Mary Richmond Design

Days of Wonder

I can't get enough of these days. Days at the beach looking for horseshoe crabs, letting hermit crabs tickle my hands, watching kids discover new things under every rock.

This summer has simply been wonderful. One beautiful day has followed another and this one was no exception.

I only have a few more days in this job. Then I'll be on my own again.

I will miss moments like these in this incredible place but my plan includes days like this in other incredible places so I will not mourn any losses quite yet.

Whether it's holding  young horseshoe crabs for little people to examine or identifying shorebirds for retired people with binoculars this seems to be part of my destiny.

I am spending hours with pen and paper writing down my plans, my goals, my hopes for new programs. Next week I will begin in earnest.

There is much to do and I am excited.

Remember the huge cecropia caterpillar? The kids named it Peter (though we have no idea of it is male or female) and it/he is now in the process of metamorphosis. The caterpillar spun this cocoon or chyrsalis and attached it to the side of the little aquarium.

It will winter over in this form, exchanging chemicals and changing form. It will emerge in the spring as a beautiful moth with a wing span of about four inches.

I love this metaphor for what is going on in my life right now....

Will I too emerge this spring with newly minted wings?

Ah Summer.....

There's nothing like searching for butterflies on a beautiful August morning, especially if you can take a bunch of 7 and 8 year olds with you.

We also found grasshoppers of all sizes and colors and a few dragonflies and crickets.

We saw a young rabbit and kept our eyes out for snakes.

And then we saw a bush start to shake. We watched the movement go through the branches and then looked under the branches to see what we could see and this is what we found.

Eastern box turtles are a species of special concern where I live but this one location has a pretty healthy population and the kids love to find them here. The turtles patiently let the kids touch them and then we put them back where we found them.

Kids love turtles. They love big turtles, little turtles, sea turtles and land turtles. They even love snapping turtles. I think they like that little shiver down their spines when they think about really, really big snapping turtles.

Turtles are sort of goofy, you have to admit....

Who doesn't love a turtle?

Beach plums are almost ripe. Bushes are loaded with them this year. Box turtles will take their fill, as will many other birds and animals. Many people have their secret stash and all over Cape Cod people are digging out their jelly making supplies and cleaning out glass jars....

I spend a lot of time here at South Beach in Chatham, taking families out to look for seals in the surf and to do a lot of beach walking and beach combing....this view is from yesterday afternoon. What a day it was....

and it's one of the most isolated parts of the Cape still....ah, yes!

When I turned around, this was my view....

I've fallen in love with local food and the farmer's markets here. These tiny potatoes are a blue variety and they melt in your mouth. I love that I have to wash the earth off them and scrub them with a brush the way my grandmother did....

I bought some fresh onions and loads of garlic, too. The flavor is unbelievable. I don't know how I'll go back to store bought this winter....

This fall I will be planting my own garlic and I'll plant onions in the spring.

 

I had several kinds of fresh new potatoes and carrots, some wonderful fresh rosemary and of course the onions and garlic.

I mixed them all up with some fine olive oil, salt and pepper and spread them out on a sheet of tin foil on a cookie sheet. Cook for about half an hour at 400 degrees and oh my....

We had these with fresh caught bluefish....

Summer on Cape Cod doesn't get better than this.....

Unless it is to do this.....like we did last weekend with fresh caught lobsters bought at the farmer's market.....

Birds on the Boat

These little house finches are very excited to see Dad arrive with some long awaited food.

If you know house finches you know they will next just about anywhere. They nest in flower pots, boots left on a porch, pockets in old coats left on an outdoor hook. Sometimes they even nest in bird houses or in the branches of bushes or trees. They are very adaptable.

It's Mom's turn to feed the hungry brood.

These little finches were raised on a boat. The boat is one we use for tours of the marsh and cove. It is a fairly quiet and slow moving pontoon boat. It travels pretty flat and for much of the time it is at rest on its mooring, though it often makes 3-5 trips a day.

The house finches set up the first nest early in the spring and have now raised three families on the boat. All the young survived to fledge in each instance, a pretty amazing statistic in the bird world.

