We Have Fallen in Love With Maine

6/21/2016

Low Tide, Bailey Island/ Marianne Vecsey

We drove up to visit Marianne's uncle Harold, 94, last October. Recently we returned. We wonder why it took us so long to discover Maine.
Every time I turn the wheel, the view changes.
The people are individuals.
It reminds us of Wales, another singular place we love.
That is high praise.

Harold said he knew a place in Boothbay that has the best haddock and fries in the world. He's been in 70 countries. He was right.

The lady said the fish comes off the boat at 5 AM. They open at 11. (NB: Seasonal. Closed Sunday and Monday) Do you see what I mean about Maine?

Friends from Long Island invited the three of us to their stone house on an inlet. Lena made an amazing Swedish specialty from fresh salmon and eggs and dill. Claes harvested rhubarb growing since they came here. (below)

Harold has been living on the same street for 70 years, since he met Barbara when he came to help dredge the Kennebec River, which flows behind his home. In between, he helped build facilities for the military. (His photos were recently displayed by nearby Bowdoin College.) About 60 years ago he gave away one of his yellow construction helmets. Recently, somebody gave it back. People have histories in Bath, Maine.

Two sisters, friends of his late wife, visited Harold recently. He dug out the helmet, and nimbly crouched for a photo. (He does the baking.)

Alan Rubin link

6/24/2016 06:31:19 am

George—Harold is typical of the wonderfully hardy people of Maine.

Before my long retail career, I worked as a metallurgical engineer for ten years, two at Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford and one at Arwood Investment Casting in Groton, CT., where I got to know several Maine Yankees. They were usually short on words, but always warm and friendly.

Arcadia National Park, which was created from land donated by visionaries, is a perfect example of Maine’s ruggedness and beauty. Anyone who can swim in the cold waters of Maine’s rocky beaches must be a special breed.

https://www.nps.gov/acad/index.htm

George Vecsey

6/24/2016 09:09:49 am

Alan, thanks. We find people to be individualistic, quite easy to chat with, at least in Freeport-Brunswick-Bath-Boothbay area. They are conditioned to "outsiders," maybe.
Haven't gotten to Acadia yet.
My friends on that point say the water gets up to 70 by Labor Day...they swim at high tide....water rises 10 feet but not in a rush like Fundy or St-Malo. .

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QUOTES
More and More, I Talk to the Dead--Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — After my mother died so suddenly — laughing at a rerun of “JAG” at 10 p.m., dying of a hemorrhagic stroke by dawn — I dreamed about her night after night. In every dream she was willfully, outrageously alive, unaware of the grief her death had caused. In every dream relief poured through me like a flash flood. Oh, thank God!
Then I would wake into keening grief all over again.
Years earlier, when my father learned he had advanced esophageal cancer, his doctor told him he had perhaps six months to live. He lived far longer than that, though I never thought of it as “living” once I learned how little time he really had. For six months my father was dying, and then he kept dying for two years more. I was still working and raising a family, but running beneath the thin soil of my own life was a river of death. My father’s dying governed my days.
After he died, I wept and kept weeping, but I rarely dreamed about my father the way I would dream about my mother nearly a decade later. Even in the midst of calamitous grief, I understood the difference: My father’s long illness had given me time to work death into the daily patterns of my life. My mother’s sudden death had obliterated any illusion that daily patterns are trustworthy.
Years have passed now, and it’s the ordinariness of grief itself that governs my days. The very air around me thrums with absence. I grieve the beloved high-school teacher I lost the summer after graduation and the beloved college professor who was my friend for more than two decades. I grieve the father I lost nearly 20 years ago and the father-in-law I lost during the pandemic. I grieve the great-grandmother who died my junior year of college and the grandmother who lived until I was deep into my 40s.
Some of those I grieve are people I didn’t even know. How can John Prine be gone? I hear his haunting last song, “I Remember Everything,” and I still can’t quite believe that John Prine is gone.
-----
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/opinion/death-grief-memory.html
Jan. 30, 2023

We Have Fallen in Love With Maine

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