unexpected explorations

We have been quite pleased with the variety and selection in the local IGA store here in Milo. It is a small store, "grocery store" rather than "supermarket" but with many things that I have not even been used to seeing at the supermarkets in other places. Nice vegetables, reasonable prices too... two kinds of "natural" peanut butter (just peanuts and salt kind...) for example where most stores have only one, a name brand, if any.

But, as we began discovering the Monday night we moved in, they do tend to "roll up the sidewalks" a bit earlier than we are used to... On that night we found, at 5 till 7, that one of the two pizza joints in town was closing at 7 and would not serve us. Fortunately the other stays open later and had excellent pie! And, on Sunday eve, the IGA closes at 5. And last Sunday we needed potatoes and possibly cranberry sauce, as I was cooking the half-turkey, thawed and left over from Thanksgiving. When we discovered that none of the places remaining open that claimed to have "groceries" had any sort of instant potatoes at all, we decided to punt with rice, but on the way home followed our noses, exploring a road we had not been down. Eventually we ended up on a "good" road headed west, which seemed to be going somewhere, so we followed it. I guessed it would end up in Dover-Foxcroft, and I was right. And lo and behold, there on a Sunday eve in this fair town (of more size than Milo) there was a Save-A-Lot store within sight of where we entered town and it was OPEN! Not only did we find our instant 'taters and the cranberry sauce, we also found a wonderful Maine-made, refrigerated cranberry-apple cider and many other unexpected treats... Lemon curd being one... something K had searched for, high and low and unsuccessfully, in NC.

This evening, after a visit to the Bangor PO to get the forward turned off (and still wondering how much of my mail had been running back and forth between ME and NC over the week...) I opted to take my "old" route across town (to avoid congestion at the downtown onramp to I95) and in the process spotted a massage office and booked a session for Thurs late afternoon! WooHoo... I will be able to move soon!

But on the way back home, after getting back on the Interstate, I was wool-gathering and missed the exit to Milo. Once. I will NEVER do that again... for it is MILES and MILES (of bog, and wonderful trees but never the less a frustrating digression when you want to be headed HOME) to the nearest offramp.

This morning, on the way in to training, just as the sun was rising, I composed this poem:

Red birch twigs
Flame with the rising sun,
Stark against sky and sleeping earth.
I envision the sun-warmed bark
Calling forth renewed life;
Sap rising from underground slumber
As the season turns.