The current issue of Echoes magazine anticipates the blooming of spring with true stories about the birth of a family of robins in a Presque Isle back yard, a mother’s love of wildflowers and a man’s passion for dahlias.
Contributed photo
The latest issue of ECHOES celebrates springtime in Aroostook County
Louise and Louis Calabrese e-mailed photo after photo of the growing family of birds nested in a flower box on their deck in Presque Isle last spring. From one egg to three, to three begging beaks and ultimately an empty nest, they kept their friends informed of the new lives of Peter, Paul and Mary.
The story appears as a photo essay in Echoes No. 92, released last month, along with a tribute to Minnie Parker’s love of wildflowers, written by her son, David, and a feature on Roland Berube of Brewer who is obsessed with dahlias.
The cover of Echoes 92 pictures the azure St. John River with Sainte-Anne-de-Madawaska visible on the Canadian shore. Presque Isle native Don Cyr, now of Lille, envisioned the scene as it might have appeared in 1909, standing 500 feet above what is now the Acadian Village on Route 1 between Van Buren and Madawaska.
He did the preliminary drawings for the painting in 1978 and started putting it on canvas in the 1980s. He was inspired to complete the work for an exhibit of faculty artists in the Reed Gallery at the University of Maine at Presque Isle in February 2011.
“The show was the push I needed,” Cyr said of the 36-inch by 56-inch alkyd on canvas painting, which recalls the days when farms pushed forests from the riverbanks, creating an open view of mountains to the west.
In a memoir titled “Food on the Farm,” Mitchell Littlefield recalls the days when nothing went to waste when feeding a family on a farm.
“We not only raised and hunted (our) meat,” Littlefield writes. “We also butchered, cut and wrapped all the meat for the freezer.” Littlefield catalogs all the food he remembers as he grew up in the 1950s and ‘60s, from herbs to apples, vegetables to turkeys, honey bees to maple syrup.
“We always ate biscuits and bread hot and fresh from the oven,” he writes, adding a variety of pies and cookies also eaten fresh and warm in the farm kitchen.
A tragic fire in Van Buren inspired Nancy Morrow of Kingwood, Texas, to write about the family home lost in that fire. Her sensitive memoir traces the history of Van Buren’s Morrow Homestead to the days when it was Van Buren’s first hospital operated by the sisters of Religieuse Hopitalieres of St-Joseph from Saint-Basile, N.B.
Roger Parent of Lille continues the series of episodes leading to his service as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand. Part six of “From Maine to Thailand” recalls how Parent had to leave his sweetheart, Roland Ouellette, to attend Peace Corps training in Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1961.
Photographs of students from Fort Kent and Wallagrass elementary schools, along with seventh-graders from Presque Isle Middle School, illustrate a feature story on the ways teachers used February’s World Cup Biathlon Championships to teach everything from geography to math.
Allagash is the topic of a book review by Glenna Johnson Smith, a contemporary of Louis Pelletier, who, with his daughter Cathie, wrote “A is for Allagash: A Lumberjack’s Life.” Smith hopes young people will read the book and appreciate Pelletier’s love of his homeland.
Fiction in Echoes 92 includes a short story about a group of old friends and the first chapter of a new novel by Ardeana Hamlin titled “Abbott’s Reach.”
In their regular columns, Glenna Johnson Smith enjoys being snowed in, John Dombek reflects on Memorial Day, Lucy Leaf describes her $10,000 home and Kathryn Olmstead pays tribute to the memory of poet and children’s book author Ethel Pochocki. The April-June edition of Echoes also presents nine poems and a 2010 index of articles, contributors and subjects in the magazine.
Published quarterly in Caribou and printed at Northeast Publishing in Presque Isle, Echoes is dedicated to rediscovering community and preserving qualities of life at risk in modern society. Visit the magazine’s website at echoesofmaine.com.
