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The Blue Boat had an important job for many years – to deliver milk, ice, and vegetables to my grandfather’s customers in the nearby summer island cottages . . .
The abandoned steam roller sat beneath the oak tree by our farm gate, a once proud machine. A metal roof covered the entire frame . . . The front roller was a massive, solid, round steel drum. Light rust now covered the roller with its bottom now slowly settling into the ground.
The Cheese Factory was open late April until about the end of October each year. Every morning when the factory was open, on the road there was a parade of horses and wagons, mostly a wagon with a single horse.
Every barn has one, some have two. What I am describing is a barn gutter, a place for cows to dispose of their digested hay or grain.
My first look at the 410 was as it sat on the seat of the 20-foot wooden Cupernall boat that my father drove to and from work on Round Island. The gun was loosely wrapped with brown paper . . .
Worn smooth into the meadow was the cow path leading to the barn. Our farm had about 20 milk cows and the path was the route our cattle followed to the barn from the meadow and back again.
Date: January 1966: From Clayton, NY, to Grindstone Island on the ice was about a 15 minute drive under good conditions.
This packed-down snow path would become a slick, solid sheet of ice when slightly melted by the sun. This path then became an Olympic Sled Run for us kids . . .
Cruising along, I am still lost in thoughts of tomorrow, afraid of failure, and of letting my family down. Suddenly, a fish hits the Pikie lure as I was right opposite Sugar Island.
Almost halfway across the width of Grindstone Island was the Lower Schoolhouse.
Manley wrote this poem about the rope swing that hung for many years on the Rusho property on Grindstone Island. The rope hung high . . .
In the old farmhouse where I lived as a child, my bedroom was at the top of the stairs. A quick turn left and you entered a small bedroom with a window facing north – due north.
My Grandmother Ordelia Graham Dano was my maternal grandmother and the mother of 12 children. Her home was a small, two-story wooden home, complete with two stoves . . .
. . .I was almost at the location where an old barn had once stood when suddenly a full-grown mountain lion stood looking at me, maybe 50 feet away, maybe closer.
I first saw the spring some 80+ years ago, when I was about 8 or 9 years old. I was assigned to fetch drinking water for the schoolhouse . . .
Weekdays, there was a routine that never changed; out from the warm bed under the feather-tick cover, we emerged to put feet on the cold flo
My Aunt Eleanor (Calhoun), my father’s sister, was pregnant; we were told that she was having trouble with the pregnancy, and she needed a doctor.
Somewhere around 1943, my cousin John (Dano) and I had a winter project to fix up an old ice boat. We had been working on this old ice boat for several days now, salvaging parts from all over . . .
