Posted on the LBB (Lincolnville Bulletin Board) over the weekend: Can I get reminiscent for a moment?  This photo [of sea smoke over the Bay] brings back a lot of memories.  I used to be a free-range kid, and I’m not sure my parents were aware of how far I ranged sometimes.  My family spent a lot of time on that stretch of coast right there helping out the grandparents.  I was constantly walking the piece of shoreline between the beach and the bottom of Monroe’s field, which is now spotted with macmansions.  

Forty something years ago that stretch of shore felt wild.  As a kid you could forget that the rest of the world existed, and you were all by yourself on a primitive coast or a deserted island.  It was covered in driftwood and seashells, and no houses or other signs of development could be seen anywhere, except there was one set of wood stairs near the beach.  For as many times as I walked that piece of coast, I hardly ever saw another person.  Even now, although I don’t spend nearly so much time there, I hardly ever see anyone along that stretch. The people from the macmansions seem to stay up on their bluff, and there’s just a couple of sunbathers down about Frohock Point that spend some time on the rocky shore many afternoons.  I haven’t seen anybody actually walk by in many years.  Maybe that’s why there’s always a bald eagle sitting in the tree on the next point south of Frohock.

It seems kind of a shame to spoil the wild nature of that piece of Maine coastline by building a pier for a personal watercraft and paddle boarding launch when there is a perfectly serviceable public launch a 5 minute walk, or 1 minute drive away. . . . I'm not a resident, so I don’t think signing a petition is something I can do in this case, but if I could sway one or two people to do so then writing this was time well spent.

What caught my attention (apart from the fact that I know this “free-range kid” and from everything I’ve heard of him, he’s been admirably free range as an adult as well) he wrote it remembering what it was like to be a child.

I could only dream of a childhood like his with a “wild and deserted shore” to roam, and the adults too busy to check on me. Mine was spent in an orderly midwestern suburb, streets neatly gridded and named for English lords, lawns mowed, bushes trimmed. But even in that manicured and curated world there was a secret wildness in plain sight.

We called it the “vacant lot”, an odd name for a parcel of land that hadn’t, in the 1950s, yet been bulldozed beyond recognition, built upon (Google Maps shows five houses sit there today) and tamed. To this free-range kid – we all were then, when parents shooed you outside in the morning with instructions to be home in time for dinner – it was a little paradise of tall grass that tickled my bare legs, scruffy trees that no one tamed, and the spot of my first garden.

It’s where, with my best friend, I learned what it meant to “break the sod”. Digging through a foot of thick roots with our fathers’ spades, Linda and I managed to uncover a 10 x 10 foot plot; it took us days, and I remember the heat and the sweat, and the lemonade (or was it water?) her father, Joe, brought us.

That was the extent of parental involvement in our venture. We went on to plant corn, and probably beans and carrots and some other stuff, but I’ve forgotten. We hauled water from her house (two blocks away) in a red wagon and kept it up all that summer.

Parents, even very attentive and loving parents, let children be back in the day. I know that’s a risky comment, as I always hear my middle son’s voice “This is the only childhood I have. Don’t tell me yours was better!” True enough.

But there’s been an enormous shift in the way children are brought up from my 1950s childhood to today. We knew little of the world beyond our neighborhood. Glimpses into dim apartments from the El as it clattered its way into the city, or of enormous “big old barns” – the term my dad and I had for the huge hulking houses on Lake Michigan’s shores – had little context for a young girl who lived in a proper, six-room house on a neat lot on one of those well-cared for suburban streets.

We watched the TV news with our parents every night, that network news that was as carefully curated as our town. We saw what the MSM wanted us to see; the main stream media is all there was in those days. The little we could figure out about sex came from air-brushed Playboy covers or National Geographic’s topless women living in grass huts.

There were glimpses, though, of a different world. My family drove through the South towards Florida vacations a time or two, and I’ve never forgotten what I saw out the window where I sat in the back seat, bickering with my little brother. Pre-interstate highways, the roads were all two lanes, connecting one small town with another.

