Remember how smug we used to be? How safe we are, here in Maine? No poisonous snakes or scorpions or spiders here. Or alligators to snatch small dogs. Hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes or floods are rare to non-existent. While California and Arizona burn up in the heat and drought, the welcome fog drips from our pines.

But sitting here this morning with some 40 (I made that up) tiny brown tail moth hairs (microscopic venomous hypodermic needles) embedded all over my body, the smugness is gone. I’ve been a mosquito magnet my whole life, went to the ER my first Maine spring, swollen up with black fly bites, made a solemn promise to my dad decades ago to never keep bees, but this itch is like nothing I’ve had before.

Is there anyone in our entire town not itching from the little bastards this week? One friend takes her hairbrush to bed with her, the better to scratch. A long thread on the LBB delves into the many remedies that may help; a scalding hot shower has been my only – temporary – relief.

Bug bites itch the first day, but fade away in another day or two. I swear these get worse. Scratching, while deeply satisfying, only prolongs the agony. Sleep can be impossible.

Enough whining. I’m sure everyone shares my pain.

But not only are they making us physically miserable, these voracious caterpillars are stripping our beautiful oaks, denuding ancient apple and pear trees. Their very poop – frass it’s called – covers the ground under the trees. Drifts of the stuff has collected on my grandchildren’s new trampoline.

One particular apple tree, a gorgeous, spreading apple of an unknown variety, grows next to Don’s deck; its branches hang over the railing, giving an excellent view into its interior branches. Standing there you’re eye to eye with thousands of the hairy little worms, watching them munch-munch-munch their way through all the foliage, until only stark leaf stems are left. They’re already gone, now that they’ve stripped it bare, gone into the rough cocoons they’ve spun around a curled leaf, wrapped around a denuded stem, or tucked under a railing or rafter.

They’ll emerge as moths – pure white with brown hairs at the tip of the abdomen – in a month, sometime in July, to mate and lay eggs for next year. The Maine website explains their whole lifecycle. Even the cocoons are hazardous, so drop them ever so carefully into a pail of soapy water to destroy them.

It’s always been there, Don says of this apple tree, at least in his memory, which goes back a good ways. Perhaps his grandfather planted it, or even his great-grandfather, Joe Thomas. Old apple trees are iconic, symbolic of an earlier time. Our giant pines, the ones that grow in the Tanglewood forest or almost anywhere in the Camden Hills State Park, are more impressive. Stand under one of those and look up; they’re enormous.

But an old apple tree, certainly shorter, perhaps bent and twisted, to my mind tells a richer story. Of course the more majestic conifers, the oaks, the birches, the popple and the ash each played a role in our region’s history. But these trees had to be cut into lumber, shingles, kilnwood, masts and planks, firewood – in other words, sacrificed to burn in the lime kiln or kitchen stove, to frame the houses, build the ships or birchbark canoe.

But the same apple tree gave fruit year after year. When Clarence Thurlow, near the end of his life, took John Bunker, local hunter of lost apple varieties, to the Fletcher Sweet that he remembered from his childhood, it was barely recognizable as an apple tree. A single trunk grew tall enough to reach the sunlight amidst a thicket of other trees, coming out of what was clearly (to John’s eyes) an old graft on the original stump. John climbed that tree to reach some living wood. All he took were a few twigs to cut into scion wood, take home, and graft a new generation of Fletcher Sweets.

An unknown variety of apple grows at Stacey Glassman’s on Fernalds Neck, not far from the house Margaretta Thurlow (sister-in-law, by the way, to Clarence) lived in for most of her life. This old tree either didn’t set fruit, or when it did, the apples would drop off or wither. Stacey remembers only one year when she actually got apples, but still the tree persevered. John Bunker took a look at it a couple of years ago, cut some scion wood, and today a young tree, named Margaretta, is growing in the Common Ground’s Heritage orchard.

The connection to Margaretta Thurlow is symbolic, as the tree was only growing in her neighborhood, not her dooryard. Still, that Stacey suggested the name speaks to the durability of our town’s oldtimers, and certainly to a woman many of us will never forget. There are many Margaretta stories, including a couple in my book Staying Put; I especially like the way she faced old age. Essentially, I think she ignored it.

When her family decided she shouldn’t be popping off squirrels from her front porch with a gun anymore, she turned to trapping them, then sinking the trap in her bathtub. When in her 90s a baby skunk toddled up to her, kneeling in her garden, she pushed it away, then got in her car and drove to PenBay for a rabies shot. Cyrene Slegona remembers finding Margaretta and her dad, Frank – both nearing 90 ­– lying on their backs under her car, diagnosing some automotive problem.

