Seedlings, Socializing, and Storms

We celebrated my birthday the day before it on the 30th, when we gave a party celebrating three birthdays: Karen’s, Stephen’s and mine.  Melenie came the day before with her husband Jay.  Jay works as a therapist but his love is treater. He has been starring in a number of plays in Western Massachusetts, and now is doing occasional solo performances of the play he co-wrote about his childhood abuse by a priest.  He will be performing in Ireland at a festival and here on the Cape on Memorial weekend.  Melenie seems to be very much enjoying his growing fame.  We’re looking forward to seeing the play in Ptown. 

We cooked several dishes for the party – a spoon roast, a shrimp avocado dish that was the best thing we cooked, curried deviled eggs, a pasta salad, a Spanish broccoli salad that I put beans in as well.  Woody made a wonderful cheesecake decorated with strawberries that I freeze in June when the local strawberry harvest appears.  He also made his ‘famous’ Caesar salad. [Italics mine; everybody loves it but I’m not a big fan of croutons.] Tasha made chicken teriyaki and Dale some delicious parmesan shortbread.  It was a small party, just ten friends, but we really enjoyed it.  Sunday, my birthday, we were invited to Easter dinner at Tony’s in town, which turned out to be mostly outdoors around a fire pit. Tony and his mother Karen did fine cooking for the party. 

It took me a couple of days to recover from all the socializing of the past ten days.  Old friends of mine dating back to my days in the regional New York office of Students for a Democratic Society and then Movement for a Democratic Society which I cofounded with Bob Gottleib.  Eleanor and Jeff unfortunately arrived on the Cape as a powerful storm approached, a combination of a huge storm from the west and a smaller but still quite strong storm from the south.  The major problem we were worried was not the amount of rain.  We’re on a hill and our soil is mostly sandy.  But the high winds scared us in advance.  Sixty mph gusts.  The wind from a nor’easter roars across the marsh right to us.  That’s the reason we had four trees that were dying or dead taken down recently.  We didn’t want them falling on our house, the neighbor’s house or our gardens.

I took this week off from my new book THE HOUR OF MY DEATH.  So far I’ve been working on my office through Thursday; then I began to attack my bedroom.  I’m still digging out there.  I was determined to finish 4th draft of my book excluding whatever I could put aside – piles of it.  I still have to read through the book as a whole this coming week and see what it needs, what it has too much of. Also, I haven’t sufficiently gone over the poems included. It’s time to do that and see if each one is a good fit where it is.

We didn’t go overboard with gifts this year.  Woody gave me two dresses that are gorgeous, a fancy blue tee, and two lbs. of dark chocolate-covered fruits. I will be wrapping his gifts this week. We spent so much on the new truck and the tree work that we didn’t want to spend too much. But the two new dresses are very welcome.

I started cucumbers and marigolds this week. We have run out of space in the bay windows and some tender seedings have had to go out to the greenhouse.  This week I’ve be starting two kinds of basil, zinnias and sunflowers.