Readers must surely know that right now in the United States there is a constant fire hose of bad news that is covered, quite rightly, by various forms of media. No point in denying this bad news, and being somewhat of a news junky, I pay close attention.
But at least in my personal life, there are many good things happening too, and I hold on to them the way a person falling overboard might cling to a tossed life preserver ring. The good things help keep me afloat.
First and foremost, October in Maine. October in Maine is so glorious that it never fails to fill me with joy—that slant of sunlight reflected from the golden leaves; the deep blue sky made brilliant by the lack of humidity; the bursts of orange and red; the nutty smell of fallen leaves. I could go on and on singing the praises of October. And even this year, when the drought has muted the color of the changing leaves, it is still a wonderful month.
Here are pictures taken last week from my backyard.
A flash of red in the nearby woods,
yellow leaves against blue sky,
and the view from the patio.
Then there are the new cats, who despite their pesty ways with plants they shouldn’t be nibbling on, are bringing us so much joy and laughter.
Kai chilling on the cat treeLittle Fern helping me with my upcoming novel, Darcy Dansereau
Finally, there is another reason why October is such a special month for us: our eldest daughter Dee was born the end of October. We will be celebrating her birthday next Saturday with a trip to southern Maine, where we will meet our daughter Shannon and Mike. But that will be a story for next Monday.
September is shaping up to be quite the month. There are two birthdays—mine and Clif’s—and while our celebrations are simple, they are always so much fun. My birthday is next Monday, and Dee, Clif and l will all be playing hooky, taking time off from work, having lunch at a local noodle shop—how I love noodles—going to a movie (surprise, surprise!) and depending on the weather, enjoying tea and cookies by the Kennebec River. Finally, ice cream on the way home. Phew, sounds like quite the day. Clif’s birthday is at the end of the month, and of course the birthday boy will get to pick his birthday outings.
Between my birthday and Clif’s, Shannon, Mike, and their dog Holly will be joining us for more birthday brouhaha. Our philosophy has always been: celebrate early, celebrate often.
At the end of the month, I will be getting together with two lovely blogging friends—Judy from New England and Thread and Dot from The New Vintage Kitchen. What a treat that will be! We will be meeting at Stonewall Kitchen in York, which is about a 200 mile round trip from my home. That will give our EV Bolt a good workout. Will I be able to get there and back again without stopping at the Kennebunk Travel Plaza to charge the Bolt? I’m thinking I will, but stay tuned.
Speaking of the Bolt…how I have come to love our zippy little car. I’ve gone here and there locally, and what a pleasure it is to drive the Bolt. Best of all, we charge the car from home and therefore never have to go to a gas station. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I don’t miss that smelly experience. Not one bit. The final cherry on the sundae? It costs half as much to charge the Bolt as it did to put gas in our Honda Fit.
On a more serious matter, I was chosen for jury duty, and the trial will be held on September 16, 17, and 18. I found the jury selection process fascinating, and I was so moved by the judge’s ending speech to us, where she reminded everyone that the defendant is innocent until proven guilty, that we need listen closely to the evidence and keep an open mind. This I will make every effort to do. After the trial and verdict, I’ll write more about my experience.
Finally, after some testing of the camera on my phone, Clif, Clif the computer guy has determined it is the hardware that’s at fault. Therefore, next month, when this phone is paid off, I will be getting a new one, and once more there will be pictures on my blog. I have only had this phone for three years, and, yes, it burns my biscuit that it stopped working the way it should so soon. We are not ones who replace things at the drop of a hat. We like to things to last.
But, to borrow from Tony Soprano, what are you gonna do?
Note: I will be taking the week of September 15th off from blogging. Between my birthday and the trial, I know I won’t be able to keep up with reading blogs and commenting. I will back on September 22.
Yesterday, my son-in-law noted that we have made it to the ‘ber months, his favorite time of year.
