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March 26, 2023

The Chestertown Spy

An Educational News Source for Chestertown Maryland

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Point of View Laura Spy Top Story

Indefensible By Laura J. Oliver

March 26, 2023 by Laura J. Oliver 2 Comments

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As newly discovered best friends, my daughter Audra and a ponytailed third-grade classmate were enjoying the instant intimacy of those who share the same aspirations—to possess a horse, pierced ears, and the ability to do a split. 

It was the first time Audra had been invited to visit, and as we were leaving, Linda and her mother invited us to admire a pair of mourning doves, which in the confines of a homemade coop in Linda’s backyard, had produced two perfect ivory eggs. The nesting birds seemed to be juveniles, so they were somewhat small, their gray and white feathers as soft as mink, their fragile bodies sleek and without substance. 

Built on a high shelf attached to the back of their house, the nest had been enclosed with three walls and a roof of chicken wire. The girls stood on cinderblocks to see into it. “Is it really all right for the two of them to be inside the enclosure?” I asked Linda’s mother. She was a science teacher, which made me feel devoid of practical skills and undereducated, but I hoped we might become friends. 

“Oh, sure,” Mrs. Hall replied, distracted. Her two-year-old son Jaimie was using a blue-flowered fistful of her skirt as a tether, weaving around her knees. He crashed into her legs periodically to entertain himself, then swung away again on an elliptical orbit. 

“Linda goes in there all the time. She’s so excited about having baby birds,” our hostess explained.

As we continued to watch the girls through the honeycomb of chicken wire, the doves became increasingly active, fluttering, and repositioning themselves. Linda jumped down from the cinderblocks with a soft thud and joined her mother outside the enclosure, doing a little dance in the spring grass, chatting away about what she planned to name the fledglings. Still in the enclosure, Audra continued to gaze into the nest, her forearms anchoring her precariously to the wooden shelf. Though she would never ask, I imagined she wished to adopt one of the birds when they hatched. I’d once had a similar longing. 

When I was five, searching for arrowheads along the pasture fence, I glimpsed a flash of Bermuda blue in the grass. I knelt, parting sticks and leaves to get a better look. A robin’s egg—as blue as a jay’s wing, as blue as the April sky.

With one finger, I touched the smooth turquoise surface. Warm. With mounting excitement, I nudged the delicate treasure to one side. Unbroken—still protecting the tiniest and most fragile of hearts. I picked it up and struck out for home, the rhythmic thrumming of my corduroy overalls resonating like someone blowing through paper pressed to a comb. 

Slipping in the backdoor, I ran upstairs and laid the egg in a bed of Kleenex which I then placed on a Thom McCann shoebox directly under the hall nightlight. The bulb emitted just enough heat to keep the egg warm, and I went in search of my overworked mother to assure her I’d be responsible for my impending offspring. That night I went to bed unable to stop talking (girl-joy, admit it, you still do that), imagining how great it would be when I taught my bird to ride on my shoulder and to speak. 

At daybreak, I hopped out of bed and padded down the hall on bare feet to check on the egg. To my horror, the nightlight had been turned off sometime after I’d gone to sleep. The egg was stone cold. That afternoon I buried my charge at the base of the play yard swing set, the only witness to my inability to protect a life for which I’d taken responsibility. 

I thanked Linda’s mom one last time and told Audra we had to go. Her little brother was waiting at home; I’d left a lasagna in the oven. As she retreated reluctantly from the nest, her worn tennis shoes slipped from the cinderblocks, and she was thrown off balance, grasping instinctively for the shelf as she fell. In slow motion, the entire arrangement broke away from the wall. The air was filled with beating wings; there was a crash, a child cried out. 

As the chaos settled, I scanned the wreckage. A yellow yolk was sliding down the side of the house, and Audra, frozen in remorse and embarrassment, was staring in horror at the toe of her shoe. The remaining egg lay broken in the canvas creases. 

Linda’s eyes met no one else’s as she reeled in closer to her mother. I tried to touch Audra through the wire wall separating us as apologies and absolutions were offered on the breeze. 

“Look, Linda,” said Mrs. Hall after a few excruciating moments.

“These eggs were never fertilized!” She was examining Audra’s shoe with a clinical eye. “They would never have hatched. Maybe next time.”

We’d be friends, all right. I already loved her.

Apologizing again, unable to do anything but carry our remorse with us, Audra and I walked to the sanctuary of our second-hand Volvo. She moved with deliberate dignity as if she could do penance for this disaster by never making another spontaneous movement. She was uncharacteristically polite and arranged herself with formality on the front seat. 

I was afraid to touch the fragile shell of her composure on the ride home. We spoke of practical matters, and finally, I told her about the lost robin’s egg that was as blue as her eyes and over which I had spun dreams. I wanted to take some of her disappointment from her by demonstrating I already had a place for it. 

We pulled into our gravel driveway. Getting carefully out of the car, my daughter informed me that she had some things she’d like to do in her room and climbed the stairs with the self-conscious posture of an 8-year-old penitent. 

Later that night, I checked on her on my way to bed. She was asleep, silky brown hair against her pillow, the white down comforter a rumpled heap that had fallen to the floor. 

I stood there imagining that love is a force field. That the ferocious, abiding love we feel for our children, and sometimes extend to each other, could ward off every hurt. But that’s not how it works, of course. Hurt is the heart’s tenderizer. And it’s necessary. How can you be moved to assuage someone else’s pain if you’ve never experienced your own?

