A Franklin Winter Walk

Monday was Martin Luther King Day, and as I reflected on the celebration of all he represented and the fact that our President was being inaugurated again, I got overwhelmed by the depth of it and decided to take a walk.  Tennessee in the winter time is, how shall I put it…cold, yet also warm on some days, quite gray, very rainy, and just plain depressing at times, but every once in a while a sunny day comes along that just knocks your socks off.  That was Monday.

Living less than a mile from town has its perks and this girl loves to walk, so I bundled up and braved the 39 degree chill.  People in the Northeast just made a scoffy snorting sound after reading that.  Whatever, it’s the south, 39 is an arctic chill when it’s cloudy.

West Main Street has some lovely pre and post Civil War homes that look like a picture when they’re strung with Christmas lights, or when the old stately magnolias are blooming.  I never get tired of imagining what it would be like to live in a beautiful old house like that…until I remember the  mid-60s one that I am currently trying to fix up, and it all comes into perspective.  This lovely little gem is for sale.  I wonder what kind of stories the walls in this house could tell…

Every home on this street has so much character.  This one is a holiday icon.  I don’t think I’ve ever not seen the place decked out for a holiday.  I find myself getting all excited when I drive past and see the beginnings of the next decorating spree.  Cupid is upon us with all his hearts and arrows.

This house is a particular favorite of mine, especially when I’m walking home at night.  I completely creep myself out and always think I see a shadowy figure in the darkened upstairs windows.  I’ve had to make a conscious effort not to look at the place when it’s dark and I’m walking past.  During the daytime though, it really is breathtaking.

Heading toward town I pass Sweet Cece’s and literally entertain the thought of getting some fro-yo, but no, that is crazy.

The Franklin Tea Shop was my destination (I didn’t take a picture because I felt a little bit like one of those be-sneakered, fanny pack wearing tourists).  I am always in search of a good almond tea.  Ever since Celestial Seasonings broke my heart and discontinued their Almond Sunset, I have been hopelessly seeking what apparently is the holy grail of teas.  Their website recommends replacing my former addiction with Chai.  They have to be kidding.  I tried the Almond Tisane flavor at the tea shop and was pleasantly surprised, nice mild flavor with lots of natural almond coming through.  I may go back for seconds at some point, but it still doesn’t hold a candle to that cheap $2.49 box of Almond Sunset.  A girlfriend and I are planning a trip to the Celestial Seasonings factory later this year.  I plan to harass them thoroughly on the matter.

I made my way around to the Brownstones to gaze longingly at my favorite fountain in town.  I used to go sit on the benches nearby and listen to the water.  No replacement for the ocean, but it helped.  Apparently the residents didn’t want riff raff like me encroaching upon their courtyard because the fountain is now protected by a locked gate.

Somebody needs to have an intervention with Mother Nature.  It’s January over here…January, not April.

 
Next view is the old silo or whatever this is.  All I know is I’ve seen it on the backdrop of about ten Christian artists’ album covers.  I wish some billionaire would come in and spruce the place up, turn it into an art gallery or something.

Speaking of art galleries, Gallery 202 totally rocks.  I visited shortly after they opened and was pleasantly shocked when the owner walked me around the place and pointed out a Picasso, two Dali’s, and several Warhol’s.  They also display a variety of local artists and were instrumental in starting the Franklin Art Scene which is the best thing to do in town on the first Friday of every month.  I love this gallery.  You never know what you’ll see when you walk in.

 Ah next stop, yes it was a stop, I browsed…the Franklin Antique Mall.  This place is so much fun, it’s a treasure trove for trinkets and crazy things you’ve never seen before.  One time I got a set of miniature Beatrix Potter books the size of a quarter.  Another time I found this old antique depression glass plate I had broken years ago.  Then there was the booth with all the retro harlequin romance novels.  This time I walked away with some vintage postcards that still had one cent stamps on them.  I literally have to stop myself from going in this place on my walks because I know I won’t be able to control myself and end up buying stuff I will have absolutely no use for.

The square looked so pretty with the afternoon light streaming down.  I’m so thankful I work for a company that observes holidays like MLK.  Days like these are good for the soul.  Crisp walks on winter days remind us to be thankful for warmer times ahead.  Franklin is a great place to live and I’m so glad my journey brought me to such a charming town.

