Maine, an Award, a Reading, and Lettuce

We went on our annual overnight to Maine this week to hit and outlets in Kittery and Freeport, get organic lamb from the Noon Farm as we have for over forty years and buy good just picked apples from Sweetsers in Cumberland Center. They grow 51 types of apples, many of them heirloom varieties. We were pleased to discover they still had a few peaches left. I wrote about how tasteless supermarket peaches are with no flavor to speak of. Well, these were the way I remembers peaches as being, sweet, full of flavor and juicy. We won’t have any left by tomorrow morning. We got two kinds of apples. Woody, who got Cortlands for him, said they bear no resemblance to supermarket Cortlands. The first apple I had today, Paula Red, was sweet-tart with a complex flavor and moist flesh.Apples were one of the main things I wanted from Maine. I also got two pairs of the slippers I wear all year. One pair gets ratty by September. I got a bag of Lindt chocolates and boring stuff I needed that I hate to pay full price for, like sox. Woody wanted a warm feather quilt for winter. I got two cat kitchen towels.We stopped as we do every year to pick up natural lamb from Jean Noon and catch up.I don’t know how long Jean can maintain the farm after her husband died suddenly two years ago. I hope for a long time, but it’s rough. She went to Ireland with a friend and stayed on a sheep farm with a relative of her friend she was traveling with. Jean is a sculptor as well as a sheep farmer. We have one of her wire sculptors. She shows in galleries in Maine.It obviously rained some while we were gone. The cats were ecstatic to see us although Janet fed them and spent time with them. She left us a note by the door to the sunporch, that she’d closed, that there was an orb spider building a net across the doorway. If we’d have walked through, especially as exhausted as we were, one of us would have gotten a surprisingly large spider in our hair. Woody trapped it and put it in my garden, where it belongs. My mother taught me not to kill spiders if it can be avoided. They do good work for us. Yesterday we picked. I spent the morning processing beans [in sptie of what woody said ten days ago, the pole beans are still producing] and freezing peppers.Friday evening I had a packed reading at the Provincetown library. There’s a big old ship in that library. It’s a beautiful building that has been a church and a museum. They were giving me the Dorothea Rose award for a Cape writer with an international reputation. I was surprised how many came considering the Banner had the time wrong. Dorothea is the name of the ship inside that library. A number of friends came to the reading.Today I plant fall lettuce, escarole and endive. Woody will pull the paste tomatoes in the other tomato raised bed in my garden. I hope they will germinate and do well. Much depends on the weather. This week, Anderson is supposed to finally replace the windows in our dining room and in the bay window upstairs. We put down a deposit in late July.   I am worried they will put it off again because they need three dry days and we’re supposed to get rain from Florence on Tuesday.Tonight we eat the first of our winter squashes, a butterkin, mix of butternut and some other kind of winter squash, probably a pumpkin from the name. It’s round like a pumpkin but beige and not large. We’re still catching up from the trip. I had to prepare for the reading yesterday, so while I unpacked, lots of things are still undone. My office and bedroom are a mess. I also need to freeze more peppers.