More than one male seemed to help feed the young. Was it one of the young from an earlier nest? You can see two of them here, waiting their turn to feed the babies.

When the boat was out on the water, the babies hunkered down in the nest and didn't make a peep. Most people on the boat were unaware they were there. The parents waited on shore and greeted the boat the minute it came around the bend toward the dock. They flew from boat to boat, from mast to mast, calling and chiriping and the young woke right up and answered them.

This handsome guy is waiting for me to move so he can get back to business but he didn't seem to mind posing for me one last time.

The four young in this nest have fledged and are doing fine. The original nest leaving took place on the boat and the little ones hopped around on the floor of the boat getting strong enough to fly. One little one joined the captain in the captain's area for a trip through the cove before flying off with its parents to the nearest boat when he returned to the dock.

And that's my tale of birds on the boat. I know, I have a tough day job.....

Any good stories to share?

Green, green and more green....

So often our greens get dried out and faded looking by now but this summer has had just the right amount of rainfall and all our greens are still lush and lovely, cool and refreshing. I'm on Cape Cod and we have not had the drenching rains or flooding some parts of New England have had. We've been very lucky so far. This has been one of the most beautiful summers I remember here and I've been here all my life.

The top picture is of pokeberry, also called inkberry. The berries will soon turn a deep purple and can be used as a fun ink substitute and dye. The young shoots of this plant are supposedly edible but the berries are toxic. Apparently not to birds and animals, though, because they chow down on these berries as soon as they ripen, leaving only the pink stems behind.

The second picture is of fox grape leaves. I walk by them every day and they make such a lovely pattern.

And who can resist ferns? There are something like two thousand kinds of ferns and I think I can name maybe two....and I'm not even really sure of those so these will go unnamed for now.

I believe these funky ferns are called Christmas ferns but I can happily be corrected if someone thinks otherwise!

Queen Anne's Lace isn't green but the white is sort of neutral and it fits in the green landscape so nicely I'm going to include it here. It's the plant that just keeps on growing and I love it. I've let it sprout here and there in my yard, much to the horror of one of my neighbors who always wants me to know it's really a weed, not a flower. Oh well.

And then there's this little guy....who isn't so little! This is a cecropia moth caterpillar and it is one big guy! It was found by one of our kids on a trail, just about at eye level. We all admired it, looked it up in the books and then took it back where we found it. Pretty cool, huh?

So what did you do today?

All in a Day's Work

This is where I go to do my day job each day. I know, it's tough, as they say, but someone's got to do it.

I work mostly outside, with kids and families at this time of year. I work with school groups the rest of the year and spend most of the winter and early spring in a classroom setting. But in the summer we take walks, we look at nature, I tell them what it is we're looking at. Are you buying the tough part yet?

Today was yet another stunning day here on the Cape. Hot, but not stifling, with a good breeze picking up off the ocean this afternoon.

This is one of the ponds we explore.

With some nice pickerel weed and lily pads....

This is another pond just down the path. You can't see them in this picture but there are often herons, egrets and kingfishers here. We also see lots of turtles, fish and sometimes a muskrat.

That is where I spend most of my mornings.

This is where I spend most of my afternoons. Actually I'm on different boats going to different places but this will give you an idea.

We go places like this....

And do things like this....

I think I said it already.....it's a tough life....but someone's got to step up the plate and do it and it might as well be me.

Oh, and we do the same things in really crummy weather, too....just in case you were feeling no sympathy.

Is it Spring Yet?

The red-winged blackbirds and grackles are back making a racket from the tops of still bare trees and flocks of robins are hopping about on lawns hoping for a juicy fresh worm or two.

Buds are fattening, sap is running and the chickadees and titmice are singing their courtship songs. Woodcocks are performing in the fields, the afternoons are getting warmer and the light is lasting longer and longer each day.

But how do we know when it's spring on the Cape?

We know it when the whales come back! And guess what?

They're BAAACCKKK!

Today I took a group of kids up to Provincetown where whale sightings have been going on all week. Sure enough, we saw lots of spouts! We also saw lots of dolphins.

