The Roseledge Books Blog

The BOOKS and OPEN 2-6 signs are hung and banging against the porch.  The bushes are dancing as the afternoon sea breezes blow. (See at least two clicks of the webcam.)  New books are unboxed and ordered by size and color to catch your eye as you walk in the door. ROSELEDGE BOOKS IS OPEN! Where are you?

That was written six cloudy-rainy-foggy always humid days ago. (See webcam  again.)  The question remains: where are you?  A little wet never stopped —  more likely provoked — a reader to read and thereby to discover a need for just the right book.  And ROSELEDGE BOOKS IS OPEN with just the right books.

A foggy day is okay; a foggy mind is not. Bring on the books.

I’m reading and unexpectedly loving Edmund deWaal’s The Hare With Amber Eyes.  The author inherited a collection of 264 netsuke, tiny Japanese carvings, and herein tells their story through their connection to his hugely wealthy family, starting in late 19th C. Paris, then, after 100 pages, in 20th C. Vienna.  This is not only a thoughtful family history filled with much about the times I didn’t know — always a good thing — but it is also a first-rate search book.  Throughout, he mentions the sources he uses and the sources of those sources, e.g. family letters, photographs, dinner-table stories, boxes of unexplained memorabilia.  He uses libraries advantageously, always a good search strategy, this librarian avers.   He goes “vagabonding” or traveling to pertinent sites to see them now, imagine them then, and extract the building insights, even when they are harsh.  And, wow! does he know how to “read” the thousands of words a picture is worth.  Clearly, he attends to and extends his curiosity.  What a treat to have picked this up.  (Commenter and friend Kathy (see last post) pegged this book and my interest exactly.  I am blessed.)

Two favorite books come to mind and soon to Roseledge Books:

Kem Luther’s Cottonwood Roots, a thoughtful family history he wrote after collecting data and visiting the 200 or so years of home sites from Nebraska back in time to New York, which I  think of as vagabonding.

Phillip Davis’ The Thread: A Mathematical Yarn, an engaging story of many questions answered by many means and somehow summing to a whole  in a life of always learning.  (It’s been a long time since I read the book, hence the “abstract” or “impressionistic” review.)

If you don't know what these are, you've been too long away. The harbor calls.

Related Tenants Harbor news: The Happy Clam, to which Roseledge is  a (noise) abuttor, agreed to a compromise-later closing time of 10 p.m.  for service on its deck.  This seems okay to me, as surely the deck people will not be noisier than the yacht club parties of old in tents on the East Wind Inn lawn.  When I asked one yachter if his was a “loud  is fun” party group, he  said they were, but they had limited staying power beyond 9:30, especially as they had to row back to their boats, ready to sail again at dawn.  The Real Finds Consignment Shop is full of good “stuff”  in the True Hall Realty building just down the hill on Mechanic Street.  With Roseledge Books, we two are a right angle of retail glory.  And I think the Happy Clam has an ice cream window.

So many reasons for you to be here.

“It don’t get no better than this,” one ten-year-old said to another in Minneapolis some years ago.   Surely they meant to include summer in Tenants Harbor, had they but known. Even with rain and more rain, the flowers, herbs, and sun-glo tomatoes are planted, the kitchen is back together  with a Cheerios-yellow wall plus two metal roses, and early morning Sea Street walkers are up and at ’em. The books are shelved, if in the company of unusual neighbors, and when I can find the BOOKS and OPEN signs to hang on the porch, Roseledge Books will be open for business.  But I’m here now, if you should happen by.

I love your comments and suggestions.  To those of you who  think the chipmunk did us a favor or who want to be sure the 2012  Cheerios are finished before they come for wine-plus   (you know who you are, S. and S.),  may I say that snotty ill becomes you.

Add wee adirondacks, tear off the 2, follow the arrow. You're here!

