Three weekends ago (would that be April 12?) we went to a Native American arts festival at Bowdoin College. By now we’ve been to a few events like that, so some of the vendors look familiar, and some of them even recognize us.
The thing I remember most about this one is one pre-teen girl dancing to the drumming, gracefully, lightly, unselfconsciously, and totally in tune with the music. It looked as though she had been dancing to that kind of drumming all her life and if you asked she would say, “that’s just what you do when you hear drumming, how can you stand still?”
Joe Dana was carving little wooden turtle key fobs. Arlene bought one, and I talked to him for a while about snow snakes, of which he had several for sale. I took a picture of them and his walking sticks, but it’s pretty blurry:
We had lunch in downtown Brunswick and walked another block to Gelato Fiasco, an ice cream place that underwrites on Maine Public Broadcasting, just to say that we recognized them from the radio spots. Arlene asked for a taste of one of their ice creams and the guy asked me if there was any I wanted to taste. I said yes, I was curious as to the Vidalia Onion ice cream. He said, “It’s pretty intense.” I think they may have made a mistake in creating that flavor, much as I like J P Licks’ cucumber ice cream. But why call yourself “Fiasco” if you’re not willing to try making some daring flavors?
Arlene wondered if we could get out to the ocean. Midcoast Maine (that’s more or less from Portland to Bar Harbor) has long peninsulas running north to south with long bays in between, so the through routes are about 20 miles from the open ocean. I wasn’t sure how far we would have to drive to get to ocean scenery, but we set out down the road to Harpswell and found this:
We couldn’t have asked for anything that looked more like Maine coast.
Lovely pix of the Coast. Look at the trees !