"A duck...."

...that's what Milo would say, as we drove past these things.

All over town, we began to notice, there were these ducks. Okay, really, loons. Over time, we noticed more and more of them.


[this one is right down town, near the library]


Certainly, the first one we noticed was the one at the top of our very own street. Day after day, we'd drive by, noticing, but never stopping.


Finally, one day in October, I decided we needed to go on an adventure. Find them, photograph them, figure out how many there were. Pay a little more attention to them. I think Ray was away that day, and I hucked the kids in the car, and off we went, for a local drive.



We stopped first at the one that we consider "ours". Closer inspection revealed that it was the "Bass Shoe Duck". This town used to be home to the Bass Shoe factory, and this particular duck commemorates that, with its cobbler's apron, pictures of factory workers on the side, and, a tiny painted picture of one of the factories in the loon's eye.





All in all, we counted seven, I think. Later, we were at the town hall, and asked a few questions about the loons, and discovered that there are a total of twelve, though some of those are privately owned, and therefore might not be visible to passersby.

[this one resides outside the town hall, and has "blueberry" as its theme.]

Sometime in late October, they suddenly disappeared, gone for the winter, just like many of the real birds... We'll look forward to their return in the spring.

Obligatory Fall Foliage Post

The strip of trees outside our house was spectacular, for days.

I actually think I took some of my best and most interesting fall foliage shots the weekend we went to Hancock Point to close up the house.

Then, we moved into the more brown and dull stage of fall, but even that has its beauty.

Including the beauty of taking our children out for a little walk, on a rainy morning that got less rainy and allowed them that classic childhood pleasure: throwing rocks into water.

Time to get blogging again

We've been back for months now, and have I posted? Not once.

Need to change that.

Lots of time spent getting ready for winter. Gathering food and wood. Two essentials.

Unfortunately, I don't actually have any photos of the "food gathering" efforts. But, one of the major ones was blueberry picking. We went, a number of times, to a local pick your own blueberry place. Picked pounds and pounds. In the end, between the blueberries picked this summer, and ones picked this fall, I think I have somewhere in the vicinity of 30 cups. Just the other night, after our quick weekend away to the south, we came home and ate blueberry waffles for supper (and watched ski movies, as we get psyched for winter...).