
The petals had fallen from a vase and got me thinking.

You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall

The petals had fallen from a vase and got me thinking.

While most of Eastport’s sardines were packed in cottonseed oil, some brands boasted of mustard, too, or of even smoking them first.
Even those that weren’t still might be smothered in a mustard sauce.
In 1900, J. Wesley Raye, the 20-year-old son of an Eastport sea captain, founded his mustard business in the family smokehouse in 1900 and moved it to its current site in 1903 to meet demand from the canneries.
Not just Eastport’s, either. Much of the family’s mustard, as the Raye’s website touts, was shipped by both rail and steamship, two means of transport long gone from the city. But, as they boast, their mill remains the last one in America to make mustard the old way. Theirs is made in small batches from mustard seed they’ve ground slowly on millstones made in France.

If you don’t recognize the name, you might know the taste. It’s rebranded by some high-end labels.




You think it’s all about the sun, but I’ve found that without clouds in the right positions, it’s just lights on, lights off.
It’s best when the sunlight can angle up under the cloud.



And that’s before you see it mirrored in the water.
The inlet gets its name from an early family rather than royalty, even if the British Navy did land here when it captured Eastport during the War of 1812.






Running out of baby’s first names for hurricanes and tropical storms has me wondering.
Can we turn to corporate behemoths, you know, for naming rights, like sports stadiums do?
Hurricane Amazon would be a natural. Or Geico, reminding folks of the need of home insurance. Victoria’ Secret Hurricane could be hot. You get the drift.
And let’s think about all the good uses we could put the money to, starting with relief for impoverished folks in those storms’ paths.
So how ’bout it?
What corporations would you nominate as the most amusing or fitting for the storms?
~*~

Refined Japanese, I’m told, would gather with sake to watch the full moon rise. First there’s only the crown of the head, and then the brow and cheeks and chin before the moon lifts altogether in the air. The passage is both slow and fleet, maybe five minutes, if that.
The event would be celebrated with the writing of hokku on the spot.
Here’s how it happened one summer night in Eastport, looking over Campobello Island. And this is what you get rather than a cocktail or poem.



While Eastport and its neighboring towns are technically on Fundy Bay, they’re sheltered from the open ocean. Not so for much of Lubec and Cutler to our south, where the shoreline on the open Atlantic rivals anything Acadia has to offer. It helps to know where the trailheads and parking are, though. Here are some views from the trails in the Maine state public lands in Cutler.






