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.