Towns that started out with shacks sitting on dirt yards, where colored (the word we were taught to use) people watched us drive by. The shacks became substantial houses on grassy lawns with shady trees, giving way to a business district where we might stop for lunch. Back in the car, the neat neighborhoods – the white neighborhoods – gave way to the colored ones as we drove back out into the country.

My childhood, yours, anyone’s were different as to where we found ourselves. Whether we grew up playing on a dirt yard or a green one, on a farm or in an apartment our vision of life was as narrow as those circumstances. A little girl playing in the dirt yard had a different reality to mine, neither knew much of anything about the other’s.

Yet today’s children have the world literally at their fingertips – the Internet. These kids are not naïve. They know enough to be scared, know what to be scared of. And many of them are.

Remember hiding under your desk in case a nuclear bomb is dropped? Today’s kids learn how to evade a school shooter, which is way more likely than the bomb. And now they have Covid to worry about. Around here they’re in masks all day (which, in my limited experience of today’s children, most wear all day without a thought), some with the full support and urging of their parents, but others are stuck in the middle between their school’s policy and their own parents’ objections.

Poor kids.

They also know what climate change is. Greta Thunberg is a star to them. They know our waters are warming; they only know about snow, enough to build snowmen and snow forts and to sled on, from their elders. My own grandchildren, growing up here in Lincolnville have never experienced a real Maine winter with so much snow you had to have a little red flag on your car’s antenna (what’s that?) to be visible along the roads where snow was piled higher than a person.

Remember?

The voting age was 21 in almost every state until 1971 when, in the heat of the Vietnam War and amidst the protests of young people (“young enough to die in a war, young enough to vote”) the federal age for voting became 18.

But now a movement to lower the voting age to 16 is taking hold.  Vote16USA is full of information and arguments and studies to show that 16 is better than 18 to start voting. If this is a new idea (and it was for me), please check out the site. It makes a lot of sense.

As Grandma to six teens (ok, one is only 10, but he’ll argue he’s double digits) these guys have or will have the knowledge and ability to vote responsibly. And certainly more than me and my septuagenarian peers, they have a greater stake in the future. Yet we 70+s are the first to line up at the polls on Election Day to cast our vote for the candidates we hope will do what we think is best for the world.

Well, we won’t be around to see how it all turns out, but they will. Kids are more sophisticated than we were at their age, and unless you’re in your twenties, “we” includes you middle-agers. There’s something about turning 30 or so, starting a family, maybe buying a house that makes us see the world in a different way. We become more cautious, more cognizant of what can go wrong.

Balancing this settled, middle age pattern of thinking with youthful optimism – as well as the outrage young people feel at school shootings, bullying, shaming – can only be good for our country’s future.

So while Mike, remembering his Lincolnville childhood and writing us from California, had a wild seashore that’s about to become a bit tamer, I had a tiny remnant of the Illinois prairie that wasn’t to last much longer. Thinking about all that has somehow brought me around to the children of 2022.

It’s time for them to have a voice.

Around Town

We have a new published author in town; Nathaniel Bernier is introducing his new (and first) children’s book It’s Good to Be Different, featuring the animals on his parents’ farm. Get your copy at Drake’s , the Lincolnville General Store, Zoots, or Bayside Store in Northport. You can also order online at Amazon, kindle and Book Baby   Congratulations Nathaniel!

Fishing Derby Saturday

The LCS PTO is holding an ice fishing derby at Norton Pond this coming Saturday, February 5, 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. With prizes for the top fish provided by Maine Sport, Maine Outdoor Guides, O’Hara Bait and more, a 50/50 raffle, BBQ and hot drinks this looks like a great family event. At $15 per person or $30 for a family, pre-register by sending payment via Venmo to @LCS-PTO-1 along with names of the participants in the note.

Weigh in at 12:45 p.m., prizes drawn at 1 p.m. You must be present to win. For updated information check the event page on FB: Lincolnville Ice Fishing Derby.

Fire

Neighbors, friends, the whole community was distressed to hear about the fire that severely damaged Charlie Amborn’s home on Beach Road the other morning. Our Fire Department arrived promptly, but it was too late for the house. It’s a fear we all live with in the winter, whether we burn wood or not, fire is always a danger.