G.M. Smith, part two

My review and commentary continue:

(Part one here.)

Doctor Smith: Hokianga’s King of the North, by G. Kemble Welch.
Published by Blackwood and Janet Paul, Auckland and Hamilton, 1965. Printed in Great Britain by Latimer Trend and Co Ltd, Plymouth.

p. 26-27

Although the hospital was small, it was full of trouble…His chief worry was a boy of four with an appendix abscess on which he had operated. The wound had broken down; he had repaired it; now the second lot of stitching was giving way and the wound was full of pus.

It is difficult these days for a younger generation of doctors, let alone of lay people, to realise the constant anxiety that infection, and pus–its sign–were to a surgeon before the era of antibiotics. He was constantly aware that any kind of wound, from an insect bite to a surgical incision, might get a germ in it which would set up an infection he could not control, and he would have to stand by and watch his patient die of septicaemia. It was all part of the world in which he lived and worked and the risk was accepted as inevitable; but so was the worry inevitable and not less wearing for that.

We are in a new age of anxiety, this time over antibiotic resistance. Now the question is not necessarily one of infection but of superbug infection, of appropriate antibiotic usage, of the possibility that we may soon be right back in G.M. Smith’s era of worry, plus some.

A week ago, The Guardian ran this piece: Antibiotic-resistant diseases pose ‘apocalyptic’ threat, expert says. The World Health Organization has published figures for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis and staph infections such as MRSA that are worrying because they are so widespread. Extensively drug-resistant TB, for instance, has been found in 64 countries and counting.

What can we do about this? The strategy that seemed likely to work for limiting the spread of really bad bugs (screen new patients for MRSA or VRE and have health care providers use physical barriers like gloves and gowns) was discovered in 2011 to have “no effect.” The New England Journal of Medicine study (scroll down to “Intervention to Reduce Transmission of Resistant Bacteria…”) notes that “adherence to precautions was suboptimal.”  However, the article just below (see “Veterans Affairs Initiative…”) gives us some hope that institutional change can be effective where everyone is responsible for infection control.

It’s a problem with many facets, of course, including high antibiotic prescribing rates, the shift to using newer broad-spectrum antibiotics, and patient non-compliance with finishing a round of prescribed antibiotics.

Rates of antibiotic-resistant infection peak in winter, when another unfriendly bug makes its rounds: the flu. This year’s a bad one, from everything I’m hearing from the northern hemisphere, with the CDC confirming an early beginning and a probable long tail. Just think: at least it’s not 1918.

p. 41-42 [The 1918 influenza epidemic]

Dr Smith and the district nurses were trying to be everywhere at once, but of course did not succeed.

At nearby Pakanae nearly every family was sick; but only two people died. This was probably due to the efforts of the Fells and the Websters, who alone remained unaffected. When they realised that in the Maori settlement all the people had sickened at the same time, were too ill to look after themselves and were starving, they organised a relief service.

To start with, the Fells killed a pig and gave one half to the Websters. From both halves broth was made and taken around in dixies in the family buggies. As they came to a house they would call out, and whoever was least ill would come outside with some sort of container. They would ladle out the broth, and go on to the next place.  A bullock followed the pig, and with the twice daily supply of food the people began to get better. As they improved, Mrs Fell and Mrs Webster made scones, rice puddings and cakes to add to their diet of stews, until the people were well enough to look after themselves again.

…

In the middle of all this a call came from Waiotemarama. They were hard hit over there, with many deaths, and urgently needed more supplies. Could someone help? Mr Fell couldn’t really spare the time from his own worries, but it sounded as though Waiotemarama was worse, so he agreed to drive in a dray loaded with their requirements: coffins and whisky.

In November 1918 Mr J. Nisbet had just returned from the war to live in Rawene with his bride and they ‘walked right into the ‘flu’, and into Dr Smith’s handling of the situation.

He had decided that, since the disease was infectious, people must stop making contact with one another; if each family lived in their own house and there was no visiting, no travelling, the possibility of handing on or catching the disease would be greatly reduced. But he found that people were weak; they liked visiting and travelling and were not prepared to stop merely because Dr Smith said it might save their lives. The next step was to post armed men at crossroads to turn back travellers. There is no record of them needing to shoot anyone. No Parliamentary or other authority was given for this. It was G.M.’s idea. He said do it, and it was done.