I lifted the comforter from the floor and covered her then, still intent on nurturing something breathtakingly fragile that might one day take flight. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

Filed Under: Laura, Spy Top Story

Food Friday: Home Cooking

March 24, 2023 by Jean Sanders Leave a Comment

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Last week The Spy received a query about our St. Patrick’s Day piece, asking why we published recipes from easy-to-find websites, and why we weren’t featuring local restaurant reviews. Food Friday has always been about home cooking and never about food criticism – unless we are disparaging my inability to make a pie crust. The foods we talk about are seasonal, sometimes home grown, or found at our farmers’ markets. Sometimes it’s when when we have to get creative with a load of turnips from the CSA. It is economic food cooked hastily; or the tedious and oft toiled over: the boring and repetitious lunch box challenge. We have modest expectations. Sometimes we are served an unexpected and wonderful dish in a restaurant we’d like to recreate, or we remember a childhood dish, and find out it that isn’t a secret family recipe after all – but one from the back of the box of Baker’s Chocolate.

I have never been a professional cook. I worked as a server in a few restaurants during college, but never in an establishment with aspirations of greatness: my best job was waitressing at L.S. Grunt’s Chicago Pizza Pie Factory in London: sightseer by day, waitress at night. After six months I thought I’d never want to see another pizza in my life. And now, my longest cooking experiment has been 30 odd years perfecting pizza dough. In the 90s, I started making a weekly Friday night pizza with our children. The fever was re-ignited during COVID, while everyone else had a named pet sour dough starter, I was weighing and measuring King Arthur’s “00” flour and comparing it to Cento Anna Napoletana Tipo “00” Extra Fine Flour Italian pizza flour, seeking the magical ratio of water to flour, stretching, rolling and manipulating the resulting doughs. (I can’t toss the dough – low ceilings and decided lack of coordination.) We even bought a pricey Ooni pizza oven for flash cooking pizzas at 900°F. This is very serious, though highly unprofessional cooking.

But it is home cooking. COVID brought us all home. There aren’t too many restaurants in our little town, so for three years we very studiously tried to stay safe at home, reading other people’s food stories for inspiration, because otherwise we would be mired in the cavernous rut of cooking the same foods every week. Monday is pasta night. Tuesday is Taco Tuesday. You know the drill.

When I post links to “easily accessible websites” it’s because help is out there, and I spend a fair amount of time every week thinking about the other home cooks, who don’t have the leisure time to poke around the back waters of food writing like I do. Since we started the Spy back in 2009 we have always admired the Food52 website. What a wildly successful juggernaut of food thought: recipes, helpful hints, videos, virtual classes, podcasts, merchandise. Wow. It is daunting just to tap onto their site sometimes – all their positive energy and myriad inspirations! They are full time geniuses. While the rest of us limp along.

Kenji Lopez-Alt, who used to be with Cook’s Illustrated and now is with the New York Times, will take huge amounts of time exploring cooking processes. He spent an entire month perfecting cooking a hard boiled egg. He keeps exacting records, with photographs and annotations. I don’t have that kind of skill, or stamina. But I do have subscriptions to both publications, and can read about it, and let me tell you, the paywalls there are swift and unyielding. I try to digest some of Lopez-Alt’s research. ( He also has a charming Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/kenjilopezalt/ Lots of great ideas there.)

I also keep shelves of cookbooks, most of which are not digitized. They came in handy this weekend, when I couldn’t find our most delicious and reliable chocolate chip cookie recipe. It had vanished out of the 3-ring binder where I keep printouts of our faves. I couldn’t find it on the Food52 website – which has a great little file for saving recipes. I couldn’t find it in the New York Times food section. It wasn’t in Julia Child’s, or Alice Waters’books. Finally Mr. Sanders dug it out of a Dorie Greenspan cookbook. Phew. The cookie attack was successfully resolved.

Origin stories of recipes almost never make it to websites. You have to thumb through your own batter-flecked and stained cookbooks to remember a successful birthday dinner, or a firefly enchanted summer cookout. (Unless you document everything on IG. Good luck to you there.) That’s why I read Vivian Howard, M.F.K. Fisher, Mark Bittman, Laurie Colwin, and Nigel Slater. I listen to food podcasts while walking Luke the wonder dog. This morning on Table Manners a guest remembered Iraqi-influenced chicken dishes from his childhood – the orange chicken was sweet and citrusy, and the lemon chicken was tart and peppery. Listening to the stories of those meals made me think a little more creatively about our dinner tonight. Maybe I’ll thaw some chicken. Because we will be cooking at home.

COVID and the restrictions that we have learned to live with have influenced how we eat and cook. The economy makes it challenging, too. I like setting the table and lighting candles every night; to rehash the day, talk about the news, share some gossip, while eating a modest, home cooked meal. I will never cook a real New Haven pizza, but I enjoy making the effort every week. There is always room for improvement, and the time spent in the kitchen, at home, is rewarding. We enjoy the feeling of satisfaction when the bubbling pizza slides off the peel, when the freshly baked cake springs to the touch, when the steak sizzles in the cast iron pan. There are stories to tell.

“No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.”
― Laurie Colwin

Filed Under: Food Friday, Spy Top Story

Chestertown Spy Profiles: A Chat with Scholar Bill Leary 

March 22, 2023 by James Dissette 1 Comment

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Chestertown’s proximity to Washington, D.C., has brought many visitors to our community with an eye on retirement or a second house. Not surprisingly, new residents often arrive with lifetimes of experience serving the nation at one of the nation’s highest levels.

