I was born and raised in a town in western Pennsylvania where the factory meets the farm. My father sold paint and glass to both retail and industrial customers. My mother was a registered nurse who worked part-time overnight shifts, both at the hospital and for private older clients. I grew up as an outside […]

I was eager to go to the grand opening of a new grocery store at Cook’s Corner in Brunswick. I was expecting free food samples or free helium balloons. I didn’t get either one, but I did receive a $2 coupon for cheddar cheese from a cheerful greeter as I pushed my cart into the […]

The Lincoln County News started a discourse with the Damariscotta Historical Society story about old houses in my hometown. One, long ago torn down for a new highway, belonged to the Alexander Yates family: merchants, shippers and one missionary. Reportedly, they exported rum to western Africa “in exchange for profitable and valuable cargo.” That set […]

Can a hometown be not the town you grew up in, but the town you feel the most at home in? If so, Rumford is that town for me. I grew up in South Portland and moved back for almost 10 years, but I don’t feel the attachment to it that I do to Rumford. Rumford […]

On weekend mornings Jon and I sometimes walk down the hill to the Bayou Kitchen. Enjoying a Huey P. Long and blueberry cornbread at the counter, we chat with the dishwasher as the owner warms our coffee. Paintings of bougainvillea dripping off the balconies of Creole homes, images of gators and swamp scenes fill the […]

HO-scale trains have been Randy’s hobby since he was a child growing up in the Bronx. His father used to walk with him to the New York Central Railroad tracks, where they’d sit and watch the trains whiz by. Kind of reminds me of a Norman Rockwell print hanging on our wall. When we lived […]

I grew up in New Jersey. That means my “hometown” stretches from Mahwah to Cape May. I might cite the Jersey Shore – if a hometown is where our most cherished memories and seminal experiences lead to the person we’ve become. Add the values we embrace, and the people we loved who instilled them, eh? […]

When I was growing up in Portland, I absorbed the beauty of the Earth as I walked down the hill on Prospect Street. The street was lit by the gold of the falling leaves, and I was in the embrace of the arms of the chestnut trees that reached into the darkening skies. I filled […]

Hometown was the central character in the theatrical version of my father’s life. At 74 he took his life, directly because of an untreated mental illness, but indirectly as the result of never having been able to stay rooted to a hometown of his own. It is a complicated story, parts of which I learned […]