Day Three, Tuesday

Pace House Residency

I knew from the beginning of Monday morning that it wasn’t going to be a very productive day. Even at 8:24 a.m., when Elanor and I climbed downstairs, the day was already filled with warm, bright light, and the air was still and dry and hot. At that early hour I new I wouldn’t be as productive as I had been the day before; for some reason there was something about the dour grey fog that had engulfed the island on Sunday that really got me motivated to work and with the absence of that weather today I felt minimal creative spirit.

We tried to let Kathleen sleep in, while Elanor and I made some eggs for ourselves, but Elanor can’t be without mom for to long these days, and soon enough she was back upstairs begging Leen to get up.

I ended up eating breakfast more or less by myself on the front porch, a country style two egg omelet with some havarti, fried in some bacon fat in my beloved orange skillet.

I really had no idea what to do with myself, as the sun was just to bright to make any photographs outside, and the weather in general was making me feel pretty lazy and apathetic and in pure vacation mode. Kathleen insisted that I didn’t always need to feel like I had to produce things, and after assessing some work I did want to accomplish later in the day, the girls and I set out for a walk into town.

We got back from our walk, and after a quick rest I made a pot of coffee and set out to the barn to do some work. The afternoon passed by relatively quickly, having made a few images in and around the house as well as scouting out some locations and camera positions for more elaborate image making later this week.

I was going to make a video piece that I have long been thinking about once Elanor got down for a nap. This video piece involves two cameras at different positions filming the same activity. It was only after I moved the cameras all over the yard, finding their optimal location based on factors of light and space while taking into consideration the fact that the cameras will remain in the same space for a good amount of time, did I then realize that I neglected to pack one of the camera chargers in my bag before I left. I need the charger to plug in to the camera so it will have enough juice to keep the camera going for a good hour and a half.

Lame.

By this point I had been running all over the house and yard, drinking coffee like mad and wearing nothing but my cut off shorts.  My back and shoulders were starting to feel pretty sunburned and it seemed like a good time to take a lunch break with Kathleen.

Together we made a batch of dough for some French bread, and afterwards we retreated to the front porch were I spent the rest of the afternoon drinking the remainder of wine from the previous nights bottle, having some sausage and mustard along with it.

Tuesday (this morning), on the other hand, started off with a bang. Elanor woke early, about 6am, and she insisted that Kathleen get up with her and I was left to finish sleeping by myself. It wasn’t till 9 am that both girls woke me up and so I slowly stumbled downstairs and began my morning coffee making routine.

After a quick breakfast of eggs over easy fried in the bacon fat remaining from the slabs of bacon I cooked, I retreated to the barn for some reading and coffee.

Of the half a dozen or so books I brought with me, one of them is Serious Pig by John Thorne. A cooking or eating memoir in the most flexible sense, my primary interest in the book right now is the first section entitled “Here.” John goes in to detail about growing up in rural Maine, and his return there as a young adult and how the life and culture of Maine is reflected in the foods that Mainers eat.  I brought the book because I wanted to absorb as much of the Maine way of life as I possibly could through the act of cooking and eating things like baked beans, potatoes, lobster, and other historically Maine foods.

I have had great pleasure in finding traces of the Paces’ love for and appreciation of food scattered throughout the house. Stephen’s wife Palmina was of Italian heritage and must have had a deep-rooted love for cooking; you can find notes and maps of the vegetable garden out back for every year they lived in the house, showing the different crops the planted every year. There’s also a small library of books on mushrooms and Pam (as she was called) was an expert mushroom hunter. I imagine that Stephen, (having been born and raised in the Midwest), had a culinary upbringing very similar to the one that many rural Maine families have. High starch and carbohydrate foods, potatoes and beans, and simple rustic breads cooked in an old oven or woodfire stove. There’s a box of pamphlets and manuals for canning and preserving foods as well as information on vegetable gardening in Stephen’s studio and the kitchen contains a nice library of cookbooks, most interestingly are the few on Chinese cooking which probably go along with the two different size woks we have found here. Eating and meal making is a very important part of our family life and it’s soothing to know that it played a part in the Paces’.