MeInMaine Blog

Author: Andrew Mooers

  • Maine Simple, Easy And Tell Me What To Expect.

    In movies, books knowing how things turn out, what happens at the ending is not so critical.

    Kids Know To Keep It Simple, Real, Easy, Fun.
    Helping Each Others, Aware It Is All About Others.
    Part of the entertainment is just trusting that usually things turn out for the best. And everyone lives pretty much “happily ever after”. In real life, folks want honesty. Need predictable to happen more often than not and routines that are healthy to be happy, content.

    Wouldn’t you agree that most people are well intentioned?

    That we all want the same things? Love, security, family, to work together for the common good? Buckle up. And accelerate away from the stinking thinking, that default notion that others are not so noble or think first only about themselves. And find yourself in Maine where we need each other. Less of us to lean on and we are all more empowered through life’s twists, turns and straight aways to reach out to lend a hand, extend a sympathetic ear.

    In rural states like Maine where self sufficiency is more critical for day to day survival, I think Mainers extend others more slack, apply less demands.

    And look deep inside to cultivate more from themselves. Events that don’t turn out the way you had hoped, prayed, dream can sadden. Or the way you look at them, the approach in your thinking can be “wait a minute”. With positive consideration that good does triumph, come out of every situation if we pull back and really see the unfolding events.

    Learning, growing never stop. Maturity happens because of those events we would not wish on anyone but that have to be experienced just the same. Head in the sand denial to our role in the events is not an option and greater appreciation for life happens from each of the joys and even setbacks all of us go through.

    Don’t wallow, don’t anger, or get apathetic or judgemental during pain and suffering.

    Chose to accept and see the how and why and benefit from them. To constantly work on our outlook, to rid ourselves of tearing down “stinking thinking”. Otherwise you infect others near and dear around you. You rob yourself and others from enjoying all the good in life, in others in it.

    Make things easier for yourself, for others and strive to find enjoyment, happiness that is surrounding us. If we open our eyes, ears, hearts and live in today. Plan and dream in the future. Maine is a place where there are special nooks and crannies to really think. To pray. To accept the unchangeable, to see and believe in the possibilities presented every day to all of us. Many of the ruts, holes, snags we encounter in life are because of our own limitations, not others that it can be too simple to blame. Point fingers at. Keep it simple, easy grasshopper. Strive to not get shook up, to instead hang loose. And become excited, enthused, passionate about what your life can offer others by sharing your skills, talents and working hard on relationships.

    I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers, ME Broker
    207.532.6573
    info@mooersrealty.com

  • Squeak Squeak Sound Of The Maine Potato Farm Harvester, Digger….

    Getting Maine Potatoes Out Of The Farm Land In To Spud House Storage.
    Snacks, Lunch Tastes 100 Times Tastier In The Maine Harvest Potato Field.

    Picking potatoes, working as a kid on the Maine farm land means starting early, getting up when it is pitch black outside.

    Rise and shinning to the smell of frying, sizzling bacon and home fries, eggs just the way you like them. Partnered with a stack of pancakes, french toast drizzled in Houlton Farms Dairy real butter and maple, blueberry or strawberry syrup. Preparing the sleepy workers, the potato warriors for the another day in the Maine field or spud house.

    Sometimes the radio or potato farmer hot line pre-recorded message announces a delay in the harvest start time.

    To be at the field at 8AM because of frost, or a rain set back. Possibly a scrub of the potato harvest mission altogether. Regardless, like a paratrooper gathered around the open airplane door to jump when the word comes in, the Maine farm workers need to have an equally gut busting lunch packed to get them through the day. The cold mornings, the blistering hot afternoons and any other kind of weather in between coupled with hard outdoor laboring hour after hour burn a lot of calories.

    Long hours when the weather is good means make sure extra water, snacks, a sandwich or two is handcrafted for that field lunch. Ice added to the water jug that is crucial for staying hydrated. To wash down the potato dust, to wet the whistle during the manual labor.

    Hard work but lessons learned in the Maine potato field classroom that stay with the worker for life. Making the most of the rain, cold, lack of sleep if you stayed up too late and played the night before. Clearing your head with the blast of fall air in Maine sweeping across the open potato field. Zipping up the sweatshirt a little tighter. Wishing you had added another clothing layer this morning as you fumbled in the dark to get ready to head to the section of Maine farm that needs harvesting attention focus today.

    Grapevine rumor has it among the migrant field workers that travel the circuit to harvest crops of all kind that Maine blueberry raking is harder than potato picking or harvester work.

