The Chesapeake Oyster Wars

I was treated to a dramatic display of facial expressions recently when my youngest grandsons tasted raw oysters for the first time. I can report that they both succeeded in bravely swallowing one down, while the teenagers passed on the experience. Conversation at the table of course turned to the Oyster Wars! Here is my account of that forgotten episode in local history, first published in The Dabbler in 2016.

Pirate oyster dredgers on the Chesapeake

It was like slurping up a gob of phlegm. I swallowed as quickly as possible to get the awful thing out of my mouth. But then the flavor hit, delicate with a hint of brine. Absolutely delicious.

My first taste of a raw oyster, or as Marylanders on the Eastern Shore say, orster. My husband, descended from a long line of Chesapeake Bay watermen, had insisted I try the regional delicacy at least once. Though oysters are also a traditional London food I had never had one. That first taste cured me of any reluctance based on the phlegmy texture. Now I bite into the squishy things with relish.

In fact I might have turned into a bit of an oyster connoisseur, even a snob. When we order raw oysters we question the waiter as though we are ordering fine wine. Sweet or briney? From the Chesapeake’s Maryland or Virginia waters? (Of course there is a rivalry, of which more later). The varieties even have creative names and pretentious descriptions just like wines: Chesapeake Golds, Skinny Dipper, Choptank Sweets, and, I swear this is true, Sweet Jesus. The latter have “a clean, sweet taste that’s reminiscent of cucumber with light hints of salt,” according to Baltimore magazine. The other day we were sampling some Holy Grails, “their initial saline burst finishes up smooth and slightly buttery,” when my husband casually mentioned the Chesapeake Oyster Wars as though they were common knowledge, like the Civil War. He grew up hearing the tales of his Crisfield ancestors but the rest of us drew a blank on this historical episode. I had to learn more.

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The Film of Murder in the Cathedral

On My Bookshelf for National Poetry Month I find a book on a film of a play by a poet, the verse drama Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot. It is a story of faith, conscience, power, and murder. 

I first saw this film decades ago when I was a student. Of all the films one sees in a lifetime only a few leave indelible images in the memory. I think of the first appearance of Death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. And just as powerful, the chorus of women in Murder in the Cathedral who kneel in prayer and intone the sonorous words:

Since golden October declined into sombre November
And the apples were gathered and stored, and the land
became brown sharp points of death in a waste of water and mud,
The New Year waits, breathes, waits, whispers in darkness…


Now I fear disturbance of the quiet seasons:
Winter shall come bringing death from the sea,
Ruinous spring shall beat at our doors,
Root and shoot shall eat our eyes and our ears,
Disastrous summer burn up the beds of our streams
And the poor shall wait for another decaying October..


Some malady is coming upon us. We wait, we wait.

It is easy to discern the voice of the poet who wrote “April is the cruelest month,” the famous first line of The Waste Land. The chorus chant of the sufferings of the poor and set a tone of anguish and foreboding for the event to come.

The chorus – scene from the film
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Finding My Irish Family

For St. Patrick’s Day here is the text of a talk I gave to the Maryland Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians in March 2019. I was scheduled to present it again at the Maryland Irish Festival in the fall of 2020, but for obvious reasons that never happened.

My display table at the talk

I’m going to tell you about a long and winding road of research and travel in search of my Irish family. But first a confession, unlike perhaps most of you I’m not Irish-American, I’m Irish-Flemish. I grew up in England with an Irish father and a Flemish mother. My mother grew up during the Nazi occupation of Belgium and my father was born to Irish immigrants in the northern English town of Manchester. My parents met when my father was a soldier with the British troops who liberated my mother’s town of Ghent in Belgium after D Day. They had a classic wartime romance, married in Ghent in 1947, and settled in the suburbs of London. My brothers and sister and I are quite proud of our unusual heritage. I once met a Flemish history professor from the University of Louvain. Of course I told him I am half Flemish. He asked what was my other half? When I told him Irish he reared back in mock horror and said “What a volatile combination.” Both peoples are known to be hot-headed and argumentative. Anyway that’s my family’s excuse for any number of sins!

