October 26: Guacamole

Dinner with good friends at another favorite restaurant, El Camino in Brunswick. For starters, home-made chips, salsa, and guacamole. Squash and peppers tacos for dinner. Chocolate and chili pot de creme and maple flan for dessert. We discussed what three foods we'd want to have on a desert island, and I was reminded of a winter when I spent a month camping in the Sonoran desert of Arizona and practically lived on tortilla chips and guacamole we made each day from good, fresh, inexpensive local avocadoes (and special Coronas from right over the border).

If stranded on a desert island
one food I'd wish with me:
fresh guacamole with tortilla chips.

October 25: Witch-hazel

On a short lunch break walk through the woods along the river, we came upon a flowering witch-hazel tree. No, this is not some confused tree adversely affected by global climate change. This fall bloomer is right on schedule, its small, yellow-green flowers emerging from the tree's slender, bare branches almost magically, life sprouting from something seemingly dead (or at least dormant). The branches are also ornamented by what must be last year's dried seed pods, little cupped wings.

To come upon this tree in fall, blossoming when everything around it, even its own foliage, is fallen and dying--is perhaps the one, last saving grace of autumn. A hurricane is due next week that will take care of any bright and lingering leaves, and then it's the long, dark slide into winter...

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

There's no bravery
in these late-blooming flowers--
that's just what they do.

October 24: Moon over the bay

The Chamber of Commerce's Business After Hours were hosted by Point Lookout Resort this evening. The Summit Center of the resort is perched atop Ducktrap Mountain in Northport, which I think offers the best panoramic view of Penobscot Bay in the Midcoast. When I arrived tonight, I hurried outside to the patio first thing to snap a photo of the view still rosy with the last tints of sunset. And there was the moon, looking down on all those islands, the deep blue waters of the bay, and all of us standing out there absorbing the beauty.  

View of Penobscot Bay from Ducktrap Mountain

Waxing moon tugs

at the bay, tugs on

our inner horizons.

October 23: Glow

Dusk was falling as I was leaving work tonight--the sky above still deep blue streaked with thin clouds, but the woods around me all dark except for the windows of houses across the river...

Hazy half moon.
Birch trunks glowing,
and beyond, one window.

October 22: Getting something off my chest

Still worn out from this lingering cold, I left work early, turned on the heating pad, and stretched out on the couch under my faux fur blanket for a necessary nap. I awoke to find our cat lying on my chest, facing me like an inscrutable sphinx. Purring, she licked my chin. She stretched out one soft paw around my neck. For a moment I entertained the thought that she was cuddling up with me out of sympathy, to comfort me. Then I realized that I must have slept through till her dinnertime, when I'd normally be coming home from work. This was confirmed when she began gently chirping at me. She has successfully conditioned my husband to respond to this every morning by waking up and feeding her. I had no problem ignoring her because all I wanted to do was fall back asleep. My "comforter" eventually jumped off me to wait for my husband to come home and feed her.

Comforting nonetheless,
hungry cat on my chest,
tail flicking.

October 21: Chairlift ride

Rode the chairlift up Ragged Mountain this morning with my friend Janet so we could fully appreciate the fall foliage from on high, as it were. The Camden Snow Bowl is apparently the only ski area from which one has an ocean view. This time of year, when the surrounding forest is burnished gold and copper, the deep blue autumn bay shines in beautiful contrast.

View from just above the chairlift station, looking down Lookout

The highlight of the outing for me, besides the glowing landscape, was watching (and listening to) a pair of ravens circling the summit. Also, we unexpectedly came upon a little garter snake crossing a ski trail, undoubtedly on its way to a sunny ledge. But the real surprise was when we were back down the mountain, heading for the car. Behind one of the maintenance buildings I heard a singing phoebe. I think the warmth of this sunny day must have confused him into thinking it was spring.

Bald Mountain, as viewed from the Ragged Mountain chairlift

Phoebe's out-of-season song
makes the day feel warmer
than it really is.

