The Retirement of a Lifetime

Apartment and cottage living at Piper Shores offers residents fully updated and affordable homes, with all the benefits of Maine’s first and only nonprofit lifecare retirement community. Located along the Southern Maine coastline, our active, engaged community combines worry-free independent living with priority access to higher levels of on-site care—all for a predictable monthly fee.

But as Kenny has promised, the best is yet to come. On the second floor we pop into a treasure-filled attic from our childhood imaginations. There are layers upon layers of odd collectibles and yellowed news clippings. On a joist over our heads is a five-foot-long bill of a prize swordfish. Of course! Next to that, on the adjoining joist and getting equal billing, is a tenor saxophone. A sextant is cheek by jowl with a disco ball. It’s like that throughout, in part due to the tenant, a marine salvage operator and colorful harbor mainstay named Billy Lee. He’s not here today to explain the ceramic toucan or the cubist painting reprint or the saxophone, but no matter.

Kenny is overdue back at his bustling shop, but he’s happily losing himself in the buoys and belongings of fishermen he’s known, and vintage paintings, woodcuts, and photographs of the building we’re in. “It’s too bad, these are getting ruined— I hate it!” he says, alarmed at their dissolving condition. “But you don’t want to take them out of their spots.” It feels like a sacred space, as if we’re on an archaeological site, which we kind of are. There’s a ship’s bell and a tidy cast-iron stove. For a long time we hover over a small mounted photo: The handsome young fisherman on the right was a classmate of ours who died soon after the picture was taken.

The building teems with stories. Our stories. When we get back outside, I ask Kenny if he owns a painting of the Motif. Kenny has a robust art collection, one that’s so large he’s not sure of everything he’s got, but nothing immediately comes to mind. He professes no special sentimentality about the building in his backyard. What about a salvaged piece of wood from the original Motif? Did he get himself a keepsake? “Oh, I think I do have one of those,” he says. “Oh, sure.”