Stacey Tran realizes it can be difficult to find a sense of belonging when your culture isn’t reflected in the place where you live. For this writer (I am half Chinese and based in Portland), that notion hits close to home. In Maine a staggering 94.2 percent identify as “white alone,” according to census.gov. However, that still leaves over 100,000 people living in Vacationland from other origins and ancestry.

This made me wonder: What do I need to feel safe, heard, and supported? What kind of setting makes me feel most open, most connected to my community? Enter Tender Table, a community-centric, volunteer-run organization that celebrates Mainers of color through food and storytelling. Events vary, from picnics and poetry readings in public parks to virtual book clubs, artist talks, and dinner parties. The content might shift from one event to the next, but the mission stays the same.

“There are so many spaces in the world where people of color feel like they can’t let their guard down,” Tran tells me. “Their identity, their existence, is constantly in question. So, we’re making that space.” To date, just over half of Tender Table’s events are for people who identify as BIPOC only, with the others open to everyone.

“For so many of us, we already have to hand-hold people through race on a daily basis,” says co-organizer Veronica Perez. “Or be that person who represents an entire culture at work or school. Here, it’s sometimes nice to just sit back and ease into conversations that we know won’t be filled with stereotype.”

Perez is a multidisciplinary artist who has received fellowships at Indigo Arts Alliance’s David C. Driskell Black Seed Studio and the Lunder Institute at the Colby College Museum of Art. Despite their success in the Maine arts community, Perez, who is half-Puerto Rican and Italian, almost left Maine at one point, due to an unhealthy work environment that left them feeling isolated. In one of many instances, Perez felt gaslit by colleagues and was told they were overreacting when they finally confronted issues. I nod when Perez tells me this, recognizing these behaviors in many interactions I’ve had throughout my own life. Often, discussions about race with family and friends result in scenarios where people of color end up doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

“It’s not [a BIPOC person’s] job to educate,” Perez says, adding that there are resources available now for those who want to learn about how embedded racism is in our belief systems. Tender Table is a place where you don’t have to worry about any of that, where, Perez adds, “you can loosen your jaw and stop clenching.”

Tran recognizes that, to reduce this tension, sometimes being around those who have been in similar situations is a great relief. “At our events, you can expect to be among others with shared and overlapping experiences and cultural backgrounds. They are centered around themes of healing, joy, rest, and connection, with food as the binding element.” Tender Table member Jenny Ibsen is a Chinese adoptee who grew up in a white family in Connecticut. Now she’s a printmaker, illustrator, and writer living in Portland, who advocates for restaurant workers. “There was a group of other Chinese adoptees who were all born in the same city as me, that I spent time with once a year. We shared stories of our adoptions and our families, bias incidents that we experienced (but barely understood in elementary school), and curiosities about our birth parents. We didn’t always talk about heavier topics—we laughed, watched TV, went swimming, and jumped on trampolines. But there was always an assumption of a shared experience, an openness that I could rarely find with my classmates or my parents, who would talk with me but could never empathize.” For Ibsen, Tender Table fills the same void.

“Tender Table isn’t just a place for us to rant, although it can be that for someone if they need it,” Tran says. “In one meeting I felt the group’s exhaustion when talking about race. What about food? Bad TV shows? Nature trails?” She tells me there was a collective sigh in the group. I wonder how many fellow Mainers are searching for this release but don’t even know it. “So much of our progress and events have happened because of conversations with one another and our communities,” Tran says. “Not because Tender Table is bound by some expectation. We listen, we see how the community responds, and we make things happen in response to that.”

This approach is opposite to the five-year busi-ness plan many organizations are modeled after. Instead, Tender Table operates as a call-and-response with their attendees. It asks itself and its communities: Is this going to help us build more relationships? Is this going to lead to deepening connections, to people doing amazing things? Can we support them? Can we support you? This meant that for the majority of 2020 and 2021 meetings were held over Zoom, to ensure that the community stayed safe and yet connected during the pandemic. In one memorable meeting, Tran delivered ingredients for making soup to each attendee’s front door, and they cooked together remotely while bonding over recipes and stories.

Tran, whose parents grew up in Vietnam, says her deep sense of belonging began at the dinner table, and Tender Table is an extension of wanting to share that powerful, sacred space. “Through the food I ate and the stories I heard at the dinner table, I learned more about my family, my ancestors’ food traditions, the landscape they grew up in, their experience of scraping by in times of poverty and scarcity, and the delicious nostalgia of very special decadent meals at New Year celebrations complete with firecrackers and the whole neighborhood singing karaoke into the wee hours of the morning.”

Perez knows that not all tables are that generous. “My family had evening dinners, but they weren’t always generative and kind. I sometimes left the dinner table in tears. It’s who you surround yourself with at the dinner table that creates spaces of vulnerability, and that is what Tender Table does.” Now, at the Tender Table helm with both Tran and Ibsen, who was asked to join the team as an artistic collaborator and organizer, Perez has no intention of leaving Maine. Tran also invited Sydney Avitia-Jacques, the political education director at Southern Maine Workers’ Center (SMWC), to join the growing Table, and now these four organizers have big plans for the year ahead. Tender Table is partnering with SMWC and Indigo Arts Alliance to host several events throughout 2023 in conjunction with the appointment of renowned musician and activist Toshi Reagon as Bowdoin College’s 2022/2023 Joseph McKeen Visiting Fellow. Reagon has invited members of the Maine community to create cultural and social justice programming based on themes from Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower. The programming will accompany Reagon’s Parable of the Sower opera, which is on tour and will be performed in April 2023 at Merrill Auditorium. Tender Table will create a series of workshops and dinners to hold space for community skill sharing and conversation.

Later this year, Tender Table plans on bringing back a version of its successful (and really fun) annual food, poetry, and art fair. For the past two summers, this vibrant event brought the BIPOC community to center stage, under the canopy of trees and tents at Congress Square Park. Tran says this year will be similar: tables filled with food and music and tents adorned with goods and art crafted by Mainers of color. After attending the past two Tender Table fairs, I can attest to how energizing it is to see a group clearing some space so that artists can fill our state with the diversity we already have as well as with the diversity to come.

“The world begins and ends at a kitchen table,” Tran quotes from her favorite poem, “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” by Joy Harjo. “No matter what, we must eat to live. The gifts of the earth are brought and prepared, set on the table.”

Tran ends with a big smile, an invitation, and perhaps a challenge. “We welcome your hungry and curious selves and hope you’ll leave feeling nourished and restored.”

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The post Claiming Space at the Table appeared first on The Maine Mag.

“Buy what you triple-love,” says Portia Clark, who has been running Portia’s Barn, a rotating collection of curated vintage and found rugs, furniture, art, and objects, out of her home in Portland since 2017. In Clark’s opinion, one that has been honed and perfected since her high school days prowling Goodwill for vintage clothing, that’s the number one rule when it comes to finding gems in the dusty corners of antique stores, vintage boutiques, and flea markets across the state. “I don’t want to buy something where, if I don’t sell it, I’m stuck with it,” she explains. “Double love is okay, but triple love is when you wake up the next day like, oh, I hope that hasn’t sold.” The second rule? Be curious. Stop at a variety of places—especially nonflashy or unmarked ones—and stop often. The 30-mile strip of Route 1 that stretches from Kittery to Arundel, for example, is home to more than 50 unique antique shops. “Be nice and ask questions,” says Clark. Like the watches you see on display? Kindly ask if there are more stored behind the counter. “A lot of times people will open another drawer for you.” And don’t be afraid to fix things, be it an old, beat-up dresser that needs a little elbow grease, or a lamp whose wiring looks a bit, let’s say, sketch. “There’s a wonderful shop in South Portland called the Lamp Repair Shop,” says Clark, who takes her finds there to be looked over. “I’m usually like, okay guys, I think this looks okay, but is this safe?” Another situation in which being nice often pays off is haggling. “If you’re respectful and really like something, you don’t have to be afraid to ask, ‘What is the best you can do on this?’” says Clark. Especially in smaller shops, bargaining is expected. Are there rules on how many types of wood to place in one room? Yes. But also no. “Stop looking at Instagram,” says Clark. “If you love a collection of items and they speak to you, they’ll have a place and won’t go out of style,” says Clark. Finally, and perhaps the most practical piece of advice: rent a trailer and hitch from U-Haul to schlep your treasures home. “It’s $19 for the day, and you don’t have to pay for mileage!”

