Down East Magazine

6 days ago | downeast.com | Sarah Stebbins

Some of Jill and Joe Drew’s closest friends have been their guests at Harrison’s Greenwood Manor Inn. There are the Daleys, whose kids bounce back and forth with their brood between the single-family home, where the Drews live, and the attached former carriage house, where the inn’s guest rooms are located. There are bachelor buddies Ed, Mike, and Jimmy, who were among the first people Jill texted after giving birth to the couple’s fourth child in January.

1 week ago | downeast.com | Jesse Ellison

Lynn Karlin seems to hardly ever sit down. On a late-fall afternoon in the whitewashed photography studio behind her Belfast home, she was up and down, making coffee and tea, offering crackers and cookies. She moved in and out of a prop room and the large sun-drenched space where she shoots still lifes. She darted between a table where she’d recently staged a portrait of pastel-colored pumpkins and striped squashes atop peeling wooden pedestals and the computer where she edits images.

2 weeks ago | downeast.com | Sara Anne Donnelly

During a trip to Bar Harbor in the mid ’90s, Cheryl Staples spotted a chunk of sea glass shining like a sapphire on the beach. She dug it out, dusted it off, and held it up to the sun. The smoothed jar bottom seemed to glow in her hand. “I really enjoyed how beautiful it was,” Staples recalls. “So I put it in my pocket and that was that.” Every day for the remainder of the vacation, she trolled the beach, filling gallon-size Ziploc bags with sea glass.

2 weeks ago | downeast.com | Will Grunewald

Since time immemorial, the humble hoe has been an essential implement of agriculture (and, consequently, civilization). Both the ancient Sumerians and ancient Chinese believed deities had conferred hoes upon mankind. Fast-forward to the present to find hoes leaning against sheds around the globe and featuring in innumerable YouTube and TikTok videos that tout their virtues — “Know Your Garden Hoe” or “What Your Favorite Kind of Hoe?” In Mozambique, a hoe even adorns the national flag.

2 weeks ago | downeast.com | Sarah Stebbins

When Meredithe Stuart-Smith wants to show her English colleagues how Americans celebrate holidays, she often pulls up photos of the Fourth of July festivities in Castine. Every year, the town common is a hub of patriotic pride, with a parade assembling on School Street and costume, tug-of-war, and pie-eating contests playing out on a wide lawn.