Last Beach Day of 2011

It was 80 degrees on October 9 in Ipswich, Massachusetts.

Nice old place; supposedly more 17th century houses than any other town in the US. There used to be textile mills on the Ipswich River, there are still some farms and Ipswich shellfish are locally famous.

The beach is more than an hour's walk from the train station and it goes through salt marsh. (I included a painting by Martin Johnson Heade who specialized in this kind of landscape for a time, but I think his painting is from Newburyport or Essex, neighboring towns.)

Crane Beach is about five miles long and backed by sand dunes. It has been a crazily mild fall...