A Tick-Borne Summer

As I listen to my surroundings, I hear the song of many birds, the hum of summer traffic on the road, and the wind moving through the thousands, millions, of trees on our land here in Maine. Every year, later than I would like, the leaves come back to the trees after months of absence. One day, they are tiny speckles of lime green, and the next, there are millions, billions of lime green leaves dancing in the air. Just before that, the birdsong comes back with the birds, and the silence of a wind-whipped winter is over. I love sitting outside in the wind, in the sun, in nature, in this tiny sliver of peace and paradise: a small house, green, with a nice porch, and plants all around.

I started feeling really crummy two Tuesdays ago, but couldn’t place the feelings; was it bad hummus? Had I drunk pond water on my Monday swim when it was so hot and clear the only thing to do was to swim? Or perhaps I had done that on my Tuesday swim, when conditions were similar only cloudy? On Tuesday evening I started to feel like there was a rock in my belly, or a beach ball, or something that was taking up all the space that I usually fill with tasty things like roast chicken or tacos or muffins in the mornings. My belly also became swollen out like a little kid’s. Usually my tummy is fairly flat with its fair share of mid-forties curves and wrinkles. I have been exercising alot on my elliptical and feeling proud of being stronger and my tummy flatter. But no longer. On Tuesday evening I tried to eat dinner as normal but barely ate half of it, saying I didn’t feel super well. I thought: tomorrow will be better.

Wednesday came and went and the stomach trouble became worse: it hurt very much and was very uncomfortable, and with it came this weird back pain across the whole top half of my torso. I had a hard time standing or sitting for long periods of time. If I could lean back, I was ok. If I could lie down, that was better. I was annoyed.

On Thursday I thought I caught the chill of a cool day that followed a few hot ones, but as I drove home from the gallery I recognized the familiar feelings of a fever. By the time I made it home, I was shaking, cold, and feeling rotten. So began my days of spiking 101 degree fevers (high for me as my normal temperature is about 97 degrees), breaking fevers into crazy sweaty messes, and the realization that something was wrong with me.

On Friday I managed to get in with a random doctor who told me that she thought I had a stomach bug that was roaming around. I asked her if she would run a tick panel just in case, and she said yes, so we did. I took the rest of the day to chill out, thinking I might be feeling better til the fever started again.

On Monday, I went to my regular doctor and told her I was worried I had a kidney infection and she said she was worried I had Lyme disease. Luckily, the tick panel was already being processed, and on Tuesday, she called and gave me the gross and terrible news that I have anaplasmosis and Lyme disease, together.

Blech.

She also told me I have to take antibiotics for at least 30 days and they are these fun ones that cause you to sunburn so easily you can’t really be out in it. She apologized for ruining my summer (I blame the tick, personally). And since Monday I have been taking two types of antibiotics, twice a day, and probiotics 1 or 2 hours later. I felt better on Thursday, and then yesterday I felt bad again. Today is Saturday, and I am very tired. I wonder if I am now feeling tired from not eating enough, because one of the things with that stomachache from Hell is that my appetite has gone on vacation. Somewhere good, I hope.

One of the strange emotional responses to these illnesses is that I am determined to not sweat the small stuff. That feels good, like I am doing something right in a situation that I cannot control at all. Anaplasmosis is super scary and can kill you in various ways (spooky!) if not treated early, so I am proud of myself for going to the doctor. So in the vein of not sweating the small stuff, I am trying to be a nicer version of myself, more understanding, and quieter. I am trying to spend time thinking about what I think about the state of the country, but not react to it as much as maybe I have been. I am thinking about the importance of creating art in times of dread and sadness, and trying to be participatory in that process.

The energy level is the challenge. Fatigue is real with Lyme and anaplasmosis. I haven’t felt this fatigue in a long time, but I am not unfamiliar with it; legs made of lead or concrete, not strong, dragging through space. I would like to go swimming or maybe just sit in a lake. Today is hot and I hope to fill up our cowboy pool with the cold, cold well water that comes from deep within the earth. I plan to put it on the leechfield, on top of the septic field; I think it’s mostly harmless to that process going on below. Last year when I filled up a giant pot to dip in on the hottest days, the water was so cold it was shocking! (There are photos to prove it!) This year, I will fill up the stock tank and let it sit for a day or two to warm up before I dunk myself in. Over by the leechfield I have planted lots of medicinal herbs and witchy plants, as MOFGA told me I could plant shallow-rooted perennials. Over there we have hops, madder, weld, motherwort, marshmallow, thyme, yarrow, blue vervain.

