I wanted to go to my Aunt Flavie’s dairy farm to work with my cousins. My cousins were there to meet us when we arrived. As my mother drove off, I instantly became homesick. My cousin told me that we had to go to bed early because we had to milk twice daily; we were […]

At age 88, I feel I am finally and truly a Mainer. Behind me are an unfortunate accident of birth, which kept me a prisoner for my first 21 years in Massachusetts, and necessary career choices, which, for the next half-century, kept me trapped in New Hampshire and Washington, D.C. During those yearning decades, I […]

Growing up in northern Maine – potato country – and living in Maine my whole life has given me appreciation for the simple pleasures and beauty surrounding our precious state. I remember our parents driving us around town admiring Christmas lights, decorations and cutting our tree. Making our own fun like winter skating, sliding, cross-country […]

By definition, a real Mainer is wicked funny. Arthur Gott qualifies. One day Arthur’s good friend Bill Matthews (then president of the Cape Arundel Golf Club) took Arthur and another friend, Eddie Spalding, for a picnic lunch outing on Bill’s boat up the Kennebunk River. On the way back, the boat ran out of gas. […]

Going to “the camp” on the New Meadows River was always great fun for me as a kid, whether with my grandparents on most summer weekends as we made it through Cooks Corner without Pepere even slowing down his two-tone Studebaker, back when there was but a single stop sign at that intersection. Or with […]

My real Mainer actually started out as two people, but after 60 years together they are certainly one real Mainer now. My mother said it was love at first sight – and those of you who know him agree that love must be blind. They married, raised four kids and worked hard all their lives. […]

So, it’s July Fourth, my husband and I are in Scarborough on Dunn Estates Drive. We have brought our L.L. Bean chairs and we are sitting on the side of the road waiting for the neighborhood parade to begin. We are the only ones watching the parade because everyone else  from Dunn Estates is in the […]

If I were a Maine native, or if Maine and Massachusetts had not parted company almost 200 years ago, this commentary could not have seen the light of day. However, in the intervening years, Brad the Portland native and I, the Massachusetts native with a Bostonian father met and married across the ‘great divide.’ I […]

On the face of it one might think and instantly proclaim that a “real Mainer” is a person born and raised in Maine – whether on one of the largest estates on the East Coast or in a humble weather-worn cabin in the woods. In fact, it is well-known here in central Maine that being […]