
Along the Machias River, Whitneyville, Maine.

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

Along the Machias River, Whitneyville, Maine.


The delivery of cut, split firewood means I’ll be spending much of my upcoming time stacking it neatly. With luck, this will then season for a year before warming our house.
Alas, stacking it also means feeling my age. And how!
Using what I had previously thought of as life boats was a common practice during the cruise.

Babson Island a wet landing
wearing Converse high tops sans socks
a mistake
lucky I don’t have blisters

a fine-shell beach
unlike any we have to the east
I know of

so here we are going ashore again
this time for lobster
Babson Island, Maine Coastal Heritage Trust

Just walkin’ along and there they were.


Where, for heaven’s sake, would this place be? We don’t have a lot of options in our remote rim of Maine.
And then I was told the restaurant was a late and lamented site a block from my home, now reincarnated as an echo of the grill and bar next door. Only, perchance, a shade better.
Well, as a reaction, I did have an appropriate Greek slang expression I’d found earlier when researching background for my novel What’s Left, not that I’ll quote it here.

Lowbush, rather than high. Sunrise County is the world capital. This tray is about to be frozen for later use.

Eastport, as you may have gleaned from this blog, can be overrun with deer. They do make gardening a challenge.
The encounters become more lively when mention of an albino deer arises. We’re discovering that Moose Island, where we live, has had a series of white deer, including fawns with the gene.
For the record, they’re probably not albino but leucistic, and as I saw in this case, mostly pink. Defining piebald has its own set of technicalities.
This encounter was on a Sunday morning while I was heading out of town on my way to Quaker Meeting for worship. I passed what I thought was lawn decoration and then realized it wasn’t. When I whipped back, this was the best I could capture before lowering the car’s window, and by then they had slipped behind the house. Wily critters they can be.
The deer in question, by the way, is on the right in the photo.

The naked eye saw only white sometimes tinged with pink or blue. The cell phone camera using a 4-second exposure saw this and much more. Was anyone really expecting northern lights?

this is the great north of my life
including mosquitos
I wouldn’t want to go on a typical
ship cruise
or Navy vessel
the sea’s so blue with a sky to match
in the zodiac, I’m an air sign

The Phoenix has a devoted following and some fine views.


