Crab Shell Constellations

Perhaps a Peekytoe.

maine

Water Weave

This webwork boggles the mind, I've never stared at it long enough to find out if it would hypnotize me, but I should. These are Sebago shallows, the ones here at Ocean Grove were thick with pulverized jellyfish today - the clear kind. They hit the legs with force like a hail of rubber pellets, got caught between the toes. My daughter was unable to get them out of her hair, some are still in her mop, dessicated. They'll expand when it rains.

People here were allowed into the water up to their knees, but many went in deeper, keeping these very patient life guards on their toes.

The Tarboxes

Raymond Cape is across the East part of Sebago Lake, called Jordan Bay, from my grandparent's house, this small camp turned residence which they bought in 1965. Near the tip of the cape there's a tiered outcrop of about 30 feet people jump from called Frye's leap. I think at one point I knew the story of Frye, I think the story goes that he leapt to escape hostile Indians.

Opening Sebago Lake Land (Herbert G. Jones, 1946) at random, I found this sad story on page 101, one I'd never heard before:

It was one of those distressing tragedies of early pioneer life that rarely if ever occur in these days. The Tarbox family consisting of mother, father, and four children, the eldest a girl of twelve, lived in a cabin on Raymond Cape. It had been a very severe winter, with storm following storm, cutting off all communications with their neighbors. Their provisions became nearly exhausted, and the father was compelled to set off on the long journey to get a bag of corn ground at the village mill. He reached the mill safely, and with the bag on his shoulders, started to retrace his steps. Meanwhile another storm came up, and within a short distance of his house, he sank down exhausted, unable to take another step.

He called for help, and his wife, anxiously awaiting his return, heard his cries and quickly left everything to go to his assistance. She soon found that she could make no headway in the deep drifts, so returned, and donning some of her husband's clothing, reached him while he was still alive. She couldn't move him, so taking off her coat, she covered him the best she could and set off herself in the direction of the nearest farmhouse for help. After a short struggle, her breath failed her and she sank down exhausted.

The children, left alone in the darkness, huddled around the fire, under the protection f the little girl of twelve, who kept blowing the horn throughout the night, trying to attract attention to their plight. But the storm closed them in for three days and three nights, before the alarmed neighbors could reach them. After a search they found the frozen bodies of the parents, and in the distress and excitement, the little tot of three had wandered off alone, and almost lost her life, before she was rescued and taken into the Hawthorne family as one of their own.

Interesting about compassion, it's faster than thought, it comes crashing over you before you know it, popping the heart like a water balloon and pooling around the feet.

Wish I had time to read the rest of this book but leave today and can't take it with me. Maybe I'll come across it again or one of his other titles: I Discover Maine, Old Portland Town, Old Koussinoc, Maine Memories, Portland Ships are Good Ships, and Isles of Casco Bay.

Daddy Longlegs

Or Harvestmen, of the order Opiliones, named in 1833 by Swedish Naturalist Karl Sundevall. No one seems to know why he invoked the Latin for shepherd, Opilio. They've changed little in the last 400 million years. Just think, all that time without a name.

Not spiders, these arthropods have only one body part, making them walking cephalopds. But I understand the Greek for "head-feet" has been claimed by those swimming head-feet, the Octopi and their mullosk kin.

This unidentified member of Opiliones is one of many seen on the slopes of Rattlesnake Mountain in Raymond, Maine. If anyone has seen one in Brooklyn, I'd love to know. I never have.

Ephemeroptera

"The mayfly belongs to group 1 taxa, or pollution–sensitive animals. This means if mayflies are in or around the water, the water should be of a good quality.^[3]" (Wikipedia)

Fast clocks! As adults, they live from a few day to a few hours.

slow clocks

amphibious vehicle

From what I've read, the first oceans condensed from vapors of volcanic origin. They were not saline, the water cycle had not yet rinsed salts into them from terrestrial watersheds, so they made perfect germination pools for amphibians, those most tender creatures, no longer found in the now heavily salted seas, only in fresh water. But it seems to me all water is fresh, no manners at all. It just touches you wherever it wants, even from the inside.

Up here in Maine these places where rocks appear to push through asphalt are called heaves, a word I suspect finds more uses in winter in relation to the unabashed swelling of ice. As far as I know, ant hills are still called ant hills and crows are black as ever. I wonder what advantages their darkness gives them, if there's more to it than absorbing maximum warmth.

Around Sebago

A caterpillar with stripes similar to those of a snake I saw on the dock yesterday. In case you wondered, that's not my tongue it's found its way to.















A firefly? If so these Northern ones play up the stripes.












A pale green insect trying to get in the house, a slow moving tannin-dyed stream in the woods behind the lake. I suppose the color comes from leaves in decay.












No frogs around. One summer years ago there were buckets of them. I miss them. Victims of Chemlawn perhaps? Many yards around here suspiciously large and green.

I saw a Kingfisher fly over the lake.

lumber party

Mary K

On the last day of our vacation in Maine we went to visit my grandmother, Mary K, at St. Joseph's nursing home in Portland. I had picked up some flowers from Shaws with some chartreuse carnations which happpened to match her green suit.

At first she didn't want to visit with us because she told us she always sits next to Jimmy. I wasn't sure who that was but was really happy she had such a close friend there. Then she seemed to focus on us and marveled over how much my son, who she said was handsome, had grown. My 10 year old managed to make herself invisible. 

The nursing home is too stuffy - outside I was nearly high off the aroma of this little glenn of pine trees they have in front of the home, but inside that place there was no air at all. I wonder if it would be terribly hard for them to let a little more fresh air in there. We sat by a window with my grandmother which my mother cranked open and some of the sweetest air I've ever breathed wafted in which made me so happy I nearly cried because it didn't smell too good  in there. People would visit their elders more if they could stand the smell of those places.

My aunt says my grandmother is not always lucid. For instance, once when she went in, my grandmother asked if she liked how she had redecorated the place. Sometimes being semi-lucid is just the thing to get you through the day, I think. If you disagree, please come discuss it with me when I get back to Brooklyn. You'll find me at the Lefferts house growing flax.  When I get home, I'm moving in there. And my grandmother's going to redecorate, she was always a great decorator with refined taste and considerable hand-crafting skill. But we'll just change things a little, what we can get away with before some historic preservation committee hunts us down.

Tiny Lanterns

Fireflies seem like the most sociable bugs, often landing on me, even though they have no interest in gathering a blood sample. Who can say if it's out of curiosity, affection, or exhaustion, but I can say I don't mind the visit. It doesn't tickle, and because of the load of phosphorous they carry, they always get the royal treatment. That is to say, I don't squash them, and the kids gather round in wonder.

Speaking of phosphorescence, happy 4th.

Summer Butter

My friend always used to say "What's up, buttercup?" Down East this buttercup is what's up.

When I was little an eon ago, we'd pick these and hold them under each other's chins. If we saw yellow reflected on the baby fat we still had, as it always would because of the high lustre of the petals, we'd act surprised and say "oh, you like butter."

The irony is that if the cows whose butterfat went into the butter had eaten buttercups, the butter would be rendered inedible from the various irritants in these plants. To begin with, these little sundrops don't tolerate being turned to cud, and would cause the cow's gums to blister.

Even though there are some varieties of ranunculus that are lethal, I don't think that was what Thoreau was concerned with when he wrote "At one leap I go from the just opened buttercup to the life-everlasting." I know from High School English that he was expressing his Yankee transcendentalism. Taking it to the pond, where the buttercups grew alongside the croaking frogs their scientific name derives from, long before any beatniks would take it on the road.