G.M.’s ideas about quarantine weren’t new, and they weren’t ill-founded. If you keep people apart, the germs can’t spread from host to host. Galileo, for instance, was kept from seeing his beloved daughter because of the Catholic church authorities’ rules during the bubonic plague outbreak of 1629. She sent tonics by messenger that were meant to keep him safe from the plague (while rats roamed freely, of course).

We know about rats and their fleas now; we know about antibiotics for bacterial infection and precautions for avoiding flu viruses and still we fall ill, all too often. I’m thinking of my brother P and his wife C and their three kids, who’ve played unwilling hosts to this year’s flu bug. Get better, dear ones.

More excerpts of G.M. Smith’s biography to come!

G.M. Smith, part one

I am reading a book out loud to the family. It’s a biography of a Scotsman, a surgeon who came to Rawene in 1914 with his bombastic personality and big ideas about how to practice medicine, and even more than that, how to go about the business of living. His name was G.M. Smith and he was a believer in socialized health care. He saw the inability of people in the Hokianga to pay for a doctor’s services and, believing deeply in the human right to healthcare, started the socialized health care system that is still in place in this small part of New Zealand.

He also happens to be the grandfather of Alexander McCall Smith, who you’ll know if you read the Ladies’ No. 1 Detective Agency books or any number of his other works.

No small part of the charm of this book and why it’s working to read it out loud to the whole family is the narrator’s wit and turns of phrase. The book is quite rare; it’s not on Google Books; I found a couple on sellers’ online sites from closed auctions. The author, to the best of my knowledge, is still living, and NZ copyright law protects the work until the end of the calendar year 50 years from the time of the author’s death. So the only way this delightful, extraordinary book will find you in the reasonably near future is if you read these excerpts I’m publishing under fair use as a means of reviewing the book.

Doctor Smith: Hokianga’s King of the North, by G. Kemble Welch.
Published by Blackwood and Janet Paul, Auckland and Hamilton, 1965. Printed in Great Britain by Latimer Trend and Co Ltd, Plymouth.

p.20

[Upon arrival in Rawene in September 1914, G.M. Smith and his wife moved into the medical superintendent’s house.] It was a standard New Zealand box in the style of the time—a gabled square with a veranda across the front and down one side. For water they had only rain from the roof stored in tanks; but for four months after they arrived none fell. The grass dried and bleached to white. Gaunt cattle stood in a countryside which was brittle and ready to burn at any spark.

They tried to turn the large rough section into an orchard, a vegetable garden and lawns with flower beds; but as, time after time, seeds failed to grow among the sprouting weeds, or seedling plants transplanted failed to thrive, they lost heart and gradually put less effort into it, until in any ordinary sense there was no garden. The front fence became a long mound of climbing roses, the once white picket gate opened on to a path kept almost clear of the honeysuckle which had taken over most of the ground, and steps rose to the front door under large loquat trees which shaded and almost hid the house.

But in 1915 things were different. On 9 January of that year Dr Smith began a diary in which the first entry says:

Owing to inability to get a suitable book this diary is a little late in being started.

At this date our household dependents consist of our two selves, the Lily, Flannigan (a half-bred setter and half a retriever, I think) Caesar (a chestnut gelding aged five years and sixteen and a half hands high) and Donald (a bay gelding about fifteen hands high and rising four years).

‘The Lily’ is a thin muse named Edward Beazley, now in our employment. He is called the Lily because of a wonderful yellow and black jersey which he affects and because he toils not, etc. I am giving him two pounds a week. So far he has been highly satisfactory. He lights the kitchen fires, does the fowls, the lamps, and feeds the horses, besides the garden, etc.

Today he put up a new garden gate. He has been wheeling up shells and soil from the site of an old Maori encampment down by the river, intending to put them on the garden. Just now in the garden we have little or nothing. The tomatoes are not ripe but they are a good crop. We have sown seeds in the new soil and also have lettuces, one marrow (which I think is ripe), turnips and radishes (getting rather passé).

Our own gardening efforts in New Zealand have produced some beautiful strawberries, tomatoes, and quite a few zucchinis (known here as courgette). I didn’t know what marrow was until now: summer squash. We buy a kind of marrow from the vegetable shop here called kamokamo.

p. 24

By this time [January of 1915] he had adopted a style of dress which became the insignia, the uniform, of Rawene Smith. It consisted of an old grey felt hat with a sagging brim, a loose grey flannel jacket over an open-necked white cotton shirt and a pair of unironed flannel trousers, Roman sandals and no socks.

