an apartment building," Rubob said, looking at the old Coolidge home.

"What makes you say that?" Tine asked. "It's a mansion."

"It has two front doors," Rubob said.

"The second door is for a mother-in-law flat, Rubob. Maybe Grace Coolidge, wife of Calvin, lives there. It's certainly not an apartment house."

"I think you're wrong about that," Rubob said.

"Then how come it has only one address out front? There's the house number: No. 31. What kind of apartment house has one address and one newspaper box, Rubob? It's a mansion with an extra flat above the garage, perhaps for the servants. Calvin and John Coolidge wouldn't approve of their home being turned into an apartment house. They were staunch Republicans who fought against the overreaching New Deal, you know."

"The house is another historic desecration, I'm afraid," Rubob said. "The Coolidge homestead has been divided into comfortable apartments.

"Like Dr. Zhivago's house after the Revolution -- divided up for 13 families. Poor old John Coolidge -- he'd rue the day," Tine said.

"The evidence was right before your eyes: two front doors," Rubob said. "Facts and evidence, Tine: That's what you must go by."

"No. 31," Rubob. "That's the plain fact of the matter. A pleasant family, the folks who live on the hill, live here, and they're quite happy. I have a hunch they run a small business, perhaps making business forms. 'The chief business of the American people is business.' Calvin Coolidge said that, and he knew what he was talking about."

"You can't rely on hunches, Tine, especially in business," said Rubob, a gentleman farmer.

"I'm relying on my powers of observation and deduction," Tine replied. "Take this sign, for instance," she said, pointing to a new bright yellow "15 MPH" road sign on Diamond Glen. "It wasn't here yesterday. They put it up after the accident last night."

"What accident last night?" Rubob asked.

"There was an accident last night, when you were out. There were fire engines, police-cops, the works -- even a helicopter overhead." (Tine always refers respectfully to the police as "police-cops.")

"A helicopter," Rubob asked, looking doubtfully at Tine. "A helicopter couldn't land here."

"It was circling overhead," Tine said. "It didn't land."

"There is glass here by the side of the road," Rubob observed -- "and it is windshield glass. And it's not covered up by the snow."

"You see -- exactly what I said!" Tine replied. "You can see that the road's been swept here. There was an accident here, and last night!"

"But that doesn't mean that the sign is new -- and it isn't new," Rubob stated.

"It wasn't here yesterday, and now it's here this afternoon," Tine said. "One must believe the evidence of one's senses. We can only deduce that they put it in after the accident, probably this morning. It'll slow down the scofflaws. Very sensible."

"Then why aren't there any footprints around it in the snow?" Rubob asked. "How was the sign put in?"

"A post hole digger," Tine offered. "Post hole diggers don't leave footprints."

"No, Tine, there'd be footprints -- lots of footprints. And look, there are none. The snow hasn't been touched. The power of deduction, you see. Science, based on observable fact, has triumphed over intuition once again."

"Well, I declare," Tine thought to herself. "Still, I don't think the Coolidges would have converted their home into an apartment house," she said with finality.

As they turned the corner at the bottom of Diamond Glen, Tine was regarded menacingly by a vicious dog much larger than herself.

"It's a dangerous neighborhood, this post-Coolidge neighborhood," Tine thought. "These apartment dwellers have brought in all manner of beasts."

But as she continued up her street, thinking of Rubob's pumpkin pie in the oven, she thought, "All in all, a very pleasant walk."

A Generous Helping of Currant Pudding

2007-12-26T20:26:00.001-05:00

Tine and Rubob took only a short walk this afternoon.

"It's Boxing Day," Rubob, "and I'm quite worn out after packing up all the boxes and giving them to the household servants."

"I don't recall receiving any boxes," Rubob said with some disappointment.

"Let's go on a different walk today," Tine said. "I'd like to get away from things. Did I tell you that Mr. Brians and Aunt Beryl went for a walk around the lake in Macclesfield on Christmas Day? That sounds perfect. Why don't we go for a walk around a lake today?"

The closest thing Tine and Rubob have to the lake in Macclesfield, Derbyshire, is the reservoir at the top of Diamond Glen, so that's where they went.

"A beautiful scene," Rubob said. "Dave used to love ice fishing, you know. Dad would take us. I just hated it. I'd sit there on a wooden bench and freeze. Dave would have his teeter-totter and wait for it to spring up."

"A teeter-totter?" Tine asked.

"A tip-up, Tine. It tells you when a fish is on the line. Then you'd have to pull the lines out of the icy water."

"Do you think we could fish for smelt here?" Tine asked, looking out over the frozen surface of the lake.

"You need a river for a smelt run, Tine, and there's no river here. The smelt swim upriver to breed."

"Well, I don't know," Tine said. "We might try it one day. I have a hunch there are some smelt down there. Where'd you go smelt fishing?"

"On Lake Superior. It was cold, Tine -- there's nothing to do all day but stare at your teeter-totter and freeze."

Tine looked at a mailbox, which had a tip-up of its own. She imagined the flag springing up with a smelt on the line.

"I'm getting cold just thinking about it, Rubob. Let's turn back."

"Already?" Rubob said.

"It's freezing today, and I'm tired after all the Christmas festivities. I can hardly move my feet. Tine looked up a dirt road leading away from the lake, up to the Metacomet Trail over the mountain.

"Christmas is like ascending a great mountain," she said, thinking of a flag she'd just seen hanging from a tree.

"There's just so much to do," Tine said -- "so many gifts to buy, so many trips to the shopping mall, all those little hearts to please with just the right present: a Robopet puppy, a pink cell phone with unlimited text messaging, gift certificates to Abercrombie -- all the Christmas wishes and letters to Santa, the expectations, and for us, the memories of past Christmases all wrapped up and ready to open again. And when it's finally over, there's a pile of boxes and crumpled up wrapping paper to put out on the curb."

"Detritus, Tine -- the detritus of the holidays," Rubob said.

"I don't know that I can be doing with the whole thing, Rubob," Tine said. She plodded wearily on toward home in the gray afternoon.

"There's a bowl of currant pudding and hot custard waiting for you for your dessert this evening -- or even when you get home," Rubob said, and the thought of it boosted Tine's spirits.

"You certainly do make a delicious currant pudding," she said, wondering how he happened to think of currant pudding at just the right time. "It was just like the currant pudding at the Royal Oak in Betws-y-Coed."

Years ago, Tine and Rubob had attempted to climb Mount Snowdon in North Wales, but it was such a rainy, windy morning that they didn't manage to hike more than a few hundred yards beyond the parking lot at the base of the mountain. The rain had soaked them through in minutes, and the wind had pushed them back. The weather was so foul, in fact, that a stray sheep had sought to push its way into the driver's seat of their car when Rubob opened the door to drive back into town. The sheep might have been looking to dry off, Tine told Rubob, or maybe for a ride into town.

Snowdonia, on a dry day

Tine and Rubob drove hastily back to their bed and breakfast -- without the sheep -- but they found, to Tine's dismay, that their room had no heat and no hot water in the daytime. So Tine -- pale, wet and shivering -- suggested that they enjoy a warm lunch at the Royal Oak in the center of town.

http://www.information-britain.co.uk/extrapics.php?placeid=2433

"What a memorable lunch that was," Tine said to Rubob. Like old Alfred Wainwright after one of his walks in the Lakeland fells, she drank at least a half-dozen cups of tea to warm up. She then moved on to the fish and chips, and she finished up with a plentiful helping of steamed currant pudding.

The Royal Oak. Photo: http://hotel-snowdonia.co.uk/

This Christmas Eve, with memories of that Royal Oak lunch in mind, Rubob had made currant pudding for dessert, and he'd served Tine two generous portions with custard up to the brim.

"It's Christmas Eve," Tine had said to Rubob, who'd looked over at her dripping custard. "It's how Alfred Wainwright always had it. He'd insist that his bowl be filled with custard right up to the brim. And that's exactly how I like it."

"Memories of your currant pudding and custard, Rubob," Tine said on her chilly walk this afternoon -- "that's what keeps me going. They keep me warm. How'd you get it so much like the currant pudding at the Royal Oak?"

"It's steamed, Tine -- steamed in a mold over simmering water for one and a half to two hours."

"Just like with those smelt that Dave loves so much -- it takes some waiting, I guess, Rubob," Tine said.

As they walked back down Diamond Glen, Tine thought (and maybe Rubob, too), "All in all a very pleasant walk."

Tine Spots a Grånisse or Two in the Mist

2007-12-23T20:14:00.000-05:00

Tine is a single-minded little soul, and she set out on her walk today determined to find a nisse -- a Norwegian elf. On yesterday's walk during the "blue hour" -- the hour between dusk and nightfall -- she'd hoped to see the blånissen, the blue elves that are said to paint the sky and landscape blue.

Sadly, while there may have been blånissen at work in the village last night, Tine didn't spot them.

"They're elusive creatures," she said to Rubob as they passed the misty Bull Lot on their walk this afternoon.

"But I'm going to find a nisse -- even if it isn't a blånisse," Tine continued. "This is perfect weather to see a grånisse. They're sure to be out. Do you know what a grånisse is?"

"Yes, Tine," Rubob said somewhat disinterestedly -- "the blue elves. I thought they only came out in the blue hour."

"The grånissen," Tine asseverated -- though very small, Tine can asseverate quite forcefully -- "not to be confused with blånissen. The grånissen are gray, not blue."

"Yes, Tine," Rubob replied, sounding a little like Richard speaking to Hyacinth Bucket on "Keeping Up Appearances."

Richard Bucket (Clive Swift)

Tine stopped and regarded the Blue Lot. "You see, they'll definitely be out there in the mist. This is just the sort of thing they like."

"The mist transforms everything," Rubob said. "It seems to smooth out the rough edges of the present. It's timeless, Tine."

"You said that about the snow a couple of weeks ago, Rubob. Did you mean to say the mist or the snow?"

"The mist, Tine," Rubob said. "And then it's like a rejoinder seeing the black pavement. One's instantly carried back into the present."

"There might be grånissen living in that house over there," Tine said, stepping into the road, planting her feet back in the present. "They like everything gray."

"I'm not sure that I like that shade of gray," Rubob said. "Do you?"

"Yes, very much, Rubob," Tine replied, looking at the door as though a grånisse might emerge at any moment.

Tine was quickly distracted by some red berries she saw farther down the street.

"Those are the nicest sort of Christmas decorations of all," she thought.

Watching her from over the fence was someone with an equal fondness for red. Tine stuck her nose through the fence to have a good luck.

Rubob, who doesn't make friends as easily as Tine does, seemed more interested in the mist in the distant field.

"Maybe he's looking for grånissen," Tine thought. But as Rubob stood there gazing into the distance, she thought he was probably just reviewing the day's news in that head of his. He'd been poring over the morning newspapers until well past noon, and his head might have been filled with gray newsprint.

Tine stopped to look at the beads of water in some high grass.

The two passed another gray house, surrounded by trees with more red berries. Tine moved quickly away when Rubob said, "There was someone in the window there, just behind the parted curtains. She's gone now, Tine. It was an almost spectral presence."

"Maybe it was a grånisse," Tine said. "We're being watched by the grånissen."

"It was more like a ghost," Rubob said.

It seemed a perfect day for spectral presences, Tine thought, with the mist covering the ground. They passed through the schoolyard on their way to Mountain Road, and Tine stopped at a signpost that intrigued her.

"Möge Friede auf Erden sein" -- now what language do you suppose that is?" Tine asked.

"It appears to be Norwegian," Rubob said, and he said it so seriously that Tine wondered if he had blånissen and grånissen on the brain.

"Do you really think so?" Tine asked. "Well, isn't that something. The schoolchildren put it there for the grånissen. You don't think it might be German?"

Rubob didn't reply. He was busying himself with the other languages on the post. He seemed especially intrigued with the Chinese and Japanese characters.

Just then, a creature peeped out at Tine from behind a tree. For a moment she thought it might actually be a grånisse -- a genuine gray Norwegian elf.

"A grånisse!" Tine called out to Rubob. "He's come to read the message of peace left to him by the children."

As Tine approached him, the grånisse scurried up the tree trunk to a branch, where he sat watching Tine with suspicion.

"Möge Friede auf Erden sein," Tine said to him, but he seemed not to understand. "It probably isn't Norwegian at all," Tine thought.

The two walked down the pathway behind the school and approached the old Studio building at Miss Porter's School, where Robert Brandegee had taught his drawing, painting and sculpting classes more than a hundred years ago. The stone building seemed softer in the mist, almost insubstantial.

Tine imagined a group of girls trooping out the door with their easels, walking down to the Meadows with old Mr. Brandegee to paint scenes by the river. The girls would be wearing white dresses and saddleshoes, or white skirts and sailorshirts -- "yes, that's it, sailorshirts," Tine thought.

"They're like nissen in a way," she thought, "like white nissen busily painting the landscape."

The church next door was unlocked, and Tine and Rubob nipped in to take a look at the mural Brandegee had painted over the altar.

The figures seemed hazy and insubstantial to Tine -- "wraithlike," she thought. It was all a bit dark and eerie. Rubob must have been thinking the same thing because he didn't comment. Perhaps he was turning over the word "spectral" again in his mind. "Sepulchral" would be just the word, too, Tine thought.

Out again in the fresh air of the world at large, the town remained lost in the mists of history. As the two passed the eighteenth-century Stanley Whitman House, Rubob stopped and regarded it curiously.

"The middle upstairs window is off-center," he said. "Or maybe the door is. In fact, it might even be the chimney."

Tine didn't give these architectural anomalies a second glance. She was rushing ahead to look into a misty ravine where she thought she might finally have a glimpse of -- well, you know what she was looking for.

"The mist loves the ravines -- the low places in the landscape," Rubob said, catching up with Tine.

Not seeing any grånissen in the ravine, Tine rushed across the street to look at a gray house.

"Just the sort of house they might like," she said.

"Who, Tine?"

"The grånissen," Tine replied. "For heaven's sake, the gray elves. But I suppose you're right -- they probably don't even live in houses. They most likely prefer your misty ravines."

"How gauche to say 'about,'" Rubob said, referring to the '1760' sign by the door. "Don't they know about 'circa.'"

It seemed odd to hear Rubob use the word "gauche," but he often commented on these signs on houses. He'd said he might put a sign on their own house saying "Tine and Rubob, ca. 2001." Or perhaps "Capt. Ichabod Rubob, ca. 1620" (28 years before the town was established). Rubob, a gentleman farmer, had tilled the village soil for decades, but he was still regarded as a recent transplant in town.

"'Ebeneezer Rubob' might be appropriate, too, if you don't get going with your Christmas shopping soon, you miserly old thing," Tine thought.

Ebeneezer Rubob, ca. 1843

From the "About 1760" house, the two crosssed the road and walked through the snow up to old Mrs. Riddle's house on the hill -- the place Tine wanted to purchase and convert into a bed and breakfast.

"If we ran it as a B & B, we could put morsels out for the blånissen and the grånissen, Rubob -- any kind of nissen, really. Have you heard of the hvitnissen? I'm sure they'd love this snowy landscape."

"What are the hvitnissen?" Rubob made the mistake of asking.

"Well, those are the white elves," Tine said. "That's why they like the snow. And that's why we can't see them. It's the hvitnissen who paint the landscape white in the winter."

"Isn't it beautiful?" Tine thought. "I'm sure Mrs. Riddle would be eager to sell. After all, the place is probably crawling with those beastly elves."

"Look, Rubob, they've even set a little table on the porch for the elves," Tine said, poking her nose up against the window. "Nissen -- nissen of any color and variety really -- like to have food left out for them -- and maybe even a book of poetry with a cocktail."

Rubob was gazing off in the other direction, toward the hillside in front of the house.

"Of all the views here, that's probably my favorite, with the bush growing over the stone wall and the field in the distance," he said.

"Because of the sheep?" Tine asked.

"I didn't even notice the sheep," Rubob replied. "Isn't the bush growing over the wall beautiful?"
"It's the sheep I like, safely grazing in the mist -- amidst the mist, in fact."

"The mist is thickening," Rubob said. "It's funny, but when you're in the midst of it, you hardly notice it, but when it's off in the distance it's so apparent."

Tine looked down into a ravine, a pocket of mist at the side of the road, in hopes of seeing a nisse of any color, but they were too quick for her.

Outside the entrance to Mrs. Riddle's Bed and Breakfast, they passed a little cottage as they walked down the hill.

"It looks so different depending on which nissen have been busily painting it, doesn't it?" Tine said. "Do you remember it last January when the blånissen had been working on it in the blue hour?"

"The nissen certainly do transform the landscape -- and the houses," she said. "And there's the wreath you liked on Ann Howard's old house. My goodness, will you look at that -- it's not at all like it was last night in the gloaming."

"Beautiful, Tine," Rubob said.

They then passed what Tine insisted was a green "Julenisse," or Yule elf.

Tine walked up to him for a closer look, but Ebeneezer Rubob didn't seem to be all that taken with the lifesize holiday decoration.

"It's a nissen sort of Christmas he likes, with the mist over a snowy field, or a bush over a stone wall -- that sort o' wintry painted scene," Tine thought, "and perhaps I'm inclined to agree."

The two made their way down past the village school to the library.

"Look, Rubob, another grånisse," Tine said, pointing to the espaliered tree on the library wall.

Rubob took a dim view of a tree forced to spend its life growing up against a wall.

"What's it called, Tine -- escalier? It reminds me of a crucifixion somehow, without the redeeming features."

"Espalier, Rubob -- it's espalier," Tine said. "Escalier is a stairway. That'd be even worse. 'Esprit d'escalier' -- you know about that. That's the 'wit of the staircase,' or 'staircase wisdom.' It means something you think of saying too late, just as you're on the stairway leaving someone's house -- a rejoinder or bon mot, the perfect comeback really. I think your old friend Marcel Proust might have mentioned it in The Guermantes Way, though I can't be sure."

Rubob perked up with the mention of Proust. It was a topic he enjoyed discussing on their daily walks.

But Tine launched into a less pleasing topic: "Do you remember when you followed me into that ghastly gift shop years ago around Christmas time?" she asked. (Ebeneezer Rubob hated gift shops, and you could see his expression turning sour with the mention of one.) "The saleswoman at the cash register asked if she could help you find anything. 'Yes, the way out,' you blurted out. That would have been esprit d'escalier if you'd thought of it too late, on your way out. But you thought of it right there on the spot -- when your back was up against the wall, come to think, in that shop filled with what you called 'overpriced junk.' I guess that was 'esprit d'espalier' -- maybe you're right after all, Rubob. Escalier, espalier -- who's to say?"

Tine bustled along, filled with memories of seasons past. "A regular little font of knowledge and memories I am, to be sure," she thought.

As they turned onto the street leading home, Tine was blessed with yet another sighting of an elusive -- but not elusive enough -- grånisse. (It was a Scioattolo grånisse, to be precise, though Tine, for all her knowledge about the varieties of nissen, didn't know the scientifc name.)

"They certainly are out in force today," she said to Rubob. "Will you look at that? They're busy painting the landscape gray."

They soon passed the Timothy Pitkin house, "1788" -- no "circa," no "about," just a straightforward, sensible "1788" on the sign. "Plain and simple, the way Rubob likes things," Tine thought.

"Look, Rubob," Tine said as they continued down the street -- "a blue door. The blånissen, the blue elves, must be out and about, too. They'll be at work on the sky before long."

"It's a pity we didn't take a longer walk," she added. "We could have arrived home just in time for the blue hour."

The two passed the old Bull Lot again, and Tine recalled how Rubob had said a paved road was like a swift rejoinder to the misty fields, carrying one right back into the present.

As Tine reached the walkway to her front door, she saw the most extraordinary thing by the side of the path: a large frying pan.

"Good heavens, Rubob, what is that doing there? You haven't been putting food out for the grånissen and all the other nissen, have you?" She wondered, in fact, whether fried food was good for the nissen.

"No," Rubob said, disappointingly, "it was all bent out of shape and I was trying to hammer it out in the barn."

"Well, I don't believe you. You've been leaving blueberry pancakes out for the grånissen, haven't you? It's a charitable thing for you to do during the holidays. Now the nissen will reward us with many blessings this season -- many views of painted landscapes, just the sort of thing you like."

Tine stood there transfixed by the fixed frying pan. "Well, I'll be, Rubob. I didn't know you had it in you. I didn't even think you believed in the wretched things -- the sweet things, I mean. But you might have saved a pancake for me. I'm told the nissen are quite content with leftovers."

As she approached the door, envisioning a sign by it saying "Caleb Rubob, 1648," she thought to herself, "All in all, a very pleasant walk indeed."

Tine Dreams of a Blue Christmas

2007-12-21T17:20:00.000-05:00

Tine and Rubob set off in search of the "blånissen" on their walk today -- or at least Tine did.

"The what?" Rubob asked when Tine said something that sounded like she'd sneezed.

"The blånissen," Rubob.

"Bless you, Tine," Rubob said.

"They come out only in the 'blue hour,'" Tine said. "That's what they call it in Norway -- the hour between dusk and darkness. The blånissen are blue elves that live in the mountains. They emerge from their woodland dwellings and paint the landscape blue. They even paint the air blue, if you can imagine that."

This explained why Tine had kept putting off her walk with Rubob earlier in the afternoon.

"Ready for a walk?" Rubob had asked, leafing through his newspaper for the umpteenth time.

"Not yet," Tine had replied, sitting on the couch wearing her blue winter coat.

"Why are you wearing your coat?"

"It's cold, Rubob," Tine had said. Secretly, she'd been eager to get started on her walk. But she'd been waiting all afternoon for the blue hour.

They finally started on their walk at about ten after four.

"I think it's too early to see the blånissen," Tine said, contemplating some white Christmas lights on a tree.

Normally, Tine would have been quite pleased to see the lights, but today she had only blue elves on her mind.

"I have to see the blånissen," she said to Rubob. "Do you remember when we took a walk to the Hill-Stead last January and everything was blue in the fog?"

"No, Tine, I don't recall that," Rubob said.

"How could you have forgotten? Well, anyway, that was the blue hour."

"I didn't know about the blånissen then, so I didn't keep an eye out for them," Tine said. "Maybe we'll see them today -- or tonight, actually. Or sometime between the two, I mean. They only emerge in the blue hour between day and night, and we're too early -- much too early."

"It'll be dark in just a few minutes, Tine," Rubob reassured her. "The sun's setting right now."

"How do you know that?" Tine asked. "Everything looks gray and wintry to me. I haven't seen the sun all day."

"It's the shortest day of the year today, the winter solstice. Wait and see," Rubob said.

"Is it indeed?" Tine said. "The winter solstice. Well, I'll be. They'll be sure to come out for that." But she still looked around her a little doubtfully.

"We won't see the blånissen in this light -- the wretched things," she said. As they turned up Diamond Glen, a narrow winding lane leading up the hill, she looked eagerly up toward a house that showed just a touch of blue.

"Maybe up there," she said. "That has a hint of blue."

"I don't remember that house being gray before," Rubob said.

"It was white before," Tine said. "And now it definitely has some blue in it --but not enough for the blånissen. They don't live there. They live up on the mountain. Hurry up! Or wait -- maybe we should slow down to give the blue hour time to arrive."

Tine shuffled along at the side of the road, peering into the trees in hopes of seeing a blånisse.

"Is the singular of blånissen blånisse?" she asked Rubob.

"Gesundheit," he replied.

"The silly old thing -- what does he know about Norwegian, or blue elves for that matter?" Tine thought. She wondered, "Do they say Gesundheit in Norway? In French class, Madame Potié ('Madame Potty') would say, 'Que Dieu vous bénisse' -- 'God bless you.'"

"Bénisse ... blånissen," Tine thought. I think Rubob might be on to something!"

"Vous êtes une fille très paresseuse," Madame Potty would say pointedly to poor little Tine -- "You are a very lazy girl." Tine would often sneeze when Madame Potty, who smelled of mothballs and Chanel No. 5, came near her.

"Que Dieu vous bénisse," Tine said to Rubob.

"No, I haven't seen one," Rubob replied.

""Bénisse, not blånissen. But yes, whatever kind of nisse, it's too early, solstice or not," Tine said dejectedly. Her spirits picked up, though, when she saw a house with a blue door, a strikingly blue blue door.

"Maybe the blånissen live there, behind the blue door," she said.

"The Blue Dory," Rubob said -- "now where was that on our journeys?"

"Block Island, Rubob -- that's different. There aren't any blånissen there, as far as I know. They like the mountains, not the beach."

"And then there was that pub on the highway in England -- what was that called?"

"Motorway, Rubob -- it's called the motorway. And the pub was the Blue Boar. I don't think the blånissen like blue boars. They might even be natural enemies out in the wild. We should get a move on. There aren't any blue elves here -- just blue doors, blue dories, blue boars."

"I'm having a blue Christmas, Rubob, and I need to see blue elves to perk me up."

Tine sang to herself:

"I'm dreaming of a blue Christmas,
Just like the ones I used to know,
where the treetops glisten
and children listen
to hear bluebells in the snow."

"Sleighbells, Tine," Rubob said.

"Where?" asked Tine, looking all around her.

"In the snow," Rubob said. "Sleighbells in the snow."

"Oh, you mean bluebells," Tine said.

"Look, Tine, Rubob said -- "a copper cupola on that barn."

"What's on that windvane?" Tine asked. "I can hardly make it out. It's got wheels, doesn't it? Is that really a motorcycle? Well, I declare. There's something we haven't seen before."

Rubob seemed to be more interested in the copper roof on the cupola. "Very weatherproof," Tine thought he was probably thinking. "Long-lasting but costly." The motorcyle escaped his notice, and Rubob, a gentleman farmer, appeared to be absorbed in his own thoughts of barn renovations.

He then turned his attention to an abandoned house on the edge of the woods, a house with no windowpanes.

"What do you think happened there?" Tine asked, and she nearly regretted it, thinking Rubob might launch into a discussion of subprime mortgages and the housing crisis.

But all he said was, "You've seen that house before, Tine. They moved into the log cabin in back. Maybe there's a provision under the law saying there can't be any windows in this house, making it uninhabitable -- otherwise they'd have to pay taxes on both."

"Oh," said Tine. "Well, I'll be."

She rushed out into the middle of the road to get a closer look at a Christmas tree on a hilltop in the woods.

"You're going to get run over!" Rubob called out to her from the side of the road.

"I wonder who put a tree there," Tine said. "Do you think it was the blånissen? They do like mountaintops."

Unfortunately, while the tree was all very colorful, there was a singular lack of blue in the scene, Tine thought.

"It's starting to look hopeless, my search for the blånissen," she thought.

As she and Rubob made their way down Mountain Road, leaping to the side from time to time to avoid the vehicles speeding by at rush hour, Tine looked down at old Robert Brandegee's art studio.

Brandegee was a painter who lived in the village at the turn of the last century.

"You know, Rubob," Tine said, "I'm sure old Mr. Brandegee could work a little blue into the view. He was a landscape painter after all, and we could ask him to go a little heavy with the blue. I wonder what he kept in that paddock down there -- maybe blue elves?"

Tine, who despite what Madame Potty said about her, doesn't waste time getting down to business, began envisioning what a spot of blue could do for the landscape.

"Just the thing," she thought. "But we're still no closer to finding any of those secretive little blånissen, are we Rubob?"

"It might be too early to tell," Rubob said.

"What's that in there?" Tine said, stopping on the icy path. "Look, it's a bubble Santa." Snow was falling in the plastic bubble.

"It's certainly not a blånisse," she said, "but he's quite cheerful."

What Tine didn't realize was that she was actually looking at a genuine nisse, the "Julenisse," or Yule elf, as Santa is called in Norway. It's the Julenisse who brings presents to all the good children.

If she'd only known about the Julenisse , she might have asked the Julenisse if he'd seen any of his occasional helpers, the blånisse, around.

But Tine was "une fille très paresseuse -- tres mauvaise," and she knew not a thing about the jolly Julenisse.

"Let's have a look at the Hill-Stead," she said, walking toward the entrance to old Mrs. Riddle's estate. "That's where the blånissen almost certainly were last January, when we weren't yet on to them."

"Remember this same scene last January, Rubob?"

"It was the blue hour then, to be sure. And we missed them," Tine said. "You understand how the blånissen can transform a landscape, don't you?"

But Rubob, who may have been tiring of Tine's hunt for the blånissen, had walked ahead, drawn to the inviting lights of old Mrs. Riddle's home.

Tine rushed to catch up with Rubob and said, "I don't see blånissen in that scene -- no blue at all. There's a touch of purple in the light over the house, don't you think?"

"I don't see any purple -- or blue for that matter," Rubob said. "Look the lights are still on in the windows. Maybe we can have a look inside."

Tine crept through the snow up to the window.

Just as she was starting to get a good look at the treasures within, the lights went out.