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The post How to Go Antiquing Like a Mainer appeared first on The Maine Mag.

Maeve Tholen

A sophomore at Lincoln Academy in Newcastle, Maeve Tholen was named one of two first-place winners in the MWPA’s 2022 youth competition in fiction for her short story “Chocolate Hope,” which is about a young woman from a family of cacao growers who emigrates from Brazil to Miami. Originally written for a class assignment, Tholen’s story was inspired by her family’s love for chocolate as well as by a picture book she read as a child. The overarching theme is “finding community in a new place, while staying true to who you are and your roots,” says Tholen. A writer of poetry and short fiction, Tholen previously had her poem “At Sunset” published by the Telling Room, and in 2021 she won a Scholastic National Gold Medal for another of her short stories. “I love writing because it allows me to process things that are going on in my life, and to share what I’m thinking about and feeling with others,” she says. “It’s a way to use my voice.”

Leela Marie Hidier

Yarmouth High School senior Leela Marie Hidier wrote and published her first novel, Changes in the Weather, through the Telling Room’s Young Emerging Authors (YEA) program, a yearlong apprenticeship that walks four high school students through the entire publication process, from pitching a story idea to picking out cover artwork. Originally from London, UK, Hidier moved to Maine in 2018 and now lives in a three-generational household. During the pandemic, she began journaling and spending more time outdoors to help process her emotions about the state of the world, which ignited her love for writing and interest in climate activism. Her story follows across the U.S. four young climate refugees who “find sanctuary—and strength—in their families, friends, communities, and even strangers,” says Hidier. “Along the way, they learn to use their voices to create change and discover what home really means.” Recently Hidier has branched out into nonfiction writing with an essay titled “Weaving Home,” published in the November edition of Amjambo Africa. She was also accepted into the Telling Room’s yearlong Young Writers and Leaders program, during which she will dabble in a variety of genres and styles. “I want to be a seed that sparks climate activism through my storytelling,” says Hidier. “I have learned to find my place in the climate and social justice conversations through [my writing].”

MacKenzie VerLee

MacKenzie VerLee, a winner of MWPA’s 2022 youth competition in fiction, is a sophomore at Falmouth High School who was awarded the top prize for her short story, “The Lighthouse Keeper.” Written as part of a class assignment, the story was required to take place in the future and to have a happy ending. “At first, it was tricky to think of a story that could have a positive resolution, because all that came to mind were horrible things like global warming and the fall of our government,” says VerLee. However, the image of a lighthouse on the rocks, a small sailboat, and a cunning old man at the helm kept popping into her head. “The old man is supposed to represent my grandfather,” she says. “He is someone who somehow knows the answer to every question.” An avid soccer player and track athlete, VerLee has recently taken up online journaling, which helps her to manage stress and organize her thoughts. As for her favorite part of the writing process, VerLee loves naming characters, saying that finding the perfect name helps her bring them to life.

Noor Sager

Noor Sager has been involved with the Telling Room since their freshman year of high school, when they participated in a summer program specifically for first- and second-generation immigrants. Now a senior at Gorham High School, Sager was most recently a part of the literary nonprofit’s YEA program, during which they wrote and published their first novel, A Destiny Borrowed. Inspired by Sager’s love of fantasy fiction, the book follows a nonbinary protagonist with fantastic powers and takes an interesting twist on the “chosen one” archetype. Inspired by fantasy fiction books they read in middle school, Sager wanted their story to create a world focused on magic, and imbued with queer themes that they wish they had found when they were 12. “If reading a novel about a chosen one who happens to be nonbinary gives someone the opportunity to understand how they/them pronouns are used, then that’s amazing,” says Sager, who plans to stay in Maine for college. An avid writer who loves world building, Sager will soon start working on their next book, although it remains to be determined whether it will be a sequel or something new. “I cannot wait to see the books that the next wave of Maine writers produce,” they say. “If the small pool of absolutely brilliant authors I’ve met at the Telling Room is anything to go by, we have a lot of wickedly funny and uniquely authentic stories coming our way.”

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The post Four Young Writers to Watch in the Pine Tree State appeared first on The Maine Mag.

How did milkweed become such an important part of your life?

This past midsummer I read a story about the incredible journey the monarchs make during their migration from the mountains of Mexico to the eastern points of New England, some flying up to 3,000 miles. So, being a mapmaker, I really drilled down on that. I went online and looked at a whole bunch of maps, and I found where the preserves were. I had in my mind where they fly to, but then I started reading that their flight patterns are being challenged by urbanization, suburbanization, and the use of herbicides, which kills a lot of the plants that they need. Monarchs are pollinators, and our planet needs pollinators to survive. It became very clear, very fast that monarchs need milkweed to reproduce.

There is a great volunteer-based organization called Monarch Watch, and they talk a lot about how people can help propagate and spread milkweed. I kind of got roped into this magical, mystical idea of a monarch. And I thought, wow, this is something that anyone can do. “Milkweed for the monarchs.” That became my little mantra.

I started walking around Peaks with my GPS, looking for milkweed. I made a base map of the island and spent probably every morning for a month systematically looking on every trail, every corner, every road. I lost about 12 pounds because I was walking so much. I mapped 60 different locations, finding that most of the milkweed was in people’s gardens. Milkweed is a very important component of a pollinator garden. Then I thought, okay, I can collect milkweed [seed] and dry it out and propagate it, spread it around. Also when I was walking around, I started telling people what I was doing, and people started dropping off milkweed in my mailbox, bringing me milkweed pods. Everyone loves to talk about their gardens, so it was very easy to get people to tee off on the subject. Most people just want pretty flowers, and far fewer people plant pollinator gardens. But we need some intent behind what we plant, and educational intent.

“If you don’t have pollination, you don’t have life.”

Can you explain milkweed’s vital importance to the health of our planet?

Milkweed has a toxin in it, and when a caterpillar eats the leaves, their body absorbs that toxin, and other bugs and predators don’t like the taste of it. The milkweed toxin is a caterpillar’s defense against predators. The bright colors of the butterfly advertise that “I don’t taste good, so leave me alone.” There are over 30 different types of milkweed in North America, and in the eastern United States, like Maine and northern New England, there are two primary types of milkweed: common milkweed and swamp milkweed, which, as you might imagine, grows in wetter areas. What I’ve harvested on this island is common milkweed. The whole reason I have an interest in this is to help protect the pollinators because they are dying. And if you don’t have pollination, you don’t have life.

What happens with the harvested seeds?

On their own, the seeds are only going to blow so far. If someone has a garden and the garden is surrounded by two acres of mowed lawn, the seeds are not going to find any place because they need disturbed soil. They need a place to lodge themselves. Americans love mowed lawns, and they’re sterile deserts really, where not much grows. Anyone can plant harvested seeds. People have gardens, and if everyone started planting milkweed and other native flowers, that would really help the butterflies. When the butterflies hatch or crawl out of their chrysalis, they need food, so having flowers in bloom in September and early October is really important. Pollinator gardens serve not only the butterflies and the monarchs; they also serve other insects, and insects are the animals that power our world.

