I had a hankering for some banana bread, is how it started. So I bought three bananas when I did the grocery shopping last week. You need ripe bananas for banana bread, so I set them aside thinking, I’ll make the bread this weekend.

I says to Charlie, “I’m saving these bananas for banana bread, OK?”

No reply. “Charlie!” I hold up the bananas. “I’m saving these bananas for banana bread.”

“Heard you the first time, Ida,” he says.

“Well, sometimes it’s hard to tell, honey”

I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about the digestive system of earthworms. In fact, since high school – when I had to dissect a worm and locate all its major organs, of which there didn’t seem to be very many – the subject has never crossed my mind. I seem to recall that worms take dirt in one end (only another worm can tell which end is the right one) and pass the same dirt out the other, a process that has metaphorical and philosophical implications that could fill volumes.

Well, we still have a few little patches of snow on the ground here in Mahoosuc Mills, but the ice is breaking up on the river and the birds are chirping up a racket. Spring is in the air; you can just smell it. Time for you-know-what: spring cleaning. Saturday, Charlie and me decided to get to it. While he made himself busy with a dump run and putting the snowmobiles to bed, I took one look at our oven, and decided to start there.

I wouldn’t have thought Maine would have a chance in the Institute for Economics and Peace’s competition to find the most peaceful state in the U.S. To take the title, the Pine Tree State would have had to defeat places like North Dakota (“The Nothing Ever Happens Here State”), Kansas (tourist slogan: “Unvaryingly Dull”) and Iowa (road sign at border: “You Were Probably Looking For Ohio”).

Well, I just finished making a batch of my Grandmother’s molasses cookies, and boy, they sure look beautiful, if I do say so myself. Just like I remember.

I have Grammy’s recipe written in her shaky hand on white (now yellow) lined paper. The thing even has Grammy’s molasses stains on it. My mother had it laminated for me years ago, and I’ve used it so much it’s starting to separate along the edges.

(Editor’s note: DownEast.com apologizes in advance for this edition of the Week in Review. At the last moment before deadline, the regular writer of this feature decided that if Paul LePage, the governor of Maine, could abruptly take off for Jamaica for a week’s vacation, so could he.