Bridie Byrne

Growing up in England my Irish grandmother Bridget Byrne lived with us. I knew her maiden name was Carney, and that her family had called her Bridie. We knew her as Nanny. She was a very quiet, nervous woman, very religious. Her bedroom was like a little chapel, full of religious pictures and statues. She had a statue of a rather obscure saint, St. Philomena, by her bed. Later on I would learn its significance. Every morning before school we would kneel by her bed to say our prayers and then she would give us a mint, holding the round white candy out to us almost like the host at Mass. She never talked about Ireland or her family. When I was about 12 she had a nervous breakdown with paranoid delusions that my mother was going to run away and take us to live in Belgium. She was in a mental hospital for a time and when she recovered she went to live in a convent retirement home. My mother told me this was perfect for her; when she was a girl she had wanted to be a nun but her family couldn’t afford the dowry you had to pay to convents in Ireland in those days.

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Plague, Pandemic, and Human Nature

Collecting the dead and pointing out anointers during the 1630 plague in Milan by Gallo Gallina

In the church of San Antonio in Milan in 1630 a frail elderly man who had been kneeling in prayer rose to sit on the pew behind him. Before he sat he used the edge of his cloak to wipe off the seat. Seeing this, a woman seated near him jumped up and pointing to the man cried out “Look, that old man is anointing the pews.” Despite the worship service in progress members of the congregation attacked the old man, grabbing him by the hair and dragging him outside the church where they beat and kicked him to death. The mob was acting under the influence of a bizarre, false conspiracy theory about how the plague was spreading through their city. When I read this in The Betrothed, a classic Italian novel by Alessandro Manzoni, I immediately thought of the way Americans of Asian descent were attacked in the street during the COVID pandemic. Just because the virus originated in China was no reason to blame or fear any individual Asian American, but the perpetrators of the violence were acting on an irrational conspiracy theory just like the mob in Milan four hundred years before.

The Betrothed (I Promessi Sposi in Italian) is on my list of favorite reading of 2022. Written in the early nineteenth century it is a story of star-crossed lovers set against the background of historical events in seventeenth century Lombardy; famine, war, and plague. The chapters that describe the Milan Plague of 1630 are famous and considered one of the best accounts of the plague ever written. Manzoni based his account on memoirs and histories, notably those of Giuseppe Ripamonti and Alessandro Tadino. Dr. Tadino was deputy to the Chief Medical Officer of Milan and a member of the Tribunal of Health during the plague. He personally witnessed the attack on the old man in the church of San Antonio; it is not fiction.

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Tired of Harry and Meghan? Meet the Hanovers.

View of Hanover. Matthuis Merian. 1641.

If you’ve had enough of the Windsor family dramas you may be surprised to learn that they are far from the worst in the annals of dysfunctional British royal families. Meet the Hanovers! Forget the scandal of divorce; they just threw a discarded queen in prison for the rest of her life. Feuding fathers and sons? They set up rival courts. And no voluntarily “stepping back” from royal duties; one prince was thrown out of the palace, his belongings dumped in baskets outside the gates. As for royal babies, they weren’t always greeted with open arms.

It all began when the last of the Stuarts, Queen Anne, died without an heir in 1714. She had endured seventeen pregnancies, all but one ending in miscarriage, stillbirth, or babies who died very young. Her only child to survive infancy, William, died age eleven. The question of who should succeed her came down to religion. By the Act of Settlement passed in 1701 Catholics were disqualified from inheriting the throne. That excluded James II’s son and grandson, James Francis, known as The Old Pretender, and Bonnie Prince Charlie. Instead the throne passed to the descendants of James I’s daughter Elizabeth Stuart, whose daughter Sophia had married the Elector of Hanover, a tiny German province. Sophia died shortly before Queen Anne so the throne passed to her son who became George I, the first king of the House of Hanover.

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My Favorite Books of 2022

Anne Ancher Interior With Red Poppies 1905

I read a lot of books in 2022, some wonderful, some so-so, and a few just plain dreadful – yes I did try a Colleen Hoover. Here are my favorites in three categories – fiction, suspense, nonfiction, and a bonus classic. I hope you find something here to enjoy in 2023.

A word on the suspense category. Genre fiction is divided into so many overlapping categories – crime, mystery, thriller, spy, suspense. I chose suspense as the most inclusive. My favorites have elements of each but all are suspenseful.

My favorite books of course reflect my own reading preferences. It wasn’t until I had winnowed my list down to five in each category that I noticed all my nonfiction choices are history or literature. I did read other subjects, but those are certainly my favorites. I also noticed that of my sixteen books thirteen are by women and half are by British authors. My reading list certainly reflects me!

If you have opinions, pro or con, on any of these books please share in the comment section at the end of the list.