Mine, too. I don’t think I’m overstating the case by claiming that autumn in northern New England is spectacular. Blogging friends, if ever you want to visit Maine, this is the time to do so. While there are still plenty of tourists until mid-October, the summer frenzy is over, and the weather is usually delightful—warm days, cool nights, low humidity.
Then there are the changing leaves where, among others, the maple and beech trees are a burst of glory that lights up the landscape in even the smallest town. After such a dazzling display, November can seem like a somber month, but I like the modest russets and browns of the oaks, which hold on to their leaves longer.
This September is proving to be a busy time for me. I have been called for jury duty, and on Thursday, I will find out if I have been selected. If I am selected, I am not sure if I will be able to keep with reading other blogs and making comments. I might have to take some time off.
But I will keep you posted.
Note: As the lack of pictures indicates, I am still having trouble with the camera on my phone. I’m not sure what I am going to do about this. So for now, no photos. Sorry!
Note: It’s that busy time of year when Clif and I go around to various holiday fairs to sell our books. Therefore, until the new year, I will neither be reading blogs on the weekend nor commenting on those posts. It seems to me that those who post on the weekend also post during the week, which means I will be mostly keeping up with the comings and goings of blogging friends. Also, I am cutting back my own posting to once a week, on Mondays. After the new year, I am planning to resume Thankful Thursday posts.
Oh, Those Leaves
Right now the leaves are falling everywhere at our home by the edge of the woods.
On our front steps,
on the chairs on the patio,
and on the table, too.
A couple of afternoons each week are devoted to leaf cleaning.
Clif takes out our trusty battery-powered lawn mower that crunches and sucks up the leaves.
Here’s the yard before lawn-mower Clif has done his thing.
In Maine in mid-October there is a certain chill in the air, letting us know that we are edging into a time of colder weather and long nights. In mid-October, we can no longer be sure that it will be warm enough to eat outside even when the sun is shining. In mid-October, we start bringing in some of the patio furniture. (The big table stays outside under cover.) In mid-October, the leaves are falling, falling, falling. Hence, the use of fall as another word for autumn.
For those who live in a warmer climate, October in northern New England might sound like a time for alarm—this is just the beginning of the cold and the dark? But we Mainers mostly take it in stride. We have known snow and cold weather from the time we were born, and to us it seems like the natural order of things.
However, I do want to add that when cold weather comes, a fair number of folks hightail it to warmer states. Snowbirds, they are called, and I will never be one of them. To me, winter means snow.
But before the snow comes October.
Here are some photos of what it looks like in our yard at the edge of the woods.
This weekend, Clif and Dee took down the screen house and tucked it down cellar until next spring. The round table and umbrella were also stored down cellar. After which, Clif moved our fire pit onto the patio, which stops the backyard from looking so lonely. But still. I miss the screen house.
In the woods, there is a flash of red, a blaze of glory, red against green.
In our new driveway, leaves aren’t the only things that fall.
And sometimes the leaves fall in a very fetching way.
All those falling leaves mean that the great leaf clean-up will soon begin. In the meantime, we will enjoy nature’s art.
First, a disclaimer. Even though I come from the land of Stephen King (his Maine home is about an hour and half from where I live), I am not a fan of horror. The answer for this is simple: I get too scared. I have what might be called an overactive imagination, and horror taps right into it.
However, from the jump, I was hooked on From, which is billed as a horror/mystery show. Yes, there are strong elements of horror in From as well as some gore. However, the emphasis is on the characters and how they react to the terrible situation they are in.
And what is that situation? There is a town in the middle of the woods somewhere—it could even be Maine—that traps folks. While the exact method is a mystery, it involves a back road with a fallen tree and circling crows. That fallen tree spells trouble. When the series opens, a vacationing family encounters this tree and quite naturally tries to find another route. After Dad (Elon Bailey) turns the vehicle around, the family arrives in a shabby town with a smattering of inhabitants. Dad drives through the town but somehow finds himself circling around to that very same town. Again and again. The family is trapped.