That suited the hot and humid climate, but as protection from the rain he wore over all an old oilskin coat, and, since in Hokianga if it is not raining it is likely to, he nearly always had that oilskin on. With most people, hats and coats and so on are sometimes new, but Dr Smith’s were always old and rather shabby. From under his hat-brim peered piercing or twinkling blue eyes around whose corners the years gathered quizzical creases, and beneath his big hooked nose he held in his down-curved mouth a down-curling pipe. The passage of time wore the hair from his crown and in compensation he let it grow longer as it got lower, until he used to feel insulted if he was compared to an Old Testament prophet; ‘because I’m used to being placed much higher in the hierarchy than that.’

And so we see the first hints of an iconoclastic, strong, and even despotic nature that would not always play well with others but proved useful in getting things done. His choice of dress is interesting because though he wore sandals, he kept the jacket even in the heat, as men did years ago.  For comparison, 98 years later now in January of 2013, B left for the same hospital this morning to deliver a baby before his usual clinic patients. He wore a blue cotton button-down with khaki trousers. I know this because mid-morning, he called to ask if I could bring him a fresh pair of trousers, as his had been sprayed with umbilical cord blood and needed washing. Scrubs, I learned, are not a routine part of preparing to deliver a baby here. I have to wonder if G.M. wore that oilskin partly because it would have been easy to wash.

InterIsland Ferry, Wellington Revisited, and Home Again

Part Twelve: Taking the three-hour InterIsland Ferry between the South and North islands became a series of small migrations onboard the ship.  One of our routes was between the cafe on the seventh floor and the restaurant on the eighth. As on the Bainbridge ferry, if you’re embarking with a crush of other people (full ferry), it’s a good idea to stake out the family home base when you spy an open spot, so I claimed our seats on the 7th floor early on.

I’ve mentioned before how relatively easy it is to find gluten-free food in NZ, and the menus posted in the ferry included a whole list of gluten-free options, available on the 8th floor. A. has been getting migraines, and like me, if he eats a gluten-free diet, the migraines stay away. It took me years to figure out that connection, but is my 9-year-old happy about this knowledge? Decidedly not. However, it is a little easier for him when lunch offerings include GF sushi, butter chicken, french fries, and mince pie (a savory pot pie).

There was a magic show, there were movie screenings on various levels of the ferry, there were well-lit, wide staircases to climb. Would that every long journey be so friendly to captive passengers.

Two couples were chatting at the table next to ours, with the wife finishing her husband’s sentence as they said the words together (jinx! my kids yell when that happens to us). “Does she regularly finish your sentences for you?” the other woman asked with a chuckle. “Yes, and when I’m on my own it gets rather tiring because I have to find my way to the end by myself,” the man said.

Taking the ferry was the first time I’ve been aboard a vessel in open deep water. S. and I went to the blustery, sea-sprayed outer decks with their breathtaking views and cold fresh air, got blown to bits, went back inside for a bit, then seasickness drove me outside again. Here we’re just pulling past the southern end of the North Island.

In Wellington again, our car needed some minor repairs so we filled the day with a tour of the New Zealand parliament buildings and sight seeing. Our guide for the parliament tour was funny and knowledgeable and the tour was one of the best things on the whole trip. No pictures were allowed but that’s okay–you can take a virtual tour here.  Once again, I was struck by the human scale of things. Standing in the debating chamber, one could imagine the lively sally, parry, thrust of issues and personalities as the MPs sort things out. The stories the guide told us reminded me of Anthony Trollope’s hugely enjoyable Palliser novels about Victorian English politics.

We also visited the beautiful Old St. Paul’s Cathedral. Interestingly, there is a 48-star American flag hanging from the center of the cathedral, where it’s been since WWII. There is also a U.S. Marine Corps flag hanging beside it. Tucked beside the altar, you can find the story behind this; it’s quite poignant. Noel O’Hare writes:

The exhibition commemorates an extraordinary period in New Zealand history, when there was a real threat of invasion by the Japanese, and the country was virtually defenceless. Then, on a grey winter’s day, 12 June 1942, thousands of American soldiers came to the rescue. They sailed into Auckland and Wellington harbours to be met with the sort of rapturous reception that might have greeted All Blacks returning with a World Cup.  Many of those Marines worshipped at Old St Paul’s during their time in New Zealand.