    Because of the hotter weather weeks earlier in the year Downeast in Maine where most of the succulent blue good for you fruit is plucked, boxed, shipped to the processor freezers.

    Both field work arenas can be better all the way around if the Maine weather cooperates. If breakdowns are minimal and if the workers around you are pleasant, hardworking. Not Eeyores, whiners and lazy. Like any workplace setting, the chore at hand is less taxing if you know how to work, enjoy labor and rub shoulders with others wired the same way on the job chain gang.

    Strong, dependable work ethic in Maine is not a secret. To be considered lazy by your peers would be the worse shame a person could carry. Discrimination has happened a lot over the years because of what field work picking produces in kids started early. Begun when all family members are knee high to a grasshopper tall and brought along with older brothers, sisters, parents to the fields for the Maine harvest. Joy in being industrious, learning how to do the work more efficiently on the Maine fields meant crew foreman in the cities ask one question to the crowd of job applicants.

    “Who grew up on a Maine farm, worked on one in the audience?”

    Hands that went up meant a response from the guy with the clipboard, wearing a hard hat as he motions, saying “Come with me. You have a job. You start now”.

    Maine Potato Picking By Hand Is Hard Work Video

    Working Inside Grading Potato House Spuds Video

    Maine, we appreciate everything a little extra. Work a little harder, respect our surroundings and the fewer people in them a whole lot more.

    I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers, ME Broker
    207.532.6573
    info@mooersrealty.com
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  • Maine Biking Peaks Island, Around Portland ME Back Bay.

    Maine biking is one neat outdoor peddling recreational option to pass the time, to see Vacationland.

    Maine Biking, Try The Casco Bay Ferry Ride From Portland to Peaks Island.
    Until the next season rolls around for other healthy Maine living exercise options. You could bike Maine’s Acadia National Park to sample the nearly 50 miles of trails, discovering the many intricate granite bridges dedicated only to cyclists, hikers, horse drawn open carriages.

    Or you could head to Portland Maine, the Pine Tree State’s largest city to bike around the Back Bay trail.

    Taking a ferry ride to bike Maine’s Peaks Island. Witnessing the sights and sounds pedaling at your own leisurely pace around the perimeter roadway, the interior streets that have gradual easy hills. Population 843 but ballooning to 6000 in the summer months, Peaks Island is the largest handy to Portland Maine.

    The Casco Bay ferry ride is short. The damage for you and your bike is $14. Perched a top your bike seat you will see some swanky, palatial Maine homes of the rich and famous. Past and present. Complete with lots of spacing and tremendous ocean views along with the sound of surf waves pounding the rock ledge outcroppings along the Maine shore line.

    Pack a Maine picnic lunch.

    Go off road, through some interior vegetative pathways to bike the long dark interior in the rough. To see the old World War Two Battery Steele concrete bunker to add variety to the Maine biking day trip experience.

    The interior of Peaks Island is grid worked with hilly, twisting, winding short streets. The Maine island homes here more cottage like similar construction builds. More often than not shoulder to shoulder close. Up close and personal. Simple Maine vacation homes without the polarized, unique shape glass. Missing the gazebos, immense flower gardens, landscaping and elaborate stone walls, outdoor winding stairways.

    The new construction Peaks island Maine homes here taking up a very small, conservative footprint but often multi story high. Seemingly from this Maine real estate broker’s hunch, gut feeling that it is by design to not block the view for others behind the new home in front or to the side of existing structures. Or to comply with strict property lot side line set backs for new home construction.

    Peaks Island biking is an easy, highly scenic outing and make sure to bring your camera.

    To capture cruise ships at sunset leaving Portland Harbor. The flock of smaller sail boats plying the waters. And a glimpse of Bug Lighthouse, protecting the waves around the collection of Maine islands just off the Portland Maine harbor entrance. Bug Light, one of roughly sixty eight Maine lighthouses broadcasting news of the rock bound Vacationland coastline dangers, perils to any and all passing by seaward travelers.

    Seeing Maine atop of bike seat. With or without a motor. Get here quick as you can. And remember, stop fooling yourself. One week in Maine is not going to be enough once she gets into your system. And becomes a life long habit. A healthy addiction you teach, pass on to the next generation for never fade memory making.

    I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers, ME Broker
    207.532.6573
    info@mooersrealty.com

  • Learning From Your Kids Travels In And Out Of Maine.

    Maine Blueberry Raking Under The Hot Sun.
    $2.50 Per Box, 25 Pounds Or Half Bushel Paid For Raking Maine Blueberries.

    As children grow up, graduate from high school, college in Maine, they venture out, explore, begin their adult life.

