The only unified themes of today’s post are the season and the necessity of cleaning out the photograph folders on my phone, camera, and computer: everything seems very vivid this time of year so I snap, snap, snap away and now I must purge! There’s always something to see in Salem, and then we ran up to my hometown of York Harbor to escape the heat–but the heat was there too. I am not a beachgoer, so I spent the hot days in the “cottage” (which was supposedly built for precisely such weather) indoors and the cool day (we had three successive days of 95 degree-70 degree-95 degree weather) walking around looking at other cottages. Even though I grew up in York,  I still see something new every time I take a walk–as in Salem. I missed the annual vintage car show while up in Maine, but before I left I checked out two of the city’s newest enterprises: Waite and Pierce, the new shop on the grounds of the Salem Maritime National Historic Site, and Notch Brewery & Taproom, a beautiful space crafting for drinking in good company, with no obtrusive televisions and bad food (just big soft pretzels, for now).

Mid-August, Salem: the scuttelaria are out in my garden (along with the phlox), Java Head window exhibition at Salem Maritime’s West India Goods Store (curated by an SSU History student who did much more research than I did for my post), goods at Waite and Pierce, and the Notch experience.

In York and York Harbor: gardens at the Stonewall Kitchen company store; antiquing (the watercolor below, which was quite expensive, is supposedly a Salem street scene–not sure where–maybe Sewall Street before it became a parking lot for the YMCA?), York Harbor map (1910) and cottages present and past (on this particular stroll I was taken by the older, smaller, mostly-white cottages on the Harbor side), our family house (brown) and the Elizabeth Perkins House (red) and garden on the York River.

 the Samuel Donnell Garrison today and on the left in the older photograph–across from the entrance to the Harbor beach

 an ongoing–and ambitious– restoration by a family: it was fun to see them working together……..

 goldenrod time at the Elizabeth Perkins House garden

An appendix:  While hiding from the heat indoors, I browsed through several old photographic books of York, and became intrigued (for the fourth or fifth time) with “The Comet”, an odd contraption featured at Short Sands Beach in York Beach a century ago, in which tourists were carried out onto the sea on a track: has anyone seen such a thing anywhere else? Was this a contemporary seaside fad or a unique York Beach attraction?

 The Comet in action