Archive for ‘Opinion’

  • Welcome News Starts the Year

    By State Senator Bill Diamond The legislative session started last week and we were greeted with some good news. In the face of strong bipartisan opposition, the governor dropped his call for the elimination of Medicaid funding for the state’s Private Non-Medical Institutions. Known as PNMIs, these are group homes for the elderly and disabled. […]

  • Looking for owls

    This morning, we went for a walk in the park, where last night’s snow had finally turned the ground white, creating a wintry landscape. Our route led us up a snowy walkway to a unique, curving, covered footbridge over a brook. We paused there to look down at the shining water, and at a flock […]

  • The New Year: easier to swallow

    I’ve never understood the whole New Year thing. Sure, I know that there has to be a new year, if only for purely practical reasons — after all, without an annual numeric turnover there’d be obvious problems. Among other things, we’d have to sort out having November over and over again; Dick Clark would lose […]

  • In the absence of the sacred

    When I first met Gordon “Donnie” Fowler, I couldn’t speak. I was gasping for breath, after jogging all the way to the summit of Hacker’s Hill. My sudden appearance and heavy breathing jolted him up from the chair where he sat meditating. “I thought you were a moose, making all that noise,” he blurted, his […]

  • Signs of Winter

    Living here in the north, we look forward to events in the natural world that signal the change of season. One of the events I look forward to in December is the arrival of the common mergansers. These birds move south every year just ahead of the ice that covers their northern lakes, and their […]

  • Enjoying the Holidays Sensibly

    Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! For most people, this is a special time of the year. It is a time to get together with family and friends. People often get so caught up with all the hectic activity of the season — the shopping, the wrapping, the cards, the decorating and the cooking — that […]

  • Honor the bears

    By Joyce White The impetus for this focus on bears is a story that originated with the Bangor Daily News and was reprinted in the Sept. 30 edition of the Sun Journal. Nine hunters from North Carolina with several hunting hounds had encircled a bear in the Machias woods. The story focused on one hunter, […]

  • Life circles back around

    By Dawn De Busk Seeing certain parts of this region jumpstarts my brain’s memories of Alaska. Two stretches of scenery along Route 121 do this to me instantly. It is a “commute” every other week as part of my coverage of Casco’s municipal meetings for The Bridgton News. Many people are probably familiar with the […]

  • The repository of profound scribble

    We all have tics and quirky little absent-minded fidgets that we do out of habit, or possibly because we didn’t get enough phosphorus when we were toddlers. My son can’t keep still when he sits with one leg up and his foot cocked across the other knee — his ankle jumps and twitches like a […]

  • Defining the shortfall — seeking answers

    Most of the activity this past week at the State House, and there has been a lot, especially for this time of year, has been about the proposed cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). First, on Tuesday, DHHS Commissioner Mary Mayhew and a retinue of experts from the Department attempted to […]