Working Waterfront

Clock is ticking on vision for Southport’s ‘Ruth’s House’

It’s linked by a small bridge to busy Boothbay Harbor, but don’t tell Southport residents that theirs isn’t an island community. Summer houses, used by multi-generational seasonal visitors, line the shore. The pre-K to 6th-grade school educates just 30 kids. And the civic and business lives of the 600-plus year-round… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Thankful for one president, bracing for another

It’s the season of Thanksgiving and I try, as always, to remind myself of the things I’m most thankful for. For the last eight years, our American president has been among those things. Although I now and then disagreed with him or wished he’d done more or less, I found… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Adventures in eating out

A new restaurant that opened up a while back had itself a maitre d’ and its own bartender and everything. They had a lot of live music and as a result the place was quite a draw some nights. They tapped the locals as waitresses and waiters and these folks,… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

A love letter to the seasons

Summer To Fall: Notes and Numia from the Maine Woods Dana Wilde/North Country Press 2016 Remember in the film Jerry Maguire when Dorothy says, “You had me at hello…”? Author Dana Wilde had me at the first paragraph of the preface when he writes: “…this book is about the transit… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Taking back the cellar

Just about once a year, often in the fall, Martha Ballard, the midwife who lived in Augusta in the late 1700s and early 1800s, cleaned her “sellar.” I do, too, usually this time of year before I haul down there the last of potatoes gathered up, the apples and other… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Mainer roots teased out in ‘Salt in Their Veins’

Salt in Their Veins: Conversations with coastal Mainers (As told to Charlie Wing… published by Charlie Wing Books, 2016) Before Salt in Their Veins, Charlie Wing was already a published author of books about “things,” including how things work in homes and boats (and while I’m oversimplifying the topics, those… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Cultural close encounter delights island students

A concern that we sometimes have as educators on a fairly isolated island in Penobscot Bay is how our students will react and behave when suddenly confronted with a new group of people. This could be a group of people from as nearby as Vinalhaven or Rockland—our students are sometimes… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Delight of island life shines through Dutch guests

No matter where you live, it is easy to lose sight of the highlights of your surroundings. You do your job, raise children, make phone calls, pay bills and run errands. In the Cranberry Isles, the boat ride to and from our cars on the mainland forces us to notice… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Postcards from paradise… or Eden

Forever Yours, Bar Harbor: Historic Postcard Images of Mount Desert Island and Acadia Islandport Press, Yarmouth, Maine. Softbound, $14.95 Earl Brechlin The study and collecting of postcards is called deltiology, a term coined by one Prof. Randall Rhoades of Ashland, Ohio, in 1945. Earl Brechlin, editor of the Mount Desert… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Fund launched to help support Frenchboro school

A philanthropic fund to help one of Maine’s offshore island communities might focus on any of a dozen goals. Or maybe on all of them. But for Frenchboro, the community on Long Island, some eight miles off Mount Desert Island, it became clear that the school was the cornerstone of… SEE MORE