I came to live in Maine when I was 23. Looking back, it was a brave move, to come all by myself to a place where I basically knew no one. But then at 23 a person should be doing brave stuff; if not then, when? For the next three years I lived alone. I think of it as living alone, but if I’m honest, I was only really alone during the week. Week-ends, snow days, and summers Wally found his way down the St. George peninsula to the little house I rented in the section of town called Wildcat. (I never did find out what ‘Wildcat’ meant; if anyone does, let me know.)

 And then we were married, living in Lincolnville and having babies. Until January 29, when Wally died in our front room, I’d barely spent a night by myself in this house. He was such a homebody that I don’t believe he was away more than a handful of nights in all those years, camping with the boys, maybe. Until, that is, this past year when he was in the hospital on four occasions. I think we knew that was practice for what was to come, except for the good-night phone calls, and early morning phone calls and daily visits to his hospital room. He was always coming home.

 Until three weeks ago when he was just – gone.

 I think I promised last week that I wouldn’t be writing about this all the time, but in fact, it’s all I can write about, at least for now. Please bear with me….

 What’s it like? I want to ask him, every day I want to ask him. Seeing death up close, taking away the person who was half of me, as I was half of him, does make you wonder. Do we just blink out, disappear, lose all consciousness of the person we were? Or is there some soul/spirit life after?

 All I can tell is how it’s affecting me, the one left to wonder. Imagine lying in the bottom of a boat, not a particularly big boat, a boat without a tiller or oars or sail. Just drifting on water, sometimes calm water with some sunshine and then, without warning, the boat plunges into a trough, so deep and sudden you can’t breathe. I’ll never see him again.

The tears come every day, but don’t last long. I’m a pretty practical person. There’s always something to do: eggs to collect, dishes to wash, a dog to walk. Mornings are fine, plenty to do – start the fires, feed the dog and cat, empty the dish drainer, pour the coffee. Past 2 p.m. and the day starts to deteriorate. There seems no point to any of it. I still cook meals for myself (I like eating too much to let that go by), but get out the cutting board to slice up onions and garlic, and the boat dives for the bottom. He should be sitting across the room, chatting about this or that. It’s so quiet.

 A friend stopped by, a fellow who lost his wife with no warning about a year and a half ago.

“I was in a fog for most of a year,” he told me, “forgetting to pay bills, really out of it.”

Then he told me of a Native American belief that when someone dies the one left to grieve goes on a journey with the deceased soul. A year-long journey. It explains the fog; only half of you is actually left behind to carry on. Maybe my other half is wandering with him on his journey. Or not.

 I’d describe the fog as amnesia. Read about the stages of grief and the first is denial. The mind not allowing the whole impact to hit. Fog. Amnesia.

 Yet, everywhere I look, mentally travelling up and down the so-familiar roads of our town, I count the other widowed spouses, a husband or a wife gone, leaving the other to carry on. Some have been at it for years and years, others not so long. Like all of life’s milestones – taking a life partner, giving birth, losing parents, growing old – losing your spouse is an experience of complexity and, I suspect, in the end, richness. It better be; half of every couple will have to live through it. And now it’s my turn.

Sewer District

Wag It  begins a series of classes this week with Puppy Class on Thursday, Feb. 23, 6-7 p.m., followed by Basic Manners Class from 7:15-8:15 p.m. And starting Saturday, Feb. 25, 11:30-12:30 p.m. the four week Wag It Games Class begins. Wag It is located on Calderwood Lane which is just off Beach Road not far from Drake’s Corner.

Card-making Class

The Lincolnville Community Library will sponsor a tour of the local J & R Sugarhouse on Saturday, March 4 at 1 p.m. Owner Joe Calderwood will show how he taps the maple trees on his property, collects the sap, and boils it down to a thick, dark and delicious syrup. This year he has tapped about 600 trees and will soon start collecting the sap in buckets as well as through a system of tubes. Joe has been making maple syrup since 1993, now in a sugarhouse he built with all the equipment needed to process hundreds of gallons of sap. In a good year he can make as much as seventy gallons of syrup.

The lime industry in 19th-Century Lincolnville was a big deal. Remnants of it can be seen all over town, small, distinct hillocks that are all that remains of a farmer’s kiln. You can spot several near the outlet of Coleman Pond on Slab City Road. Lime was a cash crop for the farmers who were struggling to eke out a living on our rocky, boggy land. They quarried the lime rock in various places, probably outcroppings on their own land, but most notably, and likely profitably, along the shore of Nortons Pond and down Sandhill Road at what became known as Coleman City.

 The Colemans, Hugh and his son Edwin, quarried the deep, water-filled pit between Sandhill and Coleman Pond, a quarry that rivals those seen in Rockland in size, if not depth. Edwin, along with a Mr. Pendleton, built the four-mile horse-drawn railroad between the big quarry and Ducktrap. The berm it traveled on is still visible along much of the shoreline of Coleman, between the cottages and the water. At the Trap they built a large “patent” kiln, probably in the 1870s.

 And that’s where “probably” comes in. There have been virtually no records of Edwin Coleman’s lime-burning endeavors – no account books, receipts, letterhead – not a scrap. All we knew was what we saw on the ground and read in the memoir of an old man, Horace Carver, who recalled, in 1940, his boyhood at Ducktrap. Until the other day, when Rosey Gerry stopped by with a cardboard box full of old papers, the very thing that literally makes me smile in anticipation. And in it were references to Edwin Coleman’s lime business. The papers were found stored in an old stool in a house on Rawson Avenue in Camden which is undergoing renovation.

 For years now, we at the Historical Society, have been saying to one another, “some day something about Coleman and his lime business will surface.” And now it has. Want to help read these old documents and see if that brings more understanding of a piece of our past? Let me know.

A Good Movie

If you’re looking for a good movie, which to my mind means no violence, and a story line that rings true, go see Hidden Figures . It’s playing at the Colonial in Belfast this Wednesday and Thursday, 4:30 and 7 p.m. It’s a wonderful antidote to so much that feels wrong these days.