For these few lovely months, now that we’ve moved past the chilly rains of April, May, and June, the garden and chicken yard are as much a part of my house as the inside rooms. Early in the morning I wear the Bogs someone left here a few years ago to trudge out to the henhouse; walking through the dewy grass in sandals means miserably wet feet the rest of the day.

The hens are pleased to see me, all but saying, “Where have you been? We’re going crazy in here!” They push each other out of the way to be the first out the door and into the pile of goodies I’ve dumped out of the compost bucket. My leavings are pretty sparse these days, the peels and crusts and eggshells of a single woman, but my upstairs family makes up for it with all sorts of good things – leftover pizza, tag ends of hot dogs, bits of cheese that didn’t get used, etc. etc. A hen, like a dog, is grateful for any bit of food you throw her way.

It occurred to me the other day that I spend more time with animals than with people. It started with a succession of cats. The first, a large yellow male I named Ace, shared the house in St. George’s Wildcat section where I lived for three years. When Wally came on the scene (we met at my kitchen table, he picking birdseed out of his coffee, seed that had been dropped from canary Gladys’ cage hanging over the table) he brought along Admiral, a kind of runty black Maine dog, mostly Lab.

The next year we spotted an ad for English Setter pups in the Courier, so one September evening we drove up to Lincolnville to take a look. We’d have gone right past our future home on the way to Peter Hope’s place on Beach Road, corner of Sand Hill. We picked one out of the squirmy mass of warm puppies lying with their mother in a pile of hay in the barn and took him home that night. We named him Tantry Bogus after the English Setter in a Ben Ames William’s story about Fraternity Village, though he only answered to “Bogey”.

Meanwhile, more cats were moving in. Sam, a beautiful pure black cat, had a near death experience in Dr. MacDonald’s office. I’d taken him to the Camden vet to be fixed. “Want to watch?” Dr. MacD asked. Of course I did! Suddenly there was a flurry as the cat stopped breathing – “too much ether (or whatever)” Dr. MacD shouted to his assistant and then grabbed Sam’s front and back legs and swung him violently back and forth which promptly brought him back to life. He started breathing and the operation proceeded.

We’d no sooner moved into the house at the top of Sleepy Hollow than we began finding more animals to live with. King Solomon, the first of a long line of Siamese cats, came to us as a kitten, and when our firstborn came along they bonded. Bill was about three or four when on a very hot summer day some visitor brought their cat along. King Solomon flew up the ash tree in the front yard, screeching at the interloper and promptly fell to the ground, dead. Heat stroke? Heart attack? I wonder if the 47-year-old man who was that little boy remembers.

Hekyl and Jekyl were our first fowl, two mallard ducks that happily pecked around the property that first summer. “We ought to eat them,” we said to each other all along, until one day I saw only one duck and ran around back calling to my husband, “where’s Jekyl??” He stood there, ax in one hand and Jekyl, headless Jekyl, in the other.

And that was the moment we stopped just keeping pets and became farmers. We vowed to never name another animal we intended to eat. Goats followed, a one-horned nanny goat, naturally named Nanny, who gave birth to triplets, and another doe we called Bianca. Goats, it turned out, were beyond our modest skills. Mainly we had no money to build an effective fence which, for goats, has to be about five feet high at least. A cow, somebody told us, was much easier to keep than goats.

We found Molly, again via a Courier ad – “family cow for sale $100” – at the Annis farm at Simonton Corner. Molly was a middle-aged Guernsey with a missing horn, similar to Nanny’s, who by that time had moved on to a new owner. She was a great first cow for us, gentle, easy to milk, and gave us several calves. We didn’t name them, and we did eat them.

Molly was succeeded by Wanda, Leonard Lookner’s favorite cow, a Jersey who spent several years with us. Then came Daisy, a little Jersey heifer we found in Brooksville; she rode home in the hatchback of our Datsun, curled up in Bill’s arms, by now a big boy of 10 or so. She was followed by Sugar, and one more we had briefly.