Bill Leary is one of those people whose arc of experience is impossible to portray in a short interview.

His expansive academic career alone would be enough to discuss. As a historian teaching American history at William and Mary, the University of Alabama, he helped found the first course in African American history at the University of Virginia during the Civil Rights era.

In a leap of faith, Leary moved to DC to marry his wife, who was working at the National Archives. Leary applied and was accepted, and it was the beginning of more than 40 years in government service in the National Archives and the National Security Council, the President’s principal forum for national security and foreign policy decision-making. There he became Special Advisor to the National Security Advisor and Senior Director of Records and Access Management, the clearing house for determining Federal documents’ secrecy level.

Retiring to Chestertown in 2012, Leary saw an opportunity to dive back into his passion for history and recognized that the Historical Society of Kent County and Sumner Hall offered a forum to explore the Black history of Kent County.

An avid researcher, Leary co-founded and curated Kent County Legacy Day, from its first event celebrating the history of Charlie Graves and the Uptown Club in 2014 to last year’s honoring of Kent County’s African American veterans. This year’s Legacy Day will take place in August and will highlight a retrospective of Legacy Days past.

Here are a few excerpts from an extended interview with Bill Leary about his time at the National Archives and National Security Council.

This video is approximately fourteen minutes in length.

Filed Under: Spy Top Story

Making Sense of the Mid-Shore 2022 Education Report Card

March 20, 2023 by P. Ryan Anthony Leave a Comment

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March 9 saw the release of the 2022 Maryland School Report Card, which is designed to help stakeholders measure student achievement in public schools throughout the state. In schools of the upper and mid-shore—Caroline, Dorchester, Kent, Queen Anne’s, and Talbot Counties—children’s Math and English Language Arts results were commendable for the most part. Nonetheless, some real challenges exist as well.

As communities around Maryland begin using the metric as an important data point, the Spy was eager to help our readers understand the history of the Maryland School Report Card and how to decipher yearly results.

Brief History

On December 10, 2015, President Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act, the federal K-12 education law that replaced No Child Left Behind. The ESSA laid out expectations of transparency for parents and communities and required every state to develop a concise and easily understandable “state report card” accessible online.

Each state submitted a consolidated plan detailing how the law would be implemented as well as how the state would hold schools accountable for student performance. In Maryland, parents, school personnel, superintendents, community leaders, advocacy groups, the Board of Education, and MSDE staff collaborated to create an accountability system that measured relevant, actionable aspects of school performance. The plan was submitted to the US Department of Education and approved in early 2018.

The first Maryland School Report Card was released later that year. The state was able to produce two years of report card school results (2018 and 2019) before the pandemic hit.

What’s in the Card

Each school has a report card that includes a star rating (one is lowest, five is highest), percentile rank, and total earned points percent. The data also includes student group separation of report card indicators, equity information, progress toward meeting targets to close achievement gaps, and improvement from the previous report card.

On average, a five-star school has a Math proficiency of 53.8% and an ELA proficiency of 71.8%. In a one-star school, Math proficiency is 1.1% while ELA proficiency is 6.3%.

Maryland Results Overall

Of the state’s 1,316 schools, 16% had five-star ratings, 32% had four-star ratings, 33% had three-star ratings, 16% had two-star ratings, and 3% had one-star ratings. This means that almost half of Maryland schools earned four or five stars.

Scores for the Mid-Shore

Among the twelve schools in Queen Anne’s County (7,440 students), 8% earned three stars while 58% earned four stars and 33% earned five stars. QAPS’s proficiency results were:

Elementary – 44.9% Math, 57.2% ELA
Middle –        23.8% Math, 59.1% ELA
High –           39.9% Math, 47.6% ELA

The eight schools in Talbot County (4,533 students) earned five stars (13%), four stars (50%), and three stars (38%). TCPS’s proficiency results were:

Elementary – 23% Math, 43% ELA
Middle –        13% Math, 39.9% ELA
High –           22.3% Math, 56.2% ELA

Caroline County’s nine public schools (5,551 students) earned either four stars (33%) or three stars (67%). CCPS’s proficiency results were:

Elementary – 24.6% Math, 44.1% ELA
Middle –        13.9% Math, 36.9% ELA
High –           21.7% Math, 46.7% ELA

The five schools in Kent County (1,786 students) earned either four stars (40%) or three stars (60%). KCPS’s proficiency results were:

Elementary – 20.5% Math, 35.4% ELA
Middle –          8.2% Math, 34.9% ELA
High –            21.4% Math, 48.4% ELA

In Dorchester County’s eleven schools (4,573 students), 27% earned four stars, 27% earned three stars, 36% earned two stars, and 9% earned one star. DCPS’s proficiency results were:

Elementary – 16.4% Math, 29.2% ELA
Middle –          9.4% Math, 27.8% ELA
High –            13.2% Math, 42.8% ELA

Graduation Rates

While Talbot County had the best graduation rate at 95%, it had fewer students enrolled than did Queen Anne’s, whose rate was 94.21%. The other rates were as follows: 92.65% for Kent, 85.21% for Caroline, and 81.57% for Dorchester.

Overall, Queen Anne’s County Public Schools displayed the highest performance of the counties analyzed, but second-place Talbot County saw improvement in English Language Arts scores since the last report card. Kent County also showed improvement in ELA, as did Dorchester County, the only one of the five to earn one or two stars (45%). However, DCPS significantly trailed everyone else, whose scores in both ELA and Math were in line with the state average.

