Singers of Edgecomb! Give the Lincoln Arts Festival Chorus a call! There is still space for singers, especially tenors and basses, no audition required. Prepare to perform Haydn's Mia Cellensis, Mariazeller Mass and Aaron Robinson's An American Requiem on August 14 and 17, under the direction of Dr. Robert Russell. Rehearsals are on Mondays, 7:30 p.m., at the Boothbay Harbor Congregational Church, 7:30 p.m. Call Carolyn Shubert, 633-2314 or Judy Davidson, 633-2968 for more data.

Saturday, July 12, from 12:30 to 3:30 p.m., come and enjoy the Fourth Annual Books and Blooms Book Fair at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, co-sponsored by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. Meet Maine authors, including several from Edgecomb!

The night before, CMBG will present Eric Jay Dolin whose book "Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America" is among the best non-fiction titles of 2007, sez the New York Times Review of Books and others.

The week of July 7-11, the Morris Farm presents 'Earth-Friendly Farm,' exploring ways to work and live in earth-friendly ways. Call 882-4080 or www.morrisfarm.org for more information. Limited scholarships are available. You can sign up for several weeks, or only one at a time. Most of these programs are for ages six through 10; the week of July 28 through Aug. 4

will be for older children, 11 through 14.

To clarify a recent column's tidbit about bureaucracy, Lee Smith has supplied me with the true explanation: 'When a new person is elected or appointed to do registrations there is a period when he or she is unable to do them until training is done. The period is six months, although I don't know the exact date so I put `until further notice' on the notice. This is standard procedure.

"When Debbie Boucher is sufficiently indoctrinated she will be able to do everything I have been doing. There's a lot to learn!!! Lee.' Debbie telephoned me with the same information. Ah, well, it's still bureaucracy, but with a practical and sensible purpose.

Speaking as we have been of standard procedure, Bruce has just spotted the following public notice: All persons who have attended Wiscasset Public Schools from 1998 and were born prior to July 1, 1982, or their parents, should know the Wiscasset School Department is purging its files for that period. If you want the material in those files, let the department know before August 1, because after that date, the files will be destroyed. Call 882-6298 to make arrangements for obtaining the records before that date. The school department will keep permanently the barebones records: student name, address, phone number, grades, attendance record, classes attended, grade level completed, and year completed.

The annual Iris sale will be held on Thursday, July 10 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Edgecomb Thrift Shop at the Edgecomb Congregational Church in Edgecomb. At least six varieties of German Bearded Iris will be available at a cost of $4 per pot. Louise Hardina, the spark plug behind the thrift shop, raises German Bearded Iris. She has cultivated over 30 varieties in her gardens in Bristol. Each year she splits off some of the iris corms and makes them available to area gardeners. The money raised furthers the mission of the Thrift Shop to raise funds to support various helping agencies serving elders, teens, area food banks, homeless shelters and other community and global needs. The Thrift Shop is staffed by a team of volunteers who man the shop on Tuesdays and Thursdays and prepare a community luncheon every Tuesday.

The Edgecomb Thrift Shop is located on Cross Point Road at the Eddy Road off Route 27 toward Boothbay Harbor. Look for the signs for the church. For information call 563-5236. Leave a message, your call will be returned.

Edgecomb Deans' Listers at the University of Maine: Matthew Miller, David Nickerson and Rita Sieracki; also Chelsea Cameron from across the river! Well done, all!

Let's give a loud 'You Go, Girls!' to Boothbay Harbor Olympics rower Elle Logan and her Camden teammate, Anna Goodale! Both are first-time members of the Olympics Women's Eight team. Kudos also to Wyatt Allen of Portland, on the Olympics Men's Eight. Three athletic Mainers we can all be proud of!

The 2004 Men's Eight won a gold medal; the Women's Eight that year took a silver. At the risk of offending sportslovers, I have boycotted watching the televised Games for the past several years. The TV coverage is objectionable to an extreme, too nationally chauvinistic for my stomach, and focused solely on the first place winners, dismissing the second and third placers as 'losers.' I cheer for Moroccan distance runners and Czech discus throwers and Sumatran divers just as lustily as I do for the home team. That's the point, or used to be, of the whole event! To bring nations together in honest competitions of athletic talent. As for the silver and bronze medalists, I cheer all the lustier, because, friends, those are the people or teams who make the gold medalists sweat!

Herein lies a tale. I personally am the antithesis of athletic, but I was once a swimming mom. Elder daughter Daphne, at Woodward High School in Cincinnati, was a member of their women's swim team, which, by the time of the county finals, had dwindled down to about six members (and I take pleasure that they were evenly divided, three white girls, three black). They had to compete against schools like Richmond (Ohio) High School, which, rumor had it, trained in the fast currents of the Ohio River itself, and their breast-strokers were uniformly female whales. No offense, you have to be broad-shouldered to manage the breast stroke at any kind of speed. Woodward's only breast stroke swimmer was willowy by comparison, but had the shoulder strength and came in second, I do believe. (When Daphne reads this, she can correct, amend, and add to this saga.) The conclusion of the competition saw the Woodward team receive the Bronze Medal. And no mother could have been prouder, of all six swimmers!

Have a glad and safe Fourth of July, everyone! Fireworks over our several bodies of water, parades through our several towns! And give a friendly salute in the direction of Fort Edgecomb, which, according to my reckoning, at this time in 1808 might have been several excavations for foundations, and building up of earthworks, not yet ready to roll in the cannon nor man the garrison. Who did the work? The U.S. Army? Or the residents of the region? Or a collaboration among them all? I speculate about Moses Porter of the early Corps of Engineers, mulling the plans for the blockhouse, the redoubt along the shore, the positioning of officers' quarters and enlisted men's barracks, and where do we put the local volunteers? Are the soldiers in new style Federal uniforms? Or are some still wearing out their fathers' and grandfathers' buff and blue, or just swaling away with shovels in their ballooning shirt sleeves and knee britches?

Now and then an Edgecomb woman shows up with mountains of salleryash biscuits and cheese from Edgecomb cows and sheep, possibly even from goats.

Savoring Independence at 234 River Road, 633-2978, jocam@ midcoast.com.

This column appears in the Boothbay Register, The Lincoln County News, the Wiscasset News-paper, and at www.Edgecomb.org .