It’s that time again, time for Ben Mikutajcis’ Polish pickle recipe. Here it is before I go any further:

Pack whole cucumbers in a gallon jar, along with several garlic cloves and dill heads. Squeeze in as many as you can. Fill the jar with water, then pour it off into a saucepan. Set the jar in hot water to warm up the glass (unless it’s plastic in which you can skip this step.)

Add 1/2 cup pickling salt, 2/3 cup sugar, 1/2 cup vinegar, 1 teaspoon mustard seed and a handful of pickling spice to the water you poured off. Bring it to a boil.

Pour over the cucumbers. Put the jar in the fridge and wait a week to try them. They’ll last for months.

Ben was our next door neighbor for 30 years; his house has been empty for a very long time, but to me it will always be Ben and Florence’s home.

Here’s where I have to say “Stop me if I’ve told you this before.” I know. I tell the same stories over and over again. But so do most of us, and most of us listen (and maybe read) patiently, nod knowingly, feigning surprise at the surprising parts and amusement at the funny parts. We do this with old friends, longtime neighbors, and certainly with family members.

And it’s not just because we’re old. Wally gleefully told us his stories over and over again, ever since our boys were young. Family favorites like the time a typhoon in the Philippines blew away his skivvies, drying on the line. Anytime the word typhoon came up in a news story or weather report, we’d look at each other knowingly, and wonder if somewhere over the Pacific those skivvies were still circulating.

His Castine students who were children in the 80s and 90s, (I occasionally see them on Facebook), when they get together, can still recite Mr. O stories. In all seriousness he’d lecture us, when we rolled our eyes as he rolled out another oldie, on the importance of repetition in education. “You have to hear a thing 10 times,” he’d say, “to remember it.”

Those Castine kids surely do.

So when the potato bug invasion began this summer I couldn’t contain myself. Gathering the upstairs grandchildren together I told them the story of their great-great grandfather, Beriah Woodward. A cantankerous old man (and by all accounts, as a younger man, as well) Beriah lived with his son’s family. He never mastered the automobile, like many of his generation, but insisted on driving anyway, and one day drove his son’s Model T right through the back of the barn.

But potato bug season is when he really comes into his own, and I wanted to make sure this generation had the story. It was Beriah’s habit to patrol the rows early in the morning, using the time-honored method of the thumb and forefinger squeeze. The resulting crack of these little beetles is very satisfying, especially if you can catch two of them going at it. Before long your fingers are covered in orange bug slime, and once done, Beriah would come in for breakfast. Neglecting to wash his hands.

The family, sitting at the table, a bowl of last night’s warmed-up biscuits in the middle, waited for their grandfather to serve himself first. It’s the image of those bug-stained fingers picking up each biscuit until he found the best one that has come down through the family.

Even as I told them their ancestral story the other day I could see them glaze over. I must be telling it every summer, trying to ramp up enthusiasm for their own potato bug assault. And I’m quite sure it’s appeared at least every other year in this column.

As does Ben’s pickle recipe.

So, while the potato bug invasion has calmed down a bit in our garden, we’ve been watching the white butterflies flitter amongst the broccoli and cabbages for weeks now, laying eggs that will hatch into voracious green caterpillars. I spray the plants with BT – Bacillus thuringiensis. The very next day satisfying little green corpses are hanging off the plants. Much neater solution.

My story-telling, woods-loving husband had many, much more satisfying, interactions with wildlife: the skunk that rubbed up against his boot; the bear that came crashing down a trail to come face to face with him, fishing in the brook; the young moose he led off the road, arm around its neck; the chickadee that landed on his nose during one of his deer naps on Frohock. But again, I’ve written of those before.

Here are a few more recent animal-human interchanges:

An eagle and an osprey, or possibly two eagles, flew overhead the other day, one carrying a fish, the other trying to take it away. An in-flight struggle ensued and the fish landed in our backyard. A big fish, nearly a foot long, a pogey we thought, landing thump! and startling the dogs. A similar struggle must have taken place the day last winter when I found a large fish, telltale talon marks on its belly, lying in the middle of the road.

Don’s family, cutting brush down at the shore this weekend, watched an eagle swoop down and grab a fish in its talons. On that same visit, late one afternoon, a doe and her fawn stepped daintly along the treeline, heading towards Route 1. “Stop! Turn around!” everyone yelled, and the pair slipped back into the trees and out of sight.

While a fish dropping out of the sky might be a bit unlikely, I think sometimes of the young grebe that came ashore at the Beach last summer, shivering and weak. A couple of visitors happened by, bundled it up in a towel, though wet and cold is a feature of this bird’s home, and passersby like me got to examine a seabird rarely seen on shore. I marveled at its paddle-like feet, then watched, once it had revived, waddle back into the waves.

