This microstory is the third in a 3-part series, condensed from a longer piece originally published in the literary journal kerning | a space for words. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2.

The storm has passed and the weekend’s over. We take the long way home through Lubec, the little town where Julie’s store once thrived, both now ghostly whispers of their former selves. The place at the end of the earth, lost in the fog. The place that has never wanted to be found.

Candy striped lighthouse, her great-grandfather the lighthouse keeper. Blocks of vacant, once-majestic seafarers’ homes. Storefronts boarded up as if awaiting a perpetual hurricane. The Quik Shop closed for good. Everything upended by a faltering economy. We peer through the dingy glass, the store as barren as a blueberry field. Outside, dormant gas pumps.

I’d lived here for such a short time. But the memories persist, as indestructible as our friendship, as steadfast as the fishermen and blueberry rakers who have lived here for generations. All these years and we’ve never lost touch. The friend I would accompany to the end of the earth.

And in the end, my story isn’t about loss or the things we leave behind, but of what endures.

Some asshat was always banging on the door at 11:05, Julie says, every night after we locked up. Always for a 12-pack of Bud and a carton of cigarettes.

Julie managed her family’s general stores—both of them in Washington County, the easternmost spot in the nation—for nearly thirty years, and when she’ d sold them recently, she’d been flooded with bittersweet relief, the way you feel when someone you know who’s suffered too long finally passes away.

What she left behind: a legacy, her identity, her own self.

This microstory is the second in a 3-part series, condensed from a longer piece originally published in the literary journal kerning | a space for words. Here’s Part 1.

We arrived at Indian Lake the day before. A road trip to an old friend’s family camp in eastern Maine for a long weekend. Her husband moose hunting in the North Woods, mine swimming laps three thousand miles away.

In the dooryard, a felled tree. The foliage in full bloom and dock spiders cautiously crawling along the deck railing. Sky the color of fog. The earthy odor of mud cellar and lake water. Not even the trill of a loon. We’re so far removed from civilization, I can’t be sure I exist.

This little camp has outlasted every other tropical storm and hurricane, Julie says. We’ll be okay.

This microstory is the first in a 3-part series, excerpted from a longer piece originally published in the literary journal kerning | a space for words. Catch Part 2 and 3 in upcoming weeks.

Subscribe now

A mossy seawall, damp from the incoming tide. In the distance, the lighthouse, red glass sparkling in the sunlight.

We splashed in the tide pools, shells to our ears and still, I hear it, I hear the whisper of the wind. I feel it, I feel the waves, as smooth as sea glass. And I think of the marvel of being a child; the sweetness and joy of being alive.

Spider bikes and Silly String. Plaid bell-bottoms and a swipe of Bonne Bell chocolate cherry lip smacker. When all that mattered was the prize in the Crackerjack box.

The French card game we played, crickets chirping in the meadow out back. When we were still a family.

Magic 8 balls and mood rings. Partridge Family Fan Club membership card. When time and the future simply ceased to exist.

And suddenly I’m a kid again and summer means forever and everything is right with the world.

For a decade, I’ve volunteered as a running buddy for the annual Girls on the Run* 5K. In this race, everyone’s a winner. Every bib number is “1.” Every girl gets a medal, face paint, glitter and bling.

This year is different. I’m a “sweeper.” Three of us, back of the pack. Our job: making sure no one is left behind.

This year, a reminder to slow down; to cross the finish line and savor the moment—a first.

*2026 marks the 30^th anniversary of Girls on the Run, an international nonprofit organization. Its youth development program incorporates running and other physical activities to enhance girls’ social, emotional and physical skills and behaviors and successfully navigate life experiences. The Girls on the Run 5K series is the largest in the U.S.

---

Ice skates, blades rusted. A mildewed box of books–Harriet the Spy, Amy Loves Goodbyes. A puff of dust when I open The Tale of Jemima Puddleduck.

And in the antique cradle where I was first rocked to sleep, my mother’s art portfolio. Newspaper tear sheets from the fashion ads she illustrated during the rocky divorce years. Magazine ads. This sketch.

The animals in the sketch—my father’s teddy bear, its stuffing leaking out; my own Winnie-the-Pooh; a rabbit—still in the cradle. The cat, like the cries of my newborn self, long gone.

She was my running partner, too; together, we logged nearly 10,000 miles. To an increasingly outraged world, she brought comfort. Her love knew no bounds.

Kimber, our 14-year-old German Shorthaired Pointer rescue, took her last breath this week. She was the best dog ever. They all are.

In the middle of it all, a vintage market: a kaleidoscope of past eras spanning the decades of a bygone century. Where once futuristic mid-century modern is now both past and present.

Bar carts and tiki torches. A plaid Thermos, pastel Tupperware, paisley Mumus, woodgrain hi-fi.

