Rhapsodies

The day started with Mom suggesting that we go out on a canoe. While I was mostly indifferent to the idea, at the time. I got dragged to the rental place. In the mean time Mom was telling the rental having trouble with a “skunk”. (This being the country I briefly took her literally. ) Actually the “skunk” was a business rival who put his rental place closer to the water.

Anyway we got the canoe and canoed slowly for about two miles through two miles of gorgeous marshland ending in a lake. It was hot enough that I was very tempted to dive in. I took lots of pictures. The highlights included lots of blooming water lilies, black ducks, some turtles and trout.  In my imagination I kept going back and fourth between Wind in the Willows and the Fellowship rowing down the Anduin.

All in all it was magical.

After that we were assigned to pick 15 bags of seaweed for a lobster bake happening tomorrow.

And then came a long awaited ice-cream social to celebrate a scientific illustration program the Darling Center puts on. I had two servings (with a root beer float on the side ) and looked at the art samples the students had done. All good.

By the end of that it was four and my Mom and I spent the remains of the afternoon chilling in the Darling Center’s Library

Today started with my mom finally getting ahold of the axe she’d been waiting for. The purpose was to deal with a rotten log blocking a trail. While soft, it was too big for the band saw. I had some experience using an axe from a summer camp I’d gone to years ago, so I was pretty optimistic about this going fairly easily.

It turned out the rotten wood was only an inch thick and the rest of it was an exhausting ordeal. Mom and I took turns and going back and forth between using the axe and a saw eventually got it through.

After that the next job of the day was to find “shelters” made by a moth caterpillar, my dad is studying, in sensitive ferns. (Shelters are when a caterpillar folds up a leaf to protect itself) Of course that means that we had to go and find all of the places in the woods Sensitive ferns grew, mostly in muddy bogs. The first patch we found the remains of one. We couldn’t search more since there was a lot of poison ivy growing around it. We went to another forest trail down the road and found another.

After lunch we went to my old favorite, Pemaquid point. I always love the near moonscape of the rocks, as the surf crashes against them. We started by going to see the Lighthouse at the tip of the point which had a small museum of Maine maritime history. Nearby there was a gallery of local artists and a video about Maine lighthouses.

Finally we went to the Point itself where I took pictures of the rock formation until I filled up my camera’s chip.