In the Right Place: Sleepers

Dormer windows are popular here. They stand out. Literally. If you paint them red, they really stand out, as you can see from this neighboring pair of dormers:

The structure has been used in English architecture since at least the 16th century. Its name, “dormer,” comes from the French word for “sleeping room,” which is apt because the design often is used to provide light and air to upstairs bedrooms. Sometimes, the majority of the upstairs is "dormered":

Many New England settlers could not afford homes with dormered bedrooms. Their house of choice was what became known as the Cape Cod style – a simple “saltbox” with plain windows, central heating (fireplace), and a roof that did not slope sharply. As settlers prospered, they could add onto the house “out back,” maybe even put on a porch, a winter vestibule entry, and – for modern settlers – a satellite dish. Here's a neighboring variation on the saltbox theme:

(Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: The Freezing of the Queen's Lace

No one knows for sure how or why this wild carrot became known as Queen Anne’s Lace. The most famous – but unlikely – reason involves Anne, the queen consort of King James of English Bible fame.

According to this tale, Anne sponsored and participated in a contest for the creation of a lace pattern similar to the flower of this plant, her favorite; while working on her design, Anne pricked her finger and a drop of royal blood fell onto her lace, making it look like those wild carrot flowers that have a reddish floret center. In any case, the wild carrot in winter remains regal even when entombed in ice. (Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Valentine's Day

We celebrate and share with you the mystery of love, which can be found in many forms, not only in pairings. We celebrate the pair of Tree Swallows that raised two families here last Spring:

We also celebrate the love of neighbor Judith Fuller being given to everyone who comes by. 

(Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Scratch

It’s mating season for Raccoons and the weather here has been alternating between warm (for February) and frigid, a combination that disrupts the daylight sleep of these nocturnal mischief-makers and provokes them to take occasional strolls during the day. They don’t hibernate.

These masked mammals were given the strange name “Raccoons” by the early English settlers, who transliterated the Powhatan (Virginia Algonquin) name for “animal-that-scratches-with-hands.” Their masks are thought to reduce glare in daylight and concentrate light in darkness. (Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Proverbial

The forces of warmth and rain have won the latest battle here against the forces of cold and snow, forcing a retreat of most of the snow occupiers to their dark hiding places. The winter’s meteorological war is scheduled to resume tomorrow with a counterattack by the cold forces. During the thaws, however, the sleeping woods seem to awaken briefly.

The image above shows that the mosses, especially, can be resurrected from their frozen, almost gray winter dormancy into temporary vibrancy. It also provokes an odd thought: Maybe the old proverb ought to be modified to read: Rolling stones gather no moss, but leaning trees can. (Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Gear

For centuries, good sailors have taken care to stow their gear (especially ropes and chains) in ways that are efficiently safe and useful, yet artful. Sometimes this reminds us of the Art of Assemblage.

In Assemblage, among other things, three dimensional objects not originally intended as art materials are collected together in a way that creates a symbolic meaning or spirit that is important (at least to the artist).

The images here, taken last week, seem to us to show instinctive Assemblages. They show a collection of boat mooring gear stowed near Great Cove on the WoodenBoat Campus; but, to us, they predict summer joy. (Brooklin, Maine) (Click images to enlarge them.)

In the Right Place: Great Cove

Rhapsody at Dusk

(Brooklin Maine, February 8, 2018)

In the Right Place: Roars and Gurgles

The hills are alive with the sound of … fast water. Snowstorms, followed by thaws and rains, followed by more snowstorms, thaws, and rains, have raised our water table and engorged our woodland streams. We may have a very lush spring. Here's Patten Stream roaring into Patten Bay yesterday after a snow flurry the night before:

Here's an image taken February 5 after a thaw; it shows a spring-fed stream starting to ice up as it gurgles through a patch of mossy Brooklin woods:

(Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Puzzle

We share this image primarily because it shows one of those wonderful but momentary collages that Great Cove high tides create and destroy. If the image were sawed correctly, it could keep jig-saw puzzle fans busy for quite some time.

As it is, it kept us busy for more than an hour trying to identify the types of seaweed under the Blue Mussel and Oyster Drill shells. We weren’t very successful. Our best guess is that it’s almost all Rockweed (Ascophylum nodosum) in its various colors, with a dash of Dulse (Palmaria palmata). (Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Differences

Here’s one of our tough winter birds, the Downy Woodpecker, and we can tell this is a male because he has red taillights.

The female lacks the red taillights:

The Downy often is confused with its equally-tough cousin that has the same colorings, the Hairy Woodpecker. The best way to tell which cousin is which is by the bill: if it’s small (much less than the length of the bird’s head), it’s a Downy; if it’s large (about the length of the head), it’s a Hairy. Here's a male Hairy:

Another way to differentiate the birds is by overall size: the Downy is about 6.5 inches; the Hairy is about 9 inches. However, when you see one of the cousins without the other beside it, it’s hard to tell a 2.5-inch difference.

By the way, both birds are named after a patch of white feathers that appears on their backs: the Downy’s patch is smaller and finer; the Hairy’s is longer and often looks like a ponytail. (Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Spirits

Today is gray, the snow has melted, and the tree spirits are doing a dance that Native American ancestors would understand.

(Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Aw Shucks

Before reading further, you should know two things. First, if you’re not interested in scallop fishing equipment, stop reading this esoteric and overly-long post now. Second, I’m far from being an expert on that subject, but I keep getting questions about it and we have here an opportunity to try to identify a few things.

Above, is the fishing vessel (“F/V”) Tarr Baby, which is owned by neighbor David Tarr. She’s now “trawler” rigged with metal “mast” and “boom” (aka “outrigger”) and “winched” for “dredge” scalloping.

