York Corner
When we met Steve and Pat Holzel, they were walking briskly, hand in hand on the causeway by the Wiggley Bridge, and headed east toward the Harbor Beach.
It was late afternoon on that exceptionally warm, balmy day after Thanksgiving, when the area was bustling with walkers, and the Holzels paused just long enough to give us a little info about themselves.
Home, they said, was Bloomfield, N.J., and they'd arrived in town no more than a half-hour before, after a 5 ½-hour drive that they called "great." For all the talk about that day's being the year's busiest for shopping, it wasn't busy, apparently, on the highway.
"There was," they said, "hardly any traffic."
A part of the lure here for them was Steve's mother, Margaret Baldwin, now 87 and a long-time resident.
"We've been coming here since 1947," said Steve, but he also added, "We love York."
His mother, he explained, had been to camp in Maine as a child, "and always loved it." When she and her husband (he died in 1993) came to retire, they chose York as their retirement home. Now she remains remarkably active, Steve reported, one evidence of which is the fact that she drives to Quebec each month. York residents might also know her, he added, from the fact that, a world-traveler, she substitute-taught Spanish, French and German at York High School.
The Holzels themselves appeared no slouches. In New Jersey, Steven said that he "buys and manages apartment buildings," they manage a trip here three or four times a year and last September, with his mom, they rode the "Cat" from Bar Harbor to Halifax. (They loved the boat but Pat got seasick on it, so, for the trip back, they drove the long way home.) Hobbies for both, they said, are "travel, reading, walking," and "for him," said Pat, "poker."
In York, they also reported, they have certain rituals: they go to the Union Bluff for supper and to Rick's for breakfast, and they always walk from Lindsay Road through Steadman Woods, across the causeway and along the Fisherman's Walk to Harbor Beach and back.
With the daylight hours now shrinking, the sun was close to setting when we finished our chat, so the Holzels put an extra measure of briskness back in their pace as they headed out.
And they resumed hand-holding, leaving us with a message we were glad to hear: "We've been married for 38 years," Steve said, "and it just gets better. It's amazing. It really is."
We accosted two other couples there before we left, four people who were together. The men of the group, however, walked on ahead so that we got to talk to the women only.
They told us that they were Susan and Jim Crooks, from Salisbury, Mass., and Polly Lynch-Pritchard and her husband, Alan Pritchard, from Newbury, Mass.
"We're trying to stay out of traffic and away from the shoppers," the women volunteered with a laugh, reporting that, thus far that day, they'd been to Fort Foster in Kittery and were otherwise "just cruising."
Their husbands, they said, were both retired carpenters, which made Susan, she said (with more laughter) "a retirement assistant," while Polly's job as a chemist for a Newburyport company permitted her, as she put it, "to keep my husband in the style to which he is accustomed."
Because they were making us laugh, we would have liked to have had the time to talk longer, but the women had to scoot on ahead to catch up with the retired carpenters.
More recently, late last Saturday afternoon, we popped into Lucia's Kitchen to catch up with proprietor Lucia Velasco-Evans.
Lucia was carefully separating endive leaves one from another as we spoke, and she told us that, for a catering job she'd taken, she'd be stuffing them with feta cheese, olives, pine nuts and a dressing. They'd then be going as finger-food to a private party, and would be (like her other prepared meals) picked up by the buyer.
Business there, we were glad to learn, hadn't slackened since summer ended.
"September and October," Lucia said, "were really good months, and business in November has been steady." She added, "People are getting to know that I'm here, and I have a lot of local following - and a lot of repeat customers."
She has shrunk her hours a bit. She's now closed on Wednesdays as well as on Sundays, but is otherwise open from 11:30 a.m. until 7 p.m., except on Saturdays, when she closes at 6 p.m.
And she did have two other bits of news.
One was that she'd just been notified that she was a winner ("the" winner? she wasn't sure) in the gingerbread-house contest, part of the Festival of Lights, whose results are now on display until Dec. 12 at the library. Her offering (which will be auctioned off to benefit the library and the Food Pantry) is a Victorian house "just right out of my imagination," she said, with a tower, a roof made of pink gum, sidewalls filigreed with icing, and windows of melted candy made to look like stained glass.
Lucia's other news was about her former assistant at the shop, Molly Johnson. Molly, who loves travel and immersion in other cultures, left on Nov. 19, Lucia reported, for Colorno, Italy (near Parma), for a year's study of the history of food. Ultimately, said Lucia, Molly is dreaming of a career writing or editing about food.
Before we left, our eye and imagination were both caught by a line on Lucia's tiny yellow menu. It read, "What's life without food?"
One final note here.
A call from Dee Bickmore, who's the heart and soul of Hospice of York, told us that our friend David Coombs had donated this year's Hospice Lights to Remember Tree in York, and Dee thought that worth a little applause, given David's situation.
David, readers may remember, was operated on for colon cancer recently, and friends kept his York Corner Gardens business going for him while he was laid up. He's now back on the job, bravely hustling Christmas trees while trying to favor his incision and undergoing the rigors of chemotherapy.
On Hospice's Lights to Remember Tree, each light represents a donation to Hospice in memory of a deceased loved one or in honor of someone living. How suitable, we agreed with Dee, that the tree itself represents yet another gesture of selflessness in the spirit of community support and caring.
Dee, by the way, reminded us that there are now Lights to Remember Trees in Wells, Ogunquit, Kittery, Eliot and South Berwick, in addition to York, where they all started. And she said there was a new wrinkle among the always very touching notes that have come in with the donations: at least two requests from people seeking to honor people identified only as "our soldiers."
To all: Happy Holidays!
Editor's Note: York Corner will return to The Independent after a brief holiday hiatus. Be watching for more of Virginia Woodwell's travels around town in the new year.
