Avoiding Oysterfest
Every year on the third weekend of October, our village of about 2000-plus year-rounders is host to 20,000 revelers, mostly from other parts of the Cape and over the bridge. When the festival started, the first four or five years or so, maybe even six or seven, it was great fun for us. Then it ceased to be. Massive crowds, lots of alcohol, very loud bands, and oysters costing three times the usual price. No place to sit if you want to eat them, and the same tired craft vendors year after year. Traffic to and from town bumper to bumper.
It’s good marketing for the town, lots of money to be made by the shellfish farmers, but no longer our thing. We hunker down for the weekend and get a lot of garden work done. When we traveled a lot doing workshops, we would try to schedule one of them that weekend just get out of Dodge. We both taught those memoir workshops, so we’d go off and come back Sunday evening late, when all the crowds had gone home.
For many years there was a friend’s party on Saturday night which it would take forever and a lot of strategic planting to get to. Now we just stay put unless a friend invites us who lives close enough so we don’t have to go on Route 6 at all to get there.
I finished work on the copy editor’s comments on Thursday and sent off the book to my publishers. Dale had not worked Monday as we had a storm. I couldn’t work with him till Thursday when he finished collecting the front matter and the endless acknowledgements of the poems and prose previously published in magazines or anthologies. Dale was a great help in putting this book together.
It's a great relief to have it gone, at least for a while. I had planned to pot herbs today, but we went over for a sumptuous dinner with our friend Tasha who was down from Dartmouth, and old friends of hers form the Berkshires where she grew up. I brought a Swiss chard dish from our garden, actually the first we made this year. With so many veggies to cook, Swiss chard often comes last. Next, after the first frost, we’ll start on the parsnips.
The storm gave us over an inch of rain, which we desperately needed, but the winds were not nearly as fierce as was predicted. Today, as I write this, it’s cool and sunny and dry. I had hoped to pot herbs today, but being out last night, we overslept. And the Michigan/Washington game starts in 19 minutes. If Michigan is terrible, I’ll go out just after halftime, but otherwise, I’ll pot herbs tomorrow, when it was be a bit warmer than today, anyhow.
Friday morning, it was raining lightly. I heard a cat crying. I opened the front door halfway to see if some cat was hurt. A young beautiful lithe orange female ran inside. She rubbed against me, purring, examined the remaining cat food in a saucer on the floor, but apparently wasn’t hungry. She was wearing a white collar. I tried to get her to go back out, but she was far more interested in exploring. Fortunately, Schwartzie, who is very territorial, and Willow, who would have been terrified, were both sleeping. When she ran upstairs to the livingroom, Shaman saw her. He was stunned. I don’t believe in love at first sight but it must happen with cats. He was infatuated at once. I was still trying to get her back outside. I opened the door to the sunporch. She was eager to explore that room, too. I shut the pass-through tunnel and Woody opened the door from the sun porch to the out of doors. She has no interest in leaving for almost an hour. At one point she was pressed to the outside of the glass door to the sun porch and Shaman was pressed to the inside. She finally left after the rain stopped and presumably went home. Shaman kept looking for her for two days.