Monthly Archives: August 2015

North to Alaska

Whirl up, sea— whirl your pointed pines, splash your great pines on our rocks, hurl your green over us, cover us with your pools of fir. (Oread, by HD) Victoria Brzustowicz recited that to me on our last day in Maine. It seemed perfectly fitting for our week at Schoodic Point. At midday, we watched […]

Up, Up and Away

This morning we head up to Corea, ME, perhaps the most perfect fishing village on the Maine coast. On Wednesday a local told me how to find the house in which Marsden Hartley stayed while painting in Corea. It’s a grey shingle house past the post office. That’s easy enough, except that much of Corea […]

Foggy. How fun!

In Camelot it only rains at night, and that is true of Schoodic this week. The day dawned drippy, and the fog never sorted itself. Perfect painting conditions! Dim, mysterious light, fingers of fog snaking through the trees. Painting in fog requires enormous patience but if you don’t feel overly compressed, it’s lots of fun. […]

Doctor’s Orders

One of the problems with having a common name is that people are always confusing me with someone else. For example, I regularly get calls from bill collectors about a Carol Douglas born in Buffalo in 1967. Then there’s the disco star Carol Douglas. She recorded the disco hit “Doctor’s Orders” in 1974 (not to […]

All hands on deck

Among the people here with me, there’s a great well of other talents besides painting. That includes two fitness buffs whose idea of a good time is to climb up a rocky precipice, then follow that up with a brief swim across Frenchman’s Bay so they can bicycle back from Bar Harbor to Schoodic. They […]

Beautiful scenery and a lobster dinner… yum!

As most Mainers will happily tell you, the weather forecast frequently isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on (especially since we all get it on our phones now). The Maine coast is a maze of tiny inlets and peninsulas, which means a million microclimates strung together in a highly-complex blanket. The weather appears to be […]

The Huckleberry Finn problem

Among Rochester, NY’s cultural treasures is the 110-year-old Dentzel carousel, nicknamed, ‘the Duchess’. Generations of Rochester children (including mine) have been enraptured by its three rings of 33 horses, three rabbits, three cats, three ostriches, three pigs, two mules, and a lion, tiger, goat, giraffe and deer. Most carousels, sadly, have been cut up and […]

Going to the dump

One of my favorite childhood memories is going to the dump. My father was one of those tinkerer-jiggerers who could make something out of anything. Often, we would come back with more than we went there with. (Those were also the days when every house had a burning barrel and we didn’t buy everything in plastic […]

What would Johnny Appleseed Do?

When we bought this house, it was with the idea that we would keep our house in Rochester until fall. We never wanted a second home, as neither of us believe that home maintenance is compatible with vacationing. Still, we’re temporarily in this position and trying to make the most of it. I fancy myself […]