Striped Bass at Montauk Point: The Blitz

 

 

The past week I was on Long Island for a much needed getaway from all things work and house related.  Rob came with since he needed a break as well.  There was a lot going on.  The annual Maritime Festival in Greenport was fun, and a Coast Guard training vessel was there for a couple of days allowing people to board the giant seagoing ship.  Lots of hulking, seafaring men (I can’t bring myself to call them seamen) helped old ladies and helpless able bodied girls up the gangplank.  The giant hulk of a ship was pretty impressive.

And to give you some perspective of how giant the ship truly was, here it is in the harbor, dwarfing everything around it.

But now to the meat of my story, THE BLITZ!!!  We headed down to Montauk Point for the day to climb the lighthouse and dine with yuppies wearing khaki pants and horizontally striped polos.  Little did I know it would be one of the most exciting days of the year for lovers of fishing.  A few days out of the year, striped bass come in droves to the Montauk shoreline and then disappear into the blue until the next year.  No one knows when it’ll happen, but we got lucky.  Unfortunately the only fishing poles we had in the back of the car were for snappers and would have broken in two with the first bite, but it was a blast to watch!

 

As we approached the bluff where you could see the ocean we noticed a disturbance that looked like boiling water.  It was basically a bunch of striped bass having the time of their lives, a bass rave, if you will.

We climbed the lighthouse up to the yellow step (do not go beyond the yellow step or the Coast Guard will yell at you) and looked out on the incredible view.  Lots of fisherman were having a heyday out there.

After beating my thighs into submission following the 137 step climb (each way), we stumbled down to the beach for the fishing orgy.  It was so exciting we had a hard time not cheering for every giant fish that got pulled out of the water.  I imagine this is how football fans feel when their team scores a touchdown with 3 seconds to go at the Super Bowl.  I wouldn’t know.  You can see below the huge school of fish between the boat and our fisherman friend.

Fisherman friend bags himself a nice one (longer than 28 inches to be legal).
 
 What shall we name him?  Lance?  Lance Bass???

It’s a bit hard to see, but every time a wave came through you could see the outlines of hundreds of fish screaming “WHEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!” with fins in the air as they rolled on by.

I took a couple of videos that are a bit hard to see, but they’ll give you an idea of how prolific the fish were.  All in all, it was quite an exciting event to witness and makes me miss living by the shore more than ever.  Happy Blitz!!!

Home: The East End of Long Island

Working on the house has been an enjoyable task, but an exhausting one at that.  After mom and dad came to visit and help with more house repairs, I headed home to Long Island for a much needed vacation to see friends, walk on the beach, and decompress.  July is absolutely beautiful, everything is lush and green, and the inlets are teeming with life.  Here are two glimpses of New Suffolk.

A lot of people ask why I moved to Tennessee, and my answer is the same answer thousands of other people in Nashville give: to work in the music industry.  I am one of the lucky few who found an amazing job that I love and it is my main reason for staying here.  Franklin is a very pretty town with tons of history and a bustling little main street with privately owned shops and boutiques, and even though I enjoy living here, that sense of “home” has never come to me.

I’m reading a book called “A Sense of Place” by Michael Shapiro.  The book is a collection of interviews with travel writers.  One of my favorite writers, Frances Mayes, sums up my feelings perfectly.  She talks about places where she and her husband, Ed, used to live and says, “…it’s an act of freedom when you make your own choice of a place according to what you need, want, love, crave…I’ve never had that sense in California.  I’ve lived there since 1973, and I’ve always liked living there…I loved my job and have lots of friends there, but I could walk out of there tomorrow and never look back.  I don’t have that I-love-this-place feeling about it.”  She talks about when she and Ed went to Italy, they both felt that sense of home and knew they wanted to stay, so they purchased Bramasole, which led her to write Under The Tuscan Sun.

Every time I’m home and I get the ache in my chest when I look out at the water, I think to myself that I could walk away from Tennessee and never look back.  When I was a teenager, all I wanted was to leave Mattituck, explore, set out on my own, and become myself.   In the process of becoming who I am, I came to the realization that beauty and aesthetics in the place I live are vitally important to my happiness.  The surrounding environment has this subconscious impact on my psyche that comes from my feelings about the trees, water, flowers, tiny towns where people run into friends on the street, and a deep sense of belonging.  John Ed Pearce aptly said, “Home is the place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to.”  My dream is that someday I can return to the East End and become an integral part of preserving the community and environment there.