"I think they did that on purpose," she said to Rubob. "They saw me peeping in -- the docents, I mean. It's not permitted. They take a dim view of such things. Oh, bother -- now I've got snow in my shoes."

"You should have worn boots like me," Rubob said. "I'm always prepared for anything -- sensibly dressed for every occasion."

"You're in advance of all contingencies, Rubob, but I wouldn't know what to wear for peeping in windows," Tine said. "It's not something I'm accustomed to do."

Tine emptied the snow out of one of her shoes, and she and Rubob walked around to the side of the Hill-Stead. Tine looked up at the hill behind the house.

"Definitely not blue and definitely no blånissen, but perhaps a touch of purple," she said, sounding a bit defeated. "They're not out tonight -- it's a fact. I've heard that it's customary to leave them some food. Perhaps that's what we overlooked. Do you have a cracker or anything, Rubob? I've read, too, that they like Christmas porridge."

"No, Tine, I didn't bring any Christmas porridge with me."

"That's a shame, Rubob. You're not quite as prepared as you might think."

As the two passed by the front entrance to the house again, Tine said, "What would you think of buying this place and running it as a bed and breakfast, Rubob? Then we could leave food out for the blånissen."

"You could make blueberry pancakes in the morning, and serve them to the guests," she said. "Then I could leave the leftovers on the porch for the blue elves. They'd like that."

She took one last look at the house as they made their way down the driveway, and for a minute there -- no, it wasn't quite blue enough to indicate the presence of the blånissen -- not to Tine's mind, at least.

"Shame, really," Tine thought. "Then again, though ...," and she turned and gazed once more at the scene. "A touch of blue, to be sure, but nary a blånisse in sight."

After leaving old Mrs. Riddle's estate, they passed a house that was once owned by a prominent restaurateur and caterer, Ann Howard.

"You didn't seem that keen on making blueberry pancakes for our guests at the Hill-Stead B & B, Rubob. You didn't even reply. Maybe Ann Howard could do the cooking for us. What would you say about that?"

Tine failed to notice the sky above Ann Howard's house -- or former house. It's a good thing, too, because Tine might have been tempted to peep in the windows in search of the blånissen -- or at the very least, wander back into the garden. She'd done enough peering into people's windows and gardens for the evening, and come up without a single blånisse -- a bubble Santa maybe, but no blånissen.

"Nope, Rubob, not a single one," she said. "One must learn to get by in the gloaming without the blånissen. What a blue Christmas indeed -- or non-blue Christmas, really."

"There's that lovely wreath up there," Rubob said. "What about that for some Christmas cheer?"

"No, I can't be doing with it -- definitely not blue," Tine replied. Again, she might have focused her gaze a little higher at the night sky. When Tine's mind is made up that there are no blånissen to be seen, there's evidently no persuading her otherwise -- or perhaps she simply couldn't make out the blue in the deepening darkness.

"Christmas is lovely, what with its red and green and multicolored lights and all, but it could use a spot more of blue, with bluebells in the snow, like in Irving Berlin's 'Blue Christmas," she said.

"Bluebells?" Rubob asked.

"The blånissen evidently have the night off," Rubob. "They can't be out painting the landscape every night. They're mischievous and unpredictable -- perhaps sometimes even a trifle lazy on cold winter nights -- and that's how it should be. Even so, I hope they show up one of these evenings around Christmas. It'd be ever so nice, wouldn't it?"

As Tine wended her way home with Rubob, she reflected that though the blue hour wasn't quite as blue as she would have liked, all in all, it was still a very pleasant walk.

Tine's Virtual Walk Through a Patchwork Quilt

2007-12-14T15:57:00.000-05:00

Tine had no time for a walk in the village today because of pressing affairs in the world at large.

She did, however, manage to lose herself for a short while in the scenes of the village sewn into a quilt that hangs on the wall at the town library.

"It was a lot like a walk, except for the fact that I didn't have to wear my mittens and Rubob wasn't there," Tine thought. "But lately, Rubob hasn't been on a lot of my walks anyway."

At the start of Tine's quilted walk, there was even a rooster like the one on the weathervane next door to Tine's house.

You might recall the rooster that greets Tine on her walks:

Tine noticed the shift in the direction of the wind and wondered why the four cardinal points aren't called the four rooster points.

"Probably something only an ornithologist could answer," she thought, glancing toward the reference librarian.

Tine looked up at Diamond Glen, as she often does at the start of her walks:

"It appears to be clear of snow," she thought. "They did a nice job plowing it last night. But I think I'll head down to the Meadows where I was yesterday."

Tine came to the Eighty-Acre Bridge, where she walked with Rubob yesterday afternoon.

"See, Rubob -- there's the Pequabuck River flowing beneath the bridge," she thought. This was an issue that had perplexed Rubob the previous day, because there was no sign of a river under the bridge. In the 1980s, the Pequabuck had taken a new direction, and the river and the bridge had apparently reached an amicable separation.

Tine found herself right back in the Meadows where she'd been the previous afternoon.

A quilt walk can be almost like the real thing, only warmer and easier-going underfoot, Tine reflected. "Why it's almost like lying in bed at night and thinking about one's afternoon walk."

She looked down toward the river, where someone was out sleighing.

"My, my -- I wonder whether Rubob would like to try that tomorrow," she thought.

Children skating on the river had evidently lost track of time, because the moon and stars were up -- either that, or Tine had lost track of the hour.

"I must be getting back from my quilt walk," Tine thought. "It's getting quite late."

But when she reached the town's main thoroughfare, as Rubob would call it, she decided she must have just witnessed a solar eclipse. Daylight had returned to Main Street.

"I don't remember all those elms being there yesterday. Perhaps the elm replanting program is proceeding better than expected," Tine reflected.

Fluffly clouds were blowing past Congo, the name Miss Porter's girls had given to the Congregational Church.

"Once again, the snowplow workers haven't wasted any time," Tine thought. "I expect Rev. Porter was out there shoveling with them, bless his heart."

"I'll stop in at the Village Store for a refreshing drink," she thought.

Tine was undecided over whether to get a hot or cold drink. The weather had been a bit changeable today. "Rubob would get a hot chocolate, I'm sure," she thought. "He's probably home enjoying one right now, while I'm out in the world at large doing tedious chores. Well, someone has to toil away."

Children had just been let out of the Noah Wallace School, Tine noticed. "Getting on three o'clock. My, how quickly an afternoon passes when one's busy."

A couple of the schoolchildren looked remarkably like Tine -- and appeared to share her fondness of books.

"Why don't we go down to the river again and look at the Grist Mill," Rubob would say, because he always suggests heading to the river, no matter where he is. So Tine agreed. She was uncharacteristically agreeable on virtual walks with Rubob.

"Yup, that's the Grist Mill," she said to Rubob. "It's all here on our quilted walk, isn't it? I don't think we'll ever need to take a chilly walk in the wintry real world again. We can take our daily walks in the comfort of the library, in the comfort of its quilt. It's a softer version of the village really."

Rubob, however, begged to differ, even though he wasn't actually there with Tine.

"A real walk is in fact a bit more like a patchwork quilt," he said. "One never knows what one's going to run into, and I like that. That's what makes walks so enjoyable."

"It's exactly the same here, under our quilt," Tine said. "What about kids skating in the moonlight? You don't often run into unexpected things like that on afternoon walks, except perhaps during solar eclipses. When was the last time we saw a solar eclipse on one of our walks?"

Rubob had sensibly vanished, perhaps so he wouldn't have to reply to Tine's whimsical musings.

She headed back down the main thoroughfare toward home, passing the "Memento Mori" cemetery on her way.

"See, Rubob -- same sights, same natural occurences as in the real village -- even death. A quilt can't shield you from death. All the exigencies of village life are here, as you might say, but things are a bit softer overall."

"A quilt softens the harsh reality of life," Tine continued. "I probably wouldn't even have to run errands in a quilted village. I could be at home with you enjoying a hot chocolate. What would you say to that?"

But Rubob was having none of it. He was waiting for Tine to return home so they could set out on their daily walk.

"I've had my walk today, Rubob," Tine said -- "and all in all, it was a very pleasant walk."

Tine and Rubob Take a Walk

2007-12-13T14:18:00.000-05:00

Today's title might seem a little odd for a blog about Tine and Rubob's walks, except for the fact that Tine and Rubob haven't been taking walks together lately. But today -- well, the headline speaks for itself: Tine and Rubob took a walk together. Not exactly together, though, come to think, because Rubob is in the habit of dawdling. He falls back thirty paces or so, absorbed in his own thoughts or perhaps finding it difficult to keep up with Tine.

Tine was preoccupied with thoughts of her own -- or at least one thought of her own. Tine's thoughts aren't as expansive as Rubob's. Her thought at the start of her walk this afternoon basically amounted to: "Snow!" As she proceeded farther along her walk, her thoughts might have consisted of snow, in fact. Certainly, the top of her head soon consisted of snow, and the chilly, wet stuff seemed to be working its way within.

She stopped to admire a snowy house as she started out on her walk, and her thought was: "Snow!"

There might have been an additional thought: "Where's Rubob?" He was sauntering along about thirty paces behind.

"Tine, slow down!" the straggler called out.

Tine sped up. Rubob would say she's contrary, and she is. And that explains why she hadn't been walking with Rubob lately, because she's of a contrary disposition. She's always remarkably even-tempered -- of "an equable nature," she tells Rubob -- but the fact is that she's easily riled. However, in the snow she was feeling very agreeable, and it was nice to have Rubob back with her on her daily walk.

"Where is that Rubob?" she thought.

Rubob, who was fussing with his mittens, caught up with her at the corner.

"Why don't we walk down to the river?" he said, and Tine thought that was a good idea, though she didn't let Rubob know that.

She was looking at some tiny white Christmas lights on a tree and thinking: "Lights!"

Rubob followed Tine down Mad Hatter's Lane to the Hysterical Society cottage, where people with hysterical natures evidently lived -- or so Tine thought. Perhaps they just gathered there -- Tine wasn't sure.

"It looks a little crooked to me," Rubob said.

"I'm sure it's all very much above board," Tine offered.

"I mean it leans to the right," Rubob clarified.

"I think their charter strictly prohibits their advocating any political positions," Tine said.

"I mean the building -- is it leaning to the right? Certainly its neighbor is."

"I don't involve myself in politics, Rubob, and I wonder about the advisability of hysterical people taking political stances. Do you think the caretaker for the hysterical society lives in the smaller cottage on the left? It must be a very demanding job. It looks like a lonely job in that wee cottage, too."

Rubob was looking at the smaller cottage with his head cocked to the left, as well he might. Tine was inclined to look askance at the Hysterical Society's cottages, too.

"We should hurry on," she thought. "The lights are out, but one never knows."

There was actually a light on at the back of the smaller cottage, and it looked all very cozy, Tine thought.

"No doubt the caretaker's enjoying a nice cup of tea," Tine said.

"What caretaker?" Rubob asked.

"For the hystericals," Tine said. "Don't you know anything?"

They continued on down the lane toward old man Winchell's estate, where Tine nipped in for a quick look.

"Snow transforms everything," Rubob said. "One could easily imagine that it was 100 or 150 years ago. The snow smooths out the differences in times. One could envision a horse-drawn cart coming up the street."

"Yes, indeed," Tine thought to herself -- "Rubob's thoughts are so expansive, and here I was simply thinking 'snow!'" again.

They continued down Garden Street and turned onto a snowy Meadow Road. They soon arrived at the old Eighty-Acre Bridge.

Tine slid down the hill to see the bridge from below.

The bridge used to cross over the Pequabuck River, but the river had been redirected in the 1980s. In 1841, the Amistad Africans had crossed over the bridge each day on their way to and from the fields they tilled in the Meadows.

"Why'd they build a bridge here, Tine, when the river is over there?" Rubob called down to Tine.

"They must not have known any better," she replied. "A bridge is always very nice anyway, don't you think? Perhaps they didn't build it for a river, but just for themselves."

Rubob continued to look somewhat perplexed. He rarely finds Tine's musings very persuasive, if he even listens to them.

The two walked down to the river and along the bank. Tine stopped to look at the steps leading up the bank to old man Winchell's estate.

They followed a bend in the Pequabuck around to a pathway leading down to the Farmington River.

"Ducks a dabbling" was Tine's thought. That was the extent of her thoughts. "I suppose one can't be expected to have more thoughts than that when it's so cold and wet," Tine thought. "But that's all I think all the time: Snow! Lights! Ducks! I'm simple-minded, I suppose. Do the hystericals take in the simple-minded, too? I should go live there. It looks quite nice."

Rubob, who might also be simple-minded, was still trying to make his way down the slippery pathway leading to the river. He seemed to be stuck halfway down, afraid to take another step.

"It's slippery, Rubob. Be careful."

She was waiting for him to go down so she could proceed back up. It was like a bottleneck at the Hillary step on Everest. Rubob needed a metal ladder and ropes -- or at least crampons.

He eventually made his way down and looked up at the Winchell Smith house overlooking the bend in the Farmington River.

There was a blob of melting snow on Tine's camera lens.

"You'll have to use a special lens cloth to get that off," Rubob opined.

Tine, who's always impatient, used a dirty Kleenex.

They turned back along the path on the riverbank.

"You know, Rubob, my Village Walks blog gets quite impressive statistics on the number of visitors. On average, it gets 1 visit a day, providing that I visit the site. If I don't visit it, the number is slightly less. If I visit the site once a month, the monthly statistic is 1. It adds up to one unique visitor a year."

"How many did you say, Tine?"

"One -- exactly one."

"Hmm," Rubob said.

"I think perhaps the site has too specific a target market. I'm appealing to too small a segment of our culture, our society. Perhaps it's because I don't have any thoughts," Tine said.

"I'd like to have as many thoughts as snowflakes," Tine thought. "The sky has no problem producing a seemingly infinite variety of flakes. And my only response is 'snow!' No wonder readership is marginal."

The bridge came back into view, through a tangle of branches.

"I need to write a heartbreaking work of staggering genius to boost readership," Tine said to Rubob, "but I only have one thought: 'snow.' How can I build a bridge to my readers when I have only one reader a month -- and when my one reader is simple-minded?"

Rubob cooed something vaguely encouraging, as he is wont to do, but Tine was unsatisfied.

"There's nothing I can do," she thought resignedly. "It's a bridge for myself. I can't upload all of these snowflakes to my blog to satisfy everyone. They might not like a snowstorm anyway -- even a virtual snowstorm. Lots of sensible people don't care for snow. I might as well continue on with a readership of one."

Tine's mind then turned to the business at hand, making way through the thickening snow.

She and Rubob walked back up Meadow Road to Main Street, where Tine pointed out a yellow house -- a newly yellow house that was white until recently. Rubob isn't very fond of yellow houses, as the one monthly reader of this blog knows.

"It looks a little strange," Rubob said. "But it's not nearly so novel as the color of the barn where the Amistad people stayed. That's a much brighter yellow."

"What do you mean yellow? That building is blue."

"No, I just passed it on a walk [Rubob had evidently been taking walks on his own last week, just as Tine had], and it's yellow. And a very novel yellow at that."

Tine thought how novel a word "novel" was. Rubob has a knack for the bon mot, inherited from his father, also a gentleman farmer.

Still, Rubob was mistaken, Tine thought. The barn is blue, with white trim. Tine reversed direction and sped off toward the old Austin house to see the barn.

"Oh my," Tine thought. "It is yellow."

"When the heck did they do that, Rubob?"

"It's always been that color."

"No, it hasn't. It used to be blue, with white trim. It's always been blue."

In fact, Rubob and Tine were both wrong. It used to be black.

"Snow certainly can't smooth out all the differences of time," Tine thought, contemplating the "novel" color of the barn at the Austin Williams house.

Tine and Rubob retreated from the Technicolor Austin Williams barn and set off back home. They soon passed the more traditional yellow of the Timothy Pitkin house.

Tine expected Rubob to say something critical about the yellow -- he usually prefers white houses, it seems -- but he'd been all yellowed out by the Williams barn.

"Beautiful, Tine," Rubob actually said about a yellow house. He was commenting more on the view of the house in the snow, Tine reflected, not on the color. Still, it was a lapse. Rubob had found it within him to praise a yellow house. Snow must indeed transform everything, "smooth everything out," as he had said -- everything but a bright orange-yellow resistant to the forces of nature.

Tine thought that she'd rather think "snow!" or "ducks!" than "bright orange-yellow."

"That's precisely what's wrong with my blog," she thought. "It needs 'bright orange yellow' to attract visitors in today's world of blogging. And it has nothing of the sort. Alas. A blog for the simple-minded. I must arrange to network with the hystericals."

Tine and Rubob passed a sensibly white house with doors -- and a bush -- that preferred a little more color.

"Would you like to walk to the library now?" Rubob asked a very worn-out Tine.

"Yes, let's go!" Tine said, showing absolutely no inclination to turn around and head for the library.

Rubob said, "You see, Tine, the slightest sign of assent always means 'no' with you. Nothing is such a dead giveaway as your easy assent."

"I'm contrary, Rubob," Tine said.

As they approached home, she thought, "All in all, a very pleasant walk -- even if it had only a smattering of bright orange-yellow."

Tine Searches for an Ice Floe

2007-12-07T16:35:00.000-05:00

Tine set out on her walk alone again this afternoon, sad to say.

Alfred Wainwright, preeminent guide to the English Lakeland fells, might think that "walking alone is poetry, walking in a group only prose," but what about walking as a couple? That was the general drift of Tine's thoughts as she looked about her on a rather dreary day.

The snow will perk things up a bit," she decided, as flakes started to land on her nose and cheeks and settle in her hat and hair.

"A light always cheers things up, too," Tine thought. "Nothing like a little incandescence, is there?" she might have said to Rubob.

Tine felt "chilled," as Rubob would say, even though she was well bundled up. Mr. Wainwright, she recalled reading, rarely wore a coat on his walks; he said it would only soak through anyway.

Wainwright, sensibly wearing a coat

He wrote in his guidebooks that he never got sick, but his son, who was dragged along on the lakeland walks for many years, said that Wainwright frequently caught colds. After one chilly, wet walk, the son said, Wainwright warmed himself up with ten cups of tea.

"Yes, a cup of tea would be rather nice right now," Tine thought." I wonder whether Rubob is having a cup of tea now? Yes, he probably is having a cup of plum-flavored tea at this very moment -- or black raspberry. How revolting. I'll bet Wainwright enjoyed a proper cup of tea, without the durn flavorings."

A cheerful Santa waved to Tine over a letter basket, or so Tine imagined.

Ascribing animate behavior to inanimate objects -- that would be the "pathetic fallacy," Tine had read recently.

"Walking alone isn't poetic -- it's pathetic," Tine said, chuckling to herself. The snow was starting to fall a little heavier, and Tine was beginning to enjoy herself.

She crossed the busy main "thoroughfare," as Rubob would say, and passed the home of the Hysterical Society.

"I wonder why it's called the Hysterical Society," Tine thought. "Maybe it's some sort of miniature lunatic asylum -- a cottage for the incurably insane. I'd better give it a wide berth."

Tine's thoughts do tend to wander when Rubob isn't around to rein them in. Rubob would be discussing something sensible, something practical such as declining property values.

"Could they be declining due to the proximity of a small lunatic asylum?" she'd ask Rubob, but he wouldn't be listening. He'd be running through the day's business headlines.

"Perhaps subprime mortgages shouldn't have been offered to the incurably insane," Tine would offer, but Rubob would be preoccupied with thoughts of his own.

Tine was headed down toward the river, and she thought she'd first have a peek at old man Winchell's estate. She stole silently through the gate, wondering a little about the footsteps she was leaving in the snow.

"They're too tiny to see," Rubob would say.

Tine saw the light on in the downstairs window, a warming presence. "It must be the old man having his afternoon tea," she thought.

Winchell Smith wrote and produced the silent film "Way Down East," and it was he who brought Lillian Gish to Tine's village to star in the movie in 1919. Gish played a poor country girl, Anna Moore, who's tricked into a sham marriage by a wealthy womanizer named Lennox Sanderson. At the end of the film, Anna collapses on an ice floe on the Farmington River during a blizzard. The ice floe is headed directly for a waterfall, but she's rescued by the man who loves her in the nick of time.

Poor little Tine, who was quarreling with Rubob, thought she might just throw herself onto an ice floe in the Farmington River. Fortunately, there were no ice floes on the river at this time of year. Nevertheless, Tine thought she might wend her way down to the river and have a look.

She admired the gate at the Winchell estate as she turned back onto Garden Street. "Worthy of Lennox Sanderson's grand house," she thought, casting herself out onto the pavement of Garden Street.

Continuing on alone in the snow -- "blinding blizzard," Tine thought -- she passed a house looking rather forlorn on such a gray day.

Rubob loves houses with porches, Tine reflected. A little ways past the house, she turned into Riverside Cemetery to look at the river and the meadows beyond.

"Dreary," Tine thought. But a dog running free in the meadows seemed to think otherwise, and he bounded up toward Tine and rolled in the snow next to her.

Tine left the cemetery and passed a little house with two welcoming porch lights.

"No time to stop for tea," she thought. "I'm off to the river to find an ice floe."

On her way down Garden Street, Tine passed the site of the old canal basin, where someone had, in fact, perished in the Farmington River. Foone, one of the Africans who'd gained his freedom after the Amistad slave ship rebellion of 1839, had stayed in Farmington in 1843. He drowned while swimming in the river one afternoon after working in the meadows, perhaps because of homesickness for his family and village in Sierra Leone. The canal is gone now, and the basin has been filled in.

Tine turned down Mill Lane and walked down to the old Gristmill and the river.

"There's the perilous waterfall," she thought. Some of "Way Down East" had been filmed near here, but the ice floe scenes had been filmed in White River Junction, Vermont. Tine, however, didn't know this, and she was searching for ice floes.

A flock of ducks had staked out a little inlet just below Tine's vantage point.

"No ice floes here," Tine thought, and she walked around the Gristmill to look at the falls from above.

A lantern cast a warm glow over the scene.

At the Gristmill, a chef was busy preparing dinner. Tine thought with concern about the ducks by the riverbank.

"Well, no sign of ice floes at all," she thought. "Perhaps W. D. Griffiths filmed the ice floe scenes somewhere else, such as White River Junction."

"You see, Rubob, I do know a thing or two," Tine announced to Rubob, who was sadly absent on this walk.

"You do indeed, Tine," Rubob would have said.

"And much of it I've learned from books obtained right over there," Tine would say, pointing to the Millrace Bookstore. It looked very inviting, but Rubob didn't like the idea of Tine spending all of her hard-earned wages on books. "Couldn't you just go to the library?" Rubob would ask.

Tine looked wisfully at the bookstore.

She walked back up the hill from the Gristmill to Garden Street, and decided she'd see how Miss Porter's School looked in the snow -- "and in the gloaming," she added to herself.

It was transformed by the warm glow of the lanterns along the pathway.

A girl in a red coat with a fluffy white collar was twirling in the snow on the path.

Across the street from school, a snowman was all lit up with happiness over the snow; either that or he'd swallowed a lightbulb like Uncle Fester on "The Addams Family."

"Congo," as the Congregational Church was known at one time at Miss Porters, was looking not quite white next to the snow. The once-gleaming white walls had been sullied by the traffic of the ordinary world -- or at least the traffic along the village's main thoroughfare.

And the old tin shop house, farther down the main thoroughfare, was looking a trifle yellow.

"It, too, is cheered by lights," Tine thought.

"It's not quite the shade of white I would have chosen," Rubob would have said. "It's unfortunate."

"I don't know that I agree, Rubob," Tine would have replied.

As she arrived home, the old rooster next door turned his tail feathers toward Tine. Perhaps he was just looking over at Rattlesnake Mountain.

"All in all a very pleasant walk," Tine thought, but it would have been a little more pleasant with Rubob -- or perhaps the odd ice floe."

The Return of Tine

2007-12-03T14:18:00.000-05:00

Tine, who hasn't been spotted in the village for the longest time, was seen proceeding cautiously along the edge of the sidewalk leading up Mountain Road this afternoon. It was icy, and Tine believed she gained better purchase in the leafy, snowy crud at the side of the walkway.

"Purchase -- now that's a word Rubob would use," Tine thought.

Rubob was inexplicably absent on this walk of Tine's -- or explicably if you had a view into Tine's mind.

It was the Grinch, actually, who saw her on Mountain Road.

"He's probably on the lookout for like-minded souls," Tine thought.

It wasn't the sort of day that anyone would enjoy sitting outside on the porch, except perhaps the Grinch.

"I hope I'm not mistaken for a Who because I'm so small," Tine thought, but the Grinch permitted her to pass.

"He reminds me a bit of Rubob," Tine thought. "Talk about like-minded characters."

She was making her way busily up to the Hill-Stead, to see the grounds after last night's ice storm.

"Yes, I need to see the ice," she said to Rubob, anticipating disagreements, even though he wasn't there. "At the Hill-Stead. You can't disagree, because you're not here. Now go away!"

Tine was rewarded with the view below, and Rubob might have been, too, had he not been so disagreeable.

"Tine, I would have loved to have taken a walk with you," Rubob might have said -- in fact, most definitely would have said.

"It's too late for that now. You should have thought of that earlier," Tine replied.

"Look what you've missed: a misty prospect," Tine thought.

"I think I'll have a seat," she thought. "Only the Grinch and I will be out on our porches today, enjoying a thoroughly gray day."

"It's not so bad out here alone," Tine thought. "What did Wainwright say? 'Walking alone is poetry; walking in a group only prose."

Tine had been reading "Wainwright: The Biography," and in some ways he was with her on her walk today.

"It's not unlike the Cambrian fells here," Tine thought, "though I don't imagine there are many red barns there."

The sky over the Hill-Stead seemed undecided over whether to lighten or darken.

"I feel that way myself sometimes," Tine thought, reflecting on the walk she was enjoying alone today.

She got up from her rocking chair and proceeded down the hill toward High Street. From the street, she looked back up toward old Mrs. Riddle's estate.

"Rather nice," Tine thought. "I'm sure Mrs. Riddle enjoyed a brisk winter walk alone from time to time."

Across the street, Tine admired a house that Rubob might have liked -- or maybe not, since it was another "historic descrecration," as he would have said -- an extensive renovation of the old brown house that had once stood there.

"All the same, it's very agreeable," Tine thought, "and the front door is a more pleasing shade of green than the Grinch."

Rubob would pronounce the door "blue," Tine thought, because his brown transition lenses made him color-blind, though he refused to acknowledge this.

"I think a darker shade of blue would be better," he would say. "Or maybe with less gray in it."

"The gray is in the day, Rubob -- not in the door," Tine would reply. "Everything is gray today. And the door is certainly not a shade of blue," she humphed.

Tine turned back onto High Street, where icy branches overhung the walkway.

"I can hardly get to where I'm going, what with all this ice," Tine thought. The crystalline branches shattered as she made her way through them. She spotted the Grinch again across the street and felt his icy fingers reaching in to take hold of her heart. "Your heart's a dead tomato splot, with moldy purple spots."

"I haven't been in the most charitable of moods today, have I?" Tine thought. "It's that Rubob: Nothing could melt that old miser's heart. I'm giving him back a bit of his own."

Tine fumed as she bustled along -- fumed cheerily as she thought of Rubob. "He'll be having a hot chocklit while I'm out here negotiating this perilous ice. 'Negotiating' -- there's another one of your expressions."

Tine crossed High Street, looking both ways for 'vehicles' -- Rubob's word for "cars." "Vehicles" is more precise, Rubob said. And speaking of vehicles, Tine recalled that he had, in fact, once pulled her back from a speeding SUV near here. She often neglected to look before she left the curb. "I'll make sure I look out for vehicles this afternoon," Tine thought, "while you're safely at home with your newspaper and your hot chocolate. That'll teach you: I won't get run over after all. I'm perfectly capable of looking after myself. And to be more precise, you never have a hot chocolate; you prefer a lukewarm chocolate." With that distracting thought, Tine just missed being run over by a speeding mid-size vehicle.

Ice was part of every scene today, Tine remarked to herself as she passed "Congo," the Congregational Church.

She stopped to admire the Timothy Pitkin house, beautiful in all seasons, as she turned toward home.

"I don't know that I like yellow houses," Rubob would say, "but it seems to work for that house. Perhaps white would be better, don't you think?"

"No, I don't think," Tine would have said testily -- perhaps even icily.

She next lingered over a bush of frozen red berries. "Well, I'll be," she thought.

"It's like a poem somehow," Tine thought -- "a wintry poem."

A little farther along, she looked up through the field in the old Bull Lot, thinking, "A little of Farmington, a lot of Vermont," as Rubob would often say on this stretch of their walks, borrowing a line from the von Trapps.

As Tine made her way up her driveway, a rooster appeared to be enjoying his perch amidst all the icy tree limbs.

