Today is the 20th anniversary of 9/11. There’s a lot to reflect on, and people to remember. My heart goes out to those that have personal losses from that event and it’s far-reaching consequences. Like almost all of us who are old enough, I remember where I was when I first heard of the attacks—I had just crossed our town line on the way back from dropping off Sam at his preschool. I got home and was checking in with Tom at his dad’s wharf, where he and a few lobstermen were gathered around a little TV. We were all watching during those surreal moments as the Twin Towers collapsed. I was soon on my way back to pick up Sam.
So this seemed like a good week for our annual summertime post, a diversion from thinking of the heavy stuff to a scenic tour and reflections on our little part of the world. And if you do dive into the post, grab an extra cuppa for the trip. At the very least, skip to the end for three of Tom’s summer kayaking videos, they’re not very long, but really good—you’ll gently float away on them.
Bon Voyage,
—Susan and Tom
Summertime in Harpswell, Maine
Regardless the time of year, most work-at-home mornings begin with a dog-walk, a half mile down to the shore—to Lookout Point—but in the summertime, we tend to linger a bit longer. There, you can look south (left) down Casco Bay, where it will merge with the open ocean within a few miles. The point juts out enough to also look north (right) up bay, directly into quiet little Northeast Cove, and about a 5 mile paddle to the head of the bay in Brunswick, Maine.
On the south side of the point is Allen’s Seafood, the lobster wharf built by Tom’s grandfather, and the spot where we first met 36 years ago this summer.
The two little islands that you could walk to at low tide, are named Joe and George, after the local boat-builder’s sons back in the mid 1800s. Where the road ends as a boat launch, is our favorite place to pause and take things in before the day really begins. On the hotter days of summer, our dogs and I especially enjoy the cool water. Felix goes for a little wade/swim but Kali prefers to only getting her dainty little paws wet as she anxiously waits for me to toss her water drops for her to catch, it’s her thing. Sometimes, she’ll get as wet as Felix does anyway.
My favorite thing is to scan the beach for what the tide has brought in, picking up any plastic flotsam, but finding little treasures as well. For a span of a couple weeks, it must have been prime shedding-time for horse-shoe crabs, ’cause I’d find two to four carapaces a day tucked into the seaweed. A new revelation for me this year was that horseshoe crabs shed their shells as they grow, like lobsters do. I’d never really thought about it before, even though I’ve always loved their prehistoric look and history. Yes, I bring them home and save them.
When the tide is out far enough, Felix and I sometimes wade into starfish territory, The one below was as big as my open hand. After a couple photo-ops, I tucked him back into his home in the bay.
Kayaking with Tom
For the last few years our family’s official start of summer, and lately Father’s Day, has been to join Tom on a kayaking excursion. Circumnavigating Birch Island, a mile across the bay from the Lookout Point launch, has been the choice the last couple years. It’s about a 5 miles tour and we’ll spend somewhere around three hours on the water—something that Tom by himself would do in half that time—but our pace leisurely enough for me to take plenty of photos.
This year, we made a couple stops, one on each end of the Birch Island, for leg-stretches with short trails to wander and a sheltered coves for rock-skipping.
Sometimes I suspect that Sam likes these kayaking jaunts so he can stretch his legs on top of the kayak—definitely an unconventional way to paddle.
A few weeks after the paddle with Sam, Tom and I went to Whaleboat Island (below) for a 6 mile jaunt. Whaleboat is locally known for it’s open meadow and mounds of beach roses, which was a big part of my desire to get out there, aside from the stark beauty of the coast. Another day well spent.
Sunsets
We don’t have much of a western view from our house, but from the shore, the sunset can be stunning. The following photos are all from the span of one week this summer at the very end of June and the beginning of July. I understand that much of the color and beauty we saw in our skies was caused by drifting smoke from the devastating wildfires out west. Some of the photos I sharpened to lessen sun glare or to bring out the shadows—but the last one, I didn’t adjust at all.
July Fourth
Concerning the Fourth of July, they are a couple Maine sayings that I’m aware of—first, that the day lilies will bloom by the Fourth (which they did), and second, that here in Maine our four seasons are autumn, winter, spring, and the Fourth of July. In other words, our summer is very short.
This year it felt that summer may have passed us by with a cool and rainy holiday weekend. But it was also the weekend of a social event the likes of which we hadn’t even thought of attending for a year and a half—you know what I mean—1970’s disco, with Motor Booty Affair. By “we,” I mean my sister Heidi, myself, and our guys, Clayt and Tom, who had to be coerced with beers. Even then it was Heidi and I who danced away. And it was amazingly cathartic.