FICTION

Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark.
How refreshing to find a book where the main characters are in their eighties and the author treats them with dignity. Agnes and Polly are lifelong friends who met at Fellowship Point, a retreat in Maine where their parents owned summer homes. They remain close though their lives took different paths. Polly became a traditional wife and mother while Agnes never married and is the famous author of a series of children’s books about a girl called Nan. Each summer they meet up at the Point and this year there is a looming crisis. A developer wants to build a resort on the Point, part of which is a wildlife sanctuary, but Agnes determines to fight it. The women must deal with the younger generations of their families who have differing ideas about the future of their inheritance. Meanwhile a young woman who works for Agnes’s publisher visits the Point, triggering revelations about the past and the inspiration for the character of Nan. I found this a thoroughly engrossing read full of appealing characters, drama, humor, and a realistic picture of aging. I still find myself sometimes thinking “What would Agnes do?”

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Return of the Moon

A sequel to Farewell My Lovely Moon

My New Moon

Santa came early to our house this year. He didn’t enter stealthily down the chimney. He announced his arrival with a ring of the doorbell. He had a white beard and wore a jolly smile, but not a red suit. He handed me the most unusual Christmas gift I’ve ever received – the moon. Or at least a moon.

After I published my sad story about the missing moon I learned that Brian and Caryl, artists who live on my street, had acquired some of the dismantled lamp globes. They repurposed them into beautiful hanging lanterns of many colors.

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Farewell My Lovely Moon

A tale of unintended consequences

As darkness settled over our house a pure full moon, hanging low in the sky, cast its calm and comforting light through our family room window. It seemed a good omen on our first night in a new home. No sound of howling wolves or other nocturnal creatures disturbed the quiet. Just a lovely silent moon shining it’s gentle light across the garden. 

We’d lived in the house several weeks before it finally dawned on us that there couldn’t be a full moon every night. A moon that never waxed or waned or hid it’s face behind a cloud. We laughed when we realized that our moon was no celestial body but the globe shaped lamppost on the path beyond the garden fence. The ground slopes upward toward the path giving our moon the illusion of hanging in the sky.

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Lacrosse Past and Present

Dakota play lacrosse on the Minnesota River. Oil painting 1848.

Goin’ fishin’? Wotcha catch? Where’s the kippers?

We endured these taunts and more, delivered in the broad Cockney of our neighborhood and accompanied by sneering laughter, as my sister and I walked home from the bus stop. Our Catholic school uniforms already made us a target of derision for the local kids, but now at the end of term we carried our lacrosse sticks with us. What else could these odd things be but fishing nets? The kids seemed delighted to have something new in their arsenal.

Girls clumsily cradle

Our experience of playing lacrosse at school wasn’t much more positive. On the playing field up the hill behind the school we ran back and forth in miserable grey English weather. Shorts were not allowed for convent school girls and sweatpants were unheard of. We wore gabardine divided skirts, shorts disguised as skirts with box pleats, and Aertex blouses. Our formidable games mistress Miss Sands wore a below the knee tweed skirt and a sensible cardigan with a whistle on a ribbon around her neck. For some reason lost to history we called her Daisy. If the rain was too heavy for outdoor sports she took us to the gym and made us dance the Highland Fling. I’m not sure which activity we dreaded most.

Cradle girls! she would cry, Cradle! This referred to the back and forth swinging motion of the stick we had to perfect to keep the ball secure in the net. Up and down the field we ran cradling and dropping the ball, and cradling some more. It seemed a very tedious business. There was occasional drama when the dangerously hard ball would hit some unfortunate girl in the head. No one in those days seemed concerned about concussion though. My sister remembers an incident when a too generous application of the stuff used to condition the leather netting caused her ball to be firmly stuck as she ran cradling away. Miss Sands called out Oh well held Byrne! in her fluting Queen’s accent. But of course my sister was unable to pass the ball so her sporting triumph was short lived.

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The NeverEnding Speech

Sather Gate at University of California Berkeley

It was the most memorable speech I’ve ever heard, though I can’t remember a single word of it. Let us enter the scene at about the one hour mark when the audience gathered on the sun dappled lawn broke into sustained applause. Though a passer by might have taken the applause for appreciation, for the families perched on uncomfortable folding chairs the vigorous clapping had a desperate air. Surely this time the speaker would take the hint and wind things up. It was about the fourth or fifth time that the audience had broken into spontaneous applause at any small break in the torrent of words, some even standing, to try to bring the agony to an end. But each time the speaker, a tiny man whose head barely peeked over the podium, waited patiently until the clapping ceased and then resumed speaking in his barely audible whisper of a voice.

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