York Corner
Two Sundays ago, when the weather finally turned sunny and warm for a time, we talked to a number of strollers out on the causeway near the Wiggley Bridge.
As we reported here last week, many of them proved to be old friends and acquaintances. Even those we didn't know personally, however, revealed connections to folks we did know, and our talks with them illustrated, we thought, the comforting sense of shared community.
Rich and Robin LaBonte, for example, were there with two of their three children, Trevor, 8, who's a second-grader at the Village Elementary School, and Delaney, 5, who's in preschool at Smarty Pants. Their older sister, Addison, ("Her name is ‘Addie!'" Delaney told us, quite decisively), 12, is a seventh-grader at the York Middle School, her mother said, and was busy at a soccer game that afternoon.
The four were tossing food to the gulls, who were swooping down in squawking crowds to catch it on the wing, and Robin reported that the family saves its stale bread, chips and other food scraps to bring to the causeway for that outdoor ritual every week or two. On that particular day, Robin spoke for us all when she exclaimed, "It's such a beautiful afternoon!"
When we asked, we learned that she is chief financial officer at York Hospital, that Rich is a financial analyst at Liberty Mutual in Portsmouth - and that, while they met for the first time when both were students at the University of Maine in Orono, each has family ties to York that go back a bit.
Rich's grandfather was the Richard LaBonte known as "Dick" who lived with his family in the house, torn down not too long ago, that used to sit at the southern end of Sewall's Bridge. Rich's parents are Fred and Sandy LaBonte, still York residents, and he himself graduated from York High School with the class of 1981, the first to spend all four years in what was then a brand new building.
Robin told us that her family lived in York, in a house off South Side Road, when she was very young, that her grandfather worked at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, and that she attended school here through the second grade. The family left, she said, only because her father, faced with being transferred by his Dover, N.H., employers to Ohio and not wanting to leave Maine, took a job in Camden with a company called Tibbets Industries, that made small parts for hearing aids and radios. Robin, therefore, grew up in nearby Thomaston, where her father still lives in retirement.
There were many senses, then, in which Robin and Rich were both coming "home" in settling, themselves, in York, after their marriage in 1991.
Before we left them that day, they cautioned us that eight-year-old Trevor had already achieved a degree of fame through this paper in having been featured on the front page last December for advancing to finalist status in a "Punt, Pass and Kick" contest on the New England Patriots' playing field in Foxboro. We assured them that a little more fame from this quarter wouldn't hurt.
This past week, after the weather did a back-flip and gave us back a prolonged period of dark skies and cold rain, our spirits lifted when we spied David Coombs back at York Corner Gardens on Wednesday, readying racks to open up for the season with the sale of flowers on Friday.
With David were his dog, Pearl, and David's friend and neighbor Michael Carpenter, from North Berwick, and when we asked David how his winter had gone and he responded, "Great! I felt good all winter!" Michael immediately interjected, "Don't you listen to that. He did not feel good" - and David didn't disagree.
The truth was that, after having surgery for colon cancer just before his selling season ended at Christmas, David had to undergo chemotherapy all winter - one three-day session every two weeks for six months.
Still, ever irrepressibly upbeat, he was exulting, on Wednesday, that he had just one more session to go - and he judged his own circumstances blessed compared to those of others.
"Every time I went in there," he said of his trips to the hospital, "I realized how much better I was than others that were there." His own chemo he saw as preventive, or "like an insurance policy," and he said of his fellow cancer patients, "Many were a lot sicker than I was, and some were fighting for their lives. I can just imagine," he added, "how they feel."
David, however, is never serious or glum for long, and he reported that his buddy, York grower Bill Connolly, who helped out with keeping the business open when David was laid up, now refers to him as "chemo-sabe."
Michael, it turned out, was another who, with his wife, Susan Parshley, especially helped David through the winter, and David had the highest of praise for them both, and particularly for their cooking. "He says he buys cheap meat and turns it into gold, and it's true," he said of Michael's way with steaks, and, patting his stomach, he added, "I weigh 180-something - probably the heaviest I've ever been in my life." Then, laughing at his own quip, he said, "With wisdom and age comes weight."
Michael himself, who plays drums to David's guitar in their impromptu neighborhood band, clued us in to another connection his wife has to York: she's co-chair of the social studies department at Newmarket High School, where The Independent columnist Jim Fabiano teaches. And, feelingly, Michael said of her: "She's a good cook and a good woman."
Look for field pansies, English daisies, forget-me-nots and phlox, among other posies now available at York Corner Gardens. And count the good cheer and appreciation of community as not the least of its offerings.
Looking forward to spring when it comes for real, David told us that he'll now be open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on every day except Tuesdays.
