The Brick Store Museum holds more than 30,000 pieces of archival material written by historic Kennebunkers. A Voice from the Past shares from the collection. Cynthia Walker, executive director This week’s entry is from historic Town Clerk Andrew Walker, who kept a detailed diary for decades about his observations of people in town. The original […]

My wife and I recently purchased one of those robot vacuum cleaners. The kind that scuttles around the floor like a mechanical crab. We named it Klara, for the “artificial friend” in Kazuo Ishiguro’s thought-provoking, poignant and disturbing new novel “Klara and the Sun.” Artificial friends are companion robots for lonely, alienated children of the […]

As many of you know, I’ve been coaching football at Kennebunk High School for a long time now. In fact, 1978 was my first year coaching, just six years after Title IX took effect. I have had the privilege of working with hundreds of student-athletes and seen many of them grow over the years, even […]

If there’s anything a golf ball, just out of the shiny new factory package, longs and lusts for, it’s to be sitting on the highly manicured and tickly surface of a golf green, waiting for a gentle nudge or bump, to send it skimming over the roller-coaster surface toward the hole, and jump in, just […]

The Brick Store Museum holds over 30,000 pieces of archival material written by historic Kennebunkers. A Voice from the Past shares from the museum’s collection. This week’s column is from a local woman named Hattie, who traveled with her husband, a ship captain, around the world in 1884. In this diary, she is writing from […]

I read in The New York Times that there’s an “unprecedented shortage” of sriracha, a fiery red-hot sauce that adds not only a jolt of heat but a punch of flavor. This information upset me. In fact, I panicked. It was a crisis, a true disaster. Not only for thousands of Vietnamese restaurants, where sriracha […]

Over the two decades I’ve battled Mother Nature to reclaim my wooded and marshy yard, landscaping it into something habitable, I’ve learned a lot of life lessons. Lesson number one: Mama Nature fights back, she fights hard and she fights to win. While I have only a few short years left on this great, green […]

This week’s entry is from the diary of Nancie Hackett Thompson in spring 1869. Nancie was the third wife of Nathaniel Lord Thompson, who owned a large shipbuilding yard in Kennebunk. The loss of his previous two wives left Nathaniel with four young children prior to his marriage to Nancie in 1859. At the time […]

It’s not so complicated for the Mouse, he said, when I asked Nonney if he had any thoughts on parenting or whatever they might call it. He said, “We just keep telling them that they are wonderful, that we love them, and we hug and kiss them, and tell them to stay clean, don’t make […]