Happy Hay Days

The St. Marys River separates Florida from Georgia.

The city of St. Marys, Georgia, lies at the mouth of the river in Camden County about 30 miles north of our home in Jacksonville, Florida. Indian tribes occupied the area in prehistory. The French and Spanish fought over the territory in the 1560s. Then in 1663, the English claimed Georgia until the American Revolution when Georgia’s representatives signed the Declaration of Independence.

This past weekend Ginny and I had business in St. Marys, the second oldest continuously occupied city in the United States.

We found the city occupied by scarecrows.

Yes, in celebration of Happy Hay Days, a harvest festival, city residents erected scores and scores of scarecrows in the median of the main street, in front of homes and businesses.

Anybody and everybody seems to have a hand in decorating the scarecrows. Businesses, civic organizations, clubs, police, firemen, schools, and even candidates running for office constructed scarecrows with a theme related to their interests.

Here is a photo of me and a friend (in pantyhose) front of Orange Hall:

The windy day blew the purple hat off the Mad Hatter, but I replaced it:

Even the town’s churches took part in the community’s display. A scarecrow dressed in a priest’s robes greeted folks at the door of one church. Another church arranged dozens of bronze chrysanthemums around a notice saying—Worship The Lord Of The Harvest.

Ginny made friends with a lady scarecrow from a local barbershop:

Naturally, the girls discussed how the wind made for a bad hair day:

Being a history buff, I discussed how local history sites are vanishing with the Invisible Man scarecrow:

Of course no day’s outing for us would be complete without a lingering visit to a secondhand book store where I browsed among old diaries and journals in one room while Ginny looked at mysteries in a room through the arch:

With unusual and admirable restraint, we only bought two books!

We strolled along the waterfront watching fishermen, and crabbers tending their traps and shrimpers casting nets, hikers boarding the Cumberland Island ferry and Coast Guard boats patrolling the river, a three-mast schooner at anchor just offshore:

Worn out from all our walking amid 200-year-old homes, we enjoyed a magnificent lunch at a restaurant overlooking the waterfront as the end of a happy, happy day.

On that happy note, I’m shutting down this blog for a couple of weeks. My well has run dry and I need to replenish myself before I’ll have anything worth saying for a while.

Please check back now and then, or browse in my archives, if you’re interested in what I think. But for right now, I feel a time of silence is appropriate.