Commission Halts Cave Petition, Orders a Survey

Eighteen boats started from the municipal pier at ten o'clock Saturday morning in the summer regatta, and fourteen crossed the line coming home. The race went to a visiting sloop out of Saugatuck by a margin of four minutes.

The wind turned at four minutes past eleven, which is within a quarter hour of what Mr. Buddy McMulligan told the skippers' meeting on Friday evening it would do. Six boats were caught on the wrong side of the point when it came around.

Three boats retired at the point and one lost a stay off the breakwater and came in under power, with no one hurt and nothing worse than a temper damaged.

Mr. McMulligan, who has run the start for eleven years, was asked afterward how he had known. He said the wind on that stretch has turned at about eleven since before he was born, that he tells the fleet so every year, and that every year six of them find out for themselves.

The Ladies Auxiliary tent at the foot of the pier took in one hundred and eighty-four dollars, all of it going to the church roof.

Dear Lorna Dune,

My husband has taken up the trumpet. He is fifty-six. He practices in the garage with the door up because he says the acoustics are better, and the whole of Orchard Street now knows the first eleven notes of Amazing Grace and nothing after them. I do not want to take this from him. I would like the door down. How do I ask?

Signed, Musical on Orchard Street

Dear Musical,

You ask for the door, not for the trumpet, and you ask on a day he has played well. Say this: I love that you took this up, and the neighbors and I would both do better with the door down. That is the whole sentence. Do not explain it and do not soften it with a compliment on either end, because a compliment fore and aft turns a request into a sandwich and he will eat only the bread.

As to the eleven notes, he will get the twelfth. Everyone does. It is the thirteenth that takes the winter.

Dear Lorna Dune,

I have a friend of thirty years who tells me the same story every time we meet. The same story. I have heard it perhaps two hundred times. I have begun finding reasons not to have coffee with her and I am ashamed of myself.

Signed, Weary on Harbor Street

Dear Weary,

You are not ashamed of avoiding the story. You are ashamed of avoiding her, and you are right to be, so stop doing it and keep the coffee.

Here is the practical part. Next time, when she starts, ask her a question about the part she never tells. Every story has a boring middle the teller skips, and that is where the person still is. Thirty years is a long friendship and a story told two hundred times is not a failing of memory. It is the one part of her life she is certain she got right, and she is checking that it is still there.

Dear Lorna Dune,

My son is nineteen and home from his first year away. He sleeps until noon, eats standing at the icebox, and answers me in one word. My mother says I should be grateful he came home at all. Is she right?

Signed, Invisible on the Lake Road

Dear Invisible,

Your mother is right and it is no comfort, so let us have something you can use.

Stop talking to him across a table. A young man that age will not look at you and speak at the same time; the two functions are wired to the same switch. Talk to him while you are both facing the same direction. In a car, at a sink, on a dock with a line in the water. You will get eight words instead of one, and by the end of August you will get a sentence.

He is not gone. He is nineteen, which is a country with its own language, and you are hearing him speak it badly because he is translating.

It will rain this week. It rains here in July for two afternoons out of seven, it comes in off the water with about twenty minutes of warning, and it is over before supper. The following is offered for those twenty minutes and the two hours after them.

The Journal office. One hundred years of this town in bound volumes, and a reading table under a window. Visitors who ask nicely and turn the pages by the edges are shown in. The 1911 atlas is on the table this week and will stay there, and no, you may not photograph the plate.

Crumb Cottage. Six tables, a window on Main Street, and the best two hours in town on a wet afternoon. Miss Hartwell will not hurry you and will refill the cup without being asked. The awning is green.

The Anchor and Biscuit. Rain drives the whole town indoors and half of it ends up here, on the drink side, telling the other half what the commission ought to have done. Mr. Biscuit sells rope, wrenches, and hot coffee, and will let you sit out a squall without buying any of them.

The dune stairs in rain. For the hardy only, and only if the thunder has passed. The sand goes firm, the flies go home, and the ridge in a light rain is the finest thing in this county. Come down before the wind picks up, and do not be on those stairs in lightning for any reason at all.

