As I mentioned in my previous post, on Saturday I went to Longfellow Greenhouses to see the display of fairy gardens, and, yes, I was smitten. Along with the fairy gardens and the various little accessories available for sale—if one isn’t careful, one could spend hundreds of dollars on a fairy garden—was Liza Gardner Walsh and her charming Fairy House Handbook.

I bought a copy, and I’m glad I did because the book is full of low-cost and natural but sustainable ideas for constructing fairy houses and gardens. So now I know I can create a couple of fairy gardens without spending hundreds of dollars on them, which makes the project much more attractive to me.

Besides, Fairy House Handbook is written by a Maine writer and is published by Down East, a Maine publisher. So in buying the book, I was doing my bit for the local economy. And at $14.95, it is affordable.

Over the winter, I will read Fairy House Handbook, and I’ll be planning my fairy gardens. They won’t be grand, they won’t be expensive, but they will be mine, and I’ll have a lot of fun making them.

Faeires, come take
me out of this dull
world, For I would
ride with you
upon the wind, Run
on the top of the
dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the
mountains like
a flame.

—William Butler Yeats, as quoted from Fairy House Handbook

Today the sky is gray, and certain weather reports have a tempest coming our way. Other reports are more moderate, merely promising us rain and drizzle. At any rate, we shall see.

Yesterday was a glorious day, and I spent some time cutting back my perennials.  Silly gardener that I am, I even like the way some of the plants look as they are winding down for their winter rest. Nothing showy, nothing beautiful, but worth noticing nonetheless, and I don’t cut everything down, leaving plants with pods and dark seeds to give interest to the fall and winter garden.

Pictures from my October garden:

Note: From my friend Kate, I got the notion of how important it is to live in place, to be completely immersed in the area that you live. I was going to do a multi-part series about living in place, but I believe this notion is so important that it deserves a category of its own, one that can be explored on a regular basis. While a Living in Place category might be similar to a Community category, there are some differences. Community, at least to me, focuses on the human element. It’s the way we come together to make our towns, cities, and, yes, even suburbs places of resilience that nourish people in good times and bad. Living in Place is more about the land, the environment, and I truly believe that only when we fully live in place do we begun to take care of the land, the water, and the air. Thanks so much, Kate, for planting this seed, so to speak.

In Maine, October is a tumultuous month, one of lashing rain, falling leaves, frost, brilliant blue skies, and air so crisp and clear that it makes you glad to be alive. It is a bright month of orange, red, and yellow. It is also somewhat sad. Lovely, warm summer has come to an end. The time for lunch on the patio will soon be over. Even on our little acre in the big woods, there is much to be done. The gardens need to be cut down, the leaves raked, the wood stacked.

Yesterday, was a very satisfying day of emptying pots with flowers and herbs that had been blackened by frost. It was warm enough so that scrubbing those pots was no hardship. It was also a day of hanging sheets, blankets, and quilts on the line. I feel a sense of urgency on every nice day to keep that clothesline full of sheets and blankets. Soon, it will be too cold to do so, and everything will go in the basement to dry. But until then…

Here are some pictures I took yesterday.

Note: In my last post, I wrote about the importance of living in and loving place, and I promised to write about my hometown, Winthrop, in my next post. But then we went to visit our daughter in New York City, and I just had to write about that place, the city of cities. Soon, I will write about Winthrop and its various pleasures and discontents. After all, no place is perfect.

My husband, Clif, and I have been visiting our daughter Dee in New York City for 12 years, and even after all those years, the city, in my mind, is a patchwork of impressions—neighborhoods, food, people, the subway system—almost a character in itself—smells, sounds, and sights. When I try to hold an image of New York, it constantly shifts, partly because of my faulty memory and partly because of the protean nature of this big city, where things are added and subtracted on a regular basis.

