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Ponyhenge update

We went, we saw, we laughed, we rode ponies in a field in Lincoln, Massachusetts. What fun! If you're in the greater Boston area, take yourself -- and your kids -- to Ponyhenge. 

Have you seen these potatoes?

Whenever I'm planning a trip, or a staycation, or a holiday weekend in Boston, I reach for my iPad and log on to Atlas Obscura, which calls itself "the definitive guide to the world's hidden wonders." The Atlas, a crowdsourced site, features -- for example -- 113 wonders right here in Boston, and Ted and I have seen most of them. Pictured above, one we've not yet found: the Potato Shed Memorial, marking the location in Charlestown below mega-highway I-93 where potato sheds once stood. I kid you not. I've followed Atlas Obscura recommendations in San Francisco, Chicago, Rhode Island, Maine, and even in Kyoto, Japan. In recent years, the site has added features like trips to Mexico City and Venice, online classes in taxidermy and lockpicking (!), and live classes in How to Forge a Michelangelo, and perfumery, and pop-up paper art. You never know where the Atlas will take you.

Ponyhenge

My friend Stephanie reminded me a few weeks ago that I haven't yet visited Ponyhenge, a spontaneous collection of rocking horses, plastic ponies, and other horse toys in a field by the side of the road in Lincoln, Massachusetts (half an hour from Boston). Since 2010, the figures have been mysteriously appearing, and multiplying; they're occasionally rearranged into a circle, or a racing formation, or left to total chaos. Nobody knows how Ponyhenge started, though Atlas Obscura has posited some theories. I plan to check it out this summer.

Meet me in Nuala

The fictional town of Nuala, in 1930s Ceylon, reminds me more than a little bit, and not by accident, of the real-life town of Kandy in the tea-growing mountains of modern-day Sri Lanka. Police Inspector Shanti de Silva and his English wife, Jane, find a world of trouble in what he thought would be a sleepy posting outside the capital city of Colombo. If you love getting lost in a book series, Harriet Steel's Nuala books, 11 volumes and counting, will keep you amused with an endearing ensemble of recurring characters, good mysteries to solve, and great descriptions of the countryside, the gardens, and the food. Start at the beginning and read your way through summer vacation.

Joseph Palmer, bearded man

Atlas Obscura has introduced me to some surprising and wonderful people, places and things that I never would have discovered on my own. Recently, my husband and I made the acquaintance of Joseph Palmer, a 19th Century farmer who resides in Evergreen Cemetery in Leominster, Massachusetts. The Atlas Obscura write-up is so perfect that I'm sharing it with you here, word-for-exquisite-word: 

"Despite the conception that the past was a hairy wonderland of bearded outdoorsmen, bushy facial hair was long considered the mark of lunatics or worse, heretics. Today there is a Massachusetts gravestone that still remembers one man’s heroic fight against the forces of anti-hirsute vigilantes and a whole town’s persecution against his epic mane.   

"A veteran of the War of 1812, Joseph Palmer began wearing a beard in the 1820s. Beards had gone out of style in the 1720s, and Palmer was considered by most all in his small town to be slovenly and ungodly. He was even criticized by his local preacher for communing with the devil, famously responding to the accusation, “…if I remember correctly, Jesus wore a beard not unlike mine.”

"In May of 1830, Palmer was attacked by four men outside a hotel in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Armed with razors and scissors, the men attempted to forcibly shave Palmer’s face, but the bewhiskered man stabbed two of his attackers with a pocketknife, and was subsequently arrested for assault. He could have avoided jail by paying a fine and court fees, but Palmer refused, maintaining his innocence, and more importantly his right to a glorious beard. He was subsequently jailed for 15 months, including time in solitary confinement.

"Upon leaving prison, Palmer joined the Fruitlands utopian community in nearby Harvard, Massachusetts after being influenced by his friendship with fellow Fruitlander, Louisa May Alcott. The character Moses White from Alcott’s Transcendental Wild Oats is later based on Palmer. Palmer died in 1865 and his tombstone displays a portrait of him with a long beard, and as a final act of rebellion, the inscription Persecuted for wearing the beard."