A cure for cabin fever?

March garden: sunflowers

Last night: A cure for cabin fever?

This morning: The view from the Club Level (5th floor) of the Sheraton, downtown Portsmouth, looking west toward North Mill Pond

Map.

Yesterday afternoon my husband and I drove up the coast to Portsmouth through a torrential downpour and minor flooding that overnight turned into 30-mile-an-hour winds as a cold front blasted through. Inside the Sheraton, we ignored the vile weather, sipped champagne in our room at the top, then joined other pilots and spouses at the annual Cabin Fever Dinner Dance.

I had a bad attitude about attending, probably because I was suffering from cabin fever, and because I thought the guys would all be commiserating and complaining about the wretched pay cut they suffered a few years ago (and agreed to, so the company would be one of the few legacy carriers that didn't go through bankruptcy) and the contract negotiations currently, but not very hopefully, under way. Misery doesn't always love company. But guess what, it was fun, actually.

Good food. Open bar. Friends and acquaintances we haven't seen in a long time. Conversation about kids, special projects and passions, interesting places visited, and the wives' jobs rather than the husbands'. And lots of dancing. Who knew 35 to 60 year olds could be so amusingly and cheerfully unrestrained on the dance floor?

Now we're home, it's a brisk sunny day, and we're making maple syrup then going to UNH to hear the concert choir at 3 p.m. My husband claims to detect subtle signs of spring, in the color of the tips of trees for instance, with his super x-ray spring specs he got in the back of a comic book.

Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men’s affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice. But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk.

– Willa Cather

Dance there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water’s roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet....

– William Butler Yeats

HEIDSIECK MONOPOLE Brut Champagne Blue Top NV (91 points, $35)

Elegant and expressive, this delivers floral, pear and toffee flavors matched to a creamy texture. Beautifully integrated, this lingers nicely on the mineral finish. Drink now through 2010. 35,000 cases imported.

– Wine Spectator

Comments

[Bricker]

We did almost the same thing though down your way at an undisclosed hotel with a very entertaining dance party scene. A man actually passed out on the bar next to me mid sentence. I guess I'm not that interesting.

[diane bednarek]

tell john we've got BLOOMING forsythia at the corner of old locke rd. and pond path!

[Amy]

Diane, that is insanely early for forysthia! I may have to drive by today.

Lara, I might be able to guess where that is. Nice Sunday travel piece, by the way.