What do you love the most about your new mission?

The choreography. It is performance art in activism, a dance. First, you identify the location of the milkweed. You collect it. You have to ask permission, because a lot of the milkweed will be in people’s gardens, meaning you have to have a conversation with someone, which often can be very positive. You dry the seeds. In my case, I dry them upstairs in the loft of the studio where it’s warm and dry. Then you crack open the pods and perhaps create little seed packets. You can distribute them or plant them yourself, or you can give seed packets to your friends and your friends can spread them, and your garden friends can plant it. It’s another opportunity for you to stand on your stage or your little soapbox and do a show, tell, and sell. You’re telling a story, and hopefully you’re giving your story to someone else, and they can make that story their own. Anyone and everyone can do this. And I think that’s a great way for all of us to save a little bit of our environment and help the planet be healthier.

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The post Milkweed Man appeared first on The Maine Mag.

Here is Peter Dorman, 87 years old, still standing. He sews moccasin-style shoes in Lewiston, 40 hours every week, earning $20 an hour. He doesn’t get sore anymore, he swears. “After doing it for 60 years? My muscles are pretty well trained,” chuckles Dorman. Callouses tell the story of his work: the tops of his middle and ring fingers are scuffed and bright, like freshly sanded pine furniture. The sides of his pinky fingers bear deep notches where he uses them to pull his threads taut, carrying the tension across his hands lest the stress break his needles.

Dorman learned to sew shoe leather by hand in 1962. In those days, Bass made a moccasin-style loafer called the Weejun—a name that evoked traditional Norwegian fishermen’s shoes—that was all the rage in preppy America. Dorman sewed as many as 45 pairs a day for around 75 cents a pair. The mills bustled. Across the river, Auburn shipped leather and canvas shoes worldwide, as it had since the days before the Union Army marched south in boots made in Maine. By the early twentieth century, the town manufactured millions of pairs of shoes and boots every year.

The mills from those days remain. So do the old-time methods, carried on by the shoemakers who park their pickups and SUVs behind the loading docks today. Once upon a time, most workers walked. Leaving their three-story walk-ups on Ash and Cedar and Walnut Streets, passing Chapel Street and onto Canal, thousands of them filed into the hulking industrial castles on the Androscoggin River at the start of every shift. Now, the few commuters who still clock in arrive by car, clustering their vehicles on any flat patch of gravel or cracked asphalt that works.

Dorman meets me at the loading dock and ushers me past a “passenger use prohibited” sign and onto a freight elevator. The clanking green metal doors close, then open, and as we step out onto the sixth floor we are staring down the vanishing point of a vast and very empty hallway a hundred or so yards long. Cheerily, Dorman walks all the way down to the hallway’s other end, turns left, and opens a door. Inside is Easymoc, an independent shoe company that was founded by a 34-year-old but bills itself as old-school. In here, the industry’s past orchestral scale has been arranged for a string quartet: there’s the percussive tap of the machine sewer, the rough brush of sandpaper on an insole readied for glue, the rumble of the air compressor in a heel laster. And then, above it all, the elegant thwip sound of a hand-sewer’s needles pulling waxed thread through leather, time after time.

Leather arrives here as it always has, smooth and tanned in a stack of “sides.” To the untrained eye, they’re amorphous, like 20 square feet of rolled-out gingerbread dough. But of course, you can see that’s a cow there: You can make out shapes of head, legs, haunches. There’s the scar where maybe she snagged her hide on barbwire as a calf. Farther down, there’s a section of wavy fat wrinkles she gained from grazing away her adolescence in full sun. These blemishes reduce a hide’s value and vex the cutter, who must devise clever ways to hide the bad marks—under buckle straps, between the insole and plug—in the finished shoes. The cutter solves hides like puzzles, arranging die molds of a shoe’s component parts close together and shoe by shoe, heel-to-toe across the cow. Each hide has its own personality, which can vary as much as the personality of its erstwhile cow (which is to say, somewhat). Leather stretches; placing the component parts together ensures that the shoe will stretch uniformly. In this way, under a capable cutter’s ministry, any decent-living cow can be delivered a new life as 28 size-nines (give or take a shoe).

But if the cutter gets sloppy, the leather won’t stretch properly, and before long he’ll have a hand-sewer cursing his name. “Hand-sewers are not shy people—I’ll tell you that right now,” says Kevin Shorey, co-CEO at Quoddy, which makes custom boots, shoes, and slippers on the second floor of the old Pepperell Mill on Lisbon Street. They’re ornery, and they’re older, Shorey explains, and there aren’t enough of them to go around—one of the reasons he’s been lobbying the City of Lewiston to add hand sewing to its vocational programs or introduce high school students to shoemaking in class.

Even on the day he first took the job, Dorman was an ambivalent shoemaker. “I didn’t have feelings one way or the other about it. I had to have a job.”

He had grown up in Canaan, Vermont, the youngest of 13 kids. Only 10 survived infancy. When Dorman was two years old, a piece of furniture crushed his ankle. When he returned home from the hospital, his mother was gone—committed to an asylum, he was told. His memory of it all is fuzzy, but the siblings became wards of the town, and Dorman and an older brother were sent to live with a prominent couple who lived downtown. He says he has only one memory of his mother: A sunny day in June after his high school graduation, the car taking her back to the institution stopped next to his house. He walked out onto the lawn. The driver rolled down the back window. They looked at one another but said nothing. “I guess neither one of us could think of anything to say,” he says. It’s still hard for him to talk about.

After high school, he worked carpentry and house-painting jobs in Connecticut for two years, then joined the navy, sailing the Mediterranean on the last tour of the USS Salem (CA 139). “CA stands for cruiser attack,” he says. But being the relatively peaceful years of the late 1950s, “for us, it was all cruisin’.” After his tour, he married his girlfriend from Connecticut. “I never got a Dear John letter,” he says, “so I figured this is the girl for me.” They moved to be closer to her family in Maine. A brother-in-law there sewed shoes and offered to get him a job at G.H. Bass in Wilton. He figured he’d better take it.

Dorman learned hand sewing at the Bass mill the way they’d always taught it, standing in a line of a dozen or so men, watching an instructor demonstrate the basic stitches from several feet away as the factory bustled around them. Most trainees quit in the first few weeks. Hand sewing can be tricky, tedious work. It’s also, for lack of a better word, pokey—even now, Dorman jabs his own fingers with his needles or diamond awl about once a week. In those days, only one in five trainees graduated to the production floor. Dorman refused to give up. “I was a stranger here. I had to make it.”

The waste and neglect of the training process frustrated him. “The trainer would be off somewhere else, and this guy is sitting there with a totally perplexed look on his face.” Dorman kept his frustrations mostly to himself for three decades. When the head trainer finally retired in the late 1980s he piped up and applied for the job, offering a revised training program he’d gone over and over in his head for years. He’d train hand-sewers one at a time, in a dedicated part of the mill away from the other hand-sewers, giving them the individual attention and quiet he believed they needed to get the hang of the job. In short order, Bass Shoes went from 80 percent attrition among hand-sewing trainees to less than half, according to Dorman. His success gave him a sense of meaning and purpose, and his trainees felt bonded to him.