I’m here and healing. The newly- sanded floors allow the  easiest-possible paces and I need to walk a lot.  I’m reading while healing, but  Roseledge Books Regular ME suggests a reading about healing  in Victoria Sweet’s God’s Hotel, which I have ordered immediately, and to which I would add as a neighbor about-healing read, T. R. Reid’s The Healing of America.    Jerome Groopma’s How Doctor’s Think might be good here, too, because healing is a two-way  responsibility.  The more you understand how a doctor thinks and your body works, the more you know how to describe your body’s cues and thus help avoid a dreadful misdiagnosis.

Then there are books to read while healing.  The titles may vary by reader, but page-turners (e.g. David Baldacci’s The Forgotten) probably use the least amount of mind which is what you have to give when you are sickest and need everything you’ve got to heal.  Memoirs or journals(e.g. Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Studies, Anthony Shadid’s House of Stone) are focused with some fact and some fiction which makes them a good intermediate read when you’re better, but not quite on top of things.  Then when energy, impatience, taste for coffee and gummi bears return, you head for the careful, involved read.  Right now, for me, that is re-reading Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs to find any clues in the text that support her being for a time in or near Tenants Harbor.  A friend wants to do a booklet about her time here and he has actual evidence.  I am to offer “speculative insights.”   Oh the fun of entering the local fray among those who favor TH, Martinsville, or Port Clyde!  When the booklet exists, Roseledge Books will have it.

Who would sail into any other harbor? Surely not SOJ.

The native strawberries are in, the (newly invasive) rosa rugosa are blooming, and an orange crane was stepping masts at the public landing.  Nights are still cool, but the heat in my spa-recliner takes up any slack.  I am being one with nature and planting an already-big tree to shade the porch from mid-morning to mid-afternoon.  Umbrellas are heavy or electric and always iffy in the wind.  Does this mean I am green or sustainable?  Come and see.

We’re here, the webcam is on and, after two mornings of coffee on the front porch, I can report that life in Tenants Harbor just gets better and better.

The lobster boats are in today maybe because it is windy or it is Sunday or lobster prices are low or it might storm or who knows?  A few walkers-by were out – one I knew anjd one I met; one sailboat was already on an overnight mooring; and a visitor nearby enjoyed his dog – a dachshund/doberman mix (yes!) – leaping in our jungle lawn trying to catch a mouse or vole or something else moving.  I wanted to hire the dog.  Then Charlie mowed the lawn, and a dreaded chipmunk (think gnawed pvc-pipe) rushed out and  frolicked across Sea Street into the recently unearthed rock pile.  (See left on the webcam.)

Like all Main Streets, a busy Tenants Harbor is always fun to watch.

Thanks to Charlie, Roseledge has drained pipes, cold water, hot water, working computers, mowed lawn, and, beginning summer trash of used napkins from the nearby Bakery’s best-ever breakfast bagels.  The refrigerator and stove are still in the living room, though the former is plugged in, and the nonfiction bookshelves still need to be restocked and replaced against the wall once the drowned wallboard is replaced.  Charlie is thinking deeply (and snoring) about the next most important thing to do.  We are invited out to supper again tonight, so summer shopping and the stove can wait a day.  We found an unopened box of Tasteoos and the last of last summer’s coffee in the freezer, so unpicky folks that we are, we’re good for at least another day.

No book news, but the current Down East Magazine features Rockland’s Home Kitchen Cafe, the new venture of the nifty team who made the nifty Roseledge Books t-shirts these last fifteen years.  Cinnamon rolls were featured in the article, yum, and I am hoping for equally celebrate-able oatmeal.   More about books and an oatmeal report later.

One more walkway up the hill and the granite steps of Roseledge beckon.

Mostly we are getting ready for you all (and surely your numbers are legion) to come or come again and again to Roseledge Books.  Two half-screens just blew out of the upstairs windows, so it’s time for me to awaken the troops and direct once again.  Did I say it was windy?  Did I say it was perfect?

Welcome back to Roseledge Books.  Let the summer fun and perfect reads begin.

