Looking back with anticipation
The title will make sense, I promise
It’s Y2K, baby
Not really. All I mean is that I have started scanning Ruth’s columns from the year 2000. I decided to start with April, since that’s the month we’re in now…and things went off the rails for well over an hour.
I have 2 copies of every April column. Usually, this is a good problem to have, since I can choose the best quality clippings for the digital archive I’m compiling. It is not a good problem to have when identical columns bear two different handwritten dates. April 30, thankfully, had the folio line. No problem there. But the rest quickly turned into a mystery with no easy solution. I suspect this is because she usually started her columns on Sunday evenings, for publication the following week, which means that both dates often make a sort of sense.
So I decided to go back to March, even though I hadn’t scanned it yet. If all the March dates were right, I would know whether the first column in the April stack was March 26 or April 2, and the rest would fall into place.
This is how I discovered most of the March columns had duplicates with two different dates as well. Things got interesting then, as my strategy for undated pieces usually involves looking for clues on the back side of the columns that might help me pinpoint the date. I Google things until something clicks into place, which is how I discovered that one cannot easily search Heloise’s hints by date. I now know, however, that Elton John signed records and memorabilia at Tower Records on both March 14 and March 20, 1995. A fun fact, perhaps, and one that made me put on his new album with Brandi Carlile as I write, but strictly no help in resolving my dilemma.
Eventually, however, I got it figured out and so I am sharing this column from April 2, 2000, where Ruth talks about dreams of spring planting and going outside without a coat. It seems fitting, given that in my home roughly halfway between hers and their winter spot in Florida, I spent the week washing, airing out, and putting away winter clothes, then used the weekend to get things planted. Up next week, we’ll have Earth Day 2000 and 2025.
Rural Reflections
By Ruth Dennis
Almost-May days bring back sweet memories
I look out the window and see the motor homes, the travel-trailers headed west, headed home, and headed for spring.
On those recent warm almost-May days, it was hard not have the same anticipation that was part of our returns from Florida winters. Isn’t it time very, very soon to be planting vegetable seeds and annual flowers?
We left behind the warm days of late March, days meant for the beach. We left the fresh homegrown vegetables and fruit that were so plentiful at roadside stands. We left behind the flowering shrubs, the hibiscus blossoms, the beds of pansies and impatiens to head north and home.
But with each departure from Florida, I was filled with anticipation of almost immediate spring waiting for me in Jasper. I was ready to fill those porch boxes with potting soil and set out the pansies I would buy in the first days back at home.
But as we came closer to home, I recognized that this anticipation was not to become a reality for at least a few weeks or more. Besides, my first anticipation, even as we packed to leave our RV park, was seeing my family as soon as we got home.
Seeing patches of snow and feeling the cold as we were back home, I realized that joys of late spring were to be anticipated instead of being instantly realized.
These same feelings of anticipation of spring were strong on those recent days of 60 degree or more days. Days when I went coatless, days when I wanted to be outdoors as much as possible. Shopping last Saturday for groceries, I wanted to buy the pansy plants and to look over the offerings of petunias and marigolds. It must be time for gardening.
Once again I have had to accept this unfilled anticipation and wait, There have been cold and rainy days as well as some with snow flurries this past week. Just as in those first weeks after coming home from Florida, spring is on the way. March has just come to an end and May is a month away. Perhaps anticipation is a joy in itself.
On a very different Reflection, I spent part of last Sunday afternoon and evening with The Washington PostSunday edition. It did not matter that the issue was for the previous Sunday, making it a week old. The metro and regional new sections got brief attention. It was the book, opinion, arts, travel, and other special sections that I wanted to read.1
My family know that if anyone get close to Washington, they should bring me back the Sunday edition of The Washington Post. As I was reading last Sunday, I remembered those mornings when we camped at Shenandoah National Park in northern Virginia.2 The Washington Post (which was on sale at the park lodge) was part of each morning's breakfast routine and on Sundays was a morning ritual that often was renewed in the evening.
Last Sunday afternoon as I was sorting out the many sections the cover photo on the “Travel” section got my immediate attention. It was a photograph of Mt. Katahdin in Maine's Baxter State Park. It illustrated the feature article by the writer describing the climb he and his son took to the peak of Mt. Katahdin. There was an inset of the park boundaries and the neighboring towns.
As I read the article, I remembered our long ago "almost visit" to Baxter State Park and Mt. Katahdin. On one of our returns from the annual September vacations at Acadia National Park, we decided to include a visit to the mountain which is the northern end of the Appalachian Trail. We planned to camp at least one night in the park and to walk maybe a mile or two on the Trail. We had walked the trail briefly in Virginia, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire and now we wanted to add Maine to our list.
When we stopped for gas and a few supplies in the town nearest the Park entrance. we learned that reservations were needed for camping and that these had all been filled. Still, we took a chance and stopped at the park entrance. Without the necessary reservation we changed plans slightly and found a site at a nearby campground.
Our disappointment was softened when the campground owner told us that “a moose was here last night, right near your campsite.” In anticipation of at last sighting a moose we stayed up well into the night and were up again about dawn, but no moose. We should not have been surprised since we never saw the moose that were sighted (almost always the night before) in New Brunswick, southern Quebec and Northern Maine.
Sunday afternoon as I read the article about camping in Baxter State Park (the family had the necessary reservations) and climbing Mt. Katahdin, I felt almost as if we had been there.
Anticipation of spring, travel memories—these were part of my weekend, the last one of March.
If I could see my grandmother, I would ask her about a million questions I was too dumb and self-involved to ask when she was alive, and I would also try my best not to let her see what has happened to her favorite paper—especially the opinion section—under Jeff Bezos.
And I definitely would not want to break her heart over the current treatment of our national parks and their caretakers.