York Corner
"Temperatures in the mid-40s!"
Those were the words on everybody's lips at mid-day last Sunday, as a high spring sun shining through clear skies began to shrink the snowpack in a big way.
It was a day, at last, to be outside.
So we were surprised to find few strollers at the Wiggley Bridge when we pulled in there, and, and after we got out of our car, we guessed that a stiff northwest wind sweeping across the exposed causeway and bringing with it some of the lingering chill of winter might have been the reason.
Matters were different, however, down at the Harbor Beach, where the terrain was low enough to provide shelter from that wind, and where we found people coming and going and strolling about at a great rate.
Among the first people we spoke to there was a man who identified himself as Peter McKendree, of Orleans, on Cape Cod. He and his wife, Laura, he said, were in York for the weekend, staying in a York cottage owned and lent to them by a friend - and he pointed out Laura, taking in the sun and the view of the beach but remaining up by the cars.
In between tossing a Frisbee for their dog, Peter quietly told us that he runs a landscaping business, and that Laura is a sales rep for Paraclete Press, which publishes religious books and sacred choral music - and distributes them, we later learned from the internet, out of Orleans. They'd arrived in town on Friday night and had been "just relaxing and taking the dog for walks" Peter said, describing himself as happy to get away from what he called "a hectic pace of life," and one that gets especially hectic in the nine months that he's busy with landscaping.
This was his and Laura's first trip to Harbor Beach, he added, and, indeed, their first trip to York, and, spontaneously, he dubbed it all "beautiful" - more so, he thought, than Cape Cod.
"We see the ocean a lot," he said, "but it's not just like here." One reason, he suggested: "There are no rocks on the Cape, just sand and water." Another: the number and size character of trees, with the Cape being dominated by "just scrub pine."
He and Laura, we learned when we pressed a bit, had been married for eight years and met in high school - but in no ordinary high school. Called Grenville College and located in Brockville, Ontario, it serves youngsters from elementary level through 12th grade, and Peter, who'd grown up in Orleans, spent four years there as a boarding student, while Laura, who was from that region, was a day student. His parents picked Grenville for him, Peter said, because they had friends there, and the choice was apparently a good one, because he termed the place "a great school, smallish, with an enrollment of only about 300, but like a college in its offerings in subjects like sports and music."
We also learned from Peter a bit about Frisbees, and a bit about Australian shepherds.
"Sydney," the dog, was a three-year-old example of that breed, and one known as a "black tri," Peter said, for her three colors: black, tan and white. Australian shepherds, he added, come in two other color patterns, "red tri" and blue merle.
Sydney, as we were learning all this, was racing off to catch, adroitly and in mid-flight, the Frisbee flung by Peter, after which she'd trot up to him and, at a "Drop!" command, deliver it to his feet for another throw. So we got a chance to check out the Frisbee, which, Peter showed us, was made not of the usual hard plastic but of a tough nylon fabric stretched around a flexible rubber ring - a kind choice admired by us and no doubt appreciated, if unvoiced, by Sydney.
After we let the McKendrees return to their relaxation, we met another couple, this time two local folk, and two with whom we were already familiar: Peggy and Chuck d'Entremont, who run the pet-boarding facility at Meadow Winds Farm on Route 103 in York.
Peg and Chuck were also out for a bit of Sunday-afternoon respite from their jobs there - and they'd been clamming earlier, they said, in the morning, near the Wiggley Bridge - but, to liven life up a bit, they had with them a metal detector they'd bought through the internet a couple of weeks before. Cold weather had kept them from using it much since, they said, and Peg reported that, in three times out on the beaches with it to date, so far all they'd found were "just coins - dimes, quarters, pennies." But Chuck was philosophical about that result. "To find a penny is just as much a treasure," he tossed out over his shoulder as he moved on to continue coursing the beach with the instrument while Peg obligingly stayed behind with us to talk.
Business at the kennel was "busy," Peg said - but that sounded like an understatement when she added, by way of substantiation, that the facility was booked solid through the end of May, and that she and Chuck were already taking reservations for next Thanksgiving and Christmas. "But we're still having fun with it, and enjoying the dogs and cats," she added with a cheeriness that is a hallmark. "It keeps us hopping," she laughed.
And when we asked if they'd met any especially interesting people on the job, she answered - and with a diplomacy that is also a hallmark, and probably one of several exceptional secrets to their success - "All of our clients are fun and different."
Those clients go off on trips everywhere, she explained - to Europe, to ski out West, to Disneyland - and when they return to pick up their pets, she said, "they like to tell somebody about it," so that those tales end up, in Peg's and Chuck's eyes, being one of the happy perks of the kennel business.
Their daughter Katie has joined them in it, Peg also reported, noting that Katie was married in September to Jeff Spaulding of South Berwick, an arborist who, like Katie, earned a degree from the University of Maine at Orono. The couple met, said Peg, about four years ago through his sister, when Katie was playing adult-ed basketball with her in Portsmouth; the marriage ceremony was held in the Parish Hall of the First Parish Church, with the reception held in the lodge atop Mount Agamenticus.
Jeff, Peg said, now runs his own Pine Ridge Tree Service, while Katie, who worked for a time after college as a civil environmental engineer, is happy with the kennel work.
"She loves animals," Peg said, "and works together well with us."
We found it hard to believe that over six years have passed since Peg and Chuck began Meadow Winds. They did so as a way of preserving, and of continuing to live on, their farm of that name, and, on Sunday Peg said of that choice, "It was a big decision but a good one for us."
We watched them until their detector finally found something metallic in the sand. It turned out to be just a grommet, but it proved that the detector worked - and it helped generate hope and cheer for all for another sunny day.
