It has been blizzarding for the past five hours as I begin to write this letter, and ADC and the boys are baking a cake together, after a morning spent playing board games and Skypeing family. It seems that here, too, winter only begins after Christmas, and February is the coldest and wettest (well, snowiest) month).
So, what have we been doing? It seems like a very long time ago that we went to the National Gallery of Art, but really it was only two weeks ago. We had a great time there, beginning with a special exhibition of eighteenth-century American furniture. There were some really lovely pieces there. I particularly liked the the ladies' worktables, which had a soft-sided basket below where unfinished knitting/sewing/embroidery could be left when it wasn't being worked on. I could really use something like that, as I have been knitting a lot - I've made a hat, neck warmer and hand warmers for myself, finally completed GB's vest and sent it off, and almost finished my mother's legwarmers-for-next-winter in the past six weeks, almost entirely on the weekends. We then went to the sculpture galleries, which were most impressive and then had lunch. To our surprise, lunch was excellent and very good value for money: $14 for ravioli or roast chicken or a trio of salads AND the receipt gave a 10% discount at the museum gift shop. ADC and I bought mugs - his in the shape of a camera, mine with a Qing dynasty pattern, based on a vase that I had stood in front of and admired for several minutes in the exhibition of French pre-revolutionary rooms - and S bought coloured pencils. We finished the day by going to a special exhibition on Piero di Cosimo, and a quick look at nineteenth-century American landscapes and portraits. We will have to go back to look at the American material properly.
The following week, ADC went to Connecticut for three days, to give talks at Trinity College and UConn-Storrs, where he saw snow six feet high, and everyone used snow tyres. This was good mental preparation for the last week or so: After a day for ADC to recuperate, we set on last Sunday midday for West Virginia. We decided to celebrate President's Day and the long weekend by going to stay at a B&B - the first English-style B&B we have found here. The plan was not to do anything too energetic, because the forecast was for extremely cold weather, and to stop at a steakhouse in Front Royal where we had bought excellent wine on the way back from our previous stay in a cabin in the woods. We set off later than we had originally intended last Saturday (only a week ago!), as we waiting for the wind to die down so we could clear the driveway and put down salt before setting off. It took us nearly three hours to reach the Breath of Heaven B&B outside Peterburg, WV, and as we got higher and higher the temperatures dropped - but there seemed to have been less snow there than there had been in Maryland. The geology of WV seems to be quite different from Maryland the rocks were a different colour) and we saw several frozen springs, that at other times of the year would have trickled down the mountainside.
The B&B itself was lovely. We had the upper floor - two bedrooms and a bathroom - to ourselves. Everything was beautifully set out, and the decorations included a guitar and a banjo, which ADC and S jammed on for a good half an hour, before we went back downstairs to the main room, where we were plied with tea and homemade chocolate chip cookies by Geri and Ed, our hosts. This was very lucky, because when we set out for supper, the only places we found open were fast-food joints, and we took Dairy Queen over Macdonald. We retreated to the B&B and played a card game, Duco, that we bought from its developer at I-Con last year. That was very enjoyable, although I think that A should have a time limit on his turns ... Once we finished that, we finally took out the art puzzle that we bought at the MFA in Boston. We decided to recreate Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the isle of La Grande Jatte from 130 cubes, as it looked like the easiest of the six choices. It took all four of us just over an hour, but our hosts were also fascinated, and took down the name of the puzzle, since they have grandchildren who are keen on art.
