It is the first of November—All Saints Day—and although the sky is clearing, we have another gray, rainy day on the Narrows Pond Road. The brilliance of October is behind us, and although I love the bright colors of mid-fall, I also love the austere colors of November—the russets, the dark green of the pines and firs, the red of the winter berries.

As I have noted many times, the Narrows, just down the road from me, is always beautiful, but it is especially so on a foggy day. Here are some more foggy pictures of the Narrows, and as I’m sure readers have come to realize, I could easily emulate Monet and take picture after picture of the Narrows through the seasons and at different times of day.

Today is the last day of October, a chill, gray day that somehow seems appropriate as we move into November. I had planned to work in the yard today, to clean the last of my plant pots, but it was too raw to rinse and scrub pots outdoors. That chore will have to wait for a sunny day. Instead, I put on my raincoat and took the dog for a walk to the Narrows, which is beautiful whether the day is gray or sunny.

As I walked to the dripping Narrows, I thought of how tonight, the little beasties and ghouls would be out and about, going from house to house in search of treats. I can remember the thrill of Trick or Treating, of wearing a stiff plastic mask and of carrying my little bucket. I loved walking down the street in the dark and seeing the silhouettes of other children on the street. At the end of the night, my bucket would be full of candy with only a few disappointing boxes of raisins and perhaps an apple or two. Butter Fingers, Pom Poms, Hershey Bars, Baby Ruth bars, most of them small, but occasionally I would hit the jackpot and get a large one from some generous neighbor. Did I eat the small or the large candy first? I don’t remember, but knowing how gluttonous I am, I suspect I went for the best stuff first.

We live so far out in the country, on a dark road, that we don’t get any Trick or Treaters, and I am sorry we don’t. Every year, we buy candy, just in case. Then, when no one comes, Clif and I have to eat it all. This year we didn’t buy any, and as usual, no little ghoulies came to our house. When I opened the door to see if it was still raining, the night was completely dark, and all I heard was a steady drip. The crickets have been silenced by the cold, and their songs no longer fill the night.

November is on our doorstep. Time to finish with the gardens, time to rake the leaves, time to stack the wood.

In yesterday’s post, I described going to New York City last weekend to visit my daughter Dee. In that post, I had planned to touch briefly on the highlights of the trip, but the spirit of Samuel Becket seized me, and instead I wrote about the terrific play we saw—Waiting for Godot—and how it remains relevant to our time.

Therefore, today I will briefly describe the other highlights of the trip and share some of the pictures I took.

One of the things I love best about New York City is the wonderful diversity of the people—black, brown, white, Asian, gay, straight, stylish, and frumpy. It’s all there. For someone like me who comes from a mostly white and rural state, the variety is dazzling and a reminder that there are many, many types of people on this planet.

On Saturday, we began our Manhattan foray with a trip to the Chelsea Doughnut Plant for one of their fresh, fresh donuts. Dee had a pumpkin donut, which she let me taste, and it was utterly delicious. My own square coconut donut was also tasty as can be. (Unfortunately, the picture of the coconut donut didn’t come out well.)

Properly fueled, we explored some of the art galleries in Chelsea, ending with an outdoor installation of Francois-Xavier Lalanne’s Sheep Station, which appropriately enough featured sculptures of sheep “grazing” by a defunct gas station. A vision of the future? A juxtaposition of rural and urban? Whatever the case, it drew people’s attention, and there was much picture taking.

Then, it was on to McNulty’s Tea & Coffee Co. in Greenwich Village. McNulty’s bills its store as a “journey to another time,” and they are not indulging in hyperbole. The shop is small, tight, dark, and loaded with containers of loose tea and bags coffee. The closest analogy is an old-time smoke shop, albeit one with healthier products. The clerks who work there—they all seemed to be men, but I could be wrong about this—gave the impression that they had spent a long time as tea and coffee apprentices and that they took their jobs very seriously. Not that the atmosphere of the store was glum or stiff. Far from it. Although these clerks took their jobs seriously, they were also relaxed. I bought some Golden Assam for me and Lapsang Souchong for Clif. A white-haired man weighed the tea on an old-fashioned brass scale. Later that night, when we got back to Dee’s apartment, we tried some of the Golden Assam, and it was smooth with a slight tang, a first-rate tea. From now on, a trip to New York will include going to McNulty’s for tea. Among other teas, I’d love to try their English Breakfast and Earl Grey.

After all that walking, from the art galleries to McNulty’s, we were hungry, and we stopped at Spice for a late lunch—curry for Dee and pad Thai for me. At Spice, the food and the service are good, and the food is reasonably priced, not a given at any restaurant, whether it is Maine or New York.

