Nostalgia for a Age Yet to Come
Man, I do love the Buzzcocks.
I always used to dream of the past
But like they say yesterday never comes
Sometimes there's a song in my brain
And I feel that my heart knows the refrain
I guess it's just the music that brings on nostalgia for an age yet to come
Buzzcocks “Nostalgia’ Love Bites 1978
I don’t know that those lyrics are apt, but I don’t like to ever miss a chance to reference the Buzzcocks.
I’ve been reading a lot about nostalgia and the various definitions and types of it lately but I began to find it all irritating so I stopped. It is something I should investigate further some time as I have a large nostalgia box. When the boys were little they devised a system of boxes. So when I said, “You need to finish your…” vegetable or chicken or milk or whatever, they would reply, “Sorry, Mom, my vegetable box is full but my dessert box is empty.” They were conniving little things. Anyway, my nostalgia box is never full.
I’ve been somewhat obsessed (who, me?) with looking at images and videos of the recent coastal flooding damage in Southern and Mid Coast Maine. I know there are much more devastating things going on in this world, but it makes me sad. And it also kicked off a days long habit of looking at old picture of Maine before I go to sleep.
As some of you know, I grew up going to visit my grandparents in Portland, Maine every summer. I thought Maine was absolutely magical and thought I was INCREDIBLY lucky to have grandparents in Maine. Later, after my grandparents were gone and Ernie and I had started selling antiques (hmmm, or maybe before that as well) we began visiting Southern Maine, hitting some antique shops along Route One and glorying in the slightly disheveled pre-redevelopment glories of Old Orchard Beach. Then we had kids and travel got more complicated. Once the boys were a bit older, close to kindergarten age, we started going again. We would rent a house in Camp Ellis or Ferry Beach. There’s a bit of a working class feel to those areas that I always liked. Kennebunk, Ogunquit and the like never held any charm for me. Some great buildings of course, but for a different demographic, and the antique shops there sucked, either stuff for designers or overpriced or both.
We began going further north, actually down east, the year Judi died. It was too late to find an affordable place near our regular haunts so I kept looking further afield. We ended up in Lubec and I fell in love with the area. Now that’s where we always head whenever we are able to go to Maine.
I wonder if we’ll ever manage to go back.
I think part of the reason I fell in love with Lubec and the surrounding area is that it reminded me of my childhood memories of Portland and visiting my grandparents. The places I remember from then are either gone or have been slicked up and vinyl sided out of all recognition and crowded with infill development. Then again, I always do have a soft spot for hardscrabble towns. It is not an easy place to make a living as my beloved Rod Picott so absolutely nails in his song, “Washington County.”
Washington County
Rod Picott/Mark Erelli
Used to be it was only Massachusetts
Now there’s “from aways”
From every goddamn place
The coastal folks they all grin and bear it
‘Cause dollars in from the interstate
Up here it’s just hunters and peepers
A couple of months to
make some extra scratch
Try to save it up and make
A Christmas for the kids
Or do the best you can
With a sewn-on patch
Once a month we hit the food bank
Once a month we reach the end
Of the rope we’re clinging onto
And the check the county sends
Blue-lipped children
Waiting on a school bus
All secondhand jackets and
Boots and gloves
Late afternoon they’ll come back
Home in darkness
‘neath streetlights that flicker and buzz
Uncle Joe he used to work the railroad
But the trains they don’t go
Through here no more
He raised a family the kids all left for Bangor
You choose to move or just stay poor
There used to be some work
Down at the pulp mill
There used to be some money cutting trees
But they bought up every lot
Along the coastline
Turned it all into BnB’s
You can skip a stone out on the water
But you can’t drive any further east
The roads all end out at the cold Atlantic
I could walk on in and surely be released
Here are a few of buildings I love. Not all great pictures but they are where my heart is.
Lubec once had 20+ sardine and herring factories, and in fact, had the last one left in the country, McCurdy’s Smokehouse. Much of it has been preserved as a museum, but the brining shed still needed preservation. Here’s a picture I took around 2010.
And then in 2018 there was a storm…
Poor brining shed. It was famous for awhile and even had its own Facebook account. It’s quiet these days, just listing itself as “Retired & traveling the world by sea.”
Ok, I think I’ve nostalgia’d enough for the day. Onward.
Love,
Cynthia