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I'm aggrieved the hours I've lost I could have spent with my love
Before the news was overtaken by this latest and gratuitous moving fast and breaking of the world, I discovered that on Boxing Day there had been a three-alarm fire on the working waterfront of Portland's Custom House Wharf. I used to spend a lot of time there with my grandmother. She would buy her fish nowhere but from the Harbor Fish Market, which in the '80's and '90's had the great dried skin of a sturgeon on its wall along with its charts of catches and soundings and a wet-planked floor through which the harbor itself could occasionally be seen lapping in a wrack-green brindle of light. It smelled at once like open water and the clean insides of fish. It was spared the blaze; other addresses were not. Between the icing temperatures and the flashpaper of the buildings, the firefighting efforts sound even more heroic since no one seems to have died, but the damage beyond the total losses of gear and business remains significant. The Maine Coast Fishermen's Association has been taking donations for their support and partnered with a local restaurant toward the same end plus T-shirts. It is a small shoring-up of the world and it matters. "When I say charity, I don't mean, 'I've got a sixpence I don't want. You can have it.' I mean, 'I've got a sixpence I do want. You can still have it.'"
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*hugs*
Nobody I know even has a sixpence anymore and here we are.
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I read that originally as finding a tuppence in the conch, which made sense to me.
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*hugs*
Thank you. I'd like better occasions, just for a change of pace.
insides of a fish
"It smelled at once like open water and the clean insides of fish."
I recently watched a couple of episodes of Culinary Class Wars 2 on Netflix. One of the judges said something like "Korean people don't like it to smell fishy." I responded to myself "Wait, what?" because there are lots of fish in traditional Korean cuisine. I haven't personally eaten fish in about fifty years but just walking past Haymarket on sales days, fish smell fishy. Probably what he meant was that something extremely fresh wouldn't have that same smell.
Re: insides of a fish
Fresh-caught and fresh-gutted fish smells like fish, but it doesn't smell what people pejoratively mean by fishy. If you eat fish, it's how you want it to smell. Like it just came up rinsed out of the sea.
My earliest memory of Haymarket smells like blood and oranges and what I much later learned had been cilantro.
Re: insides of a fish
I can believe the smell of blood would stand out for you.
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I remember them: part of the memory is loading docks. It was so weird to walk down there in 2018 on an off day and not see the permanent bustle. I don't believe I encountered the pig's-trotter-handshake guy, though. I feel he would have been memorable.
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People are still donating. I am very glad to see that.