Off the Grid, Just Like Old Times

I'm rereading this book but wish my copy had this wonderful cover!!!
And this has an introduction by Henry Beston,author of one of my favorite books ever,
The Outermost House. I would love to get my hands on that.

Yesterday, I took a long walk with Sug along the paved bike bath to the intersection for the general store and Sam's Deli. It took at least an hour round trip--allowing Sug a little time to snoop and sniff--so I had plenty of time to breathe and remember, toss my cherished Cape Cod memories around like stones in the sea.

I recalled on the way back that the first summer I came, in 1980, when Mom and I stayed for three whole weeks, we would plan to talk to Dad from Rite & Bob's house phone. [We still don't have a phone in the house, or WiFi, and that works in one's favor to relax.] I heard something like, Daddy's calling Monday night. And my mother, in a white gauzy top and flowery skirt, would sit at the round kitchen table and talk to Dad. I guess I must have said hi, too. Then we would have dinner at Rite & Bob's, always a proper meal with meat and starch and dessert.

Maybe I was thinking that because after H. and Punchy left yesterday to get Figgy in Maine [and see H.'s big family there], my iPhone decided to stop working. Could it be too much salty air? I don't know, but it's not the charger, because the young man at the general store checked that for me. So I have to wait til I get home to the Apple store in NJ. When my family returns tomorrow, we will have H.'s and Figgy's cell phones, anyway.

But: It's like that summer of 1980. Reading voraciously. Walking or biking. Now I actually put that old green broomstick in the sliding back door when I went to bed, a trick my mother taught me so no one could slide the door open and break in. I even locked the front door before leaving for my bike ride today; I generally don't.

I also went next door to my neighbors' house and asked if I could please make a few calls. They were kind, and even poured me a cold seltzer on ice. I called Moey, because it's her birthday; H., who didn't pick up, probably because it was an unrecognizable area code [not even the typical 508]; Sis and Don; and H.'s brother, John, who pretty reliably picks up, but didn't. I left them all messages so they know all is well if I don't answer texts or calls.

I'm on the grid here at the Hot Chocolate Sparrow, so I can get WiFi and do a little work. I biked here with my laptop on my back--so glad H. left his backpack behind. It took me about 40 minutes on the path, wobbling a bit on the old black bike from the 1960s.

I'll also get an unsweetened iced tea with fresh lemon and a panini. Aside from that, I have been reading, reading, reading, Sug flopped by my side. I got a great old Mary Higgins Clark page turner, No Place Like Home, at Annie's Book Stop in Orleans the other day, and also fortified my arsenal with Cape Cod, by Henry David Thoreau, snapped up at the Audubon gift shop. I've read that book before but never as I am reading it now. I love it. Such a closely observed account of the Cape and its people, starting with a shipwreck, a ghastly/ghostly loss of many lives on a vessel coming from County Galway, home of my Irish grandpa, Jim Mahon. Thoreau repeated a story that a young mother was waiting for her sister to arrive from Ireland, with her child....but instead, he saw the aunt dead, cradling the child in her arms. It was said the mother took her own life soon after. [I have to check that fact, don't have book with me.]

Better move on.......