My photos weren’t communicating with each other yesterday, so this post is a day late. We spent the morning in the gorgeous Coastal Maine Gardens in Boothbay, Maine. They are enormous with cultivated gardens close in and acres of woods reaching back for a mile or so. They are meticulous with labels, so it was easy to identify plants we didn’t recognize. I was most interested in their lavenders, since we have trouble keeping them through hard winters. But I suspect that they may be in a slightly warmer zone being close to the ocean.

We had purchased the Sunday New York Times on the way to the gardens. After I had my fill, I sat in a meadow in an Adirondack chair and read to my heart’s content. My husband went on an hour long hike in the woods. We find that a perfect day means different things for each of us, and we leave space for such solo activities. One lovely man sat in a chair next to me and said how much he was enjoying just sitting. Unfortunately we soon heard a plaintive “Martin, Martin” He said that for the sake of his marriage he better rejoin the group tour. I was once again grateful for our way of spending the morning.

In order to have halibut, you first need an ocean, in this case the Atlantic Ocean off Bailey’s Island in Maine. As readers of my blog may remember from our last year’s trip to Nova Scotia, nothing touches my soul like waves crashing over rocks. I had read of a landmark called “Giant’s Steps,” and we drove to see it. The path has a tiny sign, but the town thoughtfully has three spots to park near it. The area is residential, but someone had gifted this stretch as a conservation spot.

The steps are giant boulders which tumble down to the ocean. They do look as if a giant could thud down them for a dip. Or to catch a halibut! I just enjoyed the sun, waves and sea birds while my husband explored the rocks. We saw only a few people and I marvel that such beauty exists to be shared with visitors. I’m grateful for the ones who set this area aside with only a dirt path to interrupt its setting.

The inn where we are staying serves a big breakfast and then sets out snacks, warm cookies and iced tea in the afternoon. This has definitely meant a reordering of my halibut every night plan! If I can even manage a salad tonight I will be surprised.

I had to just use a screen shot for this post since I couldn’t take photos at the Farnsworth Museum’s wonderful celebratory exhibit of Andrew Wyeth’s pencil drawings and watercolors. The Farnsworth in Rockland, Maine devotes three separate well designed spaces to showcase Wyeth’s long summer residency in Maine.

We had the pleasure of seeing many of father N.C. Wyeth’s and son Jamie Wyeth’s art along with Andrew Wyeth’s work in Chadd’s Ford, Pennsylvania. The Farnsworth added to my appreciation of Andrew’s technique. Working with just a pencil, he did numerous studies in preparation for a painting. One of the exhibits showed all the studies for “Dr. Sym,” a painting of a skeleton figure in a military coat next to a cannon. A chilling image, made more so by the realization that Wyeth used his own body as the model for the bones.

No halibut today, but lovely sweet lettuce, roast beet, goat cheese salad. Tomorrow we set out to explore a peninsula south of here to a point called “Land’s End.” I will try to get an interesting photo of something called “Giant’s Steps.”

Ok. So it is a wonderful painting of a moose displayed at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine. The fourth floor of the museum has a whimsical collection called the menagerie, and this painting is prominently displayed. I think it captures the moose-mania in Maine. They have moose everything here, from onesies for babies to  moose tracks ice cream(don’t ask!)

Everything that is except a living moose. We did see two stuffed moose at the L.L. Bean store, but that was it.

Last night I ate the promised halibut dinner at a terrific restaurant in Portland called Scales. It turns out if you bathe it in browned butter with hazelnuts you achieve an unbelievable flavor. Of course butter generally improves most dishes! 

Portland Maine turns out to be food-centric. We could have eaten amazing food for days. But it was time to head north to Boothbay Harbor, stopping at that L.L. Bean complex in Freeport. The quest for more halibut, more little bowls and Wyeth paintings continues.

One of our favorite vacation treats is finding local artists’ galleries and studios. This trip I am on the hunt for little bowls. Ice cream should always be eaten in a little bowl as far as I am concerned!

We found a Maine potters cooperative shop in Portland, and I bought four little bowls including the two above. Made by a potter in Farmingdale, Maine, they will perfectly hold a scoop of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. After this first use, they will be available for other flavors, too.

I believe you can never have too many bowls of all sizes. It seems whenever I reach for one it is missing. I don’t like to lay blame, but there does seem to be a direct correlation between my grandson’s pop-in visits and my diminishing bowl inventory.

We are in Maine for our annual vacation. A year ago I was in search of scallops in Nova Scotia. This year I have decided to focus on halibut, paintings by Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth, and small bowls made by local potters. I have given up trying to spot a moose. I have to be content with the moose warning signs.

