The annual meeting of the Friends of the Scarborough Library featured well-known author Monica Wood as speaker, and she held her audience captive as she described her childhood in Mexico, Maine. Her book, “When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico Maine” has received rave reviews, has won the 2012 May Sarton Memoir Award and even appeared on the Oprah Magazine Summer Reading List.
Monica was 9 years old when her father died in April of 1963 – he left behind his wife, several adult children, Monica’s 12-year-old sister Betty, mentally disabled, and 8-year-old Kathy, Fortunately for us, Monica grew up to be a writer of several excellent novels and short stories – but now she has produced this wonderful memoir that illuminates a year and a half of her life – how she and her family cope with the death of their breadwinner and head of household. Every word rings true and we are allowed to smell the acrid air of the Oxford Paper Mill where her father worked, venture inside the three-decker building where she lived in a crowded four-room apartment, taste the blue popsicles she and her friends enjoyed on hot summer days, and experience this Catholic neighborhood lived in by her family from Prince Edward Island, but also inhabited by families from such countries as France, Italy and Lithuania.
The annual meeting of the South Portland Historical Society featured Bud Warren, maritime historian and one of the founding members of the Tide Mill Institute – his lecture was entitled “Tidal Mills in and around South Portland.” An enthusiastic supporter of tidal mills, Bud has documented 223 tidal mill sites in Maine. He explained that the state has over 3,800 miles of coastline and that mills once played a major role in the economies of coastal towns – many had two mills, both saw and grist. For example, in 1728, saw mills were built on Long Creek and Barberry Creek, and by 1738, Knightville boasted a gristmill at Mill Creek – its remains can still be seen if you stand at the Creeks entrance near the Hannaford on Cottage Road.
Bud went on to point out that energy procured from wind power has much public attention and approval – but power obtained from the tides would be much more reliable – after all, the tide goes in and out every 24 hours, rain or shine, day or night, storm or calm. The trick is to learn how to control and transmit it at a competitive cost. He is convinced that that day will come and Maine could benefit greatly from that achievement.
Hidden in the little town of Clinton, Mass., is the first class Museum of Russian Icons – a group of seniors from OLLI (the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at USM) were delighted to make it their first stop on a bus trip that also included a visit to Fruitlands in nearby Harvard. The museum is the brainchild of Gordon B. Langton, who joined the firm, Nypro, an international plastics injection molding company headquartered in Clinton, in the early 1960s. He eventually became president of the company, and in 1989, on a business trip to Russia, he bought his first icon. By 2006, now a passionate admirer of this unique art form, Langton determined that his collection of over 500 icons and artifacts should be housed in a museum. Experts advised him to build in Boston or New York City but, wanting to give back to the community that had supported him for so many years, he located his museum in an 1815 factory building standing across from the town common, refiguring it into the handsome, modern museum we were privileged to visit.
I was most intrigued by the Royal Doors, a recent acquisition by the museum. Believed to have been painted circa 1600, their provenance is unknown – perhaps arriving in Europe in the 1930s when Russian sacred art was sold for hard currency by the Stalin government. The doors would have stood in the middle of an iconostasis – the screen of icons separating the congregation from the high holy altar and allowing access to the altar only by the priests and the Czar. Despite their age, the painted icons glow with color – the use of egg tempura paint tinted solely with mineral dyes – accounts for the amazing survival of the reds, blues and golds. At the top of the doors, two panels depict the Annunciation – on the left is Mary, the Mother of God and to the right is Gabriel, announcing the birth of the infant Jesus. The other four panels are devoted to the four Apostles.
We spent the afternoon at Fruitlands, the creation of another far-sighted individual, Clara Endicott Sears, a wealthy Bostonian, who dreamed of preserving a part of New England’s cultural history. In 1914 she purchased the farm that was once the site of transcendentalist Bronson Alcott’s utopian experiment, Fruitlands. Over the years, the museum has expanded, adding to the original Alcott farm house a Shaker Museum, a Native American Gallery, an Art Gallery, a shop and a restaurant.
My favorite spot was the farm house, home of the Alcotts in 1843 – Bronson, his wife Abigail, and his four daughters (including Louisa May, my cherished childhood author), another transcendentalist, Charles Lane, and his family, and their followers – altogether, 16 or 17 people. Bronson believed that every human being had within him a divine spark and he wished to gather like-minded individuals to join him in a revolt against the industrial revolution by escaping to a farm where they could practice his notions of a moral life – everyone working together with no harm to any living thing. Unfortunately this meant giving up dairy products and eggs, even honey! and since shearing sheep was forbidden, everyone had to wear linen clothing throughout the freezing winter weather of rural Massachusetts. Needless to say, the experiment did not last long, the farmhouse was abandoned and the transcendentalists retreated to an easier life in Concord.
Marta Bent lives in Scarborough.
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