Filed Under: Ed Homepage, Ed Portal Lead, Spy Top Story

The Center of the Universe by Laura J. Oliver

March 19, 2023 by Laura J. Oliver Leave a Comment

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The six of us gathered in a wide open field shouldered by forests—the brown of winter surrendering to spring’s tender green. On the staff of a regional magazine, I was accompanying a feature writer we’d hired on a hot air balloon flight over the patchwork of farms that comprise Maryland’s eastern shore. A new day blushed on the horizon. The balloon, Azure Mountains Majesty, was spread out on the ground uninflated but was already attached to the basket and burner, her crew getting her ready to rise. It looked safe enough. 

We were a small group, which included Bruce (our pilot), the writer, publisher, and chase car crew. The air carried the scent of magnolia blossoms from the south, but spring was in her infancy, and assuming it would be cooler aloft, I wore jeans, sneakers, and a rose-colored SPCA volunteer t-shirt beneath a gray sweater. 

A fan began blowing pristine morning air into the nylon envelope, inflating it above the tethered gondola until the balloon stood upright, magnificent in all her glory. A pattern of linked violet triangles in varying heights encircled her against a yellow and peach background –much like distant mountains at sunrise—much like stained glass. 

We climbed awkwardly into the wicker gondola, standing in closer proximity to each other than we might have otherwise, like strangers in an elevator. Our pilot, blond, cheerful, in his early forties, climbed aboard as well, fired the propane burner, ordered the crew to release the tethers, and we began our ascent. 

Sound is a pressure wave moving through a medium—in the case of an earthquake, earth– in this case, air. So, while our planet is a rich soundscape, as you travel up it gets quieter and quieter until in space, with only 10 atoms to be found in a cubic meter, sound disappears. 

We weren’t going that high, but as the balloon rose higher and higher, we spoke less and less. Eventually the few comments were only murmurs, whispers. Bisected by roads, miles of farmland lay beneath us waiting to become lush fields of corn, emerald soybeans, and golden wheat. 

At cruising altitude, we stopped speaking altogether. We had entered a church, a temple of air. Far, far below we could see the chase car, flying without sound along back country roads to keep up, and a fox, flowing plume of a tail, racing silently through the rows of corn stalks, but it was as if we had entered a cathedral, our silence the held breath of a congregation before the benediction. Maybe we embodied a benediction. In the face of perfection, the heart holds only goodwill. 

The pilot fired the burner from time to time to keep us aloft, the soft whoosh of flame periodically interrupting the silence. Movement without sound. It made me think of the month I watched Halley’s comet transit the earth, sailing in silence through the solar system. It made me think of falling stars. We traveled at the speed of the wind; therefore, we felt no wind.  Einstein was right, everything is relative. The speed of light, the speed of sound, the frequency of memory.

There is an anomaly, however, where silence unexpectedly imprisons the chaos of noise on the ground.  These places are called “sound shadows.” Places where sound being generated in plain sight is inaudible. It’s intriguing because our senses tell us that what we can see we should be able to hear, yet this isn’t always so. One sound shadow is in downtown Tulsa. Dubbed, “The Center of the Universe,” it is a small concrete circle set within a larger circle of bricks in a town square. Bizarrely, if you stand in the center and speak, or even shout, a distortion of your words echoes back to you, yet they are inaudible to people just yards outside the circle.

This same phenomenon caused the decimation of troops in multiple battles in the Civil War.  Gettysburg, Seven Pines, Five Forks, Perryville. Commanders relying on being able to hear nearby battles begin in order to time the sending of reinforcements, waited just out of sight, perhaps a mile away, in utter silence, oblivious to the fact that the raging battles were already underway. 

Witnesses looking just across the valley at the battle of Gaines’s Mill, for instance, could see the advance of the Confederate army, could watch 50,000 soldiers in bloody conflict for over two hours, and yet not hear a sound, as if they were watching through glass. 

On the shore the sun was rising, the air heating up, and Azure Mountains Majesty needed to descend. It was going well, the chase car close. “Hang on to something,” Bruce advised. “Sometimes things get a little rough.”  I reached for a strut just as we hit a thermal, dropped fast and seconds later slammed into the ground. The basket tipped, dragged another 20 yards, regained some buoyancy, still flying just feet above the earth, and hit hard again, like a stone skipped on a lake. When we finally came to rest, I was hurt but embarrassed and didn’t want to show it. Thrown off his feet, the writer’s body had crushed us both against the side of the gondola and I’d bitten my lip. I did what I always seem to do when I’m hurt. Thanked everyone. (I know, I know.) But my appreciation was genuine—we’d just left church. 

Although we were strangers, we’d just taken communion. 

Is gratitude the medium through which love travels? Or like light does it fill the cosmos because that’s all there is?  Maybe love can’t be diminished. Once experienced, it can only grow. 

I have a theory. The love of untold civilizations, the affection of hearts more numerous than stars in the sky, is a never-ending energy radiating up towards the heavens from this sound-filled planet.

Hold your breath. Listen closely. If I were to say I love you, could you hear me now?

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

Filed Under: Laura, Spy Top Story, Top Story

Food Friday: Full Irish

March 17, 2023 by Jean Sanders 2 Comments

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Happy St. Patrick’s Day! If you are planning on a big celebratory day of pub crawling, or consuming any amount of green beer after the parade, the best of luck to you. Tomorrow a breakfast bowl of Lucky Charms just won’t cut it. You will need a full Irish breakfast to insure your full recovery.

