Notes from Maine - 2025/07/06
The horses are nocturnal once more. They’ve been hanging out in the barn all day anyway, so I figured it was time to allow them to graze at night. The mosquitoes are worse at night, but the flies stay away. The little baby (Lilly) is the sweetest. The halter isn’t scary anymore for her. She still doesn’t like being led around. I’m trying to get her ready for the next time the farrier comes. At her age her feet don’t need much maintenance. It’s never the wrong time to learn about the farrier though. Picking up her feet and holding still are valuable skills. Some foals don’t get hoof work done until they absolute need it. The older they are, the harder the adjustment.
Mom will visit again soon and we have a ton of summer projects to work on. She enjoys keeping the gardens out front. We also have odds and ends to paint. She has been painting (walls, not portraits) for over seventy years. I wonder if that’s the secret to longevity?
In a few weeks, my sister will come up and maybe we’ll do some vacation-type stuff. If left to my own devices, I might do one or two recreational things per year. My favorite way to spend downtime is to engage in a nonessential project or just relax. My sister is much more of a “go do something” type of person. There are a few projects to do up at the camp (replace a faucet, add outlets to the gazebo) so maybe we’ll find overlap there.
I’m sitting on my porch—it’s the perfect spot this time of year. For the first decade I lived in this house, this porch was unfinished. It had pressure treated posts and an ancient door that hardly opened. My brother found a door at Hammond’s clearance sale in 2016 and told me I should have it. He was the one with the truck, so I said, “Bring it down if I need it so bad.”
He did. We put it in and then Mom started working on the planks and the ceiling. We wrapped the posts, put up some railings, and it became the perfect spot to sit on a summer morning. It’s also the best spot in the world to enjoy a good thunderstorm. Adirondack chairs from dad’s house finished the spot a few years ago. When Dad was “incarcerated” here during his rehab in 2020, he would always say, “It’s lovely out here. I don’t know why we don’t sit out here more often.”
I don’t know when the porch was added to the house. From the cellar, it’s pretty clear that the original house (1820) was just a simple rectangle, and the porch was probably added mid-nineteenth century when the stairs were moved and the kitchen was added. There aren’t a lot of photographs hanging around from that era. Still, I wonder if people sat on this porch a hundred and fifty years ago, watching for the occasional horse traffic on the road. I wonder who will sit here a hundred and fifty years from now.
I better go find something to get into before I nod off. It’s going to be a pretty day here.