Ho hum. One of the good things about having peaceful, slow hobbies is that when you are slow yourself, you can still do them. Today I want to work on jewelry, so I am about to head to the studio to do just that. I am working on a series of rings, and I need to order some materials for a custom project I am working on. One of my recovery plans is to wake up early and write in the mornings, as I have much more energy when I wake up than when the afternoons roll around. By then, I feel quite ploddy, like I am going through mud, mentally and physically. These illnesses don’t make me sad, exactly, just tired and a bit disappointed. I like having lots of energy, high vibrations, and excitement. I am sure those will all come back; I just have to let this ride out.

Current projects are:

1.Working on the second edit of the book and finding all the photos that go into it

2. Power rings of various interesting stones and two pendants for a show in August

3. Finishing the third quilt in a series, photographing the three, and sending them to their destinations. The third one has no home, so I wonder who will claim it?

I am drinking coffee now, still listening to those same sounds but the wind is stronger, the sun higher in the sky, the air is warm and dry. My living room is orange and bright with sunlight. We are on new journeys in this life, new career paths, so much exploration! We asked for an adventure and we got one! Who knows what the future holds, but we have managed to pay for everything so far, and I can only hope the blessings continue and continue to grow. Every night I look at the vast spiderweb of stars and ask them to keep helping us, protecting us, guiding us. The Big Dipper right now is just above the driveway and, every night, reminds me that “my cup runneth over” and ain’t that the truth.

I hope you are well, wherever you are, and if you are not, that you can figure out some ways to make it work while you are sick.

xxP

Laughing & Clapping Her Hands

It was a second floor, garage apartment in Hyde Park, in Austin. She moved there during COVID, sometime in 2020. She moved out of a house with people who had been friends who had become controlling and strange, into an apartment with a lease facilitated by a friend who was controlling and strange, but that is another story.

It was a second floor, garage apartment and you gained access by walking up a set of wide, wooden outdoor stairs. There was a landing, a tiny deck, at the top. There were a few plant pots with tropical plants, and a neat row of plastic Birkenstock shoes: colorful. There was a screen door and an inner, wooden door that was white with a small window. In it, she lived with her turquoise furniture, bone collection, shadow boxes, chandeliers made of old sets of silver and chains, and her plants. Her kitchen was small but lovely; everything was small and lovely. There were two rooms and a bathroom and a kitchen. One room was her bedroom, bedazzled with plants and specimens and interesting rocks, a chandelier in the corner. The other was a living room with a white leather hideabed, a round vintage plastic table, low to the ground, and two old chairs covered with interesting, faded fabric. In the corner was the preserved carcass of a roseate spoonbill, suspended in flight and hanging from the ceiling. There was also an antique dentist drill, complete with spittoon, which strangely had belonged to my first husband, years ago.

It was Texas in June, summer, hot, even in the morning. I was there in the morning, and we stood out on the small deck with the colorful shoes and tropical plants, and gazed out through the giant bushes that bordered the property, through their leaves, out to live oak trees and a pond in the center of the backyard. She said, “there is something weird in my eye. Like a cloud?” “There is a cloud in your eye? Both eyes? The same?” “No, just one, like a grey cloud at the bottom of my eye”.

Later it was discovered that her cancer had spread to her brain and that was when she had to start radiation and we didn’t get to come to Maine together, which I had been wishing for, but it is ok now that it didn’t happen. Earlier that spring we had gone to Galveston and stayed in an amazing apartment right on the beach, and ate at Gaido’s. Her face was a little swollen then, and she had no hair so she either wore fabulous hats or fabulous dresses with her bald head. It was the last Easter, and we didn’t know that. When she started radiation, they made her this crazy radiation face shield that she said she would bedazzle for Halloween that year. It really would have looked cool.