During the week I tend to be a bowl of sticks and twigs kind of breakfast eater: bran flakes, raspberries and 2% milk. I worry about my fiber intake. Sundays I let loose, and bake biscuits, or make pancakes, with bacon or sausage. Sometimes I bake scones. Or make eggy French toast. I won’t say that I am abstemious, but I have had very few meals that have included three kinds of sausage and bacon. I thought the overwhelming English breakfasts I was served in modest B&Bs were absurdly huge, until I ran into the multifarious Full Irish breakfast.

Remember Gareth? Whose funeral we attended in Four Weddings and a Funeral? Remember the foreshadowing with his big English breakfast fry-up every morning: eggs, tomatoes, bacon, sausage, and fried bread, topped with a soupçon of cigarette ash? That was modest high cholesterol fare, the breakfast of a hermit howling in the wilderness, compared to the vast number of heart-stopping calories found in an Irish breakfast.

Here is what is required in a full, Irish breakfast:
Bacon or rashers
Sausages
Fried eggs
Black pudding (don’t ask – think of scrapple)
White pudding (ditto)
Mushrooms
Tomatoes
Baked beans
Fried potatoes
Soda bread/toast/fried bread
Real Irish butter
Breakfast tea

According to the Irish Post newspaper: “A full fry-up contains on average around 1,300 calories in one serving, which is almost three quarters of a woman’s daily recommended intake (2,000 calories) and over half of that suggested for men (2,500 calories).” Yikes. https://www.irishpost.com/life-style/the-ingredients-of-a-hearty-traditional-full-irish-breakfast-78903

The Irish Sun newspaper information is even more dire: “Three rashers weigh in at 213 calories, one slice of black pudding is 192 calories, while two sausages grilled add 324 calories. Toast, eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms, beans and hash brown will bring it up to over 1,500 calories.”

I’ve read that some calorie-wise folks will grill everything instead of frying it, and might even toast the bread instead of frying it. It sounds like a fool’s errand to me. Opinions about the Full Irish are strong. If you serve your beans in a ramekin, you look snobby and are acting self-important, even though some people don’t like having the beans touch their eggs. You must ask first. If you serve chips (French fries) instead of frying the potatoes in the chip pan you are rejecting tradition. It is morally wrong to serve eggs without runny yolks. Here are some tips for preparing your own Full Irish breakfast feast: https://www.irelandbeforeyoudie.com/the-perfect-traditional-irish-breakfast/

If you were an Irish farmer, facing a long day of grueling physical labor in the field, a Full Irish will adequately fuel your day. But if you are a puny twenty-first century home-office worker, it might be overkill. Especially if you consider that everything is bathed in sweet delicious Irish butter. It’s oatmeal for you. Maybe Weetabix. Think about your fiber intake. Think about Gareth. And just smell the bacon.

“When you make a wee wish
on a green four-leafed clover,
may your belly stay full
and your cup runneth over.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich

https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/irish-weekend-fry-up-51145610

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https://www.happyfoodstube.com/full-irish-breakfast/&psig=AOvVaw1ZG1J5ogXJQ68RYbQX1Gxi&ust=1678731865774000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CA8QjRxqFwoTCJj7ldaB1_0CFQAAAAAdAAAAABAR

Filed Under: Food Friday, Spy Top Story

A New Era for Sheltering Animals in Kent County: A Chat with Richard Keaveney

March 15, 2023 by James Dissette 3 Comments

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Kent County loves its critters and just proved it again with the opening of the Animal Care Shelter for Kent County on Worton Rd.

After five years of planning, fund-raising, and construction, the $6+ million shelter is a state-of-the-art facility designed to care for lost and surrendered animals until they are reclaimed or find a forever home.

Executive Director Richard Keaveney says that promoting the health and safety of the animals are their primary goals, and to that end have constructed spacious cat and dog galleries, unique adoption rooms for cats with access to outside areas on warm days, and outdoor play areas for dogs who are walked by staff and volunteers four times and day.

To maintain an optimum health environment, a controlled air system is in place to block any cross-contamination. This safety feature, along with separate areas for sick animals and a special medical room eventually for minor surgeries, dentistry, and neutering, are central to the health care of any animal at the facility.

A food prep kitchen to accommodate special diets and meds and an industrial laundry room help staff and volunteers work at an organized and comfortable pace. A separate break room is available for everyone during the day.

Additionally, Animal Control now maintains an office at the new shelter to bridge the lost and stray animals to the facility and on their way to healthier lives and forever homes.

And yes, there’s even a special “barn” for feral cats where they will learn to socialize and be introduced to the adoption galleries.

An official ribbon cutting will open the new facility to the community in May. The Spy will keep you posted.

Here, Executive Director Richard Keaveney walks the Spy through this extraordinary addition to Kent County.

This video is approximately 14 minutes in length. For more about the Animal Care Shelter for Kent County, please go here or call 410-778-3648.

Filed Under: Spy Chats, Spy Top Story

CBMM Takes on a Changing Chesapeake

March 13, 2023 by Val Cavalheri Leave a Comment

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“Tangier Abandoned” by Tom Payne

It’s an emotional experience—The Changing Chesapeake exhibit now at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum (CBMM). It’s unlike anything you’ve ever experienced or anything CBMM has ever done. The Spy was invited to the opening night of the yearlong show at the Steamboat Building gallery. It would also the first time the 70 artists participating in the exhibit would see their work on display. To some, particularly those who don’t usually think of themselves as artists, sharing their work with the world was overwhelming, and more than once, we noticed emotional reactions. 

