viriginia creeper…after the leaves have fallen. blue berries. it’s also called woodbine. and the instant that david told me that, i was back in northport.

for on the corner of woodbine avenue and main street sits skippers pub. it’s just on the other side of main from the park and the gazebo and the harbor boatslips and that place – at the end of the dock – where i have sat for hours and listened to the clanking of metal-rigged sails in the moonlight. it’s visceral.

some of the berries are gone now – only a few days since i took this picture. but as the temperatures drop, the critters have been busy, i suppose. and i hope that the woodbine berries help them prepare and stoke up.

in daydreams, i go back to skippers. sit at the bar and talk with crunch about fishing or diving or life, eat lobster bisque and baked clams, maybe sip a beer (back in the day). i go back when i was 18 or just barely 19; those earlier times were different than later.

a bunch of years back, david and i were on the island and we spent time walking around northport, spent time on the docks, spent time at skippers. we sat at the bar and ate baked clams and buffalo calamari. he sipped a guiness and i had a glass of wine. it was a little bit of heaven. i pointed out the window and, as he looked out, i knew he was looking out the same lettered window i had gazed out of decades ago. the view was a little changed – both from inside and out – of me.

but i could feel the energy of those times past and i could feel the bits of goodness that still floated about from happy moments spent there. skippers will always be a place of refuge in my mind – not because it was a pub – but because it was a place of joy, a place of innocence, of fun and friendship and tales of fishing and diving.

there will always be places we internally feel good about and, of course, the complete opposite – places that are inherently negative, that drudge up things toxic or painful. each of us can likely rattle off a few examples of each category.

skippers – on the corner of woodbine and main – will remain one of the good ones.

and now, each time i pass our dear westneighbors’ fence along our driveway and see the woodbine curling and stretching and growing on the wooden posts, i will likely smile and think of baked clams and lobster bisque and the long island when i was 18.

*****

read DAVID’S thoughts this D.R. THURSDAY

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