Maine in a Basket

I'm posting in pain this morning, back pain. I sat in a bad position for way too long at my Garden Club meeting yesterday and I'm really a mess today. The worst is that I have three days of long sitting ahead, my nephew's college graduation on Saturday, T's nephew's on Sunday and a cross country 5 hour flight to San Francisco on Monday. I'm tentatively stretching, icing and crossing my fingers.

Today is my favorite day of the week, my painting group, we'll see what I can do. I'm working on a small portrait of my maternal grandmother, but I may just be present without wielding a brush.

So my blip today is just a bit of Maine in a basket. We have lupine all around our summer place(my maternal great-grandparent's homestead) Down East as we say, on the rocky coast of Maine. It's a tiny hamlet called Machiasport, where young men of my grandfather's day went to sea in vessels with full sails, tended lighthouses and rowed lifesaving longboats to save hapless mariners. The women could do it all and then some. It's a 7 hour drive from here and we don't get there often enough, but a June trip finds the house surrounded by these blooms. Since my parent's died, we have shared the house with my brother and family, they live just through the woods near us here at home. My brother and I spent childhood summer family vacations in Machiasport when we visited our fabulous great Aunt Abbie. She held court in that old house, living there after her parents died until she was 97. A spry old salt, politically active, strong and hilarious, she lived long and well. We adored her. I found the lupine in the basket in our old town cemetery, a patch with a mainly blue palette and arranged them in a basket woven on that lovely rockbound coast that is in my blood and heart.