By Gina Hamilton
Coastal Journal editor

It is Saturday night, and I am waiting for a call from my brother and sister, who are at a hospital in St. Louis tonight. I am waiting for them to call me and tell me that my father has slipped away at last.

The end game happened so suddenly there was no time for me to get there, and no real point for that matter; he was in trouble on Friday in the late afternoon; by Saturday morning he had lapsed into a coma, and by Saturday afternoon he was in the hospital and the prognosis was grim. He is bleeding into the brain; there is no way to stop it, and soon it will choke off the brain stem and he will die at last. No funeral is planned, nor even a memorial service. Our memories, for now, will remain private.

My sister called me to let me talk to Dad on the cell phone; he was unconscious, of course, and I have no reason to believe he even knew what was going on at all. My sister did it for me more than for him, and I thank her for that.

by Gina Hamilton
Coastal Journal editor

Wasn’t it a gorgeous weekend? The weather cooled down a bit and things dried out a bit, and down at Turning Tide Cottage, we harvested a ton of cucumbers and even a few tomatoes.  And a lot more are coming.

Chris and I had to go looking for pickle jars, because the jars we had were pretty small, and the cucumbers in question were pretty big.  Down at Rogers, they had a huge ‘commemorative’ jar, and quite a lot of cucumbers fit into it.  We also got a few half-gallon jars, but the only thing we can use them for is pickles, so we have to get some more quart jars pretty soon as the tomatoes start coming in to make spaghetti sauce.

Making pickles is a little less hot than making spaghetti sauce.  It’s relatively simple, too.  We’re doing cold-packed pickles, and Chris is experimenting with vinegars and types of salt and so on. We picked up some pickling spices at Now You’re Cooking, and it was a lot more than it looked like.  We also converted one of our pepper mills to a salt mill, having reached the brilliant conclusion that sea salt would not clump the way it does if it was fresh ground.

I know it sounds silly, but it tastes better, too, I think.

by Gina Hamilton
Coastal Journal staff

Down at Turning Tide Cottage this weekend, one of us celebrated a milestone birthday, and it wasn’t me, nor our son and heir, nor Alex.  Chris turned 50 on Sunday.  When I asked him if he wanted a birthday party, thinking he might want to get our friends together and have a BBQ or something, the old curmudgeon (something that you can only be after the age of 50) said, “A party? Why would I want a party?”

“Well, you don’t turn 50 every day,” I said.

“You don’t turn 43 everyday either,” he said.  “And that’s a prime number.”

He had a point, which I freely acknowledged.  Why we focus on so-called milestones is a curious thing, and even more curious is why we choose the particular milestone birthdays and anniversaries that we single out for special recognition.