So many golf competitions are being played now, amateur and professional, in America and Europe, men and women. The cameras keep switching from one to another. There are few fans allowed at the events. Social distancing limitations are followed rigorously. I find these competitions quite enjoyable to watch on television from my sofa in our air conditioned apartment.

92 today. That famously kind man.

Facebook can confuse us at times. This happened with regard to a high school classmate. According to Facebook she was living in Seattle. This was odd I thought. I wondered if I was hallucinating or worse. So I searched for her. If she was somewhere in Seattle I couldn’t find her. Well of course she wasn’t in Seattle. She was alive and well and still in Connecticut where she had been for many many years. How this mixup happened I do not know, but I am spreading correct information now.

This is a favorite activity for women living overseas with time on their hands. A kind of make work activity for idle hands. Compile a book of your favorite recipes. Favorite recipes of Payson Park Church. Favorite Recipes of Women Living in Bangladesh. etc. And I have participated in projects like this, and the resulting cookbooks have proved to be very useful. So once again, the residents here at Ida Culver House Broadview have been asked to submit their favorite recipes. That will keep us busy and proactive! Presumably men will be included also – after all this is 2020.

My favorite recipe is one from a dog-eared copy of a Betty Crocker Cookbook. Apple Crisp. That’s my party piece. And Ian’s favorite recipe is one for Apple Pie. I don’t know where he sourced it, but his pies are delicious. Or rather they were delicious. That was one of the first signs of dementia – he stopped cooking. SAD. That was about 3 or 4 years ago.

What is her name – that friend in Dublin who I can picture, who I know so well , who lives across the street from Sue, whose husband is William, who supplied us with a dead magpie, who lived on Hillside Road – I can picture the house and the steep narrow drive, I can picture her collection of captive birds, I can picture her as a bereavement counselor. Her son Nigel was a classmate of Andrew at Wesley, Andrew beat Nigel for a prize in Geography (Andrew wrote a report on a survey of shopping patterns in Thimphu Bhutan). I am sure her name will suddenly pop into my head. And I’ll think “of course”

P.S. Her name is Florence. So easy – Florence Bell. Yes, it just came into my head – from nowhere!

One of our neighbors in suburban Dundrum, Dublin, Ireland had a small pool in the courtyard of her bungalow. We purchased our bungalow in 1969. It was one of 5 structures in a growing suburb in South Dublin, at he foot of the Dublin mountains. Each one of the five blocks consisted of 2 bungalows. The 2 bungalows were divided by a low wall between the interior courtyards. The wall between our bungalow an our neighbors had an extra row of bricks because my husband Ian was so tall (6’3).

Two driveways divided each block. Our neighbor Letitia had a small pool feature in her courtyard nd every so often a heron would come along and capture a fish from Letitia’s pool feature. This annoyed Letitia but I don’t know if she ever did anything to try to prevent this from happening. She is a very keen gardener and conservationist. Actually she is not the original owner. She bought the bungalow from the original owners in about 1980. I’m quite sure it was she who at some point added the pool feature to the courtyard.

I have photograph of a group of high school friends who took a trip to Ogunquit Maine. I was the driver – I think we had a Mercury or Plymouth at that point. On the way we stopped a little craft booth run by a woodturner. That photograph is all I have from that trip. My classmates – Barbara Brooks, Sylvia Elso, Gail Knight, one other I think. I don’t have the photo to hand right now – I suspect it is still in lockdown in our house as we are in lockdown here at Ida Culver Broadview. Anyhow – those classmates – Barbara Brooks is fine so far as I know, living in Portland Maine. Sylvia Elso has passed away. and curiously Gail Knight lived just North of us in Crown Hill – she passed away in 2000 almost simultaneously with our move to Ballard. Gail Knight Coburn.

The missing classmate whom I can’t remember right now might have been Marilyn Weedon. She and Sylvia were best friends and usually were together. Marilyn and Sylvia were Very Scandinavian – either Swedish or Norwegian. Lutheran. Blond hair. Always cheerful. I raise this now – in high school they were just friends. I didn’t think about ethnicity. Looking back now, we had tremendous diversity – European and Middle Eastern roots abounded – but no African. There were no African American families allowed, by law, to live in Belmont.

I have a photograph of a party I attended as a 4 or 5 year old. There was an African American boy at the party. The birthday party was for Bobby Walsh, a Downs Syndrome child. Thinking back, this little African American was probably the child of a staff person.

Does my cat miss me? Poor Katerina, she looks puzzled. Those big eyes – where is Janet? Why won’t you let me come into the house?? Yesterday James was over at the house to look for the embroidery book I wrote about yesterday. Now if I can figure out how to transfer that photo o this blog post. That’s the challenge for today.

My previous blog has unleashed a whole set of “new” memories. I asked my son James if he remembered the Enniskerry Pottery, cited in my previous post. No he was rather vague on that one. Now I’ve thought that he was too young when we used to visit the Enniskerry Pottery. He would have been only age 5 or so. He has better memories of Enniskerry and environs when he was 10+ when he went skiing nearby. That’s a whole story in itself. I will relate that story in due course.

Meanwhile I’ll keep hunting for a copy of that old embroidery book. E-Bay here I come.

This was before I became seriously in weaving. It was when we were living in St. Lucia in the early 1970’s – 50 years ago. In Castries, the capital, I found a book on embroidery. It had an appealing cover and looked interesting so I bought it – this was in M & C, the department store. A very small department store. I referred to this book many times and still have it today. In St. Lucia, for lack of anything else, I worked on a big embroidery project. It was a picture of a girl on a swing and involved doing the different styles of embroidery stitches. It was actually fun. Upon completion I wondered what to do with it. I finally found a home for it in Dublin Ireland. I tried to sell it in a small pottery in the village of Enniskerry, a few miles from our home in Dundrum Dublin. The years passed – no one purchased my big piece of embroidery. One of the potters died of cancer – very sad, she was too young. The other potter, Mona Parkes, moved on. And my embroidery ……….who knows. I can’t remember what happened to the little shed – I think it was knocked down as part of a road widening project. Pity. It really added to the charm of the village.