The Good List

Chase's Daily, on Main Street in Belfast, ME,  has the best homemade breads, fine cheeses and farm produce.

Good things today:

• Reading.
• Shopping for groceries at the Belfast Co-op--perusing all of the wonderful things, the spices sold by the ounce, the carob, the fresh local turkey breast, the tiny handmade chocolate turtle candies [45 cents each], the trout spread, the smoked Maine mussels. Considered getting shrimp for the enchiladas I was making tonight, but the man behind the counter said the shrimp were not due from Port Clyde [Port Clyde!] until the afternoon. I was getting my ingredients ready so I could do dinner right upon returning from the mall. [Yes, Figgy and her cousin Taylor are plunk in the middle of gorgeous nature, but she and he wanted to go the Bangor Mall to meet a friend. It was a one-hour drive to get there.]
• Going to Chase's Daily for a wedge of Fontina cheese for the enchiladas [in retrospect, a tangy Cheddar would have been better], and a single perfect Boston cream donut, light, airy and artfully topped with dark chocolate frosting. The young woman who worked there and I were raving about how incredible it was, how unindustrial, unlike the ones stamped out at Dunkin' Donuts.
• Rolling past snowy mountains and icy lakes. Seeing beautiful bare trees, dark, stark and storybooklike against the sinking sun at about 4:45 P.M.
• Taking music turns in the car with Figgy and Taylor, so we each played our list for 15-minute intervals. It's only fair--I can't listen to their stuff all the time. They plugged their iPods into the sound system--I played a CD I love, with "Home on the Range" on it. They rolled their eyes, but I didn't care. A dose of old-fashioned music is good for them, and it feeds my soul.
• The time to sit and observe Bangor in action while the teens I came with roamed the mall. Watching jeans, hairstyles, jackets, boots go by. Noting that babies are adorable everywhere. Seeing a couple interact shyly at Zales: The Diamond Store, right across from my chair. Checking the stock at Hickory Farms, where everything was marked down 50 percent [the sausages, cheese blocks, cheese balls and fudge went fast]. 
• Talking to Dad--about how much he paid in the past to get a driveway shoveled in a blizzard, and how he loved the plate of Turtle Bars I brought him last week.
• Cooking dinner, and Leah making a fresh green salad in a big wooden bowl. All of us eating by candlelight.
• Watching Hitchcock's The Birds with family tonight in this cozy house with the picket fence...screening the rental video has become a winter tradition we love.

Good night.