    And what they learn, they share with parents back at the ranch. Or when a trip is taken to where they are a long way from the childhood Maine home.

    Oldest son Alex is swinging back through Maine from Colorado rafting, working winters at A Basin ski area to do his annual blueberry and potato pilgrimage.

    And Maine blueberry living on the barrens is not something I experienced growing up on a potato farm.

    So interesting to hear about the Maine blueberry gathering process that starts at 5AM with no delay due to frost like fall potato harvesting. Wyman’s is the central blueberry in Maine giant that runs the processing / distribution centers. The summer blueberry harvest like Maine potato fall operations is about three weeks long.

    Tines, rakes to comb through the Maine blueberry bushes gather the precious fruit. Strings for lanes are laid out in a field to follow for the blueberry picking. It helps if you get between two seasoned Honduran blueberry rakers / pickers as it serves to help like NASCAR drafting. You get pushed, pulled along by their momentum. Alex had a blueberry rake with 70 tines. To glean a great deal of blueberries with each swipe, swath taken with the rake. As you follow a course across the barrens marked out with a simple white string for lanes.

    A Mexican family shows up, puts on the apron, serves the blue berry workers meals out of a cook shack with many gas burners.

    Five dollars for lunch, six dollars for dinner which is unlimited. Breakfast is on your own with egg sandwiches made at 4 am to prepare for a Maine summer day that will only get hotter as it runs it course. As you wield a blueberry rake, the bigger the better for box count production.

    Strategy for more productive Maine blueberry raking, picking for the boxes that head to the processors to be frozen and distributed around the world? Find a section, row, lane that is not overgrown with bushes, rock out croppings to work around. The lower to the ground, cleaner sections have more blueberries per square foot. Less culch, other vegetation to wrestle with.

    Like potato sections in Maine that are grass free, not clumped up like end rows that grow longer or contract, these type of conditions for blueberries are more efficient to glean, rake. Not so much a hide and seek, hunt and peck process to maximize the fruit collected which translates into more boxes. Twenty five pounds is a half bushel of blueberries which the raker earns $2.50 for raking.

    In Alex’s two years of blueberry raking, staying at migrant shanty cabins for his exodus back to Maine before potato harvest and the sling shot back to being a Colorado ski lift operator winters, white albino berries have been seen once. Rare and used for jam for the locals.

    Thought to have some special powers, he said he spied only one ten foot section of the stand out white Maine blueberries.

    I asked if sampling the Maine blueberry happens on the barrens remembering nibbling on fresh strawberries during picking as a kid myself on the farm. He said with pesticides folks are warned not to, that it could cause rumblings down below.

    Maine, big state, the people here spend more of life outdoors.

    I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers, ME Broker

  • The Best Time To Visit Maine…

    Clucking, Whistling, Yelps... To Guide The Maine Horse Teams.
    Maine, Like When We Were Kids, We’re Outdoors Most Of The Time.

    Trick question because there is no best time to visit Maine.

    And your particular availability depends on the balls you juggle in the game called Life. When the kids are busy in activities ranging from T-ball to horse riding to cheering camp and hockey clinics, your ability to venture out revolves around school vacations.

    But when the kids are grown, you have the leisure to schedule some spur of the moment trips to Maine for rest and relaxation.

    You suddenly have boatloads of options. Really. As for sea coast towns and harbors, a little before and a tad after the main tourism season give you a more personal glimpse into the unique flavors each area offers too. Less crowded, more elbow room. And what about Maine weather, climate, any myths? Oh yeah.

    Things to do in Maine. Whoa. That is a tough one because of all the choices. As for area parks, bring your bike to explore the 50 plus miles of carriage roads. Take in the unique stone bridges of Acadia National Park. Or hike one of the many trails, the big selection of mountains at Baxter State Park and others around Maine. Being retired in Maine, relocating here for full time fun is cool. But you have lots of day and two day options. For a quick fix of Maine to tide you over until the next visit. All I know if one week would never do me if I was forced to live outside of Maine. Not nearly enough, need more in my system, day to day.

    Or if it is people you want to avoid, replace it with scenery and wildlife. You see more of both up close and personal by yourself, or as a couple. Maine was made for those kind of personal encounters. It’s not because we are anti social in Maine. But less people, more unspoiled wide open spaces on water, in the woods, on a hill top. Or peering out to sea at a Maine lighthouse. It’s not like this other places.

    No matter the season, or the reason, Maine.

    Always, always your best case scenario. Maine, are we there yet? Not just kids use the whine to show they are anxious and ready to bound out of the family car along the trip to get there. Stretch those legs, arms, your mind in Maine.