The concert was outside under a big open-sided tent, limited ticket sales, we’re all vaccinated and live in a highly vaccinated part of Maine. It felt safe and freeing after holding back for so long.
What came back to me was the last time I was out dancing with abandon—at the Gala Dinner for AQC, the big quilting conference in Melbourne, Australia—April of 2019. Tom was with me on that trip and those quilters have something to teach the world about letting go and having fun. Until this summer’s concert with Motor Booty, I’d never experienced a crowd that leapt to their feet the moment the band started playing. Good on ya, ladies—you taught me to dance like no one’s looking, and besides, no one cares what you look like anyway. At least that’s what I told myself as I found myself belting out Dancing Queen and spinning around with my sister.
And fireworks in the rain? They can be magical.
Gardening?
In past years’ summertime posts, I’ve mentioned my garden. I do enjoy getting outside and puttering, but I think that maybe I’ve just cleared areas for other plants to take over. And maybe that’s okay. An area where I planted some snap peas got quickly overrun with stinging nettle. I had let the nettle get a hold in a pathway last year because, well, stinging nettle is an edible crop—I got some at the farmer’s market once, and I liked it. So I let it grow this year as well and now have a healthy patch of it, though the snap peas were swallowed up in the growth. I just have to take the time to look up again how to prepare the nettle and I’ll be all set.
I did plant four cherry tomato plants that are thriving in a bed that I can still access, and one or two paste tomato plants appeared in the compost bed and are now ready to harvest. I found them behind the jewel weed (good as a salve for poison ivy with flowers that are appreciated by hummingbirds).
Garlic planted years ago has been holding its own as a perennial provider of garlic scapes, below. In the garden they looked a bit like a beaked creature poking out from a milkweed and aster forest. Cut, it’s a scape bouquet waiting to be turned into pesto.
My mom, bless her sweet soul, walked down from her house next door to see my “garden.” As she looked from the milkweed to the goldenrod to the soon-to-bloom asters (all for my butterflies), she remarked (with no sarcasm) how beautiful it all was. She especially liked the seven foot tall thistle that was just beginning to show it’s fluffy purple tufts.
The two thistles I let grow in (former) garden paths, plus the wild evening primrose that came up with the nettles, are already attracting the notice of goldfinches and migrating warblers. I think you can see the direction my garden is going—to the birds and the bees.
I did manage to hang on to the cleared and mulched area under our small peach tree (below), and was rewarded by easy access to this year’s peach bounty. The green peaches you see are the ones Tom had to cull from the branches in order to give the others space to grow and not weigh down and break the branches in the process. Even after “sharing” the ripe fruit with birds, bees, squirrels, and possibly a porcupine, I weighed out more than 30 pounds of peaches! My mom looked forward to her daily supply and I made a couple yummy peach BBQ sauces among other recipes.
The garden excitement of the season was the evening I (unintentionally) dumped kitchen scraps onto a skunk in the compost barrel. It wasn’t until I was scattering some lawn clippings onto the fresh scraps that I noticed my hand was inches away from some black and white fur. Once my brain registered “skunk,” I didn’t stop running until I was back in the house. Luckily the skunk didn’t have time to register any sort of threat from me.
Since it was getting too dark to maneuver around a skunk, he had to hang out where he was until morning. He was pretty cute, and I freed him by tipping the barrel. I say “I,” because Tom was all the while standing at a safe distance with video camera in hand and keeping me updated as to what the skunk was up to. I hit a snag when a sheet of compost kinda tipped over on the skunk as I tipped the barrel, but a little careful rolling of the barrel readjusted the food scraps so he could calmly walk out on his own, and into the tall field grass.
So this year, my garden is supporting the critters, while I support the local farmer’s market. Below, is the impressive interior of a beautiful head of romaine lettuce from one of the vendors. Doesn’t it look like the torch flame of the Statue of Liberty?
I get help shucking ears of corn that I bring home from the market—from Felix and Kali. See my helpers in action below.
And then there’s the Monarch butterflies. I raise them, though much, much fewer this year than the last couple years. I was afraid for awhile that they wouldn’t show up on their migratory path at all. But at least at this moment, I have 35 Monarchs either going through their caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly transformation, or have already flown away. Two years ago it was 230, last year only 80 or so.
