Category: Communities

A confession: I never learned to hula hoop. Not enough to keep it from hitting the floor, anyway. It’s a late November afternoon and quiet on Islesford—also known as Little Cranberry, one of the five that make up the town of Cranberry Isles—and I’m about to get my first official hula hooping lesson from Anna Fernald. There are two things you need to hula hoop successfully, Anna says. A good beat and lots of space. After putting on her slippers, she pulls chairs to the edge of the living room and puts on a Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris album of duets. She cranks the volume so you can hear it in any room in the house. “OK,” she says, picking up one of her three colorfully striped hoops. “You’re counting on your body to hold it up, but you want to have the hoop cling to you and do the work.” SEE MORE

The first time Monhegan Island’s teacher, Mandy  Metrano, laid eyes on the island she now calls home, she was not impressed. In 1995, as an 18-year-old high school student on a visit to see her boyfriend, a summer resident, she saw Monhegan as “all ocean and dirt roads and nothing happening. The only evidence of nightlife was a bunch of kids playing Hacky Sack under the island’s only street light,” she remembers. A year later, her boyfriend had lined up a summer job waiting tables at Monhegan House, but Metrano had planned to spend her own summer break traveling to India with a friend. When the trip fell through, her boyfriend, Jon, suggested she work with him on Monhegan instead. This time, the island stole her heart the day she arrived. “We took the early boat and even when we got close, we couldn’t see the island because it was so foggy. We could hear the foghorn, though, and as we approached the dock in the fog I heard bagpipes. It was magical.” SEE MORE

For an island community that’s a 75-minute ferry ride away from the mainland, Vinalhaven has been fortunate to have had two very successful long-term town managers, says Emily Lane, a current member of the island town’s board of selectmen. Sue Lessard served from 1993 to 2000, and then Marjorie Stratton… SEE MORE