Articles
Local food: ‘We didn’t have much, but we sure had plenty’
If you grew up on an island anywhere in America, or along any remote rural coastline, you can relate to one of Jenny’s Cirone’s pithy observations. Jenny was a crusty, independent Maine woman from Cape Split, South Addison, an out-of-the-way Downeast fishing harbor roughly halfway between Pigeon Hill Bay and Moosabec Reach—in other words, if
Spring poetry: Or, what’s words worth?
Do you grow up loving words or do you learn to love them later? Is it love at first sight or familiarity breeding attempts? My earliest experiences with words occurred whenever I had to write a distant aunt or uncle a thank you note for a birthday or Christmas present that revealed the vast depth
How not to be an April fool
I thought the Druids invented April Fools’ Day, but it turns out they had first actually invented Easter, not the Christian kind, but the pagan kind that celebrated springtime fertility with rabbits and eggs to coincide with the vernal equinox, an astronomical event, when people also are accustomed to running around making jokes and pulling
Mud season, and the seven-year camp-out
Most of us can recite Maine’s four seasons by heart: almost winter, winter, still winter and mud season. Our seasonal travails may not make us the most joyful people on the planet, but they do teach us patience and a Buddhist like understanding of the essential nature of the human condition. This winter came early
We of the north
Winter does not become us. We of the North become winter—in our whitened faces, and buttoned up visages, and in our calculations of who deserves to be rewarded. Garrison Keillor, who hails from the austere Lutheran fastness of northern Minnesota, has made a career as a humorist suggesting that we of the north believe that
The Gulf of Maine at the end of the carbon age
The generation of previously young people in America who grew up protesting the state world they were about to inherit from their parents are now in the uncomfortable position of considering the state the world they are about to leave their children. So let’s take a moment to consider the leading economic and ecological indicators
Guy times
It began innocently enough. A friend from years past moved to town and called another friend to reconnect. The two of them went out for a run together one Saturday morning, found it satisfying, and kept it up. Soon they added a second running date Sunday morning before they went to church. Then another friend
Objects in Mirror: The town that disappeared twice
Recently on my 60th birthday — OK, it wasn’t that recent — I suggested to a group of friends and family who had gathered for the celebration that we take a boat ride over to Hurricane Island, where most of us had spent some formative years together in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Back then,
A winter physics lesson
In a column several months ago, a certain self-satisfied father let his Scotch nature get the better of him while complaining about his children’s wasteful energy habits whenever they returned home (http://www.workingwaterfront.com/articles/Empty-Nesting/15108/). We must learn to be careful of whom we have become. With their children now all off launching their lives into the gales
Connecting a pair of unrelated existential questions
OK, two questions: why be cheerful and what is the value of innocence? The first question begins with the enduring impression I have of my father-in-law in his final years and months, while he was much reduced by open heart surgery, followed by a stroke from which he struggled mightily to regain his mobility and