Already there in spirit and soon in body, Charlie and I will be smelling the sea’s salt and, with luck, saying hello to the harbor before dusk  next Friday.  Maybe a week late, but better late than early when its cold and rainy, as it was in Tenants Harbor over Memorial Day.  Roseledge may only be as ready as chipmunk damage allows, but Roseledge Books is always all ready to entice ready readers.  Okay, the shelves might be awry, but think of the fun of browsing through the disarray and find unaligned treasures.

I love Roseledge. I can hardly wait. First sightings in daylight are best.

I will put on hold Anthony Shadid’s House of Stone — which I am enjoying a lot — because it is a many-paged trade paperback (therefore awkwardly big and heavy for travel and one-hand reading) and I want to savor learning about his Lebanon as he rebuilds his family’s home.

I love reading about people who live two places, especially Nicholas Kilmer’s A Place in Normandy in which he tells about the week he spent deciding whether or not he, as the only sibling interested, should continue caring for the 14th Century farmhouse his grandparents had bought in the 1920’s.  (When this is finally in paperback again, Roseledge Books will have it.)  My other favorite is Lillian Beckwith, who wrote a number of semi-autobiographical books about her post WWII years living among the crofters in the Hebrides, none of which is available in paperback .  Aarrgh-h-h.

So I will travel with the right-sized G. M. Ford’s Cast in Stone, a Leo Waterman mystery set in Seattle, which he knows well, and featuring as helpers, his “boys,” who are retired reprobates as are many of my friends. I’ll keep you posted, but I like learning about Seattle.  Besides, Charlie who lives in Seattle which is on big water, recommended — or at least mentioned — it.   Traveling books are always tricky, especially if fog or other delays may be likely.

Lobster buoys are part of what I know and love. Thanks, Tenants Harbor.

Summer will be different this year, especially without Tim to smooth the way and always be a backup.  I will miss him.  And his East Wind Inn has been sold.  A friend called to say that without leaves, the Happy Clam seems almost an extension of my backyard; Dave Lowell’s wharf  is a beauty to behold from the front porch; and my unmowed front lawn which is mostly on ledge has gone amok.  More next Saturday when I can speak from experience.

I may be ever slower, but I am still moving, sometimes more smoothly, and isn’t that a good thing!  After next Saturday, the chairs will be on the porch waiting for you all and sunshine.

Hello all from Fairview’s excellent Acute Rehab Center where I am figuring out — with great help — how to stand and walk again. And I will do it, even if a ruptured appendix has tried its best to lay me low. Who knew people of an age had errant appendices?

I’m a bit behind on my reading, but I’ve been thinking about it.   Apparently distressed innards require my full attention for healing. And I lost my taste for coffee, but that is returning — within limits. I am fussier now after fourteen days of ice chips and sips of water for a troubled tum.

Sea breezes and vistas, maybe an interruption or two: read on.

Reading joy is coming back too, thank heavens. Gabriel Allon, Daniel Silva’s art restorer / Mossad agent, is a great companion right now. His conversations, reflections on art, and huge sense of places in and over time, especially the middle East and Europe, and (in The Fallen Angel) the Vatican, are just the right amount of thought provoking. And snotty Vatican novels are always a favorite. Another time I healed with Bernd Heinrich’s The Snoring Bird: My Family’s Journey Through a Century of Biology which was captivating both for the detail of what I learned about eastern Europe during WWI and WWII and the details about a field of study and higher education, both lifelong interests. Both books did their job of helping healing, but the latter required closer reading — or maybe the print was smaller. I know it was longer, and I was sorry to finish.

Both are great transition books on a healing-book spectrum that includes getting through tough times with the distraction of page-turners, recovering with the companionship of conversation,
And rejoining the land of the living with wholly engaging books of unexpected insights.

Water, rock islands, wildflowers and sun: a good read just gets better.

