O, Pioneers (Well, Maybe Not Exactly So)

Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • February 9, 2015

The Blizzard of 2015. Snow, wind, more wind. No power, no mobile phones (horror!) But we do have – wood burning stove, gas range top, candles, lanterns.


It’s when the power goes out for a long period of time that you are forced to slow down and live a bit closer to the way that Maria Mitchell and her family once did. Having a ten-month old son provided us with a different perspective this time around. His first blizzard. We had to make sure we had extra water on hand for bottle making and water to heat for bottle washing. While it was cold outside, we warmed the house with a woodstove that my parents were very smart to purchase when building our family home in 1983. It heats the entire house and keeps us nice and warm – as long as we feed it all night! It provides us with another stovetop to cook on, to heat water on, and now, to heat baby bottles on. It also is a place where we can warm our toes after going outside and to dry out our hats, mittens, boots, and socks. This blizzard however we found that our Siberian Husky had even had enough of the wind and snow and cold. Typically, she will walk in all weather – we say she is better than the post office – but this time she wouldn’t leave the driveway. That’s how you know it really is a blizzard.

When I was finally able to get in to check the Mitchell House and other MMA properties, this is what I found. It made me think about some of the pieces I have posted over the years from Maria Mitchell’s journals where she writes about the heavy snow and cold and sleighing along Main Street or the temperatures never getting above zero. She recounts all the games she played or poems and rhymes she wrote or new tatting she worked on – all to pass the time. And being in the Mitchell House always gives me a renewed perspective on how cold it got in houses then – especially in a room not lit by a fire. So the next time the power goes out (as long as you are safe), take some time to relish it, accept it, slow down, enjoy the people you are with. Read a book, just sit quietly doing nothing, nap, or better yet, write a poem or a silly rhyme. Even better, write silly rhymes about one another as Maria did with her Vassar students at her annual dome parties. Be creative, rely on your brain to entertain you – not your “device.”

View from the attic window.

Curator’s Cottage

I will make one plea here – and that is for people to at least have a landline that can call out locally and receive calls. Relying on your mobile phone is not always good as this latest storm illustrated. Landlines were the one thing not damaged by the storm – at least in most places on island. And this does not mean a cordless phone. You need to have one of those good old-fashioned cord phones with the push buttons where the handset is connected by a cord to the rest of the phone folks! It is the only way we really knew what was going on – my parents calling us from off-island to give us weather and power updates.


JNLF

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By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • August 17, 2026
August 19 {1857}. There are four great men whose haunts I mean to seek, and on whose footsteps I mean to stand: Newton, Shakespeare, Milton, and Johnson. To-day I told the driver to take me to St. Martin’s, where the guide-book says that Newton lived. He put me down at the Newton Hotel, but I looked in vain to its top to see anything like an observatory. I went into a wine-shop near, and asked a girl, who was pouring out a dram, in which house Newton lived. She pointed, not to the hotel, but to the house next to a church, and said, “that’s it – don’t you see a place on the top? That’s where he used to study nights.” It is a little, oblong-shaped observatory, built apparently of wood, and blackened by age . . . .” Blackened no doubt by the wood ash and soot found in the air throughout over-crowded nineteenth century London. We always think about London being very foggy in the nineteenth century but frankly a lot of it was wood and coal ash as the nineteenth century grew older, particularly as factories developed and belched all of that into the air – think Sherlock Holmes in the 1880s. But Maria Mitchell, while starting in Europe as a young woman’s chaperone, also knew that this tour of Europe was a great learning experience – the equivalent of a college education she could not have. Doors were thrown open to her around Europe – in particular at all of the observatories that dotted the continent. She was not just well-known – she was famous. JNLF
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