STANLEY IRA HALLET WITH ACCOMPANYING TEXT BY JUDITH GOLDSTEIN

I became friends with Judy Goldstein and her brother Jon Stein over many years of summer vacationing on Mt. Desert Island. They purchased their family property in the same year that my wife Judy and several friends bought our house. The year was the same, but everything else was different. We were in Bar Harbor in a mansion, an aging monument from Bar Harbor’s long past golden age and Judy and Jon shared a compact Bauhaus like cottage built in 1952 on the other side of the island. From a cleared, flat, grassy setting, we looked out on the immense expanse of Frenchman Bay. They were in a completely different part of Mt. Desert, on a small pond touching close to Somesville, Mt. Desert Island's most modest and picturesque town. 

 The typical Maine woods is often an impenetrable tangle of underbrush, the result of criss-crossing dead branches from the fir and spruce trees. It appears that only the top of these deciduous evergreens are alive as they block out the sun in its attempt to penetrate the forest floor.  The acidic needles that fall, form a thick forest floor where little new growth stands a chance of surviving. The resulting thicket hides everything including sizable boulders called glacial erratics that haphazardly fell to the earth when thick glaciers retreated from the island. Through a patient but strenuous act of editing, of careful removal, the once impenetrable forest became an ever-expanding refuge for plants as well as people.  

101 pages hardcover, dust cover, premium paper, lustre fiinish, web price $32 Blurb.com price $41.22

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