If a white-collar executive had overhauled the training program at a manufacturer of Bass’s size, they might expect six or seven-figure bonuses for an improvement as substantial as Dorman’s. But Dorman and his men got a different reward: in 1991 the shoemaker all but quit hand sewing shoes in Maine, laying off all but ten hand-sewers and moving operations to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

“This is the funny thing about business that I don’t understand,” Dorman says, shaking his head. “They trained all these people to do the job, and then they shipped it offshore.”

After Bass left, Dorman jumped from job to job for almost 20 years—attending automotive technician school, tuning skis at Titcomb Mountain in Farmington, working on marine engines at a boatyard on Lisbon Street in Lewiston, and eventually working in insurance customer service at an ICT call center. Ironically enough, ICT had its call center in the old Bass headquarters in Wilton. And the job was steady, with a 401(k).

While Dorman was working at ICT, his wife got sick and he quit to take care of her, shuttling her to doctor’s visits and hospital stays. Time passed, hospital bills piled up, and her health got worse. He cashed his retirement savings to cover the costs. He was broke when she died. This is how he found himself sewing shoes again in the Pepperell building in 2012, renting a small room with a hot plate and a cot for $300 a month in a part of the mill everybody called the Dungeon.

But Dorman found a little magic in that dungeon. One of the other millworkers was being picked up every day by his girlfriend named Joyce. Joyce and Dorman caught one another’s eye. When he heard the two broke up, he decided to show up at the Acme Social Club on Park Street, where he knew she liked to go. That’s how he, at the age of 77, met the love of his life.

“I saw him walk through the door,” Joyce says, recalling the day. “Offered him a place to sit. One thing led to another.” She tells me the story after church on a Sunday—Joyce and Dorman faithfully attend Pathway Vineyard in Lewiston—the three of us chatting over brunch at Governor’s Restaurant down the road. That night, she says, she invited him to go dancing with her and a friend at Mixers in Sabattus. “Now this place is a pickup, okay?” says Joyce, raising an eyebrow from behind her plate of eggs and hashbrowns. “If you wanna get picked up, you get picked up.” She smiles. “But Peter just sits there! I say, Peter, don’t you dance? Come on, then!”

“I gave her the opportunity, and she took it!” He shrugs and smiles craftily. “She picked me up! Oh, man.”

Dorman moved out of the dungeon and in with Joyce shortly after that. Three years later, he asked her to marry him—so they wouldn’t be “living in sin,” he says, grinning.

Dorman’s ship from his navy days is a museum relic now, open to the public in Quincy, Massachusetts, where it is billed as the last ship of its kind in existence. G.H. Bass left Maine decades ago. Dorman’s one living sibling moved to warmer Florida. He’s grateful his five children by his first wife still live in Maine.

But new signs of life are sprouting up in the mills: artisanal companies like Easymoc, which was founded in 2020. Easymoc’s founder, Greg Cordeiro, is one of a wave of disaffected millennials—the children of the generation that shipped all those jobs overseas in the first place—who aim to bring U.S. manufacturing back to its roots.

While growing up in the 1990s in the suburb of Pembroke, Massachusetts, Cordeiro says, he never realized he could simply make stuff for a living. Nobody he knew went to vocational school. Cordeiro’s father had a degree in architecture and loved computers. He was even featured on the cover of a 1980s Brøderbund Software computer catalog for his creative use of an early drawing program, but he got “stuck in sales,” Cordeiro says.

After Cordeiro graduated he marched into the corporate world as well, working as a design director for Timberland, where he made patterns to be assembled in factories out of the country. It wasn’t until 2012, when he purchased his own industrial shoe-sewing machine, that he realized he could make products and found a company.

“There’s a reward, a catharsis,” in manufacturing, says Cordeiro. “I can see the fruits of my labor. There’s a physical end—I see it on people’s feet.”

Cordeiro believes the postpandemic era presents an opportunity for artisanal manufacturers like his. The white-collar world is full of disenchanted desk workers seeking meaning and substance like he once did—and like his father still does. “He’s 65 this year, and he’s counting down the days” until he can retire from his corporate job, says Cordeiro. But he’s fighting an uphill battle, even on the home front: his father’s division sells manufacturing robots that automate factory work in North America. “Of course he’s trying to sell me a robot. I’m like, Dad, really? Your own son? You are a salesman through and through! Can you imagine us putting a robot next to Peter here?” Cordeiro laughs, gesturing at Dorman. In this mill, Dorman himself constructed many of the tables and workbenches by hand—“We call ’em Peterbuilt,” Cordeiro says—including the double-bench teaching station where he currently works.

Cordeiro introduces me to his newest trainee, whom I’ll call Evan, who graduated in 2015 with a degree in mechanical engineering and moved home to Maine during the pandemic.

“He’s just like me,” says Cordeiro. “He had a desk job, hated it, and decided to come in here.” Cordeiro says he views Dorman as a sort of secret weapon, whose charm and deep knowledge can inspire his next generation of hand-sewers.

“This man is a wealth of knowledge,” gushes the newest trainee, beaming at Dorman. “He’s got me all worked up!”

But six weeks later, Evan has all but quit too. His poorly cobbled moccasins are jumbled in a bin beside Dorman’s teaching work-bench. Dorman is frustrated with the man’s lack of stick-to-it-iveness.

“He can’t focus and just do his stitching,” Dorman says. He gestures at a pile of moccasins next to his workbench. “These are the three best shoes he did. And he did those two weeks ago. Oh boy, since then? He’s been going downhill.”

Dorman’s seen it plenty of times: a trainee makes progress and has a magical, masterful day when the needle grooves and every stitch lands just right. But then they go in the next day, and it’s a mess again. The backslide happens to everyone. That’s when most decide they’re going to quit—Dorman can see it in their eyes—even if they don’t say so out loud. “He’s done it. He didn’t recover,” he says. “100 percent of people have that rollercoaster. There’s good days and bad days. It’s human nature.” Yet others persevere, as Dorman did. “They would all make it if they’d stuck with it.” He wishes he could get everyone to see that.

With no one to teach, Dorman turns back to his sewing. He pulls the vamp around a size-8½ wooden dummy foot, known as a last, and hammers metal tacks into the heel and toe, holding it in place. He does the same with the smaller top piece of leather—the plug—so they sit loosely alongside one another. The leather and the last are cozily warm, fresh out of a makeshift toaster-oven/heat-lamp rig that Peter calls his hot box. He punctures the vamp and plug together in one smooth motion with his diamond awl, then slips two needles through the newly made holes in tandem, in opposite directions, and pulls the threads tight, raising his arms wide. As the waxed thread zips through the firm leather and goes taut, it’s satisfyingly audible from yards away, even as the heel laster’s air compressor goes full bore.

He gingerly tucks a needle in the crook of his thumb and forefinger. Switching back to the awl, he places his index finger firmly against the side of the shoe—the same distance from the seam every single time—and repeats again, and again, and again. The meditative rhythm of Dorman’s work makes it look easy, but it belies the complex calculus at play in his hands. In 2023 computers can best humanity’s chess champions and peer into the universe’s far reaches through the infrared astronomy of the James Webb telescope, but no machine can efficiently make an elegant and even moccasin seam, as Dorman does now with his needles and diamond awl. His fingertips sense the pliant leather—its warm, animal idiosyncrasy—and from those small touches, he knows its needs. Deftly, imperceptibly, his fingers adjust the angles of his needles to stitch an unpredictable hide into a smooth and perfect curve, one that will someday cradle an individual foot. A sturdy shoe.

They call it muscle memory. Dorman’s got six decades of it. He swears six weeks is enough to do the job. Just don’t quit on him.

Dorman sews the seam until he reaches the tacks hammered into the toes of the last. He pries them out. He keeps sewing.

