Community Building

Thursday night, Franny made dinner at the cabin and I joined the sailing staff for pasta and kielbasa, then square dancing at the yacht club. To me, yacht club sounds shi-shi, but theirs is old Maine, wood cabin, punch and animal crackers and thirteen year old kids. Essentially, a hop. First dance, I was paired with the caller, a middle-aged mustached feller who never looked me in the eye. He did an oddly close swing your partner and an oddly distant promenade. Though a few of us were tipsy, there's not too much trouble to be had at an old-fashioned square, and when the fog rolled in heavy, we rearranged our cars to accommodate the families unable to sail back across the cove.

The Chase's eldest, Becker, has a great bookshelf from which a volume dropped into my hand when I was fumbling about without my glasses - Paris to the Moon, which I'd been planning to read! I've been enjoying it every morning between 7 and 8, with a cup of coffee in the reading chair. Sometimes I mutter in French and Eric asks me for translation. This morning Amelia, nephew Nigel's partner, swung by with snacks for rehearsal and was companionably pleased to find out what I was reading.

The cat, whose name is apparently "Smudge," whom I call "Wonky Cat," brushed up against me for the first time today. Being thus objectified as a convenient back-scratcher has solidified my place in the family.

I'm finding a realer friend in Q2's stage manager, who went to Muhlenberg and has been working in NYC. She likes long letters and long books and Gershwin and Nina Simone. She's living by her lonesome in a little cabin, and since I'm rarely alone, and she usually, we're planning to join forces.

Today the dancers, the SM, and I went to the lily pond and swam and lay on the shore, then cleaned up and went to a Very Fancy Dinner in Blue Hill. The first place we tried, Barncastle, was closed because their electricity had suddenly failed. Plan 2: Table, where I had the best risotto of my life - lobster and chevre and 3 kinds of fresh-picked local mushroom (including the same chanterelles Alison and I pluck from the woods). The bites of dessert (deep chocolate torte with sea-salt; ricotta icing on a lemon cake; perfect crême brulee) were similarly divine.

I'm really enjoying the group I'm in. The dancers are interesting people, from a professional cheerleader (a boy one) to his half-Italian girlfriend (not me) to the ballroom dancer and founder of an arts-outreach in Zimbabwe. One has a tattoo of his partner's initials and a beautiful face and the kindest questioning manner; a good teacher. They are very real. They have very real bodies that work for them, that they have trained and demanded and that are imperfect and exciting. I am such a perfectionist - in many ways I've been saddened and corrupted by expecting bodily perfections of myself and never achieving them, by finding a narrow range of beauties in a world of them. I love that I'm seeing these dancers and thinking, look at the strangeness of that body, look at what it can do! It's simultaneously a more deeply aesthetic, artistic, and curious impulse and a more loving one. I don't feel depressed or jealous or other, but welcome, dogged, inspired!

I'm also loving the new community members, whom we met today. A bunch of fun broads! Some are frighteningly recognizable (Alice=Gretchen Hall, Sue=Betty White, Jeannie=Aunt Peggy/Beatrice Arthur), all are a little skewed and enthused. A thing I know. Our transition into working with them was smoother than we anticipated, in part because again, these groups of people are falling into place really well. There's intentionality in it I appreciate, as I appreciate each night planning the morning ahead.

To bed now, because my morning plan includes early tea, that book I'm cuddling, weeding the garden, and my very first sail! And soon, a post on reading habits and local histories, sweet swearing and architectural debate. I'm on the lookout for a coffeeshop in which to write my notes.