Thursday, March 27, 2008

Spring!

We've had day after day of sunny weather and that lovely smell of spring, enough to get a person excited about spring cleaning. The crocuses are coming up--never mind that the twinkle lights I put in the bushes in the winter remain stuck in icy piles in places--it's spring! The apple tree pruners came by and tidied up the orchard. We should have huge apples and pears this year. I’m not sure when the cider pressing will be but I’ll let you know.

Guests have been in and out of the Cape House, checking on properties, working in the area, visiting family. A couple from Europe stayed almost a week--"This will be a great memory that we can bring back home to Sweden!" Soon we'll have members of the Western Mountain Trash Can Band staying as they take part in the 2008 New England Pan Festival here in Blue Hill.

I pass North Country Textiles as I walk to the post office. They, like the crocus, are blooming--gorgeous rugs drape the railing and, inside, the gallery is filling up with yummy new stock.

I just finished a Maine-based book, Bride Island, by Alexandra Enders. She quotes Sarah Orne Jewett from the Country of the Pointed Firs (You can visit Sarah Orne Jewett's home in South Berwick when you're in Maine next!): "In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness." Remote and islanded, endless regret or secret happiness…

Enders also quotes Dorothy Simpson, an author I'm unfamiliar with, from The Maine Islands: "If a man is lucky enough to possess a whole island--even if it's the merest speck of rock and turf, and a few spruce trees and raspberry bushes--but can only spend a few summer weeks on it, spiritually he is an islander all year round. This is particularly true of children who have had island summers. They become islanders for life at an early age." I was especially struck by this as I had just taken a reservation from a woman who knew Maine from a few weeks on an island each summer. She said that even now when she thinks back to her childhood summers, the memories are always from those weeks.

I am mourning the passing of Lloyd Capen, whose book The Price of Clams I so enthusiastically wrote about in my New Year's entry. I regret not having told him in person how I adored his story.

Rain is forecast for the weekend so it will be indoor work—inventory and interviews. The raking of rocks from the yard will wait for the sun.

Friday, March 14, 2008

Spring?

Perhaps not quite yet. Still, this middle season brings so many delights--like baby goats! Sunset Acres Farm will be having hundred of baby goats born now through the month of April and they're open for visiting and you can pat and hold the babies. Visiting hours are from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. with milking time occurring in the evening. Sunset Acres Farms makes amazing goat cheese, which you've likely had if you've been here. We use it in omlettes and with Nervous Nellie's Hot Pepper Jelly and to stuff plum tomatoes...

So guess who's been nominated for a James Beard Award? Rich Hansen, chef and co-owner of Cleonice! And Brian Hill, chef of Camden's Francine, where everything is good but the butterscotch pudding is the best you'll ever have. And the team from Chase's Daily, in Belfast. Where, at the risk of repeating myself, everything is good but the fried potatoes are amazing. So don't worry about being well fed on your way here or once you arrive.

I always tell myself, when I'm working on my blog, "Fewer words, more pictures." But I read a lot and often want to share a lot of it with you. When a person buys something like an inn, the books on the shelves often convey, along with the high four poster beds and the silver sugar bowls and the sign out front. So all winter long I've been taking advantage of the books at the inn. Last night I picked up Lincoln Colcord's Sea Stories--From Searsport to Singapore. Colcord was born in 1883, in his father's sailing vessel going around Cape Horn. But he was a son of Searsport, Maine, and in 1936 helped to found the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport (add it to your list of places to visit!). According to the Fishermen's Voice, "In the 1880’s, Searsport supplied more than 10 percent of America’s sea captains. At that time, in a town of 2,000 people, 77 of them were in command of American sailing ships." Here's a great picture of his father, one of those captains.

In the Drifting Diamond, Colcord writes, "For us who are sailors, the sensations of a landsman at sea are hard to understand. Wind and water are our familiar elements; a ship is our home, the field of our endeavors, the companion of our days. The things of the sea are what we love and know--are often all we know. A seaman lying in his bunk, can tell at once when his ship is carrying too much sail; a feeling is communicated to him, a feeling that's an instinct in the sense that it's the sum and lesson of all past experience. And in a storm, he knows by the laboring of the deck under his feet, exactly how it is with his vessel; he can measure the degree of her effort to a hair. But the poor landsman is separated from the knowledge by a wide and impassable gulf. An ordinary big wave seems monstrous to him, as he compares it with the calm of the day before; and when the masts once lean from the perpendicular, it's as bad as if she'd put her scuppers under. In a storm, he goes thorough agonies of needless apprehension, as if every wave and every squall were to be his last. Yes, actually!--I've watched 'em. You have no conception of what a man suffers. His life has been bounded by the firm land--by fields that spread without motion, by hills that stand eternally changeless, by houses that wouldn't dream of leaping across the streets they stand on, by floors that never in the course of their orderly existence have tipped up on one side and down on the other." Mind you, they are in the midst of a typhoon at this point in the story, points out landlubbing Sarah.

Today will be sunny and 40 degrees here, but to quote Winnie- the-Pooh, "The more it snows, tiddly pom, the more it goes, tiddly pom, on snowing." I won't be putting the snowshovels away just yet but the apple tress will be pruned soon and it's beginning to smell like spring.