Summer in Maine

Summer in Maine is brief. Despite what the calendar says, summer pretty much starts on July 4 and is over on Labor Day. Because of its brevity, I schedule my teaching so I can be home during this fleeting season.

Maine calls itself Vacationland, and I certainly plan to squeeze some vacation time into the next couple months, along with a variety of other activities that can only happen once the tundra thaws and the caribou have migrated north and … just kidding.

Every so often, a student will ask me, “what do you do for fun?” So let me tell you—family, pets, walks, beach-combing, gardening, kayaking, embellishing things (think shabby chic), reading, trying out new recipes—these are all things that draw my attention during time off.

Family

Summer is a great time to gather the family for special events. Last month my sister and I took our father to a local ocean overlook, the Giant’s Stairs, to celebrate Father’s Day.

We weren’t the only ones enjoying the vista that day in June—and there’s many more tourists here now that it’s full-summer. But Maine is a big state and there’s plenty of empty space to share, though summer weekend traffic is the closest thing to rush hour gridlock that we experience. So my husband Tom and I tend to stay close to home in the summer, which we’re lucky to say, is not a hardship.

Walks

A twenty minute walk from our front door and back, takes us to Lookout Point (below)—where the road ends in the bay as a local boat launch. It’s one of the most photographed and painted locations along the mid-coast. A sunset scene made it onto the cover—and September spread—of the 2017 Down East Magazine’s wall calendar.

Tom’s grandfather built the lobster wharf nestled in the cove, and it’s where Tom and I met 32 years ago—as of tomorrow—the day after this posts!

Pets

Our dogs, Kali and Felix, love summer, of course. Felix, the brown and black dog, likes to wade in the ocean. For the life of him he can’t figure out why there’s so much water and none of it’s good to drink.

My cat, Djinni, is an indoor studio cat, doing her best to help me with my projects, so she doesn’t usually care what season it is outside.

However, since this spring we have had a feral cat hanging around, nicknamed Cookie, which absolutely drives Djinni wild. Lately I’ve had to do my bull-fighter impression of waving a blanket in front of me as I back out the studio door, she wants to dart out and drive that invader away so bad.

[Cat update for 2018—Cookie was lured by food to my parent’s house next door. By the end of the summer he was lounging on their living room carpet. He is mostly an indoor cat now and loves to have his tummy scratched. And he no longer taunts my Djinni cat.]

Gardening

I have varied success in my gardening. I grow a few vegetables. I have some perennials. For a blast of color I fill window boxes with annuals.

I also like to encourage certain beneficial weeds—much to my husband’s annoyance, and to the crowding out of my garden space. Yep, that’s my “vegetable garden” below. I’ve given half of the original space over to milkweed and other pollinator-loving plants—I feel the bees and butterflies need all the help they can get these days.

I do try to keep the rest of the garden open for our use, but had only enough time earlier in the season to rescue one of my square plots for some golden cherry tomato, bell pepper, and basil plants. Thank goodness for farmer’s markets to pick up the slack!

Once Monarch butterflies arrive on their migratory path, I no longer pull the milkweed from my part of the garden either. Milkweed is the only plant they lay their eggs on and the only food source for the hatched and growing caterpillars. Last year I successfully nurtured 24 out of 26 Monarchs from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly. It’s estimated that only one in 10 make it to adulthood in the wild, so I feel like I’m helping an endangered species.

[Butterfly update: by the end of Summer 2017 we ended up raising and releasing 80 butterflies out of 86 caterpillars found!]

However, this year Tom did give up on “our” vegetable garden and is growing “his own” tomatoes, various varieties of jalapeño peppers, and red onions. He has them planted in 55 gallon barrels that used to hold lobster bait! He calls them his Salsa Gardens, because that’s what he plans to make from the harvest.

Kayaking

Tom is a registered Maine kayak guide, which keeps him in and out of the house at irregular times for most of July and August—another reason for me to be home-based this time of year. He leads groups on day tours and sometimes on multi-day camping trips from H2Outfitters here in Harpswell.

I feel like I’m in pretty good hands whenever we go out for a paddle. The bays around Harpswell are beautiful, fairly secluded, and full of wildlife like seals and sea birds. Hopefully we’ll have a chance to kayak camp out on one of Maine’s many islands with our son, Sam (now a college junior), at some point this summer.

You can read about last year’s Shelter Island adventure in this post from August 2016.

Reading

While out on an island maybe I’ll make a dent in the new series of books I’ve recently gotten pulled into—the Stephanie Plum Series—mysteries by Janet Evanovich. They have everything you need for a good summer read—suspense, colorful characters, violence, a plucky heroine, and a little bit of sexy. (Even Tom is reading them and he’s a book snob!)

While not exactly reading per se, I’ve also been pulled into the Creative Strength Training Prompt Cards (below) by Jane Dunnewold. Jane is a fiber arts instructor I met while teaching at Art Quilt Tahoe last November 2016. There, I picked up the oversized deck and started playing with them soon after, until the end of last year.

I haven’t even had the chance to look at them between then and now, and after all the teaching I’ve been doing in the meantime, it’s feeling like a good way to get my own creative juices flowing again.

Each card gives either action or writing prompts and suggests exercises that got me working with media that I hadn’t picked up in years. These cards aren’t about a finished project—I just took an hour a day working quickly in a sketch book—it’s about stretching your brain. The cards took me out of my fabric collage box, and in turn, I found myself thinking more creatively in both my work and everyday life. Thanks Jane!

And let’s not forget…

Of course, gotta keep my art business going too! There’s still these weekly blog posts that I know you guys look forward to—and I don’t want to disappoint.

Plus, the online course that I have promised. I’ve now defined what I need to do, and am taking steps toward completing that goal.

Plus, I have a new quilt idea for myself in mind….

Whew! I don’t know about you, but I’m a bit exhausted thinking about (just some of!) my summer plans. I think a siesta with a purring cat sounds like a good idea right now.

[2018 update: done, done, and done (though working to finish the new quilt this summer)—stay tuned!]

But before I go, I had another one of my ideas that has Tom literally knocking his head onto his desk—another time-lapse experiment (since a few of you commented that you liked them the last couple weeks). This one is more for me than you. You see, I entertain myself on flights by taking photos out the plane window of cloud formations or ground patterns and features. One time it was 300 cloud photos—the beauty, and excessiveness, of digital photography. Though Tom may have banged his head then too, those were exceptional clouds that particular flight, since usually I take many fewer photos.

For this week’s movie I compiled all the cloud, aerial, and on-the-tarmac photos from my teaching travels so far this year into one 4 minute/50 second movie. I worried about potential bruising on Tom’s forehead when I mentioned musical accompaniment—but a little piano jazz sounded appropriate. Since, after 32 years, he knows better than to dissuade me, he humored me instead, chalking the following cinematic selection up to time-lapse movie making experience.

Though I got a kick out of seeing the photos strung together, please refrain from viewing if you too wish to hit your head upon any hard surface.

In-Flight Entertainment: January—July 2017