Tag: Downeast

Books? Yes, we have plenty

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Mine is a family of booklovers, which means we need bookshelves everywhere in our renovated home. Make that two homes, considering the younger daughter and son-in-law, too, in their new purchase in suburban Boston. To that let me add one friend, a famed author, who had so many volumes stored in his Maine barn that one corner collapsed, according to the New York Times Sunday magazine. I’m not prepared for that possibility here in our historic house.

Still, this gets painful as we prepare for triage. What volumes must each of us keep, which ones become optional, and where will all of the remainder go?

On my end, after much culling, I’m finding my eyeballs no longer support the small type in many paperbacks, many of them with binding that is crumbling.

Gee, I’d never thought it would come to this. Take a deep sigh before they are trashed.

The other partners in this move will have to explain for themselves.

As for getting our old house through future winters?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Ours has long been described as a cold house, at least through winter, even before we discovered how much heat had been leaking into upstairs despite attempts to seal that off. Now that our bedrooms are actually up there, it’s on longer considered a problem.

Or, as our contractor quipped, back then folks believed in letting a house breathe. Uh-huh. They did burn a lot of firewood.

Once we had a wood stove in place, we resolved to see how well that worked in our revamped place and make adjustments from there.

Our existing blown hot-air furnace is definitely inefficient. It even lacks an air filter. Like much of New England, it runs on pricy fuel oil. Beyond that, it’s also vulnerable to Maine’s notorious electrical outages. No electricity, the thermostat’s useless.

An obvious improvement would be turning to a heat exchanger, perhaps one tied into our existing downstairs duct work, though that would still be vulnerable to electrical outages. Or outrages, if you will.

The conversion would also work for cooling the house come summer, as needed. Not that we have many days like that, living on an island as we do.

In addition, we have those rotting downstairs sills to contend with, and the obsolete triple-track often badly out of whack storm windows and screens, plus the front and back doors.

As for cold intrusions? Who can be sure they’re really not ghosts?

We’ll do what we can at each step ahead.

Sharpened light

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One of the sensations in watching a full solar eclipse comes as the light seems to become more focused before going into twilight. I skip the discussion of optics and physics. Here’s how it looked in the trees around us in the April 2024 event here in Maine. Something similar happened with shadows.

A moment in the life

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Late afternoon at the former West Quoddy Coast Guard lifesaving station. The boathouse, lower right, sits at the edge of Lubec Channel, with Campolbello Island, New Brunswick running above it. A bridge, barely visible here, connects Canada to the United States, with the town of Lubec continuing along the water. You may even detect the “sparkplug” lighthouse sitting in the water. The city of Eastport, where we live, can be seen beyond the bridge.

 

Welcome to Middle End, maybe the only one on earth

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When I moved to Eastport nearly five years ago, old-timers began telling me of the intense antagonism between the North End, or Dog Islanders, and the South End, aka Assault and Battery (for Battery Street) or Sodom and Gomorrah. Their antagonism toward Lubec just to the south was the only thing strong enough to unite them.

Yes, when it came to the antagonism toward Lubec, the town to the south, they unified in their venom, which was something like the reaction of Dog River residents toward Wolverton in the Canadian comedy series Corner Gas.

Only four months ago, at a historical society forum, did I first hear that the residential section between them – where I live – was known as Middle End, a designation that many of those who grew up here had never heard yet was common in usage by others.

It’s the neighborhood containing the majority of the homes in town, much of it proposed for National Historic Registry recognition as the Eastport Central Neighborhood district. Well, it does have its merits.

Our house would be the oldest within its boundaries, built by the man who originally held title to half of Middle End. His brother-in-law, Caleb Boynton, held the other half. Shackford’s sons and sons-in-law and presumably their wives were active in developing their share, what they surveyed with numbered plots as Majorville.

A middle, by definition, is between ends rather than being an end or even having one, I suppose. For me, that leads to a quaint contradiction. Is there even another Middle End on the planet? Google maps proffer a nada.

The Eastport neighborhood is largely to the west of downtown, with a little wrapping around to the south and north, so it wouldn’t exactly form a West End. And to the east of downtown? It’s all water and very quickly beyond that, Canada.

Well, if they had only called these “sides,” but for whatever reason, they didn’t see things that way.

The End.