Signs of spring .... the rabbit hole ....LD366 ..... Curry King

This Week in Lincolnville: Waiting for the sun ....

....to rise in Sleepy Hollow
Sun, 04/09/2017 - 8:45pm

    Most mornings this winter my first glimpse of the sun comes in Barb’s email, a photo of that day’s sunrise from her perch on the shore in Camden. She tracks the seasons through the sun’s trajectory back and forth across Penobscot Bay, the islands serving as markers. Though I’m only a mile from the shore the sun is well up before it gleams through the trees of Sleepy Hollow and shines on my neighborhood.

    Tom Crowley, the poet of our Bulletin Board, has a view similar to Barb’s, and today’s email brought this:

    Spring Medicine

     In the spring

    I take my medicine

    in coffee spoons.

    small doses of

    new-made maple syrup

    overflowing the spoon

    into hot coffee. 

    Healing the

    wounds of winter

    as the earth warms,

    and the sun rises

    over the islands

    sooner every day.

    Maine.

    So, instead of looking out my window at 4:30 a.m., I slide open the shed door and listen. Too early, too dark for the birds, I listen for that most welcoming sound at the end of winter – drip drip drip -- the snow melting off the roof.

    “At last”, we all say to each other. And “It’s supposed to get up to 50 today!” The weather. My dad, a Midwesterner, a town dweller, a city guy moved to Maine in his 70s, and never got over how people here raved about a good day. He always maintained that “Anyplace where they talk about a nice day as much as here must have lousy weather.”

    I think it’s a country thing, but it sure is a Maine thing. The diaries people kept in the old days invariably start out with the weather report. “Fair but it has blown a awfull gale all day”, wrote Ralph Richards on March 26, 1908. “And tonight it is whooping it up something fierce.” A day later, “Warm overcast. Rain tonight. Awfull hard traveling.”  By March 30, “Fair. But such traveling would drive a man to drink.”

    CALENDAR 

    MONDAY, Apr.10

    Conservation Commission. 4 p.m., Town Office

    Selectmen meet, 6 p.m., Town Office


    TUESDAY, Apr. 11

    Needlework Group, 4- 6 p.m., Library

    Wage and Personnel Policy Board, 4:45 p.m., Town Office

    Budget Committee, 6 p.m., Town Office


    WEDNESDAY, Apr. 12

    Yoga, 6:30 p.m., United Christian Church Parish Hall, 18 Searsmont Rd.

    Planning Board, 7 p.m., Town Office


    THURSDAY, Apr. 13

    Soup Café, noon-1p.m., Community Building, 18 Searsmont Road


    FRIDAY, Apr. 14

    Good Friday Service, 6 p.m., United Christian Church Parish Hall


    SATURDAY, Apr. 15

    Children’s crafts, 10 a.m.-noon, Library


    SUNDAY, Apr. 16

    EASTER SERVICES:

    Bayshore Baptist Church, Sunrise Service at 6 a.m. at the Beach, followed by breakfast at the church; 9:30 Sunday School, 11 a.m. Worship

    Community Crossroads Baptist Church, 9:45 Sunday School, 10:30 Fellowship and snacks, 11 a.m. Easter Service, Lincolnville Central School

    United Christian Church, 9:30 a.m., 18 Searsmont Road


    Every week:

    AA meetings, Tuesdays & Fridays at 12:15 p.m., Wednesdays & Sundays at 6 p.m., United Christian Church

    Lincolnville Community Library, open Tuesdays, 4-7, Wednesdays, 2-7, Fridays and Saturdays, 9 a.m.-noon. For information call 763-4343.

    Soup Café, every Thursday, noon—1p.m., Community Building, Sponsored by United Christian Church. Free, though donations to the Community Building are appreciated

    Schoolhouse Museum is closed for the season; call Connie Parker for a special appointment, 789-5984.

    Bayshore Baptist Church, Sunday School for all ages, 9:30 a.m., Worship Service at 11 a.m.; Good News Club, Tuesdays, LCS, 3-4:30

    Crossroads Community Church, 11 a.m. Worship

    United Christian Church, Worship Service 9:30 a.m., Children’s Church during service


    COMING UP

    April 19: Library Presentation and Concert

    April 22: 1st sewing class at the Library

    April 30: Story-telling at the Library

    May 1: Deadline to return nomination papers to Town Office

    May 6: 2nd sewing class

    June 3: Pickling Class

    That would be mud season, and for a man who delivered the mail on a daily 25 mile route from Lincolnville Beach up Cobbtown Road to Belmont’s Halls Corner through Searsmont and back down to the Beach “on runners” (sleigh) or wheels (wagon) mud was a big deal. It still is. On my twice-daily trips to the hen house I feel the ground giving way underfoot as the frost comes out. Yesterday the rain barrel, rather the ice barrel for the past several months, had melted enough to siphon out a bucketful for the chickens. Carrying a pail of water from the house through the drifts and ice of winter was getting old.

