Golden Green ~

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.

Thank you Laurie Miller for these kind comments:

"The delicate greens in those pictures [the sand mill] ....remind me it's that shortest season of the year when 'Nature's first green is gold.'  Robert Frost is right.  The first green of new leaves in spring *is* gold;  I see it in those pictures.  And the leaf buds, as they break, *do* look like flowers.  But only for 'an hour.' "

Laurie, through your familiarity with poetry, you raise our awareness of nature's "first green." Thank you.

"Before retiring to bed, [Theodore] Roosevelt and his friend the naturalist William Beebe would go out and look at the skies, searching for a tiny patch of light near the constellation of Pegasus, "That is the Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda," they would chant.  "It is as large as our Milky Way.  It is one of a hundred million galaxies.  It consists of one hundred billion suns, each larger than our sun."  Then Roosevelt would turn to his companion and say, "Now I think we are small enough.  Let's go to bed."

~ THE LITTLE, BROWN BOOK OF Anecdotes, Clifton Fadiman General Editor.

Moulds for iron castings ~

The sand for making moulds was ground from a particular rock.

The ruins of the sand mill, circa early 1800s, are located near Dry Lake in Haldimand County minutes from Cayuga.  Extensive in their lay out, the ruins are barely visible when the leaves are on the trees.  Today the property is owned by an aggregate company.

[Photos: May 11, 2014 lbw]

 

 

 

 

Haldimand's Ruins ~ Do you know what they are?*

*Tomorrow

When David J. Forsyth began researching the lives of his ancestors and filling filing cabinets with his findings, he committed to providing his descendants with a record of his own life growing up in rural Ontario in the forties.  Dafydd is that book.

We are pleased to have David in The Neat Little Bookshop on Thursday, May 15 for the Third Thursday or for what we call our Cayuga Literary Circle.

Please drop in ~ "The coffee pot's always on..."

"Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength ~ in search of my mother's garden, I found my own."

~ Alice Walker (b.1944)  In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, 1974.

"Give a little love to a child , and you get a great deal back."

~ John Rushkin (1819-1900) The Crown of Wild Olive,1866

        
         Happy Mother's Day !