We lived for a year in Colorado. The access road to our housing complex presented a spectacular, expansive view of the Rockies. The mountains were my morning companions as I drove beside them into Denver. I thought at first that they stood as a silent reminder that some things cannot be corrupted. But, it now feels like stoical acquiescence. I will return to the mountains, they are like friends; but, the ocean is in my blood and I can’t be away too long. In contrast, my grandfather, Robert Lowry Calhoun, wrote of how the mountains restored his faith when he found he had, “Doubt that there is any God, and…

My family has owned a house on an island in Penobscot Bay where we have gone in the summer since the 1930s. Summer people are never fully accepted into the community by the locals; except, with some dispensation for the fact that “my Grandmother knew your Grandmother”. At the height of the depression there weren’t many options for a “proper” vacation with four children on a professor’s salary. The first year, while Grandpa taught on the mainland, Grandma took a boat to the island and she and children and luggage were all dropped on the muddy sand of the harbor at low tide. How long was it, wondering what kind…

In May I stopped in Harrisburg. The Dauphin County Historical Society has the pre-colonial account book of the Rev. John Roan for Paxtang and Derry. I discovered in this book that my ancestor, George Calhoon, twice paid his church subscription with “a bushel of salt”. An art professor of mine was pleased to have my company but mentioned a proverb from his native Poland, “One is not a friend until you have shared a barrel of salt.” The sense was that one’s friends have shared both times for breaking bread and salving wounds. I was not aware until recently that this expression has an origin earlier than Aristotle. But it is…