ROGUE ROSES! OH BOY!

Wonderful wild roses — flat, pink with a cream center — are sprouting from the cleared rocks of my roadside stone wall. Clearly they have found spots which suit them. The rosa rugosa hedge blossomed and spread and allowed wrong rogues like barbary and goldenrod to grow within, but Millie has cut and pulled and ignored the nattering chipmunk, so the hedge remains a thing of beauty waiting for its big, red-orange rose hips which fool walkers-by into thinking they are cherry tomatoes, just ripe for a pick and taste.  Pucker.

North Dakota’s state flower is the (wild) prairie rose which looks much like my rogues. This happy circumstance surely suggests that my memory of wild rose fences keeping cows from roaming deserves further consideration. My 96-year-old, nifty uncle John, who was raised on his settler grandfather’s ND farm, says that, to his (substantial) knowledge, the wild rose fences never happened. I only remember hearing about them, never seeing one, so maybe the fences are another example of my dad’s “Irish truth”: if it could happen, it probably did.  For my dad, probably was as good as actually.

I may be becoming my father’s daughter.  When I used Tim Severin’s voyage to Iceland in a leather boat (recounted in The Brendan Voyage) to support my contention that the Irish were here before the Vikings, my brother-in-law pointed out it only meant that they could have been here, not that they were. Picky, picky. My brother-in-law is not Irish. Nifty, just not Irish.  Somewhere speculation meets documentation and makes maybe which is as much as most decisions are based on.

Figure #88. Can you practically see the early boats in the mist? Ignore the mowed lawn and the Esst Wind's Chandlery. Then the fun comes in deciding whose boats they are.

The Willow Street Bakery molasses doughnuts are as good as ever, especially with very hot, quite-dark-roast, coffee. The Bakery has changed owners at least three times and location once in my time here, but the recipe must go with the sales, thank heavens. When Garby and Tim were Hall’s Market, they had Willow Street molasses doughnuts twice a week which, with the beans on Friday, you had to reserve if you wanted any. The sights and smells were apparently too much for newbies to ignore. So the summer regulars met the challenge.

Heavy day today with high humidity, low clouds or dense fog, and intermittent rain. Some breeze, though. I’m about 2/3 way through David Grann’s Lost City of Z and though it is well-written, it is more about Percy Fawcett than about the author’s preparations to search for him and Z. Biographies of crazed Victorian explorers don’t interest me much. So I’ve taken a rainy day detour with Catherine Coulter’s Knock Out. If that ends too quickly, I have Daniel Silva’s The Defector waiting. If I need more Amazon adventure, I have Candice Millard’s River of Doubt or Teddy Roosevelt’s Through the Brazilian Wilderness, his own report of his Amazon adventures.

More boats were in the harbor today, some against their sailors’ wishes. Fog assures me some browsers, even if the idea of RB only occurs to them as they walk down Sea Street past the RB sign on the corner maple tree.  Yesterday, RB returnees mentioned that they could see the new, very  YELLOW chair on the porch from their boat.  Better than a flashing neon rose, I say.

Webcam problems at the moment. Trust me; it’s perfect.