There's one more day of summer showing on the calendar as this column is being written, but the signs of autumn are everywhere on the coast of Maine.

I have mixed feelings about summer.

I’ve always loved little spaces I could make my own. When I was a kid, maybe 13 or so, I lived for a while in a box a refrigerator had come in. I

When your community's electric rates are among the highest in the nation, it pays to consider ways to cut consumption. Work done on Monhegan Island was both simple and effective, and could reduce the island's collective annual electric bill by $15,000.

Being an Island Fellow is pretty awesome. You get to live and serve in one of the most beautiful places in the world, with some of the best people you’ll ever meet. However, like anything in life, there are some rules that must be followed.

We’re proud of our homegrown Internet service, but with the need for even more speed and investment, we need the cooperation of local, state and federal governments, as well as that of FairPoint, which will finally offer Internet on the island.

To call this an industry would be a stretch, but they are certainly a group of businesses with the potential to become an industry. What would the industrial scale look like? Well, there will be choices.

It has been a good summer on the coast of Maine, and for those who like to learn, it can be a place where community members are happy to become teachers, and in the process they lend depth to our understanding of the debates about who we are becoming.

One day we made the trip to Cousins Island and then to Portland, where I got a plastic boat in a department store, maybe W.T. Grant's. When we got back to the house we lived in somewhere on the east side of the island, I realized I had left the little orange boat in a brown paper bag on the ledges at Cousins Island. I knew exactly where it was, lying there in the bag. Maybe I could still find it now.