David Baldacci’s latest The Forgotten was my reliable page-turner, but this one read too much like a Jack Reacher wannabee exploit for me. And waiting for my return home and living well as I get ready to live gloriously in Maine is my latest favorite read that somehow enlarges what I know: poet Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey, a collection of her annual lectures to Bennington students, filled with insights from and leading to poetry.  “Some people wonder and some people know. Scientists know; I wonder,” she says, and I don’t want to miss a word.

But her essays require my full attention, and right now the priority is strengthening muscles that help me stand and move my feet. Very spooky moment when third day after surgery, I found that I could do neither without the help of three others. Good news is that with time and work and inspired direction, what is lost returns.

I’ll see you all in Maine come Memorial Day and after Charlie repairs the chipmunk frolic with the pcv water pipe, better than ever at the end of this, but twelve days of ice chips and a few sips of water with no weight loss? Please.

The annual longing-for-the-sea has settled in which usually means the Pebble Beach golf tournament has just come and gone. Until summer and for others who are lonesome for Roseledge, check the winter picture in the current St. George Newsletter. Wow! Beautiful, yes, and taken before the recent major snowfalls, but note the absence of tracks, human or otherwise. Few people are about apparently. I hope this means the chipmunks are gone, too, and not living it up in my spa recliner. If I were more able-bodied, I might try a whole year at Roseledge; until then, I have Craig Leischer’s adventure of a year in the Maine woods to enjoy.

Nothing beats that first look, just before the driveway turn starts the summer.

Also to enjoy is Jane Mount’s and Thessaly La Force’s The Ideal Bookshelf, my latest favorite idea book. About one hundred “leading cultural figures” noted, and in some cases explained, why a dozen or so books mattered enough to be on their single shelf. Artist Mount painted the shelf of books, spines out for browser ease, and Editor LaForce contained essays, no small task when the content is one‘s personal take on books that matter. What an excellent idea is this whole book. For instance, Malcolm Gladwell listed the books about crime that he had nearby when writing about crime and you don‘t have to be a librarian (though maybe it helps) to enjoy a look at an author‘s influences. Jen Bekman’s shelf reflected her career change from the Internet which she understood to owning an art gallery which she did not. I love both what Maira Kalman says and how she “says” it. Her shelf choices are mostly about the “how”; for the “what”, you’ll have to  check her books, which, fortunately, Roseledge Books usually has some of on its shelves, e.g. Principles of Uncertainty and The Pursuit of Happiness.

Tim's gone; the Inn's sold; adirondack chairs top the sign. What else is new?

An Ideal Bookshelf would be a great bathroom book if it were in much-less-heavy paperback, which it is not.  It could also be a great book of the (some day) dead with each page someone’s shelf of books with comment — a great, self-written, obituary. The arrayed books with comments would be fraught with nuance and reflection and a great way to be remembered or newly met. And it would give us all one last chance to control from the grave. My mom would have loved that. (The four, single-spaced pages of instructions that she left instead are a story for another time.)

An almost local news note:
The Smithsonian sold N.C. Wyeth’s 1926 painting, Duel on the Beach, for $1 million. (NYT 12/10/12) But duel on what beach? Could it be somewhere near Eight Bells, his summer home in Port Clyde? Surely this calls for the careful investigation of serious kayakers who could (after a bit of a hike) enter the St. George River at Fort Point, paddle toward Port Clyde, check it out,  buy some Ben-Gay at the General Store, and paddle on.  As it happens, some of the Most Regular of the Roseledge Books Regulars are just such serious kayakers. And don’t let Google fool you. St. George has a Fort Point, the history of which is the stuff of peace-lovers’ dreams, but that’s a story for another time.

An Almost-Roseledge-Books-Regular (a potential RBRegular who has only been once) called from the airport to say she is delayed and reading Sarah Orne Jewett’s story maybe set in Tenans Harbor, Country of the Pointed Firs, and it is perfect. Sounds good to me and suggests RB needs a new category of books to make more pleasant the dreaded airport down time. I would add Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind Body Problem to this list. It saw me, with cat, Worthy, semi-snoozing in cat-carrier inside duffel bag at my side, through a four-hour fog delay at O’Hare.  Roseledge Books should have these and others you suggest as “take with” reads for the always possible iffy weather of return flights. These take-with reads are different from, though maybe overlapping with, “withdrawal reads” which are intended to provoke memories of a time well spent no matter when or where you read them. Suggestions for either group are always welcome.

