The Old Fog Horn

© August '10   photo by smck

The old fog horn no longer sounds - modern technology has rendered it obsolete and the fishermen and other craft are the safer for it .  But I miss that mournful sound coming through the foggy night, curling round my mind as the fog curls round the cabin lost in the darkness of night at the shore - no other sound but a slurrr of surf like the whisper of time without end.

Chapel Cove Harbour, L'Ardoise

© August '11   photo by smck

This clean trim boat - the only one moored at the harbour dock this misty day - encapsulates form and function and still looks like a work of art.

Grazing toward the Bras d'Orrs

© August '11   photo by smck

The sand bars across inlets seem to be a law of nature and in a sense they are.  Although this is the calmer waters of  The Bras d'Or (as compared to the cold North Atlantic) a similar wave and current action still is at work carrying sand and gravel and depositing it to form the long bars from point to point of land.  To the far right you can see the small gut to the lake.  This photograph was taken somewhat hurriedly from the side of the road -  because there was very little shoulder and I didn't want to be blocking traffic doing the tourist photo thing.  But the bucolic appeal of these free grazing  small-farm cows looking wholesome and real and the way life has been for generations, was irresistible.

♪♫ Here Comes The Sun ♪♫

© September '11   photo by smck

Up and out early, dew on grass, old lobster traps, truck, trees, on every thing - that translucent shadow of morning which is so distinguishable from the shadow of evening just as the glow of birth is distinguishable from the shade of leaving this mortal coil - that translucent shadow giving way before me to the glow of sun on the spruce on the hill, and so now on this Easter day (of posting) this scene remembered in the strange storage of my human brain and remembered in the pixeled world of computer-land is so tempting in its imagery of the light of resurrection.  But when I glimmed this burst of sun on the tops of trees back in September it was the shade of leaving for another year, the always background thought of my transience in this world of living and in this narrower world of living in Cape Breton that gave me momentary pause and the unformulated thought of the end of summer as of the end of all.  But here tonight I am transfixed with the photo and look forward to scything the hill again, of raking the tall grasses and stiff stems of the monocotyledons of Golden Rod and wild daisy, and the numerous pithy growths of Lambs Kill and other noxious plants (to my imagined grassy hill side to be), and seeing Spring Hill spring up to being again my born-again home again.

Semipalmated Sandpiper ??

© September '11   photo by smck

If you are a birder would you please feel free to either confirm my identification (in photo title) or tell me what it should be - the Semipalmated was just enough different (winter plumage) in my old Birds of North America, so that I was not too confident - but nothing else fit the bill (sorry 'bout that, eh?).