If a shoe remains unfinished at the end of a workday, so be it. “When it comes time to quit? I quit. I might have one needle through the hole, the other one’s danglin’, all right?” But really, Dorman has no plans to be done. He wants to put his own sturdy shoes to good use. He’s taken up hiking and is eyeing the Appalachian Trail. The dream came to him one day in church, he says. He wants to hike the entire trail by the time he turns 90. Sure, it’s not easy. But it’s simple: you put one shoe in front of the other.

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The post A Stitch in Time appeared first on The Maine Mag.

The honeybee is adaptable. It knows how to survive frigid winters, how to extract food from unlikely sources, like the mouths of blueberry blossoms, and how to navigate using the light of the sun and the magnetic pull of the poles. The honeybee can fly, dance, and hold its breath underwater for five minutes. It can move house, if necessary. It can move from climate to climate, and often has. The honeybee has thrived on every continent save one—but then again, we can’t blame it for not loving Antarctica. Few species do.

Good beekeepers are, like their wards, adaptable. Not just because they’re stewards of swarms, a famously strange phenomenon that we only partially understand, but because the Earth’s ecosystems are both delicate and resilient at the same time. One small change—a single-degree rise in ocean heat, for instance—can cause a cascade of disasters (which we still term “natural,” even though it’s becoming clear they are consequences of human activity). And yet, massive, sweeping changes can occur—animals can lose food sources, plants can invade and take over, storms can strip trees and fell giants—while life continues on. The system shifts, accommodates, adapts.

We’re living in a period of rapid change. In the 1960s, a group of Soviet scientists proposed the theory of a new geological epoch, which has been termed the Anthropocene. The name follows the pattern of previously named epochs (the Holocene, the Paleocene), with the root anthropo- meaning “of or related to human beings.” There is no specific date for the dawn of the Anthropocene; it began when people started having large-scale effects on the various systems of the globe. While it’s not universally recognized—according to most geological scientists, we’re still living in the Holocene epoch that began after the last ice age—the idea that our time on Earth is unique feels true to me on a gut level. I believe that climate change is happening, that people caused it, and that we’re also causing all sorts of transformations in the material world. Bees are just the tip of the (melting) iceberg.

But our world is changing in other ways, some of them positive. Let’s start with a feel-good story, one about the people who tend hives and harvest honey, before we dive into the plight of bees. “When I first started beekeeping, the folks who got the most attention were always that Burt’s Bees type,” says Thalassa Raasch, who has been keeping bees since they were a teenager living in rural Minnesota. “My view of the industry was limited, but it seemed male-dominated to me. And I think they encouraged that—there was a certain image of who a beekeeper was.” While I’m sure there are many lovely gentlemen beekeepers with bushy beards and locomotive hats, it’s heartening to hear that centuries-old agricultural traditions are welcoming in new blood.

“People think of beekeepers as old guys with a hive,” agrees Meghan Gaven of the Honey Exchange, a Portland-based business she co-owns with her husband, Phil. When we spoke, the Gavens had recently returned from the Maine State Beekeepers Association annual conference, where they had a chance to survey the crowd, mingle with newcomers, and discuss advances in bee science. Meghan and Phil have been beekeeping for 15 years, running the store for 11 years, and teaching beekeeping classes out of their Portland shop for a decade. Recently, they’ve noticed both an increase in would-be beekeepers and a shift in the classroom makeup. These days, their classes are female dominated by an estimated three-to-one ratio. “2020 was our biggest year in terms of interest in beekeeping,” Meghan says. “But 2021 was a close second.” During the pandemic, many people came to the Honey Exchange looking for a new hobby, a new way of interacting with the natural world, maybe even a new community to make up for the ones that broke down out of necessity and caution.

Beekeeping is a science and an art, a place where human intervention bumps up against animal instincts.

According to Meghan, this changing of the guard isn’t merely good for optics. It’s a much deeper shift than that, one that resists easy identification or description. “There are teenagers keeping bees now. Nine-year-olds. Women, men, older people, parents. It’s everybody, anyone you can imagine,” she says. “Every county in Maine has a beekeeping club. It’s a huge cross-section of people. You may not have anything in common except for bees, but it’s a great way to connect.” I’ve heard similar sentiments from passionate hunters, fishers, hikers, and gardeners. Spending time in nature allows for easy connection to others and the forging of bonds that cross tricky political lines. Nature can be a healthy “third space,” one that exists outside typical social boundaries and norms. Plus, research has shown that diverse groups are better at problem solving, and there are always problems to solve when it comes to bees. Experienced beekeepers can mentor the newly passionate, and beginner beekeepers can bring fresh eyes to entrenched problems.

In 2022 the biggest problem facing farmers was the summer drought. Ponds, rivers, and lakes around the globe dried up, and Maine, a place famous for its abundance of fresh water, wasn’t entirely spared. The drought was less obvious than in other places, but our soil dried out, our rivers sank low, and wells rang empty. Without water, flowers continued to bloom as they always did, but they didn’t produce enough of the sweet, complicated, enzyme-rich nectar bees adore.

Honeybees can survive for some time without nectar. In fact, it’s common practice for beekeepers to supplement the diet of the hive with trays of sugar. Bees aren’t making their honey for us; they’re making it for their superorganism, their colony. When we remove their food, we have to give something back or they’ll starve, and the beekeeper will have to start again with a new swarm. Thus, beekeepers stock up on syrup and sugar cakes, the two best delivery methods for sweet, simple calories. While some studies have suggested that bees overwinter better on a diet of cane sugar than they do on reserved honey (it has something to do with their poop schedule), they don’t like to eat it all the time. It doesn’t have the same amino acids, proteins, ions, and lipids that bees find in nectar. It isn’t good for the baby bees, and bees that are consuming it don’t make very good honey. Some beekeepers don’t even consider this thin, watery yellow liquid honey at all, it’s such a pale imitation.

This is one reason Maine’s beekeepers have been embracing an unlikely ally: invasive plants. Knotweed, hated by many gardeners for its impenetrable root system and tendency to overwhelm local plants, blooms in the fall at precisely the time when foraging honeybees are in storage mode, gorging their two tiny bee stomachs in anticipation of winter. “For bees in this area, knotweed is the plant that gets them through winter,” says Meghan. “And it makes great honey.” She offers me a spoonful of knotweed honey, dark and thick. It has a faintly nutty aftertaste—it’s less herbal than the wildflower honey I’m used to, and somehow sweeter than the Ohio honey my father-in-law makes each summer. It’s not better, but it’s a different flavor, rather buttery and less botanical.

While it’s normal to talk about the terroir of wine, the placeness of that beverage, it’s always been easier for me to taste the specifics of land in honey. As the climate of Maine changes, the plant life will shift, the honeybees will find new food sources, and our honey will change its flavor to reflect this new world. Yet Maine State Apiarist Jennifer Lund cautions that knotweed may be doing more harm than good. “It outcompetes our native species,” Lund explains. “For two weeks, it provides good food for insects, but because it’s pushing out other plants that would flower throughout the summer and fall, it’s creating gaps that bees have to struggle to fill.” It may not seem like a big deal to have dense clumps of knotweed growing alongside telephone lines or in highway ditches, but that same soil would have once been home to a variety of flowering weeds, grasses, and bushes. Though it has to be said: not all of them are native to Maine, either—nor are honeybees themselves.

If I sound a bit torn about invasives, that’s because I am. Some invasives are delicious to forage, like Japanese silverberry, while others look gorgeous, like rambler rose and burning bush. The golden knotweed honey was delicious, and I understand why beekeepers are happy their bees are fed, even if they’re feasting on an intruder.

