First Day on the Marsh

First Day on the Marsh

Oil on canvas, 11x14

I feel like an addict who's found her drug of choice: the Great Marsh.

Essex, just up the road from where I am staying in Gloucester, MA, runs along the edge of this gigantic, gorgeous, wildly living marsh. Everywhere you turn, there is something beautiful to see.

The water snakes through the rich grasses, and the wind ruffles it in waves, and when the tide goes out, you can smell the salt and the brine and the centuries of animals and plankton and grasses that have lived and died on the marsh.

Egrets and cormorants, ducks and seagulls, crabs and snails and who knows all what gathered on the marsh, eating, swimming, darting around. And above it all, a huge sky stretches out, wide and blue and open.

A woman and her granddaughter and their poodle came and looked at my painting, and invited me to park in their driveway whenever I wanted.

The marsh is gorgeous in the fall, she said, and in the winter, it looks like it goes on forever.

In the summer, it looks like it goes on forever, too.

The World Headquarters of Jacobson Arts is in Gales Ferry, Conn.