Vermont and Maine

How do you like my new Blog header?  I thought it was time for a change.

While I said that seeing the Jane Stickle quilt was the highlight of my recent trip to New England, the rest of that area we traveled through was nothing to sneeze at and was just lovely this time of year. I debated posting so many photos and was only going to show them to family but then decided What the Heck -  How could I not share some of those pictures too? 

               

Bennington, VT

             

Although for the most part we were a little early for the true fall colors, some parts of Vermont were just gorgeous. You'd be driving along, everything was green and then BOOM! you'd go around a curve and the colors just exploded. I was trying to read but the scenery kept grabbing my attention until I said okay, okay, I get it and finally just put the book down. What I love about road trips.

Aside from The Quilt, there were some other wonderful exhibits at the Bennington Museum in Vermont, including a nice display of Grandma Moses paintings, which was my second favorite thing about the trip. 

                               

                               

The Checkered House

I've been a huge fan of Grandma Moses since the late 1970s  when I visited New England for the first time. While I was there I bought some lovely prints to hang in my very first apartment in Chicago after college. They still hang in our home today although I've changed the frames a few times. "Primitive" was not really popular among my circle of friends at that time and having a love for paintings created by a 90-year-old woman seemed odd to them and I got teased a bit but I didn't care - I loved the primitive style and those prints fit in well with my decorating scheme - simple, affordable, resale shop antiques and wall quilts (I was not a quilter yet). Something that has stuck with me, I'm afraid. 

                                 

Hoosick Falls  in Winter, my first and probably favorite GM print. I still love it after all these years.

The museum also had a very pretty miniature glass display -

How cute are those tiny glass irons?

We traveled to Maine from there. We'd been to Acadia National Park years ago but never really saw the southern coast or the city of Portland, which turned out to be fantastic. I'm hoping not to bore you too much with all the photos but there was so much BLUE everywhere we went I couldn't stop myself from snapping photo after photo of that beautiful ocean. I know some of you will appreciate the pictures and decide to take a trip there yourselves someday. 

Beautiful little seaside towns and picturesque fishing villages

Camden, Maine

One of my favorite poets is Edna St. Vincent Millay and as we drove through Camden I remembered that she wrote one of her first and most famous poems while living in Maine when she was nineteen. It was fun to actually stand in the spot she wrote about in 1912. 

"ALL I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked the other way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I’d started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood."                                              - from "Renascence"

Millay went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize in 1923, the third woman to win the award for poetry. She wrote some of the best sonnets you'll ever read.  

Did I tell you everything was BLUE??

The long drive back toward Sweet Home Chicago, where there is no ocean  : (