Blog de Puree

It was a glorious Sunday in the northern Seacoast area of Massachusetts–the temperature hovered in the high 50s/low 60s and there was hardly a cloud in the sky.

We took advantage of what was possibly the last fall-like day of the season to head to an undisclosed beach for an hour or so to collect rocks for the beginning of a rock wall that I’m constructing in the front yard. (Contractors and formal cemented walls be damned, there’s nothing wrong with well constructed stacks of well placed stones.) We’re aiming to be part of a select group of homeowners who can say that the wall is made entirely of hand-picked stones and comes only from what’s found in the forest or along the seashore.

Naturally, it’s difficult to walk away with but a small pile of rocks at a time, so this is a long term project. In the end, we want to emulate this stone wall we discovered at a house in Newburyport that we fell in love with. Note the evergreen bushes in front and the wild flowers around it. That’s what we hope to build:

And this is what we have so far . . . (giggle)

We also picked up a fair amount of smaller, finely smoothed stones to fill in a small chipped area on the side of our front porch, eliminating the need for store-bought, river rock. We hope to create a soothing rock-filled area to soothe one’s senses and to extend that in a functional manner down the length of the driveway to hide a rainwater runoff and drainage ditch that leads to the street.

Again, we’re a long way off from completion:

To end the day, we enjoyed a hearty meal of mussels marinara/fra diavlo on a bed of linguini. So, the mussels were farm raised and we didn’t dig them up ourselves, but it was still seashore related.

All told, it was the perfect kind of day to remind us why we chose to live in northeastern Massachusetts.