Portland - I
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We got away for two days of the weekend. Several years ago Marie, another of the art teachers, had let us use her condo in Portland ME for a weekend and then a week at the beginning of the summer. It's a pretty cool place to go to get away for a weekend, and we made reservations for the night at a Comfort Inn in South Portland.
On the way there we stopped at the Crate and Barrel outlet in Kittery. Kittery is the first town in Maine; it is 75 miles from Boston, apparently just far enough away from major retail centers to be a center for outlet stores. Once upon a time there were outlet stores at factories, but now, you know the deal. On the Sunday of Labor Day weekend the parking lot at the place we wanted to go was packed, and that was after crawling along for half a mile to get to it. We drove back out to Route 1 and went two parking lots up the road before we found a place to leave the car. We weren't by any means the only people walking along the highway from one mini mall to another. It's still Maine; between two parking lots was a tidal inlet with a stream, mud flats, gulls, and seaweed. It was a little chance to do some walking outside, thanks to the filled parking lot.
The C&B outlet is the only place to get Marimekko fabric any more. Mekko was THE hot stuff in Cambridge in the '70s, when Design Research was on Brattle Street. It's cotton, sixty inches wide, hand silk screened in Finland with big bold designs and bright colors. Well, yes, they have neutrals and earth tones, too. The C&B chain uses it for store decoration, and then rolls it back up on bolts and sells it at the outlet for $4.95 a yard instead of the full price of around $20. Sometimes they have little remnants, under a yard, by the pound. Today I got two yards each of three fabrics with big diamond shapes of colors grading into each other. One is burgandy, magenta, and red-orange; one is gray, yellow, light orange, and light violet; and the third is smaller diamonds in reds, oranges, and green-brown. Maybe I can get some short sleeved shirts done before it's too cold to wear them.
We got back on the highway, dropped our suitcases off at the motel in South Portland, and went a few stops up the road to the Maine Audubon Society's Gilsland refuge in Falmouth. A woodchuck was chowing down on fallen apples behind the headquarters building. Avoiding the poison ivy, we walked out to the edge of the salt marsh and saw black-bellied plover, unidentified small shorebirds, and egrets (probably snowy). Back through the woods there was a redstart and a yellowthroat, and -- oops, what's that that just landed, almost as big as the crows that are keeping a wary eye on it, with the very streaky breast? A hawk -- probably Cooper's, I guess.
Back in Portland we looked and looked for a place to have supper. Restaurants in Old Port were telling people there was a half hour wait for a table for two, and we kept walking, down to the street along the harbor, where the Bakehouse Cafe had immediate seating. We would have been OK just with a bowl of soup and some of their bread, but we ordered a cup of soup and a main dish each, not knowing about the bread. All I can think of to describe it is "hand-hewn." It came in slices three times as thick as storebought bread, whole wheat, filled with sunflower, pumpkin, and poppy seeds. I'm sorry to gloss over the main dish, which was excellent too, but the bread is reason enough to seek it out again.
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