Well today started with getting two hours to myself.  I spent them taking pictures in the woods. It was a really gorgeous morning, with a steady breeze so there weren’t any mosquitos. I really got into my zone shooting nearly everything. It has a really meditative feeling. The sheer overwhelming silence, that I’m yet to get used to, seems to slow down time. Two hours felt like twice that, in a good way. Seriously, by the end of my time I was feeling like there was something wrong with my two hour timer. When I got back it was more trail maintenance, going over some of the stuff we’d done in the rain yesterday.

After lunch we went down to the coast again to check  out a spot Mom thought would be good for paining. It was indeed a nice spot, though she started to obsess about some driftwood that was cluttering things up. So I did my first watercolor of this trip while she cleared it up. Both the watercolor and the rock clearing came out very well.Visiting Parents: First Watercolor on the Maine Coast

We quit early because of a lecture at Colonial Pemaquid about the Salem Witch trials and the significance of Maine in it. The gist of it was that, with the colony in Maine being pretty much wiped out by both King Phillip’s War and King William’s War, Massachusetts Bay Colony was flooded with refugees. Along with the economic burden a and one of the worst recorded winters in history it was just easier to blame the devil.

The speaker ended it in an interesting way. Before you ask how people could be so ignorant, just sit back and replace the word witch with terrorist.