When I tell people I’m from New York, they think I grew up in the city.  When I elaborate and say I’m from the East End of Long Island, they envision some overcrowded suburb just outside of the city.  There is nothing that would make me happier than to share with my friends the incredible beauty of where I grew up.  Since airfare is crazy expensive these days, I took a few pictures (all on the iPhone, but obviously one doesn’t need a high tech camera, these places would look gorgeous taken with a disposable keychain camera).  Allow me to give you a 5 cent tour of some of the highlights of Long Island in July.

Dad’s daylily garden contains thousands of brand new flowers he’s hybridized over the years.  The result is a palette of color only God could have created.  Each day dad faithfully crosses the prettiest flowers that show the most genetic potential with each other to produce seeds which he can then plant and re-cross, otherwise know as “flower sex.”  When mom catches him surfing the net for pictures of new varieties, she calls it “lily porn.”  This giant garden is a hobby that turned into a labor of love.  Many people in church, some of my friends, and now I have dad’s own unique lilies in our yards.

My very favorite pastime, walking Bailie Beach in Mattituck to find pieces of sea glass at low tide.

The next three pictures show a small peninsula in New Suffolk called Kimogener Point (pronounced Kim-ah-jen-er).  The point is a private strip of shore that defines the landscape with its iconic windmill.  The Jacqueline Penney print in my dining room shows Kimogener Point at night with the moon peeking through the clouds, so I wanted to get some pics of the actual place.  I think the home in the third picture has one of the most incredible views on all of Long Island being surrounded by the nothing but the Peconic Bay and salty air.

Baby birds seem to be a theme these days.  This little blackbird fell out of the nest and the parents were squawking up a storm and fluttering about him.  I can only hope the little guy was able to make it.

Bailie the kitty (named after Bailie Beach) taking a moment to reflect on the lovely summer day.

 
A trip to Greenport with some friends to see the fireworks.  Afterward we headed to a little restaurant called First and South to discover that our server did a new locally themed chalk drawing every week.
A new ferry route opened the weekend after July 4th by the Peconic Jitney taking passengers around Shelter Island all the way to Sag Harbor.  Schedules can be found at http://www.peconicjitney.com/ .  The trip was absolutely gorgeous!  We sat on the top deck, breathed the salty air, and took in the incredible scenery of waterside mansions and million dollar sailboats.  Shortly before we arrived in Sag Harbor we passed Jimmy Buffett’s yacht and all waved like idiots.  He often docks in Greenport, and one of the passengers with us pointed his boat out to everyone as he cruised by.  This is a great little trip if you just want to do some light shopping and eat lunch.  The Hampton Jitney can be taken to the other towns if you’re adventurous enough to sit in bumper to bumper traffic on Montauk Highway.
A trip home for me usually includes a trip to the Hamptons.  Mom and I will head down there, hit up the Cheese Shoppe in Southampton and the Golden Pear Cafe for lunch, along with every thrift store on the south side.  One time I picked up a pair of old Manolo Blahniks for $20.  This time, a vintage white leather Mui Miu purse for $12!!!  The TJ Maxx in Bridgehampton is also a favorite stop for me since I found my dining room chairs there.  For exactly one third of the price for the same chair in Anthropologie, I shipped two down to TN.  Mom and dad brought two more when they drove down, and voila, I have chairs from the Hamptons.  The East End also has a plethora of incredible wineries where one can get quite sloshed after a day of tastings.  The vineyards are so beautiful and a much more pleasant sight than ugly subdivisions and housing developments.  If you want to get the inside scoop on the historical social drama in the Hamptons, I would highly suggest a book called Philistines At The Hedgerow: Passion And Property In The Hamptons by Steven Gaines.  It is most educational and quite entertaining!
The North Fork can’t be summed up in pictures and I can only convey a small sense of what being there is like for me, which simply cannot do justice to this lovely piece of shoreline.  In the past several blogs I have shared my house with you and in this one, I wanted to share my home.  To those of you who live there, don’t forget to treasure what you have.  Sometimes it’s very easy to miss the beauty in a place when you see it everyday.  To those of you who have never been, I hope that someday your travels will bring you there so you too can breathe the marshy air, get frizzy hair from the humidity, glance down and find a piece of sea glass, and fall head over heels in love with a Long Island you never knew existed.