Snow Movers – Winter Transportation Festival

This weekend I am heading out to Owls Head, Maine to the annual Snow Movers Winter Transportation Festival. I can't wait to check out the pre-1990 snowmobiles, snow plow vehicles, snow blowers, sleigh, toboggans, sleds and ice boats.


















1926 Model T Ford snowmobile

This weekend I will get to ride one of those things.

Palette of Green, Granite, and Dark Blue

I looked along the San Juan Islands and the coast of California, but I couldn't find the palette of green, granite, and dark blue that you can only find in Maine.
-Parker Stevenson

Neighborliness

In Maine we're used to it, it's still
the custom to look out for the neighbors, a habit
handed down from the start
of the earliest fishing villages, of the first
long strings of hundred-acre farms
stretched along ridges, each one usually
just called, "The Road."

On that road,
if a man fell sick, or a widow
was facing a hard winter, it was neighbors
who filled the woodshed, the neighbors
who shared meat when they butchered If a house
burned down, the whole neighborhood
turned out to help build another. When a storm
threatened anyone's cut hay, it was everyone
who hurried over to help get it safely
into the barn. And the helping
goes right on: this fall I heard
of someone who had to put a whole paycheck
on an old debt, and then found a hot dinner
waiting on the step when he got home from work
every night for a month -- but no one
ever admitted a thing.

In Maine
we have a way of looking out
for one another. When the great ice storm
struck us last year, the grocery stores
were full of extra heaters left there
for anyone to borrow, and the whole state
was busy with jeep cans of water and stacks of wood,
making sure we were all alright, that everyone
would pull through.

In Maine
we are glad to be part of a land
that remains so beautiful under its green skin
of woods and open fields, that is glitteringly
bordered by thousands of miles
of breaking waves, and that is lovely,
too, with an unbroken tradition
of concerns, with the kind, enduring grace
of its neighborliness.

By Kate Barnes of Appleton: Maine Poet Laureate Emerita

The Changing of Seasons at Colby College

Here are pictures of the view out of the window of my room as the seasons have changed. The last picture was taken in December. There is many times more snow outside now.

Bates in the Snow

This last week Maine, and the rest of the Northeast, has been hit hard by a massive snow storm. These are a collection of Polaroids taken in the last few weeks. Some are from before the storm and some from after.