Life Along the Edges: The Chesapeake Artistry of Photographer Dave Harp
The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.
Nonpartisan and Education-based News for Cambridge
The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.
The recent memorializing of the Henry Highland Garnet School Media Center in the name of Emma L. Grason Miller opens a new door into Chestertown’s African American history and a long-overdue appreciation for the school’s founding on Calvert Street.
One hundred six years ago, across College Avenue from Bethel Church, Emma Miller started a school for Black children that offered a curriculum beyond the 6th grade, for years the standard grade level in Kent County’s dozens of African American one-room schools.
It was an uphill battle. Keeping the schools open was challenging enough with low attendance during harvest season when boys were needed to help in the fields, and funding was scant.
Undeterred, Miller extolled the value of education to the children’s families and convinced them to contribute anything they could from their meager income. But the educator knew this was unsustainable and looked beyond the County for help.
She wrote an appeal to the State Legislation, followed by a visit to Annapolis to state her case for the future of education in Kent County. Legislators were impressed, and funds were forthcoming. The first structure of Henry Highland Garnet School across from Bethel Church was founded in 1916. The current Garnet was built in 1949.
As Karen Somerville tells the Spy, “Without Emma L Grason Miller, there would have been no Henry Highland Garnet School.”
The arc of Emma Miller’s life and fervent advocacy for the education of Kent’s Black youth is also a story about another woman, Mary Elizabeth Lange (1789-1882), a Catholic nun who founded the Oblate School for Colored Girls—later the Saint Frances School for Colored Girls—in Baltimore, the first religious congregation of women of African descent in the United States.
Lange fled Haiti to Cuba after the slave insurrection against French colonial rule, finally settling in Baltimore in 1813, when the free African-American population outnumbered enslaved people. Despite the many Protestant organizations providing services for the burgeoning free African-American population, “Mother Mary” Lange saw a greater need to address illiteracy and “empower youth with the ability to overcome obstacles in the face of hopelessness.” Currently, documents about the educator are at the Vatican to consider for canonization.
Near the end of Mother Mary Lang’s life, Emma Miller would have been a young student and imbued with the same zeal to serve her community. She did so, from Virginia to Talbot County and finally to Chestertown where she would become supervisor of schools and pave the way for the founding of Garnet School.
The Spy thinks it is not beyond the pale to consider further recognition for Emma L. Grason Miller. Henry Highland Garnet’s esteemed legacy as an abolitionist, orator, and educator could be shared with the woman who devoted her life to the school’s founding.
The Spy recently talked with Karen Somerville about Emma Grason Miller’s path to Chestertown, Mary Elizabeth Lange, and Miller’s attendance at the Hampton Institute in Virginia. Last Spring, Somerville spearheaded the project to name the Garnet School Media Center after the educator and recently received a grant from the Chesapeake Heartland Institute at Washington College’s Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience to create a biographic video about Miller’s life and pioneering service to education in Kent County.
Born and raised in Kent County, MD, Karen Somerville is renowned for her singing appearances at the annual Women Helping Women concerts at The Garfield Theatre, the Chestertown Jazz Festival. She currently works with Hope Fellowship in Chestertown.
This video is approximately fifteen minutes in length.
The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.
There are those who think serendipitous timing is a matter of chance and those who think nothing is. I’ll bet you have some thoughts on this but let me tell you what happened.
Mike was a laid-back, bear of a man, who wore a pale-blue oxford shirt with khaki pants every day and looked like a stocky Paul Newman. He’d left his job as an editor at Time/Life Books to start The Chesapeake Boatman when I came to work for the magazine as Associate Editor. A kind and generous mentor, Mike put up with a lot from his young, given-to-drama staff–rather like a long-suffering father shepherding a bunch of rowdy adolescents. We made him buy lunch a lot.
The Boatman was a substantive magazine but struggled for three years in a saturated market. I was delighting in my second week of maternity leave when Mike came to the house to meet my new daughter, and to deliver the news that the magazine had folded. He was closing the office. I grieved for the loss of a job, a boss, and a routine that I loved, but I supplanted those losses with new motherhood, which I loved more.
We lost touch and I never saw Mike again, but 23 years later, I was waiting for the pasta water to boil one evening when he came abruptly, vividly to mind. Without pausing, I picked up the phone, asked the operator for his number and instead of giving it to me, she connected the call. A second later, a person I deeply valued and had often missed, came on the line as if we had just paused for breath. “Laura,” he said. “I’m so glad you called. We just got back from Chicago. I’ve been part of a study there. I have kidney cancer and it looks like I’ve got about 3 months to live.”
