As I sat on my favorite perch drinking my morning coffee and watching the goings on in Maine's Saco Bay, I chanced upon a Mutual of Omaha moment.  The water was all agitated and swirly due to a fast running incoming tide, and a group of cormorants had just arrived and were settling in to fish for breakfast.   I knew from my younger son, the outdoorsman, that there are diving ducks and puddle ducks.  Puddle ducks, he tells me, make for better eating, as they dine near the water's surface - on a diet full of lovely micro greens, seeds, insects and small fish.  Diving ducks, unlike their salad bar loving cousins, swim down to feed on all sorts of fish - bottom feeders, various crustaceans and all the other slimy stuff that never sees the light of day. 

Cormorants aren't ducks (I was pretty sure of this, just checked, got that one right, small victory accepted).   What I did not know is that cormorants are more than just divers, they're more like scuba divers, going down to depths of 25 feet and more.    I had only noticed that they seemed to be down there quite awhile before resurfacing with their catch.   Apparently I wasn't the only one watching.  READ MORE

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Here we sit, mid August.  I imagine you are like me, squeezing the most out of the remaining weeks of summer as our white knuckles will possibly allow.  My mind is on perfectly sun ripened local tomatoes, waiting to be tossed into a lobster cobb salad or a light pasta with blobby bits of brie and a chiffonade of basil.  The garden is running a little wild, with my passion flower vine climbing across the kitchen window, bursting open in daisy chains of prehistoric seeming blooms.  I wake up every morning and throw on a loose cotton dress, my August uniform.

Here's the weird thing - for those of us who dwell in the world of retail, August is the season when holiday deliveries begin appearing on our doorsteps.  Wait what?  You read that right.  And a lot of these boxes include pieces that have been months, for me even years in the making.   That's enough to make my brain explode.  Until I remember that it's fine if I go sit on the beach and read a book for awhile - these remaining days of August are too precious to let pass by.   READ MORE

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Listen my lovelies, I have a wonderful story for you.  Have you seen this image before?  It was taken on the eastern coast of England, at a remote beach in Suffolk just across the North Sea from the Netherlands.       

It was here that two old friends first came to visit in 2005.    Els and Lida had been close childhood friends in the Netherlands, but as they grew older and had families, they had mostly fallen out of touch.  Some forty years later, they found themselves reunited after both received breast cancer diagnoses within weeks of one another.  Upon completing their treatments, they rented a cottage in this tiny village of just forty residents to heal and walk the beach together.   

After one such walk, they sat down on the pebbly sand and emptied their pockets of the shells they had picked up along the way.  As the two women chatted, they began to place their white whelks in a line.  They didn't spell out their names, nor make smiley faces (or a horrified face),  just a simple line, one shell after another.  On each of their remaining walks,  they'd stop and add a few more.   The holiday ended, and the two vowed to return every six months to ostensibly check on their line ... perhaps more to check on each other?  READ MORE

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