Providence Day Four: A Drive Along the Rhode Island Coast

Yesterday, all the little towns along the Rhode Island coastline brought out the flags to celebrate Veteran's Day. Some were thinking about recent or relatively recent wars, but some were thinking about a long time ago. This plaque, which sits on a rock near the shore, is celebrating the Swamp Fight of 1675, which took place on this coast. If you add it up -- that's only two generations after the Pilgrims.



Gilbert Stuart, the famed portrait painter who gave us the definitive likenesses of all the first fathers, like George Washington and Ben Franklin, came from this little farmhouse with twin water wheels -- a little one on the side of the house, and a bigger one. Of course, in those days the mill wasn't closed from Labor Day until May.



It's getting colder -- gloves in the morning on the way down to the campus coffee house for a medium latte and the New York Times -- but Plot and Duck will be long out of the East by the time the real weather starts, and glad of it. But it feels nice to be outside in this limited kinda-sorta-coldness. You'll notice The Great Ducknik climbing down the rocks at Beaver Tail Lighthouse on Jamestown Island, wearing her spiffy leather jacket.



The East gives you a sense of autumnal reality. Back home, the summer we don't have turns warm instead of cooler, then we get a delightful winter, instead of a miserable one, followed by a quick spring, instead of a slowly arriving one, followed by cold and fog, instead of hot and humid. One thing we rarely get: a hard frost, which means deciduous trees with leaves turning gold and red, and falling off the trees, with each gust of wind, onto narrow country roads.