It came to me then. Conversations from 20 years before. Mike was an atheist. Mike had been born with only one kidney.
My family was leaving for New Zealand in a few days where I’d be staying indefinitely—The Land of the Long White Cloud. Mike was soon leaving for parts unknown and was already well beyond visitors.
We exchanged email addresses and I wrote to him as much as I thought his nurses would tolerate as the days counted down. He believed that at the moment of his death, he would cease to exist. Intuitively, I felt otherwise but kept to the facts.
I told him he was the best boss I’d ever had. And by boss I also meant friend. I thanked him for teaching me to play racquetball and by racquetball I meant how to polish a manuscript, how to make respect the point of origin for all relationships. I asked his forgiveness for redecorating his office over the weekend as a surprise, but getting paint on the carpet, a penalty he must have absorbed when the magazine closed. And by paint on the carpet, I meant, forgive me for every time I took your patient equanimity and generosity for granted.
From 12,000 miles away, I told him about being in New Zealand for the America’s Cup. I described the cheering crowds in the tidal basin, the excitement of watching mark roundings and tacking duels from the spectator fleet.
Then an email arrived that he told me would be his last. A few days later, New Zealand won the America’s Cup, and I flew back to the States, reentered life here with 3 kids, organizing their activities, their return to school. I tried not to think about the inevitable news that was coming. A few weeks after that a woman who identified herself as Mike’s secretary called to say Mike had died.
I searched my inbox for his last email so that I could hear him tell me goodbye. Just above his name he had typed, “God bless you.”
I don’t know if that was something Mike came to believe, said for my benefit, or just threw out there covering the bases for both of us. He had told me he wasn’t bitter or regretful about his impending death though he was young. He said, “I look at it this way: X number of people will die of cancer this year. If one of them is me, then one of them isn’t someone else.” Chance.
But the fact that someone I loved and hadn’t spoken to in 23 years, came to mind at the exact and only moment in which I could have said thank you and goodbye, felt like something other than chance. With or without divine orchestration, it felt like more than an accident in timing. And his blessing felt intentional.
Maybe we don’t have to believe that everything is chance, or nothing is. Maybe we don’t need to be that black and white. Maybe we aren’t going to know with such mathematical clarity what is a gift and what is a given.
William James said, “No one knows the truth with a capital ‘T.’ The truth is what works.”
Being open to possibility is the wild, tender nature of grace. And that works for me.
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.
The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.
The Spy does not have an annual Summer Strut feature like Slate Magazine’s Culture Gabfest. Every year (except during COVIDtimes) the podcast hosts solicit the listeners to submit their favorite Song for the Summer, for listening to while strutting along merrily through the summertime heat. These are zeitgeist songs we hear blaring out from passing cars, or wafting over the hedge from the neighbor’s cookout, or from a dance floor. We listen to all these songs of summer as we walk the dog, walk to the ice cream shop, mow the lawn, and drive to the beach.
It’s a way to feel good in all of this sweltering heat. The Slate folks have compiled the list for more than ten years. It is a great reminder of how much popular music there is out there, and how hard it is to keep up. So you should liven up your playlist, and try something new. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2oc68EJC3OyLUi1Honhxlw?si=44ec68203e8d47a9&nd=1
Here in the much vaunted Spy test kitchens, we will be listening to the Summer Strut songs while testing perfect summer cocktails. Something to sip after a long day at the drawing table. After walking on the melted sidewalks with Luke the wonder dog. Something cool and delicious to remind us of summers past: vacations, sojourns, by the lake, by the ocean, in a hammock. Won’t you join us? Next year we will solicit Spy readers for their favorite drinks of summer: the Summer Sips 2023.
A classic, bubbly vodka and tonic immediately brings to mind the thrill of trailing your hand through the water while idling in a lazy canoe. But that was then, this is now. How about a Dirty Shirley? It’s been suggested by the New York Times that this is the drink of Summer 2022.
Dirty Shirley
Ice
2 ounces vodka
1 ounce grenadine
8 ounces Sprite or 7-Up
1 maraschino cherry
Fill a tall glass with ice. Add the vodka and grenadine to the glass. Add Sprite and top with the cherry. Yumsters.
