The annual Fourth of July parade in Lyme, which was founded by Dr. William Irving in 1958, will be held Tuesday, July 4, starting “at 10 a.m. or when everyone is ready.”
People wishing to participate should assemble at Camp Claire between 9 and 10 a.m. No prior registration is required to march.
After the parade, Lyme Parks and Recreation will be providing food and fun while hosting a range of activities at the Grange Hall.
Sunday, July 2, 1 to 3 p.m. is Kid’s Nature Day at the exhibit. Join the Lyme Land Trust for fun hands-on activities for children!
Note: Children must be accompanied by an adult.
The event is sponsored by the Lyme Land Conservation Trust with support from the 8mile Wild and Scenic Committee. The Lyme Public Hall is located at 249 Hamburg Road (Rte 156) Hamburg, CT.
Old Lyme’s trash and recycling schedule for the week commencing Monday, July 3, is as follows:
Monday, July 3:
All trash and recycling routes will be picked up on their normal schedule.
Tuesday, July 4:
NO trash or recycling pick-up.
Wednesday, July 5:
BOTH Tuesday AND Wednesday’s trash and recycling routes will be picked up on their normal schedule.
Thursday, July 6 & Friday, July 7:
All trash or recycling routes will be picked up on their normal schedule.
Michaelle Pearson and Jim Lampos gave a fascinating talk at the Old Lyme Phoebe Griffin Noyes Library last Tuesday.
Last Tuesday evening local authors and historians Michaelle Pearson and Jim Lampos gave a captivating talk to a packed house gathered at the Old Lyme-Phoebe Griffin Noyes Library that took the audience back in time to pivotal turning points in the Revolutionary War involving the Lymes.
Husband and wife Pearson and Lampos asked their audience to imagine they were standing at the bend of the “Three roads” as it was then called — McCurdy, Lyme St. and Ferry Road — and then expertly described the street during an ordinary day in bustling colonial times. Such was their storytelling expertise that as they spoke, you could almost see the shipbuilding on the river, merchant deliveries being made by horse-drawn wagons and the ferry making its way across to Saybrook.
Only then did you realize how much our town has changed … but at the same time, how much it has not changed at all.
It is not always a given that writers are also good oral story tellers, but when you can almost hear the gallop of Israel Bissell — one of the five riders dispatched with Paul Revere — thundering down Lyme Street with his call to arms, you know that Pearson and Lampos are exemplary at both and moreover their love of history so strong, that you can’t help but feel it too.
The intricate parts played and the powerful plans made by these memorable figures whom you have heard about all your life are exciting stuff! To know that all this was going on here in this town, shaping not just individual futures but the country’s too, summons up a host emotions.
Lampos and Pearson delivered an extraordinary history lesson that brought Lyme street into a “new light.“ When you have the chance, take the time to hear this talk and you will have a new appreciation for our town greens and the inspirational independence the Lymes had before, during and after the Revolutionary War … and continue to exhibit to this day.
A present from a New Hampshire daughter, The Tide is a delightful, entertaining, and thought-provoking mix of lucid, often poetic, language with numerous literary quotations plus detailed scientific explanations of the tides that embellish our lives on this earth. It is Aldersey-Williams’s thought-experiment.
It is also his history of the oceanic tides, mixed with a bit of mathematics. But not more than you can handle. As he notes, “You may be relieved to know that I will leave the mathematics aside here.” And, given that many tell us the world’s tides are soon to be much higher, this is a most worthwhile book.
It is, as he states, “not a book about the sea” (sailors, ships, and winds), but rather a book “about the seas” and the ever-changing space between land and water. The tide, he explains, “offers an irresistible mathematical tease” as we attempt to understand and predict it. It is both a horizontal and a vertical force. That is a “scientific challenge” and “a physical; and psychological influence on our culture.” The classic story of King Canute’s (or Cnut, as the author spells it) attempt to stem the tide may have altered the English view of nobility.
This is the author’s story of watching tides around the world, from the English Channel to, of all places, Griswold Point on the Connecticut River, with a cousin, David Redfield. Tides are entrancing: they give us slow, relative motion that produces a “hallucinatory feeling.” Water is, after all, “an inelastic fluid (that) cannot be compressed or expanded.” I too have been mesmerized: by the 10-foot tides in Tenants Harbor, Maine; by the rising waters in Bosham, West Sussex, England, that regularly swamp cars in the local bar’s parking lot; and by the rushing tidal currents in the Straits of Shimonoseki, between Honshu and Kyushu, Japan, through which we once sent our Navy ship (at slack water, of course!)
He acknowledges the inevitability of climate change and global warming, and the fact they will lead to rising seas: “The greatest impact of rising sea levels and the changing tides that may accompany them will be on human habitation.” After all, we easily succumb to the human drive to cling to shores. “In the long term, if not the short, ‘managed retreat’ is our only option. The sea always wins in the end.”
Trying to ‘stop the sea? “It is a futility that Sisyphus would understand all too well.” So New York is a potential Venice … and New London too!
But do not be deterred by such pessimism. The Tide is full of rich, poetic language, as in this description of birds above the sea: “Once aloft, the birds first coalesce as an egg-shaped cloud low over the water, before gaining height and taking on ever more extravagant, twisted shapes like a pixelated flamenco dancer.”
It is enough to send me down to the end of Ely’s Ferry Road to watch the Connecticut River slip by the marshes of Essex.
Editor’s Note: ‘The Tide’ by Hugh Aldersey-Williams was published by W. W. Norton, New York 2016.
Felix Kloman
About the Author: Felix Kloman is a sailor, rower, husband, father, grandfather, retired management consultant and, above all, a curious reader and writer. He’s explored how we as human beings and organizations respond to ever-present uncertainty in two books, ‘Mumpsimus Revisited’ (2005) and ‘The Fantods of Risk’ (2008). A 20-year resident of Lyme, he now writes book reviews, mostly of non-fiction that explores our minds, our behavior, our politics and our history. But he does throw in a novel here and there. For more than 50 years, he’s put together the 17 syllables that comprise haiku, the traditional Japanese poetry, and now serves as the self-appointed “poet laureate” of Ashlawn Farms Coffee, where he may be seen on Friday mornings. His wife, Ann, is also a writer, but of mystery novels, all of which begin in a bubbling village in midcoast Maine, strangely reminiscent of the town she and her husband visit every summer.