Maine Summer: Family & Beach Reads

THE JOY OF FAMILY

Braving Maine’s cold waters

About once a year, I indulge in a paragraph or two about our granddaughters.  They come to Maine with their parents for a week each August, and it’s a fun time.   Filled with favorite activities from swimming in the cove to competing at miniature golf to several trips to the local bookstore.  Add in going to railway village for a train ride and vintage cars, plus the botanical gardens where pausing to create a fairy house is a must. 

Her first steamed lobster
Ocean at his back
Enjoying Maine’s rocks

 Lobsters, oysters, and clams make an appearance on our plates. 

 We dine at casual Cozy’s Dockside (ending with ice cream!) and recall previous good times at the Newagen Pub.  The Chief Penguin and I and Tim have been coming to this part of Maine for 35 years!  Today, our 9 and 13-year-old granddaughters continue to create memories of their own.

READING: BEACH BOOKS

Sometimes a beach read is just what I need to decompress and relax.  They may not be fine literature, but the plots are thick with secrets, conflict, and romance.  All played out against the waterfronts of Maine or Connecticut or Cape Cod or Nantucket.  Recently, I read several beach books, each engaging enough to give me a few pleasurable hours, and each by an author whose previous work I didn’t know. Two of these titles were published in 2022; the pandemic, whether overtly or in the background, colors their worlds.

Maine Characters by Hannah Orenstein  

In Maine Characters, Vivian and Lucy are half-sisters who have never met. Lucy, a schoolteacher, has spent every July at the lake house with her father.  Vivian, a sommelier from Manhattan, comes to Maine to spread her father’s ashes in July, when usually she has visited him in August.  When the two sisters meet each other, sparks fly.  Neither has much sympathy for or welcome from the other. How they navigate several weeks together is a messy, difficult business.  

At times, I didn’t care for either Vivian or Lucy very much; one entitled, the other unsympathetic.  Together they learn about each other’s earlier life, unravel the secrets of their parent’s pasts, and tentatively navigate a fragile new beginning.

Vacationland by Meg Mitchell Moore

In Vacationland, Louisa brings her three children, ages 7, 10, and 12, to her parents’ Maine house on Penobscot Bay for the summer.  A professor, she is determined to finish writing her scholarly book.  Her husband Steven stays back in Brooklyn to work on his podcast business.  The children are self-sufficient up to a point but still need attention.  

A young woman on a mission, Kristie shows up from Pennsylvania looking for a job and attracts the attention of Danny, the handyman who works at Louisa’s family home.  How these various lives intersect, who has secrets, how the stresses in a marriage play out, and what individuals owe each other and themselves make for an engrossing novel.  Moore is masterful at portraying the details of daily life with kids along with the tensions within a marriage. Recommended!

The Summer Place by Jennifer Weiner

The Summer Place is mostly about three generations of women and the choices they make regarding life, careers, and love.  The male characters, especially Sarah’s twin brother Sam, are also crucial to the story.

Set on Cape Cod, the family beach house here is also a character and reflects on the people who live there and what it wishes for them.  Sarah, daughter of writer Veronica who owns the house and is contemplating selling it, is Ruby’s stepmother. Sarah is married to Eli, a dentist, and also mother of their two boys, Dexter and Miles.  She is a musician and head of a music school; she wonders if she should have become a concert pianist.  Unexpectedly, stepdaughter Ruby announces that she and her boyfriend Gabe, who is staying with them during the pandemic, are getting married.

This is a novel of stunning secrets, wondrous first loves, and mistaken identity.  A lot of action and a wide cast of characters are featured in alternating chapters.  It was easily my favorite of these three beach reads.  A great form of escape which will keep you guessing as to which secrets and when will they be revealed! 

Note: All photos including, header photo looking to the water, are ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved.)