Here is a classic that’s not so sweet: Aperol Spritz
2 parts Aperol
2 parts Prosecco
1 part club soda
Combine over ice in a wine glass or any glass you’d like. Garnish with an orange wedge.
My mis-spent youth: Cape Codder
2 ounces vodka
2 ounces cranberry juice
Juice of half a lime
Club soda
Use a tall glass and combine vodka and cranberry juice, lime juice and some ice. Stir. Top with club soda. Garnish with a lime wedge.
We’ve missed Wimbledon, but surely there is a croquet game in our future before school starts again? In which case, Pimm’s Cups are in order:
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/drinks/a9967357/pimms-cup-recipe/
Frozen Prosecco.
One of my favorite Saturday evening indulgences: https://www.delish.com/cooking/recipe-ideas/a21085218/frozen-prosecco-recipe/
Not every drink has to be alcoholic. There are plenty of non-boozy ways to cool off this summer, too. Mr. Sanders is very fond of an Arnold Palmer – simple, thirst quenching, IG-ready:
https://www.thespruceeats.com/arnold-palmer-mocktail-recipe-760357
This is as refreshing and cool as sticking your feet in a pool: Cucumber Lime Mocktail
https://www.vibrantplate.com/cucumber-lime-mocktail/
All those blueberries in your freezer can now be pressed into service for something other than pancake and muffins: Blueberry Ginger Coolers: https://www.cookwithmanali.com/blueberry-ginger-cooler/
To celebrate summer winding down, you need to plan ahead a little bit, and make your own homemade Limoncello. It takes a week or so. You can pretend to be in Italy, sitting out on the piazza with the rest of the village, groaning with pizza and pasta. A cool digestif is just the thing while finishing a nice indulgent evening meal, with the sun going down, feeling the ancient cobbles that are still warm under your weary, sandal-shod feet: https://food52.com/recipes/76746-limoncello-e-pepe Now that is a dream summer vacation.
“Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered…sealed away for opening on a January day with snow falling fast and the sun unseen for weeks…”
― Ray Bradbury
The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.
While the Mid-Shore Community Foundation has always been in the business of providing scholarships to regional young people for educational purposes, it was only about 15 years ago that the region’s largest community foundation began to become a major player in scholarship assistance.
That is according to the MSCF’s president, Buck Duncan, who sat down with the Spy last week to talk about the remarkable $1.6 million that the foundation gave away to needy students over the previous few months. It is a wonderful story of how the board of MSCF became increasingly aware of the urgent need for not only four-year higher education support but in such diverse fields as healthcare, hospitality, automotive technology, welding, aviation mechanics, radiology, and maritime training.
And with their goals set to expand, diversify, and reach out to qualified young people, the MSCF trustees, volunteers and staff double-downed on promoting scholarship funding in all five counties the foundation serves.
With the help of dozens of philanthropic individuals and families, a healthy stock market, and good organizational skills, the MSCF has reached a record-breaking asset base of $115 million”
We asked Buck about this remarkable achievement and its potentially transformational impact on the Mid-Shore’s quality of life.
This video is approximately six minutes in length. For more information about the Mid-Shore Community Foundation please go here.
The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.
Fickle Mirror, the new exhibition at the Art Academy Museum, is timely and relevant. In a world of selfies and personal branding, Warhol and Rembrandt feel ahead of their time in how they were obsessed with their own image. In addition to the household names, Curator Mehves Lelic has assembled a coterie of emerging and exciting new artists for this exhibition.
Artists examining their own persona leads us to question our own identity and how we perceive ourselves. Jackie Milad (the currently artist in residence at AAM) shares her identity in a less obvious way than the self portrait, but her DNA is undeniable in her bright, and visceral work.
This video is approximately four minutes in length. For more information about the Academy and “Fickle Mirror” please go here.
The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.
On a breezy afternoon in late June, five small heifers escaped from a hillside pasture on my sister’s Virginia farm by squeezing under the wire fence at the stream. It took days of searching wooded knolls and valleys to find them about a mile away on an adjacent property, hanging out under a leafy canopy of oaks and maples, reminiscing about their great getaway.
Black as a starless night, cute and curious, they were newly weaned and highly skittish. Because they’d never had grain, they couldn’t be lured back to the farm with food. They were in fact, impossible to recapture. So, they enjoyed the lush green bounty of early summer grass, found a source of water, and enjoyed their freedom for as long as it lasted. That’s where we left them—five rebellious adolescents on the lam.
