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Washout and Washington's Mt Vernon
Jun. 29th, 2015 10:59 pmThe weekend was slightly schizophrenic. For the first time in a while, the rain began in the early hours of the morning on Saturday, rather than in the afternoon, and continued almost without a break until late at night. As a result, we switched around our plans, and spent the day at home. We did a bit more packing (mainly ADC's clothes) and had quality family time: playing games together (and choosing which ones to ship and which ones to take to the West Coast), and watching To Have and Have Not. As I remembered, the plot suffers from comparison with Casablanca, but Lauren Bacall holds her own when compared to Ingrid Bergman. Both are incredibly lovely, but with a very different sort of beauty. It is hard to believe that Bacall was only 19 when she made that movie - and I wonder if my acceptance of SS/HG is due to knowing about Bogart and Bacall already as a teenager, thus predisposing me to think that a 20-year gap or so was not an insurmountable problem as such. There are some Snapely aspects (at least of the fanon version) to Bogart's character, HarryMorgan/'Steve,' as there are to Rick. 'Slim' is much more similar to Hermione than Ilse is, though!
On Sunday, we got up early and went to the farmers' market for the last time. Of course, it was the best it has been for a long time - everything is starting now (hence why we are eating pasta with zucchini flowers again today). We then continued to Mt Vernon, where S had been on a school trip, but which the rest of us had not seen. It was a very different experience from Monticello, which we visited off-season on a foggy day, so that we only got to see the house. At Mt Vernon we saw the two-part movie overview (part 1: advertorial for the site; part 2: hagiography for Washington), took the timed-entry tour of the house, and spent most of our time exploring the garden. The differences between Jefferson and Washington are expressed amazingly well in the differences between the estates. Washington was a farmer and a soldier, while Jefferson was an intellectual as well as a politician. Monticello is much more interesting as a house than Mt Vernon. Admittedly, the interpretation at Monticello was much better - we had a proper guided tour, rather than being herded in line with people repeating the same spiel in every room. Even so, there was something much more ordinary about Mt Vernon. Washington described it as "pleasant," and that is what it is - pleasant and unexciting. I also found the Jefferson family cemetery more moving than Washington's tomb.
On the other hand, the gardens and grounds - which we could not properly experience at Monticello, due to the fog and the winter - at Mt Vernon are wonderful. The upper gardens, with their combination of flowers, vegetables and parterres, were what I had expected the National Arboretum to be like. The pioneer farm, where eighteenth-century American farming is reenacted, had a lot of potential, but when we asked the interpreters questions, they had difficulty getting away from their set speeches, which was disappointing. We had just missed, by a couple of weeks, the hand-harvesting and threshing of the wheat grown there in a system devised by Washington himself. We did see the harvested grain in what had been stables and it was fascinating to touch the kernels, still soft (one always thinks of the dry wheat, forgetting that it would begin as soft as sweetcorn kernels).
We then continued to Huntley Meadows Park. Compared to our visit almost exactly two months earlier, we saw far fewer birds. We did, however, see an osprey with fish in its claws, being beaten about by a much-smaller redwinged blackbird, clearly evicting a predator. We also saw a rather huge turtle, possibly an alligator turtle, in addition to the common red-eared sliders. We ended the weekend with our last Southern barbecue, at a local branch of Famous Dave's, where we had eaten in Chattanooga. This branch did not have the grilled pineapple I remembered fondly, but both the chips and the broccoli were excellent, from my point of view, and the others all enjoyed the ribs very much.
On Sunday, we got up early and went to the farmers' market for the last time. Of course, it was the best it has been for a long time - everything is starting now (hence why we are eating pasta with zucchini flowers again today). We then continued to Mt Vernon, where S had been on a school trip, but which the rest of us had not seen. It was a very different experience from Monticello, which we visited off-season on a foggy day, so that we only got to see the house. At Mt Vernon we saw the two-part movie overview (part 1: advertorial for the site; part 2: hagiography for Washington), took the timed-entry tour of the house, and spent most of our time exploring the garden. The differences between Jefferson and Washington are expressed amazingly well in the differences between the estates. Washington was a farmer and a soldier, while Jefferson was an intellectual as well as a politician. Monticello is much more interesting as a house than Mt Vernon. Admittedly, the interpretation at Monticello was much better - we had a proper guided tour, rather than being herded in line with people repeating the same spiel in every room. Even so, there was something much more ordinary about Mt Vernon. Washington described it as "pleasant," and that is what it is - pleasant and unexciting. I also found the Jefferson family cemetery more moving than Washington's tomb.
On the other hand, the gardens and grounds - which we could not properly experience at Monticello, due to the fog and the winter - at Mt Vernon are wonderful. The upper gardens, with their combination of flowers, vegetables and parterres, were what I had expected the National Arboretum to be like. The pioneer farm, where eighteenth-century American farming is reenacted, had a lot of potential, but when we asked the interpreters questions, they had difficulty getting away from their set speeches, which was disappointing. We had just missed, by a couple of weeks, the hand-harvesting and threshing of the wheat grown there in a system devised by Washington himself. We did see the harvested grain in what had been stables and it was fascinating to touch the kernels, still soft (one always thinks of the dry wheat, forgetting that it would begin as soft as sweetcorn kernels).
We then continued to Huntley Meadows Park. Compared to our visit almost exactly two months earlier, we saw far fewer birds. We did, however, see an osprey with fish in its claws, being beaten about by a much-smaller redwinged blackbird, clearly evicting a predator. We also saw a rather huge turtle, possibly an alligator turtle, in addition to the common red-eared sliders. We ended the weekend with our last Southern barbecue, at a local branch of Famous Dave's, where we had eaten in Chattanooga. This branch did not have the grilled pineapple I remembered fondly, but both the chips and the broccoli were excellent, from my point of view, and the others all enjoyed the ribs very much.
