"Caroline, if you want to go see your ancestor Hitty, today is going to be the best day to do it," Maddy said. She has a bunch of local errands that need to happen sometime this week, and I know Thursday and Friday could be pretty stormy/wet. So, today was the day!
We live in southeastern New York, about fifteen miles from the Connecticut border, so we'd both been pretty surprised when we Google-mapped Stockbridge and found out it was just under a two hours' drive. Straight up the
Taconic State Parkway to Route 7 to Great Barrington and then to Stockbridge. (I included the link because the story of the Taconic is kind of interesting.)
We weren't sure about parking, but once again Squat, the Great and Awesome Goddess of Urban Parking Spaces (according to Maddy, anyway) was with us - or at the very least, the urban planners in Stockbridge, at any rate. The red one down at the far end is Maddy's. From that spot, she even had a clear view to back into the street - important with her Rogue, which is a bit lacking in rear window space.
The library itself, where our ancestor Hitty lives, is bigger than we thought it would be. The Historical Room is downstairs. Unfortunately, photos aren't allowed inside.(But look
here on Julie Old Crow's site for what we saw. Thanks, Tracy!) Hitty's case was to the right, almost all the way to the back of the room. I must say, she's looking good for her age. Maddy was a bit surprised (and perhaps slightly envious!) at how dainty and narrow her feet were. We both wondered if she could actually stand on them like Emmaline and the others do. (I also think Maddy has some fabric very close to the reproduction dress she had on.) Her famous "library" dress with the circle/oval print was on display along with one that they think Dorothy Lathrop made for her, along with her famous summer quilt, her little peg wooden dolls and a little basket and chest. We also got a good look at the whale rug and decided that those are indeed fish around the border. I wish we cold have seen it before it faded. Maddy said that the older fabric dyes are pretty unstable and some of them, especially brown dyes, were made from stuff that eventually ate the fabric, which is why her original dresses are in such fragile shape. I'm glad I'm not made of that kind of fabric. (Me and my
biiiiiiiiiiiigggggg mouth.....)
There were also a bunch of letters that kids had sent her - those were cool. (And I should point out that Maddy signed her name
and mine in the guestbook! I wonder if I'm the only Hitty in there. Probably not....)
I don't know if I'd want to be kept under glass like that - I mean, the Historic Room is really very nice (and there are a lot of interesting things to look at - not just Hitty) but I like to be out and about, seeing things and doing stuff and having John-John and Shel and Emmaline and the others around to give a hard time to ;-).
Sun was right on the lens when we took this.....
Stockbridge itself is pretty cool, too. I don't know what I was expecting - something a little old-fashioned and New-Englandly, I guess - but it actually reminded me more of Woodstock. There were a lot of interesting little shops and cute places to eat.
Speaking of which, I wonder if you can still get anything you want now that it's no longer Alice's Restaurant. (That probably won't make sense unless you click on the pic....)
Just some street views from around the area of the library...
Just before we got back to the Taconic, we saw a storm building. We pulled over into - something - just of of Route 7 to take some pictures. It looked more ominous than it was. Maddy joked that we might have to do a core punch (stormchaser-speak for driving right through the middle of a storm) on the Taconic, but we didn't.
Columbia County, NY....
Glad that's not my back end on this blog for all to see. I don't know whose space Maddy took. The lot was empty.
~*~
This postcard made all of us laugh, so we bought it. And we found the cutest little chick surrounded by two bobcats and a wolf (finger puppets all) in Stockbridge, so we adopted her and brought her home with us, where she'll be safe.
Maddy finally put up the other poster she got last week. She still needs a mat for the frame.
"No One Attending Will Ever Be The Same?" Maddy thinks that was probably true. I kind of like that idea, myself....
So until next time - peace, out :-)
Plushie pets don't need walking for the reasons non-plushie pets do, but they do need exercise. It's been a little tough on Coco having to stay inside so much the past week or so. Samantha likes having a dog to play with, though. Coco's good with everyone. He wouldn't hurt a fly. Maddy, on the other hand, is currently stalking the room with a flyswatter. She thinks the flies may be coming down out of the attic via a hole in the downstairs ceiling that the guy who installed the new chimney a few years back didn't quite fully patch. It's a little creepy. It reminds me of this one story in Pete Townshend's book Horse's Neck, where the narrator keeps finding flies in the house in the dead of winter. Maddy said that where she used to work down in Westchester County, the same thing happened one winter, except with ladybugs. Those I wouldn't mind so much...
And I just have to show off my new dress. Isn't it awesome? I love how the two prints go together, don't you?
