More news from Falmouth with one ta-da

Chill in the air and fall colors are becoming more pronounced.  Today we woke to 39 degrees and just a day or so ago, 38 degrees.  Cover up those plants!  John notes this is typical for New England . . . one frost comes along to kill the plants and then you have several more weeks of good weather.  Oh well, we are wearing our jackets now and our menu is slowly changing for salads to soups.

Well, I couldn’t help myself.  In an earlier post I was expounding on how Mainers seemed to make everything into wine and I think I pooh-poohed rhubarb wine.  So while in the supermarket I saw it again.  In the back of my mind, or really closer to the front, I’ll really had a desire to try it, so I bought it.  We thought it might be an overly sweetened wine, because of the tartness of rhubarb, something like our experience we had with cranberry wine, but we were delightfully surprised.  It really quite a good wine with a light blush, semi-dry, and what can one say, a slight overtone of rhubarb!  It's an unusual wine, but worth buying again.

We’ve been going to the Farmer Market across the road on a regular basis this summer.  The produce is good and we’ve become fond of the baked goods, especially the gluten-free brownies made by one of the folks there.  Kelly knows us by sight now and has those brownies ready for us.  The farmers markets here should stay open for a couple months more with the colder weather vegetables like squash and pumpkin, and root vegetables appearing . . . and maybe tomatoes, too!  Surprisingly, many of the tomatoes enjoyed on the East Coast during the winter come from Maine and other New England hothouses.  How this all started is unknown to me.

We had our first visitor from DC.  Actually, our neighbor from Seaton Street was here at a conference and she has a sister living in Freeport, so the visit with us was very limited.  Still, good to see a face from our old home.  We met for dinner in downtown Portland, and of course, just before she left we had to have lunch by the ocean at the Lobster Shack in Cape Elizabeth.  Bodacious clam chowder, lobster rolls, and crab rolls for all!

Could we have some trumpets please!  After a long search, we go to a closing on a house September 30.  We have finally arrived at a place to live, which is somewhat of a contradiction.  We had talked about buying into a condo complex where they mow the lawn, shovel the snow, and do all sorts of things for you.  This place is not.  It is an individual house in a style called “Contempory Cottage” on almost an acre of land.  We had talked about living very close to Portland.  This house is not.  When Jack and Jane told us how nice Yarmouth, Maine, was (just 10 miles north of Portland), we said, "Oh much too far for us!"  This house is on the edge of Yarmouth village.  We were looking for a smaller house.  Our comment on this house is, if anything, it is a bit too big.  It has three bedrooms, two and a half baths, a separate room for a study or office, and a large open floor plan with a kitchen, dining, and living room ending in a cathedral ceiling, a real masonry fireplace, and floor to ceiling windows looking out at a woods. . .and really, a two car garage!  So why did we pick this house?

Well, other than the bit too big part, it gives us every other thing we were looking for and it turns out, Yarmouth really is a very nice place.  It is rich in history.  Native Americans were first in the Yarmouth area around 2000 BC and English settlers arrived in the mid-1600s.  It has been an old mill town not far from the sea for a long time.  The lumber, grist, and paper mills are gone now, but mill ponds and dams remain as part of a riverside park that follows the Royal River through the village.  Also, Yarmouth is very walkable.  We timed it!  It will take us about 12 minutes to walk from the house to the local coffeehouse and the riverside park, and about twice that to the supermarket.  We hope for some good birding along the park trail.  For history buffs, the river trail stops at a number of marked historic sites where the ruins of an old paper mill are pointed out.  Of course, the village has a number of other amenities, a library, town hall, corner grocery, book store (independently owned!), a lumber yard, a hardware store, a restaurant or two, and for those who must, a Dunkin’ Donuts.  Lastly, Yarmouth is the site of the infamous Yarmouth Clam Festival noted in an earlier post.  Being a resident, would put us within arm’s reach of being tapped for Steamer the Clam crown (remember the identity is always a secret), also noted in an earlier post.







So until next post, we leave you with this final ta-da.