Sketchbook drawings from Maine

We spent a week on Little Cranberry Island, a few miles southeast of Mount Desert Island and Acadia National Park. We were there the last week of May, a time when it's still pretty cool and, in our case, fairly wet as well. Individually and as a community, the people on this island are very friendly, smart and helpful. Lobstermen, for the most part. Renee bought lobster for dinner right on the dock and my brother made a rhubarb pie from a brief harvest of the garden.

John brought along his dog, Bo, a lab who enjoyed daily dips into the ocean, each of which inevitably culminated in the near-euphoric discovery of yet another waterlogged, saliva-saturated stick proudly laid at his master's feet.

Access is by ferry. We stayed at the former Braided Rugs Inn, a big old Victorian with its own impressive library, accumulated over the life of the house. Josephine's House, as it is now called by islanders, is across the street from the island's post office and a few short steps from the elementary school -- a school that this year had an enrollment, I was told, of 12 or so.