Author: Willem Lange

by Willem Lange  EAST MONTPELIER – The crew and I shot the last episode the other day of this year’s

I’m sitting in my snug office, wearing fleece (damned if I’ll activate the thermostats yet!), listening to a cold rain dripping from the eaves, and thinking back about 48 hours to a happy circumstance – a golden apple of a day stolen from the weather gods – and a very distressing phenomenon: my only experience ever, as far as I can recollect, of being utterly spent physically.

We had an overnight guest coming, which set the housekeeping staff (me) a-humming. I laundered the sheets and pillowcases in the guest room, hung a fresh towel in the guest bathroom, and even dressed up my end of the house, making up the bed with the flannel winter sheets and wrangling a new denim duvet cover over the old comforter.

Monday this week, like the two days before it, was gray and drizzly. It was also the Feast of St. Francis, that cheerful, optimistic 13th-century Italian friar who’s most often pictured with birds on his shoulder, animals around his feet, and a halo about his head. The day before in church, we’d observed the Blessing of the Animals: everybody who could, brought their mobile or portable pet to be blessed.

As surely as sugaring presages the advent of spring, September slides into October with its usual seasonal observances.

When we were small boys, during the war, we rarely failed to make it to the Washington Avenue armory in Albany when we heard there was to be a muster of fresh recruits.

I should have known that Kiki wouldn’t stay in her little hatch in the rear deck of the kayak, even though I’d thoughtfully padded it with a big fluffy towel.

Remember the Almanac Singers?

During the 1950s, there was so much I wanted to do that I hated to waste daylight.

Well, hasn’t this been a week! As if all our poor earth’s travails – environmental, geological, and political – weren’t enough, now we’re watching video footage that, except for its scope and suddenness, reprises the United States’ humiliating withdrawal from South Vietnam in 1975.

On a cool August morning, with a slowly lifting fog, light offshore breeze, more bearable than it’d been for several days, the crew and I showed up at the town landing in Kittery Point.