Maine is Heaven! Maine is Hell!

 I know, I know. You see "part one" as part of a blog title and get scared. It's such a commitment, and we hardly know each other. But don't worry it will either be a fun trip or a quick divorce.  Yard sale season in Maine. This year it started in May and ended around the second week of November. The start was delayed until we got to a certain level of reopening  due to the virus. The actual opening, as well as the ending, is unofficial and is dependent on the weather. At the start of the season there would always be a sale or two each Thursday, with still more on Fridays and Saturdays. Seldom would there be any on a Sunday. What do you do in Maine on a Sunday? Basically breath. Most things are closed, except for corporate run businesses, but the people working there are generally not happy about being there and being forced to provide a higher level of customer service than they themselves are used to. Having been stuck in our home for an extended period going to yar

 A few months ago, as I began my banishment from Brooklyn, Lisa and I were sitting in our living room relaxing.  There is no television as we use it for reading, listening to music, and strange as it sounds: we talk to each other. Slowly we became aware of a scratching noise coming from our chimney, this was followed by a chattering; which I wrongly thought was coming from some birds taking shelter in the chimney.  This is kind of like when you hope that the grinding sound in your car is going to go away. And it usually does just before your tire goes flying off into the next lane. After consulting with my neighbors (who are both my gurus and jailers during my captivity) it becomes apparent that we have a case of the raccoons. Now raccoons are cute, if you are watching them in a nature film, a cartoon, or in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies; but in real life they are the bringers of ticks, property damage, rabies or at the very least some really painful bites that will lead to rabies

When I moved to Maine there were things I was expecting and there were things that nobody told me about. The weather, yes, I wanted to live someplace cold in the hopes of beating out or at least mitigating the effects of climate change. However, nobody warned me about the sultry summers and the black flies and mosquitoes that would form an angry halo around me looking for the one spot that I neglected to bug spray. The love for blueberries was self-evident, and I can understand the obsession for donuts which seems to run through all of New England; they love, I mean really love their donuts. I also knew that I would not be able to have the convenience of a dozen or more stores that were open twenty-four hours mere blocks from my house. Nope! In my town after eight in the evening the streets are deserted as if the inhabitants have shuttered themselves in awaiting a nightly attack of vampires. Let me be clear we are at the north end of America and everything is endued with a feeling of b