You will love these wonderful Maine stories

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.

George Smith

About George Smith

George stepped down at the end of 2010 after 18 years as the executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine to write full time. He writes a weekly editorial page column in the Kennebec Journal and Waterville Morning Sentinel, a weekly travel column in those same newspapers (with his wife Linda), monthly columns in The Maine Sportsman magazine, two outdoor news blogs (one on his website, georgesmithmaine.com, and one on the website of the Bangor Daily News), and special columns for many publications and newsletters. Islandport Press published a book of George's favorite columns, "A Life Lived Outdoors" in 2014. In 2014, George also won a Maine Press Association award for writing the state's bet sports blog. In 2016, Down East Books published George's book, Maine Sporting Camps, and Islandport Press published George and his wife Linda's travel book, Take It From ME, about their favorite Maine inns and restaurants.