I will never forget the moment that I realized that she might have brain cancer, after breast cancer, lung cancer, and bone cancer. How exactly did she keep going so long? She is, after all, a miracle. Radiation made her mind muddled and she sort of forgot some things, but the most important things she valued stayed sharp. It was in October, before Halloween and her chance to bedazzle the thermoplastic radiation cap that her doctor told her that chemo had killed her, had destroyed her liver and she would soon die. She said that normal livers were like sponges, allowing substances to pass through them, and hers was like a rock. Quickly, her abdomen filled up with fluid and ammonia, there appeared little white glints, like lenses, in her eyes, and she died a month later. She told me that I had to start working in hospice, and I just finished my training and have my first patient. To be with someone who is dying is a great gift of mercy and trust, going both ways. Today I thought of her and saw her sitting in the corner in a hot pink dress, off the shoulder, bald head, laughing and clapping her hands. What a world. What would she think if she was alive today? I suppose she would be laughing and clapping her hands, about something.

Otoño y La Gracia

photo 5

This morning, it was autumn. I woke up at sunrise to the sounds of the street sweepers and noticed a copper light cast across the tops of the buildings and caught in the leaves of the trees. Cadillac Mountain, standing so stately at the end of the street, was highlighted by a glimmering sheath of coppery-gold-red-and-yellow very early this morning. The slant, or angle, of the light is so sharp now as the Sun’s light is bending around the curves of Earth! Take heed for soon it shall start to slip away…and away…and away.

photo 1

This is my bedroom, or at least, a part of it. I have spent some hours over the last few weeks decorating its nooks and crannies for winter. I have added tropical plants and candles and nicely smelling things. I have stared out the windows, wondering how it will change. I have thought about my own feelings of this house’s temporary feel: never have I felt that I will stay here for long.

photo 2

I ended up here on Saturday night: a club called the Oak and Ax in Biddeford, Maine. I watched some friends perform beautifully, and I watched a couple in paisley and beige dance. I watched young people dressed like the Beastie Boys sing space trip-hop. I spoke to a girl wearing a white polyester dress she had bought at the Goodwill-by-the-pound in Gorham. I smoked a cigarette with a man who sang like Stevie Wonder backed by synth beats. I danced, and was happy, because, beside my friends who I was attending the show with, I knew no one and was happy in a brief moment of true anonymity.

photo 3

Out beyond ideas

of wrongdoing and right doing,

there is a field.

I’lll meet you there.

Rumi

Fall is a season of overturning: of watching the colors of our landscape change before our eyes. We can feel the energy drain from the surface of the Earth to its undercarriage: the Sun begins to wane and the light disappears, the leaves turn red-orange-yellow-brown, and the wind becomes sharper and colder. We ourselves learn to spend moments feeling the cool wind blow on our faces and the warm sun shining on our backs for just a little while more. We can watch the clouds move in the blustery wind and hear it shake our windowpanes as the cold blows in off the water, and down from the North.

One of the themes of late, for me, is a feeling of letting go, of accepting new beginnings whatever they may be, and to try to say goodbye to a feeling of fighting for fighting’s sake. It is time to transition and to take off the battle garb: to look into your lover’s eyes late at night and see light flash and listen to your souls laughing. It is time to feel one another’s skin between sheets and hold another’s head in your hands: appreciating in moments the beauty of hair and skin and bone. It is time to hold hands while sleeping, and to be tender in whatever moments you are lucky enough to express it.

photo 4

“I do not understand the mystery of grace, only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.”

Anne Lamott

Racing and Hunting

NSGB1903PL13005

Early on a late September morning: foggy, damp, warm but a slight chill lingers. A very quiet town: also very dark. Slowly a few cars creep along the streets: coming, going, searching, watching. It is the time when everyone and everything is calming down and people don’t seem to know what to do with themselves. Rushing here, running there, overexerting energies to fill now empty spaces.

TWELVE

The five colors blind the eye.

The five tones deafen the ear.

The five flavors dull the taste.

Racing and hunting madden the mind.

Precious things lead one astray.

Therefore the sage is guided by what he feels and not by what he sees.

He lets go of that and chooses this.

It Goes In And Out Like Anything

night walk To be melancholic is to wake up at 5 in the morning to the sound of the street sweeper and notice the entire town bathed in deep, grey fog, and to worry about the cold and the lack of sun, while simultaneously basking in the glory of clouds traveling in and out of your windows as the moments of the early morning pass quickly by.

Also, it is to feel a pain in your heart that makes you leap toward a pond and find the baby frogs peeping on a late summer afternoon, or notice the multitude of colours in viburnum flowers that race toward the sky, pluming from branches of a very tall tree outside a tea house with a newly-built, Japanese-style water garden.