The dredge is a steel-framed, chain mesh “net” that has a twine top for unloading; it’s dragged along the sea bottom. (See below.)

As you can see in the first image, Tarr Baby also has a drop-down diving/boarding platform on the stern that David can use when he’s hand-harvesting “divers scallops” in SCUBA gear. Just above that platform is a stack of perforated plastic “fish baskets” (mostly orange) in which the harvested scallops can be collected before their muscles (what we eat) are shucked out and possibly for temporary onboard storage of those shucked muscles.

Behind the baskets in the first image is a metal “trap rack,” which can be used to secure stacks of lobster traps when Tarr Baby is transporting them at the beginning and end of her lobstering season. Here's an image of her during the early summer with stacked traps that soon will be taken out to sea and submerged:

(Brooklin, Maine) If I made any mistakes, I welcome corrections.

In the Right Place: Super

In the Right Place: Super

We, of course, prefer real Maine fish-hunting Eagles, such as this one, to the faux Philadelphia footballing variety that will be flapping this evening.

In fact, we’d go so far as to say that we would have no objection to those Philly birds being shot down tonight. Even with a Tommygun. Our neighbor Judith Fuller apparently has similar feelings; that’s her Naskeag Road banner below.

Go Pats! (Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Steadfast

Yesterday, Punxsutawney Phil predicted a long winter. We don’t have our own Town Rodent to confirm this for Brooklin, but we don’t need one: we always have a long winter. Whether that’s bad depends on your attitude. For example, it snowed a pretty snow here most of Thursday and yesterday morning, then turned beautifully sunny yesterday afternoon and today.

Yesterday morning, while annoying for some, was beautiful for others: Mostly fine snow arrived in rippling white veils; toward noon, the sun tried to break the snow’s will with piercing beams of soft light that silverized the landscape. As the snow valiantly fought a losing battle with the sun, the tide came home strong and very high. The image above is of the steadfast Town Dock during all that. Below, we see several feet of water submerging the nearby beach and rocks as it snowed.

(Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Creepiness

If you see a piece of bark tumbling from a tree trunk and then defying gravity just before it hits the ground, you’ve probably found a Brown Creeper. This is an all-season bird here that’s about five inches of good camouflage. It’s difficult to spot and best observed at an angle, as shown below.

The Brown Creeper is a cruelly-named little bird that doesn’t creep. It quickly spirals up a furrowed tree trunk by hopping spritely with both long-nailed feet together. It uses its curved bill to pry insects and larvae out of crevices.

When it gets near the tree’s top, it flutters to the base of another (or the same) tree and repeats its spiraling, barberpole search. (Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Weapon of Choice

It was sunny yesterday and we spotted a Bull Moose heading north near Naskeag Road. Shot it:

As we speak, our first February snowfall is happening:

(Brooklin, Maine)

January Postcards From Maine

Historically, January is our coldest, snowiest month and the one in which the sunsets and their afterglows are the most dramatic. This January was among the best that we’ve had and, thus, a good beginning toward fulfilling neighbor Judith Fuller’s colorful roadside banner wish for us, to the left.

January had three very good snowstorms and some of the best sunsets that we’ve seen. One of the snowstorms was of the fat-flake, slow-falling variety that was especially beautiful during the storm and after the snow carpeted our area.

The sunsets and their afterglows were spectacular contrasts at times, especially in the context of periodic thaws that melted the snow, followed by more snow.

Did we mention that January’s sunsets and afterglows were spectacular, especially when followed by sparkling mornings?

Did we mention that January’s sunset afterglows were spectacular, especially when cirrostratus clouds streaked furiously 30 thousand of feet above us, auguring wind-whipped snow and rain to come?

Conditions got a bit difficult for wildlife at times, especially the smaller, late-born fawns. But this January was not especially harsh.

January also is prime scallop fishing time around here, whether by hand-harvesting “divers scallops” after diving off drop-down stern platforms or dredging for them with nets.

January also is the time when the Amaryllis flowers on the inside window ledge explode while the snow outside provides a perfect background.

Finally, this January contained a second ("blue") full moon that also was a super moon and a "blood" (eclipsed) moon. Here's everything but the eclipse, which we couldn't see:

For larger versions of the above images, as well as many additional images of special moments in this January, click on the link below. (We recommend that your initial viewing be in full-screen mode, which can be achieved by clicking on the Slideshow [>] icon above the featured image in the gallery to which the link will take you.) Here’s the link for more:

https://leightons.smugmug.com/US-States/Maine/Out/2018-in-Maine/January/i-JhvPPHV

(Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: It's All Good

Until today, we’ve been in a relative thaw during which virtually all of our snow disappeared.

This scene of two days ago, showing a staring contest between the Brooklin fishing vessel Long Set and the shuttered summer home on Harbor Island, is typical of last week; but, it would not be a popular “Maine Winter” postcard.

As we speak today, however, there’s a serious snow shower transforming our world back into a proper white winter one. (Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Thinking Big

It’s hard to imagine the volume of water in the 10- to-13-foot tides that we regularly have in Naskeag Harbor, but here’s a way to try: Find the dark high tide band on the granite ledge in this image and cover that band and everything below it with a piece of paper (preferably green or blue), which represents water.

Theoretically, you have just replicated the Harbor’s high tide and drowned this photographer and the innocent sea glass hunter on the sand bar. Your next exercise is to use this image to try to imagine the volume in the world’s biggest tides, up the coast in Canada’s Bay of Fundy, where they’re about four times higher than ours – beyond 53 feet (16.3 meters). (Brooklin, Maine)

In the Right Place: Getting It

We like to imagine Andrew Wyeth smiling knowingly at the basic, almost austere, beauty of Back Road on a winter day when everything is eye-wincingly sharp and there’s a bite to the air.

(Brooklin, Maine)