Category Archives: Ogunquit

Our annual Columbus Day weekend in Ogunquit gets short shrift this year, as you will see soon enough. For now, though, a tease of two posts ~ this first one taken in one of my favorite secret spaces of the town. Enjoy these photos, as I didn’t get to take many more…

While spring has more obvious charms, and the aspect of a hopeful season to come, fall comes with its own set of enchantments. Falling leaves, slanting sunlight, and the cozy scent of burning wood wafting on the wind.

A perfect time to pause on a bench. It’s hard to hang onto the sun and the warmth at this time of the year, but there are pockets of both. If you’re lucky enough to find them, stop and take it all in. Nothing gold can stay.

And if you’re one of my favorite people who actually enjoys seeing me in photos, take these in now, because they’re the last of my appearance in that fair town this fall…

But that’s a story for tomorrow… for today, a few more of that time before it all went askew.

It started off overcast and gray, spitting a bit of rain, and blowing a rather cruel wind through my flimsy spring shirt. The season was late in coming to Ogunquit too, but rain or shine it was impossible not to let the town work its magic. Sometimes it worked faster than others, such as the morning we walked the Marginal Way.

On days of gray, there is a different kind of beauty at work, one in which texture and shadow become key, where the subtle palette of moss and lichens reveals its myriad complexities. The gradations, while softer, are just as richly varied if one takes the time to adjust and fine-tune our perception.

It’s a matter of perspective, of shifting the way you expect things to be. This is not an altogether unwelcome task, as it encourages a new way of appreciating the world.

So much joy is based upon that, and we should always be open to the opportunity for more joy.

While crested waves cap an undulating body of somber aquamarine, under-saturated in color but infinitely interesting in form and shape, the eye roams over what would often be lost or thrown away as a less-than-perfect day. When visiting, however, there can be no such things as a wasted day, and so we walked on, the promise of an early lunch in Perkins Cove leading us forward and around the final bend.

For some reason, we never spend much time in Perkins Cove. We pause there at the end of the Marginal Way, we cross through to get to the Ogunquit Museum, or we have an early lunch in lieu of a late breakfast – but in and of itself the Cove has never been a designated destination.

Sometimes, as on this day, we take it in and inhabit the moment, as I devour a plate of oysters and a trio of fish tacos at MC Perkins.

As we ingested our meal, the entire day transformed itself. The clouds had blown far off-shore, the sun had come out, and the skies were revealed in their truest, bluest form.

The ocean lit up as if from within – every imaginable shade of blue and green and absolutely everything in-between. Against the shore, the lime green freshness of the first flush of spring foliage – tender and shiny and new – was the brightest it would be all year.

It was a fleeting moment, a special time. Most of us don’t realize that as it’s happening. We don’t think of the fact that this is the only time of the year that it will be like this. In a way, every day and every moment could be seen as such. It wasn’t something I thought about much, and outside of occasionally contemplative moments like this, I still don’t. Not enough as I should, anyway.

The way back along the Marginal Way always seems shorter and quicker to traverse. In the sun, it also seems more vibrant and alive. The difference is profound, and the time for subtle quietude is broken by the pounding surf of the incoming tide.

Only a few tiny flowers, sheltered in a shaded nook and protected from the wind, convey the soft way the morning began. These flowers are so little they go unnoticed by most passers-by, and I have kept their location secret so that they remain so.

Amid the shouts of excited children and reprimanding adults, in the sharp gusts of wind and the sparkling flickers of sun on the sea, only pockets of peace exist now. We walk through it all, slowing at the end, which is really the beginning, where it is warm and spring-like at last.

In this strange notebook, it is not quite clear where one should begin writing. The last page looks exactly the same as the first, and what’s in between is so empty, so vast, it is daunting at best and prohibitive at worst. Such emptiness can instill a fright so absolute that it has felled many more talented than me – and quite frankly that just means I have stupid, foolhardy, careless and crazy resilience. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. On this day, it has broken the blank page, as I sit in a piano bar in Ogunquit.

My writing, a somewhat anti-social activity that I will eventually put down in favor of conversation with a few new friends, is accompanied by the singing of a growing group of gentlemen and a few ladies, who gather around the piano and regale each other with Broadway classics and standard chestnuts that withstand the test of time. They sing of love and romance, of loss and grief, of times long gone and times yet to come.

I write in this simple notebook, and it suddenly strikes me as old-fashioned – because no one seems to write by hand anymore. People don’t even use full words, much less full sentences. It’s all acronyms and abbreviations, but I pine for the completeness of a phrase and a sentence, or the simple glory of a complete word, spelled out in its entirety, sprawling across the page, unfettered by character-limits or miniscule text screens.

My lament is interrupted by the growing crowd. In a few minutes, the spaced has filled up, and suddenly every table is full. People angle and vie for the next available spot in jovial spurts of polite anticipation. I put this notebook away and engage with those around me. There are too many ways of distancing ourselves from each other. Usually it’s on a smart phone, hunched over, head down, and oblivious to the world. I don’t like that. I want to lift my head to the lilacs, inhale the richness of the spring around us, or simply say hello to a friendly stranger.

Here, in Ogunquit, I tend to put the phone down. I return to pen and paper, or I simply take it all in. There is too much to experience – the sights, the sounds, the food – and every sense should be poised to take it all in.

