Maine Metaphor The Green And Blue House

How to live in rural Maine? How--in the 1980s, when descendants of Maine's settlers wonder about our coming out of the Rust Belt in search of work, in search of a life? They were not bitter about our coming here, where jobs were already scarce--they were incredulous. Why did we come? Sometimes I answered, "God." God brought us, the formerly middle-class inept, to live among these most hardy and canny of make-do people. God brought us to experience life in Maine, where my spouse sometimes worked turning and trimming four thousand boards a night, waking to drive one hundred miles round-trip to finish our undergraduate educations with the aid of loans and grants. So I studied the place where we came to live. And I forgot where we came from. Rural Maine was ragged, rugged, hardscrabble, and wild--but full of the most visible, vital, natural creation. I've tried to express that aspect of Maine life in The Green and Blue House. And there is the metaphor, also.

How to live in rural Maine? How--in the 1980s, when descendants of Maine's settlers wonder about our coming out of the Rust Belt in search of work, in search of a life? They were not bitter about our coming here, where jobs were already scarce--they were incredulous. Why did we come? Sometimes I answered, "God." God brought us, the formerly middle-class inept, to live among these most hardy and canny of make-do people. God brought us to experience life in Maine, where my spouse sometimes worked turning and trimming four thousand boards a night, waking to drive one hundred miles round-trip to finish our undergraduate educations with the aid of loans and grants. So I studied the place where we came to live. And I forgot where we came from. Rural Maine was ragged, rugged, hardscrabble, and wild--but full of the most visible, vital, natural creation. I've tried to express that aspect of Maine life in The Green and Blue House. And there is the metaphor, also.

S. Dorman began Maine Metaphor with The Green and Blue House. She continued her explorations in the Western Mountains of Maine, studying Maine's characteristic ways and natural realm, possessing the experience, studies, and journaling of rural life and creation. And she wanted to learn about the character of the people who sometimes must live a hardscrabble life. Her quest began thirty some years ago merely in living the life on moving to Maine with her family. This state of New England, once a District of Massachusetts, greatly appealed to her for its peculiar beauty and quiet, but also for its hard-working ethic. Maine flows with metaphors helpful in understanding our right relation to creation and its Maker. Maine's people, landscape, history, geology, weather, and writers tell of this reciprocity of life. Her spouse Allen supported the family, as you'll see in the book. Not, as she says, in order that she might write, but that she might eat! After their brief familial confrontation with homelessness on moving to Maine, Allen struggled to earn a living, but now is retired, with a fixed income; yet work here is seasonal and difficult still for others making a living in the Western Mountains of Maine. Walk these back roads with her, meet some back roads folk, climb these high wooded hills and low stone mountains. Consider and dream over the telling, and come back to yourself from Maine, refreshed.

S. Dorman began Maine Metaphor with The Green and Blue House. She continued her explorations in the Western Mountains of Maine, studying Maine's characteristic ways and natural realm, possessing the experience, studies, and journaling of rural life and creation. And she wanted to learn about the character of the people who sometimes must live a hardscrabble life. Her quest began thirty some years ago merely in living the life on moving to Maine with her family. This state of New England, once a District of Massachusetts, greatly appealed to her for its peculiar beauty and quiet, but also for its hard-working ethic. Maine flows with metaphors helpful in understanding our right relation to creation and its Maker. Maine's people, landscape, history, geology, weather, and writers tell of this reciprocity of life. Her spouse Allen supported the family, as you'll see in the book. Not, as she says, in order that she might write, but that she might eat! After their brief familial confrontation with homelessness on moving to Maine, Allen struggled to earn a living, but now is retired, with a fixed income; yet work here is seasonal and difficult still for others making a living in the Western Mountains of Maine. Walk these back roads with her, meet some back roads folk, climb these high wooded hills and low stone mountains. Consider and dream over the telling, and come back to yourself from Maine, refreshed.

Pretty Good House provides a framework and set of guidelines for building or renovating a high-performance home that focus on its inhabitants and the environment--but keeps in mind that few people have pockets deep enough to achieve a "perfect" solution. The essential idea is for homeowners to work within their financial and practical constraints both to meet their own needs and do as much for the planet as possible. A Pretty Good House is: * A house that's as small as possible * Simple and durable, but also well designed * Insulated and air-sealed * Above all, it is affordable, healthy, responsible, and resilient.

THE STORY: On a cold, clear, moonless night in the middle of winter, all is not quite what it seems in the remote, mythical town of Almost, Maine. As the northern lights hover in the star-filled sky above, Almost's residents find themselves falling in and

When she was twenty-seven, Nell Stevens—a lifelong aspiring novelist—won an all-expenses-paid fellowship to go anywhere in the world to write. Would she choose a glittering metropolis, a romantic village, an exotic paradise? Not exactly. Nell picked Bleaker Island, a snowy, windswept pile of rock in the Falklands. Other than sheep, penguins, paranoia, and the weather, there aren’t many distractions, but as Nell soon discovers, total isolation and 1,085 calories a day are far from ideal conditions for literary production. With deft humor, this memoir traces her island days and slowly reveals the life and people she has left behind in pursuit of her writing. It seems that there is nowhere she can run—an island or the pages of her notebook—to escape the big questions of love, art, and, ambition.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "A must-read for anyone who loves history and art.” --Kristin Hannah From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the smash bestseller Orphan Train, a stunning and atmospheric novel of friendship, passion, and art, inspired by Andrew Wyeth’s mysterious and iconic painting Christina’s World. "Later he told me that he’d been afraid to show me the painting. He thought I wouldn’t like the way he portrayed me: dragging myself across the field, fingers clutching dirt, my legs twisted behind. The arid moonscape of wheatgrass and timothy. That dilapidated house in the distance, looming up like a secret that won’t stay hidden." To Christina Olson, the entire world was her family’s remote farm in the small coastal town of Cushing, Maine. Born in the home her family had lived in for generations, and increasingly incapacitated by illness, Christina seemed destined for a small life. Instead, for more than twenty years, she was host and inspiration for the artist Andrew Wyeth, and became the subject of one of the best known American paintings of the twentieth century. As she did in her beloved smash bestseller Orphan Train, Christina Baker Kline interweaves fact and fiction in a powerful novel that illuminates a little-known part of America’s history. Bringing into focus the flesh-and-blood woman behind the portrait, she vividly imagines the life of a woman with a complicated relationship to her family and her past, and a special bond with one of our greatest modern artists. Told in evocative and lucid prose, A Piece of the World is a story about the burdens and blessings of family history, and how artist and muse can come together to forge a new and timeless legacy.

New York Times Bestseller Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal "Hilarious…This book charmed my socks off." —Patricia O’Conner, New York Times Book Review Mary Norris has spent more than three decades working in The New Yorker’s renowned copy department, helping to maintain its celebrated high standards. In Between You & Me, she brings her vast experience with grammar and usage, her good cheer and irreverence, and her finely sharpened pencils to help the rest of us in a boisterous language book as full of life as it is of practical advice.