    One of our sons had a ritual of his own this time of year. Come a certain day with a feel of warmth to it and he’d gather up his teddy bear, Boogie, and a little basket and go out looking for what he called “Boogie’s Signs of Spring.” An hour later he’d be back and dump out the basket to show us a sprig of something green, a crocus, some moss, a feather. Best of all would be the report on his spring flower, the painted trillium he’d discovered on one of these annual forays. So his dad and I would follow him to the edge of the woods to admire what to all of us was the true, first sign of spring at Sleepy Hollow.

     This year I’m looking, alone, for personal signs of spring. The little boy has grown up, Boogie forgotten, and the one person I counted on for daily weather reports is gone. I survey winter’s wreck in the garden beds, the dirty patches of snow and ice, the woodshed litter, broken branches and piles of sunflower seed hulls under the feeders. I hurry to finish up the indoor tasks I’ve set myself. The pantry’s neat, the china cupboard purged, washed and sparkling, the oven door – well, you’ve heard enough about that – the freezer’s contents inventoried, re-stacked or fed to the hens.

    One small sign that my spring may be near: the first-thing-in-the-morning peek around the door at the box that holds his physical remains, his ashes. “Good morning,” I’ve said silently every day to that box. And “good night” last thing before going upstairs. Halfway through a recent day I realized I hadn’t done it, hadn’t blown him a kiss, hadn’t wished him a private morning greeting, the one that used to be delivered across our pillows. Had I forgotten?

     Of course, I then promptly fell through the rabbit hole. It’s how I’m coming to see my own consciousness these days. There’s the regular, normal plane. Answer the phone, answer the door. Have normal conversations with people about the normal things of our mutual lives. Make dates, promise to send a link or pick up a book at the library. I laugh at jokes, pay careful attention to the latest news, get engrossed in a novel. I’ve even started weaving again, something I haven’t done in at least a year. Most days are good, productive and well, normal.

    Then there’s that underneath plane, the place that yawns below me, the place where missing him lives. It opens up at the oddest times. Hanging the laundry, Frohock Brook open for fishing, the new splitting maul he barely got to use. Or nothing at all.

    We’d talked endlessly about one of us going, starting years ago when both of us were healthy, but basically it was him saying he’d be first and me protesting, “you don’t know that.” But he did know. He worried if I would be all right, would there be enough money (and for the hundredth time he’d talk over how the pension was supposed to work), how would I get in the wood? Or get those buckets of water out to the hens. Never once did he say or did I say, how would I stand it?

    Surprisingly, neither of us had a clue about the emptiness and the raw longing that would spring up, the need. The need for him, his voice, his touch, above all for his reassurance and his love.

    That was blessedly in the future and not for him to have to figure out. Or, for that matter, for me to figure out if I’d been the one to die. That’s the job of the one left. It’s what I’m working on now, and on a day when spring is really in the air, I think I’ll get it done.


    Is This What We Want?

    The other night I attended a meeting in Rockland of the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine, or simply the Maine ACLU. It was held at the Lincoln Center, or as I’ll always call it, the Rockland Junior High School, the building where I was once a sixth grade teacher. After poking around my old classroom for a bit, I went upstairs where several dozen people had gathered in the auditorium to learn about the work of the ACLU in Maine

    The mission of the ACLU is to defend the individual rights guaranteed by the Constitution to every person in this country. And, I learned, basic human rights extend even to undocumented immigrants who are protected under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

    Then we heard about LD 366, a proposed law working its way through the Legislature, which would require towns to make their police officers act as immigration agents. Under this law, any town which didn’t comply would loose all state funding. How does Lincolnville fit in here? We have no town police, but rely on Waldo County Sheriff Department and the State Police. And also, we have quite a small immigrant presence in town. Why should we care?

    There are a number of reasons this is a bad idea, not the least of which is that if by chance your municipality detained someone under this proposed law it’s on your dime; the feds won’t reimburse your town for any expenses incurred, such as cost of jail, transporting, etc.

    Immigrants we read, both those with proper documents and the undocumented, are frightened, and apparently, rightly so. And so here’s the question. Is this who we are? Is this what we want our state to become? A hearing on LD 366 is scheduled for April 20, 1 p.m. at the State House. That’s a day I’ve been dreading, our wedding anniversary, 47 years. I plan to celebrate it in Augusta, carrying a sign that says “We’re all immigrants.”


