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.

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.

A few weeks ago, a big man burst into the Tidewater Motel lobby mid-morning carrying a half-dozen unmarked white cardboard boxes, each about 18-inches by 18-inches and 4-inches deep. He’d emerged from an unmarked white pickup that held three white chest freezers in its bed, tied down haphazardly with pot warp.