“I am wanting to go and find Frog Rock,” my friend said with a sly smile. I waited to see if he was serious. He was. Now having spent five years living here, there are few things that surprise me. But going to see a rock shaped over time and eventually named “frog” seemed intriguing, […]
“All of us are better when we’re loved.” By the time I came upon those words at the end of Alistair MacLeod’s 1999 novel, No Great Mischief, I was changed, altered as a reader. I found this work by sheer accident. I was not looking for anything in particular to read, just something with which […]
I have a deep admiration for clammers. It began when I apprehensively ventured out onto the clamflats to try capturing a few of these mollusks. That experience fostered an appreciation for this ancestral food gathering skill and for those that spend their days moving mud. Trust me, clamming is hard work. By definition a clammer […]
When you were young did you have a special tree? I did. Maybe you still do, and together, you and the tree continue making stories. Living here in Maine, it is easy to love the landscape. The rocky shoreline runs for some 3,000 miles through nooks and crannies of inlets, harbors and channels— its goodness […]
Down East, Maine is a unique place. I have been writing about this “uniqueness” for some time now, so it’s refreshing to find a new book that offers a trove of some quirky stories that add to the unusual luster this place provides. In Jim Harnedy’s new book, Forgotten Tales of Down East Maine, place […]
On a morning crisp in its chill, the autumnal clock stirs as colors flow through the veins of leaves in tall stands of trees, saturating them with a last breath of summer. I step outside for a walk behind the house. I can see my breath bend in the cold air and hear the trees’ […]
“We are known for helping each other—across town lines, or whatever it takes. If someone needs help, the help comes quick and in many ways,” says Joe McBrine. A Maine game warden, McBrine sees in his job and in the place he lives that people are the common denominator when it comes to community. “Very […]
Life seems to come in two chapters: a time when we are young, looking forward to the future; and that time when we are older— glancing back, remembering, trying to stave off tomorrow’s arrival. In Deborah Gould’s novel,The Eastern: Later On, we find a story that is woven from the fabric of both young and […]
A mission to Saipan to pickup wounded from the battle of Iwo Jima, piloting home a plane filled to the brim with American prisoners of war at the end of WWII and a passion to preserve and record the past— these are just a few snapshots in the life of Frank Foster Jr. When asked […]
Many years ago, fresh out of college and a couple of years into my first job, I read the book First Person Rural, Essays of a Sometime Farmer, written in 1978 by Noel Perrin. After finishing the book I was convinced that one day I would go to Vermont, buy a 10-acre farm, raise chickens, […]