I want to be there, but I am here -- until summer. And where are you? (Caption is an homage to Henri, see below.)

A chipmunk ate the pcv pipe carrying water to the shower upstairs in Roseledge. Curses. Clearly, plumbing has a down side, especially when you live away some of the time, but I do not intend to give up running water. Charlie is aggrieved that chipmunk-attracting pcv pipe was installed ten years ago, but who knew? Until this summer, we had a fierce chipmunk-handler cat, but an unleashed rottweiler did him in, and though both bad dog and owner are gone, the only remaining neighborhood cat prefers batting at butterflies and the mostly unleashed cute and friendly new dog probably plays with the cat. the butterflies, AND the chipmunks.  Drat. The chipmunks will not rule for long I know, but Wow, Tim dies and the living isn‘t easy.

The new books stayed dry. Whew! Fortunately the sometimes-spewing water couldn’t reach across the room from behind the refrigerator and the collected water never rose above the bottom bookshelf-lip. The uninsulated, single layer architecture of Roseledge helped, too, as the water drained out through the bare floor boards. I just hope no more chipmunks get in or, even worse, decide to occupy my spa recliner, the only cushioned thing in the house. Only the boxes under the stairs got wet and then moldy, but who even remembers what’s in them? Charlie has promised to call Joe who always manages to make things right.

Boxes under the stairs got wet, moldy and tossed, but I am sanguine. (Caption is another homage to Henri.)

I just read and LOVED Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Stories, a memoir of her competitive swimming years with her artist’s eye and work as complement. RB will definitely have it as soon as it out in paperback. I don’t think you have to be a swimmer to enjoy the read, but maybe it helps. Agreeing with one of the book’s blurbers, I have a “talent crush“. I will never again look at the world in just the same way and I love a book that does that. Rory Stewart’s memoir of his walk across Afghanistan, Places In Between, changed my worldview, too. Memoirs seem to be an ever-growing part of my must-read pile which, means they will probably become an ever-larger part of RB’s offerings. Hurry up, summer.

As an antidote to winter blahs, or as a Scandinavian friend put it, to his annual morose Swedish cold, may I introduce you to Henri, the black cat, who won the Walker Art Center’s first ever Internet Cat Video Contest last summer?Surely your days will be merrier for meeting him, as are mine when I think of you all.

Some of you wonder if I choose the books for Roseledge Books which would be okay if, when I say that I do, some of you didn’t have the same look of incredulity that the car rental guy had when, in answer to his question about my occupation, I said I was a college professor. So maybe more explanation is warranted.

Fist of all, choosing books means knowing that a book exists.  I am helped in this knowing because I have a book ear. When other people hear background noise, I hear and pick out a book reference.

Think Moby Dick, a long time gone, fog and rocks and nothing is for sure.

For instance, from NPR, always on, I unexpectedly heard the words ”Moby Dick“, “Ireland“, and “Ray Bradbury wrote a book about it.” Hello. The NPR story was about legendary director, John Houston, filming Moby Dick in Ireland; but tucked into the telling was the essential tidbit that a young Ray Bradbury wrote both the screenplay AND a book about the whole Irish experience which I looked up and found to be Ray Bradbury’s Green Shadows, White Whale, which one reviewer likened to “the grandest tour of Ireland you’ll ever experience.” A book related to Moby Dick is always good, but this was clearly a bonanza choice for RB, embedded in a story not about books.  Whether nature or nurture, a book ear is not to be explained, just to be tuned in at all times, relished and used wisely.

Backing up a bit, maybe a book ear only works if one’s life is basically a conversation of books, which, lucky me, mine is.

