DanielSonenberg.com

Four words, friends, and I'm not ashamed to say them: Iced. Caramel. Soy. Latte. Double shot, made with expertise, even love. Double shot? Why no, a single is fine. Oh no you di'nt. A single can't carry even the smallest of iced drinks. You wind up with coffee milk, and who wants coffee milk? No sir, not I. So in this sunny little closet on the hill, a concoction of the almost-vegan gods (almost because the caramel has dairy in it, sister). To be sure, the evil Seattle corporate coffee collective is here, but we locals, we Mainers, hardy and sensible lot that we are, pay them no mind whatsoever. A cold day indeed it will be before we meekly cross that threshold. So summer is here and Hilltop Coffee is its delightful self but in peak form, and the winds of joy are circulating with force in this artsy little enclave of Munjoy Hill. The San Francisco of Portland, I like to say. And the annual gentle stream of visitors has begun. Chip Whitesell and Gunny Sen, from Montreal, with bagels and biscuits. Montreal bagels are small, slightly cakelike, almost entirely unsalted, and really quite delightful. Would I take them over the best of New York bagels? Well maybe not the "Absolute" best, but certainly over the coffee cart/Deli balloons of fluff, and any day of the week over the Maine also-ran variety. Chip is on the faculty at McGill, a published expert on the music of Joni Mitchell and writing a book to boot. So Joni, who was rated the no. 9 best living songwriter in a recent Paste Magazine article (I'd probably put her around number 3, but oh well), was in the air and wouldn't you have loved to be a fly on the wall for that business, eh? We ferried en masse out to Long Island - not the one where I grew up, but its less inhabited namesake in the shimmering and glorious Casco Bay. And then with our dear friends safely on the road to Brunswick, I hit the Bay in earnest with Doug from Truth About Daisies. We paddled out in kayaks to a completely uninhabited pair of islands called the Brothers and had ourselves a picnic and brisk 30 second swim, and paddled back, me flush with the realization of my great ambition to become a seafaring kayaker. You put up with the endless May rain, the mud season, the slight isolation, the dearth of pizza by the slice, for this. A nice day in Maine is the pearl in the oyster, an unparalleled, gleaming affair that shuttles bliss through the bloodstream and sanctifies the spleen. But work we must, at least from time to time.