Rockland, Farnsworth Museum, Christina's House and many small harbors

Meadow Cottage - by the fire (I made using Ruslan tee-pee method and lots of NY Times, no great success but warmth)

Sarah and dad up in the big house ("Oversea"), me retired - all alone these days - to the little cottage.

A full 12 hours out today - a lot of moving in and around the coves of lower Down East Maine, a lot of lobster pots and crab salad rolls and buoys all in a row. And pine trees, fog rolling in and that peculiarly end-of-the-earth feeling of a tiny Maine harbor town (in this case Port Clyde where papa Wyeth - NC - first plopped his family) socked in by sea-obscuring gray. Finally, as we drove through and I tried to isolate what about this enveloping phenomenon felt familiar, I got it - Darjeeling of course. I hadn't been making it up - the two utterly remote locals are atmospheric sister-states.

As we drove south and home, we stopped off for a visit with a remote acquaintence of dad/sarah and his wife. Tucked into a little hamlet of houses - self constructed - in the woods. Sort of a noah's ark existence with goldfinches and jays hovering at the feeders, chipmunks all around the feet and not a sound of the outside world.

She's an artist - a true, knew-from-birth and pursued it artist. Didn't love her art, which resolved itself around a labrynth form (sort of serra-style), but her studio was a box of wonders. Not quite the artist's studio-of-old - with threadbare botany finds, birds nests and snake skins - but close. And so many projects including photo impressions and a botanists books recreated in etchings and a "travel journal" of exquisite, but ultimately trying, renditions of Ayer's Rock, dense writing and Australian topography.

Was exhilirating to be amongst that much creation and someone with the confidence to pursue the art, life, vein. Would love to witness a week of her getting up, to work - how she carries herself forward.

Supposed to stay foggy for the foreseeable. Ruslan took the weather, the travel Scrabble and the signal for my cellphone with him. And company in the little cottage by the beach.

C