Tag: Musings

There were some positive steps for our City in the Bay last year

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

For a small community like ours, with just 1,300 year-round residents, though that swells in summer when the owners of second homes return, our shop owners and restaurateurs have to hustle to make their income during the summer season, long before the notorious Black Friday after Thanksgiving that other retailers rely on.

Our port’s growing popularity with the passengers of cruise ships, especially in the autumn, has provided a definite economic boost and essentially doubled our retailing season.

With that background, here are ten positive steps we saw in our local economy in 2025.

  1. Fiber optic cable came to Eastport and much of Way Downeast, providing both faster broadband connectivity as well as some healthy competition for dominant Spectrum. It’s especially important for many who work from home.
  2. The last leg of the I-395 bypass around Bangor finally opened, in time for the Fourth of July, even. (Officially, the new stretch is State Route 9 and only two lanes, but it is limited-access.) This eliminated a narrow country road link that fed into a typically congested stop-and-go suburban jag between Way Downeast Maine and the rest of the United States. It also shortened the driving time for us to get to major services in metropolitan Bangor, things that the rest of you take for granted, or for deliveries to get to us way out here.
  3. A savvy, local-oriented new and used bookstore opened downtown. It’s an inviting place to sit and read the latest. She knows her stuff and what makes our region tick. As an author, I can say how wonderful it is to be represented on her shelves.
  4. We gained a six-day-a-week bakery, the kind that makes real croissants and yummy breakfast sandwiches. Its opening overcomes the loss of our bagel shop a few years earlier, after its founders realized it was too much to tackle while still having full-time jobs elsewhere. Maybe folks will even stop lamenting a dedicated bakery that closed before the Covid shutdowns.
  5. There are solid choices for great coffee seven-days-a-week now. In addition to the bakery and the bookstore (yes!), an established gourmet coffee roaster has moved into the earlier espresso joint, this time six mornings a week instead of hit-or-miss hours. If you’re up here for a week, this will definitely brighten your day.
  6. Our fine dining options on Water Street have certainly improved. The wine bar now has a full kitchen and a masterful chef who curates a new menu weekly, featuring local sourcing while keeping the price-point in reach of us locals. Ye Ole Hookers, an upgraded incarnation of a legendary waterfront bar, also added a talented cook in the evenings, and we confidently recommend both locations for those who want something more memorable than average diner fare at the other end of the downtown. (In fairness, the Waco has stepped up its game by opening its Schooner Room with evening specials many nights of the week, too.) Gone is the motto many of us repeated a few years ago, “Don’t get hungry in Eastport on Monday.”
  7. The lobster pound returned to outdoor, next-to-the-tides seafood service after a multi-year hiatus. It doesn’t get any more iconic than this. And it is a relief to give an affirmative answer to the common question, “Where can I find a lobster dinner (or lobster roll) around here?”
  8. Ten years after the resident schooner in our harbor went down in the collapse of a section of the Breakwater pier, Eastport Windjammers (our whale watch service) once again has a schooner in its fleet. The Halie & Matthew’s day-sailing cruises are one more attraction for visitors. As an added twist, the two-masted ship was built in Eastport in 2006, so it’s also a homecoming.
  9. Passenger ferry service between Eastport and Lubec resumed on weekends. It’s a great way for tourists to view our waters and mosey around another town.
  10. Our volunteer airport opened a spacious terminal, something that can greet private pilots to our neck of the woods and assist locals who are being flown (gratis) to medical specialists in Boston, 352 miles or a six-hour-drive away. It even brings us a step closer to getting puddle-jumper commercial airline service.

Cheers to all!

Get ready for another turn here  

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Here we are again, another new year, another new calendar to fill. As if that should be any problem? Let me guess that you, too, never seem to have enough time to do so much of what you’re hoping to accomplish, day, week, month, or more. Right?

No matter. This time of the year is typically a moment for reflection of what’s happened in the previous 12 months of our lives and also for planning for our next 12.

Blogging, and my writer’s life in general, are no exception.

Blogging was, I believe, envisioned as a place for “live” journaling, or logging, in a ship captain’s sense, though my flagship Red Barn and four affiliated sites over the past 14 years have always put twists on that by scheduling long in advance. Even with that, each year has somehow always taken on a fresh emphasis.

The Barn started out with a huge backlog of previously published poems and related pieces to share, giving the blog essentially a literary focus. To my surprise, digital photography, especially once I retired from the newsroom, came to the forefront, too. As the pace picked up, marriage, family life, and our “city farm” in Dover provided fresh waves of inspiration, and there were files of unpublished poems and essays to add to the mix. Excerpts from my widespread correspondence and my Quaker writings also came into play. On top of that, publication of my novels and their subsequent revisions widened the perspective, including outtakes, as did my history Quaking Dover and the spirituality investigation Light Seed Truth.

More recently, the focus shifted to Way Downeast Maine where I’ve resettled.

So far, that adds up to more than 6,000 posts.

~*~

In addition, we’ve had the emergence of my quartet of affiliated WordPress blogs, which have undergone their own evolution.