Previously in blog posts, I’ve reported extensively about my part-time summer job of raising these guys, so check out my Summer 2019 and Summer 2020 posts for more information.
As a short refresher, Monarch caterpillars eat only milkweed leaves. I long ago talked Tom into mowing around any milkweed that comes up in the lawn, and I don’t pull it from my gardens—which is why now Tom has much less grass to mow, I have less garden to tend to, and the caterpillars have food to devour. Works for all of us, actually.
In the photo above is a caterpillar which is looking big and healthy enough to soon go into its chrysalis stage. The lovely green hanging droplet you see below is a chrysalis. At the bottom right corner of the photo below, is an empty chrysalis casing that a butterfly has emerged from.
The butterfly in the photo above is a male, note the block spots on its lower wings. the butterfly below is a female, no spots.
I have this screened and zippered butterfly enclosure on my little studio porch, so I pass by it often and offer encouragement to the little guys for the utterly amazing metamorphosis they go through.
Below, I had only a couple hours to visit with my high-school friend from Maryland, Kathryn, but the timing was such for her to release a recently emerged fellow. Kathryn now lives in North Carolina, but was the person who got me to Maine and introduced me to Tom 36 years ago. But that’s another story. The other butterflies are just a few of this year’s generation.
Out and About in Maine
Well folks, if you’re still with me and reading this post, more power to you. It’s admittedly longer than I had originally intended, but now I’ve run out of time to start over, so I just have to finish this summer journal that I started!
Old Orchard Beach
OOB is only a little over an hour’s drive down the coast, and a summer home of my friend Darlene—she’s the one I featured in a recent TBT Fabric Collage Finish Line post. Over the years, she and her husband Len, have become family friends and we try to get in at least one summer visit to their family beach cottage every year—not a tough thing to take. We didn’t go last year, but Heidi and I got away for a couple nights this August. The pups in the slide show below, are Sophie and her beach-buddy Ginger.
After getting up early for the sunrise and walking a mile down the beach for a cuppa at a coffee shop, we may have been a little tipsy on fresh air and coffee when Heidi got the idea for the video below. This tourist town was not nearly as crowded as in other years so we had room to play, and in doing so, thoroughly amused a couple sitting on a nearby bench watching our many “takes.”
It wasn’t all sand, strange looks, and twirling down the streets, Heidi had a surprise project to finish for Clayt—corn-hole boards—a.k.a. bean-bag toss, Maine style. I helped draw the lobsters, Heidi painted, Darlene brewed more coffee, and we all chatted away.
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Monhegan Island
Monhegan is an island off the coast of Maine, best known as an artist’s colony back in the 1900’s and home to painter Andrew Wyeth. For 30 years, Tom’s mom spent a week on the island every summer with her painting friends. That ended a few years ago, but she still occasionally visits to deliver her paintings to a gallery there.
For years, Tom and I have talked about taking the ferry out and spending a day with her showing us and Sam the island. This year was it, with Tom’s cousin Larry, joining the crowd. The day was foggy all around—and made for a feeling of isolation both on the ferry and on the island. From the vantage point of the island’s lighthouse (below), the village of Monhegan looked a bit like Brigadoon with fog drifting in and around. Above is topographical study of Monhegan that I saw in the Lighthouse Museum.
You get only a few hours on the island between ferries to and from Monhegan, so we kinda split up to explore the island at our own paces, after getting pointers and tips from Tom’s mom. She really wanted to stay in the center of town for garden photos to paint from, the rest of us hit the many trails going around and across the island.
For a couple of the trails, Sam and I were walking together. We rounded a corner to see a big mound of rock between us and the ocean. Apparently, it needed to be climbed by Sam. That’s him, the trunk-like shape on top of the rock face, below.
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Bethel and Grafton Notch State Park
A couple weeks ago, we were offered a stay at a friend’s time share a couple hours north of us in the small town of Bethel. It was an unplanned overnight, but our neighbor could watch the pets and we made it happen with a short turn-around time. None of us had been to that area of Maine before, better known for skiing, but also we found out, for river tubing.
We ended up choosing a morning kayak option for our 10 mile river trip downstream. We were dropped off at a bridge upstream and told that when we get to the next bridge over the river, we’d be back to the outfitters. We basically had the river to ourselves.
