At Summer's End, A Friend

Look at this lovely morning glory Patience has climbing a string down in the backyard. I just love the delicate purple markings.

Yes, it's been a few days since I've blogged last, and surely you are all wondering just what the Gardener's been up to, how the Nest is coming along and was anything of note done to celebrate the final days of Summer 2008.


Actually, I had just planned on a quiet weekend of painting and time in nature, but it turned out to be a much more interesting and exciting weekend than that, as Badum and I ended up hosting our first weekend guest!

In commiserating with a fellow blogger about our recent respective malaises (is that the plural?), I had touted the creative process as a helpful means to distraction...and painting as the sort of process you could do while spending time sorting through your thoughts...and I extended a sort of Tom Sawyer-like invitation to come help paint the apartment this weekend.

But I must admit, it was still a delightful surprise when Patrick called to say he was interested in coming to help paint if I'd been quite serious (perhaps he's realizing that I am rarely all-the-way serious about many things...there's little fun in seriousness, after all) about the invite. Which is how we ended up finally meeting at the bus station in Hyannis late Friday night!

The whole blogging experience (or at least ours) has put us in touch with such a great circle of people, where at least the frameworks for real friendships have been somewhat intensively forged online, and of course, that whole cyber world creates this sense of "imaginary" friends, and you never truly know how you'll respond to someone when you meet them for real.

I'm happy to say Patrick and I seemed to step across the gap between worlds with a hug and a smile...and we quickly moved on to proving that old John Lennon saw about how what people really want to do is sit in rooms and talk...although we proved they also want to do it (the talking, People; heads out of the gutter, please...you cheapen us all with your tawdry little imaginings...) in cars, during inauspicious late-night dinners in Wendy's parking lots...and while walking through marshes...or standing in the cool waters of Cape Cod Bay...or sitting in the sun on the deck with coffee and Cheerios...and yes, even while painting...we did get around to a little bit of that, too.

But we did speak of each one of you. Some more than others, naturally, and almost entirely good things. But I wouldn't be surprised to hear that any one of you spent at least some little piece of the weekend going, "hey, what's that I feel in the Universe...something's going on...why are my ears ringing...?" Yah, that was us. We talked about the Secret Wisdom of Bachelor's Buttons, too.

Look at the color of the dining room: it's called Amsonia Peach, which I chose as my orange component of the rainbow painting scheme for the Nest. It's amazing in the way it changes so totally as the light does. One moment, it's pumpkin pie orange, another moment cinnamon brown or here, with a blush of gold and pink, just like the skin of a peach.


The light changes a lot in this room during the course of a day, so it should be fun to watch as this color transforms right along with it. And also, some of the late day light comes in bounced off the now-pink, but soon to be brick red walls of the kitchen...so it will be interesting to see just how that changes things, too.

It really was a fun weekend. It was nice to have a kindred spirit to talk with about so many things on each of our minds. While neither of us saw this as one of those transformative, "How Someone Got Their Groove Back" weekends, in the process we may have at least realized that we each should actually have grooves, anyway...being fabulous gay guys and all.

And hosting a guest on Cape Cod always carries the additional pleasure of making one slow down and appreciate the incredible beauty around us.


With the recent frenzy of life, I've done little more than drive to local beach parking lots lately, to hurry up and soak in the sunset and snap a few photos before dashing home to rearrange some furniture or paint something.

What a joy it was to slow down and walk through the marsh with someone, laughing out loud (but not LOLing, for gosh sakes...) and talking about it or just soaking it in...and then actually walking out into the bay as the tide began to lap in around us, blue herons and hundreds of other birds flying about overhead, foraging in the shallow waters for their dinner as we snapped photos.

I should say we weren't totally chatterboxes. An evening like this would be pointless if you didn't know when to be silent and let the amazing world be around you.

The late season songs of the crickets sounding a little sad, but sweetly so, from the marsh grass. complemented by the plaintive and ungraceful blat of the great blue heron as it soars across the bay waters, the honk of a fast-moving duck overhead, the lapping of the water around our ankles. The mystery of what the small unseen creatures were who occasionally dimpled the calm surface of the water from below and the way the color of the sky changes so gracefully as the sunlight vanishes and the stars appear overhead....it was all quite soothing and wonderful.

It was good to have the birds' foraging as a reminder for us, as we are neither of us apparently clock-watchers, especially not with all the nature and talking and quiet to enjoy...but it wasn't too long after that we discovered that the Gardener's Nest is indeed within delivery range for a Papa Gino's pizza.

Not watching the clock while chatting is also how we missed the earlier opportunity to get Patrick on a bus back to NY Sunday...and it was as we dashed for the car and the bus station a little while later that we remembered we'd not done a proper snapshot to prove we'd met...and so here's that.

If you get the opportunity to meet Patrick, I highly recommend it. He's fun and smart and thoughtful and all that you imagine he might be...and a little more, too. P, thanks for your company this weekend, it was really great fun. I hope we'll do it again sometime soon (there's more painting to do, after all).

Now on a technical note, I'm excited about having met Patrick for another reason: as a blogger, I can now be validated, at least to a small circle of other bloggers Patrick has met (and more distantly, through all the bloggers they have met), and am proven to be a real person more or less as represented in Blogland (perhaps a touch more neurotic...).

Pinnochio voice: So, look at me, everybody, I'm a real boy!


