I know. I’ve written about lobsters before. But I’m a Maine girl, and it’s summer in Maine (almost).

We Mainers rarely have lobsters in the winter. And I rarely order a lobster in a restaurant. Lobsters are made to be eaten outside, or in your cottage. Not to say that lobsters served in restaurants along the Maine coast aren’t great. It’s just one of my little idiocyncracies.

An ex-boyfriend once said, “I don’t think you and all your little idiocyncracies can fit in my car together.” He didn’t last long.

Last weekend, I, and my brother, Peter, decided to go to the cottage with his wife, Kerry, and their daughter, Sophia, who had just turned 21. Sophia returned from a winter in Vietnam a couple weeks ago. She was there on a work/study program for the second semester of her junior year at Bates.

If you’ve read, like, a tenth of my columns, you know about my family cottage on the shore of the St. George, looking out to Port Clyde and islands blah blah blah…

“The cottage,” as we call it, and lobsters, go hand-in-hand. My grandfather used to have a bunch of lobster traps, and we had lobsters so frequently during the summers we got sick of them. When we didn’t get them from granddad, we’d walk down the dirt road to Olson’s wharf. John Olson has been a lobsterman his whole life, and he’s still hauling, at, like, 93. You should see his arms. Sinewy and muscular.

His son, Sam, also has sinewy, muscular arms. He got his own lobster boat at a very young age. Now Sam owns the old wharf, and his own, next door to his father’s. Sam doesn’t haul anymore. He’s a lobster wheeler-dealer. Sells to conglomerates, like Red Lobster, as well as us locals, whenever we get a hankering.

Anyway. We took a birthday cake and some presents for Sophia, and Pete went down to Olson’s for lobsters while I mowed the lawn. It was my turn. He had already opened up the cottage: got the water on, cleaned up, mowed the lawn, and did what we Mainers with cottages and camps do every spring — get the place that we love most in the world, where so many memories were made over the years, ready for another summer and more memories.

More family drama, more mornings waking to the sound of the lobster boats heading out. More, as mum calls it, “wandering over” to visit neighbors: the Wissemanns, cousin Rich, Ida and Gary.

More walks up to the Olson House, where Christina lived and is now buried, alongside her brother, Alvaro, and their friend Andrew Wyeth. More pilfering blueberries from the blueberry field where the berries grew wild when mum was a kid, and has now gone commercial (we just can’t seem to process that).

More evenings sitting on the deck with cocktails (manhattans!! :-) and more lobsters, cooked in a big pot over a gas burner in the back yard. They’re usually eaten at the dining room table, spread unglamorous-ly with newspaper or a gaudy pink plastic table cloth, with an ocean breeze coming in through the front screen door, wafting by us on its way out the back screen door.

That was the door that my nephew, Wendell, named after my father, kept letting slam shut, as he went in and out, one day when he was a little kid. We were having a “quiet” family dinner, and that door is around four feet from the table. His father — my brother Pete — finally said, in his quiet, non-accusatory voice, “Wendell, we’re trying to have a nice dinner and it is disrupting when you keep ...” Wendell interrupted him, saying, “What’s your point, dad?” Then he walked out and let the door slam behind him. :-)

Luckily Wendell is all grown up now, and he’s a sweetheart.

Oh man where the heck were we? Oh yeah — we went to the cottage on June 3 to celebrate Sophia’s 21st birthday. She had a few. She was in Bangkok on her actual birthday, on May 19. That night she boarded a plane for Madrid, but had a layover in Abu Dhabi, so she spent her birthday in both Bangkok and Abu Dhabi.

Then she celebrated again in Madrid, and again with her mum and dad when she got to Boston.

So we had our first, 2017, late afternoon lobster feed at the cottage last weekend. Lobsters, a decadent cornbread made delectable with too much butter and sour cream, and a yummy Asian brown rice salad with fresh corn, pea pods, scallions and carrots with a sesame oil dressing, that canceled out the cornbread; I’ll get those recipes from Kerry and share them with you in a couple weeks.

We also had white wine and orange Crush. Orange Crush with lobsters has become a tradition in the Thayer household. Not sure how it started, but I know it’s been a thing since I was a kid (just a few years ago). Then there was rhubarb custard pie, my new favorite dessert, and chocolate cake, with birthday candles.

Following another Thayer family tradition, I gave Sophia a bottle of (sort of) pink Champagne. I was working at the Samoset in Rockland for the summer when I turned 18, the drinking age back then. My parents brought me a bottle of pink Champagne to celebrate.

The one I gave Sophia was Sofia – a Coppola wine named for Francis Ford Coppola’s daughter, described as a “light sparkling wine with an elegant, feminine flair.” Just like my niece. It comes wrapped in pink cellophane. Pretty in pink.

Sorry. There will be no recipes this week. No one needs a recipe to boil a lobster. I WILL share the recipes for the decadent corn bread and the yummy, if healthy, Asian salad, in a couple weeks. So hang in there.

Oh. And I had three lobsters left over. Bummer. I had to make lobster rolls and stew. Poor me.

See ya next week.