Southport Summer
Scenes from our wonderful summer!
Fun to have friends visit
Note: All photos ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved)
Maine Highlights: Summer 2022
Southport Summer
Category: Maine
Southport Summer
A Maine Week: Granddaughter Fun & Books
FUN WITH GRANDDAUGHTERS
Eating at Home
Coming to Maine is a summer tradition for our granddaughters, and they eagerly anticipate the visit. This year was no exception. Certain activities are a given for the week. One is making blueberry pancakes with Grandma. Each year, they are more adept in the kitchen, and my role is now more that of an advisor. The pancakes this year were especially delicious!
A newer tradition is one dinner of clams with linguini; chef for that is our son with the clams from a local purveyor. Note, these girls also love oysters so their dad got some local ones and shucked them himself.
Out and About
Also on the agenda is a visit to Boothbay Railway Village. There is a schoolhouse and a house and other 19thcentury buildings to explore, plus the train ride around the village loop, and, of course, some time looking at the extensive model railroad exhibit. At ages 6 and 10, they still loved it.
In past years, they played miniature golf with their dad. This time, the Chief Penguin and I joined them. Dolphin Mini Golf was created thirty-odd years ago and is a fun course to play. Each hole is somehow sea-related with one shaped like a dolphin and another a whale. An ice cream hut and a small shell museum round out the offerings. The donated shell collections include shells from around the world as well as from this region.
Then there’s the annual wander through Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens stopping to play the metal drums and pipes, sitting and rowing in the canoe, and bouncing on the string bridge. We spent the most time (probably an hour total of our couple hours) in the Fairy House Village. The girls were creative and exercised their imaginations, each building a house of sticks, leaves, stones, shells, and woodland materials.
Readers All!
Both E and F, are now avid readers—such a joy to see! F is immersed in the Ivy and Bean books, while older sister E is a fan of historical novels and fantasy and is currently finishing up Chris Colfer’s Land of Stories series. I had borrowed a stack of books from the little library here and brought with me a few books for them. In addition, we all enjoyed browsing and buying at Sherman’s in Boothbay Harbor.
Other hits were a book of Little Women paper dolls, a Lego Friends set, and swimming in the cove.
We ate several meals out including two dinners at Cozy’s Dockside where the girls enthusiastically ordered cones from the ice cream treats menu.
MAINE BOOK OF THE WEEK
Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark
This is a leisurely novel about two octogenarian women, lifelong friends. It’s meant to be savored and read slowly. Polly and Agnes are women of an earlier generation, and the book takes place from 2000 to 2008. Societal expectations for women then related mostly to marriage and children. Polly Wister, is the traditional woman, married to Dick, a Penn philosophy professor, and a mother of four sons. Her friend Alice Lee is single, author of a series of children’s books that made her reputation, but secretly also the author of adult novels written under a nom de plume.
These friends winter in Haverford and Philadelphia but spend summers on the Maine coast in a family compound dating back more than 100 years founded by Alice’s great grandfather. Alice wants to preserve the open land beyond the homes as a bird sanctuary. Other owners and sons want to develop the land.
Over the years, there are secrets and conflicts, marital tension, and issues over how much one likes or doesn’t like how one’s offspring have turned out. This all plus an unjust accusation against a neighbor of the so-called “servant class” churn beneath the surface and sometimes erupt.
Add into this mix Quaker values, old money, an unrequited love, and a new friendship, and you have the ebb and flow of the enduring relationship between Alice and Polly. They are very different people and yet they share almost everything, emphasis on almost.
Both for the wonderful writing and its thoughtful exploration of the meaning of life and what kind of legacy we leave behind, it’s one of the best books I’ve read this year! (~JWFarrington)
Note: All photos ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved). Header photo taken at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens.
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Exploring Maine: Brunswick
ART AND EATING IN BRUNSWICK
For years, we’ve driven Route 1 on the outskirts of Brunswick past strip malls, fast food restaurants, and auto repair shops. We had never ventured any farther into downtown Brunswick. This week we did and discovered that Maine Street (it’s really named that) is quite charming with several blocks of shops, a wide variety of restaurants and cafes, and even a couple of bookstores. Just beyond a lovely park is the beginning of the Bowdoin College campus.
Bowdoin is an old liberal arts institution, chartered in 1794, and has produced an illustrious group of alumni. Among them are generals, statesmen, explorers, and the writers, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The campus stretches along one side of the street opposite attractive old style frame houses. It has an extensive expanse of green and a mix of a few contemporary buildings interspersed among more classic red brick architecture.
The Chief Penguin and I walked the half mile from where we parked the car to our destination, the Bowdoin Museum of Art. The art department has a grand old building listed on the National Historic Register. Next to it is a glass cube, the entrance to the museum itself.
Among the featured exhibitions, we paid the most attention to At First Light: Two Centuries of Artists in Maine. This is a marvelous exhibit filling several small galleries with paintings, a quilt, and a Wabanaki basket. Artists include George Bellows, Alex Katz, Lois Dodd, N. C. and Jamie Wyeth, along with others I hadn’t previously encountered. Here are a couple of my favorite works.