    I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers, ME Broker
    207.532.6573
    Email info@mooersrealty.com

  • Maine …. Living In Gentile Poverty, Being Highly Creative.

    Rebuilding A Maine Barn From Scratch Takes Time, Not Much Money.
    Living Simple, Happy, In Gentile Poverty In Maine.

    Back in 2001, a Maine farm property we had listed was not selling.

    So because the rear portion of this rectangular parcel of Maine land bordered another year round roadway, the back 20 acres was sold off. The couple who bought it were not flush with cash. Did not have highly lucrative weekly income streaming into a bank savings account.

    Eleven years later, I get a call about listing the land in Maine.

    When I turn signal into the 550′ long driveway I am impressed with what I see. The drive in shows flowers beds, landscaped grounds. Neat as a pin. As my jeep arrives in the main dooryard, an antique barn appears to the south of the Maine land. The couple had bought an old barn in Amity Maine for $500. Carefully dismantled it, reassembled the hand hewn beams with considerable patience, pride, love and respect.

    The barn had been used for horses with two box stalls years before my visit to list the property. But now the second floor hay loft instead of housing tidy rows of square bales, was a place to make music. To relax in the loft with friends who also played, were musicians of sorts too. Warm, comfortable colored lighting, the upper level of the gable roof line making this “space” inviting. I could mentally hear the jam sessions, laughter, time spent on a Saturday night socializing in the barn loft.

    Outside the wife had been very industrious, on her knees creating perennial flower gardens of all sorts.

    Placed in just the right spots. The perfect size for balance and placement to add to the setting. The couple had started with just Maine land. And cleared sections with a chainsaw together and not modern expensive woods machinery. You get an idea of what this couple is capable of together with creativity, patience but not flush with cash. And grateful, rich in gratitude, joy, a sense of inner peace radiating from both.

    Demonstrating living in “Maine gentile poverty” and smiling ear to ear in their day to day life. Not in a hurry or seemingly ham stringed by lack of funds, resources. Creating their own pathway of building a neat, hidden farmette country setting in the Northern Maine, Aroostook County outside Houlton Maine.

    The garage was moved in from another location a few towns away.

    Like the Maine barn, it came with next to nothing for cost in dead Presidents, sawbucks. But sweat equity, putting their back in to making the relocation move from where it was to the new spot on the Maine land the “expense”. I toured the inside and everything had a place. A a once basket case 18 year old Harley black motorcyle parked gleaming. A source of deep pride with the Maine bike owner. An addition for winter heating wood stacked, filled and awaiting snow flakes in the weather forecast attached to this garage / heated workshop.

    The cost for the modern septic system, drilled well, bringing power in 550′ feet, adding the multiple loads of gravel for a driveway, parking lot, base for the Maine house all done for $8000. Selecting a low low budget local earth contractor. Who lived down the road, a neighbor with zero overhead picked for the frugal operation. Everything for contracting machinery around him long long paid for and who still charged contracting prices based on a twenty years ago payment schedule.

    Because money was not readily available, highly resourceful methods and thinking came into play to create the Maine country home and land development.

    I am impressed with this couple and their quiet yet successful approach to create a loving Maine farm property from scratch. Using what they had to work with “reallocated” around them. Items some would classify basket case, trash not treasure.

    The Maine home is a classic. Two identical 1969 New Yorker mobile home trailers lived in by a mother and an Aunt that never had wild parties. Where lights were out by nine pm. Scripture verses quoted, hung through out the cared for homes as reminders on how to live life cleanly, simply, Godly.

    The Pennsylvania made homes were bought singularly and spent most of their life alone.

    But now joined together in marriage as one with the help of a bulldozer. That hooked a cable to one frame. To snug it tightly, get it up close and personal to the other. While down below the owner added ready rod to the two frames. Then tightening the bolts to complete the cinching together operation on the lower end of things. The cherry on top? The new metal roof added to shed snow over both now Siamese twin units. To prohibit leaking that flat roof mobile homes of that vintage are famous for in Maine snow country.

    Inside the Noah’s ark of “two of everything” inventory of rooms meant deciding which kitchen is best. How to reconfigure two Maine homes into one and all the renovations, removal, put back in construction. Again with the materials they can afford, have on hand and lots of time to think the new floor plan out. Planning together. Sharing a common vision the husband and wife craft, create and dream about together.

    Maine, money is not the end all and hard work, challenging yourself and enjoying the four season outdoor natural beauty is.

    I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers, ME Broker
    207.532.6573
    info@mooersrealty.com