Cowhands volunteered their time to round up three of the five after a week or two and they were shipped out west. As my brother-in-law said, once a jailbreaker, always a jailbreaker. But two have proved elusive–the mastermind and his Number One, his Executive Officer. Then, last week the best friend was driven off the property as well and only the CEO of Adventure Unlimited remains at large. Except he’s not large, he’s surprisingly little with an outsized strength of will. He’s actually the kind of guy you’d want in charge of your business– ingenious, resourceful, charismatic. I think he should run for governor or become a life coach.
I’d cheer for him except he’s kind of breaking my heart. I don’t have a formal policy, but I rarely choose meat these days. Just doesn’t feel right. This little cow had what he thought was a good idea. He just wanted to head out on the highway, looking for adventure, for whatever comes his way. Right?
But now he’s alone and making his last stand. Butch Cassidy without the Sundance Kid. I’m thinking he’s about to stop having fun.
So, the tactic to get him off the private property he has made his Air B and B, is to bring in a girl. A lovely, brown-eyed girl with a tag in her ear. It won’t be a romance. Romance was taken off the table the usual way for young male cows. But the theory is these two will bond because cows are herd animals. Just as horses are. And they are social. Just as we are.
Given a few days of proximity, they will gravitate towards each other. And she, a fetching but docile homebody, will be led out of there with junior following.
It will be a relief to have finally rounded up all the escaped cows. They were a nuisance and a liability, although in cow county this is not at all unusual apparently. And if this were India, not Virginia, the cows would be revered and roaming freely through the pedestrian mall in downtown Charlottesville.
These, like most of today’s cow population, are the descendants of cattle domesticated 10,500 years ago from black aurochs which became extinct in the 1600’s. But the cows you see now were never wild. Just like dogs were once wolves, but there has never been a pack of wild poodles.
The one exception is a bunch of cows that escaped in Hawaii in the 1800’s. They remained too elusive to be caught, were aided by mild weather and plenty to eat, and they are now a feral herd.
So, there’s a chance I suppose that the brown-eyed girl everyone is counting on, will be won over. That her little foster brother will convince her to elude the posse and head for the hazy hills of the Blue Ridge. Maybe when the cowhands return for these two there will be nothing there but a note. But I don’t think so.
I’m betting that what couldn’t be accomplished with ropes and roundups will be achieved by recognizing a near-universal need of all things sentient.
The desire for community, to live a shared experience will win out. It’s as if every life is a story that deserves to be read.
We all need to know we aren’t just what happened in the world, we are why what happened in the world mattered—to someone. Love longs for a beloved.
When the cowboys come back, I think a little black heifer and a patient brown cow will be waiting. Side by side.
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.
The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.
We are running around the bases, and heading into August. That means the hottest part of the summer is still ahead of us. And we will be that much deeper into hurricane season.
I am dully contemplating what to do for dinner, but the heat has sapped any creativity I might have been harboring. Last night I nearly set the stove on fire when I broiled some tomatoes, according to a recipe for Tomato Choka I found in the Thrillist. I was bored with our summer repertoire of meals, and I was showing off, too. “Look at this divine new dish I just whipped up in my most expert, food-writer-y way.” What a disaster that was! Black smoke billowed out of the broiler; I am lucky that the smoke alarms didn’t go off, it was that big of a mess. https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/tomato-choka-recipe From now on, hubris lesson learned, I need to stop trying for unusual meals, and see what is left over in the fridge.
I found a new Substack newsletter to read the other day: Andrew Zimmern’s Spilled Milk. The piece that leapt off the computer screen first was “Bizarre Foods…In My Fridge?” I cannot compete with Andrew Zimmern. We have nothing in cold storage as exotic as moose shanks or salmon roe – but we do have a jar of duck fat, four kinds of hot sauce, four kinds of mustard (no wonder there is a world-wide shortage), lots of cheeses (Swiss, Jarlsberg, Cheddar, fresh mozzarella, block mozzarella, Parmesan Reggiano, feta, Peccorino and a sad little blue-tinged cube of Colby), 6 bags of frozen homemade pizza dough, and OMG – I just found a bag of pork chops dated November 21, 2020!