Not surprisingly, food is a beacon for me, and in my mental map of New York City, the food zones light up in various parts of the city. First there is the Chinese takeout near Dee’s apartment in Brooklyn. By New York standards, it is nothing much—adequate food at good prices—but by central Maine standards, the food is pretty darned good, as Clif might say. The sauces have a subtly missing in every Chinese restaurant in our area, and the fried tofu in the vegetable stir-fry is brown and crunchy, just as it should be. In the other direction from Dee’s apartment is an Italian bakery with canolis, a crunchy shell filled with a sweet, creamy filling that just doesn’t taste like any canoli I’ve ever had in Maine. Then, turn the corner and there is the bagel shop, with large chewy bagels that have obviously been boiled as well as baked. These three shops make a ring around my daughter’s apartment, and I have no trouble placing them in the map in my mind.

We, of course, go farther afield than Dee’s immediate neighborhood, and every year we add something new. On our last visit, in April, it was the Doughnut Plant in Chelsea, with donuts so fresh and flavorful that Dee has become a convert, stopping by regularly to grab a donut during a recent film festival.

For our trip last weekend, it was Smorgasburg, an outdoor food market with over 70 vendors. Smorgasburg is an offshoot of the Brooklyn Flea, and it is in a large lot in Williamsburg near the East River. For a foodie like me, Smorgasburg is pretty much as good as it gets. While there were a few vendors selling records—that’s right, vinyl—mostly it was food, rows and rows of vendors selling enticing things to eat—sausage, porchetta, donuts, macarons, jelly, pickles, chocolate, fish tacos, falafel, and much, much more. Smorgasburg runs through November, and if I lived in the area, which looks a little like Sesame Street, then I would go regularly and try something new each time. Well, all right, maybe with every visit I’d make it a point to get a heartbreakingly soft donut from Dough and a macaron, two crunchy little meringues held together with a creamy filling, from Vendôme Pâtisserie. The donut would be the appetizer and the macaron would be dessert. Readers, I am making myself hungry as I write this.

Although it was hard to make a choice about what to eat between my donut appetizer and my macaron dessert, I did settle on porchetta served on a roll. The porchetta, from the aptly named Porchetta, was moist, crunchy in places, spicy, and utterly delicious. It would be hard to resist getting one each time, but I am reasonably sure I would be up for the challenge.

So now I have Smorgasburg to add to my patchwork map of New York City. And lest anyone think that all I do is eat when I go to New York, I would also add to my map the Strand Bookstore in Union Square. The Strand boasts of having “18 miles of new, used and rare books.” I believe this boast. At the Strand, the shelves of books go up so high that little magic ladders would be in order, ones that could whisk you up and down and sideways and every which way.

The Strand is so big and quirky that it deserves a post of its very own. Another time, perhaps, if I can pull myself away from finding more places to eat the next time I go to New York City.

My husband, Clif’s, birthday was yesterday, and he took off the day from work in the hopes of going on another bike ride if the weather cooperated. The weather did indeed cooperate, and we decided to ride again along the Kennebec River from Hallowell to Richmond, but this time just to the town line, making this a trip of about 20 miles rather than the 30 miles we rode on my birthday. And what to do after the ride? Why, go to the Red Barn for some of their delicious fried food.

For my birthday, I wrote quite a bit about the ride from Hallowell to Richmond, so I won’t go too much into it here except to add that on the way back, we stopped at Reny’s in Gardiner for a little shopping—blue jeans for Clif, a shirt for me, and chocolate chips for cookies for some special Scorpios who will be having birthdays in the next couple of months. Knowing we were going to stop at Reny’s, Clif and I had come prepared with a knapsack, and between that and our bike packs, we had plenty of room. What fun to combine things and do errands on our bikes!

When we returned to our car in the parking lot in Hallowell in late afternoon, the sun was at a slant. The river was as smooth and as placid as a lake, and the reflection of trees shimmered on the calm surface. Not far from the parking lot, 5 ducks skimmed across the water and lifted off, flying down the river until they disappeared. Clif packed the bikes into the car, and talking about our ride and some of the scenes we loved best, off we went to the Red Barn, where we ate with the hearty appetite of those who had truly earned their supper.