Freeport, Maine—home of L.L. Bean—is either a retail paradise or a shopping hellhole, depending on your point of view. In the summer there are so many tourists that parking places are hard to find, and most Mainers quite sensibly stay away until the season is over.

However, just ten minutes away from Freeport’s busy downtown is Wolfe’s Neck Woods State Park, 245 acres of woods and trails tucked between Casco Bay and the Harraseeket River. Wolfe’s Neck is one of Clif’s favorite places, and, as most of you know, this is his birthday week. Therefore, off to Wolfe’s Neck we went with a picnic lunch and a thermos of tea to go with cookies for dessert.

After lunch, Clif and Dee went on a four-mile hike. Because of my creaky knees, I stayed behind and had a delightful time pottering along the edge of a salt marsh.

To get to the marsh, I went down a trail and over a bridge,

past fungi of various kinds and colors.

I came to a steep rocky trail leading to a series of wooden steps and carefully went down to the water. As I reached the shore, a heron flew by, disappearing before I could get a picture.

I was the only one on the little beach by the marsh, which suited me just fine.

On a large rock in the water, birds—cormorants?— rested and watched.

By the shore’s edge, hermit crabs patrolled the waters.

Everywhere, there were fragments of shells, remnants of life that once was. This one reminded me of a shard of ancient pottery. Nature’s art.

All around me was the smell of mud flats and salt water, and I was completely absorbed by the marsh. A place to look.  A place to listen. A place to be.

After a while, I carefully made my way back up the stairs and the rocky trail, and walked to a grassy area where I set up a lawn chair.

Clif and Dee came back from their walk, and we had tea and cookies.

Here are a couple pictures from their hike:

Is it any wonder that Wolfe’s Neck is one of Clif’s favorite places? No matter the time of year, there is always something to see and notice.

Because of a busy schedule, I haven’t been posting on Fridays for quite a while, and therefore haven’t been sharing Friday Favorites.  However, this week, I received the sweetest little packet from my blogging friend Ju-Lyn of Touring My Backyard, and I had to bring Friday Favorites back for at least this week.

Here is what Ju-Lyn sent:

Ju-Lyn wrote that her eldest daughter tatted the bookmarks. Also that the kitties remind her of our own Little Miss and the stone cat (Minerva) in our front garden.

Many, many thanks, Ju-Lyn. What a wonderful surprise!

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Next week, I truly am on vacation. No painting trim, no standing on the toilet to reach difficult spots. Dee has taken the week off, and weather permitting, we are hoping to go to the coast a few times, have snacks by the river in a nearby town, and generally do a little more celebrating in honor of Clif’s 70th turn around the sun.

So far, the weather forecast looks very encouraging. I hope to get some good pictures and if I do, I’ll share them in short posts throughout the week.

The following week—the first week of October—I plan to be back to a more or less regular schedule.

Until then…

In the northern hemisphere, today is the autumnal equinox, when day and night are more or less of equal length. But from now until December, the days will get shorter as we head toward winter.  From the Old Farmer’s Almanac here is a lovely quotation, an Irish proverb: Autumn days come quickly, like the running of a hound on the moor.

They certainly do.

In the United States, we also refer to autumn as fall. I asked my husband Clif which word he thought we used most.

“It depends on whether you want to be hoity-toity,” he answered.

This confirmed my suspicions. In Maine, anyway, fall is more commonly used than autumn.

Whatever you call it—fall or autumn—this is one of the most beautiful times in northern New England. The days are warm, the nights are cool, and soup is back again on the menu. And in October comes a blaze of glory as the leaves change from green to red and yellow and orange.

This September has been spectacularly nice in Maine, with sunny days punctuated by  enough rain to keep things green and growing. Especially during this time of the pandemic, we feel very fortunate to be able to spend so much time on the patio.

The gardens at our home by the edge of the woods continue their gentle decline toward winter. Still, there are things to notice and enjoy in the yard.

Little stars of fall,

the tangly garden in our front yard,

hens and chicks on a rock beside the garden,

the waning of the black-eyed Susans,

and a wee red mushroom in the front yard.

Not being knowledgable about mushrooms, I’ll leave this one to the wood fairies and sprites that no doubt come out at night.

Last week Clif and I painted and decluttered in preparation for the arrival our eldest daughter Dee, who will be staying with us until her office reopens, probably sometime in September.

Dee can work remotely from Winthrop as well as from Brooklyn. After a year and a half of not seeing her, we are delighted to have Dee stay with us for as long as she can. With the Covid variant spreading across the country, we figured it was better to have her come to Maine sooner rather than later—August was the original plan. Right now, trains and buses to and from New York City are still running, but for how long? Things might shut down again if Covid gets really bad. So yesterday, we collected Dee in Portland and brought her home.

Staying here for a couple of months is much different than staying for a week, the way Dee usually does. For such a short time, living out of a suitcase is no hardship, but for a couple of months it is another matter.

There is a closet in the guest room. However, it was stuffed with clothes I no longer wanted but couldn’t bring myself to give away. Also, the brown doors didn’t open well.

First order of business for Clif: Remove the doors and shave a bit from the bottom so that they can open easily. While the doors were off, he said, “Maybe I should paint them white and give them a fresh look.”

Good idea. While Clif did that, I sorted clothes and cleaned the closet. When I was done, the closet was empty, and there were many bags of clothes to go to Goodwill.

Clif and I regarded the scuffed walls of the empty closet.

“Paint that, too?” I asked.

“Yup,” Clif replied, and the inside of the closet got a  coat of paint.

