A River Runs Through It
My husband and I recently arrived in Connecticut for the summer. We avoided the spring rains, which ruined Memorial Day weekend here and probably a lot of other weekends as well. And that in a nutshell is why we don’t come up until June. From my home office window I have a great view of the back yard and, at the very bottom, the Saugatuck River. It meanders through our property and heads toward Westport where it becomes much, much larger. One hundred and eighty feet wide, to be exact, at the place where Route 1 goes over the river near downtown Westport.
The river is almost 24 miles long, begins in Danbury, and eventually empties into Long Island Sound. In the 17th century the river was the site of a Paugusset settlement, the Golden Hill Paugusset Nation being a state-recognized Native American tribe in Connecticut. In the Paugusset language, Saugatuck means “river that flows out.” I love that we have a little piece of
My husband Bob and I recently dog-sat for a week for Miso, our daughter’s Pomsky. We adore this little three-year-old and loved having him with us – greeting us when we walked in the door and cuddling up on our bed at night. When Morgan returned from her trip she and I took Miso to the Saturday green market in West Palm Beach, which is always a fun outing. I love seeing the variety of dogs people bring there. One of the vendors we visited was Dog Deli. They’re based in Hallandale Beach, but they travel to the local green markets. The owner, who remembers Miso from the time he was a puppy, spoiled him with treats. You can see from this photo how eager he was to have her snacks. I’m sure he’s eaten everything Morgan bought there by now.
When we first moved from Connecticut to Palm Beach almost thirty years ago it was in October. Two months later the Christmas season was upon us. I remember thinking how strange it seemed to have warm weather at Christmastime. I’d spent my entire life up north and I was used to the weather being chilly in December. Sometimes we even had snow. I remember going to a local mall to do some shopping and noticing that several of the store windows were decorated with fake snow – that spray-on stuff that comes in a can. (Does anybody still sell that?) I remember thinking how the stores were trying to copy what we had for real up north and it made me miss having a northern Christmas. But I gradually got used to having Christmas in the tropics. The bottom line, of course, is that Christmas is where you make it. Now I can’t imagine being anywhere else.
It’s been a long time since I watched The Music Man, the 1962 musical starring Robert Preston and Shirley Jones (as well as a very young Ron Howard). Preston plays a con man who arrives in a small town in 1910s Iowa and poses as a boy’s band leader, with the aim of fleecing the citizens out of their money and skipping town.
All summer we’ve been in Connecticut and have enjoyed the view from our kitchen windows. The lawn in our back yard rolls down to the Saugatuck River and we often get a lovely, long-legged heron strutting about down there, likely hunting for food. We’re also home to two barred owls who sometimes have late-night conversations, filling the air with their eerily beautiful sounds. This morning I heard a red-shouldered hawk in one of our trees – identified by the Merlin bird ID app. I wish I could take credit for knowing what it was. Maybe next time.