The Cobbler’s Children

 

I’m sure you all know the story of the cobbler’s children having no shoes.  We do have cloth-covered wire in our house, but often things go years before they are rewired.  Case in point is a little fan that I have planned to mount on the wall in the bathroom to try to alleviate that just-out-of-the-shower way-way-too-hot feeling.  Since the temperatures have been going up into the 90s recently, and working from home has been keeping the things I’ve been meaning to do in my face all day, every day, the little Perfex fan is finally getting a fix-up.

You Can’t Take Me Anywhere…

…seemingly, without me finding some cloth-covered wire.  My latest encounter with finding it unexpectedly started in a way not associated with wire at all.  It started out with ocean liners.

Twisted Wire in the Woods

Well, I’ve already established that I see wire everywhere (see this blog post), but I surprised even myself when I managed to find twisted wire in the woods.  OK, it’s not twisted electrical wire, but I had to investigate it anyway.

A Transcendental Road Trip

What do cloth-covered wire manufacturers see when they are sightseeing?  Let me tell you….

On a whim, Jim and I went to Concord, Massachusetts, this weekend, about ninety miles from our home in Northampton. While Concord is best known for being, along with Lexington, MA, the location of “the shot heard around the world“, the beginning of the fighting in the American Revolutionary War, it was also home to several of America’s shining literary lights of the nineteenth century, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, who coined that famous phrase, as well as being the founder of the Transcendentalist Movement.   Just west of Boston, the road between Boston and Concord is the location of Paul Revere’s famous ride.

Jim and I visited the Minute Man National Park, a large national park covering much of the road along which that first battle of the Revolution took place.  Also part of the park is a house called Wayside: Home of Authors.  This is a house where several famous American authors lived, the Alcotts, including Louisa May, author of Little Women and its sequels, Nathaniel Hawthorne, author, most famously, of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, and Margaret Sydney (real name Harriett Lothrop), author of the children’s book series, The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew.