The bones of houses show in the summertime

[sovay]

I spent much of yesterday running pre-blizzard errands, but the local state of the parking spots is the truest gauge of the meteorology about to go down.



I have not yet managed to get hold of her memoir, but I deeply appreciate being notified of the existence of E. M. Barraud, who identified herself with chalk-cut hill figures, candidly described her relationship status as "technically single, but 'married' in a permanent homosexual relationship with another woman," published under her assigned initials and was known in Little Eversden where she worked for the Women's Land Army as John. She gave her wartime responses for Mass-Observation as both a man and a woman: "People are people, not specifics of a gender." I had never even encountered her poetry.

Comments

[ethelmay]

Surprised there doesn't seem to be an ebook. There is a recent hardcopy reissue.

[sovay]

Surprised there doesn't seem to be an ebook. There is a recent hardcopy reissue.

Yes—it should be the one I linked, with the introduction by Luke Turner. The problem is that I would want a hard copy, but I would have settled in the short term for reading it off the Internet Archive.

[sartorias]

What a fascinating person.

[sovay]

What a fascinating person.

I am so glad she left such a record to be known by.

[kaffy_r]

She's someone I'd never heard of and, as others have said, she sounds like a fascinating person.

Your picture is the first proof that "dibs" parking is found in places other than Chicago.

[sovay]

She's someone I'd never heard of and, as others have said, she sounds like a fascinating person.

fleurdelis41 sent me the article from the Museum of English Rural Life. I could read her diaries if I had access to the Mass Observation archives!

Your picture is the first proof that "dibs" parking is found in places other than Chicago.

I didn't know it could be found in Chicago! It is a regular feature of the snow-covered urban landscape of metro Boston.

[kaffy_r]

Chicagoans are so sure that Dibs is a toxic game only we play in the winter. I suspect they'd be disappointed to know others do the same stupid thing. (And I admit that one particularly horrible snowstorm decades ago lured me into doing the dibs thing. I eventually felt so guilty, I took the sawhorses and boards out of the place we'd shoveled clear for our car. The awful truth that Chicagoans forget is that is that the street is public property.)

[sovay]

(And I admit that one particularly horrible snowstorm decades ago lured me into doing the dibs thing. I eventually felt so guilty, I took the sawhorses and boards out of the place we'd shoveled clear for our car. The awful truth that Chicagoans forget is that is that the street is public property.)

We also see sawhorses! By which I mean that I saw at least one before this latest storm, although the chair is the gold standard. I am fascinated by the geographic range of this practice, especially since it is mostly illegal in the Boston area and yet every winter of my life I have seen it. One moves a space saver at one's own peril.

[kaffy_r]

One moves a space saver at one's own peril.

Absolutely. I've had friends who watched in horror as some poor unfortunate decided to risk life and limb (well, actually risking the front window) by moving a chair, only to come back to discover what a wind screen attacked by a baseball bat looks like.