Maine Moments: Nature, Art, & Reading

MAINE’S SUMMER GREENS

White cypress trunks

Inland a bit from its rocky coast, Maine has stretches of woodland with lots of green.  Green trees, conifers of several types, including long-legged cypresses, and also oak and maple trees.  Thick ferns line the roadside and, if you time it just right, you might see the local family of turkeys crossing the road.  The other morning, just after dawn, out the window and from the deck, was the unexpected delight of a mother deer and her fawn enjoying the morning. 

Fawn & doe

WYETHS AND MORE

Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland

The Chief Penguin and I made our second visit to the Farnsworth in Rockland with my sister and brother-in-law.  Both interested in art (one creates works in pastels, the other prefers pen and ink), they were keenly focused on the latest exhibit of Andrew Wyeth’s works, some of which had never been publicly exhibited before. 

Untitled, Andrew Wyeth, 1961
Drifting Study, Andrew Wyeth, 1991
Breakfast at Sea, Jamie Wyeth, 1984

I really liked Andrew Wyeth’s house in the snow with the bike and motorcycle outside and his one wall of a house in Chadds Ford. Jamie Wyeth’s couple on their porch is wonderful and serene and almost monochromatic in its golden hues. I also found his iris a bright note of color against that monolithic white lighthouse. A work new to the collection is of a seated woman with a book. Its somewhat Cubist and Art Deco elements appealed to me.

Woman Reading, Ruby Sky Stiler, 2023
Iris at Sea, Study #2, Jamie Wyeth, 1993

SUMMER READING FROM MY LIST: WWII SECRET AGENTS

The Librarians of Lisbon by Suzanne Nelson

College graduates, Bea Sullivan and Selene Dumont, a pair of smart young women, meet at work at the Boston Public Library. Each has her reasons for wanting to escape, and when recruited by U. S. Intelligence, they take up the offer to work in Lisbon gathering banned books and articles to share with the Allies.  

Bea is quick with a photographic memory, and she soon gets tapped to work undercover as an informant with a Gable, a notorious spy.  Glamorous Selene haunts the casinos and clubs on assignment from her handler, Marguerite, but ends up in games of deception with Luca Caldeira, a demoted Portuguese baron. Their work is risky and dangerous, spies do die, and the men Bea and Selene are involved with are both very attractive and yet emotionally elusive.  

Inspired by librarians who really did this work, The Librarians of Lisbon, is fast-paced and thrilling.  One might think it too neat that both women fall in love with their “colleagues,” but it makes for a very good story overall.  For another novel about WWII librarians, I also highly recommend The Librarian Spy by Madeline Martin.  It’s set in Lisbon and Paris and was published in 2022.

Note: Photos ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved.)

Maine Summer: Women, Butterflies, & Blooms

This week, I comment on a novel about several Irish women who’d like more in their lives and on a TV series about the infamous English sisters who thought nothing of ignoring and defying the accepted standards of society. Plus I offer up a few photos taken at the local botanical garden.

RECENT READING: VILLAGE LIFE IN IRELAND

The Coast Road by Alan Murrin

Set in 1994 in Ireland, Alan Murrin’s novel, The Coast Road, highlights the constricted role of women in a small village where everyone knows everyone else’s business.  Izzy Keaveney is the wife of local councilman James and a mother.  At one time, she had a small flower shop, but no more; now she aspires to again do something purposeful in her life.  

Colette Crowley, a poet, left her rich husband Shaun and went to Dublin to stay with her lover.  When she returns, she is shunned by her neighbors, and her husband prevents her from seeing her sons. She and Izzy become friendly in a writing workshop Colette leads, while each woman struggles to find contentment and satisfaction.  

There are several interwoven strands in this novel, and the reader is kept wondering how these situations will resolve, or if they will.  For more about this book, you can read an interview with Murrin in nb magazine. Recommended for fans of Claire Keegan.  (~JWFarrington)

OF BUTTERFLIES AND BLOOMS

Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens (Boothbay)

On our most recent visit to the gardens, I was struck by striking beds of bright flowers, colorful foliage against stone, and a pair of peaceful frogs.

Coleus and other
Frogs in the sun
Yellow dahlias

In addition, I very much enjoyed exploring the butterfly house with my sister Ann, who knows her butterflies, but is also a fount of information about plants and nature in general.

