The surge took large chunks of stone from the top of the wall separating the sandy beach from the grassy playground. The playground was now covered with sand and rocks from the wall. The sidewalk running along the playground side of the wall was badly damaged, too.
Still more pictures coming soon!
Tuesday morning we went down to see how our beloved beach had fared in the storm. We kept taking turns with the camera so I’ll credit us both with the pictures in this post! Beach Pond Road was closed to traffic so we walked by the pond on our way to Eastern Point Beach. The storm surge had breached the dunes separating the pond from Long Island Sound, and pushed the water and debris across the street and up onto the lawns across the street.
I think city workers had already plowed away the sand on the road because we were not at all prepared for the scene that awaited us when we got to the beach itself! The road there was covered with about a foot and a half of sand!
More pictures coming soon!
If I’ve got to see you when it’s raining deep inside the forest
I got to see you at the waning of the moon
Said oh, won’t you come on back?
Want you to be of good cheer
Come back home on the Celtic New Year
~ Van Morrison
♫ (Celtic New Year) ♫
A Cheerful Celtic New Year!
Tym-Brrr is the faerie of tree stumps and dead wood, a subject often depicted in the foreground of landscape paintings. Twisted and broken trees suggest the awesome power of nature; the aftermath of a lightning storm or strong winds. Tree stumps, on the other hand, humanize an otherwise wild scene. Tym-Brr eats and plays in one cave, sleeps in another, and stores his sailboat for seeking out driftwood in the third. Clues to how trees become “never green” are burned into the outer walls.
~ Wee Faerie Village: Land of Picture Making
Fairies are invisible and inaudible like angels. But their magic sparkles in nature.
~ Lynn Holland
(A Faerie Treasury)
Mihashirano, the faerie goddess of green-growing things, works hard alongside her mom, Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, to help things grow along the river. The plants work hard purifying the air and water as well as supplying food and shelter for many creatures. Their work also benefits the artists in many of the same ways, including natural beauty that inspires their paintings. The location for Mihashirano’s tea house was chosen by a bird.
~ Wee Faerie Village: Land of Picture Making
Janet, all bundled up to brave the elements, located the mystical bird and Mihashirano’s sailboat at the tea house out on the water by using binoculars provided by the fairies on the shore. It was a very wet, raw and windy day especially down by the river.
We didn’t feel anything here in southern Connecticut, but last night at 7:12 pm there was an earthquake centered in Maine, 4.6 on the Richter scale, which was strong enough to shake homes as far south as northern Connecticut. Auntie is supposed to come home from the hospital today – I wonder if they felt the tremor up north there last night… And today would have been my mother’s 81st birthday – Happy Birthday, Mom!
I find ecstasy in living; the mere sense of living is joy enough. How do most people live without any thoughts? There are many people in the world – you must have noticed them in the streets – how do they live? How do they get the strength to put on their clothes in the morning?
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Letters of Emily Dickinson, 1845-1886)
There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings, as now in October. The sunshine is peculiarly genial; and in sheltered places, as on the side of a bank, or of a barn or house, one becomes acquainted and friendly with the sunshine. It seems to be of a kindly and homely nature. And the green grass, strewn with a few withered leaves, looks the more green and beautiful for them. In summer or spring, Nature is farther from one’s sympathies.
~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
(The American Note-books)
The ancestral viewpoint is formative to the way society subtly changes over the generations. It helps codify the protocols, procedures, and customs that the present establishment upholds; it also forms a norm against which reactionary and reforming spirits can rebel. These two notions of conformity and rebellion, like two intertwining shoots about a sapling, define the growth of the trunk. The influence of our descendants is a more subtle one. We need inheritors to guard what we have established, but we cannot entirely dictate and mold them to our desires. Our descendants will modify and change what we leave them. The continuity of society is woven from many generational needs and influences. Only when we stand at the hub of time, as ancestor, self, and descendant concurrently, do we become fully aware of the contract that our partnership involves.
~ Caitlín Matthews
(The Celtic Spirit: Daily Meditations for the Turning Year)
bright wings of autumn
flutter, lighting on the last
sweet sips of summer
~ Barbara Rodgers
(By the Sea)