It’s harder to be sanguine about the prospect of frozen honeybees. Ironically, colonies are dying of cold thanks to global warming, and the way in which this happens strikes me as nothing short of tragic. Historically, honeybees kept warm in cold weather by clustering together and vibrating to generate heat. Thanks to some evolutionary magic, the clump of bees knows how to rotate its members. Everyone gets a turn to flutter in the warm middle of the clump, and everyone gets a turn cooling off on the outside. The size of this group depends on the weather. Cold days require big, dense clumps of bees. On warmer days, the hive can spread out and move around. They can even go outside to relieve their guts, maybe forage for food, get a little breathing room—whatever it is that bees do on their time off.

But when the weather turns on a dime, plunging from balmy 70s to frigid 20s, honeybees don’t have enough time to regroup. “It used to be that January was cold, with a few slightly warmer days,” says Lund. “But now we have wide fluctuations where we are rapidly changing temperatures. And the bees don’t know how to accommodate that.” Their instinct is to cluster and form smaller buzzing balls with whomever is nearby. Some die outside the hive, others die inside. They get cold, sickly, ill. Their lives are cut short, and the beekeeper is left wishing they’d known to insulate their boxes or remove an excess frame.

Drought, cold, unseasonable warmth, lack of food—all these issues get exacerbated by the presence of mites. It’s one of the leading causes of colony collapse in Maine, yet many beekeepers (particularly the traditionalists) don’t treat or test for them. Mites are the first challenge mentioned by every beekeeper I speak with, and perhaps that’s because it’s such a frustrating topic. “It’s mites, mites, mites,” says Meghan with exasperation. “That’s the biggest problem beekeepers have. They bring disease, they weaken the colony, and they make bees less capable of surviving cold seasons or lack of food.” Thao Kieu, a South Portland–based beekeeper and visual artist who once worked at the Honey Exchange with Meghan, echoes her mentor: “My bees have been weak this year, and I wonder if it’s because of new beekeepers. If the people who just started don’t treat for mites, that would explain why my colony is suffering.” It’s frustrating, agrees Lund, to see so many people disregard the opinions of the apiary experts, who recommend treating for mites before they appear and regularly testing hives. “People often say, I don’t see them, so I don’t have them,” says Meghan. “By the time you see them, it’s too late.”

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Beekeeping holds all the drama of the globe, writ small. There’s an increase in diversity among beekeepers, a decrease in diversity among plants, new viruses, old prejudices, droughts and famines and danger of collapse. It’s a traditional practice that is only just recently becoming truly inclusive. Beekeeping is a science and an art, a place where human intervention bumps up against animal instincts. For people like Kieu, it’s more than just a hobby. It’s a philosophy. “I’ve become a bee nerd, and I take so much pride in that. It’s a way of living, to understand how everything is interconnected,” she says. From Phil and Meghan and her other beekeeping friends, Kieu learned to see her hives as something to emulate. “A honeybee hive is badass,” she says. “It’s feminist. It’s so interesting, the dynamics of a hive and how it translates back to our functioning.” For beekeepers to thrive, the insects have to be healthy, the plants have to be watered, the atmosphere must be considered, cleaned, healed. It’s part of a whole entangled system, one we’re still learning how to navigate—one we may never completely understand. “But that’s the joy,” says Lund. “With bees, there’s always something new to learn.”

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The post Wisdom from the Backyard Beekeepers appeared first on The Maine Mag.

Every dog has its day

For our second annual Maine’s Top Dog contest, we asked our readers to submit iconic photos of their favorite pooches and pups from across the Pine Tree State. We received an influx of entries including huskies, heelers, and hounds (plus one confused cat) from Ogunquit to New Canada and everywhere in between. The one thing they all have in common? A love for adventuring in Maine. Let’s see who came out on top of the dogpile.

How we did it

To determine the Editors’ Choice winner, each member of the Maine magazine editorial team whittled down the list of dogs to their personal top-five picks based on photo quality, creativity, and editorial suitability. These selections were cross-referenced to establish the overall winner.

Editor’s Pick
Best in Show

Argos
Brittany Spaniel // Gray

Argos was an eight-year-old Brittany who recently passed away from cancer. Maine’s wilderness was the ultimate playground for him and his owner, Registered Maine Guide Christi Holmes, and they loved to fish, backpack, and hunt together.

Runners-Up

Class Superlatives

Take a Hike

Nova
Cardigan Welsh Corgi // Brunswick

Corgi or hobbit? Turns out they are made of the same stuff. Nova is a rough ‘n’ tumble three-year-old cardigan Welsh corgi who lives in Brunswick. She’s a carrot-crunching, ball-herding howler and a total petite sweetie.

Life’s a Beach

Acadia
Golden Retriever // Brooklin

Dia (short for Acadia) spends endless summer hours chasing the splash of rocks in Brooklin, Maine, where she races along the shore and dives wherever a stone is thrown. A dream day for Dia includes extra biscuits and the unequivocal attention of someone willing to throw rock after rock.

Best Fetch

Julie
English Springer Spaniel // South Portland

Julie is as sweet as they come. She enjoys long walks on the beach and playing fetch, and she’s never met a dog or person she didn’t like!

Best Dressed

Izze
Bernese Mountain Dog // Bar Harbor

Izze is a six-year-old Bernese mountain dog who loves cold weather more than anything. When the snow starts falling, she happily spends her days outside. She is an active hiker and spends her free time enjoying Acadia National Park.

Best Buddies

Remy + Taj
English Springer Spaniel + Border Collie // Monmouth

Remy and Taj have been buddies for 12 years. Like all friends, they take care of each other, they argue, and they make up again, but they always stay true. Every day, they teach us humans (the lesser animals) what real love looks like.

Best Portrait

Arlo
Golden Retriever // Portland

Arlo is a Canadian golden field retriever who recently moved to Maine. On the weekends, he can be seen walking around the Old Port in Portland, and you just might see him posing as an extra in bachelorette party pictures.

Class Clown

Otto
Great Pyrenees // Blue Hill

Otto joined his family two and a half years ago and is affectionately known as Otto, The Greatest of Pyrenees. He is a gentle giant and a crowd-pleaser who puts a smile on the face of everyone he meets.

Readers’ Pick
Best in Show

Jackson
English Cream Golden Retriever // Cape Elizabeth

“Bad Boy” Jackson (nicknamed with affection but a name well earned by his mischievous antics) found his forever family after being rehomed at age one. He enjoys the constant tease of squirrels in Robinson Woods, wrestling with his little sister, Nora (an Aussie), and the rare white paper napkin, much preferred over any dog treat!

Runners-Up

Sponsor’s Pick

Lenny
Chihuahua-Dachsund // Camden

Lenny is a rescued Chihuahua-Dachshund tri-pawd who moved to Maine in 2022 and is working hard to gain his Mainer status. Some of his pastimes include hiking Camden Hills State Park and scavenging at the beach.

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The post Maine’s Top Dog 2023 appeared first on The Maine Mag.

Emily and Nate Peterson have a problem. The couple, who moved to Bucksport and had their first baby just before the pandemic hit, discussed childcare when preparing to start a family, but they had no idea how obsessive they would become about the topic. “We’d heard so many horror stories, even before the pandemic,” says Emily. “Our friends in southern Maine would tell us about having to get on wait lists as soon as you decide that you want to have kids. It was the first question everybody asked when I got pregnant, and it was something we really worried about.”

Chances are, if you’re one of millions of Americans living with young children, or you’re in the process of adding children to your household, the Petersons’ problem is also your problem: reliable, affordable childcare is something many families across Maine and the nation can only dream of.

