More Girls

The parade of girls continues. Last week, it was my niece followed by my daughter's oldest friend since daycare, Alexa. This week, we are visited by a rising soccer star, Holly. What can you say? The girls are full of secret smiles and sub-vocal giggles. I'd be paranoid about it, if I thought any of the giggles were about me. But girls at this age think about us crinklies only rarely. I do get some great hugs and galling wonderment that my hair isn't more gray.

Having Holly with us was a great excuse to take Mike as well as our new visitor to Port Jefferson. Port Jeff, which I've blogged about before, is about 35 minutes from the Wee Cottage and is a homey seaside town.

The day began with a visit to the Avalon Foundation's nature preserve, a 90 acre spread in Stony Brook. The preserve is a very informal garden of sorts, covering a hillside, offering many paths and the odd bridge or rough fence or sculpture. The main effort in the plantings has been in the removal of non-native species and returning some plots to wild plants. The effect is gorgeous. The park was dedicated to a local resident who died in his 30s about a decade ago. I hunted long and hard for the details of Paul Simons' death. He was an avid cyclist (there's a memorial ride for him every year), but I couldn't find any other information on him, either in local paper archives or in Wiki. If anyone knows anything . . .





We arrived at Port Jeff, going first to Danford's for lunch and drinks by the harbor. Danford's is probably my favorite dining place on Long Island, so far. We had a civilized glass of wine and a half-dozen local oysters (which seem sweeter to me than Gulf Oysters). Holly and Jesse were allowed to go roaming the town independently while we finished our drinks. We miss the baby we had, but there's a definite upside to this growing-up thing.






The people in Port Jeff walk around with lobsters on their heads. It's not natural. And it's the first place -- since the mid-70s, I think -- that I've seen a nun in full regalia, with the wimple and the surplice and all the rest of it. Sadly, I couldn't manage to subtly take a picture of the sister, which I wanted to do to prove to my doubting husband that it wasn't really a gay man in drag. Tho, with that wimple thingy obscuring the Adam's apple, how can you be sure?








The other cool thing about Port Jeff is all the British phone boxes around the town. They even have that authentic drunks-pee-in-it look to them. I completely endorse Bill Bryson's call to shoot whatever British apparatchik moved to retire these wonderful old phone boxes in Britain.













Girls collapso. After having been made to run up a hill in Port Jefferson.