    Lincolnville Central School News

    Congratulations to the following March Students of the Month: Kindergarten, Declan Grant and Abby Howland; First Grade, Cora Leavitt and Elise Talty; Second Grade, Py Nakjaroen; Third Grade, Jacob Greeley and Ellora Hunt; Fourth Grade, Elliot Condon; Fifth Grade, Owen McManus and Mikayla Talbot; Sixth Grade, Luna Abaldo; Seventh Grade, Lizzie Larsen-Leavins; and Eighth Grade, Phoebe Root.

    Last week four teams of LCS students traveled to Portland to compete in the KidWind Challenge. Students have been researching wind formation and how wind can generate electricity since January during the 40 minute Flex period. They designed, built, tested, and tweaked their wind turbines until all generated electricity. Thirty-four middle and high school teams competed in Portland. Our kids – Izzy Kinney, Allie Morse, Lizzie Larsen-Leavins, Britney Jackson, Bailey Curtis, Elise Condon, jack Edgar, Jordan Peasley, Layna Thompson, Tatum Freeman, Madison Shoudy, Ava Dube, Thomas Mitchell and Kai Rainey – learned a lot about the science of wind and electricity as well as the experience of working collaboratively.


    Library news

     Tuesday, April 11 from 4-6 p.m. is needlework time at the Lincolnville Community Library. Bring a knitting or other project to work on and stay for all or part of the time. This group is for everyone, no matter their level of experience. 

     Saturday April 15 is children’s craft morning at the Library. Kids and their parents are invited to come make whimsical birds from 10 a.m. to noon. There will be lots of colorful paper and decorations for creating all kinds of feathered creatures to celebrate spring. The program is free. 

     I (Diane O’Brien) will lead a two-session sewing workshop on Saturdays, April 22 and May 6 from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Library. Each participant will make a simple blouse using a pattern and a sewing machine. We’ll lay out the pattern, cut out the pieces and assemble them, using both machine and some hand sewing. I’ll provide the pattern, you bring the cloth. It requires 2 ½ yards of 44” wide fabric; if this will just be a learning experience you can use a large bedsheet or piece of muslin. Contact Sheila at the Library, 763-4343 or by email to register. The class is free, but we can only take six people.

    The April Library Presentation and Concert will be on April 19, featuring author Barbara Lawrence and singer Annabel Milisa-Parker. Call Rosey, 975-5432, to save a seat.


    Crossroads Community Baptist Church

    Eileen McDermott writes “We're hoping lots of folks will join us [for Easter] regardless of faith background. It's a chance to meet your neighbors and make new friends, joining us to celebrate Resurrection Sunday.” Crossroads, which meets at Lincolnville Central School, has a new interim pastor, Pastor Gary Ramey. Easter would be a good chance to meet him, or if you’d like, contact Eileen about setting up a meeting with him.


    Condolences

    Dorothy Munroe, a longtime Lincolnville resident, passed away recently. Many will remember her as the wife of Bill Munroe of Munroe Lumber (now Viking). I always enjoyed running into her in town, often with her sister, Eleanor MacDonald.


    LBB

    Once again it’s a toss-up for pick of the week on the L’ville Bulletin Board. I thought I had it knocked with this one:

    A resident on Masalin Road has a VERY small terrier type/wire hair dog who has appeared in her yard.  She said she found it sitting by her mailbox wearing a Halloween themed sweater.  She has it with her right now.  A tag was found on the dog with a phone number, but no answer. If this is your dog, please give her a call at …..

     Then came another one from our local, self-proclaimed Curry King, Arif Shaikh. Arif’s been posting for a few weeks now, telling us about his amazing curries and where we can find them. I’m definitely intrigued.

     But this morning’s post had me laughing out loud: he writes, in part that he’s “100 percent convinced that my parents never did anything more than grunt at each other, which they still do. The only thing better than watching the July 4th fireworks is watching my parents’ eyebrows while they fight.

     “Just so you know, the last time my father smiled was 1985, a few years after immigrating to the U.S. He found a $1,000 bill in a used coat he bought in a yard sale for $6. After three gas stations told him they don't accept Monopoly money, he went to Kmart to buy a map to find out where the state of Monopoly was. We lived in the State of Wisconsin at the time. I won't delve further into this. But needless to say, I was banned from board games for life. Poo Poo. Poo. That's why I didn't get a Ph.D in physics.)”

     It goes on from there. Then this: “Mark this day: April 9, 2017. In a few years, history classes in America will refer to this day as the beginning of a 'Curry Coup' - the day a benevolent dictator from an Indian village took over kitchens across America from the armchair capital of Facebook.” With Arif and our poet T. Crowley, along with an occasional little dog in a Halloween-themed sweater, the LBB is the best entertainment in town.