“Foamberg Fish” by Nic Galloro

Such it was with Laura Guertin, who wiped away a tear as she found her quilted art “Looking Out at the Ghosts of the Coast” at the gallery entrance. Guertin, whose work portrays dying trees through a window frame, has a Ph.D. in marine geology and geophysics and is a college professor. She started quilting a few years ago as a way to tell ‘science stories.’ “People get drawn to it because no one feels threatened by a blanket, right? And once they see it, I can hook them with the science. This is a serious theme, and we need more action and activity, but we have to bring people to that conversation.”

Laura Guertin with “Looking Out at the Ghosts of the Coast”

Lee Hoover was also affected by seeing her photograph, “Pintail,” on the wall. “You prepare yourself, knowing you’ll see your stuff, but then ‘boom,’ there it is.” Her photo is of a name being lettered on a ship stern. “The old ways are disappearing,” she says. “Who paints letters by hand anymore? It’s all done by computer. I’m hoping that people will remember the old ways of doing things. But I also hope they think about how the Chesapeake is in trouble.” 

Nicholas Thrift with “Ospreys Don’t Wear Coats”

This is a different type of show for CBMM, explains Jen Dolde, Curator and Folklife Center Manager. “We’re usually featuring the work of one person, or we’re putting together a historical exhibit on a specific topic. But one of the things we’re called to do, now that we’re a Folklife Center under the Maryland State Arts Council, is to look not only for the historical voices but also the contemporary ones. These are the voices of all the people and how they live their lives and form their identities. I see this exhibit as a form of documentation.”

To Jill Ferris, Senior Director of Engagement, Learning, and Interpretation, whose focus is on the community, her goal is open up those channels of conversation. “I’m hoping to get some artists to do workshops or talks. There were a lot of submissions about ghost forests, which seemed to be a huge inspiration point, and I’d like to bring them together to talk about that shared image.” 

The idea for The Changing Chesapeake started a couple of years ago, with an invitation in 2022 to anyone interested in expressing how climate and cultural change have shaped the Chesapeake. CBMM received over 140 submissions which went through a blind ranking process with community panelists who were unaware if the work they were judging was by someone with a reputation as an artist. Seventy-eight pieces by 70 artists were chosen and included traditional media such as photography, sculptures, and painting, as well as fiber art, stop-motion animation, found-object art, original songs, embroidery, poetry, etc. There was even a novel translated from Italian.

Unlike other museum exhibits where a little label titling the work and identifying the artist is discreetly affixed on the wall, here, to fully understand what you are observing, you are encouraged to take the time to read the artist’s description. Not doing so may cause you to miss some significant and interesting facts about the person, the area, or the historical implication of the piece. In fact, the narrative is an integral part of the exhibit

There is Joi Lowe’s sea glass, shell, and driftwood mobile named after the ship, “The Generous Jenny.” On its own, it’s a beautiful piece, but the meaning behind it is heartbreaking. The artist created it to honor the memory of the unnamed enslaved people who arrived at the Sotterley Plantation in 1720. Each of the 260 pieces that make up the sculpture is a life either lost or determined to survive. For instance, the brown sea glass represents the 91 enslaved men; 20 unaccounted souls are shown as white sea glass, and shells symbolize the 29 people thrown overboard due to a smallpox infection.

The various displays are spread out over two floors, and you’ll soon discover there are themes. “What our Exhibition Designer, Jim Koerner, did,” said Dolde, “was to group the pieces so that they connect, play off the other, and send different messages.” For the community, the fun part becomes going through the rooms and figuring out the association.

For instance, look for the homage to the Eastern Shore’s most iconic symbol, the osprey. Along with the more traditional painting, you’ll find an intricate textile piece that was woven and hand painted. And then there is “Ospreys Don’t Wear Coats,” which shows a whimsical bird dressed for the cool temperature and holding two coffee cup containers. ‘Nests can’t be made with coffee cups’ is stated on the accompanying description by Nicholas Thrift. Thrift, who considers himself a part-time artist, says he was inspired to paint the osprey to express the ‘duality of man and animal, in the midst of environmental catastrophe, through the lens of the humorously grotesque.’  “I wanted him to have a veil of ambiguity,” he said. “There’s hope and fear in the picture, just mashing together.” 

That message of hope and fear is everywhere and in every piece of art throughout the gallery. It’s in Sharon Malley’s oil painting “Momfords Poynt from Space,” which imagines John Smith’s map of the Chesapeake from space. It’s in Thelma Jarvis Peterson’s Celtic-inspired song, “Ghost Forests,” and in the music video “Can’t Work the River” by Peter Panyon and Big Tribe. It’s also found in Nic Galloro’s “Foamberg Fish,” a sculpture made of recycled wood, CDs, aluminum foil, milk cartons, and glass. It’s there when standing in front of “Sea Rise,” a sculpture by George Lorio that explores the relationship between rising sea levels and an affected home, or in the heartbreaking photo montage by Tom Payne of Tangier Island underwater, “Tangier Abandoned.”

“I think that art is uniquely able to capture that poignancy of the human experience,” said Lode. “You can’t always put it in words or name it, but we feel it, and it’s different for everyone. So what one person will respond to in this exhibition will differ from the next person.”