It is a palpable sense of love: one that you hold in your hand as if it were a roasted chestnut on a cold day, keeping it safe inside your hands, warm, suspended in animation, knowing that love is multi-layered, a palimpsest without limit. trees 2 Melancholy is noticing the light of late spring sunsets cast behind maple leaves, transforming them into a glowing mass of golden-green light that shifts in the wind, that shafts of sun pass through, temporarily blinding you in glory as you drive into the sunset instead of away from it.

Melancholy is the feeling of joy and poignancy that comes when the beauty of the natural world is so overwhelming you wish you could just bottle it, pour it into a cup and send it to the ones you love the most just so that they could see it and feel it, too. tool barn Melancholy is cigarettes smoked late in the night, in the morning really, while walking along a path on the shore, gazing out at fogbanks that cover up islands all in a row, breathing out, into the rain and fog, walking home, staring at the lights of houses and boats bobbing in the water, and hearing foghorns and the deep clanging bell noise of the buoys.

Melancholy is unlocking the door: a sideways glance at all of those who enter, wondering who will stay, who will go, who will sit and talk, who will break your chairs or smudge your walls with emotional fingerprints, and whether those smudges are dark and greasy, or golden, gilded and everlasting.

Melancholy is rhubarb and sweet peas, exploding with growth in spring sun, reaching ever upward against gravity, deep green, pungent, earth black, filled with earthworms, and the echoing call of wind chimes hanging in the branches of an apple tree.

Melancholy is sitting on an upholstered sofa that was brought in through the windows in the 1920s, and realizing how many people have sat here, just like you. tool barn 2   Melancholy is an antique vise, a ball peen hammer, a plane that exemplifies craftsmanship and care and engineering and appreciation and art, all at the same time; old locksets that turn with skeleton keys, and the stillness of many pieces of antique steel, all in rows, organized against the entropy of the outside world.

Melancholy are the crows: hopping and flying from here, to there, calling and cackling to all of us as we walk along, under them, noticing all the things that make life so beautiful and dark, so colorful and raw, so lovely, so visceral, and that passes us by so quickly, in the blink of an eye, blinded by the beauty of a sunny day. trees

Photodiary: Harbingers of a Maine Autumn…

We have entered the very beginning of the waning season: the light, less gold, more cottony-white, as I heard it described yesterday, slants sharply across the horizon and through the branches of trees. The swamp maples are already changing to red, the leaves are beginning to bleach, the seed heads on flowers dessicated, brown, crackled like bark or the wizened hands of an old woman, the reeds in the ponds are tipped with gold, no longer green from end to end.

Last year, one of my first posts here was of photos of my new, tiny town on the coast of Maine. Last year, everything was new and my life to come here was full of unknowns. Now, a year later, this place still surprises me every day with its dynamic change, its eccentric personalities, its size, and its amazing beauty. I think I am beginning to know it better.

dans garden end of august 2013 012 dans garden end of august 2013 013  dans garden end of august 2013 040 dans garden end of august 2013 043 dans garden end of august 2013 045    dans garden end of august 2013 063 dans garden end of august 2013 075 dans garden end of august 2013 081 dans garden end of august 2013 085 dans garden end of august 2013 094 dans garden end of august 2013 100

How Summer Ends…

rockefeller gardens 5Leaves beginning to disintegrate in the waning sunlight…

“The first week of August hangs at the very top of the summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. “

Natalie Babbitt

And here we are, again, another ending to another season: summer.

moglosMorning glories on parade!

Tonight I walked out of the restaurant with another week of summer under my belt. Summer, to me, has meant non-stop working: smiling, helping, bringing, doing, aquiesceing to peoples’ desires. Summer is a season of wants, sometimes fulfilled. Summer is a season when the population explodes: when your always sleepy town is transformed by people strolling in pistachio green or salmon pink trousers, people stopping in their cars or at least driving ever so slowly, as if creeping along a new road that has yet to be discovered.

rockefeller gardens 6Hidden views from Rockefeller Gardens

Whilst driving home, I noticed the outdoor temperature was 49 degrees: 49 degrees! Ever so cold for August; ever so cold for a girl who lived most of her life in a place when if it was less than 100 degrees in August, those types of low temperatures were considered a reprieve.

