To soon, too soon

Sea in my ears, foxes cross my toes (he really did), blueberries 'neath my nails...GONE.

Gone to ineptitude and not-our-problem attitude of delta airlines. Gone in the face of a stale-smoke room in what was once - not so very long ago - a Howard Johnson's in Revere. Gone (dissipated) in the flux and flow of 6 am business travelers grasping at free Wall Street Journals and small cups of coffee.

So, by the time I'd made it to 60 Centre Street - Court House (City of New York) very big with scenic flight of steps, Maine was gone from my system. Tomorrow will tuck a balsam sachet behind my "juror's crossword puzzle" and sneak sniffs.

Am being considered for a civil trial of lady vs. dentist. Fine except that jury interviews (30 for 6) are being conducted by lawyer bent of dredging our dental horror stories. And since people do like to share , have heard tales of impacted molars and hideous family sagas of root canals gone wrong.

Girl to my left on the bench reading Orwell's Burmese Days. Damn. Every only-in-New York jury story comes rushing back.

Best part is this "cross section" thing - the people watching and the awkward lunch hour when we perch, lonely, on unfamiliar benches in unfamiliar parks.

Tomorrow: 9:15. In Maine they're distinguishing cormorants (seen above)from loons.

C

Fog

From DownEast Magazine: A section on fog entitled "In a Fog" - expert opinion:
July is the foggiest month, "Fog forms where warmer air hits cold water - the colder the water the more the fog."
Asked for predictions for the summer ahead:
"It's a good bet that the picture includes fog."

Fit for neither man nor

Each morning, 8 so far, Dad launches my day by slamming the screen door on his way in the kitchen.
Do I need milk from the market, have news since we last spoke (just before bed the night before) and have I heard about the weather.

Where a stretch of road or entire island can disappear in seconds, there's always time for talk of fog and fronts.

"Fit for neither man nor beast", dad hailed.

(When dad peppers his speech with archaic declarations, his day-to-day sweetness is tempered by a gruff timelessness.)

Truism born out. We got the tattered ends of the southern fronts which, in Maine-speak means shrouded neighbor 50 meters of beach away and a fire all day.

It also means fog-aligning one's senses and turning over the day's agenda to smaller things. Squatting on the beach for sea glass, starting in reading the sprawling library of the big house and then napping amidst it, running (under cover of fog, which makes me want to run low), minutes passed at the windows looking at the fog, discussing the fog, discussing tomorrow's fog.

And it will be foggy, all signs and almanacs say so. But we're dug in for it and I have a library to get through.

C

Rock, here, has no plan ever to be sand

Said Charles E. Wadsworth in The Coast of Maine

Essentially answers a question I'd been pondering - why the stone beaches and, really, will there come a time when they too turn to sand? Is sand then the "default" of the beach to which the majority have simply fallen to?

No - it will never turn - via will and glacial cicrcumstances, these beaches shall stay just as they are (thank you).

C