In New York, the streets are crowded with cars and trucks, but bikes are making inroads. I have been going regularly to New York City since 2000, and never have I seen so many bikes and bikers. There are bike lanes, relatively new, and stands of city bikes, which can be rented. Mayor Bloomberg, apparently, can be thanked for the bike promotion, and this is a lesson that shows the importance of visionary leadership. I am all for community-based action and projects, but with big things, such as bike lanes, the initiative must come from the top down. And if  such services are provided, people will use them, as was clearly demonstrated on my New York trip.

Sunday, was Dee’s day to choose the activities, my birthday present to her, and being a movie buff, she chose movies. We saw the excellent 12 Years a Slave, and this movie was so good it is my guess it will turn out to be the best movie of the year. The acting was outstanding, the cinematography was beautiful, and the story was gut wrenching. Set in the 1840s, the story revolves around a free black man named Solomon Northup and how he is tricked, captured, and sold into slavery. A must-see movie, that’s for sure. Interesting that the director as well as many of the actors are British.

We also saw Claire Denis’s Bastard, a stinker of a movie. But you can’t win them all.

All too soon the weekend came to an end, and it was time for the long bus ride home. But what a weekend! A stellar play, an equally stellar movie. Donuts, tea, good food. And best of all, a visit with my daughter.

What to say about my weekend with my daughter Dee in New York City? It was packed with so many good things that it’s hard to narrow it down for a blog post.  First and foremost, we both agreed that the time we spent together was too short, and we both wished we could have had a few more days. Now, there is nothing that warms a mother’s heart more than hearing her adult child say, “Mom, I wish you could stay longer.”

Second was the play Waiting for Godot with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. It was an absolute thrill seeing these two fine actors on stage together. They brought spark and energy to what, for all its popularity, is a difficult play. There is no straight narrative, where the characters move from one point to another. Instead, there is symbolism, dread, futility, and loneliness as the the two tramps, Estragon (McKellen) and Vladimir (Stewart) stay exactly where they are, waiting for someone who is never going to come. One has lost his memory, the other has prostate problems, and so it goes. To liven things up, there is the brutal master Pozzo (Shuler Hensley) and his downtrodden slave, ironically named Lucky (Billy Crudup).

Somehow, though, Samuel Becket was able to endow Estragon and Vladimir with enough warmth, sympathy, and earthiness to balance the symbolism and the absurdest elements of the play. In addition, Waiting for Godot also addresses poverty, old age, and decay.

Waiting for Godot is a masterpiece, and the existential dread it depicts is as relevant today as it was in the 1950s when Becket wrote the play. For many, many people, God is no longer the center of existence. Instead, it is puny little mankind and our puny little selves, neither of which gives much larger meaning to life. To compound this, at least in wealthy nations, most of us have reached a level of comfort where we don’t have to spend every minute of our lives providing food, clothing, and shelter for ourselves. For the most part, we don’t have to worry about our children dying before their fifth birthdays. On the face of it, these things seem like a blessing, and in many ways they are. But how do people make meaningful lives now that survival, like God, is no longer the main point? (Again, I want to stress this the case for those of us who live in wealthy countries.) How do we avoid living in perpetual dread of the nothingness? Sixty years after Becket wrote Waiting for Godot, we are still grappling with these questions, and I hope to return to those questions in a future post.

I expected both Mckellen and Stewart to be very good, and I was not surprised by McKellen’s natural, shambling Estragon or Stewart’s ringing, intelligent Vladimir. What did surprise me was how Billy Crudup, as a drooling, haggard Lucky, and Shuler Hensley, as the cruel, commanding Pozzo, were as impressive as McKellen and Stewart. It can’t be easy to be on stage with two such famous actors, but when Crudup and Hensley played their parts, all attention was focused on them. Dee quite rightly noted that this was also a sign of what good actors McKellen and Stewart are. They know how to stay in the background when it comes time for them to do so.

For this post, I had planned to write a paragraph or two about Godot and then write about what else we did in New York, but Becket and his play took over. Tomorrow, I’ll write more about what we ate and what else we saw.

Tomorrow, I’ll be going to New York City to visit my daughter Dee. I might be a country mouse, but I adore going to New York City. While it’s true that the crowds and the city can be overwhelming at times, there are so many interesting things to see and eat in the city. Dee has lived there since 2000, which means we’ve done all the touristy things, from going to the top of the Empire State Building to walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. I must admit I’ve enjoyed all of them.

Because I have been going to the city for so many years, I’ve developed a bit of a routine, which gets folded into whatever else we might have planned. On Friday night, when I arrive, we will get Chinese takeout from a little place just around the corner from where Dee lives in Brooklyn. That little takeout beats anything we have in the Augusta area, where, admittedly, the bar is so low a snake could jump over it.

A trip to the Strand bookstore, with its miles and miles of books, is always on the agenda, and I hope to slide in a delectable donut from the Doughnut Plant. Their donuts are pricey—a single one can cost $3—but my oh my are they good. Some of their donuts are square—that’s right, square—and at times I dream of the coconut-cream-filled ones.

