I haven't had time to blog lately because we've been so busy getting the Notebook ready for its season opening on June 21.
We've set up bookcases downstairs and are filling them with the more than 1,000 natural-history titles we've added—one of New England's biggest and best collections. Art workshops and photography hikes are being planned. Our Congolese bonobo has moved in. A bird canopy is rising. The Natural League baseball standings board (a.k.a. the Little Green Monster) is up and operating. Dogs and elephants are in the house. I am trying to learn how to levitate the Earth with my hands (you'll understand if you visit).
E.O. Wilson, the renowned naturalist, sits at the top of the staircase smiling at us as we tote art supplies and the makings of an ant world up to the second floor. E.O. has discovered more than 300 species of ants himself and has studied how a massive ant colony can function as single super-organism. As Pamelia, I and two wonderful College of the Atlantic students, Haley and Sarah, worked together yesterday, I felt as though we were our own super-organism, carrying each piece of the new Notebook to exactly the right place.
At day's end I stopped to see our friend Betty, who has been making beautiful knitted goods for the shop. She gave me the sort of gift I didn't often receive in my pre-Notebook days: a beaver skull with one loose tooth. She'd found it on the ground near her cottage. We will add it to the Notebook's growing collection of specimens.
If any of you happens to be a small-animal dentist, please stop by this summer.