Pines and Needles. Out the lake road, and rain is when that porch earns its keep. Visitors on Onesday, and only Onesday, and the women there will hand you a needle inside of ten minutes whether or not you came for one.

The pier at the end of it. Go down when the sky opens back up. The whole lake turns the color of a nickel for about a quarter of an hour after a July rain, and then it stops, and the people who were on the pier saw it and the people who were not did not.

Softball. The Whiskey Pines nine lost at Fennville on Sunday, nine to four, in a game that turned on a fourth inning the less said about the better. Sheriff Kincaid has said less about it than anyone, which those who follow the club will understand to be a bad sign. The season stands at six and four with four to play.

Bowling. The summer league at the Anchor completed its second week with the hardware team leading by two games. The fourth lane has stayed fixed, as Mr. Biscuit asked that it would, and he has asked that this be printed.

Horseshoes. Mr. Jasper Morgan lost the town title on Thursday evening, after seven years of holding it, to Master James Bradley, who is twelve. Mr. Morgan shook the boy's hand, said it was about time somebody did it, and asked for a rematch in August. Master Bradley has agreed to give him one. The pits behind the township hall are open evenings and the crowd has trebled.

Swimming. The current at the north end has settled with the wind. The sheriff's office reports no incidents in two weeks and asks that this not be taken as an invitation to stop watching children, since two weeks is two weeks and the lake has no memory of them.

The roof fund stands at one thousand, nine hundred and forty-four dollars of the twenty-two hundred needed, the regatta tent having brought in one hundred and eighty-four dollars and the ice cream social a further three hundred. The trustees say the balance will be raised by Labor Day and have asked that nobody take that as a reason to wait until Labor Day.

Vacation Bible School finished Friday with forty-one children, one more than were enrolled, and no one has yet established whose the extra was. The ladies report that the week went well and that they would like it noted that two helpers were asked for and four came.

The ice cream social on the lawn Sunday evening ran out of vanilla at half past six and out of chairs before that. Seven freezers were lent. All seven have been returned, which the committee reports is a first.

Sunday services hold at nine and eleven through Labor Day. The choir returns from its summer half rest on the first Sunday of August.

Thanks are offered by the family of Mrs. Ida Renfrew Pettibone to all who came Friday, to the choir for singing without the organ as she asked, and to whoever left the sweet peas at the church door, who did not sign the card and is known to the family regardless.

Mrs. Martha Maxx did not hold the Thursday quilting circle this week, the circle having gone in a body to the township hall on Monday and declared itself too tired for a nine patch. The circle resumes Thursday next.

Miss Becky Hartwell of Crumb Cottage Bakery has had the new awning three weeks now. This column has received four letters on the subject of its color. The awning is green. This column has been across the street and looked at it.

Mr. Ethan Michaels was observed at the pier on Sunday evening in company with the same young woman of this town, this being the third such occasion, at which point a column has a duty. This column will say only that on Sunday she was carrying the coffee, which those who have been young will understand.

Mr. Finch Featherstone has photographed the township hall from four positions and has asked at this office whether the Journal keeps a plat map. It does. He was shown it. He photographed that as well.

Mrs. Verna Loomis has taken first place in hollyhocks at the county fair, second place having gone to a woman from Fennville whose name Mrs. Loomis reports she did not catch.

Mr. Floyd Fiddlefaddle has sold out of leeches and is philosophical about it.

Correction to last week. This column reported that Mrs. Loomis brought the cherry pie to the Fourth of July social. Mrs. Loomis brought the cherry pie to the ice cream social, which is a different event, in a different month, and Mrs. Nussbaum brought the pie in question after all. This column corrected the wrong particular last week and regrets doing so twice.

Mrs. Esther Lund, seventy-nine on Thursday, and the only person in this county who has ever finished a statement to the road commission inside two minutes.

Miss Becky Hartwell, thirty-four on Saturday. She will be at the bakery at six that morning, as she is every morning, and would rather you came in than made a fuss.

Mr. Cal Petrie, sixty-six on Monday, spent as he spends every birthday, on the water, alone, and back before anyone can organize anything.

