A Tiny Beach Cottage

We went to the beach and looked into the clear water. I saw a barnacled oyster and some slow moving aquatic snails. My son took off his shoes and stepped into the frosty cold New England waters! Brrrrr! I probably won't be doing that until the end of June.


Look at his toes. They don't seem to agree to go into the water with his feet.


Then he played gravel factory for a long time. Here is the the gravel factory's fine product, below.

While he was doing that I built a little stone house on the beach.

I was thinking about one of my favorite children's books while I built it. Have you read "The Secret of Ron Mor Skerry" by Rosalie K. Fry? It was made into a wonderful movie by John Sayles, "The Secret of Roan Inish". Try to get an old copy of the book from the library, the original illustrations are really special.


In some of my favorite scenes, Fiona and her cousin Rory (Eamon in the movie) fix up the stone cottages which the family abandoned on the island when they moved away a few years back.


They scrub the windows, sweep and wash the floors, fix the broken roofs and thatch them with reeds, whitewash, cut peat, start a garden, and gather bits of furniture to fill Grandmother's house. The children want to move back to the island with their grandparents. That's the only way they can get little Jamie to come home.


Jamie is Fiona's baby brother. He was kidnapped by the seals and seagulls when the family left the island, and people say that he is still alive and that he sails the sea about the island in his little cradle boat.

Listen to what happens when the children start to work on the cottages.

"They had not been long at work before a shadow moved across the bay and a sleek, dark head broke the surface of the water and turned toward the shore. A few minutes later a second head appeared and then a third and a fourth, and as though in reply to a secret summons, the bay became suddenly crowded with seals. They remained in the deep green water offshore with little more than their eyes above the water, silently watching everything that Fiona and Rory were doing."

For another idea for a way to build cottages on the beach, see "Make a Driftwood Cottage" in the column to the right.