This morning we'll be heading back to Portland, and home, and regular life. Tomorrow T will start work on a new building site, and I will drive to Monson, a turn-around that will require some extreme laundry contortions. So we can't procrastinate much: within a couple of hours Chuckie will once again be amazed by the wonders of travel.

Over the course of these long and formless days I have read hundreds of pages of Dos Passos and Berryman, plus most of two Louise Penny mysteries. I've revised a manuscript and written a new epilogue poem. I've gotten up late and taken naps and gone on long walks and prepared semblances of meals. Tom has read, slept, sorted prints, taken new photos, gone on long walks, and eaten semblances of meals. Around the edges we've done the bare minimum of cleaning, zero laundry, and very little useful work. We've enjoyed the company of our entertaining and well-behaved cat pal, and we've visited with our old friend every single day. We've stared out our back window into the most beautiful of seacoast views.

It's been a wonderful week--even a productive one, in a few ways--but time management was not a key feature, and I wonder how I'll manage to reinsert myself into clock world tomorrow morning. But for a few more moments I'm not going to think about packing or driving or washing clothes. A fire crackles in the stove. Chuck stares at the coffeemaker, with its perplexing spurts and burbles. Tom rolls over in the creaky bed. A deer pauses in the yard. Dawn paints sky and water. 

We're heading out very early this morning so we can catch low tide and walk over Bar Harbor's eponymous sand bar to the island that overlooks town. I should be back in the cottage by midmorning and will write more then.

 

I keep getting notes about how much people are enjoying these little videos. They are not quite the first movies I've ever made, but certainly I've not been in the habit. So I'm surprised, and amused, to find out that they're actually watchable. The question is whether this stupid blog platform will let me upload them. If you're getting an error message, stay tuned. I'll keep trying.

I made this one yesterday, around midday, at Wonderland, a park trail near Bass Harbor that peters out amid tide pools and stony rubble. I love clambering among the rocks, staring up at gulls or out into the coves, watching ducks and loons bob in the surf, picking up pebbles, fishing up snails from the tide pools. Peaceful and purposeless.

The rest of the day was equally satisfying and unspectacular. I helped my friend move some flowerpots into the barn for the winter. I roasted sweet potatoes and made Salisbury steaks. I worked on my manuscript . . . and I wrote what I think will be its final poem. (This last accomplishment is in fact spectacular, but only to me.)

Acadia is famous for its spectacular coastline, but the freshwater views are also magnificent. This is Jordan Pond in a stiff wind, framed by the two hills known as the Bubbles. I also filmed you a glimpse of the bog, and the day's moody clouds.

We walked for a while along the lake, then struck off into the woods on a 2-mile loop-climb among moss and granite cliffs.

Briefly the skies brightened, then morphed back into wind-whipped shadow.

The hike was good, as was my post-hike grilled-cheese sandwich at the Thirsty Whale (I am not making that up, honest). And then we wound our way back to the cottage, and enthusiastic Chuck, and leek and potato soup for dinner.

**

Now, as dawn fingers the horizon beyond the cove, the lobster boat hiccups into life and putts off into its daily round. I don't know what we'll be doing today, other than going out for breakfast with our friend. I need to figure out something or other to make for dinner, preferably involving the sweet potatoes in our pantry basket. I bet we'll go for another walk, as the weather is supposed to deteriorate tomorrow, but I don't know what that walk will be. It's interesting to feel so idle and unplanned, yet also to be reading and revising, prepping for a class, making arrangements with Teresa and Jeannie for our next Poetry Lab Notes post. The days are slow and loose but I am not doing nothing.

I finally managed to get that Ship Harbor video to load, so here it is--a replacement for any newer photos because we didn't visit the park yesterday. Instead, we spent much of it doing this and that for our friend . . . well, mostly Tom doing this and that, tacking up sagging insulation, lugging trash, moving a toolbox, and other such little chores, while I messed around in the garden. Other than that, and making a bolognese sauce for dinner, my biggest accomplishment was revising a chunk of Awake at the Olympus. This actually did feel like a major step--my first real run-through of the manuscript in which I was able to see it with any sort of clarity. I never find it easy to revise at the manuscript level (rather than the individual poem level), but I'm learning that a linked narrative has its own special blinders.

Today we're going out for a hike somewhere, though I don't know where yet. But no one is in a rush . . . slow waking, slow coffee, an idle fire in the stove. The lobster boat putts across the cove. Clouds puff along the horizon. Chuckie crunches his chow.

Sorry I'm a bit late writing to you this morning, but the blog platform has been recalcitrant, the wood stove has been grumpy, and Chuck slept in instead of squeaking Breakfast, breakfast, breakfast! and licking my eyelids at 4:30 a.m.

For some reason the blog does not want to post the photos I took yesterday, but finally it has decided you can look at this picture of Chuck on the screened porch being amazed by a robin. He also had the thrill of seeing his first-ever turkeys yesterday. As far as Chuck is concerned, vacation is fabulous on all counts--visitors! birds! everyone home!--though he remains suspicious of the coffeemaker.

We didn't go on any extravagant hikes yesterday, partly because we were lazy, partly because trails were still sodden from the previous day's rain. But we did drive to Ship Harbor to clamber over rocks and watch the grebes and the eiders dive. I took a short video of high-tide waves crashing on granite, which apparently I'm not permitted to share with you (this blog platform is in a bad mood), but maybe you'd like to look at some lichen instead.

When I wasn't outside I was reading books, doing some mild cooking, taking a yoga class with my friend. I did pound out a little schoolwork, but not much. All day long the clouds were moody and beguiling, and last night's sunset was a stunner. And then I slept all night like I'd been pole-axed. Which is to say, vacation is going quite well so far.

Hey, the big news around here is that Chuck is a champ about vacation. First, he spent the three-hour car ride fast asleep in his crate . . . not a peep out of him the whole way, a vast change from Ruckus, who howled every moment he was in a car. Then, when he arrived, he carefully looked the cottage over, discreetly acknowledged his litterbox, greeted our friend for dinner, slept comfortably in bed all night, and now, this morning, he has enjoyed a good breakfast and is washing his face by the wood stove. He admits to being a little perturbed by the noise of an unfamiliar coffee maker, but otherwise he thinks vacation is extremely fun. (Pardon the unclear picture, but black cats are non-photogenic in low light.)

Tom had packed and loaded the car while I was in class, so we left almost immediately after I finished yesterday, which was good because the nights come in so early now and the island roads are overrun by deer. For years, hunting was prohibited on Mount Desert, so the deer population exploded. I think there is very controlled hunting in Tremont now, but so far it hasn't made much of a dent. The deer are everywhere, and they are not a bit shy. On a five-minute drive to pick up a pizza last night, I was stopped by four in the road at various places, all of them completely indifferent to traffic.

So here we are for a week, ensconced in the little cottage by the cove. Though the sky is beginning to lighten, the water is still invisible in the darkness. But when I open the porch door, I breathe in thick briny sea air and hear the first chuckles of the black ducks waking in the shallows.

Yet now I look up and see that night is rolling up its blanket--Swan's Island hunkers on the horizon, a long blue streak against the paler clouds, and the spruce-crowded coastline curls like crab claws around the little cove. The crackle of an engine kicks at the quiet--a lobster boat starting out on its trap rounds. And I can see that the tide is high, see ripples folding toward the shore, see jagged boulders shrinking into islets. Above everything, blue-gray clouds, low-slung and heavy,  as dramatic as a Turner painting.