Daily Archives: August 10, 2014

Cooking, Family, Holidays, Music

Three Score and Ten. And jazz.

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Lughnasa                                                                   Lughnasa Moon

We celebrated Kate’s 70th tonight, 8 days ahead of her August 18th birthday. Down Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 is a town called Hastings with a new bridge over the Mississippi, two graceful arches painted orange and lit at night. Across the bridge and beyond Hastings is the Alexis Bailly vineyard, founded in 1973 by a Twin Cities’ attorney.

Tonight, as it has done for four years now, KBEM joined with Nan Bailly, daughter of Alexis, to sponsor an evening of jazz and locally sourced food. Nan’s vineyards are green, healthy appearing and the building her father built (picture below) houses a small store and a wine bar.

Behind the building is an area with carved boulder seats, contemporary metal sculpture scattered among native prairie and a spot where KBEM put up a large white tent and several long tables.

The chef for the event, Stan Patalonis, put together a Latin menu with beginners that featured Spanish flavors then moved onto Latin America. The food was good, the wine plentiful and the jazz mellow. A suite of clouds gave us a cooler evening, just right in the mid-70’s, and the rain held off until the meal was done.

Kate enjoyed the wine and her birthday celebration. We drove home along the river, then up 280 and 35E and 10 to Round Lake Boulevard. 70 is a landmark birthday and so was this evening.

Anoka County, Dogs, Health, Our Land and Home

Flash

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Lughnasa                                                               Lughnasa Moon

IMAG0486Fast. That’s how life can change. I wired a large fallen branch to the bottom of the fence along our southern property line. The last three points of escape were along the northern fence line so Rigel has begun a systematic (well, sort of) testing of the containment.

While going downhill along the path next to the fence line, the stretch you can see here,  my foot struck a small stump and I fell forward. As gravity reached up to grab me, my body took over, putting my right arm out to cushion the fall. But as I fell, I remembered, in a flash, the sort of things that happen to older folks when they fall. This was not the kind of fall I took as a child or even a younger man. No, it had a brief, but strong undercurrent of dread attached.

That said, the effects of the fall were unremarkable. My right shoulder ached, a bit of soreness in the right lower back, but no broken bones. No head injuries. The wire snips IMAG0491and the coil of wire, now mostly gone since I had just used it on the fourth fence strengthening of this latest episode, flew out of my hands and I had to find them.

When I went through the business with my left shoulder a year or so ago, the orthopedist remarked on how strong my bones were. Guess so.

(I took this photograph to illustrate the size of the grapevine, but it shows the coil nearing its end. This is before the latest patch.)

This is not a cautionary tale. It is, rather, a reminder that change can come at us fast and hard. It is also a reminder that resilience may be one of our most underrated virtues. I’m seeing that word a lot these days in situations psychological and climatological. It’s a good one. It is not how hard you fall, but how you bounce that counts.