Things to Do in Maine #2: Mel's Raspberry Patch

Late sleepers like myself usually don't make it to many of the breakfast and lunch establishments in town but I managed to roll out of bed early enough one day to eat at Mel's Raspberry Patch in Sanford. Located on the road to Alfred (at Rte 4 and High St), Mel's is a little restaurant that is filled with retired locals from its opening (at some ungodly hour like 7 or 8) until its close at 2pm. We managed to make it there during a rare lull at 11 and were met, upon entering, with floor-to-ceiling murals of raspberry bushes against serpentine rivers. No, really, FLOOR-TO-CEILING. Every single available inch of surface (except the tables and chairs) were covered in the mural.



The food is definitely comfortable and delicious. I had the Monte Cristo, an enormous club sandwich that was battered and fried, with french fries and a pickle and then promptly had my first heart attack. They have pretty standard breakfast/lunch options plus some specials that are scrawled across the only other non-painted surface, a dry erase board above the counter.

Read more after the jump.

The Great Cemetery Hunt

When I was in college, my overly morose friends and I would make frequent trips to the cemeteries in southern Indiana to wander the soundless rows and contemplate our inevitable demise. We would pack a picnic and a few trinkets that would act as awards for the person with the strangest name, the person who lived the longest, the person with the most spouses, and the monument with the biggest ego.

Though my wardrobe has gotten decidedly brighter, I still make regular visits to graveyards without any food or trinkets (though I do still look for the noteworthy deceased). My mother taught me the appreciation for cemeteries, dragging my brothers and me out to tiny family resting places, raking through long grass and woods to find disheveled clusters of headstones. As soon as I arrived in Maine, my mother insisted that we go to South Berwick to have a look at the Old Fields cemetery.



One of the notables buried there is Mehitable Goodwin, a captive of a local Native American tribe. There is a terrible tale found in Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana about the death of Mehitable's five month old infant on the journey, whose body was hanged by the forked bough of a tree so that "she might have the comfort of seeing it again if ever they came that way." She was bounced around to several groups through battle and trade, settling with one tribe in Canada for five years before being returned to her husband and home.

The cemetery is beautiful, the graves strewn about over a rolling hill that cuts down to the Leighs Mill Pond. Most of the headstones are so old that they are made of slate instead of granite and many of them actually have the death's head symbol on them which would have definitely won some kind of an award back in my goth days.

Read more after the jump.

Tentative Steps Into the 21st Century

I finally sat down and updated my photos on flickr, created a link from here to the photos and all that jazz. Now my blog sparkles!

Read more after the jump.