Short Beach - 1983 to 2009

The house that I bought for me, Lindsay and her kids in 1983, thanks to financing from Wesleyan, was an old bungalow across the street from the beach on Long Island Sound. Our little village, part of the town of Branford, was named for one of several beaches, of which ours was the most beautiful.

We lived part time on the water, in big or little sailboats, or the canoe shown here that I used to go up the Farm River into the labyrinth of little waterways hidden among the tall reeds, and housing egrets, ospreys, gulls, ducks, turtles, fish, deer, etc. Or else out to the beach directly on Long Island Sound.
From time to time we were menaced by hurricanes, the worst being Hurricane Gloria in 1985 when he had to remove all furnishings from the ground floor, barricade the windows and sandbag the entries under the house. As it was the water came up to the sandbags, but there was no damage to us, while many other houses were inundated or even destroyed. One of the last things I did before splitting from Lindsay and moving to New Haven was to bolt the supporting beams of the house to concrete pillars so that it could not float away when the sea level rises and new hurricanes arrive.

We also lived part time on the beach. Here Lindsay feeds a bunch of swans. We often had picnics on the beach, and many of the photos of our family were taken there. There were always shells to find, and they were the source of my shellmobiles.
I used to eat my breakfast there each morning, if it was winter, greeting the sunrise. On one of these occasions I composed one of my favorite poems, with the refrain of the sound of the little waves lapping.

In the early years, we had a series of 12-15 foot sailboats with which sailed along the coast of Long Island Sound, our favorite destination being the Thimble Islands of Guilford. Eventually we were reduced to the tiny sailboat shown here, as the first big sailboat was destroyed when it was not sufficiently moored to ride out a night storm, and the second big sailboat had a leak that we were never able to repair.