Working Waterfront

Buying a house is still your best investment

The path to homeownership can be bumpy. Buyers must withstand bidding wars, contingencies, complex tax laws, and an array of market factors beyond most anyone’s control. Still, buying a house is typically the single best investment a family can make. Homeownership is the largest source of wealth creation in the… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Deer Isle’s bounty impresses this Iowan

Reflections is written by Island Institute Fellows, recent college grads who do community service work on Maine islands and in coastal communities through the Island Institute, publisher of The Working Waterfront. For me, the magic of Maine lies in the food—everything we fish, forage, and farm to feed each other.… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Architecture for the way we live

Our recent vacation trip to Wellfleet on Cape Cod offered many pleasant diversions—ocean swimming, long walks on sandy beaches on both the ocean and bay sides, and enjoying the quiet vibe of that small New England village. For me, a perennial joy of these visits is taking in the beauty… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

The islands explode into bloom

Everything Everywhere All at Once is the title of an award winning movie I have yet to see. It also is a perfect description of the frenetic time of year in the Cranberry Isles between the middle of May and the middle of June. Our island populations are about to… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Pet peeves with food and words

Linguists assure us that language is alive, always evolving. New words and reconfigurations of words emerge, and old familiar words acquire new meanings. I understand these are perfectly natural developments and I’m so annoyed about it. For example, hydrate. I remember a time when if someone got thirsty they helped… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

A taste of independence

Not to give any credit to a global pandemic, but one positive result of spending months at home is that at the age of six, Pen learned to ride a bike. She started on one of those little pedal-less balance bikes, couldn’t go seamlessly to riding with no training wheels… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Hybrid ferry is a ‘half attempt’

I was greatly disappointed to read that the new ferry being built for Islesboro has gone from an all-electric boat to a hybrid. With global warming affecting the Gulf of Maine faster than most other bodies of water in the world, I believe we need to make our best effort… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Winning and losing, frugal and green, and the coffee connection

If you win, I lose? To the editor: I’m glad you wrote “Pondering the poverty question” (Rock Bound, June issue). I agree with everything you said, and hope to read Poverty, by America. I think it’s important to point out the costs to everyone, not just the poor, of our… SEE MORE

The staff at the Penobscot Park dining room and lunch counter in Searsport. PHOTO: PENOBSCOT MARINE MUSEUM

Working Waterfront

Ready to serve ‘people from away’

The staff of the Penobscot Park dining room and lunch counter in Searsport meet the gaze of the Eastern Illustrating & Publishing Co. photographer’s camera in the accompanying photo. Their serious faces are frozen in time on a glass plate negative. The tables are set and the shelf behind the… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Maine should welcome immigrants… again

Few countries were unscathed by the Great Recession, whose symptoms first appeared in the fall of 2008 and which metastasized six months later as U.S. unemployment rates nearly hit 10%. Scary times, and certainly unprecedented in most of our lifetimes. One country that was hit especially hard was Iceland. The… SEE MORE