A Guilford State of Mind

The Guilford Marina in the town I grew up in, next to where I live now. This is the public marina, though I'm sure there is a waiting list for berths. There are a couple of private marinas and yacht clubs in town as well. We kept our boats here more than 40 years ago... I'm not a boat person at all though. I love to LOOK at the water but am very, very uncomfortable ON the water. Funny because I spent a lot of time in boats growing up, and all of my friends were into sailing.

Typical decor for New England seafood restaurants, thick boat lines/ropes, lobster pot buoys and uncared for petunias, lol. I could have done quite a bit of deadheading here today. That's a typical Connecticut saltwater marsh behind the deck, in which you'll find all sorts of shellfish, crabs, and little fish, as well as wading birds like Egrets and Herons. At low tide, the smell of the mudflats is, um, interesting, definitely an acquired taste. Mary brought me out for lunch and a drive around my former town, including a trip to my parent's cemetery. It was a really nice afternoon.

The marina in the top photo is in a small inlet off the Long Island Sound. Several small streams or rivulets lead off from the Sound into the saltwater marshes. In this one, a pair of Swans and a small Cormorant can be seen. Did you know that Swans mate for life? At one time. I worked in an office building that was on a small lake, and we had several pairs of swans one year. A female was killed in the spring by a coyote or a dog, and its mate stayed next to her dead body for two full days, never swimming more than a few feet away. We finally called Animal Control in town and had them take the carcass away. The male then swam alone for the rest of the summer, always fairly far away from the other swan pairs. It was sort of sad to see, but also sort of wonderful in a way, that creatures so many see as 'beneath' us in the scheme of things, have innate traits we hold as purely human. Both swan parents take turns watching the signets when they arrive, sharing the duty equally, a trait more humans SHOULD have. 

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Not too far away from the Sound is the Henry Whitfield State Museum, or the Old Stone House, built in 1639, the year our town was settled. It's the oldest stone house in New England. Guilford, the town my family moved to in the late 1700s, was settled by a group of people led by the Reverend Henry Whitfield that found Plymouth Colony a bit too religiously strict and moved south. The house is one of the oldest state-funded historical museums in Connecticut, having been given to the town in the early 1900s. It has been restored at various times in its history, some that weren't terribly authentic. It's pretty much original now, though there are people that disagree. In any case, it's a gorgeous example of the architecture of the very earliest homes built in the New World, which emulated the medieval homes back in England that the founders had left behind. The wooden shingle home in the background was the groundskeepers home, but is now another part of the museums collection of antiques. Guilford has approximately a dozen other homes built in the 1600s, all wooden. My absolute dream, even above a huge loft in Manhattan, would be to live in one of these severely primitive and stark first period 17th century homes. My family's old home was built in 1766, a second period home, and I'd settle for that, lol.