nice weekend

We're just coming out of a long weekend. Going into it, we had few plans and I worried a bit that we'd fritter away the time playing on our computers and staring at our electric meter.

We started out fairly relaxed with dinner on Friday night at one of our favorite South Indian restaurants.

On Saturday, we went for a walk around town and then to a contra dance. We have a tradition once a year of mixing English and contra, with two of my favorite callers. The contra caller's husband always plays and gathers a group of fine musicians. This year, we had a pianist, fiddler, someone on pennywhistle, and the husband who played banjo and mandolin, though not simultaneously.

The contra caller is blind and I always marvel at her ability to know how the dance is going, whether the chatter is urgent (no one understood the teaching) or friendly and relaxed (everyone got it). And she is a joyous and lovely dancer. She always dances English, which is especially challenging because you're expected to make wide graceful loops away from your partner and back again. She's quite good and of course everyone helps.

The first time she called for us, I didn't realize she was blind until I saw her dog under the piano and even then it took a while to figure out who the dog belonged to. She's at least on her next dog after that one. This time, there was a slight kerfuffle during English teaching. She was in line, the dog was lying next to the piano, and suddenly realized they weren't next to each other. So the dog came and found her, wagging his tail, so happy to be reunited. Our English caller said "Excuse us, we're having a canine moment." The dog, reassured, was led back to his blanket and we kept going. A very nice evening.

Yesterday, we journeyed up to the Currier Art Museum in Manchester NH, mostly to see a David McCauley exhibit of original sketches and final drawings that ended up in his books (Ship, The Way Things Work, Cathedral, and so on). There's so much detail in his work, and there were great placards that explained things. He's just updated TWTW and has written The Way We Work about bodies. Needless to say, we got involved in each piece. The rest of the museum is small but has some fine pieces. So, for example, the European room has works that range over four or five hundred years, but they are very good works. The smaller upstairs is devoted to American paintings and furniture, especially work created in New England.

And today, we drove west to an Audubon sanctuary at the base of a local mountain. The sanctuary has 1200 acres that go through meadows, past ponds, and through woods. We took two loops, one down to a vast abandoned beaver pond that is drying up and looks, from a distance, like a forest fire went through. Then we walked up to the summit of a hill and looked down on a massive birch that was recently split in two and now forms a wide V shape. I am most grateful to the family that used to summer there and ensured that the land would retain its beauty forever.

So it turned out that this weekend was full of activities after all, delights that tickled our senses and our souls. Add to that some down time, some good sleeping weather and great cat interactions, and I could definitely have more time of this quality.