The next two days were spent driving home, with a stop overnight in Wanganui, which struck us as a very pretty place. And finally, home again, home again, jiggety jig! We found the garden still thriving, thanks to wonderful friends D and J. We found some new spidery tenants who soon found themselves gone to that good night. We found ourselves sailors back from the sea, so very glad for the home shore.

Abel Tasman National Park

Part Eleven: Abel Tasman National Park is one of the places that caught my eye early as I thumbed through travel books on New Zealand while still in the States. It’s a small park at the northwestern tip of the South Island, made up of golden sand beaches lapped by brilliant turquoise waters, edged by a coastal hiking track that’s one of New Zealand’s Great Walks.

In the morning, we packed water bottles, a picnic lunch, bug spray (happily unnecessary, as it turned out), and drove to the water taxi gathering-point in Motueka. We hopped into the open-air water taxi, which was pulled along the street by a tractor before being launched into the sea. The boat took us around several little bays and ultimately dropped us off at the hiking trail head at Anchorage Bay.

This is Split Apple Rock, a locally famous landmark.

Our water taxi guide told us that this national park was created in 1942, exactly 300 years after Abel Tasman sailed into misadventure in Golden Bay.

I’m looking down at Te Pukatea Bay from the hiking trail. We took a side spur down to the water.

The two colors of water are interesting, aren’t they? The dark blue is freshwater.

While we walked, we talked about Galileo because I’d been reading a fascinating biography called Galileo’s Daughter.  We talked about the aspects of New Zealand and greater Polynesia that Jared Diamond touches on in Guns, Germs, and Steel because B’s been reading that.

Sometimes there was shade, and I was glad for the fern glades when we passed through them. We were all hot, thirsty, and tired by the end of the 5 hour hike. It was the most physically demanding hike we’ve taken the kids on, and also one of the most beautiful.

Back at the place we were staying, I caught a glimpse of a pukeko in the field. They have such an amusing gait, striding awkwardly on their long legs with their red beak leading the way in short purposeful jabs. This is the best one I got—I didn’t get a clear one because my arms were shaking slightly from the day’s exertion. With the kids playing in the pool (energizer bunnies all),  B grilled venison burgers for our dinner and I sat down to finish the Galileo book. Be warned: read the end only if you’re in a place where you can flat-out cry. Even better, have someone to hug right away while you’re crying. And then eat berries and venison burgers and be glad that people have loved so much and so well.

Green, Red, Purple, Black

Part Ten! Greymouth is famous for being a source of pounamu, or New Zealand jade. It’s only found on the west coast of the South Island, and when storms wash new rocks down the Grey River, people go out looking for pounamu.

This stone is significant in Maori culture for several reasons. First, because it was historically used instead of metal to form their best tools and jewelry. Second, since the stone is porous, it absorbs one’s natural oils and, it is believed, one’s spirit, which is carried forever within the stone. Third, its relative rarity makes it precious. Though nephrite jade can be found around the world, it is only found in a very small portion of New Zealand. It’s also a protected natural resource, with the NZ government recognizing the Westland tribes that traditionally controlled pounamu trade as having legal ownership of NZ pounamu starting in 1997.

This is the work of Garth Wilson, who has a lot of soul and commitment to authenticity. He and his family find all the pounamu he uses in his work. His workshop and store is adjacent to his house, so he doesn’t travel to a separate place to work. He doesn’t sell any of his stuff through any outlets–just from him.

After our stay in Greymouth, we headed north to Motueka on the newly-reopened highway. This is agricultural country, with a little town you might recognize the name of:

Braeburn apples, ripening in the New Zealand summer.

In Braeburn, there is the loveliest little U-pick berry place where we found ripe, huge, mouth-watering berries. I was picking next to a lovely white-haired lady whose husband came up and said, “Are you ready, dear?”

She said, “No… not quite yet.”

He said in an understanding tone, “Yes, the hunter-gatherer instinct is strong.”

This was just one berry! They’re a huge variety of blackberry, the Karaka, that was bred specifically for this location. They’re amazingly fragrant and helped make up for our sorely-missed berrying trips on Bainbridge last summer.

Greymouth

Part Nine: The glaciers we didn’t see, and the things we saw instead.