It is that experience that the museum hopes to convey to the public. Pete Lesher, Chief Curator at CBMM, said. “One of the bigger messages that we hope people carry away about the Chesapeake is that we want them to not only love the place and be good stewards of it but also better understand the culture and be better stewards of the culture.”

Dolde agrees. “The Chesapeake is part of our identity. So whether you’re from here, whether you’ve come here and fell in love with it, whether you’ve chosen to move here, or choose to vacation here–there’s something about this body of water. And there’s something about how you experience it. Whether it’s time with family, enjoying the beauty of nature, or admiring the resilience of the traditional waterman in the traditional culture, it’s all just inspiring.”

No matter your connection to the water, you will find something at Changing Chesapeake that will amuse, inspire, or touch you. It will also make you think. And coming once will not be enough.

The Changing Chesapeake is funded through CBMM’s Regional Folklife Center under the Maryland Traditions program of the Maryland State Arts Council. Viewing this exhibition is included with general CBMM admission and free for CBMM members. Visit cbmm.org to learn more.

Filed Under: Spy Top Story

Attachment by Laura J. Oliver

March 12, 2023 by Laura J. Oliver 3 Comments

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Kaya stood in the upstairs hallway staring down the steps that lead to the living room like it was a black diamond run in Park City. At 12 years old, she was near the end for a Labrador retriever, and I’d been mourning her death since she had turned 11 and started showing signs of age—like being suddenly afraid to descend the stairs even though she was healthy and very much alive. I do this—prepare to cut my losses if I can see an end is inevitable.

Previously I’d found her on alert in the upstairs bathroom barking at the closed shower curtain and I’d thought she’d trapped a burglar in the house. “Good girl!” I whispered from the hallway. I then crept in and dashed the curtain aside as if that was the sensible thing to do had there been a fully clothed man standing in the tub. Kaya just blinked at the porcelain tiles and shampoo bottles and kept barking.

I realized then that she continually confused the doorway to the bathroom for the top of the stairs and by the time she realized her mistake, she couldn’t figure out how to turn around. I rescued her periodically, helping her back up like an 18-wheeler stuck on a dead-end street.

Because she was 12, I’d tried on for size in my imagination the pain of living without her loyal company and by loyal company I mean silky ears and the exuberant welcome home when I’d been gone 5 minutes. It was an effort to inoculate myself against inevitable loss by exposing myself to pain in low doses.

If you have ever loved someone you knew was destined to leave your life first—pet, parent, partner, lover, friend—you too, may have done this. It’s the opposite of looking forward to say, Thanksgiving with the family, or the annual vacation at the beach, this anticipatory grief.

And I’ve been doing this all my life not because someone I love is going to die but because I am.

It may be decades from now, but I’ve been careful not to love this life so much that I’ll regret or resist having to leave. It’s as if when I was born someone whispered, “You are going to love this world with all your heart, little baby, but don’t get too attached. The price of entry is the heartbreaking knowledge you can’t stay.”

A visceral awareness of my visitor’s status has permeated my entire life. It has made me acutely aware of the transitory nature of all things. The earth’s molten core will cool, the moon will escape her orbit, the sun will nova, and in a short one billion years, the planet will no longer sustain life. Oh, and relationships end, kids leave home, dogs die.

The heartbreaking reality is that everything you love is on loan.

Is it possible to live your whole life already gone? Only half here? Trying to avoid the grief of letting go? I may not be alone in this.

When we lived in New Zealand, my American friend Melinda and I visited a woman whose family owned one of the most successful businesses in the country. She too, was American, but she had married a Kiwi and made New Zealand her permanent home. Being that Melinda and I were both from the States, she asked each of us how long we planned to stay. Melinda said they’d moved to Auckland to raise their kids, they’d bought a house, and would be staying for the duration.

My family had come for an America’s Cup campaign, so my response was, “three years.” With total candor, this woman responded, “I ask because I’ve learned the hard way that I don’t want to become friends with someone who is going to leave.” I was deeply embarrassed. (Someone doesn’t want to be my friend! And she said so! Out loud!), but I was also impressed by her self-awareness. I was living the same way just covertly. I understood she and I would not be having coffee in the future, and therefore neither of us would regret my return to the States.

But the cost of my withholding was brought home to me by a tarot card reader. Hair in a beehive arrangement, glasses dangling on a chain, she spread the soft cottony cards on her kitchen table and studied them. Princesses fell on their heads from high towers, lightning bolts split hearts in two, and there was of course, at least one fool. Surveying my life in the cards with a practiced eye she took a puff on her cigarette and said, “Well, I don’t see any kickass joy.”

I was momentarily distracted from the truth of that statement by the term kickass. It sounded intense but belligerent. Joy as a bully. “Get out of the way people! Kickass joy coming through!”

But she was right. To allow kickass joy, I’d have to trust that what’s to come after each inevitable loss—after raising kids, after a career, after losing a soulmate, a love, after life itself—will be just as good as what is. I’d have to trust that loss itself is an illusion.

Seriously. Who does that? Can you?

I tried really hard to achieve this in 2006. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong that year. One of the kids became seriously ill, one decided to make her home overseas, my marriage hit an impasse, I quit a job I should have kept, and had a health scare of my own.

Looking back, it was the best year of my life.

