Remembering...

From the poem by Irish writer Nick Laird....

excerpted from Pug, from On Purpose, Poems by Nick Laird

Pug



Bruiser, batface, baby bear
bounce in your moonsuit
of apricot fur with some fluff
in your mouth or a twig or a feather


....you tend to get hiccups.
you squeak when you yawn....
your weapon of choice is the sneeze.
the Buddha would have liked you....

I miss you every day, I catch glimpses of your ghost...
That Rainbow Bridge thing better not be wrong!

I love you.

[The Rainbow Bridge is a fable about pet heaven, how our beloved friends are supposedly waiting for us...I won't post a link because It always makes me cry, prob would you too....]

lizzy

April Showers

Oh how trite! Ol' April is milking the showers thing down to her last days of '11, isn't she?

The good news is the endless encompassing deadly white fog lifted about an hour ago...

The bad news is that it was washed away by a big, dramatic thunderstorm that is keeping me indoors.
I was all revved up for my spring fix-up and wall painting, headed off to Lowe's despite the fog, list in hand...
When the storm hit. So I stayed indoors. Really...tomorrow is another day, is it not?

I tried to take pictures of the rain on my windows but...OMG, blah...so here's the windowsill junk accumulation from the winter past, with just a hint f sad grey skies behind....

I do love the beach glass bottles!

Aren't the purple ones neat! They change color due to something (manganese?) in the old glass. I've read that purple bottles always date from 1900-1911---One hundred years!---because the trace element that turns purple was only used during that time. (urban legend?)

The darkest purple one is not a beach find, it is a dump dug find, from Illinois, from my dad's collection....

And the marbles, used here as stoppers,  are found on the beach also, tho I never find the really worn ones, maybe my sand is too soft?

These are cool old bottle bases....

And a few favorite, very white shells moved to a prettier location.

Every spring I weed out the windowsill collection, pare it down--usually  paint the darn window frames, boy, do they ever leak!
And start again....

So here's to starting again, getting ready for summer! And plans postponed, for now...

[Wonder if we'll have a rainbow...the sky is getting brighter, even as I write...I'm off to take a look!]

love


         lizzy

gone to the beach

linked to Sarah's  Good Life Wednesdays atA Beach Cottage

Day Lilies

Hi! I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays! Easter here at the beach turned out pretty nice! Look at these waves...

The fog stayed away and the thunderstorms held off til nighttime. A few daring souls even took their sand chairs down to the shore (bbbrrrr!)... 

My grocery store had these stunning lilies! Not at all my usual Easter flower, I am drawn to blue hyacinths and white tulips...But I think because Easter was so late, the lilies are in season.....

It was hard to choose, but very inexpensive, so I went with two bright bunches...

Casual day , mostly beach walking and relaxing....

For Easter supper, a spring salad of baby lettuce-greens, pears, walnuts, gorgonzola, with an apple-vinegar dressing. I  made brisket because the butcher stocks it for Passover and it makes such a nice pot roast casserole. With Hungarian egg noodles made with caraway and a sour cream....

Asparagus and brussel sprouts...made crispy cooked, in a smidge of olive oil.

And earlier, for what my Cape Cod parents called cocktail time---actually after beach hike snack time!--- I did  a big plate of devilled eggs (horseradish, blue cheese, capers, a bit of mayo mixed with the mashed up yolks for the stuffing...) and my usual cheeses and crackers...Sadly I couldn't find my special egg platter with the indentations for the eggs!? Something to look for at the flea markets in the weeks ahead....

Dessert was miniature lemon tarts, each with a couple of little pastel Cadbury chocolate eggs on the top---to make them look like tiny Easter nests.

Now I'm back to work on hearts and other fun things for Mothers Day gifts, weddings, teacher-hostess gifts...I'll be sharing them soon.

love

         

                   lizzy

                

gone to the beach....

All My Eggs in One Basket

Well maybe not all...

 

Happy Easter, Happy spring to everyone!

                   

Do you all decorate a lot for Easter and/or spring? Now that my kids are beyond the Easter Bunny age I don't decorate much for Easter most years.....

I love my collection of speckled eggs and old peeps, the fluffy Easter toys, not the candy marshmallow kind. I often find the old chickies inside the vintage papier mache eggs, relics of a long ago child's Easter basket, now treasured again, by me.

The eggs are a mixture of real, blown and dried eggs from the flea market, some hand painted robin's eggs from my mother,

...and plastic eggs from the craft store...[yes, plastic. I love the colors...]

But this year, since I have been finding the German papier mache eggs now and then, I decided I'd get out my collection and display them this year...

Recent flea market finds...