It’s fun to be in Portland, Maine after living in Portland, Oregon for 50 years. Oregon’s city was named by a coin toss. Heads Portland, tails Boston. The Maine city is also a large port. Even though Portland, Oregon is inland, it is a major Pacific Coast port via the Columbia River. The Maine city is much older with brick sidewalks and many cobble stone streets.

Tomorrow we will go to the Portland Art Museum to fill up on Winslow Homer paintings. Tomorrow night I’m hoping for halibut.

That summer when I worked for Challenge was the first time I had encountered a full East Coast summer. In Oregon, summer temperatures are usually in the low 80’s with no or very low humidity. Evenings are cool and comfortable. In Cambridge, to the contrary, temperatures were in the high 80’s and low 90’s with very high humidity and evenings that never dipped more than 10 degrees or so from the day’s reading.

Here we are returning from a much needed field trip to the beach where we swam, ate and cooled off. Clearly, running after all those kids was exhausting, and someone  snapped this picture of me on the air conditioned bus with a tired student sacked out on me as a pillow.

Our apartment had no cross ventilation and was unbelievably hot at night. I remember my roommate Molly and I taking turns getting in the shower and then standing au naturel in front of a fan, creating our own private air conditioner. Sleep eluded us in the roasting apartment, but we had a good laugh over our cooling strategy.

At the end of the summer, neighbors wanted me to stay in the neighborhood for my senior year in college. We were allowed to live truly off campus as seniors if we wanted. When I told them rents off campus were too high, they assured me that I could have a full flat in one of the triple decker houses for a very reasonable price, at least 1/3 the cost of comparable apartments near Harvard. When I mentioned that, they said they never rented to students. In fact, they never even advertised when apartments were available in the area. It was their own effective hedge against gentrification. While I didn’t move there in the end, I appreciated the offer and realized that I had been accepted as one of the “town” and not the “gown,” a true compliment.

As in most places, there was a “town-gown” tension between Harvard and the surrounding city of Cambridge. To address that, many students volunteered through Phillips Brooks House, a center for community based projects run by students. I worked with “Challenge” an after school program for middle school Cambridge kids to supplement their math and science education.

For the first time, in the summer of 1968, we ran a program during the day using Harvard classrooms. I am pictured above with four of the boys I taught in a math class. Not only did the kids come to the campus for class, but we lived in apartments in their neighborhoods. In my case, I lived with a roommate in a second floor flat in East Cambridge, at that time a working class, mainly Italian neighborhood. Our apartment was next to a sausage factory.

I earned just enough money for food, the bus and the apartment. Even knowing I would need to work more during my senior year to make up the short fall, I took the opportunity. The kids were pretty easy going, considering they were doing “school” in the summer. But they gained some prestige from going to “Harvard” and we were able to share our talents with some underserved kids.

The next summer I landed a job at the medical school, working in the lab of the scientist pictured above. This job paid the astonishing $400 a month for two months. I also got to wear a white lab coat. I had really moved up the job ladder!

However, the work itself was no more exciting than peeling dimes off index cards. This time I got to walk and retrieve the professor’s mail, make coffee, answer the phone and do some key punching. Yes, key punching since he had a gigantic computer. Probably the computing capacity of that large room sized computer was the equivalent of my cell phone today, but it was cutting edge in 1967. Dr. Tunturi was studying brain waves and the effect of concussions, and he needed the equipment for his work.

Actually, the best part of the job was the office intrigue. One married man was carrying on an affair with one of the permanent lab assistants. This caused constant turmoil as some of the others felt that assistant was given more leeway than they were. She probably was! And though most of Portland was hot that summer, I had the advantage of air conditioning in the computer room, since it couldn’t be allowed to overheat. Few buildings had air conditioning at that time, so it was a real treat to stroll around in comfort, lab coat and all.

At the television station, I had to relieve the switchboard operator when she took her lunch. She was a formidable presence, with an enormous blond beehive hairdo held in place with a layer of hairspray. She gave me a cursory introduction to the board, since she didn’t find it very difficult. She forgot that she had been doing it for years and I had never seen one before!

I sat down and waited for the phone to ring. I answered it properly, learned it was the head of CBS wanting to talk to our station manager. I told him just a minute, and promptly disconnected the call. I had no way of either calling the man back, nor did I know how to reach the station manager to let him know I had just bungled a call.

When the real switchboard operator returned from lunch, I confessed my mistake. She easily called New York back and connected the two men. She didn’t find it amusing, so I acted very penitent. However, I returned to pulling dimes off index cards, pleased that I had had contact, however fleeting, with the head of CBS. Fortunately, he had no idea who I was!