The storm I’ve mentioned, the one that deprived us of our greatly anticipated rail journey and kicked up a whole lot worse trouble for folks actually living and working on the south island, also washed out a key bridge on the highway south to the glaciers. It had also washed out the road to the north, leaving us right where we were in Greymouth, not a planned destination.

You can just barely make out the Southern Alps on a fine day from Greymouth, and that’s as close as we came to the Franz Josef Glacier. I think the glaciers were still accessible by helicopter, because we saw several tour helicopters flying south the next day. Have fun, flush ones!

The Franz Josef Glacier is really cool because it’s normally so accessible, with its terminal wall only about 900 feet above sea level and safe hiking trails and education resources right there. It’s a World Heritage Area, with the little town of Franz Josef absorbing and playing host to the crowds that normally come during the summer.

The front page of the local paper bemoaned the situation—not only were land communications and supply lines cut off to southern Westland, savvier travelers than we were had stayed away.  This last fact gave us some hope that we could secure last-minute accommodations, and in fact, there was a lovely cabin available at the Greymouth Holiday Park, right on the beach. We got some provisions from the grocery store, settled firmly into Plan B, and enjoyed the sunset.

Pancake Rocks

Part Eight! Having arrived on the west coast, we drove just a little north of Greymouth to a natural feature called Punakaiki, or Pancake Rocks. These strangely beautiful natural sculptures formed 30 million years ago about a mile under the surface of the ocean, then were upheaved and weathered to the state we see them in now. Gorgeous!

When the tide is high and the wind westerly, blowholes in the rocks make for a spectacular spray show. We didn’t see that going on because the seas were too calm, but we did have pancakes on the brain long after visiting Punakaiki…

The next morning, guess who had pancakes for brunch? All five of us hungry hikers scarfed them down as fast as B could turn them out of the pan–turns out, a cabin kitchenette, a box of GF cake mix, and a whole bunch of eggs works pretty well when you’ve just gotta have pancakes!

Arthur’s Pass

Part Seven: Across the Southern Alps

We all got up early in order to get to the train station in Christchurch, only to find at the station that the heavy rains earlier in the week (known to us as the crazy Wellington wind, in the northern iteration of the storm) had washed out a significant portion of the rail track and the TranzAlpine wasn’t running. Instead, many of our would-be fellow travelers were climbing aboard a big touring bus that had been arranged to get folks to Greymouth. We opted instead to rent a car a day early and drive ourselves over the gorgeous Arthur’s Pass.

Our first rest stop on the way across the Southern Alps was called Castle Hill. We all stretched the old legs, the kids used the portable loo, and B and I helped push a no-go camper van for some friendly Germans.

These boulders are huge—the cows grazing in the field give a point of reference.

The intense blue river that flows along Arthur’s Pass is the Waimakariki.

Christchurch

Part Six: We took the next leg of our journey by airplane; leaving our car on the North Island would allow us to take the rail line on the South Island and come back as foot passengers on the huge InterIsland Ferry. It took an hour to fly from Wellington to Christchurch. The plane was a small one that we boarded from the tarmac (it’s always exciting to walk out into the open air and up the steps to your plane—there’s an extra sense of adventure, colored by the roar of the propellers and the old pictures of movie stars and presidents turning for a photo op on the plane stairs). The plane that AirNZ flies between the islands is an Aerospatiale ATR72 , made by the same company that made the Concorde.

Once we landed, our trip began to veer into Plan B territory. We’d thought of going to the Antarctic Center (I read that 70% of all the people flying to the Antarctic take off from Christchurch) and/or renting bicycles to tour around the largely flat city, but I was feeling a little low-energy. Punting on the Avon River was perfect, because after walking for 45 minutes to the CBD, I just wanted to sit and let the riverbank stream past. The kiddos didn’t mind it either.

Christchurch is a sprawly sort of city, which I wasn’t expecting. Some parts of the outer city and suburbs look like they’ve recovered well from the devastating 2010-2011 quakes, while the main part of the CBD is still in utter shambles, enough to make your heart catch in your throat for a second.

This is Christchurch Cathedral, at the heart of the city.

(Map source: blog.teara.govt.nz)

You can see the clear zones of earthquake risk in this map. Up in the Far North where we live, it’s pretty low-risk, but even the areas of less severe risk (such as where Christchurch is) can be hugely disrupted if a quake is a lateral one where the earth shifts sideways rather than up and down.

