May Day! May Day! No, I don't need help, thank you.

I'm just reminiscing about the lost tradition of May baskets. We used to pick wildflowers and maybe put in a cookie or some penny candy. Sometimes we made baskets out of dried burdock, but most of the time they were that simple origami that gives you four little cups, or maybe a crown. We hung them on people's doorknobs, hollered "May Basket!" at the top of our lungs, and run like rabbits, with the receiver of the basket chasing after us.

I remember that my sister Anni had it easy one year. All of her contemporaries were down with chicken pox. She'd had it a couple years before. But I guess she got chased, at that. When you're recovering, you're never that sick that a good run won't do you good.

The Sheepscot Valley Conservation Association is conducting a Bio Blitz, “an intense period of surveying to record living species within a designated area” during the month of May. Call SVCA at 207-586-5616 to find out more.

Continuing the search for Capt. Warren Gove and cousins Albion and David. Cathy Orne and I met Tug Busé last weekend at the North Edgecomb Cemetery, where lo! we found burial plots for Thurston Gove (Warren's father), his two wives and one daughter, and for Solomon Gove (father of Albion and David), his wife and a daughter.

"I was born and raised in Warm Beach, Wash., about 50 miles north of Seattle,” Tug said. “I grew up on the water, and have always loved it. I went to Bowdoin College in Brunswick because of my Civil War hero Joshua L. Chamberlain (I've been interested in history for a long time). I have lived (besides Washington and Maine) in California, Iowa, South Carolina, and even China for 5 and a half months. I will be moving back out to my beloved Washington State in a week and a half."

Here is one nugget from Tug's research, not helpful in tracking down Capt. Warren and associates, but possibly amusing (if annoying, I apologize) for those descended from Enoch Gove, an item under domestic news and opinion in the Boston Recorder, Sept. 25 in the 1880s, vol. 8, issue 37, p. 147: Remarkable Circumstance. The Wiscasset Intelligencer states that a child of Mr. Enoch Gove, of Edgecomb, about two and a half years old, for the last twelve months, had suffered under some strange and unaccountable indisposition. But on the 20th ult. the cause of its illness was fully ascertained. In a violent vomiting the child threw from its stomach a green frog, about half-grown, which, though dead at the time, had every appearance of recent animation."

Cathy Orne and I reported on our adventures at the recent Edgecomb Historical Society meeting, before heading out to see Susie Stephenson's progress in the Salt Marsh schoolhouse. "The bathroom will be last,” Susie said. But she has her great aunt's classic potbelly stove in the classroom, and an electric stove, artfully disguised as a woodburner, in the addition, chiefly for dyeing batches of yarn and other artistic tasks, but I daresay for an occasional cup of hot soup. She has graciously invited EHS to hold occasional meetings there.

The next EHS business meeting will be Thursday, May 22, 2 p.m., in the conference room at the Edgecomb Eddy School, but we also plan an evening meeting that same date at the Edgecomb Congregational Church, featuring Sue Carlson's "Hidden in Plain Sight" experiences discovering archaeo-astronomical sites throughout Maine and elsewhere in New England. More about that later, and in press releases to come.

Just now I'm too busy sunning myself in the unaccustomed warmth at 234 River Road, 207-633-297, and jocam@tidewater.net.