Square dancing

 

Friday night closes out the week with a rollicking square dance.

Wacky Canoe Races

A Thursday morning tradition.  Fourteen canoes.  A regular race.  A paddling backward race.  Change places when the horn sounds.  No paddles, use your arms.  Jump out and get back in when the horn sounds.  Gunwaling.  Swamp it when the horn sounds.

The Ice House

In the winter, a crew cuts slabs of ice from the lake and store them in the ice house.  All summer long, a crew delivers ice blocks to the iceboxes in the cabins.  It has been hot; hope the ice lasts the summer.

The Raft

 

Sisters.

What else do you do when there are pretty girls on the raft to impress?

Main Dock

Peaceful at 7 a.m.

 Busy at noon.

Loon

I hoped to see and hear loons while on this New Hampshire lake.

But the loon nesting area is directly across the bight from our cabin.

 I see this loon and its mate all the time.

Roots

 

A tree in Ridgefield's Ballard Park.

A Favorite Main Street Garden

 

One of my favorite Main Street houses in Ridgefield also has one of my favorite gardens.  Not because it is host to bees, butterflies or birds, because it is not, but because it is colorful and matches the house.

The Annual Garden

 Back to West Hartford twice last week.  On Wednesday for an eye appointment.  Yesterday for a memorial service for a friend and longtime neighbor.

While there, I stopped in at Elizabeth Park.  Of course.

Around the Yard

A pair of Eastern tiger swallowtail butterflies began flitting around the garden yesterday.  Welcome back!

Monarch butterflies are starting to appear.  They particularly like Joe Pye weed.

And echinacea (coneflower) is good, too.

I think this is a skimmer dragonfly, but I am willing to be corrected.

A damselfly landed on an unknown-to-me bush.

Bumble bees flit from one plant to another.  They are everywhere!

Bunting

American flags, banners and buntings are very common in Ridgefield.  

The rainbow symbol of Pride is also very common in Ridgefield.    

What has not been common is a side-by-side display of red-white-and-blue bunting and rainbow-colored bunting.  But, here we have it on a beautiful house on Main Street, at the intersection of Routes 33 and 35. 

Josh and Minelva

 Josh and Minelva met in college years ago when he was a grad student and she was an undergraduate biology major.  They now have a 20-month old son -- a "pandemic baby."  They moved from Minneapolis to Ridgefield a year ago to be closer to family.

Josh is from upstate New York.  He works remotely for an engineering company doing software programming and web design.  If he had more free time, he would spend it fishing.

Minelva is from St. Croix and grew up in the Bronx.  She thought she would get a Ph.D and spend her career doing research in a laboratory, but she likes working with people too much, so she is a family physician.  Her twin sister lives in a town south of Ridgefield and her parents have a weekend house here.

First Church of Christ, Scientist

At the sidewalk, this Main Street church has a newly installed box with literature for passersby.

Corey Pane

 The talented Hartford-area muralist Corey Pane painted a terrific mural last year on a wall near Union Station, where traffic exits U.S. Route 84 and dumps onto Asylum Avenue.

In addition to several well-painted wall-sized figures of women and smaller paintings of a typewriter, a bird, a dog and a tee shirt, there are additional pieces that seem done by children.  It would be fun to spend some time reading them, though it would be done at the peril of hurtling cars.

Linked to Monday Mural.

Off-Main Experience

 Yesterday there was an event sponsored by Connecticut muralists on the west side of Stamford.  Several artists painted large canvases to be raffled off.

Patrick Ganino painted the rap artist Biggie Smalls a/k/a The Notorious B.I.G., based on a 1997 portrait by Barron Claiborne three days before Smalls was murdered in a drive-by shooting.

Lauren Clayton had just begun.

A very intense artist had a sophisticated spray can technique using a camera and viewfinder,  I didn't want to interrupt him to get a name.

And two other unnamed artists worked on a big heart and "Summer Love," respectively.

The woman who painted these kids' faces was good, too.

Pound Ridge Square

Down the street from Kahlo, a small market was going on in Pound Ridge Square. 

At one booth a young lady from Taconic Distillery showed a bottle of Hudson Valley bourbon.

At the next booth another young woman showed her handmade pottery.

A trio played rock classics . . . some of my favorites, played very well!

The walls of the stores were nicely painted with images of great blue herons.  I searched but could not find the name of the artist.  Several animal sculptures were scattered around the area.

 And next to Pound Ridge Square is a small grassy park maintained by the Lions.  The feature sculpture was Stickasaurus, created in 1993 by David Rogers.