"A fine view you have today," Tine thought. "We proudly rule over our solitary, icy roosts this afternoon, don't we?"

"East and West will pinch the heart," Tine thought. "Now what the heck is that from?"

"The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky, --
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That cannot keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat -- the sky
Will cave in on him by and by."

-- Edna St. Vincent Millay, God's World

"With a mix of poetry and ice, all in all, a rather pleasant walk," Tine thought.

In the Middle of Nowhere

2006-10-07T10:43:00.000-04:00

Tine and Rubob ventured out beyond the village late yesterday afternoon, on a bright and chilly fall day, and they came across this curious sight in the middle of nowhere:

"It reminds me of a phone booth on the Pennine Way," Tine said. "It was on the edge of a moor, by a deserted road. I thought, 'What a nice surprise!' and placed a call to a friend in New York."

Rubob was contemplating placing another sort of call.

"I need to micturate," he said to Tine. "Too much coffee, I think."

It was one of the few things Rubob had said on the walk. He'd been absorbed in his thoughts about repairs he'd been making to the barn all day. Tine had dragged him away from the project for their walk.

"Our every need is provided for in the wilderness," Tine mused as Rubob busied himself in the remote British Telecom call box.

"It's extraordinary what one finds in the middle of nowhere," she thought. And she recalled the area by the riverbank called Nowhere in the town where she'd lived as a child. Nowhere was down a cobblestone lane leading to the mudflats by the river. The lane was lined with fishermen's red brick cottages.

The fishermen's boats were pulled up on the mud flats, and their nets hung on poles standing in the sand.

"A convenient facilty," Rubob said, emerging from his call.

"British Telecom at your service, Rubob," Tine said.

"British Telecom?" Rubob asked.

"You weren't listening," Tine said, and she told him again about the phone booth in the middle of nowhere on the Pennine Way.

"'Who have you forgotten to call today?' she thought, recalling the slogan on British Telecom vans. "Shouldn't it be 'whom'?" she wondered.

As she and Rubob returned to the village down Meadow Road, Tine kept an eye out for other useful items in the middle of nowhere.

"I don't think we have much use for one of those," Tine said to Rubob, "though it puts me in the mood for a pint at the Plough and Harrow." Unfortunately, the village didn't have a Plough and Harrow. Just the thought of a pub was enough to sustain Tine, however, on the walk back into town.

"And here's a bridge in the middle of nowhere, without even a stream," she said.

It was the Eighty-Acre Bridge over the Pequabuck River, the bridge the Amistad Africans, including Foone, used to take from the village to the Meadows each day. The Pequabuck River had been redirected in the 1980s, leaving the bridge, well, in the middle of nowhere.

"Shame, rilly," Tine said, quoting one of the her uncle's favorite remarks.

"And here's something," Tine said, after turning back onto the village's main thoroughfare. "Look at this, Rubob," she called out to him. Rubob had been moseying on ahead, eager to get back to the barn. For a gentleman farmer like Rubob, fall is the time for fixin'. For an idle hand like Tine, it's the time for leisurely afternoon walks, having a good look around.

"A heron, Rubob," Tine said. "Well, I declare. And once again, in the middle of nowhere."

"That is something," Rubob allowed.

Venturing nowhere in particular certainly does make for a pleasant walk, Tine thought as she and Rubob turned up Hatters Lane toward home.

"Yes, all in all it was a very pleasant walk," she mused.

A Country Walk

2006-10-05T16:21:00.000-04:00

Tine and Rubob took a country walk on the fringes of the village today.

The two weren't very chatty, because they were worried about their doughty sloop Puffin, which hadn't been all that doughty this past week.

"Doubtless the engine will be OK," Tine thought, looking out over the rolling hills, thinking a little of rolling waves. She thought of crossing Long Island Sound in Puffin last weekend, and making it home despite an overheating engine and the dreaded white smoke at the exhaust. "Sounds like a blown head gasket," the mechanic had told Tine.

"I don't think we'll be visiting any more islands this year," Tine said to Rubob.

"No, Tine," Rubob said dejectedly. Rubob and Tine had done their best to get the engine working well enough to get home, and they'd flown back across the Sound at near hull speed, with the mainsail raised in a 20-knot October breeze out of the southeast.

"The sailing season would seem to be over," Tine thought, still feeling the boat rocking under her and hearing the steady rhythm of the waves at the bow. "I'll have to find a new rhythm for my days. At least we have our walks in the village."

And all in all, it was a very pleasant fall walk.

Tine Searches for Sea Captains' Houses

2006-09-19T16:10:00.000-04:00

Tine has been away from the village for a night, checking on the doughty sloop Puffin. Few things are quite so comforting as falling asleep on a boat bobbing at its mooring, Tine thought as she returned home this morning.

Though she was gone for only a night and part of a morning, it seemed like a week to her. "Did you miss me?" she asked Rubob as she returned home. "I did, Tine, and I've made a blueberry pancake for you."

"We've got to look for sea captain's houses in town on our walk today," Tine said after she finished her late breakfast. "You'd be surprised, but there are a lot of sea captain's houses in our little village."

Rubob looked skeptical, but Rubob was probably thinking about something entirely different, as he often was; and even when he was thinking about something entirely different he tended to look skeptical.

"Well, maybe not sea captain's houses precisely, but houses of people who owned ships that sailed to China," Tine said. "Did you know that?"

But Rubob was indeed thinking about something entirely different.

"I think we're growing a football in the garden," he said.

The world's largest fungus

"Yes, I saw that, Rubob. It's the world's largest fungus," she said. "Our garden has gone to seed. I've been spending far too much time at sea."

"You were away only a night, Tine," Rubob said.

"So I was," Tine agreed, wobbling a bit from mal de dembarquement as she made her way down the path.

"Did you notice anything different about your pancake, Tine?" Rubob asked.

"Was it made from a giant mushroom?" Tine asked.

"It had buttermilk powder in it, rather than milk," Rubob said. "That's why it was so fluffy."

"It was awfully good, white and fluffy like the giant fungus," Tine said.

As they made their way down the driveway, Rubob seemed lost in his thoughts. "Oxen," he said, apropos of nothing. "Oxen," he said once more, looking out over the distant hillside and seemingly rolling the word over in his mind.

"There, he's said it again," Tine thought. "I wonder why." She then remembered the village tour they'd taken on Saturday and how the tour guide had told them about an old store being moved in the 1920s from Main Street to Mill Lane on logs, with the help of oxen.

Store moved by oxen from Main Street to Mill Lane

He must be thinking about that, Tine surmised -- maybe about oxen being driven up to the fields above the village on Rattlesnake Mountain. She would have asked him, but she was distracted by something white and fluffy that was neither pancake nor fungus.

A dog much larger than Tine dashed to the edge of the lawn to bark at her. It most certainly would have viciously attacked her, but it was restrained by an invisible electric fence.

One doesn't face such perils at sea, Tine thought. She thought of the cormorant watching her go by in her dinghy this morning.

The two turned down Hatters Lane and passed a new house, and Rubob took issue with the placement of the newly planted trees.

"They need another tree in the center, and the one on the right, the maple, is far too close to the evergreen. I'd like to ask the landscaper what he was thinking at the time," Rubob said.

"It could be moved with oxen," Tine said.

"The sapling?" Rubob asked. "Why would you need oxen?"

"The house," Tine replied. "Like the old village store that was moved from Main Street. They could move the house away from the trees with oxen."

"Oxen?" Rubob said, somewhat flummoxed.

"And they did move trees with oxen at Mrs. Riddle's estate," Tine said.

"Have you thought any more about moving to the house on Main Street?" Rubob asked.

"What?" Tine said, alarmed. "I never said I wanted to move to a house on Main Street."

"We could cut our mortgage in half," Rubob said. "And the taxes are less."

Rubob was always thinking of cost-cutting measures, Tine thought.

The two turned onto Main Street, and Tine stopped at one of the houses that the guide said was owned by a merchant who sent ships to China.

"That's it, Rubob -- the sea captain's house," Tine said.

"It looks more like a shipwrecked captain's house," Rubob said.

"Well, it's a nice house, all the same, and a sea captain lived there. We could move there and cut our taxes in half," Tine said.

"Our mortgage, Tine, but I don't think so," Rubob said.

Tine reversed direction and hurried along to another former Cowles house, on the other side of Main Street.

"Now here we have another remarkable example of a sea captain's house in a landlocked village," Tine said. "Note the Oriental design in the gate, no doubt brought home by the captain on one of his voyages. The design means peace and prosperity."

The wide-open gate wasn't easy to see, but Tine poked her nose around the wall and took a good look.

"A merchant's house," Rubob corrected. "The Cowles were never sea captains."

"Be that as it may," Tine said, "it's connected to the sea. Neighboring Hartford was a shipping center, you know, and that's how old Zenas Cowles became prosperous. They went down the Connecticut River out to the Sound, just like you and me in Puffin."

The two turned down Meadown Road and then onto Garden Street. They walked through Riverside Cemetery to take a quick look at the Meadows and the river. With all the leaves, Tine could get only a glimpse of the river.

"It strikes me that there were two paths to riches in the village," Rubob said -- "farmers working their fields at home, and then the merchants and traders, those open to the whole world."

As Tine and Rubob continued down Garden Street, they stopped to look at the old canal basin, Pitkin's Basin, where the canal boats had stopped in the early 1800s.

The canal was developed in part by another member of the Cowles family, George, who wanted the town to have a link to the sea, for trading with Europe, the West Indies and Europe.

"You know George's house, the one on Main Street, where the architect Jim Thomson used to live," Tine said. It's another sea captain's house, as it were."

"Sea merchant's house," Rubob said.

"There are certainly a lot of sea captain's houses in this landlubbing village, aren't there, Rubob?" Tine said. "It's like you said: The village was open to the whole world, and this basin was its link to the world. And it's where Foone died, too, swimming in the basin."

Foone was one of the Amistad Africans who'd lived in the village in 1841, after he and his fellow Mendians took control of a slave ship off Cuba, sailed it to Long Island, and won their freedom in court. Foone had drowned in the basin one afternoon after working in the Meadows. He may have taken his own life because of homesickness. "Foone going to see his mother," he told a friend the day before he died. Tine and Rubob had just passed his grave in the cemetery.

"Foone was someone who knew the land and the sea," Tine said. "And did you know he went to school in the Village Store, the one moved by oxen to Mill Lane -- on the second floor?"

"I didn't, Tine," Rubob said.

"That was Deming's store, owned by Samuel Deming, an abolitionist," Tine said. "Stuff from around the world was sold there, as well as produce grown in the Meadows. Somehow everything is connected in this village, isn't it? And everything seems timeless at times."

"It is, Tine," Rubob said, looking at his watch. Rubob, a gentleman farmer, had to be getting back to tilling his own fields.

"'Time present and time past are both contained in time future' -- and in Pitkin's Basin," Tine said.

"You like that little book, don't you?" Rubob said.

"What little book would that be?" Tine asked.

"Eliot's Four Quartets," Rubob said.

Never heard of it," Tine said. "'And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time," she added.

"That's the one,"Rubob said.

"It's lost," Tine said. "I can never find it. At the end of all my exploring, I arrive where I started, a pile of books, clothes and other junk on the bedroom floor."

"Look, we can stop for a cup of tea on that porch," she said.

"No time," Rubob replied, hurrying Tine along.

"Time and the hour run through the most pleasant day," Tine said, hoping to distract Rubob with a line from Rubob's favorite bard.

But Rubob wasn't listening. He was several paces ahead of Tine.

He didn't stop to notice Timothy Pitkin's house as they turned down their own street toward home.

"Was he related to the Pitkin of Pitkin's Basin?" Tine wondered. "No doubt he was, wasn't he Rubob?" Tine said to herself. Even when she talks to herself, Tine often addresses her comments to Rubob.

They passed yet another Cowles house, but Rubob didn't stop to take a look there, either.

"Doubtless another sea captain," Tine thought. "Sea merchant, Tine," she corrected herself, quickening her pace to catch up with Rubob.

"We passed another Cowles house," she said, as she drew up alongside Rubob.

"Did we really?" Rubob asked distractedly. His mind was clearly on the fields needing tilling at home. Most likely, he was thinking of oxen.

"We have the whole world before us when we're out and about in the village," Tine thought. "Its history reaches down the Farmington and Connecticut rivers, out into the Sound, across oceans. There's no limit to it all. We're sea captains sailing on the seas of history. "

"'History is a pattern of timeless moments,'" she said to Rubob. "We've had a few timeless moments on our walk today, haven't we?"

"Yes, Tine, I suppose we have," Rubob agreed, checking his watch once again.

"Timeless moments certainly make for rather pleasant walks, all in all, don't they?" Tine said as she followed Rubob up the driveway.

Tine Returns from Her Time Travels

2006-09-13T19:36:00.000-04:00

Tine hasn't been seen on her daily walks for a while, and some villagers (who set their clocks by her daily walks with Rubob) most likely assumed that she was away. If by "away" they meant away from the village, they were mistaken.

Tine leaves the village only with great reluctance, and she's managed to stay very much within it recently. And yet, curiously enough, she arrived back among the villagers yesterday afternoon, at about 2 o'clock.

Tine, you see, has been time traveling. For the past few weeks, she's remained very much within the here portion of the here and now, but not within the now. Tine's been preoccupied at home, poring over dusty old documents, digging into her village's past.

Tine's time mechanism

But she resurfaced yesterday, as it happened, on a walk with Rubob. It was a bright, warm day -- all very summery for a change. Even so, she was very much lost in her thoughts, as she has been for weeks. The two were crossing Main Street when Rubob stopped short to look at a house -- well not so much a house, but a cottage.

"Did you know that it was once a hat shop -- in the late 1700s," Tine said to Rubob. "That's why Hatters Lane is called, well, Hatters Lane."

They had just walked down the narrow lane to the cottage.

"Yes, Tine, I think you did say something about that recently," Rubob said. Tine had talked of little else for some time. This house was occupied by so and so, and interestingly enough, that house was at one time a such and such. "Quite remarkable," Rubob said.

"And a barber had a shop there, too, around 1850," Tine continued. "And after that, a Barbour owned it, funnily enough -- not a barber, but a Barbour, one Henry Barbour. And let me see -- it was an antiques shop as well. Did you know that, Rubob?"

Rubob didn't reply. He was looking at the cottages rather quizzically, with his head cocked to one side.

"And Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis, that scholar of all things English, he was a customer of the antiques store. I don't suppose you knew that, did you?" Tine asked. Tine thought she might get Rubob's attention with the mention of Wilmarth -- known to his friends as "Lefty," understandably enough (Wilmarth?).

But Rubob was lost in his thoughts, as he often is.

"It looks a little crooked," Rubob said. "Is that house leaning to one side?"

"Lefty said the antiques shop owners had excellent taste but weren't very good at running a business," Tine said. "They revived an interest in Victorian bric-a-brac, Lefty wrote in 'One Man's Education.' You like bric-a-brac, don't you?"

Rubob, as Tine knows, doesn't much care for bric-a-brac, but in any case he wasn't listening. He was squinting at the cottage, standing well back from it, with his feet planted dangerously in the town's busy main thoroughfare. He was leaning considerably to port, with his head tilted the same way.

"It's definitely a little crooked," Rubob said. "Take a look."

"I think we should get back on the sidewalk," Tine said, "but OK." She cocked her head a little to the left, tilted it back the other way, and agreed with Rubob. "It's crooked," she said -- "a crooked house. Probably a crooked antiques store, too."

"A crooked what?" Rubob asked.

"Antiques store," Tine said. "You know, where Lefty shopped. He bought furniture for his house there."

"Who's Lefty?" Rubob asked.

"Wilmarth," Tine replied. "You know, Lefty. He was named by his Yale pals after Lefty Louie, a New York gangster. Lefty was just Lewie before Lefty Louie came along."

"He did?" Rubob asked. "Wilmarth Lewis really bought antiques there?" Rubob had read all about the Lewis Walpole Library -- containing Lewis' collection of Horace Walpole's letters and artwork -- and he'd visited it several times, but evidently he'd missed this fact.

Lefty Lewis' house

"He did, Rubob," Tine said. "He bought some of his grand furniture in this little cottage. I'm sure he paid too much, if you're convinced they were crooked."

"But really, Tine, I'd never noticed that the cottage was leaning so much," Rubob said.

"It's disorienting looking at it too long," Tine said. "I can't tell whether it's crooked or whether it's the neighboring cottage that's a little off."

"It's the left one, Tine -- only the left one that's leaning," Rubob said.

"I'm not so sure," Tine said. "I'm not so sure about anything these days. These cottages throw me back in time and leave my head in a whirl. You know, it's all my historical research -- it's left me not knowing what century I'm in when I'm walking around in the village. My head reels from it all."

"H. G. Wells said that the sensations of time travel are 'excessively unpleasant,' " Tine continued. "He talked of a 'helpless headlong motion,' a feeling of 'an imminent smash.' Well, I don't know about that. I'm inclined to think that time travel can be rather pleasant -- at times at least. Even Wells goes on to write about misty landscapes, puffs of vapor, and white snow fading into the bright green of spring in an instant -- that sort of thing, you know ['sor' o' thing,' she added to herself, quoting Chef Blackstock]. It sounds not unlike our walks through the village together, Rubob."

"But still," Tine said, "it's true that I've been caught up in the headlong whirl of my time travels. H. G. Wells writes about an 'eddying murmur' and a 'strange dumb confusedness' after he shifts his machine into gear. I think he must have done a bit of historical research himself. I must say that it's rather agreeable being out on a walk for a change, back in the here and now, just standing here admiring your crooked cottage. "

And it was, all in all, a very pleasant walk, Rubob had to agree -- even with the old cottage's foundation clearly sinking into the ground.

Tine and Rubob Sail Toward Home

2006-07-27T10:06:00.000-04:00

Tine and Rubob have been so preoccupied with their doughty sloop Puffin this spring and summer that they haven't had time for their walks in the village. Villagers who've set their clocks by Tine and Rubob's passage along the village sidewalks have had to resort to other accurate methods of timekeeping, such as sundials, clepsydras (water clocks) and atomic clocks.

Clepsydra

"We need to go for a walk in the village soon," Tine said to Rubob this past Sunday as they sailed by a lighthouse at the entrance to Narragansett Bay.

Rubob asked Tine to pass the bucket in the cockpit, and Tine thought he was looking a little green around the gills.

"Perhaps Rubob needs to sit under a tree," she thought. She'd read that Queen Elizabeth had asked the captain of the royal yacht Britannia what the best cure for seasickness was, and he'd replied, "Sitting under a tree, your Majesty."

Royal yacht Britannia on the River Tyne (as it happens)

Tine and Rubob did have an opportunity to walk in Newport, along the Cliff Walk.

It was all very beautiful and the cottages were quite remarkable, of course, but it made Tine a little homesick for her own village.

"I wouldn't mind stopping there for a cup of tea," Tine said to Rubob as they approached the Chinese Teahouse in front of the Marble House. "But I suppose it's out of the question. Shame, really. We'll have a cup of tea on Puffin."

Queen Elizabeth used to take her afternoon tea in the teak-lined Sun Lounge on the Shelter Deck on Britannia, before the royal yacht was decommissioned in 1997.

On Tine and Rubob's boat, the Sun Lounge was the cockpit, but it wasn't very sunny when Tine and Rubob set out for home on Sunday.

You might have seen them passing if you'd been looking out over Narragansett Bay from Newport that morning. On the stern of Puffin, their home port was listed as "Farmington, CT."

"Curious to think of Farmington as a home port, isn't it?" Tine thought. But for all her sailing, Tine's home port really was her little village far from the coast.

The Village of Beautiful Gates

2006-03-04T17:23:00.000-05:00

"'A Village of Pretty Houses'," Rubob said this morning, quoting a headline in the previous day's New York Times. "Can you guess which village George Washington was referring to when he said that, Tine?"

"I don't know," Tine said. "But it reminds me of the book we have about our village, "The Village of Beautiful Homes."

"The Village of Beautiful Homes, "
by Arthur L. Brandegee and Eddy H. Smith

"Yes, it is like that, come to think. Look, Tine," he said, holding up the Travel section of the Times, which featured Tine and Rubob's village as the Connecticut "Day Trip."

"Well, I'll be," Tine said. "The world at large has discovered us, Rubob."

"It would seem so," Rubob said. "Listen, Tine: 'Farmington, Connecticut, looks like a rich but sleepy suburb where nothing much happens."

Tine looked at Rubob with raised eyebrows.

"That's fine with its preppy residents, who would just as soon not be noticed," Rubob read. "'The rapper 50 Cent found it and joined its mansion-owning crowd in 2004. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis knew her way around the place, too as did her sister, Lee Radziwill, and her White House social secretary, Letitia Baldrige ... all of whom attended Miss Porter's, the fancy girls' boarding school that occupies much of the historical village center.'"

"Well, I declare," Tine said, "it sounds like a perfectly horrible little village. Its 'preppy residents' and 'fancy girls' boarding school'? How all very pert. We won't be taking a day trip there, will we?"

"But we live here, Tine," Rubob said.

"Do we really?" Tine said.

"And behind Farmington's prosperous-looking facade of tree-lined residential streets and sedate-looking buildings, there are discoveries for the casual visitor," Rubob droned on.

"Hmmphh -- it doesn't sound like our village at all," Tine said. "The Times' roving reporter must have taken a wrong turn, maybe in Greenwich or Westchester County. We can be thankful for that."

"You're in a bit of a state this morning," Rubob said, chortling over his newspaper.

"Let me see that story," Tine said, snatching it out of Rubob's hands.

"Preppies dozing off behind their 'prosperous-looking facades' -- what poppycock," Tine said. "People see what they want to see, don't they? Why do you suppose George Washington didn't describe it as "the village of sedate-looking buildings'? Tell me that."

"Things weren't quite so sedate in Revolutionary times," Rubob said.

"Or maybe he just saw things for what they were, without all the high-blown hogwash. He would have known what was fit to print, too," Tine said, slinging the paper in the recycling basket. "It feels musty in here with all this newsprint scattered about. A little fresh air would do us good. Would you be up for a walk?"

"Sure, Tine," Rubob said, rising from his chair.

"I'd like to check on the mysterious case of the missing gate at Oldgate. It worries me," Tine said. "We can't have 'casual visitors' wandering around with gates missing, can we?"

Tine hurried outside and waited at the bottom of the driveway for Rubob, who dawdled over his shoes in the hallway and then over a bag of trash that he was carrying to the shed.

Tine busied herself looking at a hollow at the base of a hemlock tree. "I wonder who lives in there?" she thought.

A group of women, out for a walk, passed by Tine's house.

"I hope they're not more 'casual visitors,' drawn by the story in yesterday's Times," Tine thought. Eve was just the first of many, Tine feared, thinking of Eve Glasner, the Times reporter who wrote the "Day Trip" story. But the women seemed to know their way around, heading toward the steep, narrow road up Diamond Glen, where 'casual visitors' wouldn't be inclined to exert themselves.

Rubob caught up with Tine, and they headed down Hatter's Lane.

"In 350 years, how much do you suppose the price of a fine house in Amsterdam, right on the canal, has gone up in price, when you factor in inflation, Tine?" Rubob asked.

He was often absorbed with numbers, and this morning he was particularly focused on house prices, after reading the "Real Estate Issue" of the New York Times Magazine.

"I don't know," Tine said. "A lot, I imagine." She stopped to look at two dogs watching her from a front yard. "Who let the dogs out/ Who let the dogs out," she sang to herself.

"No, not a lot -- you're wrong about that," Rubob replied. "It doubled in value. Can you imagine that? Think of how much an investment in the stock market would have risen over the same period."

"Doubled?" Tine asked. "Why's that? Is it a hovel?"

"No, it's a beautiful red-brick, Renaissance-style home," Rubob said. "But over the centuries, house prices haven't risen in Amsterdam as much as one might expect."

"This is going to be about the Housing Bubble, isn't it?" Tine said warily. It was one of Rubob's favorite topics on their walks together.

"Yes, as a matter of fact," he said. "A professor in the Netherlands did a study of houses along the canal, called the Herengracht index."

"The who's 'n' what index?" Tine asked.

"Herengracht -- it's the name of the canal," Rubob said.

Blauwburgwal with Herengracht.
http://www.grachten.nl/indexeng.html

"Of course it would be, wouldn't it?" Tine said, borrowing a line from her uncle, Mr. Derek.

"The study found that the real value of the houses hasn't climbed all that much over long periods of time," Rubob said.

"And outside of Amsterdam?" Tine asked.

"The story says Amsterdam might have a more turbulent history than other cities," Rubob said -- "what with the plague, tulipomania and the like -- but the general conclusion, that bubbles don't last, applies elsewhere. In fact, the Dutch professor concludes that the commonly held idea that real estate rises significantly in value over time is a myth."

"Not to worry; values might keep going up here in the village because of yesterday's story in the Times," Tine ventured.

"That's right -- I hadn't thought of that," Rubob said.

"We're on the map now, Rubob."

They turned onto the main thoroughfare at the hatter's cottages, passing a Raveis "Open House" sign on the corner, and headed toward Oldgate -- to investigate, as it were.

"Why do you think housing prices go up?" Rubob asked. "Is it because of the scarcity of land or because of government regulation?"

"A bit of both, I imagine," Tine said.

"Well, here's another study," Rubob said: "A Harvard professor found that 95 percent of the land in this country is undeveloped. And let's say that every American received a quarter acre to build a house on. How much land would that take up in the United States?"

"Ummm," Tine said, thinking hard.

"Less than half the land in Texas," Rubob said, with a note of triumph. "So, you see, it's not a scarcity of land. It's something else. "

"Government regulation?" Tine volunteered, wondering at the same time why everyone chose to live in Texas.

"Exactly," Rubob said. "All sorts of complex regulations needlessly restrict the development of housing. And this in turn leads to ..."

"The Housing Bubble," Tine interjected.

"Precisely," Rubob said.

"It all comes down to that, doesn't it?" Tine said. "Do you see the village only in terms of real estate, Rubob?"

"Not at all, Tine," Rubob said. "It's just that I've been reading all the real estate stories in the Times magazine."

"The Village of Historically Overpriced Homes -- that's what George Washington might say if he visited it today," Tine said. "Look, here's Julia's house," she said, pointing to Oldgate.

"Well, I'll be," Tine said, standing before the gateway. "The gate's not gone at all. It was just open all the way and hidden. They must have opened it for the snowblower after the storm."

"How about that?" Rubob said. "That's a relief, isn't it?"

"I've been worried about it," Tine allowed.

"It was much ado about nothing, wasn't it?" Rubob said -- "a tempest in a teapot, or a tempest in a threshold or portal. A symbol of security, seemingly gone, now restored."

"Gates really do represent security, don't they?" he added. "Portals and ports -- it makes me think of Dubai Ports World, and the whole hullabaloo over security."

"Not that topic again, I hope," Tine said. They'd visited the issue on a walk earlier in the week.

"This gate means so much more than security," she said, heading off a discussion of Dubai. "For generations, the family has left it partly open as a sign of welcome. And there's the design on the gate, meaning peace and prosperity."

"But gates -- not just this gate but all gates -- are symbolic in other ways, aren't they?" she added.

"How so, Tine?" Rubob asked.

"Well, I'm thinking of Japanese gates. The son of that friend of mine in Canterbury, a student at Oxford, spent a year abroad studying gates in Japan. Now there's an 'academically rigorous institution,' like Miss Porter's School," Tine said, referring with a chuckle to another one of the Times reporter's comments.

"I talked with him a little about gates," Tine continued. "In Shintoism, a gate, a "torii," separates our world from the world of spirits -- the spirits of natural things like wind, rain and trees. The gates are protected by two guardians on each side, two animals, like those dogs on Hatter's Lane. They must have abandoned their posts."

Gateway to Shinto shrine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinto

"It reminds me of the lions at the Red Lion in Stockbridge, Tine," Rubob said.

"Happy times, Rubob. That's an agreeable village, too, isn't it?" Tine said. "Anyway, when you pass through a Shinto gate, you step into a place where you see the beautiful things in life, the important things -- not unlike the Red Lion Inn, come to think. At a Shinto shrine, you commune with the 'kami,' the sacred spirits representing the natural forces at work in the world. I suppose the kami are like Plato's forms in a way, like looking past the shadows of things in nature and seeing the beautiful ideas behind creation."

Itsukushima Shrine in Miyajima, Japan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinto

"Interesting, Tine," Rubob said. "You've opened a gateway on another world."

"Shintoism's all very far removed from us, though, isn't it?" Tine said. "It's outside our little world of the village. But there are Japanese gardens here -- like at the house where Ann Howard used to live on Mountain Road. In Japanese gardens, gates are like you said, the thresholds to another world. We put aside our daily cares and walk into another realm, a place of peace and natural beauty."

"At Oldgate, I suppose, we could cross that threshold and walk back into the world of Julia Cowles in the 18th century," Tine said. "Do you remember the garden stretching back for a block behind the house, when we went on the village garden tour?"

"It was like being transported into another world, wasn't it, Tine?" Rubob said as they walked toward the corner of Main Street and Meadow Road. "Who would have guessed that there was so much to see behind the houses, behind the facades?"

Former Cowles Tavern

"Look," he said, pointing to the old white colonial that was once a tavern. "Part of the fence has fallen down. How about that. It must have happened in Thursday's snowstorm."

"The 'prosperous-looking facades' are in disrepair," Tine said, recalling the Times article. "But there's more on the subject of gates, Rubob."

"OK, finish what you were saying," Rubob said distractedly, no doubt eager to return to his ruminations on the real estate market.

"In Japanese gardens, some things are partly hidden so they slowly reveal themselves," Tine said. "There's a word for it: 'miegakure.' I have no idea how to pronounce it, but it means something like 'conceal and reveal.'"

"The gate helps conceal and reveal; it's part of the idea of 'miegakure.' Once you step through the gate, the garden is revealed. You see it completely, as a whole, even become one with it. That's when you can appreciate it for what it is."

"A fence that needs mending, Tine," Rubob offered.

Tine sighed and said, "Yes, that's it, Rubob. It's too bad you didn't bring along your post hole digger."

"We see what we're prepared to see," she reflected, thinking again about the article on the village in the Times and its "sedate-looking buildings." In contrast, she thought of Washington's "village of pretty houses."

Bicentennial Quit,
Farmington Library

The two headed down toward Garden Street, stepping through snow, mud and sand. "Look at the mess on the sidewalk," Rubob said. "It's not good at all -- filth, in fact."

"Scofflaws," Tine said. "They didn't clear their walk."

"Scofflaws -- that's what the Indian leaders are for refusing to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty," Rubob said. "And yet the U.S. is treating them as friends." He'd lapsed into his thoughts on the news of the day, and he had on his mind President Bush's agreement to nuclear technology and fuel with India.

"They should be treated as outlaws," he said, "but instead they'll get help with their nuclear weapons program. The Administration rewards its friends and punishes its enemies. That's what it's all about."

Tine looked up into the branches of the trees, seeking release from the issues of the world at large.

The two passed the gate at the Millstream Manor on Garden Street.

"At least Pakistan didn't get a similar deal," Tine said, endeavoring to pick up Rubob's thread.

"Different countries with different needs and different histories," Rubob said. "That's the line, but neither one of them should have gotten a deal."

"For all we know, the gate was left partly open with Pakistan, too," Tine said. "This Administration conceals more than it reveals."

"Back to gates, Tine?" Rubob said. "Is that the theme of today's walk?"

Tine smiled, and said, "We're investigating gates."

"I wonder what that house is selling for," Rubob said, pointing to a modern home behind a fence. He reached over the fence to a box with handouts giving all the details on the house.

"It's 2,530 square feet," Rubob said. "They want 650,000 for it."

"At least double what it was worth in 1650," Tine said.

"Multi-zone heat," Rubob read. "It's economical."

"And conveniently near the Pearly Gates," Tine said, as they passed the cemetery -- "or as Mr. Derek says, 'the girly pates.'"

"Our friend Heidegger has something to say about gates, Rubob," Tine said.

"Of course he would, wouldn't he?" Rubob said, and Tine laughed.

"I think he probably has something to say on just about everything one finds on walks," Tine said. "In an essay called 'The Fieldpath,'" he said, "The knowing serenity is a gate to the eternal."

"In the seasonally changing air of the Fieldpath the knowing serenity, whose expression often seems melancholy, thrives. ... Nobody gains it, who does not have it. Those who have it, have it from the Fieldpath. ..."

"The knowing serenity is a gate to the eternal. Its doors swing on hinges which were once forged from the riddles of existence by a skilful smith." -- Martin Heidegger

"He wrote about something very similar to the Japanese idea of concealing and revealing, too," Tine said. "I know you were fascinated by the idea of 'miegakure' in Japanese gardens. Well, here's another word for you: 'aletheia.'"

"It must have something to do with German Heideggerian gardens, right?" Rubob asked as they turned up Maple Street, back in the direction of home. "Didn't he have some sort of home in the Black Forest?"

Martin Heidegger's Die Hütte, Todtnauberg,
http://www.freewebs.com/m3smg2/cottage.htm

"In Todtnauberg," Tine said -- "a small cottage overlooking the little mountain town below. He took daily walks at his cottage. "

"But aletheia isn't a German word; it's Greek for 'truth,'" Tine said. "Heidegger interpreted it to mean 'unconcealment.' Things on the path at Todnauberg are concealed, and they can't be known unless they're unconcealed. That's clear enough. But here's the enigmatic part, the riddle wrapped in the enigma, shall we say: Unconcealment has within it concealment."

"How's that, Tine?"

"I didn't think you were listening, but I thought a smattering of Churchill might get your attention,," Tine said.

"That's not exactly what he said," Tine, Rubob said.

"Oh?"

"He actually said 'a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,'" Rubob said. "He said it in a radio broadcast in 1939."

"Whatever," Tine said. "But unconcealment: Tangled up within it is concealment -- and 'tangled' is one of the words Heidegger uses. The reason is that when something is revealed, it's unconcealed only in a certain way. The other ways are not disclosed."

"Heidegger uses the example of a pair of peasant shoes in a painting by van Gogh. Sitting on a doorstep, they might appear to be nothing more than a pair of old shoes. We see them as well-worn shoes, wearing away into uselessness. 'A pair of peasant shoes and nothing more,' Heidegger wrote. That's how they're seen at first, in all their ordinariness. And yet the painting reveals so much more, he said."

"Heidegger wrote about the 'richness of the soil on the leather,' the ripening grain in the field, the peasant woman trudging through the furrows, her lonely path on the way home, stretching out under the soles of her shoes."

"A Pair of Shoes," by Vincent van Gogh

"In the beat-up pair of shoes, he found something beautiful, and it wasn't based on some abstract notion of beauty. The shoes' beauty is revealed in their their rugged heaviness, their thick leather soles and dark, worn insides. Beauty, he wrote, is part of the unconcealed truth of things."

"That's what he was really getting at: not just the beauty of the shoes, but the truth of things -- the shoes' essence, their being." Art is 'one way in which truth occurs as unconcealedness,' Heidegger said. In art, we see the truth and beauty that all too often isn't apparent in ordinary things. He looked at van Gogh's work and was struck with wonder at what it disclosed about the nature of things -- all things, not simply the peasant woman's shoes."

"Heidegger's word for wonder was 'Thaumazen,' a 'radical astonishment of being.' It's with that wonder that Heidegger's philosophy begins, when truth begins to disclose itself. Aristotle, too, said that 'philosophy begins with wonder.'"

Rubob's boot.

Rubob was silent, and Tine didn't know whether he was listening or not.

"Getting back to that house of yours in Amsterdam," she said, casting a line back over toward his dark pool of thoughts -- "that inventory of homes along the canal, the Herlihy index -- it's fascinating in its own way -- and useful -- isn't it?"

"Herengracht index," Rubob corrected.

"Whatever," Tine said. "I won't be able to think of the canal now without thinking of houses doubling in value over the past three centuries. It's revealing, but it's just part of the truth of things. Wouldn't you like to get a look inside that house?

"It's interesting that you say that, because the story gets into a bit of that," Rubob said. "The house was built by a carpenter who lived during country's golden age, when Holland grew to become an empire. The writer of the story says the few available details about the carpenter indicate that he was contented, that he lived beyond his years, surrounded by family. Here was a man who saw the tall-masted ships return from the East Indies and who 'walked the streets with Rembrandt.'"

"Imagine that," Tine said. "It makes one think that the reality of life in the houses along the canal was something more than real estate agents counting up the dollar value of properties in their counting houses," Tine said.

"The world is not the mere collection of the countable or
uncountable." -- Martin Heidegger

"The guilder value of things, Tine," Rubob corrected.

"The humanness of man and the thingness of things dissolve into the calculated market value of a market which not only spans the whole earth as a world market." -- Martin Heidegger

"And the $650,000 guilder house back there on Garden Street," Tine said. "When it's just a dollar value you put on it, it's not what the architect had in mind, with the low-pitched roof, the geometrical patterns and all. Did you notice those things?"

"Yes, Tine," Rubob said. "The house is in one of your books on Farmington. And the red roof -- how could I miss it? I'd have to be blind."

"Well, you get what I mean," Tine said. "And, come to think, it's like Eve Glasner with her sedate little town. It's not the village that we walk in every day. It's not the village revealed to us, though I'm sure she saw things we've never seen, too."

"She certainly has, Tine," Rubob said.

"Like what?" Tine said, taken aback.

"The plaque on the pew donated by Jacqueline Bouvier to St. Patrick's Church," he said. "Do you want to go in and see it."

Tine and Rubob were right outside the church on the corner of Main and Maple streets.

"Why not?" Tine said, amused that Rubob had remembered such a thing from the piece in the Times.

The two went into the church, which was empty except for a man sitting quietly in a pew at the front.

"You find it. I don't want to disturb his praying," Tine said.

Rubob marched busily up the aisle, looking at each plaque on the pews.

"Here it is, Tine, right up here on the front pew," he called out loudly.

Tine tiptoed up the aisle, and before she sat in the pew opposite the "Miss Bouvier" plaque, she genuflected before the altar and made the sign of the cross. "When in Rome," she thought to herself.

"Well, I'll be," she thought, looking at the plaque.

The man praying in the pew pushed off, disappearing into a side doorway.

"He can't be doing with 'casual visitors,' "Tine thought, "or God forbid, I made the sign of the cross backwards."

Tine and Rubob walked back down the aisle, a little more at ease now that they had the church to themselves.

When they were back outside, Tine said, "You don't generally see that in Congregational churches -- "I mean a man praying like that, or just sitting there meditating before the altar. Why is that?"

"I don't know, Tine," Rubob said. "Maybe they have more money in Congregational churches and don't need to pray."

Passing a gate outside the Cowles place -- the home shown on the title page of "The Village of Beautiful Homes," Tine thought of Holman Hunt's painting at Keble College, Oxford, "The Light of the World." The painting is shaped like an arched doorway, and Jesus, holding a lantern, knocks on a door.

The Light of the World, Holman Hunt,
http://www.orthodox.clara.net/christ_the_light.htm

She stopped to look at the gate to the Old Burying Ground across the main thoroughfare.

"Mr. Derket's girly pates," Tine said. "The gate seems so brightly lit today, standing there in the noon sun. The whole village is sparkling today, in fact."

"A 'lichtung' -- that's what Heidegger calls it: a 'lighting,'" Tine said.

"Uh-oh," Rubob said.

"Just one more illuminating thought," Tine said.

"When we look beyond the gate and things are disclosed, it happens in a specific place," Tine said. "Aletheia, the unconcealedness of beings, occurs somewhere, Rubob. Do you know where that is?"

"The field path in Todtnauberg, how about?"

"Yes, I'm sure it does there," Tine said. "But more specifically, Heidegger wrote that it happens in a clearing, which is another way of translating the 'lichtung,' the 'lighting.' It's a clear space in which things are disclosed. It encircles us and is in some way beyond us, greater than us, and yet as human beings -- what he called 'Dasein' -- we're in it. It's a region in which we're open to the world around us, a place of 'gelassenheit,' or 'responsive openness."

"Bless you, Tine," Rubob said.

"Heidegger wrote that when thinking opens out on the path, we stand in the lichtung, the clearing," Tine said. "It's an illuminating place, a place in which the nature of things is revealed. And yet here's the enigma again: In any given circumstance, we're always limited by what we can see, even in the lichtung. Within the unconcealedness of the clearing, there's always still concealment."

"The clearing in which beings stand is in itself at the same time concealment." -- Martin Heidegger

"That's how things stand, Rubob, even in the lichtung," Tine said.

"Shame, really," Rubob allowed.

Heidegger seemed to find a way out of that predicament in art and poetry -- in van Gogh's pair of shoes, in a Greek temple -- in works of art in which things reveal themselves more completely. But I don't know. We can't put ourselves in his shoes, can we?" Tine said.

"Maybe there's room in the clearing for any number of vantages on the world -- your Harkenback index, my gates, your ruminations on the news of the day, my Heidegger," she said.

"Herengracht, Tine," Rubob said.

"I thought it harked back to the golden age, before the bubble collapsed," Tine said. "But what I mean to say is that any way of viewing things is part of an approach to the world, a vantage point. It's all part of the path that each of us takes. Heidegger's path was more demanding than most. He was asking the big question -- something he called 'beingquestion,' 'Seinsfrage.' It's the question in 'Being and Time': 'What is Being?' But we can start small with our own questions and come upon our own clearings, our own 'lightings' on the way. An investigation of gates opens out into an inquiry on paths, doesn't it? What do you think?"

"That you're dawdling again, Tine -- that I'm going to be late," Rubob said. "The big question is what's the Time. We'd better be getting home."

"I wonder whether it's gone up in value much since our departure," Tine said.

"What, Tine?"

"Home," Tine replied.

"Probably down," Rubob said, "but all the fluctuations are eventually evened out over the centuries."

"That's reassuring at least," Tine said.

As she walked up the driveway, Tine checked again on the property at the base of the hemlock tree. It appeared to be doing well, maintaining its value in a volatile seasonal market.

When Tine got back in the house, she retrieved the "Day Trip" article to check on something the Times reporter had written.

"Look at this, Rubob," she said said: "'A brass plaque reading "Misses Bouvier" remains on the pew.' But the plaque said 'Miss Bouvier.' I wonder whether she even saw it. The church was probably locked when she visited, and sensibly so. "

Later that evening, Tine picked up a weighty volume she'd found at the library, "Farmington Town Clerks and Their Times," by one Mabel Hurlburt.

"What the heck are you reading that for?" Rubob asked.

"I think you'd enjoy it," Tine said. "Listen here:

"We see here that the finances of the town were rapidly becoming alarming, and that the answer here was not in an increase in ... taxes. In the next few years we will follow the efforts of a few clear-sighted men who lifted the town, by its own boot-straps, out of its debt, gave notes for the indebtedness and reduced the amount of taxes."

"Absolutely fascinating," Rubob said.

"It's all based on one's perspective, isn't it? Aren't the town clerks' views of the village as revealing in their own way as Eve Glasner's?"

"Eva who?"

"The reporter for the New York Times," Tine said. "But it's not as a dry a book as you might imagine."

Tine leafed through the pages and came across this:

"Washington's journeys through Farmington are extensively recorded and repeated. If he stopped here at all, as he might well have done for refreshment, it could have beeen at the inn of Solomon and Martha Cowles at the corner of Meadow road and Main street, it being the first one he would have found in the village on his way from Litchfield .... "
"We might have been walking in the footsteps of Washington today, Rubob," Tine said. "And you must agree ..."

"What, Tine?"

"That all in all, it was a very pleasant walk."

An Aerogram Addressed to the Village

2006-03-02T13:18:00.000-05:00

Before Tine set out on her walk with Rubob today, she received an aerogram from her uncle, Mr. Derek, who lives in a remote northern region of the continent.

"Look, Tine, mail from Derek," Rubob said.

"Mr. Derek," Tine reminded Rubob. "He's quite particular about the 'Mr.'"

"Of course he would be, wouldn't he?" Rubob said, using a favorite expression of Mr. Derek's.

Mr. Derek, after reading in "Tine and Rubob's Pilgrimage" about the triangular stamps from Tannu-Tuva, wrote to Tine that such stamps were so commonplace in his early collecting days that "bargain packages, 500 different" were often advertised as having "no Tannu-Tuva."

This prompted Tine to search for her stamp book, which she dug out from the back of a closet.

"I've never seen that before," Rubob said.

"It's from third grade. I haven't opened it in years," Tine said.

Tine leafed through the fragile, discolored pages, and remarkably enough, she found one stamp from "Touva," as postal authorities insisted on spelling it. ("And we don't need the durn foreign spellings," Tine's grandfather might have said.)

"I used to get those bargain packages of stamps," Tine said, "and it looks like I got swindled because there was a Tuvan stamp in the bunch. But look, here it is!"

Rubob was suitably amazed, Tine thought. "Perhaps Tuvan stamps are no longer so commonplace," she reflected.

Also in Tine's collection were pages of Queen Elizabeth stamps, sent to Tine by her grandmother.

Mr. Derek wrote in his aerogram: "Shortly after the war, Australia issued a stamp simply captioned 'HRH Princess Elizabeth.' Buckingham Palace got itself in an uproar, insisting it be reissued with the modified title 'HRH The Princess Elizabeth.' Goes to show, like - as they say in Chester. Yers, yers, yers."

1947 Princess Elizabeth stamp.

Tine, who was suddenly consumed with stamps -- for the first time in many years -- pointed out to Rubob the picture of Shakespeare among the Queen Elizabeth stamps in her album.

"There's a story in today's Guardian saying that the 'Chandos portrait' is the 'only true painting' of Shakespeare," she said.

But Rubob had gone back to his newspaper, and he didn't look up. He was absorbed in the urgent matters of the world, which were beginning to intrude on Tine and Rubob's village, it seemed.

News stories had been reporting for a week that a Dubai-owned company planned to take control of more than 20 U.S. ports. Now, a front-page story in the local paper said, another conglomerate from Dubai was buying an aerospace plant in town, improbably enough. And what's more, the company was also taking over a metal-casting firm in the shoreline town where Tine and Rubob kept their doughty little sailboat, Puffin. Dubai may in fact have been infiltrated by al Qaeda, some reports said, and there was an outcry by those who said America's security might be compromised.

"Infiltrated," Tine said. "We'll have terrorists living right next door to us -- al Qaeda operatives in the village -- barbarians at the gate, Rubob."

"It's just a lot of hype -- that's what the story is, a lot of hoopla," Rubob said. "Xenophobia -- that's what it amounts to."

Chandos portrait, National Portrait Gallery

"But getting back to the Shakespeare story in the Guardian, I'm trying to tell you about that," Tine said. "The painting at the National Portrait Gallery in London might just be the one true portrait."

"More hype," Rubob said grumpily.

"Here's something else from the Portrait Gallery's Web site," Tine said: "Who died on this day in 1797, at the ripe old age of 80?"

"I have no idea," Rubob said.

"Horace Walpole," Tine replied. "That's where we'll go for our walk today, to the Lewis Walpole Library."

From all this, it's easy to see how walks take shape in Tine's mind. In this case, it all began with a Tuvan postage stamp. Tine's thoughts, it would appear, can get a lot of mileage out of 2-aksa Tuvan postage stamp. Two aksas -- the equivalent of 200 kopeks -- was enough to whisk her in a moment from Tuva to Canada, then on to England, down to Australia, back to London for a quick visit to the National Portrait Gallery, back home for an encounter with terrorists, and now, apparently, to the doorstep of the Lewis Walpole Gallery.

Horace Walpole -- Lewis will be introduced presently -- was the 4th Earl of Orford and the son of Prime Minister Robert Walpole. He lived in his "little Gothic castle," Strawberry Hill, in Twickenham, England. He was an art collector, antiquarian and writer, known for his Gothic novel, "The Castle of Otranto," and his prolific letter-writing. He'd written: "The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well."

And that's where the Lewis in the library's name comes in: Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis -- known as "Lefty" to his friends -- was profoundly interested in Walpole and knowledgeable about a thousand other things. After graduating from Yale University, Lewis devoted his life to collecting the books, manuscripts, letters and artwork of Walpole -- in short, "Walpoliana." He lived on the main thoroughfare in Tine and Rubob's village, and his home is now a museum and library.

Horace Walpole, painted by Alan Ramsay.

"Are you ready for a quick walk in honor of Walpole?" Tine asked Rubob.

"The library's closed for renovations," Rubob said, rooted in his chair, "and even when it's open, it's only open to guests twice a year."

"I know that," Tine said. "We had cookies there after the tour. But I'd like to just walk to there, to give my regards."

"Cookies?" Rubob said, showing some interest.

"Yes, Pepperidge Farm cookies," Tine said -- "orange milanos, chocolate-chips with hazelnuts, vanilla creams and others, too. You must remember the cookies. I don't think we left enough for the next tour group. The man in charge of buildings and grounds -- and in charge of the cookies that day -- was keeping an eye on us. We were eating all the cookies he provided -- silver platters full of them. It was embarrassing, but it couldn't be helped. It was a long tour."

"All right, Tine -- we'll have a look, but there won't be any cookies today," Rubob said, with a note of disappointment.

It had been snowing all morning, and Tine and Rubob left fresh tracks in the snow as they made their way down the driveway.

As they turned down Hatter's Lane, Tine observed that the only sign of spring was an profusion of flowers that appeared to be looking out a bow window.

"Look, Rubob, we could stop for a pint," Tine said as they passed a window with a neon "Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer" sign in it.

"It's getting on lunchtime," she said. "It'd be like meeting Mr. Derek for a pint of Tetley's ale at the Duke of York in Yorkville."

"Pabst -- that used to be one of the cheapest beers around," Rubob said. "Pabst, Miller, Old Milwaukee -- they were sponsors of the Minnesota Twins' radio broadcast. Hamm's, too -- that was one of the sponsoring breweries back then."

"Hamm's? I've never heard of it," Tine said.

"'From the land of sky blue waters, from the land of pines, lofty balsam, comes the beer refreshing,'" Rubob sang. "Hamm's the Beer Refreshing."

"Well, that's a rather nice jingle, isn't it?" Tine said. "You must have listened to a heck of a lot of ball games."

"Well, you know how Dave loves fishing," Rubob said. "He constantly wanted me to go out on the lake with him in the Alumnacraft -- a 16-footer. It was boring, and I'd take the radio with me. That was the only thing that made it bearable, listening to the games. There was nothing else to do."

"It reminds me of the old coot who used to sit on his doorstep on High Street, holding a transistor radio to his ear, listening to the games," Tine said. "We passed him on our walks. He's gone now. I wonder what became of him. His house is being torn apart and rebuilt. Another 'historic renovation,' as the sign says, Rubob -- or more likely, as you like to say, another historic desecration."

"I wonder whether the Lewis Walpole renovation will be another historic desecration, Tine," Rubob said. He often joked about the approval process of the historic district commission, which seemed to approve every new homeowner's project to expand the historic houses in the village.

"A proposal to tear down the Lewis Walpole Library and replace it with a Wal-Mart: approved," Rubob said.

"They should open a pub at the Lewis Walpole Library," Tine said. "That'd draw a nice crowd. I'm sure the commission would approve it. A plan to convert the museum into a tavern: 'Nuff said, approved."

"The house across the street from the library, opposite Meadow Road, that was once a tavern," Rubob said. "Maybe the area's zoned for taverns."

The two reached the main thoroughfare at the bottom of Hatter's Lane, and Rubob stopped to look at one of the old hatter's cottages. He tilted his head and said, "I've never noticed this before, but isn't the upper window of that cottage crooked? In fact, the whole upper triangle looks crooked."

"It's the whole house that's leaning, I think," Tine said. "It's the crooked hatter's cottage."

"There was a crooked hatter and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse.
And they all lived together in a little crooked house."

Farther down the main thoroughfare, Rubob said, "That house seems very out of season with the wreaths and all."

Tine stopped to look at Julia's house, Oldgate.

"There's something odd there, too," Rubob said. "Look, isn't the gate gone?"

"It's true, Rubob -- it does appear to be missing," Tine said. "What could have happened to it?"

The gate is always left open, as a sign of hospitality, but now it seemed to have vanished. Tine and Rubob had passed it on the way to Litchfield last Sunday, and they'd seen it on their misty walk in January.

"The symbol on the gate, the missing gate, appears to resemble the Nazi swastika, but it's not in fact the same," Tine said, adopting Churchill's pronunciation of "Naazi" for Rubob's benefit. "It was copied two centuries ago from the Watergate by the Thames River in London. It's an Oriental symbol meaning peace and prosperity."

"Where'd you read about that, Tine?" Rubob asked.

"Maybe in one of Ernest Shaw's books," Tine said. "I hope the gate hasn't been carried off in the night. There's a fine line between being welcoming and being secure, isn't there, Rubob?"

"They're probably just repairing it," Rubob said.

"Or it was acquired by an Dubai antiques company," Tine speculated, seeing if she could get Rubob worked up over the topic again. "A proposal to sell the front gate at Oldgate to Dubai International Capital: approved."

"Symbols of our security, sold to the United Arab Emirates," Tine continued. "Stop the presses, Rubob. It's a bulletin! Nothing's secure in this world any longer -- not even the village gates. We're not safe in our homes."

Dubai aerogram. Photo from:
http://friends.peoria.lib.il.us/community/howardcourtney/dubai.html

"A lot of hooey -- and hysteria," Rubob said. "That whole Dubai story is much ado about nothing! And it's a done deal, anyway."

Tine chuckled to herself, while Rubob fumed.

The two passed the old tavern that Rubob had mentioned at the start of the walk.

"I could use a pint, Rubob," Tine said. "It's a bit of an old shock seeing the gate gone at Oldgate. But maybe it's just being repaired."

Rubob didn't respond; he was absorbed, no doubt, in the news of the day again.

"Why are you so quiet?" Tine asked.

"What? I can't hear you over all this noise," Rubob said as a group of trucks rumbled by on the main thoroughfare. "It shows what a racket the 21st century is -- a 'devilish din.' On our way to the Lewis house, we should be hearing the clip-clop of horses. But now all we hear is the roar of diesels. 'Shame, really,' as Mr. Derek would say."

"The simpler times of yesteryear," Tine said.

They crossed the busy thoroughfare and stood before the Lewis Walpole Library.

A sign out front confirmed that the museum was closed for renovations -- another "historic desecration."

Tine and Rubob wouldn't get a view inside the house today, though they had seen the Walpole library twice during tours.

"At least Mr. Lewis could retire to the back of the house to surround himself with Walpoliana," Rubob said.

"But of course it wasn't just Walpole stuff he collected; he had an absorbing interest in 18th-century England," Rubob added.

"What would you collect if you were a collector?" Tine asked as they turned back toward home. It would be only a short walk today, because Rubob had business in the world at large.

"I just don't know," Rubob said. "It'd have to be something English, of course."

"Yes, it would be, wouldn't it?" Tine said.

"What about you, Tine? But you're already something of a junk collector, aren't you?" Rubob said with a chuckle.

"Stamps from Tuva," Tine replied, unruffled by Rubob's remark. "I only have one, and I feel a desire for more. I'll order a bargain pack without 'No Tannu-Tuva' on the bag. But I tend to get swindled in stamp collecting. I've told you about how I traded my John Glenn Mercury space capsule block to a Russian fifth-grader for one measly Sputnik stamp. It turned out to be ripped, and I tore it up in a temper tantrum."

"Here's a better idea," Tine said: "I'll collect beer bottles from the Speckled Hen in Norfolk. I could imagine myself becoming profoundly interested in beer bottles. I've already started the collection, with Monty Python's Holy Grail Ale, Chimay Ale from the Trappists, and Dirty Dick's."

"At least you'd be limited to 150 bottles," Rubob said. "That's how many kinds of beer they say they have there. It'd be one of your smaller collections of junk -- a sub-collection, a containable one."

"You're a bit grouchy today," Tine said. "You need a Tetley's ale to cheer you up, I think."

"Preoccupied maybe," Rubob allowed.

The two walked through the snow on an unplowed sidewalk, and Tine said, "Scofflaws. They haven't done their civic duty."

Rubob didn't reply, though failure to shovel sidewalks was something that could get him riled up -- when he wasn't consumed with the affairs of the wider world.

"We're like Franklin searching for the Northwest Passage," Tine said, thinking that might whet Rubob's interest. He'd watched a "Nova" program about Franklin a few nights ago.

"Franklin hoped to be stuck on the ice at least one winter, because he thought it would be a grand adventure," Rubob said. "As it turned out, their ships, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, were locked in the ice for two winters -- long enough for their tins of canned food to become contaminated with lead. They abandoned ship and set off across the ice, dragging a boat filled with the poisoned food and silver dinner services. "

"Of course they would have silver dinner dishes, wouldn't they?" Tine said. "Yers, yers, yers."

"They should have carried packages of freeze-dried meals," Rubob said. "But their food probably was freeze-dried after all."

"The frozen cans?" Tine asked, though she sensed where Rubob's story was leading.

"That, too," Rubob said. "But the lead poisoning drove them mad. There's some evidence of cannibalism."

"Rather nasty -- all very macabre, in fact," Tine said, "but a proper English story nonetheless. At least they remained civilized in the midst of it all, with the silver dinner services. They succeeded in keeping barbarism at bay, didn't they?"

"That they did, Tine," Rubob replied.

