“We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” Joni Mitchell’s iconic anthem “Woodstock” played softly in the distance from the farmhouse. Time passed pleasantly under the August sun. My daughter Cara and I lugged heavy stones to build a makeshift wall for a flower garden. We chatted about our respective teaching jobs. It was […]

I stuck fairly close to the small New England town where I lived through college and a job nearby with the phone company. I liked the job, but after a year I decided that I did not want to spend the rest of my life there, and, on a whim, joined the Peace Corps and […]

“Now you’re one of those people, the ones who live at the end of the road,” my new neighbor quipped when I dropped something off at his house, an old cape with gawking black windows and all the paint gone from the clapboards, secreted at the end of another dirt road that backs up on […]

I awoke to the usual door lock disengaging, freeing my door for the last time. I was excited, nervous and maybe even a little scared. Today was the end of a very important lesson that I gave 15 years of my life to. Within minutes I would take that lesson and leave the life I […]

My adventure starts in July 2016 when for security reasons, my wife and I decided to abandon everything we were able to build in order to protect and save our offspring. In Angola I was living perfectly good. Despite the insecurity we were facing, life was treating us well because we had the minimum to […]

I was over 70 when I decided to start over. My husband of about 25 years had died a few years before and I was sick of caring for the three acres on the top of a hill in the mountains in New Hampshire. Don’t get me wrong. I loved it there. I loved the […]

The year was 1953. I was in the third grade in Northeast Harbor schools and it was Christmas break. My mother was having a troubled second marriage, and a decision was made that I would return to school after the break in Jonesport. This is where my father hung his hat on the weekends as […]

As a native Mainer, I’m descended from a long line of sea captains, mariners and ship carpenters who sailed from Searsport and Stockton Springs. According to the Penobscot Marine Museum archives, Searsport sea captains made up 10 percent of the merchant vessel masters in the United States in 1880. Seafaring careers were a family tradition […]

I was on a straight line toward working as an adult at Wilson’s Dollar Stores in Winthrop, where my dad was a part owner, and I’d started working when I was 12 years old. I enrolled in the business school at the University of Maine in Orono in order to prepare for working at the […]

My choice of what I was to become in life came at an early age. One of seven children of immigrant parents, my family was very close and had strong religious and family values. The Greek community of Portland had its own Greek Orthodox church and supported a Greek language school that my brothers and […]