Tuesday, July 27, 2010

While I was away on the mainland today, leaving with Ethan at the usual 7AM on a day that was cloudless in the entire state of Maine, and finding on the mainland that I’d left the lights on since driving down in the fog last Wednesday from Phippsburg with David and Tony following behind, draining all there was in the battery, producing no sound at all when I turned on the ignition, thinking it could have been worse and I’d left the keys on Seguin, and being grateful that Ethan hadn’t disappeared yet so he could give me a charge, France stayed behind once again; a good thing so that at least the visitors that Ethan brings out at 11 can see all there is to see.  He’s got a fishing trip tomorrow so we changed the schedule.  Anyway, Darko and his mom Naida were supposed to be coming today but now hope to make the trip next week.  And there were others who came ashore.  Who knows how many we miss on Wednesdays.  Maybe we should leave a separate guest book out on the porch where we post a sign when we go ashore saying, sorry we missed you.  (There’s one now in the gift shop.)

So the day didn’t get much better for me, spending a lot of time in the morning trying to find parts to finish the knobs and plates and spindles on the two bedroom and two closet doors in the guest quarters going from hardware store to the locksmith in Brunswick and on to several antique shops..  I have to have some time to browse flea markets and that’s not going to happen immediately.

It was like coming home, to be back.  I know why France doesn’t want to leave.  We caught her swimming in the cove as Ethan and I came around the point and into view.  Lugging the stuff up the hill is always an ordeal and the only thing that gets easier about it is that you remember where the flat rocks are coming off the beach onto the steps that lead up to the lawn that leads to the ramp that ends at the car on the tram, which you load and then get to operate.  That’s such a trip.  I feel like I’m Lost in Space on some outpost running some primitive beast.  But then you have to unload it at the top and put everything away.

It was just pleasant enough at the picnic table to enjoy the fresh crab cakes from Gilmore’s, heated for 15 minutes in a preheated 350 degree oven, and a simple salad of baby romaine lettuce, fresh picked from the garden.  I’ve developed a taste this summer for Oyster Bay sauvignon banc from New Zealand and it went perfectly.  But the big draw was the sun setting in such a clear sky exactly behind Mount Washington, 86 miles away in New Hampshire.  We’ve seen it before but never backlit like this.  It was perfectly outlined and clear.

While France was taking some of the visitors up to the top of the lighthouse today, she told me, as we watched the suns rays disappear, she carried up a bowl wrapped in a dishtowel.  A man asked when they reached the bottom why she didn’t have it anymore.  She had left the dough for the bread she was making up inside the lens to rise.

Before I’d gotten two pages read of the New York Times that I’d purchased at the grocery store not thinking that it would be Science Times today and not the Dining Section, France called out that it was happening.  Two nights ago the moon rose full as could be in the east just after the sun set in the west.  Last night the same thing happened but it seemed a little less full.  Waxing moon.  But tonight it seems fuller once more and rising more north of where it was a month ago.  Is this as it should be?  Isn’t the moon on the same orbital plane as the sun?

Regardless, as it rose, because it was a cloudless sky, it was a fiery red ball.  We’d retired from one side of the house after the sun set, to sit on the porch on the other side of the house.  The sea and the sky were dark because the sun had set but the moon was a bright red ball of fire, full in the rays of the sun by its position in the sky.  Have I seen this before?  With the naked eye, or in my case the ones that see through progressive lenses, there appears to be the face of a classic female with a circle of a smile and wide eyes kind of a surprised female Santa.  But with the binoculars, the dark spots are just blotches.  Have I ever seen it this close?

It reminds me of a time when France and I stayed out late in Gail’s garden on Vieques under a full moon we could swear we were tanning beneath, listening to the wild horses graze on the grass below.  The moon litup the sky there and made it appear an eerie reversed kind of daylight.  But tonight it was a fiery ball in the darkness.  If there were no pollution in the atmosphere, the moon would appear on the horizon as the same white light we see when it is overhead.  It would send all the colors of the spectrum back to earth and not just the ones that can come through chemical particles that are in sufficient quantity as to affect the appearance of the reflected light through more of the earth’s atmosphere, along it’s surface, to the horizon.  It almost makes me want to start smoking again.