We’re standing in the vast, muddy log yard at Robbins Lumber, shivering in the drizzly cold of another “lovely spring” morning. The truck delivering Don’s 400 Christmas trees has just arrived from Sherbrooke, Quebec, its last stop in Maine. The 53-foot-long trailer appears empty, but several men, including the driver, climb inside and start to carry out bundles of balsam fir – baby Christmas trees, 100 trees to the bundle – from the dark front of the trailer.

There are only three orders left on the truck and naturally Don French’s four bundles must have been the first loaded; 7,500 trees have to come off first. We talk with the driver as he works. His truck, he tells us, carried some 100,000 trees to various points in Maine, and he has four more trips to make this season: to New Hampshire and Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania and Minnesota.

Seven thousand of these trees will be planted here in Searsmont. The men carry the bundles carefully, laying them next to the enormous log piles that are kept damp, continuously sprayed from a sprinkler, though in this weather the sprinkler seems redundant. The little trees have been packed with their roots together in the middle, the already budding tops sticking out the ends of the bundle, the middle wrapped in plastic. Their roots have to stay moist until planting and these 7,000, the men tell us, will be in the ground within a few days.

So will Don’s, if all goes well.

Why, I wondered, would an 80-year-old man, a guy who jokes about not buying green bananas, want to plant 400 trees?

The answer lies in the land. It’s a story that can be told all over Maine’s rural places, which, after all, is most of Maine. Once upon a time land was a family’s livelihood. Don’s land is described in the 1910 census as a general farm, and its owner, Joseph E. Thomas, was listed as a farmer, though at times he’d taught school in town. Joe Thomas was Don’s great-grandfather, and he died the year before his great-grandson was born. By then, he held Lincolnville’s Boston Post Cane, the honor bestowed on the town’s oldest citizen.

Joe Thomas was quite a bit older than his wife whom he married when he was nearly 40. Her name was Ella and that’s all the family really knows about her. In the 1900 census Joe Thomas was married to her; in the 1910 census he’s widowed. He’s buried in Camden’s Mountain View Cemetery, but there’s no stone for Ella there.

Their daughter was also named Ella, and she was Don’s grandmother. Ella married Howard Forsaith from Ellsworth. They moved to Boston where they had a daughter in 1911, Barbara – Don’s mother. When the Depression ended Howard’s successful career as a salesman, the family returned to Ella’s childhood home where her father, Joe Thomas was living out his years.

Barbara, in turn, married a Camden man, Francis “Frank” French, in 1936. He was descended, by the way, from Lincolnville Beach’s first permanent settler, Hezekiah French. This couple, along with their two sons, followed his work as a quality control inspector to Connecticut to Pittsburgh to Michigan to Chicago to Michigan again, finally settling in Akron, Ohio, where the boys would grow up. Their oldest son, Murray, died tragically of an infection while a student at Ohio State leaving Don to finish growing up alone.

A constant in all their lives was the land on Atlantic Highway that stretches down to the shore, and the old Cape with the bay window, facing the sea to the southeast. Nobody knows how old it is or who built it. Joe Thomas bought it in 1880 or thereabouts, perhaps at the time of his marriage.

But the house was already out of date by then with its three fireplaces built into the large central chimney, with its beehive oven in what would have originally been the kitchen, with its implausibly steep and twisted staircase built into the tiny space left against the chimney, a staircase, Don says, that everyone in the family has fallen down at one time or another. All three fireplaces are sealed up with old stove pipe holes. Perhaps Joe Thomas did that, installing wood stoves which were more efficient.

The wonder of the house is the way each of its occupants seems to have honored the ones who came before them. Ella Thomas Forsaith’s oil paintings, the two she did, “trying her hand at oils” Don remembers her saying, still hang, I’m guessing, where she hung them. Her father Joe Thomas did paintings of ships, and Don points them out. Crocheted doilies, knick knacks from Ella’s time, and then those from her daughter, Barbara share space with Don’s wife, Jean’s collection of miniature houses.

But those remnants are only from the recent occupants, say from the last 100 years. Upstairs under the eaves are relics of a much earlier time: broken chairs, the pieces of a spinning wheel – a high wheel or walking wheel, very old – trunks of mice-eaten books. Somebody put them there thinking someday they’d need them again.

