(Continued.)

It's now 11 years since my mom passed (2025).

A toy Diana camera that worked was placed in my hands as a very young child; started a life of images. My mother did that–and most importantly, she got the photographs developed. What was the focus? Draft horses in the Durham fairgrounds arena (now gone), taken through the white board fence. My mother took photographs, all the time, everywhere; many remain undeveloped.

Front view of a Diana camera by Jim Newberry Photography (Jimtron). This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license. Linked to Wikipedia page for more about this amazing device/camera.

My father was a curious man. He always said there were acres of trackways near the famous Rocky Hill site and he was right. A 2013 excavation found many more during excavations for work to construct a new state building. And in the Connecticut River Valley, once you start looking, dinosaur footprints show up everywhere. I'm talking about trackways, fossil mudcracks, scribbles of multi-legged critters in long ago mud flats now hardened to stone and weathered by time. “Most people walk past them” said a librarian at Portland Public Library, a river town that is home of the famous brownstone quarries that have yielded not only tons of building stone for town structures and New York city and Wesleyan University, but also beautifully preserved footprints and trackways.

Chunks of stone in yards yield interesting impressions someone thought worth saving. If you wander near the old quarries, the stones in walls often hold traces and tracks – especially clear when the natural light in the late afternoon illuminates them.

Time travel to when dinosaurs walked along muddy lake beds is possible. Imagination can animate a scenario of vast mud flats with strange animals walking along – at least in my mind's eye.

Note: A story of Baileyville and the Lake Beseck dam is linked here.

We shared a passion for explorations and a fascination with dinosaur tracks and natural history (he didn't call it that though). My mother was always game to “go for a ride” in our station wagon or send some of us along with dad. A favorite destination was a little-known (at the time) former quarry on Powder Hill Road where tracks (then outlined in paint) were visible.
At Hubbard Park in Meriden, we'd stop to examine slabs of rocks with bird-like tracks, then stretch our legs and run around. A family visit to the Peabody Museum in New Haven was a rare treat indeed; for me, it was like visiting a true magic kingdom. There were expeditions to the world-famous Strickland Quarry. (More about that in a story linked here).

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