Jim and Joy

We have guests! Jim and Joy Harris, who live in Cherry Hill, NJ, are vsiting us for a couple of days. They are not actually staying here at the house overnight - they are at the Hampton Inn - but we had supper out and the evening with them here at the house yesterday, and earlier today, I went on a little trip with them over into New Hampshire, and they will have supper with us this evening before Ellen and I go to a Dummerston Church choir rehearsal. Jim is Shirley's nephew, the son of her brother, Ladd Harris. Ladd died, tragically, on July 31, 1960, at age 38, when Jim was only six years old. Jim has two siblings, an older brother, Robbie, and a younger sister, Patty. His mother is no longer living. Joy is his second wife, and they are a happy couple. Jim worked much of his adult life as an assistant District Attorney for the state of New Jersey. He has a son, Matt, by his first wife. Joy has a son by an earlier marriage, whose first name, coincidently, is Harris. He lives in Boston, which is the main reason for this trip. They will go to Boston tomorrow. Jim is retired, and in his retirement, he has gotten very interested in his inner life, and has become an author. His first book, Banishing Snakes by Fire: 13 Rituals for Recovering Your Authentic Self, draws on the work he has done in his own iife to heal the trauma of his father's death and its aftermath, and he is currently working on a novel about a man whose dreams prefigure what happens to him the followimg day. They arrived just before supper yesterday, and we ate together at Panda North. I had my usual Mala Tofu ad Ellen her ginger chicken chicken string beans, and Jim and Joy shared a shrimp appetizer and a main dish I forget. We had a surprise sitting at the next tabe was Ken Burns, the well-known PBS film-maker! He was with what looked to be a granddaughter. That was cool! Today, we went over to Harrisville and Dublin, NH, which are important locations in Jim's family tree - nothing to do with the Harris family- that is another coincidence - but rather with the Townsend family - his great-grandmother was Kate Townsend Langley. We visited the house where Kate was born and grew up in Harrisville, and the graves in nearby Dublin where her father amd mother and other Townsends are buried. Harrisville is a lovely old mill town, beautifully kept amd restored, and we had lunch at the General Store, which is an extremely popular gathering place. The Dublin cemetery proved to be a challenge for me because of hills and rough ground, and it was very cold and windy, but we had a good time.

Joy and Jim at Panda, with Ken Burns in background.

The Townsend house in Harrisville as it looks today

The Harrisville General Store, outside and inside