Barton Street, Presque Isle, Maine

When my spouse and I envisioned the trip to bury my dad, we did not have a crowd in mind, but our kids saw it differently. My parents had spent the eight years before he died living nearby and my folks had been a constant in my children's lives--they came annually if not more often, and this was the first death in our family since my FIL died over a decade earlier. So there was quite the crew and instead of staying in one of the hotels in town, I got three Airbnb's and one of them was on the street that my mother grew up on, just down the block from the church she got married in. The house here is the one that I knew, but it turns out that my grandparents built it when my mother was in high school and she only lived there a couple of years. They had the property long before that, but were unable to build during WWII--so what I thought of as the family homestead was not so much that, although my grandparents lived there until the mid-70's. The house she lived in growing up was just down the block, and one of the very fun things about the trip for all of us was my mother reminiscing on each and every drive we made between the three houses and to and from restaurants the whole trip--it is very likely her last trip here, and it was really great to see it once more through her eyes. My kids had the opportunity to fall in love with Maine as adults, and we all had a chance to see it as my parents did.