For instance, faithful commenter Mary Ellen picked up on my dad’s reading (true) while watching sheep (not so true) (See “Fact Checking“, posted on 10/17/12) and inferred that he may have been reading ABOUT sheep rather than watching over them and the memories merged into Irish truth. Yes! And then the fun becomes thinking about sheep books he might have liked.

Then love knowing that you can live it all from a comfy seat on shore.

Two favorites come to mind: Marele Day’s Lambs of God, a strange, especially apt choice set in stone ruins off the coast of Scotland. It is also a great snotty Vatican novel, always a favorite category, and a tribute to resourceful women everywhere and anytime. Clearly a dad-book and given the island setting, an RB choice, too. The second favorite is Lorn Rubenstein’s A Season in Dornoch: Golf and Life in the Scottish Highlands which is only slightly about sheep but much about loving the landscape with sheep and golf. Charlie golfed the Royal Dornoch course and I watched, doted, and nattered away with the groundskeeper, and though this may make the book more personally bewitching, it is still a book set alongside the ocean, therefore a must for Roseledge Books next summer. Okay, book inferences may be VERY subtle, several degrees away from the reported situation, sometimes really speculation, and uncommon, if not rare, but they are so much more fun to dwell upon and virtually endless in their possibilities. Another sheep-book possibility is Susanna Kaysen’s Far Afield, although the cover picture of sheep may be misleading because I don’t recall that sheep were key to the story which s set in the Faroe Islands and sheep live there, but I liked the book a lot. I love this stuff.

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At breakfast the other morning, during which I continued noting the absence of flavor and texture in the Wednesday cream of wheat, even though the too-few cranberries helped but not enough, a group-homey was eye-ing the goodie I had not yet eaten. I said, as I sipped my hot, brewed coffee, “We Irish suffer before our pleasure.” Without missing a beat, he responded, “We Scandinavians don’t have pleasure.” Thanks again, Irish dad.

Richard III (1452-1485) is alive again in the public mind! This is no small feat for someone dead these 500+ years.  The newsworthy note is that Richard III’s bones have probably been found which means that two questions about him will probably re-arise.  Was he a villain or a “goodly,” albeit a medieval, king?  (In a nutshell, did he kill his two nephews who were in line to be king or were we duped by biased sources?) And  was he a hunchback or was his scoliosis magnified?  It’s time for some Tudor-time fact-checking.

Never fear; St. George and his dragon are ever near in his same-named Town.

Let the fact-checking interest begin with Josephine Tey’s  A Daughter of Time, a 1950’s police procedural that, among other themes, questions the contemporary sources used by Shakespeare and in history texts to support the victorious Tudors rather than the defeated Plantagenets.    Roseledge Books will have Tey’s book for those who want a good mystery, then watch with pleasure as readers find themselves caring about good and bad sources and consequent judgements.

Okay, newly-found bones alone may be iffy on acts and their motivations, but iffy raises questions which is better than dead silence.  I also know better than anyone that Roseledge Books is closed until summer.  So don’t wait; go now to your off-season bookstore and get  Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time in time to “test read” it before giving it to someone, preferably one of the huge and exploding number of ninnies who don’t know a good source from a bad.  The book is short, interesting, pertinent, fraught with unacknowledged questions about sources, especially bias, and generally wonderful.  Then, after the holiday, maybe the even minimally curious will rush the library to find out more, always a goal of Roseledge Books, especially, in the winter when the time to think is upon us.

Come summer, come back to RB and follow-up the interest in sources with Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, the best compilation of information pitfalls that I know currently in print e.g. selective perception, questionable expertise, truthiness, declining objectivity, questionable choosing.  You can read it and weep for the ways you were fooled in this election season of ongoing information follies.

Sort the good and useful from piles of clutter and the world smiles.

