Loose Leaf Notes

Rockport, Massachusetts is a place that’s forever etched in my psyche.

Whenever I’m there, I feel like I’ve walked into a timeless painting.

The first time I went to Rockport was in the early ’70s with my sister Sherry. It was a foundational experience and a brave endeavor  for two girls to hit the road in search of the place that epitomized our ’60s and was immortalized by Tom Rush’s beautiful folk song “Rockport Sunday.” Listen HERE.

We stayed at the Peg Leg Inn, which is still there. It was our first B&B Inn experience and we were treated like royalty.   Later, when Sherry met her husband Nelson, she discovered that his family used to vacation in Rockport and had stayed at the Peg Leg.

I still remember the first time I saw this shop scene. Tapestries, lanterns, wind chimes and exotic Indian prints were displayed in front of that red building like something out of a Laura Nyro song. Incense filled the air.

I’ve been back to Rockport twice since that first trip, both times with Sherry and Nelson (2005 and now).  We always check out this world famous fishing shack, which Nelson just told me is called Motif 1.  I call it their version of our Mabry Mill, the most photographed and painting scene in the state and beyond.

Why do they call it motif 1 and is there a motif 2? This is what my research turned up:  “The picturesque  old building, known as Motif No. 1, may be the most painted building in the United States — if not the world. It has also appeared in movies, as an award-winning float, on magazine covers, on a postage stamp, in a 1960s Winston cigarette ad and as a Kentucky bourbon bottle. Rockport’s boosters shamelessly promote Motif No. 1 as a tourist attraction. Other coastal cities and towns shamelessly steal its image as their own…

Why ‘Motif No. 1?’ Built around the time of the Civil War, its prominent position at the end of the pier made it a natural backdrop for artists painting harbor pictures. Finally in the early 1930s, while critiquing a group of students’ pictures, several of which featured the little red shack, Lester Hornby, using a term often employed by French students to describe frequently painted sites, exclaimed, “What – Motif No. 1 again!” His fateful words stuck and since then the little red shack has been referred to as “Motif No. 1.”

Rockport, along with my hometown beach town, Hull, Massachusetts, are places of my dreams.  I have reoccurring dreams of their essence and feel like I live alternate lives in both places.

_____Shadow Shot Sunday