October 20: Long walk

Participated in Rotary's End Polio walk today, about six miles from Lincolnville Beach into downtown Camden. This morning before we started out, torrential rain--but it stopped before we began the walk, so we were just fogged in. As the walkers spread out, the ones up ahead were almost invisible in the mist. Then the fog became more, well, precipitous. It began raining again, though fortunately just a constant drizzle, not like this morning's downpour. And at least it was relatively warm. The constant motion helped too. By the time we finished up, I felt pleasantly invigorated. The rain on my face, the camaraderie of a shared cause, the bright, wet foliage we'd passed by, the tingling in my leg muscles--after being sick for four days, I needed that. 

She should have known
not to wear mascara
for a long walk in the rain.

(Lest anyone get the wrong idea, this is not about myself but a friend I walked with, one of those women who won't appear in public without make-up on and who spent much of the walk wiping it off with her rain-soaked sleeve.)

October 19: Floating leaf

When I looked out the window first thing this morning, I noticed a red leaf paused in the air, floating against the white door of the shed. It took me a moment to realize that the leaf wasn't frozen in space or time, but caught in a spider web.

Red leaf stuck in a web.
My in-laws trapped a fox
in their backyard.

October 18: Carrying eggs

Feeling ill with an incipient cold, I went into work this morning only because I had to; the committee I co-chair was having its monthly meeting. But I fully intended to come home right after the meeting and go back to bed. Well, as things go, I felt a little better as the morning wore on and then got caught up in things, so I ended up working the whole day. Now that I'm home, however, the cold is catching up with me--sore throat, headache, achey joints. Whine and sniffle. It's just a cold, but some days the body just feels so over-sensitive, so fragile. I want to tell it to just toughen up already, a cold virus is nothing; does mind over matter ever work? Instead, I just take more cold meds and huddle on the couch.

A dozen fresh eggs.

I carry them gingerly,

aware of my own fragile shell.

October 17: Quarry

This morning I participated in a Land Trust outing at the Simonton Quarry Preserve in Rockport. This property is currently owned by the Nature Conservancy, but we've managed it for many years. Still, this was my first visit, in part because quarries give me the creeps. Those impenetrable black depths... given all the junk that gets left on the property in plain sight, who knows what might be down there in that water, or how deep? Today our findings were innocuous--beer bottles and a big TV face-down in cattails, dumped off the back wall of the first quarry.

Walking around the edges of the quarries was sometimes challenging, and I felt an irrational fear that I was going to trip on something I couldn't see, fall from atop one of the sheer cliff walls of this depthless crater, and end up in that cold, dark water. But that didn't stop me from scrambling up the rocks with the others to get a sense of these strange, man-made water bodies, which twisted back into the woods beyond our sight.

The quarries are a historic remnant of Rockport's past as a center for lime production. Limestone was quarried and then shipped by train to the big kilns on the waterfront. We found abutments of cut stone and old cement pads where machinery had once poised. Across the road from the quarries, flanking Goose River, several tailings piles cobbled the woods with randomly strewn, sharp-angled, loose rocks that were a challenge to walk over.

Amid the awkward human landscape, spots of wild beauty: bright green foliose lichen growing like an arboreal lettuce patch on some tree trunks, twisted old apple trees, little ruby-crowned kinglet acrobatically exploring a birch tree, great blue heron flying down river. Climbing atop the highest tailings pile afforded a great view of nearby farm fields and fall-tinged trees along the river. And the others in the group spotted a fish in one of the quarries, which I was intrigued by. How did it get there? Were there others, or was it alone in that vast, carved stone bucket of black water?

Yellow leaves floating
on water the deep black
of dilated pupils.

October 16: Last light

At day's end the sun finally appeared long enough to cast its golden, dying light onto the west-facing slope of Mount Battie. Scraps of blue sky appeared, orange leaves began to shine. And a cardinal chipped and chipped from somewhere out of sight, shy bird, no doubt pecking at bird seed on the ground below the bird feeders.

Cardinal's chip intensifies
as the day's last glow
fades from the mountainside.