My dad’s grandfather emigrated from Ireland, settled in way-north North Dakota and promptly built the Coghlan Castle.  (I am not making this up.)  Dad told of sitting in the turret window reading books while watching the sheep.  When I told this story to the farmer who now owns the Castle (my dad’s brother-in-law’s grand-nephew), he said, “Your dad must have been really tall, then, because I’m six-feet-tall and I can barely see out the window (My dad was 5’6″.) and there were no sheep.”  I checked the 1885 Agricultural Census, and there were no sheep.  But my dad was a big reader his whole life, bad eyes and all.  From this I learn about Irish truth: there is always something true or real in the story; you just have to figure out what it is.  Is this a variation of truthiness?  (I miss you, dad.)

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Life in the group home (senior residence for the picky) is good, but cream of wheat three times a week for the breakfast hot cereal?  Really?  Before I left for Maine last May, it was only two days a week which was borderline tolerable for those of us willing to substitute cheerios for oatmeal on occasion.  How many people of reasonable taste can swallow wallpaper paste and think your body is saying “thank you” three times a week?   But life is good when the oatmeal/cream of wheat war is the only complaint and the good coffee is perked and waiting at 7 a.m., right next to the patio when reasonable weather calls.

Tim Watts died Wednesday morning and the tenor of Tenants Harbor changed in a heartbeat. He is a great big reason I know and love Tenants Harbor, and for that I will be forever grateful.

Spring of ‘79, I was searching for Mohegan-on-the-mainland (I could no longer walk the rocky paths with confidence.) when, while reading Down East Magazine, I spotted in the East Wind Inn’s three-line ad, “Country of the Pointed Firs.” Worth a try, I thought, and wrote to Innkeeper Tim asking for the particulars, e.g. walking surfaces and distances to water, rocks, boats, general store, post office, library, restaurant, public landing, trails, etc. Thanks to his detailed, precise, sometimes terse response, Charlie and I came that August, settled into the EWI for two weeks and fell in love with Tenants Harbor. We came back each summer.

Who can look at the East Wind Inn and not see Tim on the steps? Not I.

Then, April of ‘82, after surgery at Mayo to stop the crippling, I called Tim and said, “Guess what? I have a new nine-month job.” (Pause) “What is the question?” he asked. “Can I come and volunteer mornings at the East Wind for room and board?” “Sure,” he said, (or “Shoo-ah” to my Midwestern ears.) So thanks to Tim, I began my treasured summers in Maine, and, because I was there, knew to bid on long unoccupied, but ever-tended Roseledge, which would be available once they found Bess McClusky’s heirs. (That’s another story.) I bid and won that lottery in summer ‘83.   Tim surprised me with electricity in the cottage for which I berated him, as it just made fall’s leave-taking harder.  He just harrumphed.

The earlier Gledhill, unlovely then, perfect for the summer staff.

June of ’84, I arrived ready to move into Roseledge, but before that happened, local son Tim took me to the doors of my neighbors to introduce me. First I met Harry who said, “You’re in my lady’s house” (another story) and I said, “I know and I will do my best to take care of it.” Harry harrumphed with a half smile and turned away. Tim and I went to meet the Andersons up the hill who said “I’m Bill” and “I’m Mrs. Anderson” and I responded with my name and plans to live next to them in the summer. They nodded and that was that. Some time later that day, Harry and Bill, both deaf as posts, met on the road in front of Roseledge and began shouting, “And then she said to me…” “And then she said…,” and each one repeated exactly what I had said, so I figured that was fine. The Andersons sold their house a couple of years later, but Harry was my good neighbor for nearly twenty years, and I miss him still. Introductions matter.  Thank you, Tim.

Roseledge and neighbors, with rocks at low tide, in front of the East Wind Inn

I will miss Tim. He was the crabbiest person I know (“Then you get to be the nice one,” he would say.), but he was always there with a just-right solution to whatever needed doing. He is my definition of a Mainer and, though I know he will haunt the harbor forever, I will miss his presence. Tenants Harbor just changed indelibly. Real estate shifts don’t bother me; I figure that’s a generational thing. But Tim’s going? Well, maybe that’s a generational thing, too, but he died way too young and deserved his dotage as a generous crabby person turned generous curmudgeon.

Colleen