Whales go south for the winter to mate and to calve (not at the same time, just so you know) and while they're there they do not eat. By the time they come back north to our plankton rich green waters they are pretty darn hungry and for the next few weeks they'll be eating like.....whales! The bay is full of krill right now, those tiny shrimp like creatures baleen whales like right whales really love to chow down on. Finback whales are here, too, and soon the humpback whales will return.

I have found myself feeling a bit blue that we have no flowers or very warm weather yet, especially when I see all these festive signs of spring on other people's blogs, but we do have whales....and that's enough sign of spring to keep me going until the flowers and the warm weather arrive.

What's your favorite first sign of spring where you live?

The Joy of Teaching

How we learn and how we experience and process the world we live in has fascinated me since I was a high school student. As a senior I was allowed to take off the last half of the year to write my (insert tongue in cheek here) incredible world class brilliant thesis "Creativity in Barnstable Schools" based on following the elementary art teacher around for 2 months and reading "Summerhill" instead of going to classes. I was convinced that A.S. Neill had it right and that my home town school was wrong, wrong, wrong. As befits my 17 year old arrogant and still wet behind the ears self, that 24 page paper is too embarassing to read all the way through today but I still think it was a cool thing to do and even cooler that the school let me do it. I really did learn alot about creativity and about education and about the limitations that educators face every day. Of course it was 1972 when the times, they were a-changing and even educators were trying to be cool and hip. I did not study education in college though I did take a number of child and adolescent psych classes, educational philosophy and other such things. I read Jonathan Kozol and all the rest of the young, hip educators and thought I knew it all.

Then I taught. Oh how little I knew. Thank heavens the students were patient and helped teach me. I was teaching at a nature center and I was teaching painting to both adults and children. I survived my initiation and have gone on to teach countless workshops and classes in all sorts of things from art, nature, integrating science and humanities and creative problem solving. I've loved it all. I've been told I'm a natural teacher and I have to admit it feels very natural to me. I'm the sort of teacher who asks a lot of questions and wants the students to figure it out. I love to see that aha moment. It makes me giddy with delight when a kid "gets it" or an adult says "I did it!"

Yesterday I taught 5 classes of 4th graders all about earthworms. I had about 3 dozen worms, a few containers of sand, compost dirt and soggy woodland leaves. I also had a chalkboard and a bunch of eager kids. For forty five minutes we talked about animal families, food chains, the importance of decomposers (complete with mental images of us all walking around up to our necks in all sorts of disgusting things if these little guys didn't munch their way through all the stuff we don't want to think about...) and finally, we got to play with the worms themselves.

We experimented with different habitats and looked at their anatomy. We talked about what we knew was true and what wasn't true. Sorry, kids, but worms cannot be cut in pieces to grow new worms....it was a blast. I had a ball. The kids had a ball. The classroom teachers had a ball. Even the principal wanted to know what we were doing down in the science room that sounded like so much fun.

A day like this is surely why those of us who teach continue to do so. We get to be a little bit performer, a little bit comedian, a little bit serious imparter of knowledge. We get to make a difference for just a moment. Imagine, every single child ended up handling worms when most of them came in swearing they were definitely not going to touch such a disgusting thing.....Now that's the joy of teaching!

Flickers, Waxwings and Other Things

I have always loved flickers. They're big, they're bold, they're beautiful. What's not to love? This winter I have had three or four visit my suet feeder on a pretty regular basis but just before the big storm this weekend my yard seemed full of them. We have the Northern Flicker here, also called the yellow shafted flicker. I was so excited to see their cousins, the red shafted flickers when I was in New Mexico but that's another story.

There are several big hollies of different varieties all tucked in together in our tiny yard. Each winter they are full of berries. We also have privet bushes  growing up wildly here and there that are full of inky berries, most likely planted by birds and several good sized multiflora bushes that would actually like to take over the yard. Each spring we battle it out. I win in May but by September it's pretty obvious that they only let me win and only for a moment. You can almost hear their thorny snickers when you walk by. Multiflora is an invasive and a pain in the butt or any other body part it gets tangled up with but the birds do at least like the appparently tasty little hips that decorate the bushes at this time of year. We have a large resident mockingbird that makes it very plain that this bush, this land is its land with nothing for you or for me, to paraphrase Woody Guthrie. It spends huge amounts of time and energy defending this prickly territory, often to my great amusement.

