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May 31, 1999 |
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the weekend |
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May 29, 1999
May 30, 1999 May 31, 1999
Reading: Murder on the Prowl by Rita Mae Brown, The Boy Allies with Haig in Flanders by Clair Hayes
Copyright © 1999, Janet I. Egan |
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Lizzy decorated my hair with tons of butterfly hair clips and a scrunchy. I must've looked ridiculous but the rest of the family acted like this was perfectly normal. Maybe they didn't notice the scrunchy. Once again I proved how inept I am at bird song recognition. I was deep in conversation with my mother, when Kevin said "let's test AJ and see if she recognized that one." I hadn't heard anything. "It's a really common bird, a really easy song," says Kevin. Umm, yeah it would have been if I'd heard it. So everybody got to laugh at my not recognizing a phoebe. Maybe I'm going deaf. Anyway, when Lizzy took me over to look at the phoebe's nest in the garage I definitely heard the mother scolding me from a nearby bush while the babies sat stock still in the nest. Sunday: On Sunday I took Nancy to breakfast at Angie's, since she'd never been there. Nothing untoward happened to my glasses. In the afternoon I took my turn selling catnip fishies at the MRFRS booth at Newburyport's Flower and Art Festival. It was still beastly hot. Saturday's brief shower hadn't cooled off anything. I manned the booth while Nancy walked around the festival and of course ended up at Olde Port Books. She even asked for Domino by name, but Domino was hiding out downstairs where it's cooler. Besides, it's my reading tastes that Domino knows, not Nancy's so far. The coolest thing about working the booth was the number of people who stopped by because they'd adopted cats from us or knew someone who had. It made me feel like I'm part of something really good. The daughter of the woman who adopted Eliot came by and when she mentioned Eliot our faces lit up. We told her that we were all so happy we cheered when he got adopted. About a half hour later, her mother showed up having heard from the daughter how well we remembered Eliot. It was a thrill to meet her. She says Eliot loves to curl up and act like a lump under the blanket and he's very happy with her. Awhile later, the people who adopted Felix and Jasper came by. They didn't mention whether the cats can open their fridge the way they could open ours at the shelter, but they did mention how much fun they are together. I remember them as a very playful pair. After my stint at the festival booth Nancy and I went for a walk on the beach at Sandy Point. A minute or two after we started walking I stopped in my tracks and announced "Ohmigod! A piping plover!" It was walking in typical start/stop piping plover fashion along the wet sand - hence visible and not camouflaged - really close to us. I mean like really really close. Like identify it with the naked eye close. Close enough and contrasty enough for Nancy to see it - this was her first piping plover 'cause with her vision it's kind of tough to pick them out against the sand. It walked parallel with us for awhile and then stopped, turned, and walked directly toward me. I was transfixed. I stood there watching it until it lost interest in me and proceeded back down the beach in search of food. It passed a black-bellied plover and a flock of ruddy turnstones and then vanished over a ridge in the sand. For the complete greater Salisbury experience, I took Nancy to Angelina's for subs for supper. No chairs fell on my head. The phragmites still look like they're going to overwhelm the building any second. The majority of customers seemed to be landscapers rather than fishermen today though. By the time we got back to Providence, we were both pretty tired and it was still too darn hot.
The Southland people bill this as a cruise that will appeal to bird lovers because we'll get to see snowy egrets, Canadian geese [sic], and an emu farm. Two thirds of the "snowy egrets" our narrator pointed out were actually great egrets, and I couldn't resist shouting out the correction. Guess I'm pedantic. There were plenty of Canada geese and double-crested cormorants as well as common terns, herring gulls, and great black-backed gulls. And yes there really was an emu farm. I saw three emus but there may have been more. Why anybody would want to raise emus on an island in the Great Salt Pond I haven't a clue. After the cruise we got creamsicle flavored soft ice cream at the little tourist shopping place next to the Block Island ferry dock. We sat outside overlooking the harbor and the fishing boats and a royal tern. Yup, a royal tern. I was peacefully savoring my ice cream when I saw a bird land on the Brenda something. It was acting tern like but it wasn't a common tern. I whipped out the binoculars and ran off the deck of the ice cream place for a closer look. This was my first royal tern ever so I wanted to be sure. Nancy asked me how I knew it wasn't just a common tern on a bad hair day - royal tern has a little crest - and I cracked up. The tern took off and I lost sight of it, but I'm sure enough to put it on my list. So, having ice cream on the dock turned out to be better birding than the bird lovers' cruise! We bought T-shirts on sale. They're like those ubiquitous gray Old Navy shirts except they say "Old Block Island". Now we just have to remember not to both wear them on the same day. We stopped at The Indian Club in East Greenwich on the way back for dinner. The malai kofta there is incredible. So are all the breads. We got poori, nan, and roti and devoured them all. Full of Indian food and sated with ocean and birds, I didn't even really mind the Memorial Day weekend traffic between there and Nancy's and between Nancy's and home until I huddled in front of the air conditioner in my bedroom almost too tired to sleep. |
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Saturday:
Andrea's 8th birthday party with eastern phoebes, free food,
family fun, sunshine, thunderstorms, cake, ice cream,
presents, the works. Hot, humid weather. I started to feel
wilted by the time the clouds rolled in. Andrea seemed to
like the camera I gave her. She started taking pictures of
everything and everybody in sight.
Monday:
In the morning we headed south for a cruise on