-
Nov 15, 2024 | 
islandinstitute.org | Courtney Naliboff
I’ve walked through Mullins Head park hundreds, maybe thousands of times in the almost 20 years I’ve lived on North Haven. The entrance is next to my house, the dirt road leads tantalizingly to five beautiful and often empty beaches. The 2.4-mile loop is an easy run, and the unplowed road in the winter is a perfect cross-country ski track. It’s familiar territory.
-
Oct 7, 2024 | 
islandinstitute.org | Courtney Naliboff
Another North Haven summer has come, and more or less gone. Most of our friends have departed for points south or west. All but a few boats at the Casino have been stored for the winter. At the time of writing, I am physically, if not emotionally, prepared to begin my 20th year at North Haven Community School.
-
Aug 21, 2024 | 
islandinstitute.org | Courtney Naliboff
First things first: I have to express my gratitude to all of you who reached out after my last column. I did, very fortunately, find out that my biopsy was benign. I also learned a lot about how commonly experienced, and how terrifying, this process is for so many people. Solidarity. From the whaler, Bill and I could just see the top of Penrose’s head peeping up over the edge of her Opti.
-
Jul 26, 2024 | 
maineboats.com | Courtney Naliboff
The swordfish arcs across the sky, smaller fish dancing in its wake. Penobscot Bay gleams at its back and rows of lettuce and artichokes spread out at its sides. Bigger than anything that swam the seas, even in the ancient past, Billy Ray Sims and Ann McClellan’s 21-foot steel armature and willow sculpture graces the field at Turner Farm, inviting conversation and connecting past and present. “Our general concept was to build a largescale piece of land art with community involvement,” Sims said.
-
Jul 24, 2024 | 
islandinstitute.org | Courtney Naliboff
The name of my column, Salt Water Cure, comes from an Isak Dinesen (real name, Karen Blixen) quote: “The cure for anything is saltwater—sweat, tears, or the sea.”I am stuck in a bit of an eddy of medical tests and waiting. Hopefully it will all be fine, but so far it is stacking uncertainty on uncertainty. I am worried, fearful, and anxious. I do not want to spend these glorious and fleeting summer days fretting and pacing.
-
Jul 16, 2024 | 
islandinstitute.org | Courtney Naliboff
By the time you read this, the book I co-authored, Your Postpartum Body, will be out in the world. For ten years I’ve been throwing manuscripts at the wall of literary agents to see what might stick and have often richly imagined the moment when a book with my name on it might be a tangible reality. Now that it’s almost here, I find that I might not be big enough to hold all my feelings.
-
May 30, 2024 | 
islandinstitute.org | Courtney Naliboff
These are the rules: When you drive past the cows on Middle Road, you have to yell, “Hi cows!” and wave. When you hear peepers at twilight, even in your car with the windows rolled up because it’s still dropping into the 30s when the sun goes down, you have to say “Peepers!” in a tone and frequency similar to the peepers themselves. When a raven calls, gurgling surprisingly musically for a corvidae, you have to call back.
-
May 13, 2024 | 
islandinstitute.org | Courtney Naliboff
Getting ready for work this morning, I heard an interview that stopped me in my tracks. Author Jonathan Haidt was speaking about his new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewriting of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. In it, he outlines the connection between the increase in online socializing and the dramatic increase in anxiety that’s been well-documented in kids in the last decade or so.
-
Apr 2, 2024 | 
islandinstitute.org | Courtney Naliboff
The ocean is knocking at our door. Since the torrential, monsoon-like rain in October, the island has been battered by four additional significant storms. In January, a devastating combination of wind and tide laid waste to Brown’s Boatyard, and took out boathouses, fish houses, docks, and piers. The next storm hit three days later.
-
Feb 1, 2024 | 
islandinstitute.org | Courtney Naliboff
As I bustled down the school hallway between dropping students off at their elementary classroom and eating a quick lunch before recess duty, something unusual caught my eye. A sea urchin, a resident of the ocean tank outside the kindergarten room, had pinned a piece of rockweed between the aquarium wall and its underside. I paused, curious as to whether it had snagged a snack or if it would continue on its way.
