I took a day off in the middle of the week to go on a nature hike with Lynda at Calvert Cliffs State Park. We both find our jobs stressful, and this was a welcome relief. We asked each other a couple of times during this lovely day, “Why don’t we do this more often?”

There’s a 1.8 mile hike from the parking lot to the beach between the cliffs. It took us four hours to make it to the beach and back. That’s just a little over a mile an hour. There was so much to see on the way. The highlight was the wetland area halfway through the trail where there are nesting red-headed woodpeckers. If you don’t know what one looks like, check it out in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Bird Guide. They’re gorgeous. The red in the picture isn’t as vibrant as they are in reality, but you’ll get the idea. We watched a battle between a pair of adult woodpeckers, and a squirrel who was trying to raid their nest hole.

I searched in vain on the beach for shark’s teeth, but I wasn’t disappointed. It was pretty out there.

After our hike, we tried to visit the famous Vera’s White Sands Beach Club and Marina, but found that it is only open Thursday through Sunday. We ended up driving a little farther south to Solomons, and had a great crab cake lunch at the Captain’s Table. While searching for an alternative for Vera’s, Lynda demonstrated for me how cool GPS technology has become. She searched for restaurants near our location, and even dialed the restaurant for her so that she could make sure they were open. We’ll have to come back another day to experience Vera’s.

There are more photos from this trip in a set called Calvert Cliffs State Park on my Flickr site.

This is a report of a trip I took to Crumpton, Maryland, on July 16, 2003. I’m going to try to get back there soon.

This is the $5 yard, meaning that the minimum bid for anything is $5. You can’t see it in this picture, but the items in this category covered about two football fields of space. I know what you are thinking, “you mean, I could have that porch glider for only $5?” Well, only if no one else wants it.

This tacky treasure was found in the barn, where the minimum bid is $10. I would have loved to have this faded print of a 19th century ballet theme, in a 1950s era “modern” frame. An extra bonus is the glitter someone put on the tutus of all the dancers, plus the male lead’s costume.

The $20 yard had nicer furniture, art, and crafts. Some of the items were not old; a few artists brought in their work to try to sell it by auction.

If an item isn’t about to sell, and there isn’t a prospective buyer guarding it, you can have fun with them.

After the auctioneer passed, and the winners and the pickers had done their work, the $5 yard looked desolate.

The only problem with the auction is that it is so huge. There were a few things that I might have liked to acquire, but I could tell that it would have been hours before the auctioneer would get to them. You can’t just take them up to the register like you can in an antique store.

Some day, I’ll go there when I’ve got time to spend all day. Who knows what I’ll find at Dixon’s Furniture Auction!

I can’t let it go without mentioning that it was ten years ago today that I broke up with Marty (see Ten years ago part 1 and Ten years ago part 2). It felt like the worst day of my life at the time it happened. It’s easy to say now that it was really the best thing.

1998 was a very hard year for me. A couple of years earlier, I’d bought a four-bedroom house in my own name and moved my boyfriend and his two teenaged sons in with me. Then they all moved out toward the end of 1997 and I had to pay the mortgage by myself at the same time that I had taken a cut in pay to take a new and more promising job at the library where I now work. For most of 1998, I struggled financially, and I also struggled to keep my relationship with Marty together, despite his moving out.

On August 5, 1998, we had just returned from our third session of couples counseling. It had not gone well for Marty. Basically, the therapist, after hearing both our stories, turned to Marty and told him that he was wrong. As gratifying as I found this, I was by then savvy enough to know that this did not bode well for our future. After the session, Marty and I sat out on the patio in the backyard and discussed it. I don’t remember a lot about our conversation, except the moment when he turned to me and said, “I’m still mad at you for buying this house.”

That was the statement that made me stop my futile efforts to save the relationship, which had been an enormous drain on my emotional and physical resources. With everything I had sacrificed and compromised in the service of preserving it, it was finally clear that it was no damn use. He was stuck on the petty view that, as he put it, “a marriage won’t work unless someone is in charge, and if I get married, it’s going to have to be me.” I told him it was over, and he could take all of his stuff, including the radial arm saw in the basement, out of the house he resented me owning, and keep it all somewhere else. I didn’t care where.

If he saw me now, married to Bob, who is so much his opposite, I’m sure he wouldn’t know what to make of it. It was beyond his comprehension to think of a relationship where people are equals, and position isn’t determined by gender or (mis)interpretations of the Bible. (How DID I end up with this guy, anyway?) He’ll ever know what my life is like now; he died suddenly of a massive heart attack in early 2004, the same year in which I later met Bob.

Dang! That’s a hell of a way to end a post. Even though I am now happy in my marriage to Bob, there seems to be some processing I still need to do with the emotional remnants of my experience with Marty. Sometime soon, I want to post stories from the trip I took to Colorado with Marty to visit his extended family to tell them about how his stepfather abused him from the age of about three. How’s that for a cliffhanger?

There’s a wild time going on in West Virginia this weekend. The Appalachian String Band Music Festival is a mecca for old-time musicians all over the country. I’d guess a good 3,000 people are crammed into every possible camping space at Camp Washington Carver in the little town of Clifftop. There will be fiddle, banjo, and band contests, not to mention clogging. There will be tunes in the campground all day long and all night. Some of the greatest, funniest, most interesting people I’ve ever met will be there. But I won’t.

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve been to the festival in Clifftop. About ten years ago, I just got tired of camping. I especially got tired of camping around hundreds of people whose priority was playing tunes, drinking, and hollering at all hours of the night. Now I’ll admit to having engaged in such behavior myself when I was younger. But I’m not the same person any more.

Still, I remember fondly the transcendent moments I experience while at a festival. One night I’ll never forget was about eight or nine years ago, at the Bluegrass and Old-Time Fiddlers Convention in Mt. Airy, North Carolina. It was a warm, clear night, around midnight. I had gone there alone, and was at that moment strolling from jam to jam with no one but myself for company. All I know is that the music was so good that I felt a peace within myself unlike the way I usually felt, which was insecure and lonely. I looked up into the sky at all the stars, with the music wrapping around me like a ribbon and I realized that at that moment, I was exactly where I belonged in the universe. All was right with the world because I was at that festival, hearing that music.

Moments like that at a festival are the exception, though, not the rule. I hate trying to sleep while a couple of drunks decide to have a yelling match outside my tent at 5:00 a.m. It’s not like it’s safe for a single woman to speak up for herself in that situation. And then there’s waiting in a line for an hour for a hot shower in a concrete bath house. Don’t get me started on the PortaJohns.

About four years ago, I met Bob, who will listen to old-time music, and even likes some of it. I’m fortunate that he also likes to dance. But festivals are really for people who play the music, and not much fun for those who don’t, especially if all their spouse wants to do is chase jam sessions all weekend. So, between my dislike of camping, and my desire to not make Bob endure a whole weekend of boredom, I’ve stopped going to the big festivals like Clifftop and Mt. Airy. Fortunately, there’s the Rockbridge Mountain Music and Dance Convention in September. It’s small enough, and Bob knows enough of the people for both of us to have a good time. I’ll be there again this year, and since Bob has taken up the ukulele, we’ll even play together there with some other folks we know.

To all my friends who are in Clifftop right now, I say, “Whoop it up!” I’ll be thinking of you. And I’ll have some of you over in a couple of weeks so you can tell me all about it.

I cannot believe my good luck today. I was driving down Main Street in Laurel, Maryland at just the right moment to witness the delivery of a seven-foot fiberglass chicken to the front of a butcher shop. An even greater stroke of luck was that I had my camera with me at the time.

More photos on my Flickr site