One of my favorite photos was of Dan and Sue, a young couple much in love, ordering pizza on the Hampton Beach, N.H., Boardwalk. I always ask permission before I take anyone’s photograph, and no one in Hampton Beach hesitated or turned me down. They all seem tickled to have been asked.
Dan and Sue were happy in their love, and proud of it. I should have paid for their pizza, I didn’t think of it until later. I thank them for their generosity of spirit. I love taking pictures like this.
I met the King of The Beach in New Hampshire, a proud creature who followed me up and down the Boardwalk, eyeing me hopefully and suspiciously at the same time. I thought he was about to fly down and check my pockets, but we traveled together the length of the Boardwalk before I asked him permission to photograph him and he puffed himself up and strutted like a peacock and agreed to pose as long as I shot on his right, his good side.
He is, he told me, the Admiral Of The Gulls, the big cahuna of the beach. He carried it well and posed proudly for me.
Maria and I were delighted to find the Playland Arcade had opened on the Hampton Beach Boardwark, a delightfully retro and musty arcade filled with hundreds of games, contests, video war machines. Maria challenged me to a game of Skee-Ball.
People think of Maria as being sweet and quiet, but she has a ferocious competitive streak (unlike myself, who is but a meek lamb.) I won the first round, she won the second. She was not happy about the first round, but gamely took our tickets and redeemed them for a tacky plastic bracelet that I gave back to her.
Maria is the queen of cheap, and she throws nothing out. She is wearing the thing even as I write this. My game was good, I started off strong and racked up a few hundred points, but faded in the stretch. I told her her lob was wishy-washy, she called me nasty names.
We promised each other a rematch to break the tie and see who gets the title of Skee-Ball Champion.
Maria was not gracious about her loss, she cursed the balls and threatened to throw one of them at my head. I told her this is no way to treat a senior citizen.
Flo is a barn cat of many thrones. She likes the Rapunzel Chair, the box on the porch, the front porch, she is the queen of all she surveys. Lately, a new throne, the bird bath in the back of the farmhouse near the Dahlia garden. Flo likes to nap there and then look out and scour the pasture for signs of mice and moles. She is a fierce and efficient hunter.
Back from the ocean and into the gray.
We have begun serious rotational grazing – the summers are warmer and hotter than ever and the ground is try, the grass is half of what it has normally been. We have just put a new fence cutting off one third of the pasture, and we now have three areas to rotate – the side pasture, a new side pasture (newly fenced) and the back pasture.
We do not have enough good grass to get all of our animals through the summer, so we have rotated grazing in earnest, and the sheep, pony and donkeys don’t like it. They are used to going where they want and where the grass is greener. The usual benign and obedient sheep are giving Red a hard time, rushing towards the fence with the best grass on the other side and holding their ground.
Red is using all of his considerable skills to move them away from the fences and to whatever pasture we are using. Chloe and the sheep have eaten all of the grass down in the area behind the pole barn – our fourth area, now a paddock, no grass will grow there this year, it has all been eaten down, mostly by Chloe, who never stops (ponies do not take breaks from eating).
So they are all restless, a bit confused and frustrated. They get grazing periods twice a day, usually for between two and three hours, so they have plenty to eat. They will just have to get used to a new regiment. Fate joined the spirit of the things, rushing ahead of the sheep trying (unsuccessfully) to turn them around.
She did distract them and slow them down, Red got them where they belonged. This is a kind of chess match, I think it will go on all summer and perhaps forever, if the weather doesn’t return to normal. Which, I know, it won’t.