islesfordEnd of summer sunset from the Islesford dock

I have been writing here for almost a year: so much has happened over the last ten months. Most of the discoveries of the last almost-year have been reflective in nature: never before did I give myself the latitude of place to have time to think. This morning, when I woke, I noticed that the sun that daily streams through my front windows has bleached out my rendering of Shel Silverstein’s “Hector the Collector”, which is written in my slanting hand on the inside of a greeting card with the blazing emblem of “Let’s Get Drunk and Eat Waffles” on its cover.

rockefeller gardens 8Even lilies become caught in late afternoon misty rainstorms

My little house, so filled with light and creative projects, has been transformed from the tiny cottage it was when I moved in, to a jewelry studio with a small kitchen and bedroom. Everywhere, every surface indicates that an active artist lives here. The floor, messy, is covered with bits and bobs, the kitchen table-now-work-station is covered with silver wire, stones, pliers and projects halfway completed. On the counter lie Queen Anne’s Lace blossoms, drying in the salty air. On the floor below is a skateboard-cribbage board, now decorated with insects from the 1800s. In the window hangs an Egon Schiele print, some prisms, a steel block or two, a slide from a Magic Lantern, tins filled with magical objects of a lost art, a sea urchin skeleton, and some antique steel components that once belonged on the drawers or in the doors of someone, somewhere far away.

rockefeller gardens 3Stucco rusting, dripping, disintegrating

To the right is a tiny antique shelf from Germany, or maybe England, although its rendering of wildflowers makes me think of Heidi, up there in the mountains of Europe. On the shelf lies a strand of ivory: Indian, not African, brought to me by my father when I was a little girl, before ivory was entirely illegalized. Within the curves of the ivory necklace is a stone box, with a magnetic clasp. Inside the box is the surprise of cicada exoskeletons, their bodies green and wings a plastic, black, threaded delight of perfect cells, and the dessicated body of a hummingbird who once flew into the windows of the school in which I taught. He flew into the glass, hit his little head, and fell to the ground, dead. I put him in a tin of salt, and after a time, he became what he is now: an artifact, a beautiful, scary thing that will stay for all time. His feathers shine green and black and grey and brown: a miracle of suspended iridescence.

rockefeller gardens 1Gateway in the rain

One of the things to appreciate in this grand scheme of turning time, this period of peace and quiet and loneliness, for it is that to be sure, are the stars. Glorious and reaching, they spread from horizon to horizon on nights like this. Wherever you look, there are stars, and the backbone-like fuzz of another arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. A galaxy so far, far away, yet we are a part of it and see only the tiny fraction of what is ours, what is our own neighborhood, here from the surface of planet Earth. Tomorrow when I awake, again it will be sunny and the sunshine will glitter like shimmering pellets on the water’s surface. Again the water will be deep blue, and the sunshine gold upon it. Again will I wonder at the beauty of this place, the stillness coupled with unfathomable dynamism: this place of daily change, of growth, of beauty, of solitude, of trees, water, and earth.

rockefeller gardens 7Sleepy Lisianthus, reflecting cloud cover and covered with an afternoon dew

Time

nasturtium 2

Gone are my long, wistful days of winter-spring when all I had to do was work a little bit and play alot, traipsing through my tiny town in my black Bean boots, staring at the wind and the sun’s movements across the landscape.

cactus zinnia

Now it is summer and there are flowers everywhere and the grass is green! The air is hot, sometimes, the sun shines bright, and the days fly by. Tomorrow is July 23rd? How is this true? It seems only yesterday it was the beginning of May.

A couple of hours ago, I walked out of the restaurant in which I work, into the darkness of almost-midnight, and felt a chill upon the air. Realizing, in that moment, that summer is halfway over, and that the chill is slowly returning,will be slowly returning as the light begins to leave us again, made me think of how strange it is to live in a place where the weather is so dynamic that as soon as you get used to one feeling in the air, it will change into something completely different.

nasturtium

My days, at the moment, are spent working at one of three places. I feel so behind on making jewelry!! I feel like time is just slipping out of my hands: there is not enough of it! But oh well, such is the way of the summer. Yesterday I went to an amazing part at the 10 Spot Labs on Islesford and spent the afternoon with friends, sitting in the sunshine and under the shade of fir trees. I walked through a door that was floating in between two trees, I watched a girl skinny-dip in the ocean, I stared at strange fertility sculptures that decorated the hallway leading to a bathroom, I received a lovely compliment from the Compliment Booth, I laid down on a dock in the late evening and fell asleep, surrounded by friends.