This weekend just before the storm my yard was suddenly inundated with birds seeking seeds, suet and berries. All at once I had flocks of winter robins, cedar waxwings, starlings, blue jays and at least a dozen flickers. There were also the usual feeder friends such as cardinals, chickadees, nuthatches, titmice, goldfinches and house sparrows. The yard was alive with color and the noisy chattering of birds arguing and eating. There were birds everywhere; in the trees, in the bushes, all over the feeders and covering almost every inch of ground. It didn't last long, maybe 15 minutes or so, but it was one of those moments where you catch your breath and imprint the image on your brain and in the rest of your senses. You know it is rare, you know it is precious and you know you want to be able to pull it out to remember, to see, to feel, to hear on one of those cloudy gray days of the mind when all seems hopeless and sad.

Moments like these make me happy, make me glad to be part of this world, part of nature, part of all this wonder and mystery. This moment also brought me out of what can only be called a long drawing slump when I drew the little illustration above. I have had so little motivation to draw or paint or do anything creative these last few months. I hope it is the beginning of a renewed enthusiasm. I have to admit I have very little enthusiasm for anything right now and that's not like me. Perhaps I'm having my own migration and hibernation even though I'm still in the same geographical place and am not asleep....or am I?

The Beach, the Woods, the Sand, the Sea....the Light!

Late afternoons with the kids walking in the woods, along the beach....this week has been so lovely and beautiful. It's been warm enough to walk outdoors for hours and the light has been simply amazing. I love the light at this time of year except when I am driving.

This photo was taken at the site in Wellfleet where Marconi transmitted his first telegraph. The station he used has long since washed out to sea and even this vantage point is being undercut by every storm tide and wind.

Look how lovely the sand and water look in this soft light, so calming and sensuous. Everything looks so sweet and calm from this angle on this quiet afternoon. There is no sign of the raging waves that tore half this cliff away. Looking down from this angle one can't see the damage this fall's storms have already wrought. The sea looks so innocent here.

Another view with the hint of the setting sun in the distance. What you can't see in these shots is that the sky was filled with hundrends of wheeling, diving gannets. Gannets are huge white seabirds with black wingtips that only come near shore in the fall and spring. They usually get blown in by the wind and hang around for a few weeks doing some fishing before heading back out to sea. I love watching them dive bomb and splash head first into the water. Their splashes pop like little whale spouts. There must have been good fishing this day because we watched them hit the water, boom, boom, boom, over and over again.

At this same spot there is a trail into a white cedar swamp. When I brought another group of kids here earlier in the week we were lucky enough to see a great horned owl. I hoped we might spot it again since owls tend to hang around in the same area for a while but no such luck.

Again, the light through the trees was just awesome. You can see one little man running ahead of us on the trail here.

This is my favorite picture of the day. These two little people were running ahead of me and when the sun silhouetted them like this I just had to snap their picture.

I have a few days off this weekend. I have to laugh as I say this because actually I have a tile job to finish, an article to research and write and the mess from last weekend's sale to clean up! On the other hand, my schedule is my own for the next few days, always a nice thing to look forward to.

Storm

It's a bleak, rainy, windy day here with the remnants of the hurricane that was so awful down south slamming our shore today. Winds are about 40-50 miles per hour right now and the power is a bit jittery. We are lucky to be on part of the grid that serves the hospital and often lose power only briefly. I understand much of the Cape is without power even as I write this. We've been getting some pretty impressive gusts.

Catching images of the rain is easier than catching images of the wind, especially since I'm not one to venture out while things are blowing around and branches are coming down.

There's something warm and compelling about indoors on a day like this. I find myself cleaning, catching up on email, phone calls and....collaging! I will post my efforts so far in the next post.

Stay warm and dry if you're in eastern Massachusetts this afternoon!