by Gina Hamilton
Coastal Journal editor

When I first started writing these little missives, about four years ago or so now, I didn’t think I would be doing it for very long.  Dolce Far Niente (literally, the sweetness of doing nothing) was conceived as a way for the CJ readership to get to know me in a less lofty way than what I was doing in the news and analysis and opinion pages.  Honestly, I thought I might do it for a month, or maybe two months, and let it go.  I am, after all, a dilettante.

I wrote the column as I might write a weekly letter home, full of family news, inside jokes, and regular but gentle commentary about life, politics, petty annoyances, and anything else that occurred to me.  Through it, I shared a lot of information with you about my background, my family, my pets, my home, my dreams, and a lot of nothing about what I (and most of the rest of the midcoast) was doing on any given weekend.

In it, you shared my sorrows and my triumphs, my struggles and joys, just as a distant friend or relative would do.

And then a kind of funny thing happened.

by Gina Hamilton
Coastal Journal editor

One of the bummers of cottage ownership is cleaning up outside in the fall, and in the spring, when you have to get rid of mounds of rotten, stinky leaves.  Nine times out of ten, you never have a good day to do it on, either because you are very busy doing other things (anything, anything) or because it is raining or cold or it snows earlier or later than expected or because the kids sneak out of the house on the date selected before you notice they’re gone.

However, the Fates were with us this year, and this past Saturday, we finally did the deed.  It was a relatively warm day, sunny, and not too windy.  We went out and bought another rake - one of the ones we had lost some of its tines, and the first time we tried to use it, the rest of them fell out like an old man’s teeth - and some paper leaf bags.  Last week, I bought a pair of those wacka-wacka leaf picker uppers that look like little Pac-men. I had a set, but they got left out all winter last year somehow and the plastic became brittle and those teeth fell out, too.

by Gina Hamilton
Coastal Journal editor

Down at Turning Tide Cottage, we are getting a pellet stove this month.  Now, we have already turned an older woodstove in the Coffee Room into a pellet burner by means of a wonderful contraption called a pellet basket - you can read more about the things on the energy and sustainability page this week - but in the Library-cum-Conservatory we had an old woodstove attached to an ancient chimney that is literally falling down around our ears, and it needed cleaning and lining and probably rebuilding before we could use it safely, so we haven’t used it at all in several years.  And because we like the convenience of pellets, we thought we would get a pellet stove and put it in there, but it’s like one of those 15 number puzzles.  For every step you take there are several other tiles that have to be moved first, and what with one thing and another and with financial concerns and all, we haven’t done anything except shiver through the winters with the paucity of oil I am willing to use in a wildly inefficient furnace down in the scary basement.

(You get used to 55 degrees, honestly, you do.  You wear a couple of sweatshirts and some fuzzy socks and drape a nice blankey over yourself while you are watching the NewsHour.  And the cats and Rudie the Dog help, by draping themselves over you.