My mother and her parents are buried in Kennebunk, in Hope Cemetery. It strikes me as both appropriate and ironic that one’s last resting place be called “Hope.” Hope is where you find it. Here are some other places, beyond that graveyard in the heart of the village of Kennebunk, where I find hope. Stuffed […]

Teaching my final class at the University of Maine, in 1983, I told about 30 journalism students that their career could put them in the driver’s seat because they were becoming masters of words, and words were coming to be more important than actions. I claim no prescience, but I may have got that one […]

Odds are pretty good that you didn’t attend church today. Or synagogue yesterday or mosque on Friday. You’re in Maine, and Maine is the least churched state in America. With Christmas season upon us, a few more will attend Christmas Eve services, but the empty pews will still yawn silently through the carols. Church activity […]

Christmas is a-comin’, and soon a certain political element will revive talk of a “war on Christmas.” There may be a concerted effort to drop the word “Christmas” in favor of “holiday.” Is it a war? Probably not. But clearly a war is raging, a war on knowledge at the top levels of government. And […]

For 30 years, the fourth Thursday of November determined our farm’s success for the year. We were raising turkeys, and if we didn’t make it at Thanksgiving, we didn’t make it for the year. Most Thanksgivings, we had much for which to be thankful. Giving thanks remains important to us in retirement. When we share […]

When the professor said the middle class comprised 90 percent of Americans, I told myself — I was too shy to challenge a professor out loud — he made it sound like we were all the same, without much room to be individuals. Fifty years later, his 90 percent has dwindled, and instead of a […]

“Living next to you,” Canada’s prime minister Pierre Trudeau once said, is “like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast . . . one is affected by (its) every twitch and grunt.” He called the United States an elephant, Canada a mouse. Despite much in common, size, as Trudeau […]

When folks ask how many people live in New Sharon, I usually give a two-part answer. About 200 people live here, but about 1,400 sleep here. In other words, six in seven people with bedrooms in New Sharon conduct their lives somewhere else. They work in Farmington, Lewiston, Waterville. But not in New Sharon. And […]

Some topics beckon a writer but don’t justify a full column. The late Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle bundled these items, as does Mark Laflamme of the Sun Journal, and called them “three-dot columns.” Here, in the spirit of and in homage to Caen and to Mark, is a three-dots column . . […]