Cupboards built into the walls around one fireplace hold papers and journals, photos and documents with dates in the 1860s and 1870s. A fisherman’s license complete with photo of a man who looks quite a bit like 80-year-old Don is dated 1871. He’s fishing out of North Haven. A 1911 journal entry mentions hearing several steamboats pass by that day.

“I didn’t realize you could hear them here in the house,” Don says as we read randomly through the journal.

And all this in a house where its present owner can tell Alexa to turn on the lights, check the temperature in the house from Florida, and most recently, replace his Direct TV with an inexpensive Roku box.

Don and his brother were sent to stay with their grandparents during the polio summer, when the disease was rampant in crowded cities, probably in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Later, as an older boy and then when he was stationed in Rockland as a Coast Guardsman, Don often stayed at the house just across the road from Raymond Oxton’s dairy farm and next door to Bill Munroe’s hay field.

Maine worked its magic, as it often does on a city boy, as it did on my own father when he visited relatives on the coast of Maine at the age of 13. Don could wander down to the shore, out of sight of adults, and shoot the glass Clorox bottles bobbing just offshore marking Frank Dyer’s lobster traps and then have to face the irate fisherman who “scared the hell out of me.”

He could hang around Raymond’s barn, getting to know one of our town’s memorable characters, a farmer who regularly milked his cows at 2:30 in the morning, a farmer whose barnyard looked about like it looks today only with cats and cows. Don says he still pictures Raymond sitting on his doorstep watching the cars go by.

For Ella and Howard’s daughter, Barbara, and husband it was the place where they retired. By this time Don and Jean were living in New Hampshire where she taught school for many years, and he had an insurance agency. As his parents needed more help keeping the place up, they made the drive to Lincolnville many weekends. And in turn, they too made it their home after both had retired from their careers. For Jean, a Mainer herself, it had become the home she loved the most.

In the years before she retired from teaching she spent summers there alone, while Don was still working in New Hampshire. He’d drive up every weekend, and the two would work together, mowing, gardening, fixing up the house and ending every day at the picnic table down by the shore, the spot where some years later their daughter Jen would marry Morgan Keating on a glorious summer day.

Land poor refers to those whose entire wealth is tied up in land. Parcels, often large parcels, are passed down through families, an inheritance that brings with it obligations that a nice hefty stock portfolio doesn’t. First are the taxes. And second, land doesn’t sit in the bank accruing interest. Land isn’t a liquid asset. It’s no surprise that people end up selling off the land, subdividing it for houses, or if they can afford to, designating it to a land trust.

But often, there’s the emotional attachment. Few feel emotional about a big chunk of money. And that’s what Don’s banking on.

Hence the Christmas trees.

Frank, his own father, had the idea first back in the 1970s: plant the fallow, overgrown field with Christmas trees. But with increasing disability as he aged, many of the trees got away from him, the several stately balsams ringing the open field today. It’s hard to know if he saw this as a way to bind his son to the land, as if a field full of young trees needing to be mowed and trimmed on a schedule would keep Don and Jean coming back. After all, just maintaining a 150+ year-old house was more than enough.

Whether it was the house or the trees or the long stretch of rocky shoreline that kept them coming, it all worked. Don and Jean later planted Christmas trees themselves with Jean keeping them trimmed and mowed. Some of those are the ones he sold this past December after a single Lincolnville Bulletin Board post.

Jean had passed away in 2016 in the house she loved.

Though their own family – daughter Jennifer and Morgan and their three children as well as son Mike – have settled far from the homestead, the tradition of traveling to Maine to work on the place continues. The handsome red door on Don’s barn (the barn with window boxes full of pink geraniums every summer – Jean’s touch) was Mike’s work last summer. He came back later from California to paint the gable end of the house.

As for Jen and family, Don had enlisted them to come plant those 400 trees he’d ordered this spring. So this past weekend, despite the cold, wet ground and threatening clouds Jen and Morgan drove from New Hampshire with 17-year-old Gavin and 11-year-old Ella to plant trees on the land where Gavin and Ella, along with older brother Austin who couldn’t make it this time, will be the sixth generation to tend this place.

