Stories are on my mind this week.

Perhaps you’ve heard the tale of Maiden’s Cliff. Various versions have been told over the years about the tragic death of a young girl who fell from the cliff in 1864. Sometime in the 1920s a Boston firm, promoting the development of Lake City, the  area that borders Barretts’ Cove and faces the cliff, even invented the tale of a broken hearted maiden leaping from the cliff, a far cry from the account that follows, given by Elenora French’s oldest sister who was with her that long ago May day.

It was back in war times, and my sister and I were living with my father and mother, Mr. and Mrs. Zadoc French at Lincolnville Beach [25 Beach Road], then called French’s Beach, named for one of the first settlers, my great-great grandfather. There were 12 of us children, and I was the oldest. On that May day I had planned to drive to Lincolnville Center with a school teacher, a Miss Hartshorne, and my sister Elenora, then 11 years old, begged to go, too.

I was 18 and felt she would be in the way and so did mother, but she teased so hard that we gave in and told her she could go. How clearly it all comes back to me, her happiness as she danced away to put on her new print dress which mother had made for her to have her pictures taken in the next week. It was made with a full skirt gathered into a fan waist, and she was very proud of it. She never lived to have her picture taken, and we have none of her.

We drove away with the old horse father kept for us to use, and it was such a beautiful day that the awful tragedy [that] waited for us almost around the corner cast no shadow. Arriving at Lincolnville we were met by a young man, Randall Young, of that town, who invited us to climb Mt. Megunticook.

This we were delighted to do and started off in gay spirits. We made the ascent on the Lincolnville side, which is very gradual and gives no idea of the height to which one mounts. When we were on the cliff, Mr. Young told us how very high it was, and as we stood looking out over the lake and its many little islands and admiring the scene, he went to fetch a big stone which he said he would roll down over the cliff to show us how high up we were.

Mis Hartshorne and I were talking and just a bit apart from us Elenora sat. I well remember how she looked. The wind had blown her hat off, taking with it her net. It was not the kind of a net the girls wear today, but was hand knit out of colored silk and little girls as well as mothers wore them.

As I saw her last, she sat there in May sunlight putting on her net. I turned to speak to my companion and heard a piercing scream. The place where sister was sitting was empty. She was gone with awful cry which I shall remember to my dying day. Should I live to be a thousand I shall never forget the horror of that moment, but although I was almost insane I did not faint and with the others ran to the edge of the cliff.

We could see no sign of her, for we could not get near enough to look down where had fallen. Mr. Young told us to go down the way we had come and get help, telling us to lead them to the turnpike road several hundred feet below. He said he would scale the cliff and find sister.

It seemed an eternity before we could get down to the village and fine men to come to our aid for they were all out in the fields as it was planting time. At last we found some and went to the foot of the cliff, while a young woman, a Miss Barrett, ran to the field, caught a horse and rode bare back to Camden for a doctor and to get word to father and mother.

In the meantime Mr. Young had crept down over the face of the cliff, how no one can ever figure out, as it is like a straight wall and had found Elenora unconscious. The men made a rude litter from the boughs and tenderly lifted her and placed her upon it, carrying her as carefully as they could.

It was two o’clock when she fell from the cliff and it was sunset when she was finally removed and carried to Lincolnville Center. She died at twelve-thirty that night without regaining consciousness.

[Elenora French is buried in French Cemetery, just south of Lincolnville Beach.]

The details leave no doubt that the writer of this account was there: the young girl “teasing” until her mother relented, the new dress with the fan waist, the net “not the kind we wear today”, the “awful cry which I shall remember to my dying day”. They give a poignancy and immediacy to the story no Boston real estate promoter could ever approach.

Words are only one way we tell a story.

An old photo album, the kind with black pages and small snapshots held in with those gummed corners, came my way this summer. It was a family album from a farm near Augusta, probably from the late teens – 1915-1920 perhaps – so a hundred years ago.  There are no dates, just a few names written in pencil, barely legible on the black pages to give a few clues.

I scanned them all, and watched them, one by one, reveal themselves on my computer’s big screen, showing detail I’d never have seen in the originals. Here are some of them:

Fred with gun and what is that bird he’s proudly displaying?

Fred with Mammy. Is Mammy the woman or the dog? Do you think she’s wearing a corset?

Young man heading out to the field?

“Eva- here I am”. Photo taken in a New York studio.

Another photo of Eva.

How does this factory fit in with the Maine hardscrabble farm?

And of course, the swimming hole.

There’s a story here, or at least fragments of who these people were and the lives they lived. Your guess is as good as mine. 

A quick dooryard visit with my neighbor Kristi Scott the other early morning turned into a long ramble around her garden, the two of us talking as I admired all she’s done this summer with rocks and plants and lots of hard work.

We’ve been neighbors for more than 40 years, raising our children sequentially, my oldest the age of her youngest, sharing plants, borrowing a cup of sugar here and there, bartering occasionally. She was present at my youngest son’s birth, one of the five women who cheered us on that night, as I labored and Wally wondered what on earth we’d been thinking, having a baby at home.  

We may go months without seeing one another beyond a passing wave, but have no trouble picking up where we left off.

This past winter she tumbled into the abyss of loss that I’d already been in for a year when her long-time partner, Fred Croft, died.

We went inside to see some photos of Fred she’d taken over the years they’d spent together. They covered three large boards, capturing the man in a way only she could do. There he was in the middle of her large and boisterous family, in the workshop he loved, cooking over an open fire, sailing, working around boats – the story of his life in full color.

We noted the different ways we’ve worked through our grief, me with words, she with pictures. And interestingly, both of us, by digging in the dirt. Last spring and summer I built a maze of garden beds that filled up days in hard work. This summer she’s done the same but on a more intricate and delicate, scale with her artist’s eye.

Dr. Candy Sidner, a Research Professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute,  will present “Always-On Companions for Isolated Older Adults”, Wednesday August 1, 7 p.m. at the Library. She will show videos of two Always-On computer agents.  One is presented on a computer screen and the other is a physical robot that her research team programmed to interact with isolated older adults. She will talk about what these agents can do, how her team settled on the design, and what was learned from a month-long study of the agents in individual homes.

The annual Blueberry Wing Ding pancake breakfast, sponsored by the Lincolnville Improvement Association, will be held Saturday, August 11, 7 – 10:30 a.m. at McLaughlin’s Lobster Shack. Get tickets for the breakfast and the raffle for area restaurants, shops and inns from Lee Cronin croninredsox@aol.com , from any LIA member or at the door that day. All proceeds go towards scholarships for local graduating seniors. Last year the LIA awarded $4500 in scholarships to Lincolnville CHRHS students.