Back

I'm back, I think. It's been a while, but suffice it to say: I've had very good reason to be absent. For various reasons, my creative energy has been much lower than usual over the last six months. I’m sure you’ll appreciate how frustrating that can be. I haven’t been writing anywhere near as much as I need to or want to.

But I’ve had my camera. I've come to understand, over the last year or two, how much I like taking photographs. I am an artist as well as a writer, and because I’ve been expending so much of my available creative energy on my current novel, I find I’ve had neither the desire nor space in my life to paint or draw for quite some time. But because I have a very strong need to make visual images, and because I spend as much of my life outside as I can, I’ve become increasingly attached to and fascinated by instant image making. So I’ll be sharing pics from time to time.

Here is one I took last weekend:


This is at Beavertail State Park at the southern end of Jamestown , Rhode Island, where I went with Nestmate, Chickling, and Baxtor (our boxer) last Saturday. We were hunting for fossils, which is just about the most fun a person like me can have. Picnic, ocean, sunshine, abundant gulls and cormorants, rock pools full of swishing and scuttling and creeping things, and wandering through 500 million year old geology with my family—what could possibly be better?

We saw some fascinating geological features such as folding caused by immense heat and pressure unimaginably long ago:





We think we did find some fossils:


Mussel?

Trigger fish?

Sea cucumber?

It was the best kind of day.



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