The House at Royal Oak by Carol Eron Rizzoli

considered the possibility that work and stress were driving us into separate, lonely worlds. What a perfect irony if we shore up this nice old house and in the process damage our relationship beyond repair.
    Often these days, I found myself walking down to the water’s edge, for a few minutes or an hour. It always helped to clarify my objectives, the consoling sight of this geological marvel that surrounds our finger of land on three sides. From the dock where I like to stand, you can see the water turn almost any shade of blue, silver, white, gray, orange, mauve, pink, or black. Depending on the weather and time of day, it changes quickly, slowly, always unpredictably. On the most ordinary of afternoons it will surprise with a showing of luminous pale green, reflecting early spring light off the maples, oaks, and willows leafing out along the shoreline.
    The largest estuary in North America, two hundred miles long, four thousand miles square, the Chesapeake Bay spans an astonishing 11,600 miles of coastline. Formed by glacial melt at the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago, the bay is the drowned valley of the mighty Susquehanna River. Long before rising seas flooded the river valley, a meteorite carved out the mouth about 35 million years ago, to the south where the estuary opens to the Atlantic Ocean.
    Much of the bay is shallow, less than thirty feet deep, and in places you can wade far out before the depth increases much over five feet. The shallowness of these warm, partly salt and partly fresh waters nurtures a magnificent ecosystem of fish, fowl, and plant life. There are hundreds of species of finfish and shellfish, thirty kinds of waterfowl alone. There are diving ducks, such as the canvasbacks and redheads, with their legs far back under their bodies to help them dive deep for food, and dabbling ducks, with their legs more centrally located for walking, such as mallards and black ducks. There are gorgeously plumed wood ducks, mergansers, Canada and snow geese, mute and tundra swans. Among the most beautiful of water birds, the great blue heron and the snowy egret inhabit the region for part or all of the year in the company of little blue herons, laughing gulls, oystercatchers, swallows, pelicans, cormorants, sandpipers, plovers, bald eagles, and ospreys.
    That splendid raptor, the osprey, also known as the seahawk or fish eagle, was once in decline. Intensive study revealed that the pesticide DDT caused the shells of osprey eggs to become fragile and easily broken, resulting in “egg failure.” Since the banning of DDT, ospreys have resurged and are more abundant now on the Chesapeake Bay than anywhere else in the world. Osprey pairs, which mate for life, return to the bay every March from the Caribbean and South America to occupy the same nest and hatch their cinnamon-brown eggs. Even with an improved environment, they have a much harder life and obstacles than we humans typically do.
    Contemplating all this, I think, should be enough to catapult anyone into a permanent state of gratitude, not to say renewed loyalty to one’s mate.
    Whenever I take time to consider it, the bay’s huge beauty and riches fill me with awe and hope. With its distinctive, extravagant flora and fauna, the bay once defined an entire culture centered on shipping, agriculture, fishing, and later crabbing and oystering, that spanned centuries. By 1900 a second culture appeared, one of recreation, and these two cultures now coexist side by side and compete with each other for diminishing resources. There are bay work boats and bay pleasure boats, bay industries and agriculture, bay tourism and development.
    Following construction in the 1950s of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, conveniently linking the Eastern Shore to the mainland, massive development got underway. Even still, stretches of bay and shoreline appear as untouched and picturesque as a century or more ago, if you know where to look.
    Along with the