Mere Brooke estuary in the Kate Furbish Preserve. Photo contributed by Sandy Stott

Some years ago, I began searching for an antidote to February. For a short month, given, occasionally, to odd leaps, it gets talked down a lot. It turned out to be a short search; not long into it I was sun struck. Here’s the short story:

It’s a cloudy February day in the aftermath of another storm. A uniform gray bathes the school where I teach; pallor sets up in every face I pass; the snow squeaks underfoot. “When is spring?” I hear a passerby wonder.

I’m walking, hunched against the cold, between classes when the sun’s light arrests me. I look up at its disc over the school’s administration building, aware for a moment that this could be the beginning of some saccharine school story, but at the precise angle of our meeting, I feel warmth. I turn to face the sun more squarely, and, in the folds of my dark scarf, a tiny riot of heat spreads to my neck. I smile and walk back toward the building I’ve just left.

To the left of the doors, there’s a stone ledge stretching beneath the hallway windows, and where the building juts left, there’s an oblique-angled corner. I go there, strip off and make a pillow of my coat and sit down on its softness. Cupped by the corner, I lean back and resume relations with the sun; I close my eyes and feel the sun’s palm spread warmth across my face, along my scarf to my chest. Palmy dreams begin.

The school bell jars me; I look up to a few quizzical faces on the path ten yards away. Have I been talking in my sleep, ordering, perhaps, a tropical drink, humming softly a Jimmy Buffet tune? The students walk on, away from this momentary curiosity. I am sun addled, but to them I am perhaps a small pocket of adult weirdness on the way to lunch.

My spot is all sun, and, aside from our bell’s metal reminder of who I am and my schedule, here I can drift on the little raft of my mind. Here I can shift seasons, book passage, swim out of season.

I’m guessing that many of you have your February sun spots too. Here are two of mine, Brunswick-based, one very local, the other not far away and publicly available.

Our house faces south, and in January the low-angled sun rides behind the pines, offering little. But now it has climbed just enough to send in a couple of hours of midday sun to a small chair I have tucked into an outdoor corner facing the sun’s way. Ten chair-minutes can be a tiny tropical vacation.

The other spot is a south-facing oak in the Mere Brook estuary at the town’s Kate Furbish Preserve. There, the sun has melted out a collar of ground at the tree’s base, and, settled onto the pillow of my thick, winter gloves, I can bask away. Both spots share one other attribute: they are sheltered from the insistent north winds, spirit of winter. Perhaps you too have a sunspot. They are scattered everywhere in town.

Part II – In the Shadows

January 24th’s edition of the Times Record carried a letter to the editor — The PFAS Brunswick Really Needs to Worry About — that caught my attention. Just as the sun sometimes suggests easing back, other moments ask that I sit up straight, pay attention. This letter from Brunswick resident Josh Katz was such a moment. Katz, a hydrogeologist, wondered about the discrepancy between the recent intense public worry about potential PFAS run-off from the proposed Bowdoin College playing fields conversion to artificial turf, and the absence of attention paid to another potential source of PFAS in our ground and surface waters.

Katz’s lucid, detailed letter points out that the presence of PFAS at the old naval air station, now The Landing, dwarfs anything the turf fields might visit on our town and the Mere Brook watershed. Drafted in response to a recent RAB (Restoration Advisory Board) meeting held by the Navy, Katz’s letter is deeply unsettling. It asks the town of Brunswick, MRRA (Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority) and Maine DEP to pay attention to the stored supplies of PFAS-rich AFFF (firefighting foam for airports) and to the wash of PFAS-carrying stormwater into the Androscoggin and Mere Brook watersheds. The letter asks us as citizens to read and then ask our town and state representatives to go to work on this dark chemical specter. It is clearly on our town turf.

Sandy Stott is a Brunswick, Maine resident, chair of the town’s Conservation Commission, and a member of Brunswick Topsham Land Trust’s Board of Directors. He writes for a variety of publications. He may be reached at fsandystott@gmail.com.