Deja Vu at the Bird Sanctuary

When Jacob was around 5 or 6 years old, he and I used to spend a lot of time at a muddy pond and on the trails of a bird sanctuary adjacent to a pretty lake near his house.   We also paddled our canoe around the lake almost every weekend in search of turtles.  Now that he's 14 we spend more time doing other things, but today he asked me to take him to the bird sanctuary so he could take pictures with his new camera that he bought on eBay with earnings from a spring break job.

We stopped at the grocery to buy a picnic lunch, and I noticed that he made a bee line for our old favorite foods-- Fourth of July crackers and cheddar cheese, berries, a cookie for him.  When we got to the pond we remembered an afternoon when we were there and I loaned him my sweater because it was too chilly for him, and the sweater hung down past his knees.  Now he's a good five inches taller than I am.  Once at the pond Jacob started taking pictures and I started sketching both the birds and him.  We saw sand pipers, mallard ducks, yellow swallowtails already doing their puddling thing, and even a turtle.

After a while we moved to a new location, along the boardwalk by the lake.  I drew an astonishingly large and complex tree (and Jacob added juice from a blueberry for a bit of color-- something he used to do when we both sketched and rubbed leaves and flowers on our pages for natural colors).  Then Jacob spotted an amazing pile-up of our favorite turtles.  It looked like there were maybe ten or so turtles on a rock;  but then at one point we counted as 14 of them slid down into the lake, leaving10 or so more on what was actually a log.