Too often I find myself dulling my appreciation of these things by scrolling through my FaceBook feed or Tweeting out some nonsense while the world spins so gorgeously around me. In Maine, I get back to the real world, and its accompanying simplicity and joy.

As I walk back to the guest house, I take my time and examine all the flowers along the way. In the past, I used plants as guideposts, recalling where I needed to turn with a sweet stretch of honeysuckle or the fading leaves of a daffodil patch.

Lining the path to our home-away-from-home is a hedge of lilacs. They make a fine marker, their fragrance written in the sky.

It’s one of the few places on earth where I don’t feel any pressure to dress to impress.

That doesn’t mean I don’t get dolled up for a fancy dinner now and then, but it does mean I don’t often feel the need.

Unless you dress like I do, you can’t know what a relief that is.

One of the best parts of this year’s trip to Ogunquit was the opportunity to see friends from all around the world. This weekend we were lucky enough to have Eileen and Raf (from Toronto) and Eric and Lonnie as our dinner companions. Though we cherish our time alone (and it sometimes seems that Ogunquit is one of the only places that affords such intimacy) Andy and I most certainly enjoy the friends we’ve made in that Beautiful Place By the Sea, and sometimes only those who love Ogunquit as much as we do understand what that’s like.

It’s wonderful when such a happy place is inhabited by such great people ~ people who have become like family from a far-away home.

The first thing that greeted us was the scent of lilacs. It marked a gorgeous beginning to our Memorial Day weekend in Ogunquit. The later arrival of spring, coupled with cooler temps, allowed for the lilacs to be at the height of their bloom period. Some years just work out that way.

It wasn’t just the lilacs that were in bloom – as evidenced here – but they were the most fragrant of the bunch, and they stole most of the glory.

For this initial OGT entry, I’ll cut the words short and allow the flowers to tell their story.

After visiting Ogunquit for fourteen years, I still find new things to love about the town, and this Memorial Day weekend there were a few more jewels to uncover. Before writing those posts, however, I need a moment to collect myself and get over the post-vacation blues. There’s no better way to do that than to indulge in a few backward glances.

While sun and warmth is sometimes elusive this early in the season, when you’ve experienced it once, you never forget it.

Ogunquit is a place of beauty, a place of peace, and a place of love – no matter what the season.

Sometimes, things get cheeky there, yes, totally starkers, and sometimes not so much. Butt… sometimes…

The whole world, in the drop of an ocean.

Spring is probably my favorite, but summer comes close, and fall, well, fall is just as magical as spring.

There are secrets here, wonderful secrets, some that are only revealed with time, some that are never revealed at all.

There are surprises too.

It is a place for family – one of the first beaches I remember, in fact, from a family vacation.

It is a place for friends.

Food, glorious food.

There is a lighthouse nearby, and even in the rain things are beautiful.

Always, there is the water. There are the memories… and there will be more.

O Beautiful Place By The Sea… How my heart longs to be with thee… Clearly I’ve read too many Shakespeare sonnets of late, but the sentiment is true: I wish to return to Ogunquit. Our annual spring trip is a couple of months away still, so I’ll have to pine for a few more weeks, but that glorious shore is within mental sight, and I can almost taste the lobster on my tongue, the salty sea spray in the air. Cries of seagulls echo in my head, and the clanging of a flagpole in the gusty shore breeze sounds happy memories.

This will mark our 14th year of visiting the gorgeous Maine shoreline, where we have always found a sense of peace and calm. I used to think it was just the fact of being on vacation and out of work, with no schedule and an open few days of freedom and unstructured casual living, that caused such a euphoric state, but after all this time it’s clear that something else is at work. If it were only that, we’d find such joy every weekend, and the simple fact is that no other place in the world conjures what Ogunquit can.

Here are some parting glimpses of our fall weekend in Ogunquit, where we took leave of the Beautiful Place By the Sea for another year. It’s usually one of our sadder departures, as we know we won’t be back until the spring, and there’s that whole mess called winter that must pass first. But the colors are rich, and we were sent off with the flaming beauty seen here.

This coming weekend marks the big Halloween celebration in Ogunquit, but they were already gearing up for it when we were there a couple of weeks ago. This fun display puts a witty and bewitching spin on our obsession with texting. My Mom asked me to take a few photos of the display, so these are for her.

It took at least three men to position this 900-lb. pumpkin so it could be carved out and carved up. Once it was propped up properly, the artisans went to work on conjuring the face you see before you. In a few short hours it went from the slightly-warped ribbing that signifies a giant pumpkin to this funny facial facade filled with two endless rows of teeth. Onlookers (including my Dad, if you look to the top right of the photo below, he’s studying the progress from a balcony) stopped to watch the scene unfold from the Marginal Way.

Dad also thought to ask the carver for a few of the seeds, which were being dumped into a large garbage bin. Others followed suit.

We toyed with the idea of planting some, but there’s no way we have anywhere near the amount of room, sun, and heat required for such a squash to reach the monster proportions of something like this.

Besides, we’ve had trouble moving furniture that weighed half of this.

The final product, glowing magically in the cool night of an Ogunquit fall. He (or she) has got a great smile.