Growing up in Maine, summers at the beach, in all their sandy, salty glory are embedded in my memory. I can still taste the salt on my upper lip after a day in the ocean. Less appealing but equally memorable was the moment at home, taking my swimsuit off in the shower and finding seaweed that had been kicked up from a storm and had traveled home with me, piling up on the bottom of the tub, mixed in with any leftover sand. We also took seaweed home on purpose, to my childish embarrassment. At the end of every beach day, my mom would fill up the trunk of the car, or a box in our VW camper van with seaweed to take home to the garden. Winter was equally glorious. Snow days were spent sledding at the dump (now a recycling center), ice skating on Roger’s Pond, and somewhere in Alfred, I can’t quite remember was a barn that we would skate in. Mom would make homemade snow cones, snow and maple syrup. She even made the maple syrup, hammering taps into our handful of maple trees and hanging buckets up to catch the sap. The sap would simmer on the stovetop for hours, until it reached its golden sugary perfect consistency. Or not, occasionally they would simmer too long and become a blackened mess that took days to clean out of the pan.
Winter was the time after the tourists went home. Each year of my childhood they seemed to stay longer, all summer, then the leaf peepers in Fall, then the Halloween tour buses that would arrive to go to the haunted houses on Summer Street, then Christmas Prelude in the port. But come January, everyone went home. The beaches were quiet, and most shops and restaurants closed up till March. As I grew older, and got my driver’s license, winters became even better. I would borrow my parents’ car, get a gas station cappuccino, turn up the stereo extra loud (Mazzy Star - rest in peace David Roback, DJ Shadow, Portishead, Tricky, all on tape) and drive around the beaches, empty, cold, and beautiful.
I live across the country now, in a quite a different landscape, in New Mexico. We get snow and cold wind too, but we have mountains instead of waves. I went home in January this year and was reminded of just how much I love Maine in the winter, January in particular. The flights were cheap and half full, with the holiday rush over. There were snowstorms of course, but thankfully it only slowed down the driving, and not my flights. I stay with my mom when I go home, in her tiny cabin in the woods. We drove around the beach, went for walks, made lots of coffee and good food. The beaches were empty, just how I like them. With a few folks off in the distance, leaving their footprints behind, but also leaving us space to be alone with the wind and the ocean. The beach is extra special after a storm, the sky still cloudy and grey, but beginning to calm, and slowly to let the sun back in.
Mom, just after the snow stopped, on the pier in Cape Porpoise.
All photographs by me, Becca Grady.