Much of my Quaker-related writing led to establishing As Light Is Sown.

The photography has joined the Talking Money and New England Spirit entries at Chicken Farmer I Still Love You.

Poetry in chapbook presentations, especially, now appear at Thistle Finch editions.

And Orphan George Chronicles make my research findings available to genealogy investigators who share some of my linage.

It’s a lot, but it’s not sitting in dusty files or some editor’s sludge piles.

~*~

In the year ahead here at the Barn, you’ll be seeing excerpts from my physical journals, which started nearly six decades ago. Last year, having wound up on this remote island in Maine, I finally hunkered down revisiting the earliest decade of the books and found much of merit that hadn’t been distilled into my novels or poetry, so we’ll give them a final airing here.

It has me thinking of a poet I’ve dearly loved and his remark that nobody since could pursue the life he did. That remark came after he saw recent real estate prices for marginal properties around the lands he and his cohorts had purchased dirt cheap decades earlier in the Sierra Nevada range of California and then built upon and then realizing they couldn’t afford to buy their places now.

I wish I could advise kids today setting forth some advice for moving ahead.

All I can say is I’m glad I’m not in their place.

Looking back, though, I’m seeing ours was often a difficult journey, too.

Here’s how things unfolded for me. It really was a merry-go-round, something of the continuing nature of this blog.

Much of what’s ahead promises to be more confidential, subjective, off-guard than what you’ve seen from me before.

As always, I do enjoy hearing your comments and sharing your company.

 

In case you want one more excuse to celebrate a new year

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Just consider:

  1. New Year’s wasn’t always celebrated on January 1st. The earliest New Year festivities date back about 4,000 years. At that time, the people of ancient Babylon began their new year in what we call March.
  2. They would have an 11-day festival to acclaim the beginning of spring. It also celebrated that crops were being planted.
  3. What we use today is known is the Gregorian calendar, introduced 443 years ago by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 as a revised version of the Roman emperor Julian’s version. Gregory declared once and for all that January 1st should be New Year’s Day.
  4. Since then, most of the Western world marks the start of the year just like you and I do — on the first day of January.
  5. Still, it took almost 350 years for the world to get on board. Turkey didn’t make the switch until 1927. What was their objection?
  6. Ours is a solar new year, unlike the ones based on the moon – a lunar (Chinese) or lunisolar new year. The Islamic, Tamil, and Jewish calendars are prime examples of working around the moon. And India and Nepal are among nations that observe the event on a more fluid calendar, so we’re told.
  7. In Eastern Orthodox countries, January 1 is a religious holiday marking the circumcision of the Baby Jesus, seven days after his birth, rather than the beginning of a new calendar. The Orthodox religious calendar starts on September 1.
  8. Bulgaria, Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Romania, Syria, and Turkey hold to a revised Julian calendar that observes January 1, but in other nations and locations where the Orthodox churches still adhere to the Julian calendar, including Georgia, Israel, Russia, the Republic of Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Ukraine, the civil new year is observed on January 1 while the religious feasts occur on January 14 Gregorian (which is January 1 Julian). Got that?
  9. Nobody celebrates a new fiscal year, do they? That date can vary, depending on the organization, but for the federal government, it runs from October 1 to September 30.
  10. And the income tax year, with its April 15 deadline, is a race to the finish line rather than a party.

There’s more, should you be interested. Like Ethiopia on September 11, with its 13-month calendar descending from the Egyptians.

Let’s leave it at that, for now. Instead, you may want to chill the bubbly.

Things I hate about Christmas

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments
  1. House cleaning. It won’t stay that way long, no matter how hard we try.
  2. The frenetic schedule. Nothing else gets done in the month.
  3. Parking lots. Really packed parking lots. And all of the accompanying traffic.
  4. Retail music. Really!  You can’t escape it.
  5. Nobody’s that happy. Or relentlessly chipper. And don’t try to goad me into it. Or guilt me, either.
  6. Cardboard boxes. Stacks of empty ones take up too much space, there’s rarely one that fits your need, and then all the wrapped ones soon won’t be, meaning trash to haul out.
  7. Pine needles everywhere from all the garlands around the house. They really start dropping overnight.
  8. Piles of dirty dishes. We do eat well, though.
  9. Waiting for everyone to get up on Christmas morning. Unless I’m really asleep.
  10. Having to wait for the cookies to finally become fair game.

Technically, most of this is actually Advent. The real 12 Days of Christmas are another matter, something I’ve thoroughly come to appreciate.

 

Our winters from the perspective of neighboring St. Croix Island

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The French learned some harsh lessons in their attempt to establish their first North American settlement on a small island perhaps ten miles north of where I know live.

“It was difficult to know this country without having wintered there; for on arriving in summer everything is very pleasant on account of the woods, the beautiful landscapes, and the fine fishing for the many kinds of fish we found there,” Samuel Champlain wrote. “There are six months of winter in that country.”

I’ve previously contended that New England has a five- or six-month winter, so that passage offers me some confirmation.

