Paddle down the lake at sunset and put anything between you and the sunset and you get a good picture. Paddle out on a still morning and you get perfect reflections. Two mornings out at Raven's in Freedom and we have most of our strawberry supply for the year. Poring over the schedule for the film festival is the summer version of studying the JazzFest cubes. Ah, sweet summer.

Pretty amazing weekend we just had, centered around the Saturday afternoon wedding of my sister Georgette to her partner July at our house on the longest day of the year. My sister Colleen, the wedding planner, made it all just so. Sue Curra officiated again, and Maine provided splendid weather. All I had to do was get them to the town office and arrange some adventures to Liberty Graphics, the Lobster Pound in Lincolnville, the antique mall in Detroit, and Belfast. David, Melanie, Jeanne and baby Martin were also here for it, and friends John and Vicky assisted. I put up a slide show of some of the photos John took.

I am not a fan of musical theater; usually it seems like a dumbing down of music and dialogue to fit in a tidy sentimental box, but a review of this odd production, Early Shaker Spirituals, made me wish I could see it. The play is a record album interpretation (pause here to take that in), and the record is a 1976 recording of hymns, marches and working songs performed a cappella by Shaker women at Sabbathday Lake in Maine. The set is "an impressionistic and fragmented evocation of Shaker style." There are some good singer/actresses in it including Suzzy Roche whose memorable conversation with the egg man back in the day is the stuff of B&B lore. The review is one of my favorite literary forms (postcard is another); it allows the writer to view an art object through the lens of his own creative intellect and spin lines like this: "...in transcendent theatrical performance as well as in religious celebration. A Dionysian spirit is reined in and refined until it becomes a precise worldly expression of something impalpable and divine." I read a lot of record and book reviews; they are a fine way of "writing about."

Here's the cheapo solution to a sit-stand desk: a $99 Ikea bar table (40" high), a $50 bar chair from Amazon. "Bar height" was the key search term to find them. I also wanted tiny and no grey metal officey looking stuff. The table is 27.5 inches square so the whole "office" is about 3 ft by 3 ft. Any more space and I would just pile it with crap. It's the corner office of my dreams.

Every time I drive down Depot Street in Unity I think "what an odd street." On the Main Street end of it is Clifford Commons with the post office and the bank, the Hysterical Sociery and the Union Church. Then a lot of nice houses on both sides, then a little scrappy farm with horses and cows across from the old fire house which is now the food pantry. Then the railroad tracks and Crosstrax Deli across from the pseudo train station which now houses a laundromat and ice cream parlor both of which are big improvements on their previous iterations. Let's see, then there is the florist and the new Dunkin on one side and on the other side in the old creamery building is Unity's newest business, a medical marijuana outfit called East Coast CBDs. The owner, Dawson Julia, gave a little presentation at the selectmen's meeting Tuesday evening. He seems to have all his legalities in a row and I expect we won't see much going on at the site where the growing will be happening inside. He has a total of 3 caregivers; each caregiver can have 5 patients and they can grow 6 plants for each patient. DHHS regulates it. Nothing is sold there. The caregivers deliver to the patients. I'm pleased that he is a local guy out of Fairfield and not a MacWeed operation from another state. That empty building has been looking for a new owner for a long time. I hope the pot business stays small, local and organic. We are all about small businesses here. A retired warden friend was at the meeting and just furious about it and I can understand Bill's amazement that after years of arresting people for it, suddenly it's being legally grown in town. Others at the meeting seemed to be taking it in stride. There are other caregivers in town. It will be deliciously ironic if the pro-business, anti-regulation folks in town make a fuss about it. Some young guys in town are launching a shiny paper magazine called Plant Roots Magazine with the focus on being a locally grown publication serving the Maine cannabis community. I am just glad to see local small businesses taking the lead here before the national franchises get going.

Here is another early summer project just about done: Bahoosh shored up and rebuilt our decks with new cedar. The upper porch deck is very weathered and gray and will be painted with some rediculously expensive Sherwin-Williams deck paint. Then to do something with the railings...

It is still surprising and delicious to see the lush green all around us after such a long winter. On the first day of June we got our dock in with help from Martha, Jim, John, and Vicky. Last weekend Melissa and I had used the sections of the old dock to make a new landing, the old landing having been deconstructed by ice coming in on high water. I flipped over and re-attached the cedar boards of the decking since the protected side looked almost new. I sealed it with some silica in the sealer to help it be non-slippy. It may be our best setup to date. Mohitos all around post dock-in.

Alewives have managed to get themselves up a dam in Benton by way of a fish lift and into Unity Pond for spawning. There are hundreds of them in the rocks around our dock. These kinds of fish spend the majority of their life at sea but return to freshwater to spawn. Their existence raises some inevitable questions: 1) Is a single one of these things an alewife or do they exist only in the plural? 2) Is is polite to call someone's mama anadromous? 3) Are the alewives part of a juvenile salmon smolts protection racket? 4) If they are part of a food chain, does that mean they are a franchise? 5) How do alewives feel about their species motto "Everything eats alewives" ? And let's not even talk about their parenting skills. I read somewhere that for the early Maine settlers the only available spring food was alewives and fiddleheads. That may well account for the enthusiam of canning everything in the summer and fall. And one final note, the name is thought to be "mid 17th century: possibly from earlier alewife 'woman who keeps an alehouse,' with reference to the fish's large belly."