Hello! How are you doing?
At some point I'm going to stop counting weeks of this pandemic. I will remember that our lockdown started on Friday the 13th of March, and then 2020 unfurled from there.
Things are continuing to open back up in our state of Vermont. As of yesterday there were 933 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in our state, which puts us way down at the bottom of the list along with Montana & Wyoming. I don't know if it's possible for this "flattening" trend to continue after things open up more, but I hope so. Our neighboring states of New York and Massachusetts have many many more cases (340,000 and 82,000 respectively), but they also contain the major urban centers of the whole Northeast so I guess they're very different from our backwater area.
The past weeks have been a bit abstract for the "specials" that I'm doing Monday-Thursday with my two children, but here are some highlights.
One day we looked at a book about the history of Brattleboro, Vermont, and found that "Jubilee Jim" Fisk, one of the robber barons of the 19th century, is buried here. Apparently his father, James Fisk, Senior, lived in Brattleboro and built the Revere House hotel downtown (which burned down in 1877). When Jim Jr was murdered by the new lover of his ex-mistress, the body was brought back to Brattleboro. I thought this sentence on the Lost New England site was interesting: "An estimated 5,000 mourners – equivalent to the entire population of the town at the time – were on hand when his funeral train arrived in town at almost midnight, and his body was brought to the Revere House."
Here's where we got really interested--Jim Fisk, Jr's grave is a monument sculpted by none other than Larkin Goldsmith Meade, Brattleboro's famous son (he was actually born across the river in Chesterfield, NH). Larkin Meade created the "snow angel" on New Year's Eve, 1855 (a marble replica can be seen today in our public library). Meade also carved the first statue of Ceres to top the Vermont state house in Montpelier (his pine version disintegrated by 1930; today there is a third version of Ceres in that spot). And GET THIS, he also designed the tomb of Abraham Lincoln.
So obviously Larkin Meade was the perfect choice to memorialize Jim Fisk, Jr. The monument is in the Prospect Hill Cemetery on South Main Street. It is an obelisk surrounded by 4 female figures that represent different aspects of commerce: railroads, steamboats, finance, and the stage. (Fun fact: Fisk co-owned an opera house in Manhattan.)
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| west side |
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| Railroads |
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| Steamboats |
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| east side |
Cemeteries are a perfect field trip during a pandemic, by the way--social distancing is easy.
On another day we talked about poetry. We discussed simple poetic forms like haiku and limericks. We reviewed six types of poetic "feet" (iamb, trochee, spondee, pyrrhic, dactyl, anapest) and came up with examples of words or phrases for each one.
I read Shakespeare's sonnet #18 (Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day) and we looked at line 9 in particular ("But thy eternal summer shall not fade") as a perfect example of iambic pentameter (10 syllables with stress on every other syllable). If you're not going to click through and read the sonnet, I want to tell you it's where "the darling buds of May" comes from.
We also wrote some of our own poetry, using the theme "summer." Here is a haiku by a participant (with scene drawing from Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets).
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| turquoise air in earth lily fern ice breeze melting summer flowers bloom |
BREAKING NEWS: RHUBARB PIE STICKY, DELICIOUS
For baking day this week we made lattice crust "Be-bop a-re-bop Rhubarb Pie," which is a 3-2-1 Michael Ruhlman recipe. This ratio-driven pie crust (3 parts flour to 2 parts butter to 1 part ice water) makes the flakiest, yummiest pie crust ever. I only ever make it once a year when it's rhubarb season.
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| Before |
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| During |
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| After: yummmmmm |
I constructed an "ant moat" to protect the pie from the little ants that come to find anything sweet that might be on our countertop. I filled a wide shallow bowl with water, put an inverted ramekin in the middle, and set the foil-covered pie on the ramekin so the pie is sitting above the water and cannot be crawled on. HA.
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