As that winter dragged on, however, more than half of the men and boys developed what Champlain called a “mal de la terre,” or “land sickness” – scurvy, a disease caused by Vitamin C deficiency. It was common among sailors stuck on ships for months at a time, and many captains knew to keep citrus fruits on board, or beverages made from evergreen tree needles. During the European Age of Sail between 1500 and 1800, it was assumed that half of all crews would die of scurvy.

It wasn’t pretty.

“Their teeth barely held in place, and could be removed with the fingers without causing pain,” Champlain wrote of the horrific suffering the settlers endured over the winter of 1604-1605. “This excess flesh was often cut away, which caused them to bleed extensively from the mouth.”

Eat your apples and oranges and grapefruit, then, as well as lemons and limes.

That ‘X’ in Xmas isn’t what most folks think

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Considering that X is also the Roman numeral for ten, here goes this week’s Tendrils.

  1. X, or Chi, is the first letter in Greek for Christ. Thus, using it as shorthand for the Yule holiday has nothing to do with striking Christ out of holiday celebrations.
  2. Applied to the English word Christmas, the use dates from the 1500s. Elsewhere, the use of ‘X’ for Christ goes back to at least the fourth century.
  3. It did take me a while in doing genealogy research of the 1600s to realize that Xpher was the name Christopher.
  4. Only half of Americans attend religious services on Christmas Eve or Day.
  5. The holiday was widely ignored in Colonial America. For that matter, the first session of the U.S. Congress was held on December 25, 1789. It wasn’t until 1870 that Christmas was proclaimed a federal holiday.
  6. Turkey is edging out ham as the centerpiece of the Christmas dinner in America. It’s even a big day for cranberry, perhaps surpassing Thanksgiving. Swan and peacock were earlier favorites, though I’m not sure where.
  7. The Rockefeller Center tree started out small. The first one, in 1931, was undecorated. Two years later, one appeared with lights. Each year afterward saw a bigger tree, culminating in the familiar giant that boasts more than 50,000 LED lights.
  8. Christmas caroling was originally mostly drunken men going door to door and making a nuisance of themselves. And then the unemployed poor took over with their begging bowls.
  9. The oldest Santa parade in the U.S. is in Peoria, Illinois, dating from 1888. Apparently, it’s played well there.
  10. The original Christmas pudding was a soup made of raisins and wine.

Notes from a Yule tree search in the woods

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The tree the kid wants ain’t natchural! At least not the ones we’ve cut from the wild.

What we find in the woods are typically lopsided, with the growth mostly to one side. And they tend to be more open than full, which can have its own appeal when it comes to adding ornaments.

Not that she perceives that on her arrival from the metropolis.

She’s always been challenging and demanding.

 

Could this be how it ends?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The time to go has come. It should have arrived several years earlier, rather than continuing in so much wheelchair loitering, trapped in a dream-state. Now the phone call, “I don’t expect him to live another week,” leads into packing and flight.

Unable to awaken, fully, from the bewildering disconnections. This is not the heart attack or car crash I had predicted. Nor the old age of graceful evaporation into a vanishing point of history. No one will say now, “He lost his mind,” but the new names change nothing. This terminal illness, in stages, until the patient no longer remembers how to eat or breathe. Perhaps, mercifully, an angel will break through the sterile chambers of medical enterprise, and another nature will take its course.

This flesh, shrinking to bone, rather than feather.

Fir tipping is a big job around here

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The signs “fir tippers wanted” this time of year can be puzzling, so here’s the scoop for those of you who don’t live in Maine.

  1. Christmas wreath makers need stands of evergreens to shape into their festive rings. In Maine, the traditional material is the tips of balsam fir branches. Don’t confuse the inch-long needles for spruce or hemlock.
  2. “Tippers” are the folks who have the skills to collect tips that usually range between 12 to 20 inches.
  3. Quality needles are found only in the mid-section of the tree. Tops and bottoms are deemed unsuitable.
  4. The season is short. The greens cannot be collected before the “tips” are set when a tree goes dormant for winter, usually around November 1, and that’s if the stand has had three nights of 20-degree or lower nights. (Beware of global warning.) Any earlier and the tips lose their needles prematurely. But the wreath-makers do need to get the product to market before Christmas Day, too. It gets busy.
  5. Millions of wreaths are crafted in the state each Christmas season. The trees are abundant and the fir branches are easily worked. Balsam is pleasant to smell, too.
  6. The work is a welcome boost in income for many rural families and comes after the crops are in.
  7. Tips can be harvested by a firm grasp between forefinger and thumb followed by a quick downward motion. Loppers or pruners do the trick for more out-of-the-way tips.
  8. Skilled tippers leave enough on a tree for it to recover in about three years.
  9. The tips are commonly gathered on a “stick” made of a small conifer stripped of most of its branches. When the stick has 40 to 75 pounds of tips, it’s carried off. Bundling the tips into smaller bunches is another method of transport.
  10. Tippers do need to get permission before harvesting from a site. Sometimes that means paying a fee for a permit.

– Source: University of Maine Cooperative Extension Service