By the time they got here, late Friday night, Don had already put some 80 trees into the ground, each little fir marked with a bright pink flag. That left another 300, and the family went at it efficiently, Ella counting out trees as she trimmed the roots, Jen and Morgan taking one row, Don and Gavin another. There’s a clever tool to poke a slot into the heavy soil, cutting through the sod while the second person kneels and pushes the sturdy roots into the hole. Stomp stomp around it to pack the earth around the little tree, replace the flag and move to the next one. After a break for lunch at Scott’s, they were back at it, finishing up by 2:30.

Don’s family lives far from this place, but like so many Lincolnville – so many Maine – families home will always be a certain piece of land on a certain road with a view of familiar trees, a line of hills, or an island on the distant horizon.

School

Congratulations to the following April Students of the Month: Kindergarten, Kalen Dunn and Sylvia Talty; First Grade, Eva Hurley and Oren Hurley; Second Grade, Ciara Boylan and Declan Grant; Third Grade, Elise Talty and Cora Leavitt; Fifth Grade, Kiernan Boylan and Abby Strout; Sixth Grade, Maren Kinney; Seventh Grade, Owen McManus; Eighth Grade, Maddie Shoudy.

Our eighth graders will join their future CHRHS classmates on May 10 at Camden Hills State Park for a round robin of activities in their assigned high school homeroom groups. A BBQ picnic will end the day. The year is winding down for these kids, their last year at LCS. It’s one of those times when emotions are conflicting – excitement at moving on to high school and sadness at leaving childhood behind. Remember those days?

Last week the third grader in my household (he lives upstairs from me) brought home a large cabbage plant and put it in our greenhouse. That plant is one of more than a million O.S. Cross (for Oversized) cabbage plants given to third graders around the country by Bonnie Plants, an effort to get children interested in growing vegetables. The kids can put their plant in the ground, nurture it and watch it grow into a giant. At the end of the season, teachers from each 3rd grade participating class select the student who has grown the “best” cabbage, based on size and appearance. A photo of the cabbage and student is submitted online and is then entered in a random statewide drawing for a prize.

Partners for Enrichment brought three authors to LCS recently. Hazel Mitchell told K-2 students stories about her dog, Toby and other characters she’s written about. Sarah Thompson spoke to grades 3-5 about her Secrets of the Seven series, and Jennifer Richard Jacobson worked with grades 6-8, sharing writing tips and what inspired her. Partners for Enrichment is a local non-profit bringing special programs to Appleton, Hope, and Lincolnville schools. If you like to make donations to local causes this is a good one!

Library

This is Knitting Workshop Tuesday, the first Tuesday of the month, when patient knitters will be at the Library t o help untangle any problems new knitters are having. By the way, they’ll teach you to knit if you’re brand new at it. All are welcome, 4-6 p.m. Experienced knitters often need help too!

Shelia Polson writes: “There’s a new writing group getting started at the Lincolnville Community Library and anyone interested in participating is invited to come to a meeting on Monday, May 20 at 6 p.m. Both beginning and more experienced writers are welcome.

The plan will be to continue meeting the first and third Monday of each month to share what people have written and offer each other constructive comments in a supportive and respectful atmosphere. This will also be a great time to discuss techniques and ideas on writing in general and get inspiration and encouragement from each other. For more information, email or call 706-3896. This could be the spark needed to get started on a writing project or return to one already in progress!”

LIA Reconvenes

It must be spring! Jane Hardy writes that the Lincolnville Improvement Association holds its first meeting of the year on Thursday, May 16 at 33 Beach Road. “The format is always a potluck supper - good food and conversation - followed by a speaker and a short meeting. As soon as the details are set for the first meeting, there will be an update. Stay tuned!”

Indoor Flea Market

And another sign of spring: on Saturday, May 18 the Lincolnville Center Indoor Flea Market opens for its 7th season at the Community Building, 18 Searsmont Road (Route 173). There will be the usual wide array of merchandise as well as homebaked goodies and breakfast casseroles. The Flea Market is held the third Saturday of the month, May through October, and is sponsored by United Christian Church. Call for more information, 785-3521 or email .

Author Talk

I’ll be speaking at the Camden Library Tuesday, May 14 at 7 p.m. about my book Half of Every Couple.