Grandson Tynan arrived Monday evening, but we wasted no time on Monday exploring the damage done to the landscape. We cleared the path down to the Frog Pond a little more and Ty was amazed at the trees bent and broken around the pond. The frogs and newts seemed to be in good shape.  The sundews, too. We still don’t know how those tiny, pond-edge carniverous plants, close around bugs to eat them.

Since the weather was supposed to be bad, we planned a trip to Mass MoCA in North Adams. But we stopped along the way to visit our neighbor’s goats.  They are always hungry. Our neighbor Sheila also told us about a natural disaster that occurred last Thursday evening, but more about that later.

Tynan took an earlier nap in the parking lot of Mass MoCA, too. He had fallen asleep on the drive and the storm arrived with us at the museum. I didn’t wake him till the storm abated. I heard that at home we got more than 2 inches of rain!  The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art always has weird and wonderful exhibits to intrigue and delight the young set. And all the rest of us. This is part of the Kidspace exhibit CRIBS.

You can see this particular exhibit ran over the gallery space, right out the window and down by the entrance to the museum.  Matt Bua uses lots of found objects in his art which was very inspiring as we considered what art we might make.

The Sol LeWitt exhibit, all geometic wall designs was cool and we got to see a video about how it was done. Sol LeWitt is no longer with us, but his walls are still being created.  The videos by Guy Ben-Ner were pretty funny.  We watched several of them.  For one of them we had to provide our own power by pedaling a bike to make the video machine run.

On the way home we bought some art supplies, stopped at the (fairly) new North Adams Public Library that has been renovated and added onto.  Now it has plumbing!  And geothermal and solar heat. It’s a great place.

We also stopped to investigate the Natural Disaster that Sheila mentioned. This is what is left of the abandoned beaver pond. (I wrote about the invasive yellow flags here earlier this spring.) On Thursday evening the dam broke and acres of stagnant, stinky water came rushing down Dell Road, through and over the stream that followed the road, down past Sheila’s house and finally down into the Deerfield River.

Tynan went out exploring very carefully.  I told him I wasn’t going to pull him out of that stinky mud. We got to see something rarely seen – the underwater entrance to the lodge that the beavers used.  Did you know that beavers sleep on a platform in the lodge and keep a paw in the water. If their paw is suddenly out of the water the sleepy beavers know something bad is happening to their dam and they swim out to repair it.

You’d think that would be enough for one day, but we had to paint a stone, have supper, play a game of chess (the Major lost) and have Reading Aloud. We are reading Flush by Carl Hiassen. It is pretty funny, but it’s about a serious problem, polluting the water down in Florida.