Taking the Long View
We’ve been enjoying a bit of a thaw over the last 10 days. February is when we start feeling like Winter’s slipping away so there’s an interesting tug between celebrating the cold weather by reading books, making hygge meals and spending time in the studio…and yearning for Spring by planning the gardens, solidifying Summer plans and figuring out the details for some of our building projects that will be starting up as soon as the cold breaks.
When the sun is warmest, we try to spend a couple of hours outside each day. Usually that involves skiing and snowshoeing but because the mid-west has taken more than its fair share of snow this year, we’re reduced to hiking and slipping on ice. I’ll do a grander post on exploring by foot in the future but for now, if you’d like to do some virtual hiking, these three sites have some terrific maps and descriptions of walks in our area: try Coastal Mountain Landtrust, One Minute Hikes with Aislyn from the Bangor Daily News and AllTrails.com (type Belfast into the search bar).
Gardens are a serious part of our world here at the Campground…it seems that we talk, plan, plant and harvest them 12 months a year. In the Fall, Steve buries all of the beds in a thick layer of seaweed (it decomposes by Spring and gives us incredible soil). Now is when our mailbox is stuffed with catalogues and we start the surprisingly contentious conversations about what we’re going to plant…it’s always a tug between ordering what we know and already love and something new that sounds incredible. Our goals for the garden are always the same…beauty, food for humans, birds, animals and insects, a bit of novelty and a whisper of whimsy…my I’m feeling poetic.
February feels short because we’re on the road a lot…mostly within the boundaries of Maine and it seems as though every trip is the harbinger of a snow storm. Fiber College and the Music Weekends bring a lot of talent together from some pretty hidden corners of Maine. For us, connectivity is more often a hug and a bowl of soup with the artists who will be down to the Coast in September.
When the lines are offering slow speed or no internet and cell phones only work if you’re standing in the corner of a bedroom that faces East, it’s easier and certainly more fun to sit together and work out the details of all of our projects. By the end of this month we expect to have the entire summer’s Artist in Residence schedule in place (expanded and exciting I might add) and the September schedule well underway.
Thursday we head to Millinocket, Saturday we’re taking the Love Train from Unity to Thorndike (doesn’t that sound just too cool?) and next week we’ll be in Cushing, Friendship and Rockland…I’ll take pictures to share!
Bye for now,
Astrig & Steve
