Tag Archives: Maine

When your great aunt suggests you come to Maine to help her harvest blueberries and, oh, to see if you can get that pesky roc from scaring her alpacas, do make sure to wear sturdy head gear.

I’d hate to speculate on what sort of concussion I would have nursed for the past two weeks if I hadn’t worn my pith helmet whilst night-harvesting those blueberries.

I’m fully recovered, at least, I think I am. Mordecai insists that I’ve developed a tic and merely ate some off lobster. If that’s the case, then I ask you – where did this 5-foot long white feather come from if not from the roc that attacked me?

Great Aunt Una sent some photos of the wild turkeys in their Spring Display.

I suggested she quit calling to them after boxes of chocolate worms were left on her back porch. That Una, ever the romantic, she thought it was rather sweet. But everyone knows Spring is not the time to trifle with a blue headed male turkey.

I spent a morning beneath the steady gaze of a Belted Galloway cow at Two Coves Farm in Harpswell, Maine last week. Look at these eyes, they’ve got stories to tell.

Bubo is not particularly a fan of cows – she’s bothered by their slow and methodical movements and their massive exhalations. Interesting, isn’t it, that the very faults Bubo finds with cows are the aspects we humans enjoy the most?

This morning, I will also give you a delightful poem by Galway Kinnell. I could not help but enjoy the similarity between the names.

Daybreak

On the tidal mud, just before sunset,
dozens of starfishes
were creeping. It was
as though the mud were a sky
and enormous, imperfect stars
moved across it as slowly
as the actual stars cross heaven.
All at once they stopped,
and, as if they had simply
increased their receptivity
to gravity, they sank down
into the mud, faded down
into it and lay still, and by the time
pink of sunset broke across them
they were as invisible
as the true stars at daybreak.

“Daybreak,” by Galway Kinnell from A New Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin).

Sunday morning I woke to fog rolling across the cove, making the air molecules cool and damp. Bubo and I breakfasted on the rocky beach during the low tide, watching the lobster boats motor about, pulling in their hauls, surrounded by halos of seagulls.

The weather report was delightfully bleak; lightening storms and hail anticipated. But instead of hunkering down against the bluffs and watching the waves, Bubo and I headed south, back to Brooklyn. We encountered driving rain the entire trip down and arrived home drenched and exhausted.

Amazing how a wild and wooly New England adventure can sap one’s energy. We’ve been recovering with copious amounts of tea and Poirot. Nothing like caffeine and mysteries to get one’s little grey cells firing.

Welcome home, indeed.