As they turned up Hatter's Lane, Tine stopped to examine a rock that had fallen from a stone wall.

"Come along," Rubob said.

"It'd be a good stone to take home for our walls, but I wouldn't dare," Tine said. "Highway robbery, you know."

Tine was, in fact, a collector of stones for her garden's walls, but she sternly suppressed the urge to carry this one home.

"London Bridge is falling down," Rubob said, looking at the stone. He was referring to "Heavy Words Lightly Thrown; The Reason Behind the Rhyme," a book he'd found at the library. The author, Chris Roberts, tells the "seamy and quirky stories behind favorite nursery rhymes."

"What was the story behind 'London Bridge'?" Tine asked.

"Something about its being based on a Norwegian poem," Rubob said. "Roberts writes in such an elliptical style. It's not at all straightforward; in fact, it's almost serpentine."

"I've noticed," Tine said. "I've opened the book a few times, but I can't seem to get into it."

"Well, the idea of the London Bridge rhyme is that it's a celebration of the new bridge -- new when the rhyme was written, in the 13th century -- and a lament on the failure of the previous ones. Those bridges were all short-lived, carried away by the tide. He writes, too, about the bridge built by John Rennie in the 1800s, which started to fall apart, too. It was packed up and shipped to a park in Arizona, where it stands now, spanning a man-made lake."

"You'd like the stuff about the history of the earlier bridges because it involves human sacrifices," Rubob said.

"Yes, I would, wouldn't I?" Tine said.

"In olden times, they sometimes sacrificed children to appease the river deities and ensure that the bridges would be safe," Rubob said. "Funnily enough, a child's body was found floating near Tower Bridge in 2001, and police said a boy had been used as part of a cult's ceremony to bring good fortune to a business."

"A gruesome tale, Rubob," Tine said. "I don't know why the company didn't simply use the symbol on the Watergate by the Thames. That would have brought prosperity."

"The Watergate?" Rubob asked.

"The symbol on the gate, the missing gate, at Oldgate -- you remember," Tine said.

"Talk about serpentine," Rubob said. "I can't follow your ramblings at all."

Rubob fell into his own thoughts once again.

"Dubai again?" Tine asked.

"I'm thinking about what new things they'll come up with today to hype the story even more," Rubob said.

"Middle Eastern magnates are coming to our town," Tine said. "It's like Edgar Møller's movie, 'The Sheik of Iowa' in Garrison Keillor's 'Praire Home Companion,' only in this case it's 'The Sheiks of Farmington Village.'"

"A lot of hooey," Rubob said. "Hype -- blown out of all proportion. The talking heads have hijacked the story."

"So the village will remain the same, you think, Rubob, even with a Dubai company moving in? We'll keep barbarism at bay?"

"I think so, Tine," Rubob said.

As the two rounded the corner and approached home, Tine thought, "All in all, a very pleasant walk."

Walls Have Ears, Tine Suspects

2006-03-01T15:01:00.000-05:00

Tine, whose daily walks with Rubob have become a topic of great interest on Madison Avenue, noticed an ad for "Hadrians Wall for walkers" on her blog today:

"The ad people must have overheard us talking about the Pennine Way during our walk to Little Pond on Sunday," Tine said to Rubob.

Tine had a hunch that advertisers were tailing her, in their round-the-clock effort to create targeted ads for her blog.

"That man we passed who wasn't wearing a hat, even though it was about 10 below 0 with the wind chill -- he might have been an ad man," Tine said.

"A madman?" Rubob asked.

"Yes, perhaps that, too, Tine said. "Be that as it may, he didn't appear to be accustomed to the outdoors. I expect he received extra pay for hazardous conditions."

Tine, you may recall, stopped at Hadrian's Wall during her long slog along the Pennine Way. In "A Nice Cup of Tea," she wrote about a tempestuous day on the wall.

Hadrian's Wall. Photo from:
http://www.vroma.org/images/bonvallet_images/bonvall49.jpg

Tine's village has its share of stone walls, too:

Tine and Rubob's Pilgrimage

2006-02-26T19:36:00.000-05:00

Tine and Rubob ventured beyond the borders of their village today, to walk around Little Pond in Litchfield. Tine can't visit Litchfield without thinking of Julia Cowles, a girl who lived in Farmington Village in the late 1700s and kept a diary from age 12 to 17, when she died. Julia rode by carriage to Miss Sally Pierce's school in Litchfield, with which she "was at that time much pleased."

Julia's house, called Oldgate, is on the corner of the village's main thoroughfare and Meadow Road, on the route Rubob likes to take out of town on the way to Litchfield.

The gate of the house is always left partly open, as a symbol of peace and hospitality, and Tine looked at it as they approached the traffic light at Meadow Road.

"Litchfield is a handsome, pleasant town," Julia wrote -- "the Society agreeable, and tho' not remarkably gay, yet sufficiently so to catch the attention and raise ambition in the heart of a child, or rather of a giddy young girl whose expectations were raised by ev'ry new face or object ...."

"The Diaries of Julia Cowles."

At the same time, though, Julia didn't like leaving home in Farmington:

"I am so strongly attached to my native place that it is not without some regret that I leave it. From these calm scenes of pleasure, into a busy crowd of extravagant people."

Julia was a serious girl with a devout turn of mind; she seemed to have a premonition of her early death. But she had a love of life, too -- of her village, her family and her friends.

She wrote of spending her days "merrily": taking long carriage rides with her friends Betsey, Anna and Mary; walking in the morning "down in the meadows after some lillies"; "tarrying in Hartford" with her uncle; sailing with cousin Horace and visiting his store; playing "button"; attending "Dance School" and taking "musick lessons."

She became ill at about age 14, suffering from headaches, colds and fevers, and seemed always aware of how fleeting life is:

"How surprizingly has the last month slipt away. We see the rapidity of time but decline making the proper use of it. Years, months, and days are swiftly passing away; each one brings us nearer and nearer to the shores of eternal bliss or ruin. This solemn [thought] is often repeated to us; we know it from Scripture, from our own observation, and these late and frequent tolls of mortality which are sounding in our ears remind us of the uncertainty of life and of all earthly enjoyments."

At age 17, her writing became increasingly solemn:

"In my former journals, much of that valuable time which my Creator has mercifully given me has been too much spent in pursuit of vain pleasures of this world, as has been recorded. A desire of happiness is the first propensity of our natures; it is predominant in the heart of man; few seek it in the right way, few that enter in at the strait gate, but many go down the broad road to destruction."

"What are you thinking about, Tine?" Rubob asked as they headed down Meadow Road.

"Julia riding in her carriage to Litchfield, Rubob," Tine said.

Tine thought how cold and windy it was -- in the low teens. "The morning was blustering and cool,"Julia had written one day in her diary. Rubob was fiddling with the heat controls on the dashboard.

Tine thought of the movie she and Rubob had watched the night before, about a young man, Reda, who drives his Moroccan father on a pilgrimage from France to Mecca.

"Le Grand Voyage." Photo from:
http://www.allocine.co.uk/film/galerievignette_gen_cfilm=43880&filtre=&page=1.html

In some ways, Tine thought, the road through Serbia in the film resembles the flat, open road by the Meadows.

"Le Grand Voyage."

"If it was such a grand pilgrimage, Rubob, what exactly do they gain from it?" Tine asked Rubob.

Meadow Road.

"I suppose the son learned a respect for his father, who he hadn't understood before," Rubob said. "And he learned of his father's love for him, the depth of his love."

"Le Grand Voyage." Photo from:
http://www.allocine.co.uk/film/galerievignette_gen_cfilm=43880&filtre=&page=1.html

At one point in the film, Reda, fed up with the trip, asks his father, "Why didn't you fly to Mecca? It's a lot simpler."

"Le Grand Voyage." Photo from:
http://www.allocine.co.uk/film/galerievignette_gen_cfilm=43880&filtre=&page=1.html

"When the waters of the ocean rise to the heavens, they lose their bitterness to become pure again," the patriarch replies.

"What?" Reda asks.

His father says,

"The ocean waters evaporate as they rise to the clouds. And as they evaporate, they become fresh. That's why it's better to go on your pilgrimage on foot than on horseback, and better on horseback than by car, and better by car than by boat, and better by boat than by plane."

"When I was a child, my father -- God rest his soul -- set out on a mule. I'll never forget that day. He was a courageous man. Every day, I'd climb to the top of a hill from where I could see the horizon. I wanted to be the first to see him come home. I would stay up there until nightfall. Sometimes I would even fall asleep up there until your grandmother came looking for me."

Like Julia Cowles, Reda's father had a premonition of his death, and he wanted to make his pilgrimage to Mecca before he died. To some extent, death is personified in a strange old woman, garbed in black, whom they meet on the road.

"She is a ghostly, almost spectral apparition," the director, Ismael Ferroukhi, says in an interview. "For me she embodies a permanent threat that is looming on this journey. She is also part of that journey. There is a surreal side to her that makes her close to the father's spiritual world."

"If you went on a pilgrimage, Tine, where would you like to go?" Rubob asked.

"I don't know, Rubob," Tine said, and then, after reflecting a bit, she said, "I've been on my pilgrimages. I walked from Winchester to Canterbury on the Pilgrim's Way. I've carried my pilgrim's staff and cockleshell. And I walked the Pennine Way. Also, I walked the length of the river I grew up by, from its source to the estuary."

"How's the Pennine Way a pilgrimage, Tine?" Rubob asked.

"The Pilgrim's Way was for the mind and spirit; the Pennine Way, a long slog over the backbone of England and Scotland, was for the body; and the walk along the river was for the heart," Tine said. "I can't think of any other pilgrimages I'd like to go on. Where would you go?"

"I'm not spiritually minded, Tine," Rubob said. "I can't think of any pilgrimages I'd want to take."

"Maybe you're content being where you are, Rubob. Your feet are planted firmly in your home soil."

Tine and Rubob were quiet for much of the way to Litchfield. Tine was lost in her thoughts about the movie and pilgrimages. Rubob's thoughts weren't, in fact, rooted in the earth; they were tossed about in a sea of questions about his tax return.

"Thinking about deductions, Rubob?" Tine asked.

"I'm trying to figure out how much we're entitled to deduct for the sailboat," he said, referring to their doughty sloop Puffin.

"Calculative thinking," Tine said, referring to her old friend Heidegger's essay, "Discourse on Thinking." "It certainly has its uses, doesn't it?"

She thought to herself of something Julia had written in her diary: "Days, weeks, months, and years move along in fast succession, and we make no account thereof."

When they arrived at the trail leading to Little Pond in the woods outside Litchfield, Rubob busied himself searching in the back seat for his "stocking cap," as he calls his ski hat, and Tine put on her fleece hat and neck warmer.

"'Chucking filly' your mother-in-law would call it, Rubob," Tine said, referring to her mother. "Your mother didn't use words like that, did she?"

"No, she didn't," Rubob replied, chuckling.

"With the wind chill, it must be about 10 below," Tine said. "Are you sure we're up for this?"

"Sure we are," Rubob said, walking over to the map at the side of the trail, which he invariably examines before walking at White Memorial.

Little Pond hadn't moved since the last time Rubob and Tine had walked there. It was still in the upper right corner of the map.

Tine dashed off into the woods, in an effort to warm up -- or not even to warm up, which was impossible, but to avoid turning instantly into a lump of solid ice.

Tine thought of the splinters of the smashed mirror in "The Snow Queen," which can turn a person's heart into a lump of ice. If the splinters get into one's eye, as they did with the boy Kai, only the dark, ugly side of things can be seen.

Tine looked back on the trail for Rubob, who seemed to have vanished, but he soon emerged from behind a tree.

The trail darkened as it led deeper into the woods, and it seemed obscured in parts by snow and fallen branches. Tine kept on the path by following the trail blazes on the trees.

The blaze, a black square within a white one, reminded Tine of the views of the Kaaba in Mecca in the film "Le Grand Voyage." Masses of pilgrims, dressed in white, pray in concentric circles around the black granite cube of the Kaaba, which is said in the Koran to be the oldest house of worship in the world. The eastern cornerstone is said to be the remnant of a meteorite.

The Kaaba, Mecca. Photo from:
http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/beardsley/250/mecca.htm

In the movie, Reda's father goes off to worship at the Grand Mosque and the Kaaba, and he doesn't return. Reda searches frantically for him, but he can't manage to push through the crowd to get near the Kaaba.

The trail blaze also reminded Tine of the mysterious black monolith in "2001: A Space Odyssey" -- a symbol of our quest for knowledge, even enlightenment, in the dark unknown, she thought.

"2001: A Space Odyssey." Photo from:
http://www.palantir.net/2001/gallery/dawn.html

When Rubob caught up with Tine on the trail, she said to him, "If I went on a pilgrimage, I think I'd rather go somewhere wild, somewhere without hordes of people -- maybe somewhere I don't know about, somewhere undiscovered. I'd prefer the desert to the city -- a hermit's pilgrimage."

"Perhaps to St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai," Tine reflected, thinking she'd like to see the Burning Bush "that burned with fire, and was not consumed."

Photo from: http://www.traveljournals.net/pictures/29303.html

"What you said about wild places makes me think of Tuva, where that Nobel Prize-winning scientist wanted to go, Tine," Rubob said. "He researched the Challenger space shuttle accident. What was his name?"

"I don't know, Rubob," Tine said.

"He dunked material from the O-rings in ice water and found that it no longer functioned properly," Rubob said. "He was one of those rare scientists who are able to make science understandable to the ordinary reader. Richard Feynman -- that's it."

"Never heard of him," Tine said.

"Anyway, he was unusual, a nonconformist, an individualist, and it was always his dream to travel to Tannu-Tuva, a remote region on the border of Siberia and Mongolia," Rubob said.

"Never heard of it," Tine said. But she was most intrigued.

"He viewed it as an earthly paradise," Rubob said. "He'd collected triangular stamps from Tuva when he was a boy, and he was fascinated with it. It was a mountainous land with yaks, camels and nomads, and its own language and culture."

"I had some triangular stamps when I was in third grade," Tine said. "I wonder whether they were from Tuva."

"I don't think so, Tine -- but maybe," Rubob said. "So he and his friend, Ralph Leighton, a drummer -- a fellow drummer, in fact, because Feynman was a drummer, too -- set about planning how to get to Tuva, cajoling Soviet bureaucrats to get the required travel papers, learning the language -- even learning Tuvan throat singing."

"Throat singing?" Tine asked.

"I don't know what it is, Tine," Rubob said -- "something to do with singing two melodies at once, I think."

"So did he make it to Tuva?" Tine asked.

"Sadly, he died before seeing it," Rubob said. "But his friend Leighton did, and he wrote a book about it, 'Tuva or Bust.' It's all about his pilgrimage there, and about his remarkable friend Feynman."

"I'd like to read it, Rubob," Tine said.

The two reached the stones that marked the entrance to the trail by the pond, and Tine thought of the meteorite at the base of the Kaaba.

The path opened out to a view of an icy Little Pond.

"Keep moving," Rubob said. "We can't stop. It's too cold."

Tine hurried along the path and reached the boardwalk that leads around the pond.

On the boardwalk in the exposed marshes, the wind blew straight into Tine and Rubob's faces.

"It's my legs that are freezing," Rubob said. "Are yours cold, too?"

"No, Rubob. You should have worn jeans, not corduroys," Tine said, chuckling. Rubob had advised Tine to change from jeans into corduroys before they left home, but Tine hadn't heeded his advice. Nevertheless, her legs weren't cold.

"It's my nose and cheeks that are cold," Tine said, burying her face in her neck warmer. "The wind's blowing right on the bow."

With her head down, Tine noticed the trail blaze on the boardwalk.

Tine recalled the acorn waymarks on the Pennine Way.

She was reminded, too, of the boardwalks over the bogs in the lowlands on the Way.

Pennine Way. Photo from:
http://www.gdn08.dial.pipex.com/pennine/daybyday/Day16/walk/index.htm

"Images from pilgrimages stay with us forever," Tine thought. "Maybe our minds are somehow more receptive on such purposeful journeys, on great adventures."

"I can't believe we skiied along this boardwalk last winter, Tine," Rubob said. "Have you noticed all the nails sticking out of the boards?"

"No, Rubob," Tine said, thinking of the winter adventures they had together.

"You've missed a terrific series on the Travel Channel the past few weeks," she said.

"What's that?" Rubob asked.

"A group of climbers have been endeavoring to reach the summit of Everest. The scenes of the mountain and the climbers' camps are spectacular. But best of all is the story of Annabelle. She's a British socialite, the daughter of the head of some corporation. She's the least experienced of the group when it comes to mountaineering, but she has tremendous determination and stamina. She's a runner who completed a grueling 63-mile marathon in Hong Kong."

"While the other members of the expedition, including the leader, are waylaid by all sorts of health problems, Annabelle strides on in her oversized boots -- literally oversized, because she ordered the wrong ones. She's filled with a youthful energy and enthusiasm -- and occasionally preoccupied with her appearance, her outfits, her makeup. She seems almost out of place in the group -- too bubbly, too naive and inexperienced -- but she might just wind up being the one to make the summit."

"I don't know whether she makes it to the top," Tine continued, "because the VCR quit taping right before that point. Of course it would, wouldn't it? The last I saw of her, she was trying to make it to Camp 3, and her strength seemed to be flagging for the first time. Her fingers were frostbitten, and she was having trouble clipping to the fixed lines. She couldn't move her fingers. I wonder whether she made it, Rubob."

"I doubt it," Rubob said.

"I wouldn't be so sure," Tine said. "She's a plucky thing. Her fingers were in a bad way, but I just wouldn't be so certain, Rubob."

Tine and Rubob continued silently along the boardwalk for a ways, and then Rubob said, "In Hitler's last days, in the bunker below the Reichstag, his coterie tried to persuade him to retreat to his Bavarian redoubt, the Eagle's Nest in Berchtesgaden."

"Hitler?" Tine asked. What made you think of Hitler?"

"Mountaintops," Rubob said. "The Eagle's Nest was his 'teahouse eyrie.'"

The Eagle's Nest, Kehlstein Mountain, Berchtesgaden.
Photo from: http://www.warfoto.com/berchesg.htm

"The anti-pilgrimage, to the Eagle's Nest," Tine thought -- "like Dante's journey into the Inferno."

"We look at Hitler's last days now and think that of course he was going to kill himself," Rubob said. "You'd think that those around him would have realized that finally the nightmare was over. But no, they still held out the hope that there'd be a last stand at Hitler's mountain redoubt. Instead, Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide in the bunker. "

"Eva Braun's sister had tried to persuade her not to fly to the bunker, but Eva had insisted on being with the Fuhrer, and of course they got married," Rubob continued. "Magda Goebbels made it known that when her husband was about to kill himself, they'd first kill the children. Hitler's advisers spoke out against this, and on this Hitler agreed. In what may be his one spasm of humanity just before he killed himself, he implored Magda not to kill her six children. But she prevailed, and killed them with cyanide pills."

"Hitler had an almost mystical attraction to mountains," Rubob said, "but the funny thing was that he was afraid of heights. In the end, the Nazis' Wagnerian vision of Gotterdammerung wasn't realized at the Eagle's Nest."

"We can find satisfaction in that at least," Tine said.

The Eagles Nest. Photo from:
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/Kehlsteinhaus/EagleNest04.html

The bitter wind was picking up, and Tine hastened ahead, leaving Rubob behind with his grim thoughts of the Chancellery bunker. She thought she'd make a break for the tall marsh grass across a bridge.

But despite the cold and wind, Tine couldn't resist stopping on the bridge and looking down at the frozen stream.

"Even when everything is frozen, there always seems to be some open water," Rubob said.

"Maybe that's what pilgrimages are all about, Rubob -- finding the open water."

"How's that, Tine?" Rubob asked.

"The living water of faith, of life -- or some such thing," Tine said. "It's just a thought."

The wind nipped at Tine's nose and cheeks, and she dashed for cover in the marsh grass.

The lenses of Tine's glasses became very dark in the sunny patches on the path, and stayed that way as the trail led away from the pond, back into the woods. Tine thought the lenses might be affected by the extreme cold.

She thought back to the start of the walk, when she was thinking of "The Snow Queen" and Kai's seeing only the dark side of things. "Maybe I have one of the broken mirror's splinters in my eye," Tine thought.

She had a hard time finding the path, and wandered off it at one point. Rubob caught up to her, and they retraced their route and found the trail blaze.

"We need Gerda from 'The Snow Queen,'" Tine thought. "Her tears wash away the splinters in the eye and the lumps of ice in the heart."

"Look, Rubob, two blazes on one tree," Tine said. "A path for two -- maybe even a pilgrimage for two."

When Tine reached the vehicle, as Rubob called it, her most pressing concern was the lump of ice in her right glove -- her index finger. She thought briefly that she might have gotten frostbite like Annabelle, and she wouldn't be able to open the car door. But Rubob opened the door, and while he did so, Tine noticed the bumper sticker on the car in front of theirs.

When she got in the vehicle, Rubob turned up the heat, and feeling returned to Tine's finger.

"It was a dark story, your tale about Hitler and his mountain redoubt, Rubob," Tine said.

"I suppose," Rubob said, "but it shows a vestige of humanity in even the coldest of hearts, the most evil of men."

Rubob stopped at the store on the way home, and Tine waited in the car and listened to Garrison Keillor's "Prairie Home Companion."

In his story from Lake Wobegone, Keillor talked about a preacher giving a sermon on heretics. The homily was on how "heretic" didn't originally mean someone who espoused the wrong dogma, but someone who created divisiveness in the church -- someone who produced faction, caused dissension.

"Of course, a lot of people feel themselves more completely when they're in opposition to others," Keillor said. And Midwesterners -- well, they're largely people who've moved to the Midwest, or from families who moved there, precisely because they wanted to get away from people whose views they opposed.

One such Midwesterner, Keillor said, was Edgar Møller, an independent-minded man who was the last Swede in Lake Wobegone to keep the "ø" with the slash through it. He ran a moviehouse in town, and one of the last films he showed there was "The Sheik of Iowa," starring an actor who later changed his name to Rudolph Valentino.

The films Møller chose to show were so bad, Keillor said, that he had to offer gifts to coax people into his theater. He gave away free glassware, and unfortunately, as it happened, cartons of eggs. During a particularly vile movie, all hell broke loose and the moviegoers hurled their eggs at the screen, at each other and at Møller. Edgar, who frequently found himself in opposition to his fellow townspeople, decided at this point to leave Lake Wobegone for good.

He set out on the road and soon ran into a musical group named Jelly Glass Morton and His Six Spicy Pickles. Edgar joined up with the group, finding his new calling as a band manager. His journey, which was full of adventures, amounted to the pilgrimage of a Lake Wobegone "heretic," Keillor suggested.

"A heretic's pilgrimage," Tine thought. "Yes, that's what I'd like, one that took me to the wild places of the world, one where I wouldn't have to push my way through the crowds. But Little Pond was wild -- and cold -- enough for me. I don't need to go far for my pilgrimage. And I don't think I'd enjoy wandering out into the desert like a hermit. Maybe I'm content where I am, like Rubob."

Tine thought of a quote from Heidegger that she'd read in enowning's blog: “We don’t want to get anywhere, we just want to get to where we already are.”

She remembered the lines from Eliot's "Four Quartets" that a friend had read to her at the end of her walk along the Pilgrim's Way to Canterbury:

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time."

Rubob returned to the car with his groceries. "Here, Tine," he said, and he gave her a Cadbury chocolate bar.

"What are you thinking about, Tine?" he asked on the way home.

"You, Rubob," Tine said, munching on her chocolate. "The end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started." She gave Rubob a piece of chocolate.

Tine thought again of what Julia Cowles had written in her diary:

"I am so strongly attached to my native place that it is not without some regret that I leave it. From these calm scenes of pleasure, into a busy crowd of extravagant people."

When she got home, Tine opened Julia's diary and read at the end:

"This day I feel quite unwell. After tea I lay down and gave myself up to serious reflections. I do indeed hope that I am not lost to every spark of gratitude for the blessings I have received, and that I am not so hardened but that seriousness and sobriety will ever be welcomed, and that my views of divine dispensations are not heathenish, neither are they atheistical."

"But a tad heretical -- that would be permissable," Tine thought -- "like Edgar Møller and his Six Spicy Pickles."

Tine also searched the Internet to see whether Annabelle had reached the summit of Everest : http://www.annabellebond.com/ and http://www.everestnews2004.com/everestnews3/anna2004dis19.htm.

Reflecting on her afternoon, Tine thought, "All in all, a very pleasant walk."

'Geworfen': Thrown Into the World

2006-02-22T15:48:00.000-05:00

Tine and Rubob took a short walk through the woods by the river today, retracing the route they'd taken on their icy walk at the end of December. But spring was in the air, and the treacherous path had been tamed by the warm attention of the sun. The path was clear of ice, but there were still shaded areas in the woods that were covered with a lingering layer of snow.

Tine and Rubob were quiet as they made their way along the path leading to the riverbank. Before they set out, they'd been discussing their sailboat, the doughty little "Puffin," and all the chores they faced in the spring to get her ready for launching. Rubob had endeavored to raise the subject again as they started out on the path, but Tine said, "I can't think about it all now, Rubob."

To her, the snow in the woods represented a reprieve before the arrival of the boat projects in the spring. But despite her best efforts, she, like Rubob, was thinking about the work ahead -- about buying a new dinghy, replacing the halyards, repairing the keel, painting the bottom, polishing the hull, fixing the engine. The list of tasks went on and on, and the warming weather was a sign that the work would have to be faced.

"Look, Tine, two trees growing together," Rubob said.

Tine looked over at the base of the two trunks, standing rooted in the earth, and she thought how the path now provided secure purchase for her feet, and for Rubob's. On the last walk here, they'd had to search for safe places to plant their feet.

"It's like two trees growing from one acorn, Tine -- like twins," Rubob said.

"There's another one, Rubob -- or another two," Tine said. "I wonder what brings them together like that, how they can thrive so close together."

"Is it a case of chance or choice?" Rubob asked. "They're thrown onto the ground as seeds, they put down roots, and that's it. "

"Thrown or fallen?" Tine wondered to herself. She thought of Martin Heidegger's use of the word "thrown" -- "geworfen." We find ourselves thrown into the "thereness" of the world, Heidegger wrote.

Rubob was thinking the same thing: "It's like what your friend Heidegger says, Tine -- how we're thrown into things," he said.

Tine thought how some acorns are scattered about by chance, and how some are brought together.

"Maybe Rubob and I were thrown into the world together -- or at least thrown together in the world," Tine thought. "We put down roots, and that was it."

"Human beings are 'more daring than plant or beast,' according to Heidegger," Tine thought, looking at Rubob standing before the trees. Heidegger quotes the poet Rainer Maria Rilke saying that we "go with this venture," we "will it."

"We made the choice to venture together in this world we've been thrown into," Tine thought, looking at the trees rooted in the ground and reaching for the sky together.

"You'd think it would be easier for a tree to have its own space, so it wouldn't have to share nutrients," Rubob said.

"I'm not quite sure how it is with trees, Rubob," Tine said.

She thought of St. Bernard, who said he'd learned more from trees than he'd ever learned from men. "You will find more in woods than in books; trees and stones will teach you what you can never learn from masters," he wrote.

"Maybe there are advantages in sharing space, Rubob -- a perfect synergy in the forest," Tine said.

With people, the more venturesome ones among us, Heidegger wrote in "Poetry, Language, Thought," "do not venture themselves out of selfishness, for their own personal sake. They seek neither to gain an advantage nor to indulge their self-interest."

To be human, Heidegger wrote, means "to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for."

Tine and Rubob fell back into silence as they followed the winding path through the woods.

Tine thought of the book she'd been reading, one she'd borrowed from Rubob, Primo Levi's memoirs of Auschwitz -- two memoirs in one, really: "Survival in Auschwitz" and "The Reawakening." In the concentration camp of Buna, the inmates had been compelled to steal from one another to survive with the barest of resources. After the war, on the long journey home, there were more opportunities to work together to survive.

Curiously, Rubob's mind was again on the same thing, because he said, "Have you got to the part in 'The Reawakening' about Primo's friend Cesare, where he sells the brass ring?"

"No, Rubob -- I was just thinking about that book. I remember Cesare selling the shirt with the hole in it, though -- by holding his finger over the hole in the collar while waving the shirt in the sun, 'declaiming its praises.' After selling it for a larcenous price to a man they call 'Big Belly,' they walk slowly to the nearest corner and then run for their lives."

In the infirmary at Auschwitz in the last days of the war, Primo Levi had met the rogue Cesare. Through a wooden wall in the infirmary, Levi had heard Italian being spoken, and he'd found two ill, emaciated Italians, Cesare and Marcello, clinging together for warmth in one bunk. Months later, Levi had run into Cesare again at a Russian camp, and on their journey home Levi had accompanied Cesare on his trading forays in the marketplaces of the towns they passed through.

