Earlier this week, we drove up to Camden, another pretty town on the Maine coast. Incorporated in 1791, Camden is on the Penobscot Bay and running through it is the Megunticook River. Early industries took advantage of power from watermills and included shipbuilding and textiles. Beginning in the 1880’s, Camden attracted wealthy folks from Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, including the Bok family of publishing fame, and became a popular summer colony. After a fire in 1892 destroyed much of the business district, new buildings were brick including the restored Camden Opera House.
Like so much of Maine’s coastal terrain, Camden is rocky and thus, the streets are a bit hilly and often at sharp angles to each other.
Colorful facades on a Camden street
Our mission was to explore some of the shops and to enjoy lunch at a highly recommended Thai restaurant (thanks to our daughter-in-law and the New York Times).
Thai Lunch
Long Grain is an attractive space with an inviting main room and bar and more tables beyond an open divider. The menu is short with a series of intriguing appetizers from crispy chicken wings to larb, mussels, and salads. Mains include several noodle dishes, a fried rice with trout, pad krapraw (minced spicy meat over rice with basil), and a green curry, the hottest dish the Chief Penguin had ever ordered. He loved it, and I very much enjoyed the pad krapraw with chicken. The dining room quickly filled up and looked to be popular with the locals. Reservations are not required at lunch but recommended.
Shops and Especially Books
We wandered around the streets going in and out of design stores, high end home décor shops, an L.L. Bean outlet, and a small gourmet grocery, French and Brawn, where we purchased pastries for the next day’s breakfast. Then, finally, on to the independent bookstore.
The Owl and Turtle Bookshop is cozy and well stocked and also boasts a café serving delicious-smelling coffee along with buns and cookies. Besides the inside seating, café tables in front beckon.
Cappuccino, anyone?
DAZZLING DAHLIAS
We made our final visit of the season to Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. Now that Labor Day is past and families are back to work or school, the gardens were quieter on this cool morning. We stayed just a short time, concentrating mainly on the gorgeous dahlias. A riot of colors, the dahlias are so lush and vibrant that I took many photos. I’m sharing just a few with you.
The Chief Penguin and I made the trek down to Brunswick earlier this week for lunch with my cousins. We met at our now favorite Indian restaurant, Shere Punjab, for some spicy curries. You can pick your level of heat from 1-10; two of us stuck with level 4 (plenty hot for my chicken curry) while the other two went for 5 or 6. Add in an order of garlic naan, a papadum, fluffy basmati rice, and you have a very satisfying meal.
Exploring Downtown Brunswick
Interior, Gulf of Maine Books
On previous trips to Brunswick, we have mainly spent time on the Bowdoin College campus visiting the latest exhibit in the college’s small, but well curated, art museum. This time, the Chief Penguin was off getting a haircut so I was on my own to explore. I never walked as far as Bowdoin; instead I checked out a few shops, a gallery of works by local artists for sale, and the appropriately cluttered (in the best way) Gulf of Maine Books. This store is obviously a labor of love with a wide selection of titles. Of course, I bought some note cards. Then on to the wonderful Curtis Memorial Library, Brunswick’s public library.
Located on the very pleasant and aptly named Pleasant Street, the library consists of a historic 1904 brick building plus a light, bright, spacious addition from around 2000. Workmen were blocking the original front door, but I was pleased to see the blue banner hanging to their left.
The actual library entrance is on the side of the building in the new part and is inviting with outdoor tables and chairs and a portico. The lobby inside is cheery and welcoming with a small lounge to the immediate left, a display of paintings on the right wall, and “Welcome” signs in several languages on the service desk.
Library entranceSmall lounge just inside the doorExterior wall of 1904 building; staircase from new to meet old
Library Spaces and Collections
The Curtis Library was recently featured in a New York Times article for their Library of Things, one of several in existence in Maine. After seeing the garden tools downstairs from the Things library, I traipsed upstairs past the 1904 brick wall and was both amazed and impressed with the range of items to borrow, from educational kits to kitchen equipment to power tools to musical instruments and so on.
All are neatly cataloged and arranged by type in plastic envelopes or hanging with tags. Brunswick’s Library of Things is so successful that public libraries in South Portland, Cumberland, and Windham created their own versions.
One aisle in the Library of Things, a tagine, anyone?
I’m a lover of libraries so I roamed around the stacks and reading areas in the new part, chatted with several staff members, and then went upstairs again to check out the more formal reading and study spaces in the 1904 building. As one might expect, these rooms are darker with wood trim and deeper colors on the walls. There’s a reading room with a fireplace, another one with oversize deep brown club chairs, and a quiet room for working on your computer.
Cozy seating in the 1904 buildingLight-filled seating in the additionHighlighting certain titles
Thus, the library brings together the old and the new, quiet nooks and livelier areas. The addition has a children’s alcove, a teen zone, and a new books room. I also liked the front facing displays of selected titles scattered throughout the stacks. Here is one example in the fiction section; several others feature biographies and memoirs. This library was definitely worth seeing!
WATCHING: PRAGUE UNDER THE NAZIS
The Golden Swan (PBS Walter Presents)
Irena, Gruber, Marta, & Petr in foreground (Hollywood-spyblogspot.com)
This Czech series, The Golden Swan (Zlatá labuť), is set in a luxury department store of the same name. The Golden Swan opens its doors in Prague, in 1939, just before the Nazis take over the country, and life is disrupted. It is owned by the wealthy Kucera family, patriarch Rudolf and his wife and their two sons (one disabled) and one daughter. Daughter Irena is the de facto CEO for both their power plants and the store. Son Petr oversees the store. Bara, a young woman fleeing the clutches of her wily and abusive boyfriend Marek, is involved in stealing for him. Through a series of interesting circumstances, she gets hired as a sales girl at the store.
Soon, Jewish employees are threatened or let go, Irena’s husband Lukas causes problems, and Irena must deal with the slyly attractive Colonel Gruber. Bara and Petra spar with each other while the family pushes him to cement his engagement to Marketa, daughter of a another prominent family.
There are eleven episodes in Season 1, and overall, there are three seasons for a total of 56 episodes. Although it is somewhat soap opera-ish, the Chief Penguin and I are enjoying the series and have now watched almost all of Season 1. Recommended If you like WWII era drama and family intrigue.
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 lobsterOcean at his backEnjoying 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.
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.
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 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!
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, 1961Drifting Study, Andrew Wyeth, 1991Breakfast 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, 2023Iris 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.
