After Rain, Treefrogs

 

 

Gray Treefrogs are nearly invisible, but you find them everywhere. They look like lichen-covered tree bark, and during the day hide silent as stones under tools in the yard, upturned buckets, the siding on the house, etc..

If you pick one up, and open your hand to look, it will leap onto the nearest treelike object, which is usually your wife or daughter, or perhaps the gentleman at the door endeavoring to interest you in the salvation of your soul. Indeed, they do. They cling with a wet thwack, like a soggy noodle, to roughly the same place you’d stick a lapel pin, or boutonnière.

At night, after a summer storm, they get out of hand in other ways, in which they make the loud noises, instead of their startled landing sites.

 

 

Wolftrap Lighthouse

 

Off the tip of Windmill Point and Stingray Point in the Chesapeake Bay, at the mouth of the Rappahannock River, is Wolftrap Lighthouse. It’s a well-known landmark, or rather seamark, for watermen and boaters in the area. I’ve passed it many times, myself. It was decommissioned and auctioned off by the Coast Guard back in the ’70’s, and moved into private hands. It’s up for sale again. For $288,000 you get the lighthouse and a piece of marshland on shore a mile away where you can launch a boat to get to it.

Now this is my idea of a dream home.

Continue reading “Wolftrap Lighthouse”

Painting – Rolling and Tipping

Aeon in her new blue dress

 

(to start of project)

Had a very, very successful weekend. Not without its bumps and mistakes, but it all ended well, and results exceeded expectations. In fact, T no longer mourns the obliteration of all that gorgeous wood, which is really saying something. Those fairing problems I was worried about? Miraculously, it seems, they’re now silent as the grave, all forgotten like dirt in a hole.

Continue reading “Painting – Rolling and Tipping”

Boats of Guatemala: Lake Atitlan Cayucos

Dugout Canoes on the beach at Santa Catarina

 

(to start of project)

The boats native to Lake Atitlan are the cayucos, a unique form of dugout canoe. You see these boats all over the lake, from dawn to dusk, though usually near shore where the fish are, as fishing is their primary use. Rows of them are pulled up on the beaches of every small village and town along the shore. Continue reading “Boats of Guatemala: Lake Atitlan Cayucos”

Home Port

Lake Atitlan from Casa del Mundo, after a storm

 

(to start of project)

We’re back.

A couple of times a decade we manage to take a nice trip somewhere. A few years ago it was the northern California coast. This time it was Guatemala, and what an amazing trip it was. A truly stunning landscape that left us literally speechless more than once. Continue reading “Home Port”

Transitions

Sunshine starts a second snowfall

 

 

 

There are things you do in your 50’s that you thought you’d do in your 20’s.
This is a given.

What you remember is often what you wished for,
not what really happened.

Some things you declined to say when you could have will ring in your ears forever.
It’s better to say them all.

There will be more joy than you expected,
certainly more than you thought you deserved.

You will continue to have conversations with people you loved,
decades after they’re gone.

You will often cry unexpectedly 
not when things are sad, but when they are beautiful.

These are some things I’ve learned.