"Yes, I remember Cesare and the shirt," Rubob said. "Later on, there's the story of the brass ring. Cesare the charlatan buys a ring from a former trading partner. He pays all of four rubles, more than the ring is worth. He then spends his time on a train journey diligently polishing the ring. When the train stops at a village station, Cesare approaches some Russian peasants, holds the ring half hidden against his chest and whispers, 'Gold!'"

"At the moment when the train whistles, preparing to depart, Cesare agrees to part with the ring for 50 rubles and climbs onto the moving train. The swindled peasant shows the ring to his friends, who express their doubts about it. The train starts to slow down for some reason and screeches to a halt. The Russians march alongside the train, looking for Cesare. He hides in a corner of a train car, under a mass of jackets, sacks and blankets. The Russians approach and start banging against the doors of the car, but fortuitously, the train starts up again, in the nick of time. Cesare emerges, Levi writes, ' as white as death.' But he quickly recovers and says, 'Now let them look for me!'"

"He's an odd companion for the honest, bookish Levi, isn't he Rubob?" Tine said. "But then he fell in with another conman, the Mordo the Greek, too."

The Greek was an even stranger companion for Levi on his journey -- a less lighthearted thief than Cesare, grimmer in purpose. Levi described him as "nothing but a rogue, a merchant, expert in deceit and lacking in scruples, selfish and cold."

"When war is waging," the Greek told Levi, "one has to think of two things before all others: in the first place of one's shoes, in the second place of food to eat; and not vice versa, as the common herd believes, because he who has shoes can search for food, but the inverse is not true."

"A Pair of Shoes," by Vincent van Gogh

After "work" hours, when the Greek had finished his scheming and trading -- in eggs, shirts and even in women -- he became more cordial, and a flask of wine would sometimes appear unexpectedly from his sack. Warmed by the wine, the Greek would tell Levi his stories of the war.

Tine thought of Levi's comparison of the Greek and Cesare: "An abyss lay between [them]. Cesare was full of human warmth, always, at every moment of his life, not just outside office hours like Mordo Nahum. For Cesare, 'work' was sometimes an unpleasant necessity, at other times an amusing opportunity to meet people, and not a frigid obsession, or a luciferesque affirmation of himself. One of them was free, the other was a slave to himself; one was miserly and reasonable, the other prodigal and fantastic. The Greek was a lone wolf, in an eternal war againt all, old before his time, closed in the circle of his own joyless pride; Cesare was a child of the sun, everybody's friend; he knew no hatred or contempt, was as changeable as the sky, joyous, cunning and generous, bold and cautious, very ignorant, very innocent and very civilized."

"Cesare is more of a friend and partner of Levi's, Rubob," Tine said.

"Levi's falling in with the Mordo the Greek," Tine thought, "was more a case of chance than choice. And while they were often separated on the circuitous journey home, they continued to run into one another. The Greek and Levi -- their journeys somehow became entwined."

Tine and Rubob turned a corner on the path, and in a clearing by the riverbank, they were set upon by four snarling beasts, a group of growling, leaping little terriers. Their owner, a stocky fisherman sitting on the bank, tried to call them off, but the dogs snapped at Tine's heels.

Tine managed to inch her way by them. She usually likes dogs, but caught in the midst of these yapping, sharp-toothed curs, she said, almost involuntarily, "I'm scared of them, Rubob." He coaxed Tine out of the clearning into the woods ahead.

The two soon reached a steep hill leading up to the old railway bridge, and Tine said, "It isn't like last time, when we could barely make it up the hill because of the ice."

"It's not the insurmountable mountain it was, Tine," Rubob said, walking briskly up the slope. "In some ways, it's like the boat. When we first bought it, it seemed like an impossible, endless project to get everything done. But think of how much we've done. It hasn't taken us long to get the knack of things. The daunting ice has melted away, and we're nearing the summit, Tine."

"I think it's because we can work on it together, Rubob, " Tine said. "We do things well together. We weren't thrown together by chance, weren't we?"

"No, Tine,"Rubob said.

As the two made their way along the railway bridge, the view of the river opened out before them.

"It's true what you said about the boat, Rubob," Tine said. "Together we'll be able to get things done in time. With us, it's not like with those trees of yours competing for nutrients. When we're with each other, all resources seem to open out to us. How is that?"

"But it's still all the details that scare me," she said -- "all the things we have to learn to do. All the loose bits and pieces of the projects have been left jangling around in my mind over the winter -- right down to the little plug for the drain in the hot-water heater. They're like the sack of junk that Mordo the Green carries around. I can't keep track of it all. You're good at finding exactly what to do with everything, at thinking through every detail, at coming up with solutions -- like how to fix the keel."

Tine, standing on a concrete bench on the bridge to get a better view over the black iron railing, thought again of Heidegger. There's a danger in being more venturesome, he wrote, but a paradoxical security, too: "The daring that is more venturesome, willing more strongly than any self-assertion ... 'creates' a secureness for us in the Open. To create means to fetch from the source. And to fetch from the source means to take up what springs forth ...."

"I don't think I'm all that good at all with details at all," Rubob said as Tine jumped down from the bench and started back along the bridge toward the path through the woods.

"Why do you say that?" Tine said.

"Well, for one thing, I can't remember anything."

"You remember all the things from your reading. What about all the details from Primo Levi's book? And everything you read about the boat, too," Tine said.

"I don't remember much at all. Sometimes I think, why not just read the first couple of sentences in each paragraph in the books I read? Why waste my time reading every sentence when I forget most of what I read?" Rubob said.

"You remind me of what you say about your durn mother-in-law, Tine said, referring to her mother -- "how she doesn't read and doesn't retain what she does read. But she reads quite a bit and retains a lot of it, doesn't she? And so do you. You're too hard on the Mutti, and too hard on yourself."

"When she called this morning, she was saying that she was reading 'Beach House' or 'Bleak House,' " Rubob said. "I can't even remember which."

"Well, that's a silly thing to say, because you gave her the book, admonishing her not to turn down the corners of the pages," Tine said.

"I asked her whether she usually turned down page corners," Rubob said.

"And she said she did," Tine said, chuckling to herself.

"She's a funny thing," Rubob said. "She was telling me on the phone this morning about her Swiss friend Margaret, who's feuding with one of the women they used to meet on the beach. Has she told you about that?"

"No, Rubob," Tine said.

"Margaret used to be good friends with a woman in their little circle at the beach. One day the woman, who doesn't drive, asked Margaret if she'd take her to the mall. Her husband, she said, didn't like shopping, and so it would be nicer if she and Margaret went together, providing that Margaret drove. Margaret was put out by the request, but she agreed. She then became annoyed when the woman didn't buy lunch for her. That's the least she could have done, Margaret said. Then, when they arrived back at Margaret's place, the friend asked to be driven home, so the husband wouldn't have to pick her up. This was the final straw for Margaret. She drove the friend home, but yelled at her, saying the least she could have done was get her own ride home. From that day on, the two haven't spoken to one another. "

"A sad story, Rubob," Tine said -- "truly heartbreaking."

She thought it all sounded a bit like Heidegger's "Gerede" -- "chatter" or "idle talk."

We've "fallen into the world," Heidegger wrote, and "'fallenness' into the 'world' means an absorption in being-with-one-another, insofar as the latter is guided by idle talk, hunger for novelty ...." In this world of "everydayness," we "fall away from ourselves"; we're left uprooted, "everywhere and nowhere." But from this fallenness, he wrote, we can "strive to return to authentic being."

"I thought of telling your mother," Rubob said, "that she should walk up to Margaret's old friend on the beach, with Margaret in tow, and say something like, 'I was just telling Margaret thus and so, wasn't I, Margaret?' and Margaret would have to speak to her friend, ending the feud."

"I don't think that would work," Tine said. "Margaret's too strong-willed for that, too self-willed. No doubt their paths will cross again before long, as Levi's did with the Greek."

"Maybe that's true, Tine," Rubob said. "I'd be less inclined to leave it all to chance, though."

"Maybe some friendships aren't based on much more than chance," Tine said. "Others, like that between Tchoan and Margaret, are more lasting. They've been friends for years and years, and yet they often have disagreements. We have to cherish and protect our friendships, to preserve and care for them. That's what old Heidegger might venture to add to this conversation."

Tine thought how Heidegger had written that we're thrown into the world with others, and we can't treat others as objects, as "human-things, as they-selfs." As George Steiner put it in his book on Heidegger, the world into which we're thrown has others in it, and being in the world is being-with.

We return to "authentic being" by treating others with "Sorge," with solicitude, Heidegger wrote. And Steiner explained: "Sorge is a concern with, a caring for, an answerability to, the presentness and mystery of Being itself, of Being as it transfigures beings."

Tine heard barking, and she snapped out of her meditation on Heidegger.

"We're approaching the vicious curs again, Rubob," she said.

"Wicious," Rubob said. "Naturally wicious."

"Swine, that's what they are," Tine said. "We'll have to find a detour to avoid the snarling beasts. They're lying in wait around the bend for us human-things."

"Us what, Tine?" Rubob asked.

"Bite-able objects," Tine said. "They want to chomp on the human-things in the woods."

The two made a wide circle around the fisherman and his wretched mutts. Back on the beaten path, they met a man with a golden retriever coming the other way, and Tine told him what lay ahead. "Thanks for the warning," the man said, and he pulled the retriever back on his leash and turned around.

The leader of the pack of terriers, a fat little beast with brown splotches on his white coat, stood on the edge of the clearing by the river and saw Tine off with a few final, peremptory barks. "Yeah, and don't think of coming back!" he seemed to say.

"Grrrr-wooorfen!" Tine growled back at the beast, before hastening along on the path.

"We survived, Rubob," Tine said as they headed home. "We made it out in one piece -- or two really. Two in one, Rubob, like your trees."

At the edge of the wood, Tine thought, "All in all, a very pleasant walk."

'Tween Pavement and Stars

2006-02-16T15:42:00.000-05:00

Tine finally rose from her sickbed this afternoon and ventured forth into the world at large.

"How long has it been since our last walk, Rubob?" Tine asked as they made their way down the driveway. "Has it been days or weeks, or even months?"

But Rubob, who was as lost in his thoughts as Tine was in her uncertain notions of time, didn't reply.

"Why are you trailing behind, Rubob?" Tine asked as they passed the open fields stretching up the hill in the old Bull Lot.

"You lead the way, Tine," Rubob said. "You're the shooter in our hunting party. I'd better be careful if a covey of quail breaks out of the brush behind us, or I'll get peppered with buckshot like poor old Harry Whittington."

Rubob had been absorbed in his newspaper for much of the morning, and his thoughts were still on the vice president's unfortunate hunting incident.

"Whittington -- wasn't there a Whittington in London?" Rubob asked.

"I don't know, Rubob," Tine replied.

"Dick Whittington, wasn't that it?" Rubob said. "He was a poor boy from Gloucestershire who walked to London to make his fortune."

"That's Gloss-ter-sher, Rubob -- not Glow-ster," Tine said.

"He becomes a scullery boy, and the cook makes his life so miserable that he decides to run away," Rubob continued. "But as he was leaving the city, he heard the bells of London ringing, and they seemed to him to say, 'Turn again Whittington, three times Lord Mayor of London.' So Dick returned to London, where, with the help of his cat, he makes his fortune."

"With his cat, Rubob?" Tine asked.

"As the story goes, Whittington had a cat to catch the mice in the attic where he lived. He sent his cat on one of his master's sailing voyages, and the cat was sold to a foreign king whose court was overrun with rats -- sold for a huge sum of gold. That's how Whittington began building his fortune. His adventures were the subject of pantomimes, and in one he's even portrayed as the 'Last Hope of the Universe’, who with his cat chases King Rat across the galaxy."

"That's a nice story, Rubob," Tine said, thinking to herself that it cheered her up a bit. Like Dick Whittington in his scullery in London, she'd been feeling miserable, weighed down by a long bout with the flu. Also on Tine's mind was the death of a high school friend, which she'd read about yesterday in the obituary pages. "We will all miss this kind and beautiful soul," the obituary had said. Tine was glad to be outside again in the fresh winter air. She let her gaze drift up to the rooftops, seeking release in the blue sky.

"Look, Rubob, chimney caps -- and not flimsy metal ones like ours, which get blown away in the wind," she said.

"And two chimneys, Tine," Rubob said. "I'd never noticed the two chimneys on that roof before."

"My thoughts are with the sky today," Tine said. "I can't be doing with all the sickness and trouble down here."

They passed another chimney with a well-built chimney cap, and Tine thought of a verse from Robert Frost's "The Kitchen Chimney":

"However far you must go for bricks,
Whatever they cost a-piece or a pound,
Buy me enough for a full-length chimney,
And build the chimney clear from the ground."

"They remind me of all the chimneys huddled on the rooftops in England -- of the view out the window of the bed-and-breakfast in Chester," Rubob said.

Tine thought of the chimneys in Dickens' London:

"The smoke hung sluggishly above the chimney-tops as if it lacked the courage to rise, and the rain came slowly and doggedly down, as if it had not even the spirit to pour."

It wasn't exactly Tine's view of chimneys, huddled together under a lowering sky.

"There's a garage with a chimney," Tine said. "Why do you suppose a garage would have a chimney, Rubob?"

"It's a mystery, Tine," Rubob said. "And why do you think that's one's built so high?"

"So it draws well," Tine said. "And to be close to the sky. It's had quite enough of the things of this world."

She thought of the poorly built "false" chimneys in Frost's poem:

"It's not that I'm greatly afraid of fire,
But I never heard of a house that throve
(And I know of one that didn't thrive)
Where the chimney started above the stove.

"And I dread the ominous stain of tar
That there always is on the papered walls,
And the smell of fire drowned in rain
That there always is when the chimney's false."

But the chimneys in the village inspired more uplifting thoughts in Tine. They seemed less concerned with smoke and fire than with the clear sky above, and they appeared to be as at home in the sky as the treetops.

The chimneys were like steeples, Tine thought as she and Rubob approached the Congregational church -- steeples built not just in worship of home and hearth, but in reverence for the sky.

"There's a perky one with a half-barreled black cap," Rubob said, looking at a chimney across the main thoroughfare.

'Tween pavement and stars is the chimney sweep world," Tine said, recalling the Mary Poppins song, "Chim Chim Cher-ee."

"Chim chiminey
Chim chiminey
Chim chim cher-ee!
A sweep is as lucky
As lucky can be.

"Chim chiminey
Chim chiminey
Chim chim cher-oo!
Good luck will rub off
when I shake 'ands with you,
Or blow me a kiss
And that's lucky too.

"Now as the ladder of life
'As been strung
You may think a sweep's
On the bottommost rung.
Though I spends me time
In the ashes and smoke
In this 'ole wide world
There's no 'appier bloke.

"Chim chiminey
Chim chiminey
Chim chim cher-ee!
A sweep is as lucky
As lucky can be."

"I'd like to live up there with the chimneys," Tine said, pointing to a cupola on the roof of the library at Miss Porter's School. "That would be just fine for me."

"Or how about up there with that chimney, safely tucked between two windows, with a pleasant view of the sky?" she said, looking at the rooftop of a dorm at Miss Porter's School.

"Or there, in my own tower, far from the troubles of the world," Tine said.

"When I think of chimneys, I can't help thinking of Auschwitz," Rubob said.

Tine stopped in her tracks and said, "Auschwitz? That's what you think of when you see chimneys?"

"It's only because I've just finished Primo Levi's memoirs on Auschwitz, and that's what they called the crematorium: 'the Chimney.'"

Tine was struck by how different her notion of chimneys was than Rubob's.

"The chimneys at Auschwitz took those too ill to be productive," Rubob said. "It was less a labor camp than an extermination camp. With the least bit of trouble they could have kept the inmates alive, but the imperative was to kill them. They were starved to death, and in winter they were provided with the thinnest possible coats, so they froze to death, too."

"And yet the odd thing is that they were allowed to go to the infirmary when they were ill, and there they were better fed than the rest of the inmates," Rubob continued. "Why weren't they sent to the gas chambers?"

"At one point, Levi writes, a rumor circulates that the inmates in the infirmary are going to be called out to be sent to the gas chambers. What was it called? They had a word for it. 'Selection' -- that's it. There was going to be a selection among the sick inmates, and Levi's group worried about it for many days. Everyone at the camp had a number, and so many had been eliminated that there were hardly any inmates in the camp left with numbers under 100,000. As it happened, only one inmate from the infirmary was selected after the rumor had spread among Levi's group, and Levi writes about him lying on his bunk, under a bare light bulb, knowing it was his last day on Earth. Levi, meanwhile, was quietly rejoicing that he wasn't picked."

"This world is too much with us sometimes, Rubob," Tine said. "My thoughts are with the sky today. I don't think of Auschwitz when I see chimneys. I don't even think of fireplaces and soot. I think only of the sky."

"Chimneys, like steeples, stand between earth and sky," Tine thought to herself. "They put everything in a new perspective somehow, remind us of our place under the sky -- even our place in the sky, in the divine order of things. They help us reach above and beyond ourselves."

But there was no denying the fact of the chimneys of Auschwitz, Tine thought. "In some ways," she thought, "Rubob grounds my thoughts, brings them back to earth."

"If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote.

Tine and Rubob turned down Garden street and passed a birdhouse nicely equipped with two chimneys.

As they passed the cemetery, Tine pointed out to Rubob that even some of the graves seemed to have chimney tops.

"What sort of smoke went up those chimneys?" Tine wondered, standing next to the granite monument. Life seemed an evanescent, tenuous sort of thing at times, its spirit and meaning as intangible as smoke, as impossible to grasp as air, its substance reducible to ashes. And yet there was that fire of life in us, and the sky arching over everything, Tine thought. There was something bright, good and lasting in life, too.

She thought of a line from Emerson: "Life is a festival only to the wise. Seen from the nook and chimney-side of prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front. "

"I've been weighed down too much by sickness," Tine said to Rubob -- "and too much by all my worries and cares. I've been living in my dark chimney corner, like Whittington in his scullery. Life is a festival only to the wise. "

"What's that, Tine?" Rubob asked.

"Emerson, Rubob," Tine said. "I haven't been taking part in the festival, have I?"

She thought of something that Bode Miller, the Olympic skiier, had said: "Anyone who isn't strong is left in a corner, no-one asks for their autograph, they are abandoned in the cold shadows. Those who win, however, become icons."

"We all need something to inspire us," Tine reflected. "I suppose I have chimneys to inspire me today."

She thought of Dick Whittington as he looked back over the rooftops of London from Highgate Hill and heard the bells calling out to him. From that moment, he didn't live his life in his master's scullery, on the chimney-side of prudence.

Dick Whittington, Lyceum Theatre

Whittington's dreams weren't simply "castles I used to build in air," as Frost writes in "The Kitchen Chimney," but well-constructed plans like sturdy, full-length chimneys, with views over the town.

On their way home, Tine and Rubob passed the Congregational Church, where workmen had left a shed that reminded Tine of Thoreau's cabin at Walden pond.

Tine recalled the story of the man who'd discovered Thoreau's cabin in 1945, Roland Robbins. He'd been intrigued by reports of a stone cairn marking the cabin site, and with "a pocket compass and a 98-cent G.I trench shovel" he began exploring around Walden Pond.

One of the things he found was the chimney foundation, and he wrote that working amidst it he "experienced for the first time the power of physical remains to captivate and capture both his imagination and the imagination of those around him. ... It also held immense promise for the future; in his mind there was no turning back." (http://www.uky.edu/AS/Anthropology/PAR/thoreau.htm)

Roland at Walden Pond, Thoreau's Cabin, 1946
Photo by Edwin Way Teale, Thoreau Society, Lincoln, Massachusetts
http://www.uky.edu/AS/Anthropology/PAR/thoreau.htm

It was the beginning of a professional career in historical archaeology for Robbins, and he became a pioneer in the field. Until he began work unearthing the remains of Thoreau's cabin, he'd operated "a small and successful window cleaning and painting business," he wrote, "but by heart I live with the unanswered questions to the... past."

The story had echoes of Dick Whittington's tale in it, Tine thought.

Robbins wanted to be more than an "expert at washing other people's windows and renovating other people's houses." The site of the cabin, Robbins was told, would "prove to be one of the world's greatest shrines."

All this from a chimney foundation, a few stone piers and a root cellar, Tine thought.

Replica of Thoreau's hut at Walden Pond.
Photo from:http://www.4peaks.com/fthwalden.htm

As Tine thought about Robbins' work in the woods by Walden Pond, she felt more rooted again in the earth, ready to bring her gaze down from the rooftops, to find a middle ground beneath earth and sky.

"Though I spends me time
In the ashes and smoke
In this 'ole wide world
There's no 'appier bloke
Up where the smoke is
All billered and curled'
'Tween pavement and stars
Is the chimney sweep world."

Tine had fallen behind Rubob as they made their way home, and she hurried to catch up with him.

"What were you doing dawdling back there, Tine?" Rubob asked.

"Spending me time in the ashes and smoke of this 'ole wide world, Rubob."

All in all, it was a very pleasant walk, Tine thought as she and Rubob reached their driveway.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bell-Maker

2006-01-30T14:36:00.000-05:00

Tine and Rubob took tentative steps back out into the world this afternoon, after several days without a walk. It was a dreary day, gray and misty after a wet weekend, and Tine was still weary after a long bout with the flu.

"It looks like the world after the great flood has receded," Rubob said, surveying the damp, cheerless scene around him.

Tine, feeling downcast, wasn't ready to look around and take in the sights of the neighborhood. She focused on more manageable portions of the world, such as a lichen-covered stone wall.

"What are you looking at?" Rubob asked. "You're not yourself yet, are you, poor little Tine?"

But Tine always enjoys stone walls, and this one boosted her spirits a little.

While she'd been ailing, the industrious citizens of the village had been busy.

Rubob, who's a capable fence-mender himself, lingered over the sight of the newly erected fence and pronounced it "perfectly straight and level."

"It can't have been easy digging those holes in the winter," he said.

"They would have had to penetrate the permafrost," Tine said, recalling a recent walk in Arctic regions. (Tine Travels to the North Pole. )

The two turned off Hatter's Lane and headed down a side street.

Tine continued to gaze at scenes close to the ground, including more evidence of citizens hard at work.

Rubob sought out broader vistas.

"I've just finished Primo Levi's memoirs of his time in Auschwitz," he said. "He survived because he was lucky enough to be assigned to work in the laboratory for the chemical factory, the 'Chemical Kommando.' Those who worked outside in the snow -- digging ditches, hauling wood -- had a much worse chance of surviving the winter. Something like seven in ten who labored outdoors died."

In the book, "Survival in Auschwitz," which Tine delved into later in the day, Levi wrote:

“The conviction that life has a purpose is rooted in every fibre of man, it is a property of the human substance. Free men give many names to this purpose, and think and talk a lot about its nature, but for us the question is simpler.

"Today in this place, our only purpose is to reach the spring."

"And Levi was lucky again," Rubob said. "He wound up in the camp infirmary with scarlet fever when the Germans evacuated 20,000 prisoners in January 1945, near the end of the war. None of the prisoners returned from that march. But all those in the infirmary were left behind, including Levi. And with luck, once again, he managed to live through the month until the Russians arrived by finding an old cast-iron stove in the ruins of the camp and dragging it back to the infirmary. It became the only room in the camp with a stove, and the eleven patients in the infirmary survived on a diet of potatoes. "

"Better lucky than good," Tine said. "What film was that in -- that line? We just saw it."

"Was it 'Munich?'" Rubob ventured. "No, that wasn't it."

"'The Man in the White Suit'? No, that can't be it, because Alec Guinness was very unlucky in that," Tine said. "Now I remember -- the Woody Allen one."

"That's right, 'Match Point,' Rubob said.

"Where the ball hitting the net can fall one way or the other," Tine said. "In the case of the tennis pro, the murderer, it falls in his favor."

"Of the 650 people in the railroad convoy that took Primo Levi to Auschwitz, only a very few were lucky," Rubob said. "Just twenty returned home after the war."

"A train convoy from where Rubob?"

"Turin, Tine," Rubob said. "The Italian Fascists arrested Levi in 1943, and he was deported to Auschwitz. The journey took four days, and the prisoners had no food or water. Once they arrived, the men were immediately separated from the women and children, who they never saw again. And right from the start, people were picked out for the gas chambers.

"The system of selecting prisoners for the gas chambers was all very detached, methodical, done in a way so as not to alarm the inmates of the death camp," Rubob continued. A guard's hand gesture to the left or the right would indicate whether a prisoner would be spared or not."

Rubob stopped to look at a curious sign on a house they were passing.

"Built in 1969? I've never seen a sign like that before, Tine," he said.

"Maybe we're getting older," Tine thought. She thought of the '60s -- and the Beatles.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono's bed-in for peace, 1969
From: http://www.beatles-discography.com/index.html?http://www.beatles-discography.com/1969.html

"Another time, Rubob -- history, " Tine said.

"Speaking of history, what happened to Rublev yesterday after I left?" Rubob asked.

They'd gone to see "The Passion According to Andrei: Andrei Rublev" on Sunday -- a long, brooding film about Russia's greatest painter of icons. Rubob had left halfway through because of commitments in the world at large. There were moments in the first half of the film where everyone in the audience, not just Tine and Rubob, must have been thinking: "Today, in this place, our only purpose is to reach the end of this film."

Tine noticed a tree that looked just like some of the endless scenes in the black-and-white film:

The movie follows Rublev on his wanderings through war-ravaged, medieval Russia. The director, Andrei Tarkovsky, presents scene after scene of arid Russian landscapes, interspersed with what one critic said were "achingly long, slow pans across Slavic faces." To make matters worse for Tine and Rubob, they were sitting in the last row in the back of the theater, right next to a leak in the ceiling. Every second, a drop of water landed with a loud plop behind them, with the slow, steady drip of water torture.

Rubob, who appeared to be enjoying a nap during much of the first half, was much relieved to leave just as the second half was starting. But as it happened, the action picked up, and Tine was glad she stayed.

"How much of it did you see before you dropped off in the first half, Rubob?" Tine asked.

"Well, a group of icon painters left a monastery to go paint a church in the city," Rubob said. "At the church, Rublev couldn't bring himself to paint 'The Last Judgment' -- or anything else."

"Yes, why was that?" Tine asked.

"I don't know," Rubob said. "Anyway, the other monks sat around doing nothing, waiting for word from Rublev. Then the scene changes and the Tartars arrive. They raid the city, and things start to pick up a little. That's when I left."

"I thought you were sleeping, Rubob"

"Now and then, Tine," Rubob said. "I tried to keep one eye open."

"Well, you got most of the first half. It did get better after you fled from the Tartars," Tine said. "Like your friend Primo Levi, Rublev was lucky, and he managed to avoid injury and death despite every imaginable catastrophe befalling those around him. He survived the bloody sacking of the city by the Tartars. And then -- do you remember the Russian prince who overthrew his brother with the help of the Tartars?"

"Vaguely," Rubob said.

"Well, the prince commissioned a bell for the church, and a new episode in the movie begins," Tine said. "There's no one to cast the bell because all the bell-makers have been felled by war, disease or famine. The son of one of the great bell-makers --Boriska, who's not much more than 12 or so -- says he'll do it. His father, he claims, left him the secret of bell-making.

"Everyone's skeptical, but Boriska is persuasive and he takes charge of things. He starts to dig an enormous hole in the ground for the casting, telling the workers that one of the secrets is that bell-makers must dig the hole themselves. It's going to be a huge bell, bigger than that black SUV in that driveway.

"Rublev, who's been wandering around the countryside in various states of torment over his life and art, happens upon the strange scene with the young bell-maker working in his hole, and he watches from a distance. The out-of-work icon painter becomes increasingly fascinated by the sight of the precocious young craftsman leading hundreds of workers in the casting of the bell.

"Like Rublev, Boriska insists that everything has to be perfect. He delays the project for weeks while he searches for the perfect clay, which he finds while falling down a hillside in a storm. Unlike Rublev, Boriska gets things done, though. He doesn't sit around brooding, but he pushes his army of laborers endlessly, even ordering them whipped when they won't do what he wants. He's a determined artist, this bell-maker, Rubob, and Rublev recognizes it as he watches everything.

"And yet all the other workers continue to doubt that Boriska will be able to make his bell. It'll crack after it's been cast, they say. It's taking far too long and it'll snow before it can be cast. But the bell is cast, and it comes out perfectly, like that fence you liked, Rubob.

Boriska (Nikolai Burlyayev),
From http://www.ramr.org/vine/journal_view.php?journalid=160444

"It's solid, strong and beautiful, and the boy, lying beside it in the muddy hole, caresses it. The silver bell looks like something that's dropped from the sky, something miraculous sent by God to the ravaged country.