Mourning cloak butterfly
Common buckeye butterfly
Monarch butterfly

VIEWING: NOTORIOUS MITFORD FAMILY

Outrageous (BritBox and other services)

Diana & Nancy (dailyexpress.co.uk)

The Mitford family, parents and their seven children, were a wild bunch.  Aristocrats and well off, until they weren’t, the six sisters were unconventional, passionate, and lived by their own rules.  The eldest, Nancy was a novelist and the family mediator.  Diana left her well-situated husband and child and took up with Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Fascists.  Unity was attracted to the Nazis, went to Munich, and was enamored of Hitler.  Sister Jessica was a staunch communist and disdainful of the family’s comfortable lifestyle.  Parents Muv and Farve are largely ineffectual in attempting to manage their wayward offspring.

The 6-part series is set in the 1930’s and presents in bursts the unbelievable actions of these sisters. The subject matter is serious, but the style of the episodes is rollicking and sometimes playful, as if it were all a farce.  Of course, it wasn’t a farce, and there were consequences.  The sisters have odd nicknames for each other which don’t always relate to their real names, making it sometimes difficult to know which sister is being addressed.

Nancy is the narrator and provides commentary in each episode.  Played by Bessie Carter, she is elegant and forthright, even when describing her own challenging marriage.  Seeing Carter in this role, it’s hard to believe she played the overdone Prudence Featherington in Bridgerton.  The Chief Penguin and I thoroughly enjoyed the series. Recommended!

Note: All garden photos ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved.)

Maine Moments: Berries & Jewels, Page & Screen

SUMMER READING: SHARING IN NATURE

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Author Kimmerer (uwalumni.com)

In this small volume, Native American plant ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer uses the serviceberry bush as a way to riff on the concept of a gift economy.  Also known as Juneberry, Saskatoon, or Shadbush, the serviceberry has small white flowers and reddish berries, which often ripen in June.

A gift economy, as opposed to our more familiar market economy, frequently operates in small Indigenous communities.  In nature, the serviceberry bush receives sunlight and rain to grow, and its berries provide food for birds.  The birds eat the ripe berries, and the seeds then get dispersed allowing the serviceberry to continue to propagate.  Kimmerer opines on how the abundance of nature is freely shared to the benefit of the plants and creatures in nature as well as humans.  

Her book gives testament to the need to be respectful of nature and to reflect on how this approach in the natural world might be more applied to human society. One small example is a book that is passed on from one reader to another to read, and then placed in a Little Free Library box for yet others to take and enjoy. The book is a gift that has served multiple individuals.

 I had never heard of serviceberries until recently, when I noticed one of the plants in a nearby garden was labeled serviceberry.  I recalled that serviceberry bush again when my friend Martha recommended this book.  A short read, but a worthwhile one.

VIEWING: INDULGENT WEALTH

The Gilded Age Season 3 (HBO Max)

Mrs. Scott & daughter Peggy (hollywoodreporter.com)

Although some critics have been less kind to Season 3 of The Gilded Age, I’m hooked.  I like the elaborate costumes, the grasping for more wealth and greater social status, the inclusion of pertinent issues of the day, and the stellar cast.  Will any of these individuals find love and true happiness?

Bertha Russell is determined that her daughter Gladys shall become a duchess; Marian Brook hopes to find love this time around after two failed engagements; and George Russell has grand ambitions to build a linked cross-country railroad.  Meanwhile, Miss Scott (Peggy) continues her career as a writer, has a new admirer, and is a supporter of women’s suffrage.   Ada and Agnes, Marian’s aunts, bicker as they adapt to new roles, while Ada is seduced by a séance and takes up the temperance cause with diehard determination. 

There are 8 episodes in this season.  They are being released weekly, with episodes one through six now available.  Due to its popularity, there will be a Season 4 of the Gilded Age.

Pink dahlias

Note: Header photo of black-eyed Susans and dahlia photo ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved.)