Often the best time to buy holiday collectibles is off-season, like don't try to find great Christmas stuff in December.

I found these two last fall...Turquoise! my fave!

And this cutie!

He came from one of my favorite etsy sellers: Joan at Anything Goes Here. Here is a link to her wonderful blog, telling about this adorable tiny red bunny egg and companion chickies eggs. They just had to come join my admittedly humongous collection here at the beach.
Here's the small egg from Joan with a similar large egg from a local antiques show (The big guy cost a fortune, geez...)...

So....Uh. Um..I opened the bin with the German eggs last week. OMG, I must own every old egg on the east coast!

These pix are just a fraction of the group.

I was a bit astounded. I think they reproduced in the bin! Each big egg held three or four smaller eggs...

Most are pre-WW2 German, a few date from my childhood and some from my first year in NYC when I lived near a once-long-ago German neighborhood...

And sleeping at the bottom were my bunnies!

I especial;y love the white homespun ones...

Bee Happy! Spring is here...soon?

love

                     lizzy

 gone to the beach.....

PS Be sure to check out Joan's blog Anything Goes Here. The photos and display ideas are wonderful! And her collections, oh my! Lucky for us she shares them, on her blog and in her shop! Her shop link is on her blog, so you can see even more treasured finds. Enjoy!

Earth Day 2011

Hello everyone! Hope the sun is shining for you wherever you are for this holiday weekend!

Warning: nature girl rant today!

Because...

Did you know there is a garbage dump the size of TWO Texas-es...slowly swirling in the Pacific Ocean?!

Pcific Ocean trash from Google pix

It's the biggest garbage dump/"landfill" in the world. Think about it---twice the size of Texas! And other gyres or circular currents in all other oceans have similar, if smaller swirls of trash---mostly plastic---too! Just google the phrase great Pacific Garbage Dump and you'll see myriad stories, research, from National Geographic to Wikipedia. This is NOT  an urban (maritime?) legend, even though the very concept boggles my mind.



Googled photo: Yes! That IS a PERSON
walking on the trash "island"!
click to enlarge

 My own beach is relatively pristine, somewhat surprising when we think how close to all the big east coast cities my little sand bar lies.
                                  

Over the past year or so I've been photographing these enormous bundles of rope and netting that wash ashore even here....

Sometimes they do good things, helping to hold the sand in place during storms...

And sometimes, they almost seem like beach treasure, when they are made of decorative ( to me) nets and floats....

There's even a woman who studies these net messes, for her art. Here's  last year's post, mentioning her site....

On a grassroots level, activist groups like the  Surfrider Foundation try to bring awareness to the public: their message, Respect the Beach rings true to me, as the beach---any beach, but especially my own, is my spiritual and artistic home.

This is a link to a fascinating slideshow from Surfrider showing the awful wash-ashore on what should have been a pristine Hawaiian beach, now named Plastic Beach. The sand itself is made from tiny flakes of non-biodegradable plastic.

Yet, again, to me---the eternal beachcomber, some of the trash there (and yes, here at home) seems like treasure...

late 1800s patent medicine bottle fragment from my beach

Seaglass is, after all, simply trash. Old and interesting---romanticized and treasured, but trash it is!

seaglass bottle, c.1890, Irish ale, from my beach

I'd be thrilled beyond words to find a glass float at the beach instead of at the flea market! Did you see the one in the slide show of Plastic Beach? sigh....

                        

Or even turquoise netting...or one of  the small rubber ducks whose ocean journey is chronicled in Moby Duck , by Donovan Hohn.  The sales blurb says: "Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them. " 

It seems a crate of toys from China fell off a ship years ago; the escaped toys, icluding thousands of Rubber Duckies, have roamed the oceans of the world ever since! How, uh, fun? And why have I never found one??? Huh?
(I just downloaded it onto my Kindle...I'll review it when I am done reading.)

Here is the ultimate wash-ashore find! (Though I'd rather find a glass float! Or a tarnished pirate's doubloon...)....

 When this small sailboat drifted ashore and washed up on the dunes in a late winter storm, all I could think was that my dad---an inveterate reuser/ recycler---could have, would have, salvaged that little boat and fixed it for summertime sailing fun.

I love my beach...and hope it is not too late to save our Earth, that we can change and preserve it for our future generations....

Note: Surfrider Foundation is the world's leading non-profit environmental organization working to protect and preserve our world's oceans, waves and beaches. Please take the time to look at their site, read their mission statement. Thank you!

love

                 lizzy

gone to the beach

note: all photos taken by me, here at my beach,  except the two Pacific Trash pix and Moby Duck's cover. My thx for their use...