When was the last time I was in Maine? I have trouble remembering. I think it was during the Pandemic, shortly after I got my Toyota Rav4, my first car in 20 years. The year was 2022, or was it late 2021? When Olivier and I drove up with Elle to visit a possible site for a singing workshop we were working on. The project did not pan out, but it was a beautiful site, right on the coast. One of those finger-like points that jut out into the ocean, creating a small bay that you drive into and out of if you take the coastal Route 1. It was a musical center, where Kareem my web-master had been staying with his family while they worked on building their new home out in the woods nearby. I am staying in Winter Harbor, in a lovely little Airbnb, sharing with Tatiana, a writer from Columbia. An offshoot of Acadia National Park is located nearby, called Schoodic Point. I plan to visit tomorrow. Today I can say is a coldest day I have felt all summer with some light rain coming and going. Not sure I will swim up here, but there is a small beach near where I will be staying near Gloucester in Rockport, that I think I will attempt a swim if the weather is still hot down there when I return next week.
So why am I up in New England? Thanks to Sika Foyer, I received a grant from the Artists for the Great Marsh to bring my Regenerative Paper Making workshop to the Gloucester area. Next week I will be teaching a two-day workshop at the Audubon Joppa Flats Education Center near Plum Island. If you know anyone in the area who is interested in Eco art, please share the following link with them so they can sign up for the class. Right now there are only at 2 participants, and we sure could use a few more. https://www.massaudubon.org/programs/joppa-flats/103953-natural-paper-making-workshop
But for now, I am happy to just be up in Maine, taking a break from this busy full summer of hosting my mother for two weeks along with my summer program at Van Cortlandt Park in this exhausting heat and torrential rains, to explore the landscape, sleep late, find some affordable steamers to eat and other fine tastes of the region. (For shame to say, I do not eat lobster. I tried it a few times, but the texture and taste just don’t agree with me) Much easier on my wallet, for sure. Where I am staying, it is a small group of condominiums that seem to have adopted a family of deer. When I first passed the deer, standing in the parking lot, it stood so still that I thought it was just a paper cutout of a deer, but then she lowered her head where I think the neighbors must have left some food for them to eat. The scene reminded me of the deer that are left to roam the city of Nara in Japan, where folks are invited to feed them crackers to eat.
Driving up here was such a joy to my eyes. Once I left the busy Massachusetts coast and headed up through New Hampshire into Maine, I was delighted to see so many more diverse native plants growing along the roadside; these included cattails, milkweed, sumac, and goldenrod. And lots less patches of phragmites and mugwort. The road felt wilder in a healthy way, more colorful, not the overwhelming green of NY state with its cascades of kudzu enveloping the trees. I was in heaven, the view brighted the last 3 hours of my journey north, I was really enjoying this stretch of interstate 95, but then I was suddenly caught off guard by an offshoot of a road, where I could see the lumberjacks clear cutting the pines and stripping them of their branches to break down into mulch, while their trunks were strapped down onto trucks and hauled off either to be broken down into lumber or paper.
Thank you for reading. It has been a while since my trip to Mexico that I have shared a travelogue; I hope you have enjoyed vicariously traveling along. Tonight I think I am going to try going to see an opera they are performing at a local art center. I heard them rehearsing last night, and it sounded pretty good. Attached are a few images to share
all my best, I am off to the opera tonight…
Michele
The attached images are of the Winter Harbor Library, the harbor, along Rt 95 and the view from the beach at Rockport in golden light before sunset.
