My 65-plus years have seen many haircuts. Growing up, the only folks in my family who got regular, “real” haircuts were the men. I went along when our dad took my brother for his first haircut. That little barbershop with its red and blue barber pole going around outside is still there. The barber with […]
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Posted inMeetinghouse, Opinion
Rick Bradbury, Scarborough: The man in the barber shop mirror
I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with haircuts. According to my parents, I did not enjoy my first trip to the barber shop. When documenting the occasion in my baby book, my mom charitably wrote: “He didn’t like it!” She later told me she didn’t want to write that I screamed my head off the […]
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Posted inMeetinghouse, Opinion
Sandy Duross, Biddeford: New ’do inspires hope, humor when it’s needed most
What is a haircut if not the style your head wears that may define (or confine) your persona? What is a haircut if not the physical outer image of what lies within? And to wax even more philosophically, is our choice of haircut meant to defer or refer to our individual personalities? And so it […]
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Carolynn Floryan, Yarmouth: Out like a lamb, with eight hands to help
There is something special about the back roads of Vermont in early spring. On this particular day, I was heading home from work, ahead of my husband, when I came up to one of my favorite places. This place is the sheep farm owned by Dave, our good friend and veterinarian to our Collie then. […]
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Anne Cyr, Buxton: All I need to see and hear is right in front of me
The neighbors’ German Shepherd is barking. I can hear it clearly throughout the house. I have to counsel myself to just accept what is. They do bring him (her?) in after a while; it’s not constant. So I tell myself, and get busy, and pretty soon it stops barking (or I stop being aware of […]
Posted inMeetinghouse, Opinion
Richard McWilliams, Yarmouth: Hard-won victory in the Buckthorn Battle of 2020
Years from now, one topic of conversation will be: “What did you do during COVID?” The answers will be as diverse as the people – read all of my bucket list books, learned a musical instrument, played mahjong online with older family members. These are all laudable, but my wife and I became buckthorn busters. […]
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Judith Robbins, Whitefield: Roadside mailbox marks former city resident’s place in rural world
As a child of the inner city, I was seduced by three manifestations of “rural” and what that meant: yellow school buses, “RFD” on mailboxes and a fifth-grade field trip to Cook’s Canyon, a wildlife sanctuary in Barre, Massachusetts. City buses were ubiquitous in Worcester, a part of the urban landscape as they plied their […]
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Aprillyn Brunelle, Yarmouth: Rural weekend experiences generate lasting memories
As a young child living in Portland in the 1960s, I would be beyond excited when my parents would plan a summer weekend excursion with my brother and me to our great-aunt and great-uncle’s rural farm in Madison. After a nearly two-hour drive, we would finally pull up to the circular, dirt driveway of Uncle […]
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Brenda E. Smith, Belfast: Moments of rural magic
A thick white sap oozed from the diagonal slash in the bark of the tree. Gravity gently pulled the liquid downward toward half of a coconut shell fastened to the tree trunk to collect this precious resource. I stood in the middle of a rubber tree forest in the rural inland foothills of Sri Lanka, […]
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Stevie Dembowski, Casco: Farm animals, chores help tardy teens hone excuses
When I was in seventh grade, my family acquired an old farmstead reclaimed by the forest. We worked on the weekends, clearing land that would become the driveway, erecting outbuildings, slowly turning the place back into a recognizable farm. By the time I got to high school, my morning duties involved feeding the pigs while […]