June 21: Summer Solstice

This afternoon as I was driving home from a meeting, the car thermometer read 90 and the sun was high in a deep blue sky. Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year. After this, as one friend put it, it's all downhill till the Winter Solstice. I reveled in the lush steaminess of the day.

Besides being significant on the world's seasonal calendar, this day is also important as my niece Nola's first birthday. What a powerful day on which to be born, the day when the sun god is in his prime, when the sun has reached its apex. Surely she will go through life fired by an inner solar power.

I was musing on the luxurious heat and light of late afternoon, the richness of the foliage on this humid Midsummer's Day, when I noticed an odd-shaped cloud scrawled on the sky's blue screen stretching over Mount Battie. The cloud looked like a big, white C. Immediately I thought of certain mountains I've seen in Arizona desert country (and in other places out west) upon which proud locals have painted the first letter of their town's name. A mountain right outside Parker, Arizona bears a large white P, for example. This seems to be a common practice, and rather than defacing the mountain, it serves in its way as a link between landscape and community.

So even though Mount Battie bears no resemblance to the arid, patchy hills of the west, today the weather  shaped a fluffy C to perch on its craggy, pine-covered summit, just for Camden, just for a moment. I looked up later and it was scattered. (I guess it was too much to ask for an N for Nola--nature's sky-writers would have a real challenge with that one.) Ephemeral as it was, however, that special Solstice cloud bridged a gap in my memory between two places I love: Maine and the Sonoran desert of Arizona. And today both of them were hot and sunny for the first day of Summer.

Strange how even on
a humid Maine summer day
I think of desert.

May 15: Chips and Guacamole

Many years ago I spent the January term of my junior year in college camping out in the Sonoran desert of western Arizona. Most of my days were spent hiking through the Buckskin Mountains assisting two geology majors with thesis work. We had a lot of fun exploring, but we also had work to do and we took it seriously. But even so, every few days we'd find ourselves quitting a little early and driving the 30+ bumpy miles on dirt roads and through dry desert washes into the nearest town, Parker, where we'd stock up on Corona (cheap so close to the Mexican border), tortilla chips, avocados, and guacamole mix. (And things to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, of course, although to be honest I can't bring to mind any other food item we ate on that trip.) These supplies were most essential to our psychological well-being. At the end of every dusty, tiring day, the first thing we did when we got back to camp was to mix up some guacamole, which we enjoyed with the chips and beer. Guacamole has never tasted so good, and we came to crave it like addicts.

Tonight my husband and I had dinner at a favorite restaurant, El Camino in Brunswick. El Camino prides itself on serving local ingredients in an authentic Mexican style. It does many things well, but the part I always look forward to the most is the first one--noshing on hand-fried tortilla chips sprinkled with sea salt and loaded with incredible homemade guacamole. The first bites of guac often send me back to those long-ago weeks in Arizona when at each day's end all we could think about was that first scoop of creamy avocado goodness washed down with a mouthful of Corona with lime. Those fond food memories are tinged with sadness--the friend who convinced me to join them on that trip passed away several years ago. But I think he'd be amused to know that the act of eating chips and guac frequently brings him to mind.

Chips, guacamole--
who would have thought they'd trigger
such strong memories.