Apparently a Midcoast fisherman reported seeing a leatherback turtle in the water this summer; its head was twice as wide as a man’s leg.

A painted turtle the size of your hand was struggling through the sand towards the Bay a few days ago when Corelyn Senn happened by.

“That’s not a sea turtle,” she thought, “it doesn’t belong in salt water.”

So she picked it up, put it in a Kleenex box provided by a nearby beach goer, and drove it to Knights Pond, a more suitable environment for a painted turtle.

Corelyn, who has introduced many of us in Lincolnville to the animals that live among us via her wildlife cameras, has spent much of this summer sitting quietly by a small body of water watching the beavers who live there. She always sits in the same place, and as time has gone by the animals are getting comfortable with her. She always talks to them when they swim close by, so the other day when she encountered one on land she naturally spoke to it. The beaver looked up at her briefly, then continued gnawing away on a stick as she walked by.

I thought of Corelyn while hearing an interview with Jane Goodall the other day. Her seminal moment while observing chimpanzees in the wild came the day she handed a banana to a chimp, and it squeezed her finger in response.

My seminal moment probably came the day I realized a raven was talking to me. I’m guessing it nests on Frohock Mountain (my 653-foot-tall “mountain”) and hangs out in the enormous pines of “my” forest. There may be a pair, but I only see one at a time. Hunched up on a branch deep into the tree, it keeps an eye out for any delicacies I throw out for the hens, then, as soon as my back is turned, swoops down to grab the goodies from the chicken’s beak.

Now, it often happens that as I step out the door, particularly in winter, I hear the “classic gurgling croak, rising in pitch and seeming to come from the back of the throat. It’s much deeper and more musical than a crow’s simple, scratchy caw…. It’s audible for more than a mile, and ravens often give it in response to other ravens they hear in the distance.”

It’s simply my raven’s way of saying good morning to me.

Broadband Survey

The town of Lincolnville is conducting a survey of it's residents to determine current access to broadband. The Selectmen have a goal that affordable broadband be available to 100% of residents. Broadband service is defined as a minimum of 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload. Your contribution to the survey will help the town determine the best steps to get everyone access to broadband. The survey should take about 5 minutes. Please note this survey is only for Lincolnville residents.

School

 With Waldo County having no active covid cases and no community transmission, and with Maine one of three states in the country with new cases decreasing the School Committee, administration and staff hope to start the school year with as many students as possible returning to in-person school - safely. Implementing strict safety protocols will require us to come together as a community in order to successfully open school in the fall. What may be desired by an individual may not be best for the common good, and everyone is asked to act according to the best interest of the common good. This is basically the introduction to the LCS 2020-21 School Year Plan This detailed plan ought to answer any questions parents or staff have about how LCS will handle the upcoming school year.

Library

A note from Librarian Sheila: “Thanks to everyone who signed up for the library’s monarch butterfly program scheduled for this Wednesday! Unfortunately, we must postpone the program due to some technical issues. We do plan to reschedule and will post it here when the new date is confirmed.”

Blueberry Swingding

Jane Hardy posted this for the LIA:

“The Lincolnville Improvement Association is pleased to announce that YOU, the wonderful Lincolnville community, added $2,248.00 to the scholarship fund through yesterday’s efforts. Our goal for next year is to have the Wing Ding pancake breakfast AND another bake sale with twice as many pies!

“BIG thanks to everyone! The Swing Ding organizers really were winging it this year and had no idea what to expect this morning. So many people baked pies (19 of them), muffins (dozens and dozens), scones, cookies, slumps, buckles, breads, tarts, and more. Others made blueberry bags, masks and napkins or painted blueberry themed rocks. There was a flurry of activity in the first hour and by 9:30, we were consolidating our goodies and taking down some of our tables. We started with 9 tables and by noon we were down to one - selling rocks and raffle tickets - not a morsel of food remained, not even a blueberry. Thank you to both the contributors and to the folks who came down to the beach wearing (and buying) masks to see some friends and buy our treasures and raffle tickets.

“The 50/50 raffle was terrific. We sold $700 worth of tickets - $350 for scholarships and $350 for the winner. We asked a random gentleman in the parking lot to draw the winner. It was Dorothy Newcombe of the Whales Tooth Pub. We called to congratulate her and to tell her to come over to collect her winnings. She generously donated it all back to the scholarship fund. Congratulations and another BIG thank you to Dorothy. Show your appreciation by supporting the Pub. Overall, the Swing Ding was a great success - no comparison to the annual Blueberry Wing Ding pancake breakfast, but given the circumstances, we are proud of how the whole community rallied to support the LIA Scholarship Fund. We will let you know the final figure once the tally is in. Meanwhile, cheers and bravo one and all. We hope to see you next year unmasked at the Blueberry Wing Ding pancake breakfast!”