Another beautiful Monday morning in Maine…carloads of visitors trickle out of the state while new carloads speed in.  They come here because clever marketers have told them it’s the way life should be.

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of activity here in my little corner of Maine.

Of course, there was The Moxie Recipe Contest, that all-consuming Friday night fire.  One of the jurors “from away” wrote a wonderful summary of it here.  Looking back with a week’s worth of sleep, it was exactly the way I imagined it in my mind.  Thank you, Dani, for capturing so many of the fun details.

There’s a new boutique on Main Street that sells vintage clothes and youthful new things.  Being a few years beyond the “youthful” cropped tops and short shorts, I’ve got my eye on a few vintage pieces that might work well for my 2015 Moxie Recipe Contest outfit.

Or maybe the Moxie Tennis Tournament?

There’s also an orange wool cape with white fuzzy buttons…why not promote Moxie all year round?  After all, the motto of this year’s festival was “it’s always Moxie season in Maine.”

I am getting ahead of myself.

My Moxie house guests from Florida are enjoying life.  I’ve done my best to provide them with the optimal small town Maine experiences within an hour or two of Lisbon Falls.  I’m so glad Moody’s Diner is now less than an hour away.

Yep, I’m still moving into my new old house on the hill.  My apartment here on the Mason family compound is pretty bare, just my office and my bed.  I scheduled the office move for Thursday afternoon.

With no distinctively different tasks to complete on Saturday, it was a treat to go happy motoring with my landlady and friend, Gina.  We started at an estate sale in Leeds and ended up in (where the heck is) Wayne, Maine.  Yackety yackety, we talked ourselves out before we got back to the compound.

It seems like life can’t get any fuller.  That’s what I was thinking while I was parked at Food City the other night.  I was checking my grocery list, making sure I had gotten everything I needed, and another friend, Karen, pulled in and parked next to me.  Karen owns The White Dresser, an antiques, vintage, and upcycled home goods shop.  We were just chatting about nothing in particular; then we said good-bye and I drove off.

So it’s another beautiful Monday in Maine…

Thinking back on the past few weeks, I don’t know if my “Lady Alone Traveler” book will ever get written, mostly because I am never the “Lady Alone Traveler” anymore.  I live in a place I love, surrounded by my family and so many friends I love.  I have to wipe a little tear from the corner of my eye because as some character in a movie once said “there ought to be a new word for happiness.”

And that, my friends, is the way life should be.