"Then the day of the great ceremony arrives, when the completed bell will be hauled out of its hole by lines of laborers with ropes that stretch out over the hillsides, seemingly for miles. The prince and his court are there, along with all the church leaders. The naysayers are all there, too, and they seem to chant in unison: It won't ring. It can't ring.

"The bell's hoisted up on its massive wooden frame, and a man jumps down into the hole to swing the rope beneath the giant mallet. It takes forever for the mallet, which sways soundlessly back and forth in a slowly widening arc, to reach the lip of the bell. The town waits anxiously. The audience in the theater is breathless, Rubob. You missed the climactic moment, you see."

"I'm sorry I missed it, Tine," Rubob said.

"The exigencies of a busy life," Tine said. "Perfectly understandable. You had your own bells to cast."

"But to get back to the story," she said, "the bell finally rings out over the landscape, with a great, rich sound, welling up from the depths of the earth, in some ways like the deep, resonant chant of Orthodox monks. It's the sound of creation, Rubob.

"The boy -- our Boriska -- flees the scene and collapses in a ditch with relief. Sobbing, he confesses to Rublev that his father never gave him the secret of bell-making. Rublev consoles him and tells him they'll go to Moscow together. 'You'll cast bells and I'll paint icons. That will give the people something to celebrate.'

"I wonder, come to think, whether Boriska was lucky or good, Rubob -- I don't really know. I think maybe the two work together, hand in hand. Maybe that was the case with Primo Levi, too.

"Anyway, the scenes of the black-and-white film dissolve at this point, and the film ends in color, with the camera moving slowly over Rublev's frescoes and icons. The most beautiful may be his icon of the Trinity, which shows three angels seated at a table beneath the tree of life.

Rublev's "The Trinity," from:
http://www.stjohnscamberwell.org.au/Sermons/ExplanationofTheTrinityIcon.htm

"So you see, it's the story about the making of an artist, Rubob. Not so bad, but very long."

"It sounds very interesting, Tine," Rubob said.

"Well, it was the icons that were the most stunning. In the Russian Orthodox Church, they believe that divinity is really present through icons. Icons are 'meeting places with the divine,' as an old church canon once told me. I wonder whether it's still true in a movie. I suppose it must be."

Tine and Rubob turned up their street, and a neighbor was putting out her trash.

"It's easier to put it out this week than last," Rubob said, referring to all the snow last week.

"It certainly is," the neighbor said.

"It's a lot warmer today, too," Rubob said.

"They say it was 9 degrees warmer than usual this month," the neighbor said. "But the temperature has been up and down, with extremes of cold and warmth. It's more healthful to have it consistent, I think. Even if it's cold, we can at least turn the heat up."

Tine thought that the cold would probably return to the village soon. We haven't made it through the gray winter yet, she thought.

Her eyes were still downcast as she walked up her driveway, but she thought of Boriska's bell deep in the muddy earth. It was the story of how Andrei Rublev recovered his passion for his art, his passion for life.

"All in all, a very pleasant walk," Tine thought.

Gelassenheit, Tine!

2006-01-27T14:22:00.000-05:00

Tine has been bedridden for much of the week, sad to say. Her wanderings have been largely confined to the unexplored corners of her bed -- and of her mind. While Tine hasn't been able to take her daily walk with Rubob, she has had an opportunity to reflect on many things -- for instance, her sneeze in the meadows on Tuesday's walk. (A Sneeze in the Expanse of That-Which-Regions.)

Enowning commented recently, "The writings of Heidegger have been classified as a Schedule I controlled substance." Tine might add that Heidegger's writings become even more mind-altering when taken with multiple doses of cough medicine.

When she was out strolling in the meadows, on the edge of Heidegger's "abiding expanse of that-which-regions," Tine thought about how her sneeze sounded -- well, not exactly sounded, because it sounded like a sneeze, but seemed -- like the opening of "that-which-regions."

In "Conversations on a Country Path," Heidegger wrote: "That-which-regions is an abiding expanse which, gathering all, opens itself, so that in it openness is halted and held, letting everything merge in its own resting. "

He wrote that we are released into the region of meditative thought -- released from calculative thought -- when the region, the "Gegend," opens itself to us. It is a mysterious region, "the region of the word," of the Logos. It is an expanse of thought -- and being -- that truly defines our nature, as wondrous, reflecting beings, not as calculative beings.

"Sniveling, conniving, calculative beings," Tine thought -- not unkindly, but with a chuckle to herself -- when she saw that a certain being, one in all likelihood named Rubob, had finished off her cough medicine.

Releasement into the region of meditative thought is called "Gelassenheit" by Heidegger, and its relation to the Gesundheit of a sneeze is that it's somewhat involuntary, Tine thought in her sick bed. The region opens itself to us when it's good and ready, and when we are ready to release ourselves into it -- all in all, not unlike a sneeze.

"Gelassenheit!" Tine thought.

A Sneeze in the Expanse of That-Which-Regions

2006-01-26T12:58:00.000-05:00

As those of you who have been following Tine's walks know, this week Tine joined Martin Heidegger and his good friends in their conversation on a country path. (Tine's Visit to Prospero's Isle.) When they were strolling along in the "abiding expanse of that-which-regions," as Heidegger's friends put it, Tine sneezed. As it happens (in fact, at the very moment at which it happened), Tine's sneeze was captured in a picture for this blog.

For those of you who don't know what that-which-regions is, the best that can be done is to quote Heidegger, who knows more about it than most walkers and thinkers: "That-which-regions is an abiding expanse which, gathering all, opens itself, so that in it openness is halted and held, letting everything merge in its own resting. "

"That sounds quite a bit like my sneeze," Tine thought. "Perhaps there's more to a sneeze than one might imagine." (Gelassenheit, Tine!)

Tine's Visit to Prospero's Isle

2006-01-24T19:44:00.000-05:00

Tine and Rubob set off for the Meadows by the river on their walk this afternoon. Tine, who was suffering from a cold, thought a trip to the fields might do some good.

"This pure stinging cold is an elixir to the lungs," Thoreau wrote in his essay "Walking," and Tine had taken note.

At the old stone bridge, Tine stopped to look out over the water and fields.

She and Rubob didn't say much; they just took in the view.

On the path alongside the Pequabuck River, Rubob seemed lost in a tangle of thoughts.

"What are you thinking about, Rubob?"Tine asked -- "something in the news, I expect." Rubob had been engrossed in his newspapers all morning.

"The Canadian elections, Tine," Rubob said.

Tine's mind was filled with little more than the open fields. That might be considered a bit empty-headed, what with everything that needed thinking about in the world; but it was refreshing for Tine, who'd felt heavy-headed with her cold all morning.

But then Tine began to reflect, as she often does on her walks. She was hoping the fields might work their magic and clear her head, the way they did for Martin Heidegger in his essay "Conversations on a Country Path." Heidegger's open fields became an "enchanted region where everything belonging there returns to that in which it rests." He wrote:

"That-which-regions is an abiding expanse which, gathering all, opens itself, so that in it openness is halted and held, letting everything merge in its own resting. "

But that kind of thing doesn't happen for the asking, Tine thought. Even waiting for it to happen isn't all that simple. Heidegger wrote:

Teacher: Perhaps we now are close to being released into the nature of thinking ...
Scholar: ... through waiting for its nature.

Teacher: ... Waiting, all right; but never awaiting, for awaiting already links itself with re-presenting and what is re-presented.
Scholar: Waiting, however, lets go of that; or rather I should say that awating lets re-presenting entirely alone. It really has no object....

Teacher: In waiting we leave open what we are waiting for.

Scholar: Why?

Teacher: Because waiting releases itself into openness ....

The third man on the path then piped up:

Scientist: As I see more clearly just now, all during our conversation I have been waiting for the arrival of the nature of thinking. But waiting itself has become clearer to me now and therewith this too, that presumably we all became more waitful along our path.
Teacher: Can you tell us how this is so?
Scientist: I am to say why I came to wait and the way I succeeded in clarifying the nature of thinking. I tried to release myself of all re-presenting, because waiting moves into openness without re-presenting anything. And released from re-presenting, I tried to release myself purely to that-which-regions because that-which-regions is the opening of openness.

Tine thought her thinking wasn't becoming any more clear. Her head was feeling rather clogged with ideas, and she thought it might be best to quit awaiting "that-which-regions." She sneezed, and that cleared her head to some extent; but the Meadows, while certainly beautiful, didn't seem like an enchanted region -- simply cold and vast. If Tine had been included in "Conversation on a Country Path," Heidegger might have written:

Tine: I tried to release myself purely to that-which-regions and the best I could do was sneeze.

"Look," she said to Rubob, "a tree in the abiding expanse of that-which-regions."

"A tree in what, Tine?" Rubob asked distractedly.

"Nothing Rubob," Tine said -- "just a tree, but a rather nice one, don't you think?"

Rubob didn't respond; he was still lost in his thougths.

"Still thinking about the election, Rubob?" Tine asked.

"The leader of the Liberals has been dethroned, but the thing is, Tine, that the Conservatives won only about 120 seats in parliament, far short of the 150-plus seats they need for a majority."

The two passed another tree, a sycamore, and Tine pointed out a nest.

"The nest is held in the abiding expanse, letting everything merge in its own resting, Rubob," Tine said.

"What, Tine?" Rubob asked.

"Nothing, Rubob. I don't really see it, either," Tine said.

"Heidegger, Tine?"

"You got it, Rubob," Tine said.

They continued on the path to the confluence of the Pequabuck and Farmington rivers. It was a place where ducks liked to gather.

They fled at first when they saw Tine standing on the riverbank. Rubob was standing farther back, attending to affairs of state, lining up his ducks in parliament.

Gradually, though, the ducks got used to Tine, and they returned to investigate.

A second flock came to have a look, sending the first group down the river.

"The king and his courtiers, Rubob," Tine said.

"Look at the beautiful reflections in the water, Tine," Rubob said.

And looking at a pair of ducks he sang,

"Birds do it, bees do it
Even educated fleas do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love."

"Cole Porter, Tine," Rubob said.

"It is nature that is all
Simply telling us to fall in love."

Across the river, a mansion overlooked the fields and streams, and a smaller brick cottage on the estate was perched on a hillside.

The two turned back on the path, and Tine said, "We live in a funny sort of village, Rubob. It's timeless in a way. Why do we still get aerograms and telegrams, for example, when everyone in the world at large gets e-mail or some such thing? Isn't that a very curious thing?" (Tine was referring to mail she'd received requesting pictures of the hot water bottle that figured so prominently in her blog: Tine's Hot Water Bottle).

"Our village is like the island in Shakepeare's 'Tempest,' Tine," Rubob said. He'd been re-reading 'The Tempest' the past few nights in bed.

"How so, Rubob?" Tine asked.

"It's a magical place, not really of this world. It's not on any maps. It's a place of magical visions and sounds, magical beings, of spirits and sprites, like Ariel."

"What's it about, Rubob?"

"There's an apparent shipwreck, Tine, but nothing's ever as it seems in 'The Tempest.' Prospero the magician has created a storm at sea to put his enemies, who are aboard a ship sailing by the island, at his disposal. He's the deposed duke of Milan, and he's been living on the island with his daughter, Miranda, for twelve years. The men on the ship are all those who deposed him, and now his plan is to depose them."

John William Waterhouse, 'Miranda-The Tempest.'
From http://www.mcgoodwin.net/pages/otherbooks/ws_tempest.html

"What's he like, Rubob -- Prospero?" Tine asked.

"He's not really of this world, either, Tine -- like the island. He's always involved in his books and his magic. In fact, it was when he was absorbed in his studies of literature and sorcery that his brother, Antonio, teamed with the King of Naples, Alonso, to depose him as duke. Prospero and his daughter were banished and abandoned at sea. That's how they wound up on the island. But now, with the shipwreck caused by Prospero's magic, his enemies are all at his mercy on the island."

Rubob's mood seemed lighter when he was talking about 'The Tempest,' when he wasn't preoccupied with politics, Tine thought.

They passed the same tangle of branches they'd passed before, and this time Tine saw a glimpse of water in the thicket of vines.

"Through a long series of dreamlike events, Prospero is restored to his dukedom and reconciled with his enemies," Rubob said. "The reconciliation revolves around the marriage of his daughter, Miranda, to Ferdinand, the son of the King of Naples."

"With the reconciliation accomplished, Prospero calls to the magical 'elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,' renounces his magic, and breaks his magical staff:

'But this rough magic I here abjure ...
I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book. '"

"In the end, Prospero plans to return home to Naples and retire, Tine," Rubob said.

"What about the wrecked ship?" Tine asked.

"It hasn't been wrecked after all, Tine," Rubob said. "It's safely anchored off the island."

"How's that, Rubob?"

"It's a place where nothing's quite real -- it's all magical, always in flux, changing," Rubob said. "It's all part of the plan conceived by Prospero, who controls the flow of events on the island. At one point, when Prospero is near the end of his plans, he gives his great speech about our being "the stuff that dreams are made of."

Tine looked up the speech later when she got home:

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack [cloud] behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

"That speech is said to be Shakespeare's own farewell, too, because it's his last play," Rubob said, as he and Tine were nearing the bridge where the path left the Meadows. "Shakespeare was leaving the stage with Prospero. 'I'll retire me to Milan,' Prospero says, where every third thought shall be my grave.'"

Looking back at the Meadows, Tine thought they seemed transformed somehow. It was the same scene that had presented itself to them when they entered the fields, but it seemed to have within it something that suggested Prospero's island.

It was, Tine thought, an "enchanted region where everything ... returns to that in which it rests" -- as though Prospero had buried his magical staff right there in Heidegger's country path.

"Patrick Stewart played Prospero in 'The Tempest' on Broadway a couple of years ago, Tine," Rubob said.

"Capt. Jean-Luc Picard," Tine said. "Well, I'll be. I saw him in 'Cyrano de Bergerac' on Broadway, and we both saw him in 'A Christmas Carol.'"

"There was a funny moment in 'The Tempest,' I remember reading," Rubob said. "Patrick Stewart was making a speech as Prospero when he tugged with both hands at his tunic, the way he did on the bridge of the Enterprise in 'Star Trek.' The audience burst out laughing. The story I read on it said, 'The gesture was not repeated.'

"Another metamorphosis in the dreamlike 'Tempest,' Rubob," Tine said. "I suppose Capt. Picard was a strong enough character to depose even Prospero."

"That's true, Tine," Rubob said.

The two walked up Meadow Road toward the village, and when Tine reached home she rushed in to get Rubob's worn paperback copy of 'The Tempest.'

An essay at the back of the play, called 'Fields of Light' and written by Reuben Brower, began with this poem by Andrew Marvell:

"The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Does streight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other Worlds, and other Seas."

Thinking back over her walk in the Meadows with Rubob, Tine thought, "All in all, a very pleasant walk."

Tine's Hot Water Bottle

2006-01-24T11:25:00.000-05:00

Tine has insisted on dragging her hot water bottle into her blog repeatedly, and the graphics department for "Village Walks" has asked this morning if viewers could be shown a picture of it.

"What's our budget for that sort of thing?" Rubob asked. "It seems rather unnecessary."

But Tine said, "I think it's a very good idea. I've received several aerograms over the past few weeks requesting a picture of my hot water bottle, and it'll give the nice people in graphics something to do this morning."

"Oh, all right," Rubob said. "But strictly in black and white. Don't waste any color ink on it."

So without further ado:

Sleeping Within a Work of Art

2006-01-23T22:49:00.000-05:00

"It's all very intriguing what Rubob said about works of art today," Tine thought as she nestled into bed with her hot water bottle and her book. "They seek a perfect blend of imagination and substance, of mind and matter, heaven and earth, past and present. "

"The village is like that -- most especially on our walks. I suppose it, too, is a work of art. It's a curious feeling walking inside a work of art (though come to think, walking with Rubob is like traipsing inside Joyce's 'Ulysses' at times). The village must be a work that's always in progress. I see it change from day to day, from season to season, and it's so imbued with life I can almost imagine I hear it breathing."

Tine became aware of her own breathing, and of the village all around her. What a remarkable thing to feel wrapped up in creation like that, Tine thought, and she drifted off to sleep in her home within the village.

'You Are Precisely My Cup of Tea'

2006-01-23T13:25:00.000-05:00

Rubob and Tine took only a short walk again Sunday afternoon. The village had plunged back into a deep freeze, with a snowstorm on the way, and Tine was weary after her one party of the year, at a neighbor's house the night before.

"It was nice seeing everyone, wasn't it Tine?" Rubob asked as they passed a neighbor's gate. "We haven't really gotten to know many people over the years, have we?"

"It was rather pleasant, Rubob," Tine said. "Most of the time -- the entire rest of the year, in fact -- it's like what Budgen says to Joyce about Londoners: "'I keep myself to myself.' "

Last night, Tine had picked up Rubob's "The Making of Ulysses" by Frank Budgen again, in her ongoing effort to plumb the depths of Rubob's mind, and also with a new-found interest in delving into Joyce.

"The neighbors keep to themselves, just as we do," Tine said. "We don't venture out much into the world at large, do we?"

Rubob and Tine had gathered in a convivial circle of neighbors around a fireplace, with their drinks on the coffee table and their plates in their laps. Tine didn't say much, but she enjoyed listening, and she particularly enjoyed the carrot cake -- not to mention the cosmopolitan that nearly knocked her out. Rubob had quaffed innumerable glasses of plonk and then stuffed himself with several platefuls of grilled pork.

"Yes," Tine said, "that was a delicious cosmopolitan."

"What was that quote from the 1950s newspaper story that Mr. Derek showed us about 'cosmopolitan filth,' Tine?" Rubob asked.

"'Complaints of "cosmopolitan filth" in places of public entertainment, voiced by Radio Budapest, have led to the immediate dismissal of dance bands thoughout the Hungarian capital.' That was it, Rubob," Tine said.

Rubob chuckled over the quote, and Tine added, "Hungary didn't want to get to know the neighbors, I suppose. They were 'cosmopolitan filth.'"

As she continued down the street with Rubob, she hummed "Getting to Know You" to herself.

"Getting to know you,
Getting to know all about you.
Getting to like you,
Getting to hope you like me.
Getting to know you,
Putting it my way,
But nicely,
You are precisely,
My cup of tea."

A teacher from Miss Porter's School, carrying a cane, walked by on the opposite side of the street.

"It's a very ancient saying,
But a true and honest thought,
That if you become a teacher,
By your pupils you'll be taught.
As a teacher I've been learning
(You'll forgive me if I boast)
And I've now become an expert,
On the subject I like most.
Getting to know you,
Getting to know all about you."

Tine thought of James Joyce again, with his long, thin cane.

"You know, Rubob, you always talk about Stephen Dedalus -- what Budgen says about him. Haven't you read the chapters on Leopold Bloom in 'The Making of Ulysses'? Or is it that you prefer Dedalus over Bloom? What's Bloom like? We haven't gotten to know him on our walks, have we?"

"Yes, I've read the chapters on Bloom, Tine," Rubob said.

"And you read the entire 'Ulysses,' word by word, line by line, without falling asleep?"

"Yes, Tine," Rubob said. "Bloom's a much more complete character than Dedalus."

"Like Ulysses, Rubob -- like what Joyce told Budgen about Ulysses in 'The Odyssey' -- that he was the most complete character in literature," Tine said. "Hamlet wasn't complete because he was just a son, and Faust -- well, we hardly even know what he looks like, and he's overshadowed by Mephistopheles."

"That's right, Tine. Ulysses was a father, a son, a husband, a friend. And he wasn't just a warrior, but a conscientious objector before he went to war. And his history doesn't end after the war with Troy. In some ways, it's just beginning. He becomes the wanderer."

"And what about Bloom, the modern-day Ulysses, Rubob?" Tine asked.

"He's as complete a person as one can imagine, Tine," Rubob said. "He's someone who's rounded -- and seen from every side. You see everything he does, everything he thinks. Richard Ellman says every artist seeks to bring into his work substance and imagination, to blend reality and imagination, heaven and earth."

"And who's Richard Ellman when he's at home?" Tine asked.

"He's an English critic, Tine. He wrote biographies of Joyce and Oscar Wilde. He's dead now."

"Severely dead," Tine said. It occurred to her that she was meeting even more of the neighbors this afternoon, her neighbors in the world at large, living and dead.

"Anyway, that's what Joyce does, Tine, what Ellman writes about: He makes heaven and earth, the real and the imagined, equal partners. He gives the reader everything. He believed that fiction had been avoiding a complete view of its characters, avoiding sex, defecation, farting -- the works. He showed us Bloom in his kitchen, the bedroom, the outhouse, the butcher's, the post office -- everywhere -- and most especially in his mind, his imagination."

Tine and Rubob were passing the stairway to the school, and it seemed to be inviting them up for a look inside, Tine thought.

"Bloom's not like Ulysses in that he's a great warrior, of course," Rubob continued. "But as Budgen writes, Joyce believed that character was revealed not so much in grand actions, but in how we go about doing simple things. Budgen says something like, 'How a man ties his shoelaces or eats his egg gives us a better clue about him than how he goes to war.' "

"And how did Bloom eat his egg, Rubob?" Tine asked.

"I don't know," Rubob said, "but I imagine with relish. He ate everything with relish, especially sausages and kidneys. He liked 'the inner organs of beasts and fowls' and 'thick giblet soup.' "

"It sounds like you at the party last night, Rubob."

They passed a curving staircase, with rounded stone steps.

"Stephen Dedalus is very different from Bloom," Rubob said. "Dedalus isn't so fully formed, and you don't get as complete a picture of him. He's young, not really himself yet, not at peace with himself, and he's not at home in Dublin. Stephen leaves his home at the beginning of the novel -- a tower he shares with Buck Mulligan, a medical student, and Haines, an English student. He isn't close to either one of them, and he feels only hostility toward Mulligan. Stephen's home is only a temporary place. Like Joyce, he'll leave Ireland and become an exile."

As the two approached old Mrs. Riddle's estate on Mountain Road, Rubob stopped to admire the house by the gate.

"That's a splendid house, Tine," he said. "We got a peek at the garden at least, on the garden tour a couple of years ago.

"That's where we got the blackberry bush," Tine said.

"Yes, he gave a few to you, didn't he?" Rubob said.

"And they've flourished in their new soil, haven't they?" Tine said. "He'd warned us they'd need cutting back frequently."

Tine and Rubob arrived at the gates to old Mrs. Riddle's estate.

"But tell me more about Bloom, Rubob. Wasn't he a bit of a wanderer, too, in Dublin?" Tine asked.

"Even though he's a wanderer, an outsider, a Jew in Dublin, he's still at home in the city, taking center stage in it in the novel," Rubob said. "He's part of it, and it's part of him. In the Lotus Eaters episode, as he wanders the city streets, he surrenders to every impression of the moment, absorbs it all in a dream-like mood. When he reaches the baths, he imagines himself lying naked in a womb of warmth."

"He's absorbed in his city, Rubob, just as we are in our village -- even though we're sort of outsiders, newcomers," Tine said. "Sometimes I feel it's all laid out here for us to see, like all the furniture stacked outside in the lot in the great fire of 1864, but we don't often get to see inside the houses and meet the people. That's why the party was so nice. "

Tine and Rubob followed the pathway to Mrs. Riddle's old colonial home.

"But back to Bloom, Rubob."

"There's an air of satisfaction, of equanimity about him, Tine -- more than an air," Rubob said. "Stephen, on the other hand, is dissatisfied, hostile. He feels put upon by past and present, by the English and the Irish."

Tine saw a bulldozer in the distance, blocking the road leading to old Mrs. Riddle's house.

"I'm losing my equanimity with that there, Rubob," she said -- "or the estate's losing its equanimity. It's not the same with the road all dug up. Let's turn back."

"Just put blinders on, Tine," Rubob said.

"I can't Rubob," Tine replied. "The world at large is intruding. It's cosmopolitan filth."

"Earth and heaven are no longer equal partners," she thought, facing the obstructed view and harking back to Budgen and Joyce. "It's all about moving the earth right now. Reality's won out over imagination."

The two left Mrs. Riddle's estate, crossed the street and passed a birch tree that had been damaged in the recent windstorm.

"Felled in the tempest," Tine said.

"That reminds me, Tine: I've been reading 'The Tempest' the past two nights," Rubob said.

"There's a purity, a simplicity about the play. Of all Shakespeare's plays, it's the most like Tine," Rubob said. "It's as if Tine wrote it. And there are so many disputes over the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, maybe you did write it."

"Why do you like Shakespeare so much, Rubob -- and why Joyce?" Tine asked. "Generally, you enjoy reading histories, not fiction. What draws you so much to these works of the imagination?"
"I don't know, Tine," Rubob said. "I suppose the works of Shakespeare and Joyce are monuments in the history of literature. Joyce is like the Irish Proust. 'Ulysses' is an immense achievement, almost like a foreign language you can enjoy in translation."

"But what do you gain from 'Ulysses,' Rubob? Do you gain knowledge or wisdom from it, or is it just entertaining to read and interesting to puzzle over?"

"There are some delightful parts in it, Tine," Rubob said.

"Budgen and others are helpful with the inscrutable parts, I suppose," Tine said.

The two passed a lawn ornament that intrigued Tine.

"Stephen Dedalus has his own theories on Shakespeare in Ulysses," Rubob said.

"What are they, Rubob?"

"The question arises, which play best reveals the personality of Shakespeare? Why are there so many plots with 'the betrayed king, banished lover, deserted father and disillusioned friend,' as Budgen writes? A poet known as A. E. in 'Ulysses' gives his theory that Shakespeare's passion and despair are embodied in the character of Hamlet. But Stephen Dedalus maintains that as an actor, Shakespeare always played Hamlet's father, the ghost of the murdered king. Shakespeare had a son who died at the age of twelve, and his name was Hamnet, with an 'n.' Hamlet represents Shakespeare's son. And as for Hamlet's mother, the guilty queen, she represents Shakespeare's wife, Ann Hathaway. "

A cat on a porch was studying Tine and Rubob as they passed.

"Stephen's Hamlet is somewhat like himself -- someone who's discontented and leaves his home," Rubob said. "Stephen believes that Shakespeare left his home in Stratford not just to seek his fortune in London but to get away from his wife. He'd married her when he was 18, and she was 30, and the marriage had soured. When he died, he left her nothing but 'the second best bed with the furniture.' "

Tine and Rubob, heading home, passed the hut where Henry David Thoreau and Will Warren worshipped next to the church, in an outreach program for wilderness lovers. (Tine Relives the Fire of 1864.)

"I was reading Thoreau's essay 'Walking' last night, Rubob," Tine said, "and here's what he says about Joyce, Shakespeare and all the rest of them:

"Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself -- and not a taper lighted at the hearthstone of the race, which pales before the light of common day. "

"Thoreau might have said it about himself, too, Rubob, " Tine said.

They then passed by a house on Main Street that Tine imagined might have been Shakespeare's, for one reason or another.

"I suppose Shakespearean scholars are always hoping he'll open his doors to them," Tine thought.

"I've been wondering the whole walk why people read the works of Joyce and Shakespeare," she said to Rubob. "I don't think it's entirely because they're monuments in the history of literature. That's part of it, of course, because people like monuments. But I think the main reason is that they're like 'lights that make the darkness visible.' For a time, they really do 'shatter the temple of knowledge itself' -- not just for a time, in fact, because they live on. They're timeless. We get as much out of them today as people did when they first appeared -- maybe even more because we have people like Budgen and Allman to explain them to us."

"Ellman, Tine," Rubob said.

"Emmon," Tine said.

"I think they open doors for us," Tine said, "in a village we all belong to. We're all newcomers in the village, outsiders, looking for a way in, and for illumination in the darkness."

"For Thoreau, it was like that light in the woods yesterday -- out there in the wild places he and Will Warren were drawn to," Tine said.

"But for others it's a light we find by getting to know our neighbors, including Joyce, Shakespeare, Budgen, Dedalus, Bloom -- everyone, real and imagined, next door and in Ireland, on earth and in heaven," she said.

Rubob took Tine's hand, and she started to hum "Getting to Know You" again.

"For me, Rubob, you're my light. You're my doorway to new realms of knowledge. In fact, you are precisely my cup of tea," Tine said. And it struck her that a nice up of tea might be just the thing when she returned home from her walk, perhaps Indian Spice.

It hadn't been a long walk really, but they'd covered a lot of ground.

Tine remembered something she'd read in Budgen's book the night before and she repeated it to Rubob: "Blake said he could touch the ends of space with his walking stick at the end of his garden."

"It does seem that way, doesn't it, Tine?"

"That's how it always is in this village," Tine said -- "especially with Joyce's long cane."

As they arrived at their doorstep, Tine thought, "All in all, a very pleasant walk."