From there, it was on to a small white night stand with drawers tucked in the basement. Perfect to go next to the bed. However, the top looked especially bad.

“Paint the top?” I asked.

Clif painted the top, but then the sides and the drawers with ugly yellow flowers looked horrible.

“Paint the whole thing?” I suggested.

After I sanded off the flowers, Clif painted the whole stand.

And what about the old clunky drawer pulls? Those had to go, and off we went to Lowe’s to buy some sleek black drawer pulls to go with the newly painted stand.

The room looked pretty darned good as Clif noted. Except for the corner with the open metal files containing documents from twenty years ago. Away went most of the documents—I did keep a few folders—and out went the stand to the side of the road. The yellow free sign did the trick, and the stand was gone by nightfall.

Readers might recall that this spring when we bought new chairs for our patio table, the twenty-year-old umbrella looked so shabby that it needed to be replaced. This was a prime example of the “Diderot Effect,” named for the famous French philosopher and what happened when he got a new dressing gown. You can read about it here.

As with the patio, so with the guest bedroom.

Phew, what a lot of work. But it was all done with heart, and how satisfying to get rid of the clutter.

Now, onward to August and to time on the patio.

Finally, here are a few photos of flowers I took last week in between cleaning and sorting.

A busy, busy weekend for Clif and me, two homebodies who live on the edge of the woods. And we never went farther than two miles from our home. (Of course, it does help when people come to your house.)

On Thursday—not technically the weekend but close enough—three new friends came for lunch, and the weather, not too hot, not too cold, allowed us to eat on the patio. Very nice getting to know these three.

On Friday, Clif and I headed to van der Brew for a rousing night of Trivia led by Nick the Librarian. We were joined by friends Claire and Lori, and what fun we had. As usual, a few times, we talked ourselves out of the right answers. (I still feel bitter over Berlin and Beyoncé, when the answers should have been Moscow and Alicia Keys.) But despite our missteps, we had enough points to finish in the middle of the pack, and we were pretty darned happy about that.

On Sunday, our friends Alice and Joel came over for a barbecue of patties made from Beyond Burger, which they agreed tasted like regular hamburgers. Alice and Joel were so impressed that they indicated they would be looking for Beyond Burger when they go grocery shopping. Naturally, we finished the day by solving the world’s problems. Good of us, isn’t it?

Over the weekend, the temperature dropped to 60°F and it rained. Normally, this would be a bummer for a holiday weekend, but after the extreme heat and the drought, it felt like a blessed event.

My new rain gauge collected an inch-and-a-half of water. The gardens should be happy for a few days, anyway.

Gray skies and rain make a perfect combination for photos of white flowers.

And here’s a bonus picture, taken before the rain came, of a lily and the world.

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Nifty posts from blogging friends far and near:

Lavinia, of Salmon Brook Farm, wrote a poignant farewell to her beloved cat Hope.

Going Batty in Wales featured an oh so magical round house, much of which was built from recycled materials.

Thistles and Kiwis was greeted with a beautiful sky on the morning of her birthday.

Ju-Lyn, of Touring my Backyard, has posted mouth-watering pictures of hawker noodles.

On Suzanne’s Mom’s Blog there are some deep and insightful thoughts about Independence Day, better known as Fourth of July.

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Finally, the return of a  feature I know you’ve all been waiting for—well, maybe some of you more than others—the video of a song I’ve been listening a lot to lately. “Road to Nowhere” by Talking Heads came out in 1985. Still seems appropriate.

As Stephen Foster once put it, this is the merry, merry month of May. The grass is greening, the dandelions are blooming, and the birds are singing.

For Mainers who garden, it is also the busy, busy month of May. In northern New England, spring is a rushed affair. By the time mid-June rolls around, the gardens are so well established that you had better have all the composting, fertilizing, and moving of plants done or you are out of luck and out of time.

To add to the merriment, I am also in the thickets of At Sea, Book Four in my Great Library Series. My current podcast story is winding down, but I’m still working on it. Then there is blogging, and while the writing is more casual, I spend a fair amount of time on each post, even fluff ones such as my Friday Favorites.

In my younger days, I could have managed it all and still have energy leftover for night-time projects. I kid you not. Once the children were in bed, I used to do fun little things like, say, paint cupboards or clean out a closet. As I look back at my younger self, I marvel at how much energy I had. Now that I am a senior, evenings are spent watching an hour or two of television before going to bed far earlier than I ever would have imagined when I was in my twenties or thirties.

This is a roundabout way of explaining that I will no longer be blogging three days a week—Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Instead, I am cutting back to Monday and Wednesday for the foreseeable future. Having an extra day to work on my book will be a big help. And who knows? Some rainy day, I might even be able to clean out a closet. We’ll see. Books, podcasts, and gardening always seem take precedence.

I will still be reading and commenting on other blogs. Such a wonderful community and a real source of comfort during the past year, which has been scary and lonely and just plain stressful.

Also, on Mondays, I will continue featuring posts from other blogging friends. I enjoy looking outward as well as inward, and it is my pleasure to share posts from folks near and far. Formerly, I did this on my Friday posts, and I decided it was a feature I want to keep even though I am cutting back.

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So here are some  posts from blogging friends near and far:

On the green banks next to green water, Clover and Ivy found a lone goose to add more atmosphere to this already moody picture.

On Thistles and Kiwis, along with the usual photos of mouth-watering food, is a photo of a tree with foliage so glorious it made my heart leap.

Ju-Lyn, of Touring my Backyard, takes a detour that brings her to some wonderful, funky public art.