Salt Marsh Spring

Sister Karen and brother in law George Graham check in from the Massachusetts coast about their excellent interface with the wild; the sea's edge borders wilderness even near the biggest cities. George says:

"We've been enjoying the wake up in our back yard, Great Esker and the Back River. We've identified at least three nesting pairs of osprey. One osprey seem to be sitting in the marsh, one perches in the nest while the other stands proud in the marsh grass,  part of the mating process?   While surveying the marsh, we did a spring cleanup before the grass stands back up. It took a pounding from the ice flows, lots of mud deposits. We pulled a child's toy, a grill cover which we filled with plastic and glass, and this antique bottle from Freeport Street, Dorchester,  my old backyard. Also saw many black-crowned night herons waiting for the herring to arrive which is any day now. Going to set up a blind to photog them, or maybe use the ghillie suit. Heading off to the Herring Run Clean up in the AM. The interface of urbia meets the wild."

And adds re night herons (which we oddly have here too, on the Rio): "Forgot the black-capped night herons, odd creatures, well built for fishing, rather silly habits of playing peek-a-boo from their coniferous perches, watching us,  they have zero camouflage."

Jane Huntington Weiner 1917- 2012

Jane Huntington Weiner, Betsy's oldest sister and surviving sibling, died, lucid to the end, in Massachusetts yesterday. She was born in 1917 in Anwei, China, raised (by strangest coincidence) with Libby's mother Patty Lucas Adam, eventually came to the states, attended Radcliffe, and survived an adventurous youth to become a serene mother and gardener and lifelong vegetarian who somehow managed to enjoy her carnivorous relatives without criticism, and even compliment one of our hounds. She leaves many Weiner descendants and Huntington relatives. I hope to post more pix and stories as they come in; I need to find the one of Jane and Patty sharing a baby carriage in Anwei. She has been to the Spur (in 1986)-- it is in Querencia- the- book.

The Huntington sisters, late 70's, when I first knew them: