There was a tinge of fall in the air for sure yesterday. Today is supposed to be pretty warm, but we walked at a little after eight o'clock and it was still in the low 60's. We got a few sprinkles so I had .02 in. in my gauge this morning, and I noticed a few minutes ago it was sprinkling again. This is looking across the pond, through lots of trees, to the Ide cottage. Each year the trees get a little taller and thicker and we lose some of our view. Once winter comes and the the leaves are off, it gets better, but there are still lots of evergreens between us and the water.

Speaking of trees, I transplanted a small maple tree yesterday and it hardly wilted. We have a row of maples along our driveway - all from the Arbor Society several years ago when we belonged to that organization and would get seedlings every time we renewed our membership. We got lilacs, blue spruce, and once a very strange assortment of maples. For a long time we kept a "nursery" in an unused part of our garden where we kept those sprigs for a year or two before transplanting them.

We had some successes and some failures, too. I think we had only three of six blue spruces survive; then there was the hazel nut hybrid program we got into that didn't amount to a tinker's you-know-what and after monitoring and reporting on the darned things as they remained nearly dormant for about five years, I dropped out of the program and told them it was a dismal failure as far as I could tell. I transplanted them and now, 15 years later, a couple are really big bushes - but still no crop of hazelnuts - and some have remained healthy but small. Our wild hazel nut bushes do very well and there are usually lots of nuts, although we don't harvest them. But the experimental hybrids just don't seem to want to produce.

The maples (I think there were seven, each a different variety of maple) were repeatedly cropped by deer for the first few years and one, at the top of the driveway, became a mass of branches with no main trunk, so Fred dug it out and I found a small maple in our woods that was growing tall and spindly for lack of light, and planted it in place of the scrubby one. We put the scrub maple in another spot just to see what it will become, and I'm hoping my transplant will survive and become a nice tall maple in line with the others. Like we don't have enough trees around our house . . . !

We went down to see what was happening at the demolition site on Sandy Beach Road. I've made a slide show for you. The work is being done by Kurt Fenoff of Danville. He is working the machine and you'll also see Rob Morse who drives the big truck. We got there at around 8:30 and the building was already down. Rob told us they were there soon after 7 o'clock and it was "all over" within a few minutes. Here's the slide show: Demolition on Sandy Beach Road

We stayed around for perhaps ten minutes and by then the truck was loaded and Kurt was packing down the load so the cover could slide along over it. Rob, who told us he used to live in West Danville but now lives in Glover, was taking the load to the land fill in Coventry. He said he'd take another load this afternoon and by tomorrow it will be pretty well cleaned up.

We'll keep you posted on the progress.

In the meantime, here is a reminder:

HARVEST SUPPER

Thursday September 9th
5:30 P.M.
CABOT CHURCH

There will be :
Baked Beans Cole Slaw
HAM Pie
HASH Coffee

Muffins and Rolls

Adults $7.00
Children $4.00

And here is something new and interesting, too:

Girl Scout registration is 6:30 Thursday evening at the Cabot School Stop by after the Church supper. Girl Scouting is open to all girls in grades K - 12 (even if they don't live in Cabot). For more information contact Cecilia Gulka 563-2284.

I believe this is for this Thursday, September 9th, but if you are interested you should give Cecilia a call.