By definition, a real Mainer is wicked funny. Arthur Gott qualifies. One day Arthur’s good friend Bill Matthews (then president of the Cape Arundel Golf Club) took Arthur and another friend, Eddie Spalding, for a picnic lunch outing on Bill’s boat up the Kennebunk River. On the way back, the boat ran out of gas. […]

Going to “the camp” on the New Meadows River was always great fun for me as a kid, whether with my grandparents on most summer weekends as we made it through Cooks Corner without Pepere even slowing down his two-tone Studebaker, back when there was but a single stop sign at that intersection. Or with […]

My real Mainer actually started out as two people, but after 60 years together they are certainly one real Mainer now. My mother said it was love at first sight – and those of you who know him agree that love must be blind. They married, raised four kids and worked hard all their lives. […]

So, it’s July Fourth, my husband and I are in Scarborough on Dunn Estates Drive. We have brought our L.L. Bean chairs and we are sitting on the side of the road waiting for the neighborhood parade to begin. We are the only ones watching the parade because everyone else  from Dunn Estates is in the […]

If I were a Maine native, or if Maine and Massachusetts had not parted company almost 200 years ago, this commentary could not have seen the light of day. However, in the intervening years, Brad the Portland native and I, the Massachusetts native with a Bostonian father met and married across the ‘great divide.’ I […]

On the face of it one might think and instantly proclaim that a “real Mainer” is a person born and raised in Maine – whether on one of the largest estates on the East Coast or in a humble weather-worn cabin in the woods. In fact, it is well-known here in central Maine that being […]

I recently read that as we grow older, we are only older on the outside, inside we are forever young. In reflection of that adage, I wholeheartedly agree. As I approach my 89th birthday on August 25th, it seems only yesterday that I was a barefoot boy, with a mop of blonde curls and blue […]

When I was young, I realized that I had a lot of friends whose parents were from Maine. And most of the time, their grandparents and great-grandparents had also been born and raised in Maine. My family was not like this. Both of my parents had moved to Maine for work and for its beauty. […]

I’m a Mainer. I have lived my entire life in two Maine towns. I married my hubby here and we raised our family here and hopefully will return to dust here. I go to bean “suppahs,” make whoopie pies and needhams, eat “original” Italian sandwiches, red hot dogs, lobster rolls with mayo and fried clams […]

It was the 1980s in Camden. I was a newly single mom. Often on the weekends my boys would go to their dad’s house. It was hard to get used to their being gone, a desolate feeling. Having their dad in their lives was of huge importance, but I was not from Maine, and I […]