The shoes he wore all last summer and fall.

The beanpot …..when/why/would/will I ever again bake the beans we grew and he methodically shelled, sitting in the barn door on late summer afternoons…. with bits of bacon and a couple of hot dogs, coleslaw and biscuits on the side, his favorite meal?

The basket full of Christmas candy that we’d filled each other’s stockings with just weeks before he died.

The Girl Scout cookies he loved, ordered a couple of months ago, delivered by our own little Scout just the other day.

His pipes, which turn up in the unlikeliest places, even though he hadn’t smoked in a year or more.

Our MOFGA membership card, carefully folded and tucked into his wallet a while ago, as he always did when it arrived, to be there next September when we excitedly walked into the Common Ground Fair on a crisp fall morning.

 These “mines” are all over the house, and each time I encounter one, it’s day one all over again. Except day one and even three or four weeks on are a blur. The fog is starting to burn off, and suddenly the house that’s been my refuge since Wally’s death at the end of January is so full of reminders I walk around deliberately avoiding eye contact with most of our stuff.

 The other part of this is our own hoarding tendencies. Or, to put a better face on it, saving stuff because we may need it some day. The burden of all of this had been starting to weigh on me in recent years. The look on my daughter-in-law’s face one Christmas morning, when she saw me carefully smoothing out used wrapping paper and rolling up the ribbon, started it.

“Diane, walk over to the wastebasket,” she said, “throw it away!”

And suddenly I saw what she saw: The day the family would have to deal with nine rooms, a barn and a couple of sheds full of the stuff we’d been, well, okay hoarding.

 When we moved into this house in 1970 we each brought our own records and books, clothes and little else. We’d both been living in furnished rentals and were starting from scratch. There was a wonderful used furniture place near the arch in Camden run by Harry Crockett and his wife. That was Harry Sr.; his son Harry, lives in the Center today. A good deal of the furniture in our house today came from Crockett’s, including the tiger-eye maple table that’s been our family dining table all along.

 We got our bed, an iron one with brass trim, from Crockett’s too; its white paint was chipped and the brass tarnished. We set it up outside, and Gertrude Hopper, who was visiting her friend, Vonnie Stone, that day, worked along side me, polishing that brass to a shine.

If Gertrude was visiting Vonnie, this must have been in the weeks before we actually owned the house. Our VA loan took forever to go through, March to July, and in the meantime we were spending every free minute at “our” house, painting it and gathering furniture. Vonnie and Nat Stone, still living here, were glad to have finally sold the place and were happy to give us space to do this. Gertrude and I painted the iron parts avocado green, just the beginning of a weird flirtation I had with color at the time.

 Before long I’d painted the kitchen cabinets fire engine red, and a piano bright orange, the one that Gertrude and her husband, Cyril (the Beach postmaster at the time) had given us. That piano, a large upright model, one of nine pianos that the Hoppers had collected for some reason, was with us until our middle son was about 11. He took piano lessons from a neighbor, Sharon McLaughlin, for a while, but when he lost interest we got rid of the piano. By that time we’d made so many changes to the house that there was no way to get it out, so Wally took his chain saw to it, and it went away in pieces.

 So now, nearly 47 years after the summer we began filling up all the rooms, barn lofts (2), shop, garden shed, and lower barn it’s time to start clearing out. It started with the kitchen. I dearly love our kitchen, but it’s a dinosaur. I often think that the first thing a new owner of this house will do is tear it out. The cupboards, counters and drawers are homemade, likely nearly a 100 years old. And there are signs that they’ve been moved, from the first room in the ell to the next [a la Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn, a wonderful book on New England’s connected houses], so the room we now call our living room was once the kitchen. Vonnie told us the old paint on the floor showed the outline of the cupboards when she moved in.