Tine Relives the Great Fire of 1864

2006-01-22T19:10:00.000-05:00

Tine and Rubob didn't go far on their walk Saturday, because it was cut short by the sudden arrival of storm clouds and strong winds. Here's what it looked like as Tine endeavored to outrun the thunderclouds yesterday, with Rubob trailing behind.

Tine had turned back for home at the Congregational Church ("Congo," as it was once known at the school across the street) after a raindrop had landed on her nose.

Before the gray skies and rain had arrived, she'd been intrigued by a new sight on the church lawn, an inviting little hut with its front door wide open.

"I think perhaps they've reached some sort of friendly accommodation with Will Warren," Tine said to Rubob. "That might explain the hut."

Will Warren was a sheep rustler and Sabbath-breaker who'd been run out of town around 1800. He fled to a cave on Rattlesnake Mountain, where he was looked after by Tunxis Indians. (Tine's Nestor Episode, at Will Warren's Den.)

"I don't think he'd have been so inclined to break the Sabbath if he'd had his own little hut," Tine said to Rubob.

Rubob was directing his thoughts to loftier matters, as he's in the habit of doing on walks: He was glancing at the sky, which was starting to cloud over.

"I think I might have felt a drop of rain, Tine," he said.

Tine was recalling another outdoorsman who'd had problems with his church, Henry David Thoreau. He'd refused to pay his church taxes. If he'd known they were going to good use, Tine reckoned, he might have reconsidered. He might even have attended services after seeing the hut, she thought.

"Some prefer to worship in private," Tine reflected, "and he was quite fond of huts, after all. He'd built a similar one for himself at Walden Pond."

Thoreu's hut at Walden Pond. Photo from:
http://www.4peaks.com/fthwalden.htm

"Thoreau ran off to the woods like Will Warren," Tine said to Rubob. "I think the hut might attract these solitary lovers of the wilderness back to the church. It's a very sensible idea. It's probably an outreach effort by the church elders."

"I really do think it's starting to rain, Tine," he said.

That's when the raindrop dropped on Tine's nose, and Tine, looking up into the darkening sky, flew off in the direction of home, just as quick as that. She doesn't usually flinch at raindrops, but she'd been invited to her one dinner party of the year that evening, and she didn't want to arrive wet and windblown.

"But come to think," Tine thought to herself, "I once had a friend whose son told her she always looked her very best when she'd just gotten off her bicycle and was wet and windblown. 'That's when you look most like yourself,' the boy told his mother."

Tine slowed down, thinking she might allow herself to get soaked after all.

"In any case, I'd miss the sunset if I dashed home,"she thought.

Rubob caught up to her and said, "Look, Tine, it's just as it was a few days ago. What a spectacular sight."

For a moment, Tine thought, the village looked as it might have appeared during the great fire of 1864.

The fire had begun in a barn, and a nine-year-old boy had spotted it from the Meadows, where he was loading hay. Adrian Wadsworth's account of that day was published in a newsletter by the Historical Society last year. He wrote:

"The cart was driven to the last haystack, and as I stood up to catch the bundles I looked up town and saw a mighty column of smoke ascending to a great height into the air. I said, 'Look up town, Father! My conscience, that's a hay barn.' "
Adrian was left behind in the fields while his father went off to fight the fire. He wrote about what he found when he returned to the village later in the afternoon:

"Looking up Main Street, we saw all the houses and buildings had disappeared. Only the standing ruins of the stone store remained above ground from Mill Lane to the open lot in front of our house. Driving into our yard, we saw that all our farm buildings and upper house had disappeared as well. "

"We saw squads of men in the house lots fighting grass fires on all sides; the back orchard was burned over as well as the old cemetery. ... Across the street on the east side we noticed the fronts of every dwelling house draped with carpets to protect them from the heat of the flames. The carpets were drenched with well water which was carried to the apex and poured over their surfaces. This undoubtedly saved them from destruction as the heat was very intense. On the open lot on the west side of Main Street were stacked, in separate piles, all the household goods and furnishings, of every description, rescued by hundreds of willing hands."

"With the burning of the Cowles house the wind had risen to the force of a great gale carrying, witnesses say, flaming shingles through the air with the greatest of force. Falling on the buildings, they threatened all the structures eastward to the mountain. Some of these firebrands fell on the great hay barn of W. M. Wadsowrth and ignited the greatest spectable of the afternoon: the destruction of all the buildings, sheds and tenement house on his premises."

-- From an account of the great fire of 1864, made available to the Farmington Historical Society by Lois Wadsworth.
"It's a good job a rainstorm is on the way," Tine said to Rubob.

"Why's that, Tine?" Rubob asked.

"The fire Rubob, the great Main Street fire of 1864," she said. "You were just looking at it through the trees."

As they walked down their street toward home, the rain clouds vanished as quickly as they'd arrived, blowing off to the north.

As Tine walked up her driveway, the sunset illuminated the hillside behind Tine's house with a refulgent, burning light that seemed to come from within the woods.

"The light of the wilderness," Tine thought -- "just the sort of thing Thoreau would like."
And Thoreau had written in his essay "Walking": "I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall."

Standing by the door of her house, looking back into the woods, Tine considered, "Yesterday's walk was all about Tithonus' love affair with the dawn. Today it seems we've moved on to the sunset. Tithonus himself would have been happy to see the sunset." (Tine's Nestor Episode.)
Tithonus , the son of the king of Troy, had eloped with the goddess of the dawn, Aurora, and he'd lived to regret it. He'd lived a very long time, as it happened, because Aurora had asked Zeus to make him immortal. She'd forgotten, however, to ask Zeus to make Tithonus eternally young, and he and Aurora had begun to get on each others' nerves. Tithonus had gotten older and older, uglier and uglier, and more and more disagreeable and decrepit.
"Maybe if Tithonus had looked over his shoulder at the sunset, he might have had a chance to get what he wanted in the end -- a final trip to the fiery underworld, like Orpheus," Tine said to Rubob. But Rubob had no idea what she was talking about (and very sensibly so).

Orpheus; photo from:
http://www.dailyinfo.co.uk/reviews/theatre/Orpheus.htm
"I'm all in a muddle," Tine said to Rubob as she stepped into the house and took off her walking shoes.
"Everyone's mixed up with everyone else, and time is out of joint," she thought. "That's often how it is in this village. It doesn't seem to have its foot in any one century. Events and ideas are scattered around like leaves -- or like all the things stacked in the open lot during the fire."
She swept the windblown hair off her face. "I'm going to look a sight for the party," she thought.
Rubob removed his boots and put them beside Tine's shoes. The sight of them made Tine think how Rubob's feet are always planted firmly in the day, neither chasing the dawn nor fleeing into the sunset.
"I get lost in all my musings," she reflected, "and he guides me home, through rain, fire and windstorms."
"And as she made herself a pot of tea, she thought to herself, "All in all, it was a very pleasant walk."

Thoughts Landing in Soft Water

2006-01-21T17:43:00.000-05:00

As Tine prepared to fall asleep Friday night, her thoughts fell back to the waterfall she'd passed on Diamond Glen, on her way to Will Warren's Den with Rubob.

Tine had watched the water in the millpond surge over the ruins of the dam -- water that once powered saw and grist mills.

"When I think back on my walk today," Tine reflected, "so many thoughts seem to tumble over the dam at once. It's often like that on walks. Everything comes bubbling up to the surface of the pond and rushes over the dam, into the stream of thoughts that fills our days."

She thought back to something she'd read in a book she'd bought on her trip to the Sound this past week, "Random Recollections: Anecdotal Tales of a Bygone Guilford." The author, Stan Barnes, wrote that as a boy he'd won a contest for a cartoon showing a man going over Niagara Falls. His winning caption was, "It was soft water where he landed."

In a walk -- and in reflections on a walk -- everything falling over the dam finds soft water in which to land. It's all taken up in a free flow of ideas and received in the soft water of contemplation.

Tine's Nestor Episode, at Will Warren's Den

2006-01-20T16:49:00.000-05:00

Tine and Rubob made their way up Rattlesnake Moutain this afternoon, on a walk to Will Warren's Den. Spring was in the air in the January thaw, and Tine thought it might be a nice day to catch up with old Will. He'd been run out of Tine's village in about 1800, for stealing sheep and not going to church on Sundays. He fled up the mountain and made a home for himself in the wild, in a cave at the base of a rock formation.

As Tine and Rubob were setting off in the vehicle for the trail leading to the cave, Tine noticed a lawn sculpture.

"He said Joyce looked like a heron, Rubob, not a stork," Tine said. She'd purloined Rubob's guidebook to "Ulysses" the night before -- Frank Budgen's work on James Joyce -- for some wool-gathering of her own.

"Who said he looked like a heron, Tine?" Rubob asked distractedly.

"Budgen. You said he described Joyce as a looking like a stork coming up the path, with his long, thin cane and his thick glasses. He said a 'wading heron.' "

"Oh, he did? Well, yes, that makes sense," Rubob said.

They wound their way up Diamond Glen, and when they passed the old millpond, Tine asked Rubob to stop the vehicle so she could get out and have a look at the dam, which was flooding over in the thaw.

"Looks like a bit of water going over that," Rubob said.

The dam looked broken down, thoroughly given over to the wild.

Tine thought of lines from Tennyson's poem"Tithonus":

"The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground."

Tine had been mulling over the lines since earlier in the afternoon, when she and Rubob had been clearing tree limbs that had fallen in Wednesday's tempest. They'd carried the trunk and branches of a fallen dogwood tree into the woods, and Rubob had said, a little ghoulishly, "It's like Indians or Tibetans who put their dead out above ground for vultures. In this case it’s a slower process, with termites, other insects and rot."

Standing by the dam, Tine thought about Tennyson's Tithonus watching the woods decay. In the Greek myth, Tithonus had fallen in love with the goddess of the dawn, and she'd asked Zeus to make him immortal. She'd forgotten to ask Zeus to make Tithonus eternally youthful, and he'd become older and older, uglier and uglier -- a dessicated husk of a man.

"Are you getting back into the vehicle, Tine?"

"Just a minute, Rubob. I'm talking to Tithonus."

"Who's that, Tine?"

"Just an old man, Rubob. I thought I saw him in the woods," Tine said.

"Yet hold me not for ever in thine East," the immortal Tithonus had pleaded with the dawn.

"How can my nature longer mix with thine?
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
Of happy men that have the power to die,
And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
Release me, and restore me to the ground."

"Tithonus wouldn't mind a place in the woods by the millpond," Tine thought, "with the decaying trees and Rubob's Indians, vultures and termites."

Released from the dam, Tine finally returned to the vehicle, and she and Rubob drove along Reservoir Road and across Route 6 to the head of the trail leading up the mountain.

"A little dessicated looking, don't you think?" Rubob said as they started walking up the trail. "Weren't there apples on the trees last fall?"

"Yes," Tine said, "but that season has come and gone. You'll have to wait until next fall for your free apple. Winter must have been a rough time of the year for old Will Warren."

As they continued up the path, Rubob said, "Look, Tine, the water's running off the trail in those channels. I don't remember those before. It looks like they've been dug."

"And look, Tine -- new trail blazes," he said. "The trail crew's been here."

Tine stopped to take a picture, and Rubob said, "The nice thing about digital cameras is that you can crop things so easily.

"I think Will Warren would like things left uncropped, Rubob," Tine said.

"That's because he was uncropped, Tine," Rubob said. "Nature needs taming," he added, expanding on the theme. "Wasn't it the view in the beginning of the 18th century that nature had to be sort of adjusted? Then along came the 19th century, and the focus was on wildness. Some people would even have craggy ruins built on their property."

"In wildness is the preservation of the world, Rubob," Tine said, quoting Thoreau. "That was Will Warren's lesson for us, like Thoreau's at Walden Pond."

"Will Warren, the old wise man of the village," Rubob said -- "like Nestor, the wise man of the Greeks."

"What was the name of that guy who represented Nestor in the Nestor epidsode in Ulysses?" Tine asked. She'd been reading that chapter in Budgen's "The Making of Ulysses" the night before.

"Mr. Deasy, Tine," Rubob said. "That's the second episode in 'Ulysses,' and it's based on Telemachus' meeting with Nestor. He counsels Stephen Dedalus on the importance of knowing the value of money. 'What's the proudest statement you'll hear from an Englishman?' he asks Stephen. Do you know what it is, Tine?"

"No, Rubob, what is it?"

"'I paid my way,' Mr. Deasy says."

"And what's that supposed to mean?" Tine asked, having no small amount of English blood coursing through her veins.

"That they're proud of being self-reliant, that they know the importance of money -- something Dedalus, who's always broke, who can't even afford to pay for drinks at the pub, knows nothing about."

"I guess Will Warren didn't know much about that, either," Tine said.

"'I stole my way' would be his motto," Rubob said.

"Like in the fall with your apple from the orchard, I suppose," Tine said.

"He must have known a thing or two to live out here in the woods," she said. "And like Stephen Dedalus, he knew all about freedom. Dedalus was a Sabbath-breaker, too, and he would have been run out of the village just as Will Warren was."

The trail became steeper, and wound up the hillside beside rocky outcroppings.

"It's easy following the trail with the new blazes, Rubob," Tine said. "It's like following a story where everything is laid out for us so simply -- not exactly like Joyce."

"Joyce thought his failing as a writer was his inability to tell a tale," Rubob said. "He invested so so much in word play and hidden meanings in part to compensate for his inability to tell a story."

"But Shakespeare was hard to understand, too, Rubob, and he told a fine tale," Tine said.

"I think Shakespeare recognized that the average Londoner was able to understand what he wrote in his plays," Rubob said. "Joyce deliberately chose to make himself obscure. He wrote so that he could be savored by the tiniest, slimmest sliver of humanity. His goal was to create such a puzzle that people would be eking out the meaning for centuries."

Tine thought of critics working on Joyce's body of literature, like Rubob's termites working on the tree trunk in the woods.

"In some ways, a work of art is better left wild," she said to Rubob. "Maybe 'Ulysses' always will be wild. It's like you said the other day; no one can ever know what an author was thinking -- though Budgen helps."

Following the trail blazes, Tine and Rubob scrambled over the rocks.

They came to an outlook with a view over the valley below, and the scene seemed subdued in the pale light of winter.

The rocky trail became more difficult to negotiate, and Tine had to cling to the rocks with her hands at times.

It was hard-going in places, and Tine, who'd taken to her bed with a spot of flu this past week, was feeling weary. As she lifted one leg after another, she reckoned that chasing after Will Warren was a wearisome business.

Tine's thoughts drifted back to Budgen's chapter on Nestor. "Weariness dominates the Nestor episode," Budgen wrote. The episode is about Stephen Dedalus' weary struggle against his past, and the struggle of the boys in his history class to learn about past events.

Joyce represents history as a "nightmare" at times, Tine thought, and she had a picture in her mind of historians gnawing their way through the past the way Rubob's termites worked in the decaying woods.

Tine stopped to catch her breath, and she looked back down the trail at the tangle of tree branches.

"What was Will Warren thinking wanting to live up here?" she asked Rubob.

"He didn't have much choice. He was run out of town. He was a Sabbath-breaker. Can't get much worse than that."

"That might explain what we're doing up here," Tine thought, being a Sabbath-breaker herself.

"Maybe Will Warren was like old Tithonus, in a way," Tine thought. "He fell in love with the dawn and chased it up here."

"Ay me! ay me! with what another heart
In days far-off, and with what other eyes
I used to watch -- if I be he that watch'd --
The lucid outline forming round thee; saw
The dim curls kindle into sunny rings;
Changed with thy mystic change, and felt my blood
Glow with the glow that slowly crimson'd all
Thy presence and thy portals, while I lay,
Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm
With kisses balmier than half-opening buds
Of April, and could hear the lips that kiss'd
Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet,
Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing,
While Ilion like a mist rose into towers. "

Falling in love with the dawn was like giving up the past in a way, choosing a new beginning each day, Tine thought. It's what Stephen Dedalus, who renounced his own history, wanted, too. It was falling in love with the infinite, fresh possibilities of the dawning day.

"Freedom, Rubob -- that's what he was after up here -- wildness and freedom."

Thoreau had put it nicely in his essay "Walking":

"I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil -- to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that."

The trail, in its effort to escape ministers and schools, wound up through the thickening woods. Trail workers had rerouted it away from the beaten path in places , to help prevent erosion.

Rubob plodded along, immersed in thoughts of his own. As they made their way over some rocks, he began to talk about someone he worked with, saying, "He always takes the easiest and shortest route possible, using the simplest method, looking for the least trouble down the way."

"There's something to be said for that, Rubob."

Rubob, though, seemed to prefer Joyce's approach, the one of greater complexity, and amid his huffs and puffs over the steepening climb, there was much huffing over the worker who always seeks the easiest approach.

"I wonder whether Will Warren's was the easiest route," Tine thought, not just about the path up the hill, but the life he'd chosen to lead in the woods. "And Tithonus, he must have been pretty pleased with himself for a while after leaping into the dawn, but then what?"

It wasn't long before Tine and Rubob reached their destination, the entrance to Will Warren's den.

There was a plaque on the rock marking the site.

And there was a rake -- anachronistically enough -- leaning on the rock wall outside the entranceway to old Will's cave.

"That's something we haven't seen before," Rubob said.

"He must have been cleaning up a bit, availing himself of modern conveniences," Tine said. "Like Tithonus, it must have been too much for him up here with only the dawn to keep him company."

"Who's Tithonus, Tine?"

"I wonder whether old Will had an Indian bride," Tine said. She'd read that Tunxis Indians, who farmed the Meadows by the river in the valley, helped look after him after he fled to the woods.

"He might have been two-timing with the dawn," Tine thought.

She climbed to the top of the rock formation that contained Will Warren's den and peered down the gap in the rocks that would have been his chimney.

But there was no sign of old Will. Tine thought of Tithonus again:

"A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.
Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man--
So glorious in his beauty and thy choice,
Who madest him thy chosen, that he seem'd
To his great heart none other than a God!"

"She climbed down the rocks and found Rubob venturing farther down the trail.

"Come along, Nestor, we need to turn back. My weary bones can't go any farther today."

"Nestor, is it, little Tine?"

"You're my wise old man of the woods," Tine said. "You didn't run off with the dawn like Tithonus, or with an Indian woman. You consider things carefully."

"Tithonus?" Rubob asked.

On their way back, the woods seemed more tame, less tangled somehow -- maybe because of the new, brighter perspective from above. Maybe it was just that the path was easier because because they were going downhill, returning home. And then, too, they weren't chasing a "white hair'd shadow."

"It looks like one of Elliott Porter's photographs of nature, Rubob," Tine said, referring to one of the books on her bedroom floor, "Intimate Landscapes." "There's nothing arcane about that scene; it's just trees in the winter woods, standing out in the here and now."

"I do not photograph for ulterior purposes," Porter wrote. "I photograph for the thing itself." The leaves on the path brought his works to mind, too.

"The bright maple leaves settle at random, arranging themselves in harmonious patterns that defy improvement as though placed there intentionally," he wrote.

Tine stopped over a rock, and sought to read its cover, as if it were a book left in the path -- a Bible of Wildness, dropped by old Will.

"Rocks by themselves ... are frequently found in fascinating shapes and colors," Porter wrote. "The details of geological formations exhibit the most extraordinary combination of shapes and colors, scarecely suspected on casual observation. The banding of glacial striations and the haphazard occurrence of fractures can be discovered in harmonious arrangements that seem to defy the chance working of natural forces. "

Will Warren had made himself at home in a "haphazard occurrence of fractures," Tine thought -- in a fractured formation of rock, maybe even at home in his fractured life away from the village.

"Was it the simplest path or the most difficult?" she thought, lost in wonder.

At this time of year, the woods by the trail looked a bit "dessicated," as Rubob had said.

"Maybe it would look different in spring, or in the rosy light of dawn," Tine thought.

"Come along, Tine, we need to be getting home," Rubob said.

"OK, Rubob," she replied, thinking of her home down in the village.

Taking her muddy boots off in the entranceway at home, and placing them under a bench, Tine thought, "All in all, a very pleasant walk."

Tine's Teapot

2006-01-19T20:09:00.000-05:00

Many of you have sent postcards, telegrams and aerograms requesting a picture of Tine's teapot, presumably because it figures so prominently in the life of Tine.

Tine's teapot is of a shy, retiring nature, but because of its fondness for Tine it has consented to pose for one picture with her.

Needless to say, it's a simple teapot, one that knows its place in the larger scheme of things (beside the cutting board). While it's devoted itself largely to a life of service, enjoying nothing more than providing a nice cup of tea, the demands on it are small. It's able to live a richly rewarding contemplative life -- one that infuses it with a sense of well-being. It rounds out its quiet days with an occasional party among friends.

Tine's teapot has many friends -- most especially Tine and Rubob, of course, but also a colorful assortment of mugs and a few rather reserved, well-mannered cups and saucers. Even the humble teabag is a friend to Tine's teapot, because it allows for the occasional morning off.

Tine's Teapot in Beaufort's Tempest

2006-01-18T15:27:00.000-05:00

It was a tempestuous day in the village today, with winds gusting to nearly 70 mph. Down at the Sound, where Tine and Rubob had circumnavigated a mulberry bush on Tuesday, 70 mph winds would constitute a Force 11 storm on the Beaufort scale, meaning "widespread damage to buildings and trees, and mountainous waves."

Photo from: http://carl-fh.com/beaufort/beaufort.php

In fact, the Coast Guard had issued gale and storm warnings for Wednesday morning and afternoon. Fortunately, Tine's small craft, Puffin, was safely on land, up on its poppets at a marina upriver.

Tine and Rubob were on land upriver, too, this morning, though not on poppets. They were sitting snugly indoors while the tempest shook the house and treetops. While there were no mountainous waves observed in the village, Rubob was quietly hove to, with double reefs in his mainsail -- the newspaper in his lap.

With the portholes rattling, Tine read to Rubob:

"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples ....
And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!"

When Rubob had ventured down the pathway first thing in the morning for his newspaper, he found a battered chimney cap in the driveway.

It fell squarely under the definition of a Force 10 storm in Admiral Beaufort's system: "Damage to chimneys and TV antennas; pushes over shallow-rooted trees." That sounds decidedly unseamanlike, but Beaufort's scale, while developed at sea in 1805, was later adapted for use on land.

Photo from: http://carl-fh.com/beaufort/beaufort.php

In Tine and Rubob's landlocked (but increasingly swamped) front yard, a shallow-rooted dogwood was down, lying next to a lamppost it had barely missed.

The agent behind all this trouble was an agitator from the south named Boreas. He's shown puffing away below, in an unflattering likeness that was enough to make anyone furious:

Indoors, Tine busied herself with a pot of tea, to calm her nerves as the wind and rain beat against the windows.

"A teapot in a tempest," she thought, harking back to her journey with another admiral, Admiral Peary, this past weekend.

Kettle over soapstone lamp.
Photo by Donald B. MacMillan,
Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum.

By midafternoon, the storm was beginning to abate, and Tine proposed a walk.

"I'm not going out there today, Tine," Rubob said. "It's too wet."

"I'd like to survey the damage," Tine said, thinking scenes of destruction might whet his interest.

With much reluctance, Rubob fetched his foul-weather gear and followed Tine out. Boreas could be seen over the treetops, heading north.

The stream in the old Bull Lot, the field on the hillside, had developed into a flood.

The sidewalk was strewn with branches, and trees and limbs were down in the back yards and woods. The great trunks of the largest trees stood out amid the fallen branches.

The bark resembled the thick planks on the hull of an oceangoing wooden ship, a vessel that knew well the "thick rotundity o' the world."

"Strong sinews to withstand many a storm," Tine," Rubob opined.

"Sturdy strakes over a steam-bent frame," Tine said.

"Look, it's beginning to clear," Rubob said, pointing to the sky over the treetops.

Chimneys, funnels and smokestacks could rest secure on their cabintops, Tine thought.

In places, Tine and Rubob's path was blocked by downed limbs -- the fallen spars of less resilient vessels.

"Force 9 at the very least," Tine thought: "Branches break off trees, shingles blown from roofs, high-crested waves."

The only waves visible were those in a brook by Hatter's Lane.

"A veritable deluge," Rubob said.

Not far from the stream, Tine ambled over to a tree that appeared to know a thing or two about storms.

"Another strong bow stem that's bent to many a storm," she said to Rubob.

As they made their way up the channel leading home, the sun was out again and Beaufort's scale was tipping back to 1 ("smoke drifts slowly, sea is lightly rippled") or even zero ("tree leaves don't move, smoke rises vertically").

Photo from: http://carl-fh.com/beaufort/beaufort.php

Arriving home, Tine thought, "All in all, a very pleasant (but tempestuous) sail."

A Spot of Sea Air

2006-01-17T22:46:00.000-05:00

Rubob and Tine ventured out of their village today, on a short trip to the sea.

Tine has been feeling poorly this week, ever since a family of germs mistook her for their own village and took up residence. She thought a taste of sea air might do her some good, and so it did.

On their way down to the coast, Tine and Rubob passed this rock, a waypoint that proved to be a harbinger of things to come.

Tine has special fondness for rocks, and this one was exceptional. It bore a remarkable resemblance to the sea, which she harbors a fondess for, too. In the rock's colors and grain, one could see the colors of a winter seascape, with the gray surface of the ocean and the muted light of the sun, Tine thought.

"And that little cairn on top might well be a lighthouse," she said to Rubob.

The two then stopped briefly in a village at the shore.

Rubob took note of the village's architectural details, as he is wont to do.

And the denizens of the village took note of Tine's arrival.

The two stopped for soup in the village market and then browsed in the village bookshop, where Tine purchased a sea saga to add to her collection on her bedroom floor. Finally, they set off down Mulberry Point Road for a spot of salt air and sea spray.

Their journey down Mulberry Point Road -- and back up and down again, then once more back up (all in search of a footbridge they never found) -- brought to mind this rhyme:

"All around the mulberry bush
The monkey chased the weasel.
The monkey thought 'twas all in fun.
Pop! goes the weasel. "

"Up and down the City Road,
In and out of the Eagle,
That's the way the money goes.
Pop! goes the weasel."

Rubob hummed the tune monotonously in a somewhat vexed state of mind as he and Tine passed and repassed the familiar sights of Mulberry Point Road.

After many twists and turns, our heroes at least (and at last) found their way to the point, which afforded them a view of Tine's favorite lighthouse.

That's Faulkner Light in the distance. Tine urges you to note the colors of the sea and sky.

"That's my rock, Rubob -- right there," Tine said.

Many a time have Tine and Rubob set sail for the lighthouse in their doughty craft, Puffin. This spring, Tine plans to sail to the island again,and she hopes you might join her on her voyages.

Here's a closeup of the lighthouse, which seems remarkably toylike (for such are the vagaries of sea air and long-distance photography).

After a taste of salt air, which Tine found to be every bit as salubrious as she'd anticipated, she and Rubob made their way home in rush-hour traffic. The journey home required passage through the world at large.

"Tengo un pequeno problema con las multitudes," Tine thought on the busy highway, recalling a line she'd seen in another blog on blogspot.com.

Tine and Rubob's journey to the sea and back wasn't a long one, but "all in all, it was very pleasant," Tine commented.

Rubob responded with a cough, showing that Tine's germs were moving on.

Watching Over Tine In Bed

2006-01-16T14:45:00.000-05:00

Regrettably, Tine is feeling a little fragile today, and she won't be up for her daily walk with Rubob.

"I think I'd prefer to stay in my PJ's today," she said to Rubob this morning, "and it might not be wise to venture out in them this afternoon."

"It won't be the same without a walk today," she thought.

"Do you think we'll be missed?" she asked Rubob.

"It's cold out there, Tine," Rubob said.

If the truth were known, Tine was also concerned about the possibility of ice pellets again. It was only a 20 percent possibility, but nevertheless, they loomed on the horizon with a large question mark in the forecast this morning.

I hope they're "non-damaging ice pellets," Tine thought. Oddly enough, "friendly, non-damaging" ice pellets had been advertised on Tine's blog recently. (Tine Ponders Non-Damaging Ice Pellets.)

This reminded Tine of a curious development in the tailored ads on her site -- something Rubob had noticed last night:

Apparently (or not so apparently, since they're very stealthy), the ad men watching over Tine's blog had followed Rubob and her home one evening, after tailing them on their daily walk to see what topics were discussed. They must have stayed late and caught Rubob in his PJ's during this episode in the blog, Tine speculated: Rubob Enters on Soft Foot.

"When I went down for a slice of bread, I thought there seemed to be a few slices missing on the kitchen counter," Rubob said.

The tailored ads would have to become decidedly less tailored if they were designed with Rubob's PJ's in mind, Tine thought.

"In any case, I wish I had nicer PJ's to wear today," she thought (a trifle feverishly).