I loved Maine Stories by Lew-Ellyn Hughes, who captures the state we love. Her columns feature Maine in so many ways and I enjoyed every column. This wonderful book was published by Maine Authors Publishing.
Lew-Ellyn’s Maine experiences mirror many of mine. She spent lots of time in the woods at her family’s camp in Greenville. And her exceptional descriptions put you right there. Actually, I have been right there!
She writes about everything from teaching young kids to ski at Sugarloaf to hosting guests at her B&B, gardening to Halloween, and talking turkey to granny rules. My wife Linda is an avid gardener, and she loved the gardening column about a fanatic gardener.
And we both loved her poem, The Month Before Christmas. The ending is hilarious:
It’s important, you see,
we must make it merry!
All I want for Christmas
Is January.
And her column Small-Town Maine, certainly captured my town of Mount Vernon. Here’s the first paragraph:
I live in a small rural Maine town. Everybody here knows everybody else’s truck and kids. We even know each other’s pets. The other day my neighbor gave me a friendly chiding about my dog. “Your dog was in the road,” he said. “If I’d been an eighteen-wheeler, he’d be a pancake.”
“Talking about loose animals,” I countered, “wasn’t that your cow running around downtown last week?”
Well, I could spend a lot of time pulling things out of her other columns, but I will stop now and let you discover all those.