A version of the wait-list story unfolded for the Petersons as they began searching for infant care in Bucksport. As soon as they decided to move, Emily began scouring the internet, and talking to whomever she could about options. She said that in a way they were lucky the pandemic hit when it did. Emily found zero infant care in the Bucksport area, but with the announcement of the statewide shutdown, they were able to take that worry off their plate for a while. Eventually, Emily’s parents decided to move to the area part-time to help with taking care of their new grandson.

This kind of patchwork childcare is all too familiar for families in Maine. A few hours of time with the grandparents here, a trade-off between Mom and Dad there, maybe a meal together at the end of the day between loads of laundry and diaper changes. The Petersons’ son started at Bucksport Area Child Care Center when he turned 18 months old, and the center offers the safe, nurturing environment that Emily was so anxious about finding. Their daughter will start in the spring, but the anxiety remains. “I worry every week about staff turnover, and what we would do if something happened,” she says. “It’s happened a number of times in our community. Childcare centers just close all of a sudden, and it’s such a gnawing anxiety, that if something happens there, we’re all totally screwed.”

Emily says the childcare issue has been a big factor in her and Nate’s decision not to have any more children. “The logistics of living in rural Maine make it too hard—how to have another kid and keep everybody moving and happy and in the right places at the right time—we couldn’t do it even if we wanted to,” she says.

On the corner of Cumberland Avenue and Preble Street in downtown Portland sits a gabled building with a cherry-red front door. The former church is small compared to the eight-story giants it neighbors, but it offers a robust potential solution to the problem that the Petersons, and thousands of other Maine parents, face.

“A board member recently described us as ‘scrappy,’” says Camelia Babson-Haley, “and it’s true. We’re scrappy.” Babson-Haley is the director of Youth and Family Outreach (YFO), an early childhood education center that serves 60 families in the greater Portland area. The center places an emphasis on supporting homeless, teen, and immigrant parents, with more than 60 percent of the families it serves at or below the poverty level. Babson-Haley goes on to explain how “scrappy” accurately explains the characteristics needed in order to survive in the world of childcare these days. “We’re drowning. We’re broken. We’re crumbling. That’s what it feels like when you’re on this side of it,” she says.

The “it” Babson-Haley refers to is the national crisis facing childcare centers. After her 33 years in a field she describes as never not struggling, she says childcare providers are now more desperate than ever: desperate for better funding and more teachers, but also desperate to offer relief to burned-out parents.

In 2020 Babson-Haley was awarded the Maine Children’s Alliance’s “Giraffe Award” for her many years of advocacy in the field. The award also recognized her leadership at YFO through the COVID-19 pandemic. But as the pandemic continues to wear on, childcare’s already chronic difficulties have evolved into a critical workforce shortage. “Childcare is just going away. It’s diminishing, and if we don’t do something soon it’s going to completely disappear,” she says. Perhaps “completely disappear” is hyperbole, but if certain changes aren’t made, childcare will come to look drastically different, losing the diverse, vibrant educational and nurturing experience that many centers currently offer.

YFO is a good example of the kind of childcare organization that’s running short in Maine. It ranks a level four on Maine’s Quality Rating and Improvement System—the highest possible rating for a Maine-based childcare center. Highly ranked childcare centers employ trained educators to teach vibrant curricula that are designed to meet the needs of each child as they progress through developmental stages. Staff members are experts in social-emotional development, trauma-informed practices, and assessment. According to Zero to Three, a Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit working to translate the science of early childhood development into programs, resources, and policies, a whopping 90 percent of brain development happens between birth and age five. Without dedicated teachers and carefully designed curriculum, early childhood education will be lacking in the diversity, equity, and quality that are crucial for a rich learning experience during a child’s most formative years. Without places like YFO providing high-quality learning, a caring environment, and important foundational experiences, children can face significant learning delays that can have lifelong effects.

Efforts to bring new childcare providers into the field are underway in the state. The University of Maine at Farmington, for example, offers a robust early childhood education program in which students get hands-on experience at the college’s on-site center for teaching and learning. The center will see a major upgrade in the next two years as it expands to make room for more students and more children. Governor Janet Mills has proven to be a champion of early childhood education, committing more than $100 million of the state’s budget since March of 2020. A portion of that funding has made the UMF program expansion possible, but it still can’t necessarily change bigger-picture problems, like salary discrepancies, that make teaching the youngest children a hard sell, even for motivated caregivers.

Teaching in general is a lower-paying field, but teachers in charge of children from birth to four years old are paid the lowest of the low, on average making 59 cents less than people who take care of animals and 73 cents more than fast-food workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even among those who work with young children, there are disparities. According to a 2019 episode of Maine Public Radio’s Deep Dive that explored childcare issues in the state, a certified teacher who works with kids between birth and three years old makes $12,000 less annually on average than a teacher who works in a public-school pre-K or kindergarten class.

Brianna Maxim, an early childhood education student at UMF, is earning a certificate that qualifies her to teach children from birth to five years old. She’s one of the people who could help meet the need for childcare providers working with kids aged zero to three at centers such as YFO, but she also has the option to become a teacher at a state-funded preschool or kindergarten. “I want to be that teacher that the kids remember years later,” she says. “I think about the structure, and the goals, and curriculum planning. Public school programs seem a little more structured. But I do like helping kids develop and become their own person, which is what childcare education is all about.”

“Childcare workers were forgotten as essential workers at the beginning of the pandemic. They weren’t recognized alongside the doctors, the nurses, even the restaurant workers who were identified as essential,” says Babson-Haley. “When they were finally recognized, it was as a need for parents and the companies those parents worked for, not as professionals.”

That recognition, however, did result in federally funded hazard pay raises to YFO’s teachers. Those funds have expired, but Babson-Haley says she couldn’t let her employees go back to what they were earning prepandemic—wages that, after the recent historic inflation rates, would create an untenable situation for most.

YFO is currently operating at a significant revenue loss due to salary increases to maintain the hazard pay rates. Those salaries make up 90 percent of YFO’s operating budget. The 18 staff members, most of whom have at least a two-year degree if not a bachelor’s or master’s, have received 40 percent pay increases over the past two years, but Babson-Haley says her organization still can’t compete with companies like Starbucks or Target, which have ramped up wages to $24 or more per hour in an attempt to attract employees. “We cannot pay that, not even to our highest-paid staff,” says Babson-Haley. “So, teachers are leaving us, and why not? Those jobs are easier.”

In Babson-Haley’s ideal world, everybody would care about her workforce. Target should be paying their employees $24 per hour, she says, but they should also be offering childcare vouchers to working parents. “They’re wondering why they can’t find employees, or why they don’t have as many employees who are women? It’s because parents can’t find childcare. This is every employer’s issue, too.”

Babson-Haley says that public funding for birth-to-age-three classrooms would make a big difference for organizations like hers, and for the families she works with. Tuition was raised 18 percent over the past two years, and families are the ones who foot that bill. If YFO were publicly funded, parents could get a break, and Babson-Haley could offer competitive salaries that would help attract highly qualified teachers. With more teachers, she wouldn’t need to sub in the classrooms, and could spend her time expanding programming, including increasing available slots, a precious commodity in any community. And if there are more available spots for kids, more kids will come, and more parents will be available to work. “It’s a completely connected web. And childcare is at the center for working families,” she says.

