Filling Up On Maine

How have you been, friends?  I have gone from one vacation to the next.  It sounds indulgent.  But when you receive an invitation to enjoy someone's house on the Maine coast, it doesn't matter when those dates fall -you go.  Even if you have to leave the day after you get back from being gone for ten days.  You would have done the same, right?

Thanks to my sister's ability to squeeze every last drop out of a good thing (and whose children are slightly older than mine) we took the scenic route there and back.  If we had stopped at every roadside farmstand, seafood truck, inlet and antique barn we would still currently be in the middle of nowhere.  It was so tempting though.  As was buying a Volkswagen Westfalia and camping out an extra couple of days so we could celebrate Bastille Day at Salt Water Farm.

When you can no longer share the good things in life with your mom -a lobster lunch, an ocean breeze, your children, it's a struggle to enjoy them yourself.  It taints everything.  I say to myself "You should be happy!"  And I retort, "But I don't want to!"  It continues on like this until I have a diaper to change or people to feed or a conversation with someone that thankfully steals me away from this inner dialogue.  But this week was a gift in its purest form.  And I could do nothing to spoil it.  We embraced the tired fog of the mornings and coupled them with buttery pastries in butterfly gardens.  We ate something from the sea every day, shared a bottle of wine every night; chasing dinners down with bowls full of ice cream   We filled up on each other.