Maine Event

Starting the summer in (Very Southern) Northern New England

The view from our window at the York Harbor Inn of the Harley Mason Reserve, York Harbor, Maine.

Greetings from York Harbor, Maine, where my wife and I have landed for our annual start-of-summer getaway. We never manage to get that far; York Harbor—a diagonal 215-mile shot directly northeast from our home in Hastings on Hudson, New York—is about as close as northern New England gets from Westchester. We’re here for a second visit (our previous one in 2021 was just after the pandemic). Last year we visited another favored destination, Wilmington, Vermont.

While many of our compatriots are oriented eastward toward Long Island or southward toward the Jersey Shore, my wife and I are New Englanders at heart, by birth and adoption, respectively. This part of the region lacks the storied quality of greater Boston or Providence, or the craggy coastline of Down East (for a while we were making annual trips to visit a mentor near Acadia National Park), but it has an unmistakable Yankee flavor. We plan to dip southward into Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to visit the history-based Strawberry Banke museum, where I haven’t been since I had a brief gig at the University of New Hampshire in the early nineties.

In some sense, this is the sweetest part of summer: its early days, when the school year has just ended—it always seems like a tortuously long goodbye—and the lassitude of dog days has not yet set in. I hope to settle into a routine of reading, writing, swimming, and napping. May you find comparable sources of respite this season.