Intros:
1. I feel like I'm doing nothing these days but being the one who remembers to inform the clergy.

2. Why am I posting this here? None of you have heard of her. Well, except maybe Sor. But when a legend dies, you have to sing about them SOMEWHERE.

Linda Woodford has died.
I never met her (more about that later); most of you have never heard of her. But she was a legend in Boston ringing circles, AND with anyone who's been a parishioner at the Church of the Advent for more than a certain amount of time. Parishioner, sexton, choir member, bellringer; trailburningly gender-non-conforming, first woman on the shop floor at Whitechapel, sometime professional bellhanger; lover of all bells and restorer of many, though her favorite bell was (again famously) the 2 1/2 tonne tenor at St. Mary Redcliffe.

Bellhanging didn't work out as a full time job, and Boston was and is expensive; she moved to Kalamazoo at some time after they got a ring, but in any case long before I got back into ringing. She died this afternoon after several days in hospice there. At least she was lucid until the last, and died with family and ringing friends nearby.
At some point there will be ringing. At some point when ringing with more than four people in the room doesn't bring the risk of yet more deaths.


3. So I have this list of people whom I'm really really sad that they died before I got to meet them. "Bop" Pritchard, survivor of the Battle of the Bulge, G's grandfather, legendary jokester and Character with a capitol C. Leonard Boyle, prefect of the Vatican Library (and therby hang MANY tales), but my parents remember him mostly as the Diplomatics professor who used to toss medieval charters across the room for his students to look at.
And now I guess Linda's on it too.

Anyway, here's some photos. At some point I will try to get a scan of the legendary photo of Linda hugging the giant tenor at Redcliffe.

Linda working with the even more legendary Bill Theobald.

Another one from back in the day.

ETA: interview from a few months ago.

End of a lot of eras

Wow. I...have been really bad at keeping this updated. A lot's happened: I will try to work out how to update the roughly three of you who read this thing, without going TOO tl:dr. So:

On Saturday I drove up to New Hampshire for what I've been explaining to people as my grandmother's wake. Which wasn't a completely accurate description, but as noted earlier* she dies in December; Christian Scientists apparently don't believe in funerals; and my mother and her siblings had decided that since Grandpa had always really liked taking people out to dinner, this would be a good way to remember both of them.

So that was a bittersweet occasion in a lot of ways, but I'm not going to focus on that, other than to say: thus ends the story of my grandparents. Because this also overlaps with/results in the ends of a few other eras.

No, unfortunately the "working in the mailroom" era is not among them.

First-off: my aunt has FINALLY ( sold the cabin )

( Secondly... )

( Conversation over the hors d'oevres )

Finally--and, for a lot of reasons, I feel weird about posting this here, but it's somewhat important.( The good news. )

* Interestingly, I apparently was ringing at Old North the morning after she died, and was there again on Saturday morning, which meant that I rushed home afterwards, threw myself through the shower, and got in the car. (Well, once I manoevred it out from behind my housemate's car.)
The other difference is that this time I managed to NOT fuck up Plain Hunt! Booyeah!

** No, not the Henry-Jamesian one. Her sister. Well, one of them. The relatively normal one.

*** Ironically, what I'd really been hoping to inherit from the cottage was the cast iron skillet. The paintings, as far as I was concerned, might as well have stayed with the new owners if they wanted 'em, just like the stuffed dear head (c. 1940). Oh well.