One of the pleasures of being in midcoast Maine is visiting the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden just outside Boothbay Harbor. It’s a glorious place and in high summer is a riot of color, shapes and scents.
Maine Musings: Gardens
Category: Maine
Maine Musings: Restaurants & Reading
LAZY DAYS
Being in Maine promotes being lazy—watching the lobster boats circling to check their traps, observing the patterns of sun and shadow on the garden lilies, letting the hours slink by without any pressure. It’s also getting together with friends, shopping at the weekly farmers’ market, and exploring new venues.
This week we returned to Portland for lunch at the Blue Spoon with new Florida friends. The café is small and serves good food that is more interesting than the usual sandwiches and burgers. It’s located on Munjoy Hill in a section of the city we hadn’t previously discovered. After lunch we walked down the hill to the waterfront and strolled along the Eastern Promenade. Stately old frame houses with widows’ walks and porches line the opposite side of the promenade, several with condo for sale signs. A tempting prospect.
We also had dinner at the Newagen Inn, the place we came to stay twenty-five years ago for the first of our annual visits. The inn has changed over the years and become more elegant—the latest addition an impressive portico and re-worked entrance drive. What hasn’t changed, however, is its lovely location on the point of land known as Cape Newagen. The casual restaurant has a cozy bar area and a porch-like section with big windows perfect for admiring the view to the sea. You can also sit outdoors on a wrap around porch with umbrella tables. We all enjoyed the excellent halibut on a bed of risotto studded with sundried tomatoes and greens. The chef, a tall young woman in a ball cap, came out to chat and enthusiastically shared her plans for future menus.
BEACH READS
With the relaxed pace of these weeks comes the desire to indulge in good stories, novels that are absorbing with convincing characters and a strong narrative arc. Here are two I read this week, one definitely better than the other.
Haven Lake by Holly Robinson. This novelist is also a ghost writer and she was new to me. Set in the Berkshires in Massachusetts, this is a novel of complicated family dynamics—an estranged mother and daughter (both adults and the mother a sheep farmer), an unhappy teenager, and a surgeon fiancé who seems obsessed with his work. Add to this a mystery about two deaths that occurred twenty years ago and you have an intriguing slew of emotions. I thought the portrait of 15 year old Dylan was especially well drawn.
Silver Bay by Jojo Moyes. I like Moyes’ work and thought Me Before You was an exceptional novel due to its subject matter. I also enjoyed The Last Letter from Your Lover. This novel is one of her earliest and it shows. It isn’t as tightly constructed and, to my lights, could have used more focus and more editing. That said, it’s set in Australia at a hotel that attracts tourists who come to see the whales and the dolphins on Silver Bay. When a developer has plans to build a new hotel and retail complex, there is immediate conflict between the outside firm and the local whalesavers and environmentalists.
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Maine Musings: Food, Film & Finch
After the intensely bright hot Florida sun, mid-coast Maine’s gray skies, cool temperatures, and spotty rain showers yesterday were a relief. Portland on Friday before the cloud cover was weakly warm with enough sun to say summertime. Thanks to my cousins, we visited the iconic Portland Head Light for the first time after lunching at the Good Table in Cape Elizabeth.
Later we meandered the cobblestone streets of Portland’s Old Port browsing in familiar and new shops from the Paper Patch to Abacus to Sherman’s Books, all the while hearing in the background the screechy honk of the ever present seagulls. I know there are seagulls on other shores, but they always seem particularly present here.
PORTLAND DINING
Dining in Portland was also a taste treat! The restaurant scene has expanded, and the city has been featured in every food magazine I know. We enjoyed dinner and the ambience at Vignola one night and had a superb meal the next in the back room known as David’s Opus Ten. Plain David’s, the front of house, was crowded and noisy so we were glad we had opted for the small back space with its short menu of small plates. Especially noteworthy were the butter poached lobster on a crispy risotto cake, the tuna tartare, and the Serrano ham and manchego cheese plate with mellow warm black olives.
AT THE MOVIES
Earlier in the week, we went to see “Testament of Youth.” This new film, based on Vera Brittain’s 1933 memoir of the same name, is a grim and unvarnished depiction of the horrors of war, in this case WWI. Some of you may recall that Masterpiece Theater did an adaptation of this work some years ago.
The film draws a stark contrast between the exuberance of youth and young love in the green English countryside and at university before the war, followed by the dirty gray and brown of death and destruction on the battlefield in France. Brittain left university to sign on as a volunteer nurse. This was a romantic, idealistic time and I don’t believe as many youths today see war as quite the adventure these men did.
WHAT I’M READING
Of course, I had to read Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman. I read To Kill a Mockingbird in high school (haven’t re-read it, I regret to report) and saw the film so for me Gregory Peck will forever be Atticus Finch. That said, Watchman is a worthwhile read. The writing is enjoyable, there are some touches of humor,and one gets a different picture of Maycomb, Alabama. I found it to be a coming of age story for Jean Louise (aka Scout). At 26, one might say she is a bit old, after having lived in New York for seven years, to become disillusioned with her father, but so be it. Other than that, she is quite believable and carries the book. Henry, her putative fiancé, is a bit flat. Calpurnia, their servant, is a warm and sympathetic character while her uncle Jack, an eccentric doctor, provides counterpoint to her father. Atticus is here, but is no longer the perfect man and perhaps as a segregationist more realistic for the times.
Note that there are no photos this time due to a less reliable Wifi signal which I hope gets better!
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Boat Trip on the Sheepscot River
I’m not a water person, not really. But I do like to look at the water and prefer a house with a water view. And I go on boats, but quite selectively–on calm waters, with certain friends, not too long in duration, and you get the general idea. Given all of that, I can wholeheartedly recommend the one hour boat trip on the Sheepscot River which leaves from the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden in Boothbay. First you have to pay to get into the gardens (or be a member–well worth it and that’s a whole other story!) and then you leave from the new boat dock at the end of the Shoreline Trail.
The boat has an electric motor, seats seven plus the captain and has a canopy which provided some protection from the sun. Sean Griffith, the captain, is a relaxed and very knowledgeable man who obviously enjoys what he does. We went out in the afternoon about midway between low and high tides (he thinks low tide is better) and cruised by Sawyer Island, Pratt’s Island and several others on the Sheepscot River which flows up to Wiscasset about 5 miles away by water. Since the motor is quiet, the captain can speak in a normal tone of voice. He even cut the motor completely and we just idled every so often.
There were quite a number of seals bobbing their heads up, and we saw a couple of osprey nests, one with two fledglings on it.
These waters are some of the richest in the state for lobsters and besides the colorful lobster buoys, we cruised past the equivalent of a parking lot or garage for empty lobster traps. A good catch is 500 pounds of lobster a day, a very good and more typical haul for Boothbay lobstermen is 1,000 pounds per day.
There was almost no other boat traffic and so the whole experience was peaceful. Cost of this excursion is $25 per person and well worth it!
