The motherland (sort of...)

Part of growing up in a Navy family is knowing that the reasons your family is the way they are has little to do with where you are living and much more about where your parents started out. Those damn potatoes at every single dinner, chowder and cabbage in the winter, more potatoes and white bread, keeping the house ass-cold in the winter, being grumpy but loving, LL Bean catalouges always showing up full of funny looking people resembling Bob Newheart in his Vermont based sitcom. The cultural palimpsest characterizing communities large and small all over the country seldom make sense to kids.

Most of you reading will know my back story but for the new family I'll give you the quick breakdown:
Mom and Dad are from Thomaston and Rockland Maine where the family continues to reside in the form of aunts, uncles, cousins, grand parents, and the resting members of our past.

Dad got drafted for the IndoChina/Viet Nam "conflict" and married mom to keep her close...
They moved to DC and from what dad says- he was in the Pentagon when the "dirty hippies" stormed it- history will tell...anyway

They ended up in southern Virginia and along came me!!! Portsmouth Naval Hospital wast the sight of my birth and thus the site of my first screaming tantrum...the first of sooooo many...

We moved to Norfolk Virginia until I was around 13, then Virginia Beach til I was 16...
It was at this point that my father was 39 and decided to retire (just a short reality check- I just turned 38!)

We moved to Maine and in hindsight- home.
This summer I am in the same county that my family has been in for generations, we have traced the English side to coming over in 1612...and to Maine some years later.
I have found (serendipity is an odd beast) a Finnish Congregational church that my great grandfather Edde Johnson helped build, the same places I wandered, and a new sense of history.
More of that as it comes.
Here are some images I made while my classes do their work...
enjoy...
read...
email...
call...
thanks to Gretta for everything- sorry to the rest of you- I'm holding on tight to the wonderful lady!The Underside of Port Clyde, Maine...a remote harbor town at the end of a peninsula. Interestingly- the tide rises so high that this view is only there at low tide.

The Olson House in Cushing, Maine. Everyone wants to recreate the view in Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth, this is the wagon used in many of his paintings. The house was great but over photographed to a crazy level...

Again- the less often view of a familiar spot. This is a worn door in the barn that has the markings of a rope blown in the wind...that marking in the center of the door just called out to me...wonderful details abound!

Harrison Point harbor at the head of Cushing, Maine. The remnance of an old steam ship's containers...
It was a wild 10 min. dance out to this on wet sea weed and rotting wooden planks (again- only at low tide) Who knows what the tops are going to look like til you climb up to see!

Ropes. Worn, colorful, Maine. Love it!

The harbors are filled with crazy things at low tide...note the green of the steel in the front- algea and slime...who else but native eyes can love this crap? Well- this transplant Maine-iac, thats who.