 None of the drawers, heavy, clunky things, really fit into their spaces; all the cupboard doors were wonky and coming apart, their hinges loose. We’d installed a huge, old slate sink many years ago, just right for washing the milk bucket, strainer and cream separator parts. It’s deep enough to fill a 5-gallon bucket; Wally carried two of them to the cow and pigs every winter morning and night. But the sink just sort of sits there, with plenty of space between wall and backsplash for mice to travel onto the counters; a wolf spider had built a large funnel web just behind one of the faucets. It did no good to brush it away, as it would reappear in a day or two. I grew used to her, lurking there, just out of reach.

 Zack Thomas, who’d done some work for us last summer, thought he could fix things so they’d work better and took it on. Everything had to come out of the cupboards, drawers and from under the sink. There’s a method of de-cluttering that has you take everything of a kind  — all your clothes, or all your books, or all the junk in your kitchen cupboards – and put them in a pile. Then sort through it, getting rid of what you don’t wear or read or use. I found several Jello molds, a stack of bread pans, too many old knives and gadgets I never use, a steamed pudding mold, dozens of mismatched plastic containers and lids, multiple muffin tins, several partial sets of measuring cups – you get the idea. I’ll put them on a table in the barn when it warms up; help yourself to any of it when you come by for eggs.

 Each drawer had to have glides attached, and then specially fitted into its slot, all the doors glued up and clamped, the slate sink repaired where its soap dish had broken off. It wasn’t a job for the faint-hearted or impatient; each element had broken or was dysfunctional in its own way and had to be fixed differently.

Zack, who likes working with old stuff, got all of it working smoothly, and pretty much used the bits of wood and hardware already stashed away somewhere in our barn or workbench.

 One day he crawled out from a cupboard holding a red-painted board. I’d told him about the red doors and drawers, and how I’d eventually taken them all to the Yankee Stripper to be returned to their natural state.

“This must be from then,” he said, and proceeded to use that one board in the breadbox I’d asked him to make. I like that.

 Wally died five weeks ago today, Sunday evening. I still can’t hear his voice or visualize him sitting in his chair; sometimes, though, I think I can see him carrying in an armload of wood, his constant winter chore. I’m not sure why this seems so important; he’s gone, isn’t he? He liked to say he hadn’t been to a barber in 46 years; I was his barber. Today I came across the lock of hair I cut from his head the morning after he died. Of course, I buried my nose in it, and there he was.

School

At the next regularly scheduled School Committee meeting, Monday March 6 at 6 p.m. members will vote on whether to make the March 17 Teacher Workshop Day a full student day, and rescheduling the workshop day for another time. At this point LCS has gone beyond the five snow days built in to the school calendar by one day. This change would keep the last day of school on Monday, June 19

 The middle school band and chorus members of Hope, Appleton, and Lincolnville are coming together, March 15, 7 p.m. at Strom Auditorium, CHRS, for an evening of fun and music. Under the direction of Shelly Burcalow, Sharon Henderson and Emily Widdoes, along with special guest conductors Nancy Rowe and Kim Murphy from the high school, the combined band will perform a variety of selections from folksongs to movie soundtracks. Admission is free.

Belfast Regional Job Fair

Lincolnville’s Tom Crowley (best known to LBB subscribers as the Town Poet) has written a children’s book, Gulls and Crows, available for Kindle, a book he wrote in 1994 about Lincolnville Beach. According to the Amazon review, “This book shows how two different races or cultures can find a way to understand and appreciate each other despite an initial conflict. The story is relevant today and worldwide as we witness or experience a tense, global humanitarian crisis. This book is for everyone over the age of 8 and will soon be available in Spanish as "Gaviotas y Cuervos". Check it out! A small percentage of every book sold will go to Rockland’s Coastal Children's Museum.

Wildlife Around Town

Two good reports this week: first, Edna Pendleton says the red-winged blackbirds are back at her place on Stan Cilley Road. They generally arrive in early March, and here they are, right on time. A flock of robins were hanging around as well, she says.

 And over on Slab City Road Coral Coombs says her husband, Michael, saw a big (two feet at the shoulder!) bobcat near their house Friday morning. Their house cats spotted it first.