Next morning we began the day with crepes, scrambled eggs and toast (and bacon and sausage), and met the other guests, who included an American journalist working for an English-language Russian newswire in DC (kind of a mirror image of ADC's cousin who used to work for Dow Jones in Moscow), who had previously covered the Middle East, including spending a couple of years in Iraq. We stayed away from directly discussing politics, apart from agreeing that anywhere else in the world was probably less crazy. After breakfast, we decided to book another few days during spring break, when it would be warmer and we would actually be able to go on some of the very interesting-looking hikes in the area. The forecast at the time was for snow to begin "in the evening" and move south, so we decided to stick with our original plan and visit the Smokehole Caverns - a stalactite cave which remains a balmy 13 degrees Celsius year round (I remind you that it was at most 13 degrees Fahrenheit outside at the time - the oranges that we left in our car overnight had frozen). The drive to the caverns was very scenic, and full of riverside cabins advertising trout fishing and honeymoon suites. We got to the site as the giftshop opened (we stocked up on jams, but decided to pass on the moonshine), and had a semi-private tour of the cave: just us, and a young couple from Calhoun, WV. The guide was quite excited to hear that we were from Israel; we are probably the most far-flung tourists they've had in a while. The stalagtites were very impressive, and much more active than any other such cave I've been in: I was dripped on several times during the 40 minutes or so that we were inside. As we came out of the cave,just after 11:00, it began snowing, and it was clear that the storm had arrived ahead of schedule. We got into the car and began our journey home, that ended at about 6 p.m. First of all, we debated how best to get back to the main highway to Virginia and Maryland, and ended up driving on a section of the WV-55 that was still partially under construction and thus little travelled. The road was covered with ice, and ADC went down to second gear; the "Runaway truck ramp" signs did nothing to improve my peace of mind and I may have actually prayed for a few minutes. At one point the car told us that it was 5 degrees Fahrenheit (= -15 in real money) outside. It seemed like forever before we saw signs for Moorefield and Petersburg again ... we stopped at a petrol station to refuel ourselves and the car: there was no way we were going to go to Front Royal. We got back to DC in time for the evening rush hour to begin, although presumably the fact that it was a federal holiday made things easier, and were lucky to reach the supermarket while there was a brief respite, so that we didn't have to dig the car out of the parking lot. Next morning, Tuesday, was a snow day, of course, and on Friday (yesterday) the boys started school late due to the dangerous cold: -15 before wind chill. ADC didn't go to work, either, as he had really suffered walking to and from the Metro on Thursday. It's now after supper, and the snow has begun to give way to icy rain. Hopefully this will wash away the snow covering the car, so we can possibly go to the farmer's market tomorrow.
On Thursday night ADC and I began to take advantage of the cultural opportunities afforded by a big city, and went to see a fringe production of The Tempest, with an all-female cast. The actors were excellent, especially Miranda/Tirinculo (apart from Prospero and Alonso, each person played two characters). I thought that having the same person play Ariel and Caliban was inspired (although I had thought that there were scenes in which the two interact, but I suppose that these were cut). The play was performed in an arts centre in a DC residential neighbourhood, and we sat in what called a "theater in a box", and what I would call theatre in the semi-round. The two island sprites were constantly in movement both on the stage and on the steps alongside the audience's seats, where some of the action also took place. It is quite amazing the difference that changing a costume and a hairstyle can make - and I had forgotten how idiotic Shakespeare makes teenage girls seem. We drove home in driving snow. I had to scramble through snow to get into the car (the driver side is next to the cleared street, while the passenger side is next to the pavement, of course, and my boots - while remaining dry inside - did not hold up to the cold. I think that my mother made the right decision not to come visit at the beginning of March - the forecast is for another arctic blast late next week and more snow and ice next weekend. I am looking forward to winter being over, and cannot say how glad I am that we did not go to Boston, say, for sabbatical.
Being somewhat housebound, we have been watching quite a lot of movies. We saw Singing in the Rain on the snow day after returning from West Virginia, and agreed that The Sound of Music was a better film - because it had a bit more plot, and the songs advanced it, rather than being showstoppers, as in SitR. It was still very enjoyable, though, and an important part of the children's ongoing education in classic films (we have booked tickets for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at the Folger Theater in May, so will have to see Hamlet before that. Any thoughts on whether the Zeffirelli/Mel Gibson or Kenneth Branagh version is preferable? I think that the Laurence Olivier one will be too stagey for the boys). Today we watched Last Action Hero, which I don't think I had seen before. It had surprising similarities to the film Ariel and I watched last night, Adaptation - both deal with the relationship between films and reality, sometime literally breaking the fourth wall. I don't want to say anything more about it, as it should be seen when you have no idea what is going to happen. We also saw a few episodes of classic Star Trek last week on Netflix; so far, our favourite is The Trouble with Tribbles. A and S are finding the 60s imagining of the future quite fascinating.
Stay warm, everybody!
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