Because that was the year I learned that those things were just circumstances and that circumstances change—it’s their nature– just as it is the nature of problems that they pass. So, I taught myself to source joy in something immutable, something unconditional. I unhinged joy from emotional attachment to people or situations. I loosened my grip. It took practice every minute of every day, but I became happy just because the universe exists. Anything beyond that was a bonus. And miraculously, in response, those circumstances improved.
But wait. An update.

You learn things, profound things, and then you forget! New circumstances blindside you, your heart breaks, and you have to learn not to be undone by grief all over again. When do lessons truly stick? When does momentarily insightful become permanently wise?

Maybe one of these days I’ll get it right. I’ll be all in. I’ll embrace the world fully even though I must let everything go. Even you.

If I’m ever that courageous I’ll tell kickass joy to come home.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here. 

Filed Under: Laura, Spy Top Story, Top Story

Food Friday: Spring Ahead

March 10, 2023 by Jean Sanders Leave a Comment

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Good morning, Gentle Readers. Rise and shine. Arcane laws, Senate bills, and agrarian rituals dictate that you will lose an hour of sleep this weekend – unless you are enjoying an early spring break and are waking up someplace in Ft. Lauderdale. But that is another story.

We change the clocks this weekend: we are springing ahead. Luke the wonder dog will be puzzled. He has the most accurate internal clock I have ever seen. Daily, he starts moaning and wriggling and doing his little wake up tap dance around 5:58 AM, certain that Mr. Sanders is about to oversleep. Every morning of the week. Luke is no fan of Daylight Saving Time. He and the birds will be up when the sun beckons, and not a minute later.

Changing the clock is as bad as jet lag, without the perk of foreign travel. We stumble around for a few days, dazed and confused, cotton-mouthed and vaguely exhausted. Who needs Ft. Lauderdale? So pour another cup of coffee and pull up a newspaper on your tablet. Breakfast awaits.

I always feel smug when I remember a meal I have stashed away in the freezer. Luckily, clock-watcher Luke, who is my constant companion, is unaware of these rare moments of personal triumph. As handsome and good as Luke is, he is an anxious dog. He has separation issues. His life is better when he has company. Mr. Sanders is his preferred human, but I will suffice during the day. He attaches himself to me, limpet-like, at 7:00 AM. We go for a long walk first thing so he can suss out the neighborhood. Then he follows me around the house, the garden, the laundry room, through my studio. I announce to him when I am just going out to the mailbox, though I will be right back. He pays more attention to where I am than my mother ever did. He is asleep here, by my side, twitching, chasing bunnies, anticipating the storm trooper UPS delivery who will shatter our domestic idyll.

I have realized that I don’t need to go to the grocery store, or abandon Luke to the uncertain fate of menacing Amazon deliveries. A day without a trip to the grocery store is a good day for Luke. Tomorrow’s breakfast is already nestled in the freezer, so I won’t need to leave him. Instead, I will just clatter around the kitchen, making pizza dough for tonight’s pie, and our secure, cosy routine will not be interrupted. There are only 6 more hours until our second walk of the day, and at 5:58 PM, approximately, Mr. Sanders will sail through the front door. It’s going to be a good day.

I like easy peasy muffin pan meals. Last week we had the sweet muffin pan Portuguese cream tarts. This week we are going for something savory: Cheesy Bacon Egg Muffins. You can prepare clattering bowls of sticks and twigs, glasses of juice, and steaming mugs of coffee to be wholesome, or you can just reach into the freezer, pull a couple of these muffins out, and call it a meal; it all depends on your level of sleep deprivation. We are having company in a couple of weeks, so I want to be fully prepared and well-stocked. These will be perfect.

Cheesy Bacon Egg Muffins for Early Mornings

Preheat oven to 350ºF.

Grease muffin pans with olive oil or cooking spray, or use cupcake paper liners

5 large eggs
1/4 pound (about 8 slices) crisp-cooked bacon, crumbled
Luke the wonder dog and Mr. Sanders prefer
crumbled breakfast or Italian sausage
1 cup grated cheddar, or any cheese you like
1 cup chopped onions and bell peppers, sautéed (optional)
A pinch of salt and a pinch of black pepper
1/2 teaspoon crushed chili pepper flakes or dried herbs (Luke won’t say, but I like oregano)

It’s the perfect time and place to sneak in some diced tomatoes, broccoli, sautéed mushrooms, leeks, spinach, green onions, olives, fresh basil, rosemary, thyme, parsley; or any other old Simon and Garfunkle song you can remember.

Break eggs in a bowl, and beat them with the salt and pepper. Add cheese, bacon (sausage), pepper, other add-ins – and stir. Divide the egg mixture into the greased/lined muffin cups and bake in the oven until set, about 10 to 15 minutes depending on the size of your muffin pans. I like to put the muffin pans on cookie sheets in case of spillage. Serve warm. Save one for Luke. He has earned it. No UPS guys broached his defense today.

Here is a variation: https://morethanmeatandpotatoes.com/bacon-and-egg-muffins/

For the Keto Diet fans this is even simpler: https://theketocookbook.com/keto-recipes/bacon-egg-cups/

Luke isn’t too bothered by the clock change since he never skimps on his naps and he makes sure his meals are served on time. Mr. Sanders and I are hoping this will be the last time Daylight Saving descends on us all. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-approves-bill-that-would-make-daylight-savings-time-permanent-2023-2022-03-15/

“I’ve lived on the equator all my life and we never had to change clocks. Now they’re telling me time goes forward an hour after midnight? What is this, Narnia?”
― Joyce Rachelle

Filed Under: Food Friday, Spy Top Story

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