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May 24, 2017

WANDERING SPRING

... john and i made a little wanderabout down to boothbay harbor ... businesses are open, but the flatlanders haven't arrived yet so the waterfront was comfortably quiet ... after breakfast i found a sign i liked ...

... rowing out to his yacht ... ??? ... crossing the harbor to see a friend ... ??? ... or, perhaps, and this is what i like to think, he was simply taking a moment to be simple ...

... with these lines is written a thousand-million years of earth's story ...

... this color is the newest page of the tale ...

... life holds on as the rocks themselves change ..

... so unimaginably powerful, the forces within the earth's crust—yet, from when i was a small child, imagine such, indeed, i have ...

... one thrust to the surface from deep within the planet's crust, another that has made the ascent twice, and a tiny creature's remains which are beginning the million-year process of return ... 

... it's not enough that john bought the fancy canon "L" super-duper zoom lens, he now has an extra-cool "doubler" for the glass ... something about "needing it to take pictures of the eclipse this summer" ... ha, yea, right, as if i'd somehow forgotten all the creative reasons i used to come up with when i wanted a new toy ...

... but, weather permitting, he will get a great picture of the eclipse ... in the meantime he's managed to use it to provide proof that, yes, indeed, my hair is lightening up a tiny little bit ...
COURTESY JOHN MEADER

... we stopped in newcastle to watch the alwives run ...

... john discovered that the designation of a lens as "super-duper" can be relative ...

... waterville's downtown window-washer is a most friendly fellow ...

... this is supposed to improve our town, i'm going to reserve my judgement until all the optimism is matched with results ...

... down along the river i found that the spring is really here ...

... from my rooftop ...

"Get outside. Watch the sunrise. Watch the sunset. How does that make you feel? Does it make you feel big or tiny? Because there's something good about feeling both."
AMY GRANT


... john picked me up and we drove over to a spot on the sebasticook river where a great convocation of eagles and a scattering of osprey were feasting on the alwives ...

... with a thirty-year old manual-focus manual-aperture nikkor 300mm affixed to my fuji x-t1 i was pretty much teetering at the very edge of the performance envelope for this kind of photography ... that didn't really bother me, however, since it was great fun simply watching these fascinating creatures ...

... eagles will eat anything, including trash, but ospreys will only dine on living food ...

... compared to that of humans, the vision of these birds is clearly a super-power, and even in the fading light they easily spotted their prey and then effortlessly snatched it from the water ...

... an older eagle, perhaps satiated after a day of gorging on fresh fish, perched in a nearby tree and preened itself ...

... after a final catch, this bird soared a quarter-mile or so to where a crowd of his kind were congregating in a bit of marsh alongside the river ... i could almost hear him as he landed, "so, whatcha say, fellows, do this again tomorrow" ...

... spring, it seems, is slowly giving way to summer ...