Each month, Down East editors select our favorite response to “Where in Maine?” Here is our favorite letter from December’s photo.
"When I was growing up in Houlton in the ’50s and ’60s, school recessed for two or three weeks in the fall so young people could help harvest the potato crop. My friends and I would call local farms and ask if we could hire onto a picking crew. The farmers would drive to town, stop at each house, and blow the horn. We came running, lunchbox and water jugs under our arms. It was so cold at 6 A.M. in September and October, we’d have our winter jackets on. Our little brown flannel gloves were not much protection against the frozen dirt. We learned about hard work but had fun too. After college, I moved down east, where I have lived for 50 years. One of my four children lives right outside of Houlton. I get to revisit my hometown occasionally and reminisce about my growing-up days." — Mary Carton Seward, Gouldsboro, Maine
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The mountain was briefly a candidate for alpine-ski infrastructure when Maine flirted with a bid for the 1976 Winter Olympics.
Many hikers turn around without reaching this mountain’s 4,170-foot peak, aiming instead for a ledge that’s 1,000 feet lower but still provides a knockout view of the winding pass below. The hike even to that point can be hairy — one route requires a challenging clamber up ladders and rungs — and “hairy” also happens to describe the human facial feature for which the scenic ledge is named.
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Marie Battiste’s education and career have taken her all across the continent — to Harvard, for a master’s degree in 1974; to Stanford University, in California, where she became the first Mi’kmaw woman to achieve a doctorate; to her family home of Potlotek First Nation in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where, as an educator, she pioneered indigenous curricula; and to Saskatchewan, where she’s been on the University of Saskatchewan faculty for 27 years and where she received the prestigious Order of Canada — the nation’s highest civilian honor — for her scholarship and activism decolonizing education and preserving indigenous languages and knowledge.
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