As if that weren’t bad enough, the family is stuck in a town where monsters emerge at night and devour people if they are out and about. Steps have been taken to protect the houses, but I can tell you right now that accidents, bloody ones, still happen. Regularly.
Presiding over the town is Sheriff Boyd Stevens (played by the excellent Harold Perrineau). His job is to protect the town, to provide hope, and to figure out how they all might escape. Let’s just say that uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
There is a wonderful cast of supporting characters, all flawed but all very human in their frailties. Bit by bit, the episodes provide clues as to what this mysterious place is and how folks might escape.
In season 3, the cherry on the sundae is a reference to Camden, Maine. Clif, Dee, and I have found that in most of the horror or supernatural series we watch, there is some reference to Maine. It always takes us by surprise although by now we should be used to it.
No doubt in honor of Stephen King, that master of horror.
Even if you think you don’t like horror, From is a show to watch.
On Sunday evening, it was a little too chilly to sit comfortably in the screen house.
“Let’s have a fire,” I suggested.
For Christmas, Dee had bought us a new fire pit, and in early spring we had tested it once on the patio. We wanted to see if the fire pit worked properly—it did—and after that trial run, we set it to one side to be used come fall.
Fall, it seems, has come tapping on our shoulders. Both Clif and Dee agreed that a fire was a good idea, and soon we were having drinks around the fire pit.
I realize this fire looks out of control, but it really didn’t seem that way when we were sitting around it. I am happy to report that the fire stayed in the pit, and the only thing that burned was the wood that fed the fire.
As we chatted and had our drinks, the neighbor’s cat came for a visit.
Fortunately, he left without catching this little chipper.
Above us, the sky was a brilliant blue.
In Maine, September is surely one of the most beautiful months of the year—warm days, cool nights, and usually not too much rain. I probably should have saved this post as an item for Thankful Thursday, but here it is on Monday, a grateful way to begin a week that supposedly will be filled with blue skies and sunshine.
Agatha Christie: The Mirror Crack’d , A Caribbean Mystery, and Nemesis from Five Complete Miss Marple Novels
Confession Time: Until this past month, I had never read an Agatha Christie novel. Seems incredible, I know. I am nearly sixty-seven, and I hadn’t read the grande dame of mysteries.
My excuse? I am not a huge mystery fan. They are not the books I naturally gravitate toward. (That would be literary fiction and fantasy. Not the usual combination, I know, but there it is.)
So what changed my mind? Shane Malcom-Billings, a librarian extraordinaire who work at our town’s library. He has put together an Agatha Christie book club, and I thought, why not? Somehow, it sounded fun. Shane is a wonderful book club leader, and I’m looking forward to his take on Agatha Christie. Our first meeting is this Friday, and it will be one where we discuss Agatha Christie in general. After that, we’ll be reading specific books. I figured I should read a few novels so that I would have something to add at that first meeting.
I found a compendium of five Miss Marple novels—the three I read are listed above—and off I went, staring with The Mirror Crack’d.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started reading The Mirror Crack’d. Would I like it? Would the writing be full of clichés? Would the story come at the expense of the characters? Here are my answers: Yes, no, and somewhat.
The writing style is solid and is not loaded with hackneyed phrases. Miss Marple is a wonderfully sympathetic character, a woman who is dealing with aging and all that this brings yet who is still sharp enough to solve mysteries. If I were younger, I might not be as drawn to Miss Marple as I am, but as I approach my seventies—my, that sounds old!—I am completely sympathetic with her frailties.
There is also a fair amount of humor in the books, especially when Miss Marple puts on a doddering old-woman act to trick characters into revealing more than they want to.
The other characters, I’m afraid, are more one dimensional. They are there to commit crimes, to be suspected of having committed a crime, or to help Miss Marple. Not much nuance.
Never mind. I like Miss Marple so much that I’m willing to overlook the lack of depth in the other characters.