After the museum, we met my Scarborough cousin and his wife for lunch at one of the two Indian restaurants on the main drag. Shere Punjab, a small colorfully painted family-run business, offered up delicious curries and naan. Collectively, we sampled the chicken and lamb curries and the fish curry. Fluffy basmati rice was served with them. It was so good we all vowed to eat there again!
MAINE BOOK FOR THE WEEK—A SUMMER COLONY
Haven Point by Virginia Hume
Haven Point is a first novel by a former political writer and editor. It’s the kind of book you curl up with, and before you know it, the whole afternoon has whizzed by! The families with summer homes at Haven Point believe in its traditions, one being the annual singalong. It’s a colony established by upper-class sorts, all with the right educational and professional pedigrees.
Maren marries into the world of Haven Point when Dr. Oliver Larsen becomes her husband. She grew up on a farm in Minnesota and was a nurse with Oliver at Walter Reed Hospital in DC near the end of WWII. She feels like an outsider during much of her life in Maine.
Their daughter Annie is a talented artist, but battles alcoholism for many years. Annie’s daughter, Maren’s granddaughter Skye, is secretive and ashamed of her mother’s relapses. She also feels that Haven Point, with its Waspy whiteness is too insular a society. Love, tragedy, betrayal, and addiction run through this novel set between 1944 and 2008 told in multiple voices. I quickly became enmeshed in these characters’ lives and the hours disappeared. (~JWFarrington)
Note: Header photo is Summer by Frank Weston Benson, 1909. Photos ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved.)
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Maine Writers Today
COMETH FALL
The past few days have been breezy and cool with some sun. The light is different, the air is clearer and drier. Fall is sneaking up on us. Masses of goldenrod line the roadway and here and there a lone red maple leaf lies in the dirt. I see only tall pines when I look around, but surely a maple tree hides somewhere about.
The coming of fall for me always prompted a return to focused work. I liked the sense of buckling down, tackling new projects, and turning more inward. Autumn in the Northeast encourages this. In a week, I’ll be back in Florida where sunny warm days invite one to linger outside, to defer serious pursuits. Florida’s fall doesn’t ever arrive until November. I miss the pronounced change of seasons.
MAINE AUTHORS
Part 1: Contemporary Writers
One of my regular readers reminded me that novelist Richard Russo lives in Maine in the Boothbay region and encouraged me to mention this in a blog post. Russo won a Pulitzer for Empire Falls, which is probably his best-known work. I’ve not read that one, but have read his first novel, Mohawk, and highly recommend Bridge of Sighs, published in 2007. A 60-year-old man who’s lived all his life in a small-town, travels to Italy, partly to visit a childhood friend who escaped to the wider world. It’s an expansive, totally engaging book as Charles Lacy and his wife embark on an odyssey of adventure and reflection. Much of Russo’s writing is semi-autobiographical in nature.
Stephen King is undoubtedly Maine’s most famous and probably most read author. He lives in Bangor, but spends winters in Sarasota, Florida. Consequently, his book signings and appearances are regularly announced in my local newspaper. I am not a fan of either horror or supernatural novels and admit to never having read him. Author of 53 novels, with his best seller being The Shining from 1977, each new book is greeted with long lines of eager purchasers.
Without a doubt, my favorite contemporary Maine author is another Pulitzer Prize winner, Elizabeth Strout. I have read many of her novels from the first one, Amy and Isabelle about a mother’s fraught relationship with her teenage daughter to Olive Kitteridge and My Name is Lucy Barton to Olive, Again. Strout delineates the complexities of small-town life for those with meager means and limited opportunities. The Olive books are sort of linked short stories with some characters appearing more than once. The second book finds Olive dealing with the exigencies of aging. She is a sometimes crochety and cantankerous woman, but offers occasional doses of compassion. I found her an intriguing companion.
On a different note, Paul Doiron explores backwoods Maine in his crime series about a game warden named Mike Bowditch. A former editor of Down East Magazine, Doiron has now penned twelve novels in the series. A few years ago, I read his first book, The Poacher’s Son, and gained an appreciation for aspects of rural life in Maine that many tourists don’t experience. Doiron lives in Camden.
Another current Maine writer, whose books I have noted on bookstore shelves, is Tess Gerritsen. Researching her for this blog, I discovered she has both an interesting heritage and an unusual path to authordom. Born in San Diego, she’s the daughter of a Chinese immigrant and a Chinese American chef. Prompted by her parents, she pursued a career in medicine and became a general physician. Early on, she liked reading romance novels and so tried her hand at writing and publishing a short story. Initially she wrote romantic thrillers and then medical thrillers and more recently, a police detective and medical examiner series called Rizzoli and Isles. Prolific in output, her books have sold more than 25 million copies! Gerritsen also lives in Camden. What have I been missing?
Who are your favorite Maine authors? What do you prefer reading, fiction or nonfiction? If fiction, which genres?
Note: Nature photos ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved).