But on this trip, the cherry on the sundae, so to speak, is the play we’ll be seeing on Saturday night—Waiting for Godot with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen. To see both of these fine actors on stage together will certainly be a treat. (Dee has seen them on stage separately: McKellen in King Lear and Stewart in Macbeth.) The ticket is a birthday present from Dee. Thank you, Dee!

In the end, visiting with Dee is the thing. This trip coincides with her birthday, and on Sunday, she will set the agenda. As Dee is a movie buff, I know what that agenda will include, and I am gathering my courage to see 12 Years a Slave. When it comes to violent movies, I am something of a wimp, but as my friend Joel Johnson, also a movie buff, sternly reminded me, it is completely appropriate that graphic violence be a part of 12 Years a Slave. I don’t disagree, but I know I will have a hard time watching some of the scenes.

So tomorrow, off I go. I’ll bring my camera and my notebook, and I’ll make a report when I get back.

Until then, over and out.

In Maine, October has really outdone itself this year. It has been so sunny and warm that we haven’t had any frost at the little house in the big woods. As a reflection of this, our heating bill is less than it was last year at this time, and I’m certainly not complaining. Nevertheless, warm weather or not, the gardens indicate that fall is progressing. The leaves of the big hostas are droopy and yellow, and the day lilies have collapsed into brown shreds.

Somehow, despite the warm weather, or maybe because of it, I am behind this year. Usually, by the end of October the gardens are cut back, and I am ready to begin raking. I might be halfway through my cutting, but that’s about it. I will need to get out there and hustle if I am to maintain any kind of seasonal schedule in the garden. But I’ll get the work done. I always do.

Even though I miss summer and warm weather and humming birds and biking, I do love this golden time of year when soup and muffins are so welcome. The other day I swept the driveway clean, and just as I was done, a wind came and blew a swirl of yellow leaves and pine needles into the driveway. No more clean driveway.

“Stop, stop!” I said, but I couldn’t help smiling at the beauty of those falling leaves and needles as they gleamed and danced in the bright sun.

Soon austere November will come in to replace golden October. Thoughts will turn toward Thanksgiving and Christmas lists and filling the deck box with pine and winter berries.

In the meantime, out I go to cut back those gardens, and as I cut, I’ll be making plans for next spring.

On Fridays, I usually post interesting pieces—most often food related—that I have read on the Internet. But not this week and not next week, either. Between volunteering, writing, cutting back perennials, and washing windows, I just don’t have that much time to read on the computer. And next Friday I’ll be leaving for New York to spend the weekend with my daughter Dee. (However, I still find the time to read my favorite blogs—Down to Earth and Letters from a Hill Farm, to name just a couple.) When November settles in, and the leaves have been raked, I’ll return to my Friday postings. There are a lot of good pieces on the Internet, and I like to think they make up for all the bad that is also posted.

This week has been so warm that I have been able to make a tray and eat on the patio every afternoon. In between reading and eating, I listen to the patter of the leaves as they fall to the ground, and the soft sound reminds me of a light rain. Even though the dog and the two cats join me on the patio, the birds remain undeterred, going from tree to feeder and back to tree with their tasty morsels—black oil sunflower seeds. This is the time of year when the feeder must be filled frequently, and I am out of seed. On Sunday, there will be a trip to Paris Farmer’s Union in Winthrop to get more seed. I just love seeing the flutter of birds in the backyard.

On Saturday, Team Good Eater will be participating in the Walk for Hope, a benefit for MaineGeneral’s Breast Care Program. As I had breast cancer 3 years ago, this is a cause that is very dear to me. The team’s 3 fundraisers are my daughter Shannon, our friend Alice, and me. So far, we have raised over $800, which, to borrow from my Yankee husband, is pretty darned good. A bunch of us will be walking on Saturday—Alice’s husband, Joel; my husband, Clif; our friend Debbie; and the dogs, Holly and Liam, the latter of whom still has a pungent smell as the result of an encounter with a skunk. (Unfortunately, Shannon’s husband, Mike, has to work and won’t be able to join us.)

After the walk, Team Good Eater will come for lunch at the little house in the big woods. I’ll be making a white chili from a recipe I got online, and if it comes out well, I’ll share it on my next post. From Farmer Kev I’ll get spinach and lettuce for a nice local salad. Shannon is bringing bread, and Alice is bringing dessert. We’ll sit at the round table in our dining room and share food and news and stories. We’ll talk about politics, books, and movies.The day is supposed to be lovely, and if so, the dining room will be lit with the glow of golden October. The leaves will continue to patter, and the birds will pick at a mostly empty feeder.

A good cause, fellowship, and food. We’ll have all those things on Saturday.