Despite its pace, summer is a lovely time, isn’t it?

morning glory

Another Rainy Day…

IMG_1155

“If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again.”

Daphne du Maurier in Rebecca

Let’s talk about rain; Maine is truly a rainy state. After spending most of my adult life in Austin, Texas, land of almost desert-like plants and a serious lack of rain due to a ten year drought, when I moved away from Texas and to Philadelphia I had forgotten that these things called umbrellas existed. The first few times it rained, I was trapped outside sans-protection, and became soaked. Since living in Philly, I’ve adjusted and now have my own umbrella, striped with color, naturally, that, hopefully, travels with me on rainy days, protecting my head.

IMG_1258

I moved to Maine almost a year ago, in the midst of a bold and warm and sunny summer. I lived in a giant tent built in the basement of my parents’ house and spent most of my days there as I was very ill with shingles. Sometimes, I ventured out into the garden or down the road to the lake to swim. The summer was golden and light and even the breeze off the ocean was warm.

This year, however, is a rather wet year. As I sit here, at this moment, in the morning, having finished one cup of coffee and needing to get to work, I am listening to the rain fall, again, on the deck, off the picnic table, off the eaves. I am wondering if my plants will ever grow big and bushy with all this rain, all this lack of sunshine. I have to say that the consistent rain, interrupted here and there by sun, is rather similar to the wintertime darkness and absence of my favorite star.

IMG_1348

People say here that you must take Vitamin D to deal with the lack of light, and I think they are right. It is hard for me to understand how the sun can come out so few and far between; this is a place in which you feel so lucky and excited about sunny days that it’s as if everyone is outside all day long, soaking in sunshine with the knowledge that tomorrow, it may be grey and windy, rainy and cool again. Like today.

Yesterday was one of those days and I spent the whole day outside building a fence of peabrush. I am in the midst of a garden transformation, taking the blank slate which is the yard of my little house, and building an outdoor sitting space and green screens and veggie patches and flowerbeds. After all day in the sunshine, my shoulders and back were bright red and warm, I felt the strange chill of sunburn, I sat outside on the deck at night and looked at the few stars peeking through the thin, wispy nighttime clouds.

The parking lot next to my house is large and full of spaces demarcated by white lines. There is a yellow painted path, newly dubbed the Yellow Brick Road, that shows you how to walk down the steps to the water. At night, there are no streetlights and if you stand in the middle of the lot, staring upward through the power lines and beyond the trees, a whole world, a patchwork quilt of stars opens up before your eyes, each and every night. To the Northeast are mountains, silhouetted slightly against the nighttime sky, and everywhere you turn your head are more stars, clustered together and far apart, shining, twinkling brightly. Over the ocean rises the Moon, when we are lucky enough to have her, and she sits happily in the eastern sky as the nighttime passes.

IMG_1225

Last night, I lay about in my bed, curled up under a down comforter, flannel sheets and a woolen blanket, reading Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and imagining the scene set in the book, the scene of Manderley and its grounds and its epic loneliness, emptiness, romantic desolation, as set here, in Northeast Harbor, amidst the mansions of old wealthy families, the cold hallways set with beautiful artworks and conservative wooden furniture upholstered in salmon and off white silk, the kitchens larger than most houses I have lived in, empty for months, populated only for weeks. In the winter, I can pretend they are mine, or partly mine, anyway, and now have to realize that, just as the de Winters in the book, in the summer, the houses, and their ghosts, must awake. Are there creatures like Mrs Danvers in the houses in Northeast Harbor? Are there skeletons in closets and banshees wailing at the gates? As old rock walls begin to pitch and break apart, as pink paint peels off walls and old sinks rust, what happens to the families within? The people…who knows all the stories?

Such a spookiness and a subtle fascination, this rainy place full, now, almost, of its summer population, its summer people, summer not residents. Soon, the streets will be filled with people, Billionaire’s Island in full swing, mostly hidden behind heavy wooden doors, and behind leaded glass windows. Sometimes, I can see a glimpse of this old-fashioned life out of a mid-century novel, by catering parties in those beautiful kitchens, holding delicate antique china, staring out at the ocean from the patio, but most of the time, the wonder comes at night, under the covers, thinking about what it would be like to really live in a house like Manderley.

IMG_1243