All of us yearning for a time we were never a part of.

Amid the desolation of the Sonoran Desert, a former mining community called Brenda, named for one of the twin children of the couple who settled the land a century ago. Both children kidnapped, so the story goes, its ending fading into obscurity like the mine’s mosaic of ores.

Boarded-up windows, rusted siding, empty trailers, shanties. A boat; a stove; a church in the dust.

And everything else left behind: dreams, hopes, faith.

We drank iced tea from aluminum cups—metallic blue, gold, and copper, the same color as her ’72 Cutlass Supreme, the one the mechanics salivated over. The antique clock that hung above her table now hangs in my kitchen, silent; forever stuck at two twenty-two.

.

Heaven, I wrote.

Our lives were still whole, then; our ending had yet to be rewritten.

Before the world crashed out.

and knowledge came not from machines—

time and worry did not exist

*

Before the end, before the multitude of mistakes, when the moon brought clarity

and sea-drops shimmered and moss, thick and vibrant

softened the sharp-edged world—

fear and anxiety were yet unformed

*

I inhale the memory of a life preserved in an amber epoch—

And I remember now. I remember everything.

I remember this moment a long time ago.

*

In the end,

we begin

again.

read (d)evolution part 1 here!

It was years before I returned to Maine for the holidays. I spent Christmases with my California family: crown pork roast and zucchini casserole. Later, we’d all sit at the beach. On striped towels, watching the surfers at the pier. Secretly wishing for snow.

excerpt from Secret Recipes: recipe card microstories

Subscribe now

He may have been a desert dog, but he never met a body of water he didn’t like. The neighbor’s pool. A creek in the White Mountains. The San Diego dog beach.

For birthdays, Milk Bone cakes with peanut butter icing. He had his own Christmas stocking, his name in gold glitter. I told him my darkest secrets. He loved me anyway.

In human years, he almost made it to a hundred. All these years later and still, I whisper his name each morning.

Together we weathered riots and earthquakes, droughts and divorces. A boss; a friend; sometimes, a mother. She once drove through South Central LA with a paring knife for a weapon.

She welcomed me into her family. We played board games, took road trips, baked Christmas cookies. Even her recipes were witty.

Time knows no hour, she often said; but it does, for now it is the ultimate memory thief.

Despite the fires at the turn of the 20^th century, Jerome became the richest copper mine in the world. Its reputation for boozing, brawling, bordellos and brothels earned it the title of “Wickedest Town in America.”

Production peaked; fortunes reversed. The boomtown went from 15,000 to 50 souls mid-century. America’s Wickedest Town became America’s Largest Ghost Town.

And still, Jerome survived.

Today, an eclectic community lives on: writers, artists, musicians, and historians, haunted by the clinking of pickaxes from a ghostly past.

Next Tuesday, my food blog Cook & Tell, leaves the island for a culinary tour of Spooky Season in Jerome. If you’re not yet a subscriber, sign up!

Cook & Tell

blending memoir with menu: a foodletter about cooking, family and life on a Maine island

By Amie McGraham

--Field Notes from a future book on three generations of family foodwriters

My grandparents’ dog, Duke, was the subject of many of my grandfather’s illustrations. Read more about him here, here and here!

Mid-century modern: Housewives replace wartime working women. Perms and peroxide; cake mixes and sewing kits.

Every decade redefining women’s roles and beauty ideals. The braless freedom of the ‘70s. Women in the boardroom, in politics. Silicone and Botox; tradwives and influencers. A return to domesticity.

My own continuum: 1983, a newlywed playing house in a trailer park. Men marry a mother, not a wife, I learned, swapping housework for business suits in the ‘90s. A quarter-century later, a family caregiver in flip flops. Now, a work-from-home food writer.

You’ve come a long way, baby, the ’60s cigarette ads told us.

Have we?

This is the last microstory in the mannequin moments trilogy. Read the other two here and here.

Over a century old, once a lunch cart nestled among now-shuttered canneries. A bygone era of seafarers, smugglers and sardines.

Inside, minimal décor: two buoys, a chandelier fashioned from wine bottles. Generic tableware. On the menu: “Complicated Breakfasts” and “Handhelds (For the Fork-Challenged).” The bar, in a separate room, spans an entire wall. Outside, a deck overlooking the bay.

The place where the sun first rises. Home of the Wabanaki*, the People of the Dawnland.

*Since the dawn of time, Native American peoples have inhabited the land now called Maine. Today people from the five tribes—the Maliseet, Micmac, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot and Abenaki—collectively known as the Wabanaki, live throughout the state. I am grateful to be here, and acknowledge that I am doing so on the ancestral and unceded territory of the sovereign Wabanaki people that call this land home.

Share the micro mashup.

Diners Club is an ongoing microseries. Read more here, here, and here.