Kayaking on a river is so much different from the ocean. It took a little to adjust to the fact that you were always being carried by the current, sometimes faster than you expected. But then that was fun too ’cause you could basically put your feet up and relax, letting the river do the work for you. Tom had to find ways to challenge himself at least a little, and sometimes entertained himself by paddling downstream backwards.
Around the half-way point we came across a nice little sandbar to beach the kayaks, walk around, and have a snack.
We took our time getting back, somewhere around three to four hours—river kayaking was something new to try, and that’s always good.
Next stop was Grafton Notch State Park, just a few miles north of Bethel. We didn’t have all that much time left in the afternoon before we needed to head home, so we stopped at a couple of the recommended turnouts, just inside the park entrance.
Screw Auger Falls is very interesting in its rock formations, and we climbed from top to bottom for different views.
Then we were back on the road for the short trail to Moose Cave and the Moss Garden.
Labor Day
Summertime in Maine this year passed quickly, as everything seems to do these days, but it was good. There was beautiful scenery and a few new things to see, time with family and friends, tasty local food, dancing, and butterflies.
I’m going to end my photo journal with the Labor Day Tea I put together for my mom, Heidi, and my niece Maia. My mom had begged out of the family BBQ the evening before, so I put together some leftovers in a way I thought she’d especially enjoy—finger sandwiches on thinly sliced schwartz Brot (black rye bread) with combinations of hummus, goat cheese, and pesto, topped with my peach BBQ sauce—served on china.
And she did enjoy the afternoon with her girls. Cheers.
Next week
I’ll have a new “Earthshine” installment—I’m almost ready to call it good on Sam’s moon portrait and prepare it for quilting. Plus, my mom has been busy turning out her fabric pumpkins for the one-year anniversary of Oma’s Pumpkin Patch. The first of the fall harvest is already listed in her Etsy store, but there’s lots more to be added for next week’s release.
From Tom
The year 2021 was a mixed bag as we all know. But it was another good year for sea kayaking. My first paddle of 2021 was a New Year’s Day pre-dawn paddle in Portland, Maine. At the end of August my (imaginary) kayak odometer ticked over 500 miles. Last year I passed 500 in mid-November, so I’m ahead of schedule.
My biggest adventure this year (so far) was a day trip from Portland (Susan dropped off me and my kayak) back to my “home port” of Lookout Point, a half mile down the road. This was a trip I’d been looking forward to for a while, but it was made even more memorable by a side trip to Halfway Rock, a lighthouse about 3 miles from the nearest island. All told we covered 25 miles.
For me kayaking and shooting video are inextricable. I almost never paddle without my GoPro. I’ve installed camera mounts in my kayaks so I have my hands free. I love to edit the video I collect: it doesn’t really feel like I’ve gone paddling until I put the footage together. Lately I’ve been incorporating music into my videos. My go-to composer is from Australia, Scott Buckley (scottbuckley.com.au), who always seems to have a new composition out that fits the mood of my edited piece. Also, having to edit my footage to fit the length of the music is a good way to keep the video from getting too long!
I enjoy kayaking for many reasons: for the companionship of my fellow paddlers, for the exercise, for the natural beauty, and the connection to nature. Here’s a video that celebrates nature. Be sure to watch it in as high a resolution as possible (click the “settings” button in lower right).
Wow I have never seen garlic grow and I love the dog corn huskers what a beautiful place you live in thanks for the great pictures.
I absolutely loved the pictures and videos. How can you not feel at peace. Beautiful.
Thank you.
Inspirational! Thank you both.
We raise Monarchs too and love watching the process. This past spring we released over 50… our first season! We did not know how to tell the difference between male and female though. Thanks for sharing your knowledge!
I visited Maine for the first time this summer. What a beautiful place you live in! Thanks for the wonderful pictures to remind me that I need to go back soon.
Enjoy all your videos. Would love to live near the coast & find the horseshoe carapaces!!! Thanks for sharing.
You certainly live a charmed life, what a fun trip to follow you through summer adventures on the other coastal tip. Thank you for sharing this amazing part of the world Tom, our kayaking adventures pale in comparison.
Happy Fall Adventures!
I read and watched everything. What a lovely way to begin a day. Thank you, both!!!
I read all your post and enjoyed it tremendously. I’ve never been to Maine, but always wanted to visit. My husband and I are kayakers also, but on the Pacific, California and Oregon lakes and rivers. It’s a wonderful sport!
Maine in the summertime. There is nowhere on earth I’d rather be. Thanks for sharing. <3