What will I think of Christie’s other protagonists?
Amid all the excitement in our household that now includes five adults, two dogs, and one cat, I can add a new cell phone to the mix. My old phone had been going for some time, but when I could no longer turn it on without plugging it into a charger, I knew the time had come to get another one.
More not-so-merry confusion as Clif and the nice young man at T-Mobile tried to get all our information migrated from our old phones to the new ones. (The package came with two new phones so Clif figured: What the heck. Why not get a new one, too?) I will spare readers a detailed list of the troubles we’ve had. Suffice it to say we are not quite there with email.
However, one huge improvement on the new phone is the camera, which, along with having a zoom lens, takes 50 megapixels pictures. Holy cats, that’s exciting to me. As soon as the camera was charged and ready, I took some pictures, and I was not disappointed by their clarity.
From yellow leaves in the garden
to Mr. Toad
to a close-up of my favorite mug,
I am utterly delighted with this astonishing camera in my cell phone.
My wee camera, with 20 megapixels, has served me well for many years, but I suspect I will not be using it much anymore.
This year, the Winthrop Grange has sponsored a Scarecrow Contest for families, organizations nonprofits, businesses, and churches. The response has been wonderful. Scarecrows are lurking on Main Street. They are settled by light poles. One is even lounging by the library, and he is clearly asleep at the job. All have really jazzed up Winthrop’s downtown.
Here are just a few of the entries. They range from cute
to odd but arresting
to cozy
to elegant
to vibrant
to spooky
to just plain fun.
I can imagine all the scarecrows late at night as they slide off their poles and glide around town, gathering by the lake to have a scarecrow dance, careful to return to their posts before dawn so that nobody knows about their nightly escapades. But those with sharp eyes and a notion for the uncanny might notice clumps of straw here and there by the water, evidence that there was some kind of wild, spooky gathering.
On Thursday, the electricians came, and after spending most of the day here, they replaced the damaged boxes and got the electricity back to the way it was before the lightning strike. Hello, washing machine, dryer, vacuum cleaner, oven. So nice to have you all back. Goodbye, microwave. Thank you for the many long years of service. Your replacement will be arriving soon, and I certainly hope the new one is as sturdy and reliable as you were.
In theory, all should be well. In reality, we discovered our water heater was another causality of the lightning strike and surge. For the past week, it had been heating erratically, and yesterday it stopped working entirely. This means no hot water unless we heat it on the stovetop. The water heater will soon be checked to see whether it can be repaired or needs to be replaced. Yet again, thank goodness for our homeowners insurance.
Despite being a bang of a month, September has brought some pleasures.
Item: Most evenings, the weather has been mild enough for drinks on the patio. This time is soon coming to an end, and we are trying to squeeze as much time on the patio as we can.
Item: Because of the excessive rain, most of the nasturtium seeds I planted didn’t germinate, but the ones that did are oh so pretty.
Item: There were enough tomatoes for a final harvest, which means more tomato sandwiches for lunch this week. Although the tomato yield was way down from previous years, Juliette—the variety I planted—performed valiantly in the face of too much rain and not enough sun. But, Juliette’s time is over, and after harvesting the tomatoes, I pulled the plants.
Item: Our new whole house power surge protector has the Whovian name “Bad Wolf.” Protect us from future power surges, Bad Wolf!
Odds and Ends: We found a new place to play trivia on Monday nights, which is a great way to start the week. On Saturday, we will be meeting friends at Absolem’s, and on Sunday, we’ll be heading to Freeport to a brewery to celebrate Clif’s birthday.
Will we have running hot water by then? Who knows? But we’ll be following Bill & Ted’s excellent advice: Party on, dudes.
Note: This is an old trailer. The movie didn’t play this summer. But the trailer was a short and snappy way to feature the excellent Bill & Ted.
A blog about nature, home, books, movies, television, food, and rural life.
Notes From the Hinterland 