As we walked along the city sidewalks and through the huge Hagley Park, which the river punter/guide told us was the 3rd largest city park in the world (after Central Park in NYC and Stanley Park in Vancouver), we talked about soul and what it means for a place to have soul. Having driven through, walked about in, and stayed in numerous towns and cities at this point, we had some items at hand for a list:

A city must:

Have a walkable urban center or small centers. Christchurch is still suffering, not least because its main central square is cordoned off and bulldozers still taking down half-collapsed buildings. We couldn’t find the natural gathering place in the evening, and it was a sort of dispiriting walk back along vehicle-heavy roads to get to our lodgings.

Have street musicians. Buskers are an infusion of beauty (even if they’re not always very good, and maybe especially then, they tend to provoke a rush of sympathy from me) into a space that often sorely needs beauty.

Have non-chain stores. Just as in the USA, New Zealand towns and cities have their chains that pop up again and again, flattening differences that would naturally arise from the area’s people, tastes, and natural resources. Okay, okay, we did patronize St. Pierre Presents Sushi of Japan, and it was a very good lunch. Seeing a place you know has food you can eat is a relief, and the dependability factor makes this issue of chain stores tricky.

Have trees and green spaces. Christchurch is called the Garden City, though there are many areas within the shadow of its sprawl that are overrun with weeds. You know what I mean, because you’ve seen it too, in other cities: the sad patch of yellow weeds behind a business, the strip of planter bed between a parking lot and the street that’s been neglected. My hypothesis is that when great tragedy struck, resources were diverted toward the highest needs, leaving scant resources to care for these wayside areas all over.

As Christchurch mends, I’m sure many of these things will return. Right now, though, it’s still heartbreaking to find a city in shambles.

Windy Wellington

Part Five: How windy?

We, along with several hundred other Wellingtonians eager to ring in the New Year, swept out onto the sidewalks and streets, braving gale-force gusts for the sake of seeing some midnight fireworks over the harbor.

After the short burst of cheering and kissing and hugging and picture-taking, we started to hear things like, “Wow, it’s windy.” ” Where are the fireworks? I was promised fireworks.” The dark harbor churned, its surface whipped and slapped by the uneven gusts, but no fireworks illuminated the water. We started to sense that even for locals, this kind of wind was ridiculous. Back in the hostel, we learned  that the fireworks were canceled because of the danger of them being blown sideways.

Wellington is notoriously windy, partly because it lies on the southern tip of the northern island, where it’s exposed to the Cook Strait winds that rush between the two islands that make up New Zealand, and partly because of its position on the globe. Wellington’s latitude is 41 degrees South, placing it in the “Roaring Forties” that have aided sailors passing along this consistantly windy band.

Over three nights in Wellington, I’d drift off to sleep with the wind shuddering at the windows, only to wake up suddenly with the snap and howl of a furious gust. It made me feel cold even though the room was warm. It made me feel small and vulnerable, and I thought of all the small children in reach of the storm, awake in the night along with me.

The wind was truly out of the ordinary, part of a huge low pressure system that was wreaking havoc further south, down by Christchurch and across the Southern Alps by Greymouth…

But during our stay in Wellington, we filled our days brimfull. We saw The Hobbit at the Embassy Theatre where it had its world premiere!

We visited the Botanic Garden, where I smelled the rose named Land of the Long White Cloud:

And this beauty called Sheila’s Perfume:

The kids were excited to be in the first capital city of a country ever in their lives. Fun fact: Wellington is the most remote capital city in the world (meaning, furthest away from any other capital city).

We went to Te Papa, the national museum. It’s six floors of great stuff–natural history, art, interactive displays. I like to think of museums like this as magazines, and I do best when I’m moving quickly through, stopping to really take something in only when it grabs me. Otherwise a strange museum malaise takes hold–fatigue and sensory overload.

I experienced quite the opposite  in Katherine Mansfield’s house–her birthplace, where she spent her earliest years. The house has been refitted to reflect what it might have looked like when Katherine was there and is also in use as a sort of art gallery for the work of artists inspired by KM.  I learned that her maiden name, Beauchamp, was pronounced “Beecham.”  I saw the doll’s house that inspired her short story of the same name, and looked at several of her hand-written notebooks. Fascinating.

Compact, beautiful, filled with public art. I began this post with a whine about wind and I’ll end it with a love note. Wellington, I’d come back to you.