We lived in Florida for a long time, and learned one of the rules of hurricane preparedness is to be sure cook what is in your freezer right away, so if you have to evacuate, and the power is cut, you won’t come home to a house reeking of rotting meat. (I have just chucked out the vintage frozen pork chops, you’ll be relieved to know.) We don’t seem to have a lot of meat – a baggie of frozen taco meat, one filet mignon, three portions of salmon, and two boxes of breakfast sausage patties. Maybe that bodes well for the upcoming hurricane season.
In the fridge we have two bottles of wine, half of a lemon/blueberry cheesecake, two slices of pizza, four packages of tortillas, both flour and corn. Also bags of salad, a head of broccolini, a Vidalia onion, cilantro, blueberries, a green pepper, carrots, four ears of corn, a bunch of cilantro and three eggs.
The easiest meal would be cheese and crackers and wine, with a modest green salad and the yummy dessert. But that would be pretty lazy. We could thaw the taco meat, and make cheese-topped tacos. There are chips in the pantry. Then we could include some greens, and use up some hot sauce. Or we could break the family rules, and make a pizza on a night of the week other than Friday. We could also make a small frittata, and a big salad. We know the wine won’t go to waste.
I know you can’t do this often, because the novelty will wear off, but having breakfast for dinner can be amusing. Not a sad bowl of cold cereal, but pancakes are always cheery. Or waffles, with a scoop of ice cream. Decadent. You will be just one step away from guzzling absinthe.
I recommend getting out a pad of paper and making a list of everything in your fridge. It is quite an eye-opening exercise. You might feel a little bit better about your dinner prospects. Plus you won’t have to go out in the heat to stock up. You will be practically hurricane proof.
“My mother really would make these dreadful concoctions. She really prided herself on something called ‘Everything Stew,’ where she would take everything in the refrigerator, all the leftovers, and put them all together.”
-Ruth Reichl
https://andrewzimmern.substack.com/p/bizarre-foodsin-my-fridge-chit-chat
The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.
There are a few things that are front and center for Easton Airport Manager Micah Risher these days. The first is starting the long-awaited design phase to relocate and expand the airport’s primary runway over the next five to seven years. This major upgrade, which has been planned for almost twenty years, will be one of the most significant and largest infrastructure projects ever on the Eastern Shore, adding some 1,900 feet in total surface area to the strip, the destruction and reuse of the old Black & Decker plant, and the upgrading of the airport’s physical plant and technology.
And the second priority, perhaps having just as much history as the main runway extension plan, is the very sensitive issue of noise abatement as aircraft traffic continues to grow for this jet-friendly airport. And while it should be noted that the noted increase in executive jet use of EAS is rarely the culprit of this form of sound pollution (given their modern engines and long flight paths), the fact remains that the airport is seeing noticeable growth in the smaller aircraft that do sometimes require higher decibel take-offs and landings.
In both cases, Micah has some important points to share with the Mid-Shore community. Yesterday, he sat down with the Spy to talk in more detail about the runway project and its important safety goals for what is one of the region’s most important economic drivers. In fact, using a independent consulting firm in 2018, it was determined that the airport had close to a $50 million a year impact of our local economy.
Risher also talks frankly about the noise rebatement concerns for which he and his family have “skin in the game” being a homeowner in one the nearly neighborhoods affected by sound issues. Over the last few years, Micah has doubled-down on that particular challenge with a number of programs, including changing flight paths and creating the airport’s Good Neighbor Program to mitigate as much as possible aircraft engine noise.
This video is approximately eight minutes in length. For more information about the Easton Airport please go here.
The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.
After 25 years working as a professional in the healthcare sector, Patti Aaronson decided to shift gears. Feeling a strong desire to return to working with her hands, Patti not only began restoring houses in both her native Baltimore but found herself relocating to the Eastern Shore in Cambridge to take on similar projects.
This was also the time when Patti returned to the easel. Eager to highlight the beauty of the Shore’s environment, its special humanity, and, in her words, its “kindness,” she took to both oils and watercolors to document that vision.
“I’ve always had a deep appreciation for beauty, particularly natural beauty and the process of making art is often a part of that for me. I’m also inspired by my desire to develop fully as an artist and a lifelong passion to create. ”
The Spy caught up with Patti in Cambridge last week to talk about her work.
This video is approximately three minutes in length. For more information about Main Street Gallery please go here.
The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.