State of Maine

I am posting from the beautiful coast of Maine, among the mossy forests, lichen encrusted rocks and ocean vistas. And yes, I ate a lobster yesterday, fresh from the sea. And yes, I took a photo of it before I ate it. I even said hello to it before I ate it. Then I ate it with butter. And yes, it was delicious.

Other than the lobster traps and bouys hanging from houses as decoration, the word lobster advertised outside nearly every restaurant, and all things nautical in general, there are a couple things that seem peculiar to this part of the planet. Maybe it's because there is an abundance of them, but folks tend to use rocks as part of their decor, as part of their personal landscape. There are large boulders marking boundaries, corners of property, and mailboxes. Large rocks often line roads to keep traffic where it should be and one large rock near our cottage warns cars not to try to drive up that little road past our driveway. They are in the gift shops with holes bored into them for candles or bud vases. They are painted with animals or placed artistically in gardens where the lupine can crawl around and over them. All the doors in our log cabin have rocks near them as door stoppers and nearly every path, lane, trail and walk is lined with this local commodity.

The door stoppers lead me to the doors. Almost every building in this shipping village has what I would call a flimsy, wooden screen door with those simple metal handles on both sides. They do not latch, and due to the moist atmosphere of the island, they often no longer fit the frames in which they are set. They simply slam shut on squeaky springs, which is usually good enough to wedge the most warped into place. In our cottage, the front door has to be lifted up to fit, as does the back door. The bathroom door, which, along with the three bedroom doors all open onto the back deck area instead of into the main living area, has to be pushed downward to open. These doors are on the gift shops and houses and most of the restaurants. There are inner wooden doors as well that lock, but rarely do you see an actual aluminum or vinyl screen door. The sound of a slamming wooden screen door does bring me back to a simpler time, a summertime somewhere on vacation in my youth. The screen door I grew up with, and which is still on my parents' house, is metal and not much more functional than these Maine doors, though it does latch. It slams good and loud, too, which can still drive my mother nuts.

Rest assured there will be lots of photos to post when we return.