Now that my weekly Locke’s Mills column (along with those of several other former Bethel Citizen town correspondents), is part of Western Maine Neighborhood News, found on Substack and at the website wmnn.org, I’ll be posting only every other week’s “free to all” Locke’s Mills columns here on my own site.
On some of the weeks when my current column doesn’t appear here, I’ll be posting a look back at Locke’s Mills columns from 5 and 10 years ago.
FIVE YEARS AGO
In the Locke’s Mills column of February 4, 2021, I reported that the Greenwood and Woodstock selectmen had met to discuss the 2021 budget for the transfer station. The proposed total budget of $257,850 was about 30 percent higher than the previous year’s, reflecting a steep increase in costs to the towns for the disposal of metal and construction debris, as well as municipal solid waste.
At 6 a.m. on January 31, we were experiencing our coldest temperature reading of the winter, ten degrees below zero, and Tony and I were hoping for a warm-up before our afternoon trip to Portland for “an outdoor, socially distanced visit” at a park with our then two-year-old granddaughter and her mom, who had relocated to Portland from North Carolina at the beginning of January.
A few days before, I had done an early-morning hike of Moody Mountain by way of the newly created J&J Backcountry Trail, starting out with a headlamp about 45 minutes before sunrise, and I reported that “Jurgen and Janice Marks, who created the trail, have recently added excellent signage at all of the trail junctions. They had been up it the day before my hike, and their tracks, as well as pink flagging and the new signs, made it easy to follow the trail.”
In my column of February 11, 2021, I wrote about four recent “hometown hikes,” two to the top of Peaked Mountain in Maggie’s Nature Park; one on the Sanborn River Trail, across the connecting trail to Overset Pond, around the pond, and back to my car via the Jeep trail (a.k.a. Overset Pond Lane); and the fourth to the overlook on Patch Mountain.
“Whenever I hike around Overset Pond, I always think of Rex and Roland Martin, and how Rex told me they used to spend a week there, camping and fishing, at the end of the summer before school started. It was their reward for working hard, haying and doing other odd jobs, all summer. Rex said that from the time he was only ten or 11 years old, they would set off without much more than their fishing poles, blanket rolls, and a few potatoes. They caught plenty of fish and cooked them over a campfire, slept on the ground, and were completely on their own until they hiked back out a week later—not something many parents can imagine letting their kids do nowadays!”
TEN YEARS AGO
From the February 4, 2016 Locke’s Mills column: “Peter Musso of Greenwood is the Artist of the Month for February at the Local Hub. He has been painting for many years and since his retirement he has found extra time to pursue his passion for art. Peter will have framed as well as unframed pieces for sale. Stop by to view his works, and enjoy some of the Hub’s delicious food.”
Frequent visitors to our birdfeeders had been goldfinches, purple finches, chickadees, and juncos, along with a few American tree sparrows, a couple of white-throated sparrows, and one female cardinal.
In the February 11, 2016 Locke’s Mills column, I shared the sad news that our Twitchell Pond friend and neighbor David Brainard had passed away after a long and difficult illness. “There are so many of us in Greenwood who are grateful to Dave for everything he has done for the town over the years, especially for having shared his expertise and leadership on the Planning Board. He will certainly be missed.”
We had just celebrated Greenwood’s official 200th birthday, with cake and ice cream following the previous week’s selectmen’s meeting, the kickoff to our bicentennial celebration year. “Sally Smith made the cake, with a photo of a loon that I had taken a couple of summers ago on the top. Using edible ink and special “paper” made out of sugar, she can transfer any photo to a cake. Modern technology never ceases to amaze me!”
I also wrote about the Read to ME Challenge, a month-long public awareness campaign to promote childhood literacy in Maine. “To accept the challenge, all you have to do is read aloud to one or more children for at least 15 minutes, have someone take a photo or a short video of you reading aloud to kids and post it on social media with the hashtag #ReadtoME or #ReadaloudME and challenge others to do the same. I accepted Cathy Newell’s challenge after she posted it on Facebook. My read-aloud time is scheduled for Feb. 18, when I’ll be reading at the Bethel Library for Story Time. The photo I posted was actually a favorite photo of my mom, Ruth Wight, reading to five of her grandchildren at our camp on North Pond, back in 1976. She was a school librarian for many years and loved reading to kids more than almost anything else.”
