Expired

Hi Everyone,
To all of you who are south of Maine, I wish you a happy spring. I can't in good conscious say that I'm in spring right now, when absolutely no new vegetation has appeared. I've been told that it will come in May, so I'm looking forward to that. May also brings an expanded ferry boat schedule, including a Sunday boat! The sense of freedom is nearly overwhelming once you set foot on the mainland after being on the island for weeks on end. Anyways, not too much to report this month. I've been busy learning how to be a Mainer- tapping maple trees, boiling down sap into syrup, pruning apple trees, going swimming, helping to paint the bottoms of boats. I have collected a couple stories though...

On the westernmost point of my island sits an old Coast Guard station, which is now privately owned and has some of the best views around.
About 10 years ago, the caretaker of the station decided that he was sick of cutting the grass, so he brought sheep to the island as an easy fix. One of the rams was really ill tempered and would never let the caretaker even get close enough to shear him, and as a result, his hair was really, really long. After a couple of years, this beast of a ram finally died and the caretaker decided that he would shear that damn ram once and for all, so he threw him on top of a picnic table in the front yard of the station. By this point, rigamortis had fully set in and the ram had all four of his legs sticking straight up into the air, as if you had turned a table upside down. So, while the caretaker was shearing away, without displaying any sort of care or caution (because the ram was dead), a group Jehovah's Witnesses, with lunch in tow, had made their way up the driveway. Suddenly, they found themselves "witnessing" this man manhandling/shearing a dead sheep on top of the picnic table where they had intended to have lunch! How abominable! The group was so disgusted, they turned around and walked all the way back to the town dock, where they sat and waited there for the ferry to come and pick them up. To this day, they have never come back.

I'll leave you all with this story:

We recently had a community member die on the big island, which is always a sad thing, especially when the year round population hovers around 32 people. Because I work in the Town Office, I often have to field phone calls from people and a few days after this woman had died, I received a call from her brother....
"Hi, I'm [so and so] and I'm calling about my sister's car registration, because just like my sister, it has expired."
I was awaiting a snicker of some sort or a "badum-ching!" to indicate that this was a joke, but there was nothing. We sat in an awkward silence for a few seconds and then I put him on hold...so I could hand the phone off and have a good laugh. Though that was one of the more awkward moments in my life, I can't help but admire the man's cleverness. Touche!