We have never been to Maine before. It’s so far up North, and a little out of the way of everything else, but we really loved it! Everyone is so friendly in the little towns there, and everywhere is so pretty. It has a certain set of colors to the landscape, and a quality of light – lots of greens and blues and grays.

We stayed with my friend Brittney and her family. They also have three children – their oldest son is just a year younger than Rose, and Clothilde is only a few months older than her younger son. There’s also their youngest – a lively little girl only three years old. We haven’t spent much time with them since they moved away about 9 years ago, and we really enjoyed catching up with everyone!

Clothilde and Lochlan got along really well – they both are a little shy and separate themselves, but together they played all kinds of games and had so much fun.

Rose and Solomon went all teenager-y and started disappearing together holding hands, causing a mild scandal in the neighborhood, where everyone knows everyone else very well, and everyone has known Brittney’s family since they were young. Luckily the younger siblings helped keep an eye on them, but it didn’t take long for them to start complaining about it.

“He won’t even let me talk to Rose!” Lochlan said. Clo told me one night while we were getting ready for bed, “I can’t STAND the sound of Rose’s giggling when she’s around Solomon. It’s the most HORRIBLE sound in the whole world! It makes me want to BARF!” The teenagers just drifted along, seemingly unaware of the flock of younger siblings tagging along and being annoyed.

Brittney has the most beautiful kitchen garden, and gave me permission for a little garden tour here. Maine is a challenging climate with a very short growing season, but you can grow things like rhubarb, and there are wild herbs like valerian, yarrow, plantain, dandelion, and St. John’s wort growing everywhere.

They have an ingenious set up with running the chickens around the edge of the garden – which helps with pests, and also makes it easy to feed them weeds and keeps them safe from predators. The downside is sometimes they figure out reaching through and nibbling on the vegetables.

We also went to a beautiful farm down the road that offers a morning market during the week. They raise a variety of different vegetables and have sheep and horses.

The flowers are flowers I grow in the winter and spring garden, like poppies, calendula, rose campion and chamomile.

Their horses are draft horses that they train and use for draft around the farm. These were their two new horses that are being trained – they were so sweet!