Actually, at the moment, we have multiple northern correspondents. These photooos are for our *real* northern correspondent, the one who lives on the moominbeach year-round. We’ll call her Paulette. Click and click again to embiggen the pics.

When I was six years old, there was a big dredging operation out in the shipping channel in front of the moominbeach. We had a lot of big nor’westers that summer. The Sherman clan was camping out in our back yard with their VW bus and popup camper. That’s a lot of people using one outhouse but we managed. It seemed like whenever the Sherman clan was there, we had a lot of windy days and the grownups would joke that the Shermans brought all that wind with them. The Commander and The Goddess Esther would hang out in the moomincabin discussing the Joy of Cooking’s diagrams on cutting up cows or making spaghetti sauce like the mafia makes it or whatever and The Goddess Esther would periodically tell her five children “Sherman kids, go play on the highway”. (She was just kidding. Anyway, we all wouldda had to walk a mile to get to anything resembling a highway.)

Where was I? Oh yeah, there were a lot of big nor’westers that summer. In one of them, a whole bunch of dredging equipment got blown in to our shore. I’m not sure who the first person to discover this bonanza was. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me. But what fun! And there we all are hanging out with our new playground equipment. (I’m the tow-headed kid with diamond patterned slacks — which I don’t remember at all…)

Eventually the dredge folks retrieved their equipment. But not all of it. Someone over in the little bay on the way to Birch Point managed to make a dock out of a long dredge pipe. When we were kids, we used to walk to Birch Point all the time. (It’s almost impossible to do that nowadays but that’d be a whole ‘nother post.) Anyway, it became a part of our routine trek to Birch Point to crawl *through* that pipe and jump out into the shallow water at the end. Probably not something our parents wanted us to do. I certainly never told.

Another northern correspondent reports that severe storms may be rolling onto the moominbeach tonight. He has secured all the boats and chairs and things up on the bank and there are no dredging operations out in the channel this year but I am wondering where the boats moored in shallow water down at Doelle’s AND Grow Taller 4 Idiots will end up if we get a good one, like Labor Day 2010. My childhood beach friend Kev predicts “they’ll be in the woods” and I agree.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2012 at 6:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.