Almost from the beginning we had pigs, two baby pigs we’d find in the spring and raise through the summer in a pen next to the henyard. Piglets generally came home in burlap feed sacks; I wonder how you get a pig home today when feed sacks are all plastic. To get a pig you need to know who the pig farmers are. A favorite was out on the Belmont Road, a Mr. Morse – I can’t remember his first name ­– but he had a number of sows who had litters every spring. We could pick out the ones we wanted, but Wally was never keen on going into the pen to pluck them away from that huge sow, so Mr. Morse obligingly did that for him.

Soon we figured out we could raise the pigs much more economically by keeping winter piglets. That way Wally could bring home the hot lunch garbage every day, perfect pig food. It was always nearly full of milk and baked beans and sloppy joes and hot dogs and well, whatever was on the hot lunch menu that day. I can still smell it, the combination of all that food mooshed together. Back in the day there were several people raising pigs in Lincolnville; whoever came first and asked for the garbage got it. Nobody in Castine where he taught after six years in Lincolnville wanted it, so, considering it a perk of the job, he got Castine’s Adams School garbage.

At some point there came down a regulation from the government saying the garbage had to be thrown away, not fed to pigs. Since nobody but the hot lunch police cared, Wally ignored the rule and kept bringing it home.

One day, riding around Lincolnville’s back roads we saw a “chickens for sale” sign. Agnes Underhill showed us her flock of tiny Bantams, probably a dozen or more assorted miniature hens – $15 for the lot. Sold! We took them home and built a hen house. The house was no sooner finished, nice cedar shingles and all, when we awoke one night to a terrible squawking from that direction. “The fox is back!” he yelled to me as he ran down the stairs.

I grabbed a flashlight and made it out to the back porch just as a shotgun blast reverberated through the night. I flicked on the light to see my husband standing, stark naked, gun in hand, and a huge gouge in the front of our brand new hen house. If there had been a fox there that night he was long gone with a story to tell.

Baby chicks come in the mail every June and are held at the post office till we come to pick them up. Driving home from the Beach on a spring morning with a box full of warm and peeping chicks never gets old. Now I try to find a grandchild to grab and come with me, holding the box on his/her lap, poking a finger through the holes to touch one of the tiny, feathery babies.

Today there are no pigs, no cow, no pony at Sleepy Hollow, just a flock of hens, a little posse of four guineas, and one old rooster who, against my better judgement, we call Fluffbutt, for one day he’ll surely be relegated to the stew pot. He’s a gentle rooster unlike some of his predecessors you never wanted to turn your back on

Inside the house most everybody’s got a name and even their own food dish. Fritz, a white Golden Retriever, is seven years old, an age I confirm by an old photo of him as a puppy. He was making his first appearance at the day we Moved It!, pulled the old schoolhouse across Main Street and onto its new concrete slab. It was October 2012; Fritz was three months old and had been with us exactly one day.

The day before that had been hard; Sammy, a Golden much loved by Wally and by Corelyn Senn, who took him on weekly adventures in the woods, had been killed on the road in front of our house. The sight of my heart-broken husband carrying his beloved dog across the garden to bury is one I’ll not forget.

That very night we sat mourning, realizing we were dog-less for the first time in our lives together. We need a dog, we said. Now. We need a dog now. In the morning he looked at Uncle Henry’s and found there were Golden Retriever puppies in Windsor. We got in the car and came home with Fritz. If you’ve been to my house you know he’s a jumper. It’s his only fault. He seems to lack the impulsive and stubborn nature of Sammy, both of which led to his running headlong into the moving school bus that afternoon.

With this house divided into two dwellings, Fritz is officially known as Downstairs Dog; he’s banned from Upstairs by his penchant for eating Upstairs Cats’ food. And as of a week ago, there’s an Upstairs Dog as well – Conrad, a Texas-born Border Collie/Something Else mix who found himself transported to P.A.W.s this summer, fortuitously rescued from a kill shelter down south. Conrad is gentle and well-mannered, though at two years old, he’s full of energy, able to hop over the gate we installed at the top of our front stairs. He freely moves between Upstairs and Down.

