Barbara Scott

Sixty-seven years ago I had all day to work out my plan, a Rube Goldberg construction that involved my bedpost, a tree outside my bedroom window on the second floor of our rented one-hundred-and fifty-year-old farmhouse, a pulley and rope, a coat hanger, some rags and a sheet. That house was spooky. The farmer landlord, who had a newer home hidden by fields and trees, Elderberry thickets and a swampy creek, said the house had been built by ancestors in the early 1800's.

Sometimes there is a flicker in my memory and I walk back to a simpler, though maybe less convenient world of the past. We just didn’t know it was inconvenient. (And that conundrum poses philosophical questions I won’t explore here.) That flicker was the sound of wooden floors, old wooden floors — the creak and snap of beautifully worn and cared-for real wood — an ambiance that so many are trying to recapture with up-scaled, modern redos.

PREFACE. Four kayak adventures will do. I was 70, more than just a few years ago when I decided to “learn how to kayak” in the Aeolian Islands. It sounds like a fantasy, but I was solivagant in Italy again. Wandering around alone was my form of adventure and I began traveling around Italy by train, bus, boat, ferry, and ship in 1994 when I spent a fall semester there on sabbatical. Getting around was pretty easy, just look at a map, decide where you want to go, and show up at the train station.