I've been out of the fire service for a while and you can leave the fire service, but the fire service never leaves you. Some recent news stories got me thinking about those days and I thought I'd…

The Women's March on Washington, a concept begun by one woman and a handful of friends just after Election Day, far exceeded their expectations. Two months later, it had become the distinctly…

Okay, so last week I wrote about curried chicken. That contains apples and raisins, making it a savory AND sweet dish. Who doesn't like that combo? Not me, that's for sure. (It could also be…

I used to call it Czechoslovakian curried chicken. I Googled Czechoslovakian because I wasn't sure how to spell it. Try finding that word on the internet. You can, but…

Have you had the Scottish cast iron roasted salmon with toasted sesame oil and tamari glaze at the Carriage House Restaurant in East Boothbay? Have you had the white and black sesame encrusted,…

So, it’s the day after Christmas.

I woke up this morning and resolved to stop eating crap for the foreseeable future.

I headed to the kitchen and started dictating this column to the…

These days, after the big potluck community supper in the church basement — and how far back this custom goes I do not know, because people’s memories differ—…

If you're finding that all you want is more light this time of year — with strings of lights around your house and even the outside hedges and…

Polar vortex, cold, wind chill, chilly: All references to the weather last weekend, when the polar vortex descended in full force. Temperatures hovered around zero,…

“There’s so much more community here than anywhere else I’ve ever been.”

So…

Fall is when I start thinking about apples and apple pie. I rarely have either in the summer.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t care less about eating an apple. A fresh, crunchy cold apple just…

If you’re a follower of mine on Facebook, you no doubt have seen the posts about the bear baiting, donut Saturday mornings. I post about sharing a donut with a local law officer while on my way to…

There was a story I happened to see twice on the evening news back on Thursday — first on the NBC evening news, and then another report ran…

I rarely order a sandwich when I go out to dinner. I want dinner at dinnertime. With a manhattan before and wine with. Sandwiches are for lunch.

But lately I've been known to order a…

In the early 1900s, we were fortunate not to have telephones, automobiles, etc. Maybe you can't imagine why but there is one good reason. In spite of the fact that we love our telephones and…

Speaking of comfort foods (soups and chowders over the past couple weeks), have you had a chicken pie from Wiscasset General Store lately? No? Okay, don't say I didn't warn you. If you're trying…

The words to the old sea chanty, in the back of my head, make me smile when I drive the truck noisily aboard the ferry, banging onto the steel deck in a U-Haul loaded with a ton-plus of trash,…

Late at night sometime in early spring 1989, at Middlebury College in Vermont, word spread quickly through the dorms: Go outside and look at…

Turkey. Now there's an interesting subject. Wonder what made me think of that. Just kidding.

CNN reported that last Thanksgiving an…

I live with a man who is prone to posting appropriate comic strips around the house, appropriate by his lights, that is. One that survived many years on our refrigerator door had Snoopy sitting on…

I usually don’t write just before elections because everyone is more interested in letters to the editor than my drivel and it’s hard to get space to get noticed. This election was something, wasn…

It's that time of year. Time for chowders like the one I made last week, and soups like the one I made last night — curried cream of butternut squash soup.

Hot chowder on a cold day: The ultimate comfort food. Seriously. Imagine taking a long walk — like 10,000 steps — on one of these cold days. Like Angie McLellan, Julie…

It would not be a good idea for me to write a political opinion column, because nothing is simple enough in my worldview or my experience to fit into a succinct, tidy, manageable, gross…

I used to pick mussels off the rocks in front of the cottage in Cushing at low tide.

We had them way too often when I was a kid. They…

We are all too young to have seen the carved figureheads on the bow of large vessels, but they existed and are seen now, I believe only in museums. I recently saw two in the Maine Marine Museum in…

Okay, so a couple weeks ago I told you about my favorite choco, or chocolate cookies. At some point in my ramblings about those I mentioned my other favorite cookies: Ginger. I never shortened it…

The constellation Gemini, the Twins, is dominated by two bright stars side-by-side in the sky above Orion:  Castor and Pollux. These twin brothers share an interesting backstory in Greek mythology…

John Donne wrote, “No man is an island.” Simon and Garfunkel countered with, “I am a rock; I am an island.” Sometimes a summer visitor will comment—with the most romantic of intonation—that they…

I’ve been seeing ads for devices that you attach to something you might lose and these things help you find those lost things. On the surface, they sound kind of interesting, but me being me it…

I know I've mentioned salads with hot pan fried sliced steak thrown on top — maybe more than once, but I haven't really stressed how good it is.

A hot steak salad is my go-to dinner —…

When I was a teenager, I entered a model railroad competition at the encouragement of my father […

Choco cookies: That's what I wrote on the recipe card 30 years ago, when I was into shortening any word that could be shortened: lobs, spags and balls and choco were…

Remember Crepes Suzette? I think back when I first heard the word “crepe” it was never mentioned without the last name, Suzette.

…

As the treasurer of the Association, I just paid the power bill for the Matinicus Island Library. That felt pretty good.

This past summer, residents and visitors to Matinicus Island have…

For the last few decades we've had a regular rotation of observers venturing out to Matinicus for a day or an hour and nattering on about ours being a "unique lifestyle." Writers, especially, and…

“Hands across the water, heads across the sky.”

Remember those words from Paul and Linda McCartney's song “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey?” I always thought it was “hands across the sky,” too.…

Back in the mid ’70s I was a soda jerk at Mitchell's Drug Store on Townsend Ave. It was during my first winter in Boothbay Harbor after I came back from sailing to the Caribbean with my first…

The Babb family has been a prominent family in Camden for many years.  Del Babb and Janaan Babb Vaughn live in town today.  It is their grandmother, whom I write about, because…

When you look the full moon in the face, what do you see? Many see features of a man's face — the Man in the Moon — amid the dark and light patches created by the moon's topography. A wonderful…

People keep asking me why I haven’t been writing and why they haven’t seen any articles from me, lately. Well, I’ve been wicked busy and when I’m busy it’s hard to find time to write and then I…

“For decades we've been trucking our super fresh, delicious scallops to out of state processing centers where they're mixed in with the stuff from the Federal fishery…

OK, so as I said last week this column has been dragging on for half a year now. I just counted 25 food columns! Yikes! Time flies.

I’…

Okay so I cheated you out of a recipe last week. I'm sorry, but every time I started writing about the one I'm going to give you this week, my ADD kicked in and I got…

So, on the off chance any of you were freaking out because my food column didn’t appear in last week’s Boothbay Register, Wiscasset Newspaper and Penbay Pilot, relax, I…

When you think of the "dog days of summer," you think of dogs lying around panting in the sun. But in fact this period of extreme heat was named for the Dog Star, Sirius, which rises with the sun…