I stopped into work on the way home from the bus station, which is how I learned that Danny and Sara were still in town at the end of their week's vacation and they invited me to join them for the summer's last sunset...which you can see above.

Though I expressed to Dan the interest his internet fan base had in a further photo shoot in the outdoor shower, I'm afraid we never got around to that this time. ; )

We were really too busy just chilling out as the last gorgeous moments of summer slid down behind the horizon.

And it was really no surprise to me at all that the sun turned a lovely shade of violet as it vanished.

Welcoming Summer: A Fort Hill Walk

It was these clouds that drew me to Fort Hill.

I was already on my way to Eastham, as banking was scheduled as part of yesterday morning's activities, since I've not yet gotten my sh*t together about direct deposit. I'm a little wary of giving control of my money to computers, truth be told, and so for now, I'm still making weekly trips back that way.

Even more honestly, I miss living in Eastham. It's a terrific little town I've lived in on and off for much of the last ten years, and I've explored it in the car, on my bicycle and on foot. It's as much home to me as anywhere. A place that's familiar to me, where I am comfortable. I haven't really explored Harwich much yet, though hopefully the summer will bring such opportunities. But I like being in Eastham and so I suspect the weekly banking trips are my way to keep going back.

And it's that time of year when - work commitments allowing - it's easy enough to be let oneself be distracted from the beaten path.

I spotted the cloud when it was still just one large puffy mass, as I drove east on Route 6. It was just hitting the breezes off the ocean as it drifted across the outer beach and as I drove, I could see it splitting into four distinct chimneys. I wish I'd pulled over to take a photo then, as it was quite a sight.

I wanted a nice open spot to do so, though, and so I decided a detour to Fort Hill was just what I needed. Plus, I wanted to see if the lupines were blooming.

Fort Hill sits just above Nauset Marsh, which is protected from the Atlantic's surf by the barrier of the Outer Beach. There's a small parking lot on the hilltop, which is a wonderful place to sit and look in all directions.

It's also one of my favorite spots in Eastham for star-gazing, something I used to do often on the way home from late-night work shifts. There are no streetlights, which makes it ideal for meteor shower viewings and spying ships passing the Cape far out to sea late at night. On the right summer occasions, it can offer a view of distant fireworks displays.

If I were an early riser, I imagine it'd be perfect for sunrise, too.

There's a series of nature trails in the area, the first of which slopes down from the parking area to Doane Rock, a great boulder which sits on the shore of the marsh and offers more views along the shoreline.

Standing atop the rock, it's easy to imagine one of the area's native population doing the same while scouting the area in the days before Europeans arrived.

On the hillside that slopes down toward the marsh and Orleans town cove, it's a wild jumble of green, hosting an assortment of twining vines, yarrow, wild roses (many of those tiny white ones I've mentioned so much of late), milkweed, buttercups and also, a great stand of lupines.

I missed the height of the show this year, sort of on purpose, since I wanted to be sure I was able to collect a little seed. I did find a few still in bloom, but they were fairly far off the path.

Leaving the path really needs to be a careful business, as this is one of those areas Mother Nature protects with one of her fiercest defenders, those dreaded Leaves of Three, poison ivy.

I was well-clad, though, and have no interest in a another of those episodes, so caution was high.

Not only did I get a great photo, but also snapped off a small stalk of fully-formed seedpods. I'll hang it to dry and hopefully have seed to plant later this summer.

Further along the path, these pink rose blossoms drew me in with their brilliant happy colors and sweet fragrance.

You never know what you'll see at Fort Hill, from a wildlife standpoint. Gulls are a regular sight, of course, and rabbits. But I have also surprised in my headlights, when arriving for some of those star-gazing sessions, owls and foxes, and other occasions, spied herons in the waters of the marsh.

Today's sighting was this red-winged blackbird, who perched in a dead treetop just above the rock. There were other people wandering around the rock today, so I didn't climb it. Nor was I able to stay and explore as long as I might have liked.

The path near the rock offers some great views of it's own, both into the green marsh itself and of the mighty Atlantic Ocean beyond. (By the way, Atlantic, Robin says "hey, how's everything?".)

Lingering to enjoy the views meant being able to inhale more of that rose-scented air, which I did for a few minutes, until the cloud of cologne accompanying a newly-arrived clump of out-of-place tourists overpowered nature's roses and I knew it was time to move along to the rest of my day.


But not before capturing a few more shots of this special place to bring along with me. Look at that cloud - it thinks it's a whale or a mermaid.

A Parade!!

Independence Day Parade, Orleans Massachusetts.

They said it would start at ten.

Fireworks

Evening found us ren
dez
vous
ing with some friends at a barbecue before heading down into the marsh behind Rock Harbor for the fireworks display.



The marsh gave us a nice clear view of the fireworks, without being down in the thick of the crowds on the beach and the parking area. Fortunately, there were some nice breezes that confounded the efforts of local insects to spoil the evening.


There was too much cloud cover to be in any way certain about identifying stars, but this was shining bright enough that I'm pretty sure it was one of the two planets who've been dancing together in our western skies lately.

Although it always seems to take too long, in time the show got underway and we had a great time.

In fact, an impromptu survey suggested that this was the closest many of us had been to fireworks in years.






Love the after image of the smoke behind this jumble of purple fire.

Here's a composite of some of my better shots from the evening!