On February 3 it was 22 degrees F, sunny and dead low tide. I went down to my favorite beach for collecting trash, only to find the gate locked! The gate is tucked in by a store between a lot of restaurant piers, and is the only access to the whole strip of shoreline. That beach is where the fishermen have always pulled their boats up for maintenance and painting. Looks like someone has decided to buck tradition and close the access. To be fair, the stairs are their private property, and of course they have that right, but it’s still sad. There is now no access to the shore between the Bar and the Town Beach. I’m going to try to contact the new owner for permission, but I suspect the building and stairs are slated for ‘redevelopment’ like the rest of the street.

I was determined to go beachcombing, though, so I headed up the street to the Bar. A stiff wind was blowing from the north and it was very cold.

 I got a few ice photos in mud puddles along the way. A lot of bits were frozen to the beach. I kept tucking my chin into my coat collar for warmth, but then my glasses would steam up, and the steam froze!

The gulls were curious. First one started to follow me, although I didn’t notice for a while.

Then there were four standing huddled into the wind and watching me. Then eight gulls were moving down the beach with me, rising into the air if I got too close, and hovering on the wind just above my head.

It was cool and a little eerie at the same time. I’ve never seen them do that before.

 Maybe they thought I had food, because eventually a whole flock of them were flapping around, just the way they do behind a fishing boat. There were even a couple of crows. Yes, I did think of That Movie, but they didn’t seem aggressive. I just kept beachcombing, and when I found this:

I forgot all about the birds!

I’m one-half of an old married couple with two teenagers, so we’ve got pretty flexible ideas about what constitutes a good Valentine celebration. We agreed that cards and chocolate are kind of boring after all these years, but the romantic moments show up unexpectedly.
Today my 11-year-old daughter’s fiddle group played at Sonogee, a local nursing home. It was once part of a row of grand mansions lining the shore, back in the days when the cream of Gilded Age society summered here and threw elaborate balls during the Bar Harbor Season. Most of the mansions burned in the great Fire of ’47, and others were sold off when the income tax was introduced and the old ways were no longer practicable. Sonogee still has a couple of fancy neighbors to the northwest, but to the southeast, the remaining mansions have been absorbed into the College of the Atlantic and various hotels. The entrance hall is still rather posh, with a sweeping staircase and arched niches and marble floors. There is also a lovely dining room with elaborate coffered ceilings. The wings that have been built on to either side of the original building for the residents’ rooms are more standard nursing home style; hospital-like and practical.

At any rate, the children played Irish jigs and ballads in the old dining room, under that gorgeous ceiling, with a sweeping panorama of Frenchman’s Bay behind them and the residents gathered in front. Such a study in contrasts and the changes time brings to people and buildings and ways of life… We parents hovered just outside the grandly carved doors, trying to stay out of the way of people maneuvering their wheelchairs and walkers in to the hall.

Near the end of the performance, the fiddlers played a waltz, and my husband and I started to dance out there in the grand hallway with the industrial carpet. It was very silly, since we are ungainly and middle-aged and overweight, but it was also absolutely lovely. He doesn’t love to dance as much as I do, and is even more self-conscious, so I can’t think of a nicer present for him to give me than an unexpected waltz in a incongruous setting. As I said, after 23 years, you take the romance wherever it pops up.

P.S. The photos are from the Next Step Chocolate Festival we went to last Saturday. My husband plays trumpet in a Dixieland band, and they’ve been playing for this fundraiser for at least ten years. The kids and I never fail to come and show our support.

Sometimes I just can’t stop playing. I started to clean up after arranging that obsessive central heart, but the next thing I knew I’d spent a couple more hours working with the rest of my white shell stash.

I think these are Common Dove Snails (Columbella mercatoria).

Shark Tooth Valentine (available in my etsy shop)

I’ve made three valentines this year. This is the first one. I started out trying to make a heart out of sea urchins, because I liked the christmas tree I made with them and thought I might have a series of sea urchin holiday photos. They didn’t work out well though – I didn’t have enough variety of sizes – so I started pulling jars off my shelves. A box of mussel shells, mason jars full of little shells from Florida, several jars of white shells … at the back of a shelf I found my collection of shark teeth. Aha! Fortunately it is a huge jar so I could pick out just the right shapes and sizes. It took about an hour and a half to sort them and make the basic heart shape.

How did I get so many shark teeth? Well, you know what a scavenger I am. Not just on the beach, but I also love yard sales and thrift shops. A few years ago I was visiting my sister in New Hampshire, and we went to a yard sale in an old barn. The owner had a huge copper maple syrup cauldron that I still remember longingly. But what the heck would I do with a cauldron? (More to the point, it wouldn’t fit in the car.) Anyway, I dug around in the barn and way way in the back, buried under dusty boxes and spider webs, were five or six open cardboard boxes piled into each other, full of paper bags and shoe boxes. Everything was heaped with shells. I pulled them out into the daylight and tried not to scream while dusting off the spiders. The owner (who was in her fifties) said her mother had vacationed at the same beach in Florida for fifty or sixty years. She would bring the shells back every year, admire them for a while, and then dump them in the barn. (I could totally sympathize – I did something similar until I started photographing my finds, except I don’t have a barn.) I bought the lot, and took them home to sort them and see what I had.

I ended up with many jars of seashells, and one huge jar of shark teeth. I wish I knew more about the teeth. I think a lot of them are fossilized. There are (or were, until my son snitched them) a few really big ones. I tried to count them once and got bored around 500, so there are over a thousand in the jar, ranging from less than a quarter of an inch long to an inch and a half. Some are broken, many are chipped, but there are still hundreds in perfect condition. Every now and then I pull out the jar and my kids and I play with the teeth. It is one of the few things about me that my teenage kids still think is cool.

And man, would I like to know what beach that woman went to!