It’s that time again, isn’t it, when the leaves are falling faster and faster, when the sky can’t settle down, but alternates between breezy blue to gray/black and menacing? Yes, it’s November, or very nearly. It’s my favorite time of year, and the deeper we go into the month the better I like it. Maine is a beautiful place in any season, but in late fall its bones show in all their wildness; you’d never mistake it for anywhere else. And unlike other, more civilized places, we can’t just sit back and enjoy the show. No, Maine asks more of us than that. We’ve got to get involved in closing up and battening down. We’ve got to get ready for winter.

Though I came from a northern place too, it was a much tamer one; my first winter here, as an adult and on my own, taught me a whole lot about surviving winter. I’ve already mentioned in an earlier article the oil burners in my St. George kitchen stove, pesky things that I never really mastered. The other part of the heating system in that house was a gas-fired floor furnace thing. It lived just under a 2 x 3 foot grate in the living room; you could see the flame when it came on, and I stood on top of it to get dressed on below-zero mornings. You never wanted to step away from the beautiful waves of heat it gave off. Wally grew up with a similar gadget in Augusta, and says he was always being shooed off the grate with “stop hogging the heat!”

One by one I’d noticed my St. George neighbors were banking their houses in fir boughs, great thick piles of evergreens neatly arranged around the foundation. A few used bales of hay, or raked the leaves off the lawn. By the next winter I was dragging boughs down from the woods behind my house and valiantly trying to replicate the look. Do you have any idea how many fir boughs it takes to wrap a whole foundation? Very, very many.

And then Wally and I had our own house, and were facing the first winter here. For many years we did at least part of the foundation with boughs, then moved into the 20th century and used the plastic-and-lathe method – way easier, though environmentally not as nice, and certainly not as picturesque. Eventually, we just kind of stopped that chore, and didn’t notice a whole lot of difference; the floors were just as cold without the banking as with it. Now, with our newly-encapsulated cellar, the old stone walls and dirt floor are neatly covered with yards of heavy plastic and gallons of foam. So much for picturesque. (Actually, that went out a couple of decades ago when we replaced the drafty old window sashes and their wavy 19th century glass with double-glazed Andersons.) Anyway, the floors are warm, the cellar’s warm, and only the root vegetables, that used to spend their winters down there, care.

This buttoning up for winter is, indeed, a complicated affair. There are so many chores to do, and sometimes you undo one thing to accomplish another. Take the potatoes and carrots, etc. Yes, we got a nice, warm cellar with a workshop we can actually stand to be in, but then had to figure out another way to store the vegetables. So we built an insulated, coffin-sized box, open to the dirt floor on its bottom and the rock wall on it’s back side; it stays at 50º and holds all the potatoes, carrots, beets and garlic. No room for the onions, but last year they stayed okay all winter hanging in the now too-warm pantry.

Thanks to Belfast’s Window Dressers, a wonderful volunteer organization in the Midcoast, I no longer spend hours trying to hang those clear plastic sheets that get held to the window with tape, and then shrunk tight with a hair dryer. Yes, over the Anderson windows that were supposed to make our house warmer. Sure, they were state of the art and all that, but install them in a nearly 150-year-old house, and something’s bound to end up out of plumb. Probably the windows. So they’ve always been a bit leaky – not as bad as the ones they replaced, but noticeably chilly on a windy day. The wooden inserts from Window Dressers are custom-fit for each window that you have, cost about $20-25 each (less if you’re low-income), weigh almost nothing, and fit snugly into the window they’re made for. We got seven last year, and have three more coming this year. The catch is that you have to order them the previous spring for this winter. So if you want some for next year, give them a call next spring to get on the list.

The to-do list to get ready for winter is long: put away the deck and porch furniture, drain the hoses, cut back the perennials, storm doors on—screen doors put away, clean out the henhouse, fill the woodshed, straighten up the barn, get out the snowblower and make sure it starts, plant the spring bulbs that arrived last week, rake up the leaves, mulch the tender things – I could go on and on. And I’m sure you can too!

Electing an Interim Selectman

“Within minutes of notification, members of the Lincolnville Fire Department were on site to help secure critical systems and minimize damage to the  school. Firefighters worked with the school principal to cut power to the effected area, stop the flow of water from, and drain the sprinkler system, as well as perform an assessment of the building to be sure there was  no additional pending danger. ‘They were completely prepared for this situation and performed professionally,’ said building principal Paul Russo. ‘Although we sustained some damage, they really helped keep it to a minimum.’”

Library News

Calendar orders are due in tomorrow, as well as ads. Download your order form here. Call Connie Parker, 789-5987, with your order, as there won’t be time to mail it; she’ll take it over the phone. This is a great way to support the Lincolnville Historical Society, and it’s a fun calendar to hang on the wall.

Goodwill Gardeners