Babson-Haley is quick to recognize that she is not the first advocate for this cause, noting that thousands have been running against walls trying to get public support for early childhood education almost since its inception in the mid-nineteenth century. There have been wins, but not enough wins. During World War II, the first federally funded childcare centers opened to support mothers heading into the workforce, but they closed with the end of the war. “We’ve seen this happen throughout history,” she says. “When times are tough there’s all this focus because it’s needed, but when things start to get better people forget about us.”

If there is going to be lasting change, there needs to be a fresh approach; otherwise, the same brick walls will keep popping up. To push the needle locally, Babson-Haley and her team have dreamed up an improved, expanded program at YFO, one that will help connect the dots for parents and community members, including things like additional classroom space, community education rooms, and affordable housing units for area residents. A successful capital campaign that concluded last March and a partnership with the Portland Housing Authority have brought the $18.35 million project within a few months of breaking ground. The expanded center will not only double YFO’s current capacity for childcare spots—addressing their waiting list of over 100 families—but also provide 60 apartments for income-qualifying families. Babson-Haley believes that the new model’s wrap-around services offer a potential answer for supporting families in need.

Here in Maine, the “oldest” state in the country (with a median age of 44.7 years), where deaths still outnumber births, improved and expanded programs such as the one YFO is working toward would not only lessen the burden for families like the Petersons but make it possible for more young families to choose to grow, or to relocate to Maine. Ironically, according to the Bangor Daily News, Maine was also the only state in the country to get younger between 2020 and 2021, seeing more in-migration during the pandemic than almost all other states. Investing in childcare is a no-brainer in Babson-Haley’s opinion, but it should be a no-brainer for every Maine citizen who wants to see the state become a vibrant, supportive place to live, work, and grow.

How can Maine begin to let its grandparents be grandparents instead of childcare workers? How can it allow parents to have careers they are passionate about? And how can it pull early childhood education teachers up the ladder in terms of both pay scale and respect? With organizations like YFO and UMF leading the charge, it seems possible that the next generation of working Mainers, both parents and teachers, might be able to find the holistic support they so desperately need.

Read More:

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  A Stitch in Time
• 
  Wisdom from the Backyard Beekeepers
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  Maine’s Top Dog 2023
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  Caring in Crisis
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  The Most Exciting 30 Seconds in Maine

The post Caring in Crisis appeared first on The Maine Mag.

Living on Bald Mountain in Camden, I enjoy a bird’s-eye view of the weather advancing toward and retreating from Camden and Rockport harbors. On this particular day the atmosphere was wildly changeable, the fog rolling in at a swift clip and swallowing boats in its way. I got to Rockport Harbor just before the fog gulped it all down. Warm and cold air colliding can be stunning. The kayaker hugged the harbor while the little motorboat sped ahead toward the mystery. I too choose to shoot in that mystery of fog, mist, and rain.

Kit Remsen-Aroneau is a photographer and writer living in Camden, which serves as the backdrop for her work. Follow her on Instagram @kitaroneau and @pareidoliapareidolia.

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The post Capture March/April 2023 appeared first on The Maine Mag.

What We Read:

Being pregnant with morning sickness (which should be more accurately named morning-noon-and-night-sickness), one seeks peace, quiet, and something to escape into—why not a good book? Author Taylor Jenkins Reid hooked me with Malibu Rising and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, but Daisy Jones & The Six is a different kind of read (and my favorite by far). Written as a documentary script, this story is told through the retelling of events from each Fleetwood Mac-inspired character, making the band’s journey feel palpable. Daisy Jones & The Six is jam-packed with drama, love stories, comedic relief, and all things rock-n-roll, including an entire collection of lyrics from the songs mentioned throughout the story. When you get to the last page, don’t be sad! The novel is coming to life on Amazon Prime as a limited series in March.

—Caili Elwell, digital strategist

What We Drank:

While I don’t have anything personal against the concept of Dry January, I think most self-indulgences are okay in moderation. This month, I was thrilled to find out that Three of Strong—Portland’s only rum distillery and one of my favorite places to hit up for always-friendly service, on-tap cocktails, and $5 bottomless bowls of popcorn—launched a canned version of their in-house draft Maine Mojito. The ready-to-drink 4-packs are made with mint, lime, and Brightwater Silver Rum, are available throughout the state and at Three of Strong’s East Bayside taproom, which means you might as well grab a growler of Hibiscus-Lime Rum Punch or a bottle of small-batch spirits to take home while you’re in town.

—Becca Abramson, editorial assistant

What We Ate:

One of my New Year’s resolutions is that in 2023 I won’t go out to eat more than once per week. Not that I was eating out that often before—I just tend to view eating out more as a last resort when I didn’t feel like cooking, as opposed to a special occasion (scarcity theory and whatnot, right?). Earlier this month I decided to use my one meal of the week to check out Trudy Bird’s Ølbar, a Scandinavian-inspired restaurant that recently opened in North Yarmouth. From the wrought iron taps at the bar to the small-plates menu filled with mouthwatering bites like charred cabbage garnished with pork belly and a cider glaze, the atmosphere and design had me hooked. Plus, Toots Ice Cream’s newer location is just down the road, so it’s easy to stop by and wash down your hearty meal with ice cream.

—Hadley Gibson, associate editor

Where We Went:

Last month, I bought tickets to a concert in Boston with a big, popular band in a big, modern venue. I paid $15 for a Bud Light and stood at the edge of the massive group of people, my view partially obscured by a beam in the middle of the room. I thought longingly back to the show I had caught in Portland only a few days prior—Butcher Brown at Sun Tiki Studios—and while I tried to enjoy the Boston show, it was impossible not to compare the two back-to-back experiences. 

I’d never heard of Butcher Brown, a jazz-funk fusion band, before getting tickets, but after some Spotify reconnaissance I decided their show would be a fun way to spend a Friday night. The band was amazing, the live performance has stuck with me as one of the best I’ve seen, and the quality of the venue played an enormous role in that. I’ve gone to a few shows at Sun Tiki since being introduced to the space, but this show was what solidified the venue as my personal favorite. Tucked next to a dive bar alongside Forest Avenue, the repurposed tanning salon doesn’t look like much from the outside, but inside it’s a great little venue with an affordable selection of drinks, a stage you can see from anywhere in the room, an almost comical number of bathrooms, and, most importantly, an incredible sound system and light setup that makes you forget how small the space actually is once the show starts. It’s a real hidden gem. 

—Olivia Ryder, production manager

What We Watched:

Apparently one of my New Year’s resolutions is to watch more TV. In November I wrote here about how I don’t watch enough, but that I had managed to get addicted to The White Lotus. Well, another show has entered my consciousness—and made it a lot harder to finish the 800-page Don DeLillo novel I’ve been reading since Christmas. Fleishman is in Trouble, on Hulu, is an adaptation of a best-selling novel by author Taffy Brodesser-Akner, who also wrote the majority of the show’s episodes. I really am more of a book person, so if a book I read and liked gets turned into a show, I’m much more likely to check it out (Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Conversations with Friends are good examples. I also recently saw that an adaptation of Adam White’s drama The Midcoast is currently in the works at Hulu. Eee!) I tore through Fleishman the novel—Brodesser-Akner also happens to be a magazine writer and is now a staff writer at the New York Times, so I especially appreciated her allusions to the journalist life. And the plotline itself is compelling, with a mysterious beginning (much like White Lotus) that you spend the rest of the season desperate to solve. A quick rundown: Recently divorced doctor, Manhattanite, and 41-year-old Toby Fleishman dives into the world of app dating when his ex, Rachel, suddenly disappears, leaving him in charge of their two children. I won’t reveal much more. But everyone I know is watching this show right now and for good reason.

—Rachel Hurn, editor

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The post Editor’s Picks: January 2023 appeared first on The Maine Mag.