Let’s start with the weather. It’s April, that often cruelest of months, as this is being written. In Maine, April is a flirt, flashing a warm, beckoning smile one day, and spitting snow the next. This winter followed the pattern of last year’s, easier on the snow and cold—though in Belfast, we saw three mornings start well below zero. Then,…

At Bunker Cove. Poems by Ralph Stevens. Westbrook, Maine: Moonpie Press, 2017. 58 pp. Softbound, $14 Born during World War II to a father who was in the Navy, Ralph…

American life faced a confluence of turbulent forces in 1971. The war in Vietnam was raging, with strong opposition that sometimes resorted to domestic terrorism. The women’s rights movement was…

Danish chef Mads Refslund has just written a book called Scraps, Wilt, and Weeds: Turning Wasted Food into Plenty. This is just the most recent evidence of a recent phenomenon…

Mainers commonly travel during the winter and early spring, and Andrea Shane and Skyler Sanborn, both of Vinalhaven, are no different. But Shane and Sanborn are not snowbirds. The girls,…

Some things just can’t be replaced, such as the historic brining shed—an integral element in Lubec’s once booming smoked herring business. The now empty and fragile structure was used as…

April’s issue of the North Haven News, our monthly island newspaper, came with a delightful surprise announcement: Cooper’s Landing would be re-opening for the season on April 17. The Landing…

The Maine Lobstering Union’s recent $4 million purchase of the Seal Point Lobster Company, a wholesale lobster distribution business in Lamoine, is expected to net union members a share of…

Booker’s Point by Megan Grumbling. Denton, Texas: University of North Texas Press “Come to a fork, you gotta take/it, they say” When I was growing up on Long Island, New York,…

Reflections is a monthly column written by Island Fellows, recent college grads who do community service work on Maine islands and in remote coastal communities through the Island Institute, publisher…