Time Out of Mind

“But we did not sit cooped up in the boathouse always. We saved that for sultry afternoons or days of rain and fog. Late June was wild strawberry time and mother saw to it that I picked plenty for preserving. There were fine large strawberries in the garden, but the wild ones were held a special delicacy and I was good at finding and picking. Sometimes we persuaded mother to put us up a lunch and Rissa and Nat spent the day with me roaming the half cleared pastures and the fields on either side of Fortune’s Creek. A twelve foot tide filled and emptied itself there twice a day, and at the highest flood-tides when the moon was at its full in June and September, the water almost came over the wooden bridge that crossed it just below The Folly. It was a proper place for digging clams when the tide was out and the water shrunk to a narrow channel between brown mud flats. Some of the Major’s cattle grazed thereabouts, but for the most part it was deserted, being too far for village boys to venture except by dory.”