Downstairs there’s a rescued bird as well, Cocky the Cockatiel, whom Lynn Hutchings found many years ago perched on a lobster trap on a bitter December day. She called to see if I’d advertise him in my Camden Herald column, and I agreed to keep him in the meantime. Nobody ever claimed him leading me to think he’d been let go, perhaps because of his penchant for loudly imitating the smoke alarm. After his neighbor in my sunroom, a Senegal parrot named PJ, went back to live with Betty Lord who raised him, Cocky’s been a solitary bird. He’s promised to a young man I know who will take him, cage and all, as soon as his living arrangements include space for a bird.

A tank of tropical fish greets anyone coming in the kitchen door. Though nobody’s named I have no intention of eating them. Two, a black shark and an algae eater, are growing by leaps and bounds, and the two black mollies have produced two more exactly like them. Every morning, before dawn when I first get up, I turn on the aquarium light, sprinkle in their food and stand watching as they wake up and begin feeding.

Finally, in response to my well-publicized rat invasion of last winter, two half-grown cats, Peter and Benjamin, named for the bad bunnies of the Beatrix Potter stories, lounge around luxuriously all day on my bed and prowl the backyard all night. Their very presence scared away the house rats. Those apparently migrated out to the hen house, where, thanks to the good work of Central Exterminating, they ate the poison bait. I’ve seen no sign of their holes or droppings since.

But fall is just around the corner, and my house is a magnet, a porous magnet for all sorts of wildlife. The rats will probably try a comeback, as surely mice will. Chewing and scurrying sounds from the walls will keep us awake. Red squirrels? Hopefully, I won’t see another weasel move into the sunroom as one did a few years ago. As for the flying squirrels, you guys are awful cute, but not on my kitchen counter like one memorable Christmas Eve. Peter and Benjamin, you’ll have your paws full.

Life Flight’s Swim to Islesboro

Sunday was the annual swim across the Bay to Islesboro, Life Flight’s big fund-raiser. It was exciting for me to host my cousin, Mandy Schumaker, the night before, as she prepared for the second time to make the three mile swim. Families and friends of the swimmers go over on the ferry to greet them as they come out of the water at Grindle Point. Several hundred of us, including volunteers running the event, milled around as the fog lifted and the swimmers started coming in. Each participant raises money and their name and the amount they raised is announced as they clamber out onto the shore. Each one is accompanied by someone in a kayak or paddle board as they make their way across. All in all it’s a fun morning for us, the audience and a satisfying accomplishment for the swimmers. Go Mandy!!

Library

The book group will be discussing An American Marriage by Tayari Jones Tuesday, August 20 at 6 p.m. Everyone’s invited to drop in and take part, whether you’ve read the book or not.

Wednesday, August 21, 4-6 p.m. bring your supplies for Watercolor Journaling. All welcome, newcomers encouraged.

Also Wednesday at 7 p.m., Hope poet Elizabeth Tibbets will be reading from and discussing her new book Say What You Can. Her poems are about her work, her roots in Maine and her love and concerns for the natural world. Elizabeth has a special connection to Lincolnville as her great-grandmother, Mary King Heal, lived two houses up the street from the Library and Mary’s sister taught school in the building that’s now the Library.

LIA Thank-Yous

At last week’s Lincolnville Improvement Association meeting President Bob Plausse presented awards to three of the organization’s best supporters.

To Marge Olson for the $1200 she’s raised selling her painted rocks at Dwight Wass’ Lincolnville Fine Art Gallery. The rocks are displayed outside the shop in the “rock garden”. They sell for a dollar or two or three, but when people hear the proceeds are for the LIA scholarship fund they often leave more.

To Andy Andrews “for your unwavering dedication to the Lincolnville Improvement Association…maintaining the buildings, placing signs up for multiple functions, carrying tents, chairs and tables, and most importantly…sharing the vision and creating the blueberry wing ding.”

Finally, “to Lee Cronin for her tireless efforts to promote and produce the Blueberry Wing Ding year after year. This year’s final tally isn’t in, but Lee reported taking in over $7000. Come to the next meeting on September 19th to get the official results.”

Condolences

Irmgard Duffell, longtime Lincolnville (Millertown) resident passed away this past week. Sympathy goes to her family and those who knew her.