She knew the plants, the animals, and the birds of her hometown. As a little girl she learned all the birds by their song. She called me every spring to get pieces of cotton warp to put out for nest-building birds; they prefer 100% cotton she’d tell me. She was the first woman to get a degree in horticulture from the University of Maine. Margaretta was instrumental in saving Fernalds Neck from development. Take a walk in the preserve down there (follow the signs to the end of the road), jump into Megunticook to cool off near Balance Rock, and think of Margaretta.

I especially remember the women, the ones who actually ran this place, or rather, saw that it ran smoothly. They did it by long, morning phone calls with one another, by bringing in casseroles and bowls of slaw, biscuits and pies to the potluck suppers that proliferated in Lincolnville “back in the day.”

 I’ve often told the story of Ruth Pottle calling me, barely two weeks after we moved here, “would I make a pie for the supper?” A pie? I’d never made a pie in my life.

Mostly the women outlived the men. Bessie Heal Dean, widowed for some 30 years, loved sitting in her window overlooking the Camden Hills beyond Dead Man’s Curve, working on a jigsaw puzzle. She’d lived her entire life in Lincolnville, could point out the houses her father, Herbert Heal built, as well as the original Petunia Pump.

Bernice Bradway Calderwood, farmer/farmwife collected eggs from thousands of hens while her husband milked and tended his dairy herd, was left alone for many years, braided rugs until her hands lost their strength, then set up her sewing machine in the living room and made intricate quilted patterns.

Ruth Norwood Pottle, whose husband John dropped dead out hunting, kept his framed picture on the table so she wouldn’t have to eat alone.

Ruth Nickerson Felton came back to her childhood home from Connecticut after her husband passed away in his 60s. She lived in the house she was born in, where the barn still held the cow stalls, her trapper father’s fur room, and chicken coop. She could be found knitting in her favorite chair at the window overlooking the pond her father had dug so his two daughters could ice skate.

Peg Drinkwater Miller still lives at the family farm at the head of Pitcher Pond. Peg and her late husband, Ray, made their living and raised two daughters, while still following the old ways – gardens, canning, hundreds of hens. Drop her a line or give her a call.

Both Stacey and I were lucky enough to land here when the town was still substantially populated with genuine oldtimers. Now, I’m as old as most of them were when I came, and so are just as many others, but there’s a quality we don’t have, whether we’re native or from away. Most of us grew up in a much more modern world, one that even today’s kids would recognize: TV, recorded music, airplanes, telephones, electricity. The old folks we encountered 30, 40, 50 years ago grew up with outhouses, dug wells, kerosene lamps, one room schools.

Peg’s daughter, Nancy Miller Heald, and I are contemporaries, yet while we both grew up with all of the above, she was uniquely surrounded with the old ones in her childhood on that farm overlooking Pitcher Pond. She recently wrote:

“….remember marching around the breakfast table with Don McNeal while Gramp Leigh kept time with his knife handle, shelling peas and snapping beans on the porch and putting up the milk and churning and being read to a lot with Gram Belle; the pantry with it's ever ready bread board and rolling pin and water that was so hard dish soap hardly bubbled, oven full of bean pots on Saturday nights, tented condiments at Gram Cora's and Gramp Grover's stories that started with when he was a little girl. At Aunties it was sugar cookies with raisin faces, bubble pipes in the sink, paper dolls on the chair rails, Uncle Harry sitting in the rocker by the window reading his paper, old fashioned ginger ale, sugar cookies, and poetry on the porch.”

Our children and grandchildren will probably remember us fondly, laugh at our technical ineptitude, our hopeless taste in music – you know. But unlike the gnarled apple trees, unlike our town’s oldtimers, I wonder if they’ll find any of the same wonder.

Town

All meetings are held remotely or, the Selectmen meeting, livestreamed. Go to the town website to get the links for the various remote meetings. The Selectmen livestreaming option is on the home page at the right.

A public hearing on this year’s town warrant will be held Monday, June 22 at 6 p.m. here.

The annual Town Meeting and primary election will be held on July 14. To vote by absentee ballot; get your ballot one of these three ways.

1)      Request online

2)    Request via the telephone by calling the Town Office (763-3555)

3)    In person at the Town Office during normal business hours

Be sure to return your ballot before July 14, the earlier the better.

Library

I got it wrong last week: it was John Richards who resurfaced and reconfigured the Library parking lot. New grass is growing and the whole place looks great!

Sheila says: “Thanks to all those who’ve returned books they’d been holding on to since before the library closed. These and many others are now available for checkout through the library’s curbside service.

“To see the entire collection, go to the Library website 

and click on “Books and Resources” and then the catalog.

“To order books, email questions@lincolnvillelibrary.org or call 706-3896 (local number) and leave a message. Pickup is by appointment. 

“Our storage shed is overflowing with donated books, so the Library is not taking book donations right now. Thanks to everyone for their understanding!”

I’m find the free Ancestry.com

option a great resource to access from home during this time. If the above link doesn’t work, go to the Library site and access it from there.