Master James Bradley, who was twelve last week and is town horseshoe champion this week, and has been asked to stop mentioning it, and will not.

Mrs. Opal Jensen, eighty-eight on Friday, who has outlived three doctors and mentions it at every appointment.

Mr. Cornelius Cornpone, whose birthday falls this week and who declines to say which day, on the ground that a man who keeps the town's records is entitled to keep one of them to himself.

No deaths have been reported in Whiskey Pines in the week past.

This newspaper notes the fact because a small town counts such weeks, and because the last one fell in April.

Last week this column carried a notice from July 1923 recording that the Fairweather boathouse, then lately bought by Mrs. Roxanne Maxx, had been reroofed by a crew of eleven men working nights.

The volume for the following week carries a second item, three inches on page four, under no head at all.

"Mr. Arno Selk, fishing off the north point on Tuesday last, reports that the new roof on the Fairweather boathouse was finished on Monday and that the crew continued to work on Tuesday and on Wednesday, at which the Journal expresses no opinion. Mr. Selk further reports that the men carried nothing down to the building and a good deal up from it. The Journal expresses no opinion as to that either."

The paper of that season had a way of expressing no opinion at some length.

There is no third item. The Journal of 1923 does not return to the Fairweather boathouse, nor to Mrs. Maxx, for eleven weeks, and when it does the subject is a church supper.

The building stood until 1931. The lot above it is the lot the county road commission spent Monday evening discussing, and the third passage on the 1911 plate runs inland from a point that a person standing in that boathouse could have reached without going outside.

That last is this newspaper's own observation, drawn with a ruler on a photograph of the plate, and it is offered as an observation and nothing more.

The morgue holds the rest of the summer of 1923. It will run here as this summer goes on.

The sour cherries came in on the fifteenth and they will be gone by the first week of August, so this is the week. Buy them pitted if your thumbs have any sense left in them, and if you pit your own, wear an apron you have stopped loving.

Sour Cherry Pie, One Nine Inch

Pastry for a double crust, chilled. 4 cups pitted sour cherries. 1 cup sugar, and 2 tablespoons more if the fruit is sharp. 1/3 cup quick tapioca. 1/4 teaspoon salt. 1/4 teaspoon almond extract. 2 tablespoons butter. 1 egg, beaten, for the top.

Stir the cherries, sugar, tapioca, salt, and almond together in a bowl and leave it stand fifteen minutes. This is not optional. The tapioca has to take up the juice or you will pour a cherry soup into your good pastry and blame the oven.

Line the pan, fill it, and dot the top with the butter. Put on the upper crust, cut four vents, and brush with the egg. Some like a lattice. A lattice is a fine thing for a woman with an afternoon.

Bake at 425 degrees for fifteen minutes, then at 350 degrees for forty to fifty minutes more, until the juice comes up through the vents and bubbles thickly rather than thinly. A pie that is not bubbling is not done, whatever the crust has to say about it.

Cool it four hours. Four. A hot cherry pie cuts like weather and sets like nothing at all, and every year somebody serves one warm to be generous and spends the evening apologizing.

The cottages are full and the porch is busy, which means the mending hour has turned into six women, one lamp, and a great deal of advice. This week, something small enough to finish on a porch.

Lavender Sachet, Four Inches Square

Cut two squares of close woven cotton at 4 1/2 inches. Lawn, batiste, or a worn pillowcase, which is better than either and costs nothing. Loose weave will let the dust through and you will find it in the drawer for a year.

Right sides together, seam three sides at 1/4 inch, clip the corners on the diagonal, and turn it. Press with the open edge folded in.

Fill it two thirds with dried buds and a spoonful of orris root, which fixes the scent and is the whole reason a bought sachet outlasts a made one. Do not fill it full. A sachet wants to be squashed in a drawer and a full one will not squash.

Slip stitch the opening closed with small stitches, and take the trouble, because this is the edge that will be handled.

Handy tip. Squeeze it once a month and it will keep two years. And do not put the buds through a grinder to make them go further. One of us did that in 1979 and her linen closet smelled like a cough drop until the Carter administration was out.