Once, many years ago, I took the ferry from New London, CT, forty-one miles out into the ocean to Block Island, Rhode Island.
No, I should start again:
Twice, many years ago, I took the ferry from New London CT, forty-one miles out into the ocean to Block Island, Rhode Island. The first time, fifty-one years ago, was with my first husband. The second –20 years later–was with my second. Both trips involved dogs: the first our German Shepherd, Gittel, who was so distressed at being left in the room of the inn where we were staying, that she jumped out of the second floor window when she spotted us on the lawn below (she was fine).
The second was with our Pit Bull, Tess, who turned us into vegetarians when we took her to a local farm, and she nuzzled a calf through the fencing.
“We wouldn’t eat Tess. Doesn’t that follow that we shouldn’t eat that calf, either?”
Anyway, the dogs—and frankly, the husbands– are not what I remember most about Block Island, and I’m not sure if the lasting memory involved husband number one, or husband number two.
It was all about the flowers. The lacecap hydrangeas to be more specific. Their blue blossoms were ubiquitous on the island, but I had never seen them before, and I was stunned by their beauty. I vowed that someday, I would live in a house surrounded by lacecaps. I bought a small white tile with a blue painted hydrangea to take home with me, so I wouldn’t forget.
One day, it broke. I don’t remember how, but I think a child was involved: if I bought it on the first trip—when I was pregnant with my first child—one of my kids might have dropped it. If I bought it on the second, it might have been one of my grandsons.
Doesn’t matter, because, now outside our front door in Maine—where I live with husband number two– we have a huge lacecap, which started out tiny, but after nearly twenty years, covers half the area between the front door and the end of the house. I worry about it each winter, when I warn the plow driver not to pile the snow in front of the house, but by the sides of the driveway, which means, in very snowy years—although not so many lately where climate change has made it colder in New York than in Maine—we drive between six-foot walls of snow to get to the garage.
But the lacecap has survived and flourished, and I’m not the only one it makes deliriously happy.
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