This post is more or less an opportunity for me to get a photo of my cousin Wendy onto the blog, a picture taken by her mother or father probably around 1949. My younger brother Tom took a lot of time in the past few months and put together old family photos, dating back to around 1910. This is one of my favorites. It's Wendy and what are no doubt two of her father's catches that day, brought in from a beach on Martha's Vineyard.
The photo is a mark of late spring on Cape Cod and the Vineyard, when shoals of striped bass feed in shallow local waters on the far end of their annual migration from the Carolinas and south. Up here Roccus Saxatilis is called "striper." Down south it's often called "rockfish." Either way, a heavy fish, a good fighter and a good meal.
This time of year, we often take our food from the land and the water that surrounds it. We've eaten mussels, hardshell clams, bluefish, striper and squid in the past couple of weeks. Lettuce, peas, rhubarb, strawberries have all been harvested by this time. It's a good time of the year to live here; not too many tourists on the streets yet, but lots of good food.
Below Wendy and her two stripers, I've posted a 41-inch fish that came this morning from the waters of the Cape Cod Canal. Friends of ours have a friend who catches fish but doesn't eat them. So he unlocks our friends' garage door and puts whatever legal bass or blue he's caught into their refrigerator. This morning, I got the two bass from the early fishing. One went to our potter friend Kim Medeiros and her family and the other came here, to be scaled and filleted and eaten by us and other friends.
Dee's peonies are in bloom, another sign of June, and so that you don't think I've abandoned making pots, the lineup of shelves for this weekend's glazing and firing.
