York Corner
This was the week the leaves returned!
And while we catch our breath in wonder, we're going to play catch-up here.
We want to report, for example, on several of the folks we met at the bean supper sponsored by the International Women's Club of New England and held at St. Aspinquid Masonic Lodge two Saturdays ago.
One of those was IWCNE member Carrie Groppe of York, who was there with her grandson, Mickey St. Denis, a seventh-grader at the York Middle School. Mickey, Carrie told us with some pride, is also a Boy Scout working on his Eagle badge, and an active member of the youth group at the Union Congregational Church.
People who don't know Carrie may remember her late husband, Arthur, who, sadly, passed away four years ago, and who, in his retirement, achieved some eminence in the craft world locally for scenes he painted on buoys and slate.
He'd been a medical-supplies salesman, Carrie said, with a route that took him all over New England and western New York, and when she also told us that she was a nurse, we ventured a guess that their professions had had something to do with introducing them to each other.
Wrong!
She was originally from Niagara Falls, N.Y., and he, from Akron, Ohio, and they'd met, she said, at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, when he was in the Marines and she was in the Navy. Following their marriage, Carrie reported that they'd moved around quite a bit, starting in Boston when Arthur was transferred there, and living, eventually, in western New York State, in Rhode Island, and back in Massachusetts, in Boxboro, before settling into a condo in York 18 years ago.
Like so many others, Carrie reported that they'd vacationed in York for many years, in rental properties, before retiring here. Additionally, (and also like many others) Carrie told us that York and Maine had won out over Cape Cod as a vacation destination, in the Groppe's case, she said, because the Cape became too expensive.
Carrie's own career as a nurse included, most recently, six years' work at a women's clinic at the University of New Hampshire, about 10 years prior to that at the Middlesex School, a private boarding school in Concord, Mass., and some eight years before that at a Massachusetts nursing home.
The Groppes had three children, Blaine, Dianne and Robert. Time and all the busy bustle of interruptions at the bean supper at didn't permit us to get a full report on each, but we did learn that Blaine is deceased, that Robert lives in Boston, and that Mickey is the son of Dianne, who also has a daughter, Hannah.
At the same supper, we caught up with Barb Poulin, a past president of the IWCNE who has long had earned our respect for (among other talents and accomplishments) the variety of hands-on part-time paying jobs she tackles - and all in spite of being retired. The latest of those jobs, she told us last week, is at Coastal Landscaping, the Route 1 business owned and run for something like 17 years by Dave and Carol Bridges - the same Dave Bridges who's also fire chief at York Beach.
April, May and part of June are Coastal's very busiest times of the year, Barb explained, and require lots of part-time help - at the labor-intensive task of repotting plants, for example: taking them as what are called "plugs," just half an inch or less in diameter, from trays with 98 to a batch and replanting each into a pot four or five inches in diameter.
Barb began work at Coastal in the last week of March, she said, and put in three eight-hour days a week in April in a schedule that expanded to four days in May - and not only does she not complain about the rigors of that work, but, characteristically upbeat, she reports, "I enjoy it and am learning a lot. I like it perhaps the best of my seasonal jobs."
Back in November and December, she added, she'd worked a four-day week in Stonewall Kitchen's York warehouse, which she also liked. There, the challenge was meeting the Christmas rush. And, she reminded us, she'd worked the previous summer from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. at the Goldenrod, pre-cooking bacon and home fries, as much as 40 pounds of each at a crack, to have all ready for the regular staff before the place opened each morning.
That's a job to which she may be returning, and she told us that she especially likes it because, among other reasons, it forces her to "get to bed every night at 10 p.m.," and because, over each day almost before the day has started for others, it doesn't interfere with other activities.
All of these blue-collar jobs (her term) she picks deliberately, she told us, acknowledging a rebellion with which we could easily identify, because they come to her after, as she put it, "31 years in the corporate world wearing panty-hose and suits!" In addition, of course, they bring in money (it goes to an IRA account) while delivering exercise. And, Barb admitted with a smile, "Some of it is ego-fulfilling, too."
Whatever the reasons, we're still admiring - and we suspect her employers are appreciative.
Two other bits of business here. Because the IWCNE was gracious in hosting us at their supper, we promised a plug for their next major event. It's their annual fashion show, to be held from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Sunday, June 3, at Wentworth-by-the-Sea in New Castle, N.H. And, like all of the IWCNE's events, it's a fundraiser with the proceeds always applied to causes supportive of women and children. (The IWCNE's bean supper, by the way, its fundraising chair Dorothy Healy told us subsequently, netted over $1,000.)
Finally, we want to mention a book. It's Kate Whouley's "Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved." It's the engaging self-told story of a 40-something woman's taking on - and succeeding at - the task of buying a cottage and "marrying" it to her existing small house on Cape Cod, and we came across it at Cottage Home, featured in this column a few weeks back. Cottage Home proprietors David and Judy Brown were displaying it because there's a York connection: the author's aunt, Rosemary Sullivan, is a customer and a York resident. Judy kindly loaned us a copy, and we can report, after devouring it, that it's a great read - genial, well-paced, informative, humorous.
But stop in at Cottage Home for your own copy to see for yourself. And, on the way, revel in the fresh leaves of spring.
