Tuesday 21 July 2009

a marvellous night for a moondance

there's rather a lot of fuss about the moon in recent days...and who left which footprint with what and where.

where were you when it was all going on 40 years ago?

i was at school in Germany. we started our day early at 8am...but by 1300hrs we were home again and sitting down to a lovely hot lunch cooked by my delightful great-aunt. there'd be at least 10 people around the table on any day, often quite a few more as starving students would turn up in the hope of a feed. after lunch we'd disappear into the park across the way or the beech forest just up the hill and play to our hearts content.

that month we watched the moon landing on a crackly black-and-white tv. i skeptically wondered why the flag was fluttering, and what the fuss was about

Woodstock had a much greater impact on me - but only about 10 years later, when i finally realised what it meant...not realising it had happened just down the road from where we lived only a little later that same year

here's a clip from the movie "A Walk in the Moon" filmed at a summer camp much like the one we lived at in the fall and winter of '69...excepting we were at Aloha Manor [Vermont] after summer camp was finished and everyone had gone home and back to school

imagine two children aged 10 and 7, running wild in the red leaf fall. paddling canoes on the lake, playing hide-and-seek in the forest. romping in the snow. good times.

5 comments:

  1. just came back from a little riverside camping so i am mercifully out of the clamor and commotion about the moon - however, I love your memories of summer and fall, when you could be gone for hours playing - I keep trying to get my life back to some of that ease and joy of earlier times
    I remember the moon fuss of 40 years ago vaguely, i was 8 at the time
    strangley, i was only like 2 at the time, but Kennedy's death made a much larger impression upon me

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  2. I was living in an apartment on the grange beach with lots of art school buddies. it is there I watched the moon landing. the fuzzy visuals didn't do it for me, the amazing occasion did....

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  3. It was the year I was born, which has made quite an impact on me...LOL
    I have not been following all the hubbabeloo about the moon landing, stopped watching the tv when we moved out to Norway last summer but I did buy your book "eco dyeing" and look forwards to playing with all the wonderful new things I will learn from it!

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  4. they sat us all down in the assembly room at school, and we watched a tiny b&W tv transfixed.

    Somethign I will remember seeing the rest of my life.

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  5. I like the image of you running wild in Vermont. Vermont can always handle a bit of wildness I always think. And thank you for the milk/soy milk hint you left on my blog. Will definitely try it.

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