~Upstream and Down~

O is for Oliver Mill Oliver Mill, in Middleborough, Massachusetts, is the scene of an annual mating ritual, wild and free, a testimony to the strength of biological urges. Come April, young and old line up on the bridges of this restored mill site to watch the herring swim against the current to the calm pond above the falls where the females will lay their eggs, and the males will broadcast their sperm. (These fish are attempting to leap the higher falls, having missed the ladder route.) Oliver Mill is one of many such herring runs where man has built a "ladder" in the stream to ease the arduous upstream journey of the river herring, in this locale either alewife or bluebacks. Some of the eggs will be devoured by under water creatures, and some adult fish will feed the gulls that have left the McDonald's trash barrels, opting instead to try their wings as fisherman-- proper gull behavior. Those fish that survive will reverse direction in autumn, letting the current p...

It's just another day. . . for me anyway. A state holiday, the day of the Boston Marathon, the Boston Red Sox played and beat the Angels. The tail end of a nor'easter wags like a puppy dog; the rain has stopped, the power is back on, and there's just a lot of chilly wind. There's no school, the start of vacation week, no big plans-- grocery shopping, a nap, a little writing, reading, laundry, stuff and roast a chicken. A day like any other. Then a friend posts a link to the Pulitzer Prize winners on the Internet Writing Workshop, and I click to check it out. I'm short on time, so I jump to the feature photography winner: Renee Byer. I'll start here, and check the others later. I have no expectations. I click through the black and white photos of mother and son-- I'm a mother of sons-- and am overtaken by the stark honesty, the terrible honesty, sad, bleak, no-hope-at-all honesty in the pictures of the mother whose young son is dying of cancer. I don...