It’s 4 p.m. in December, and the sun is setting. While the poet Dylan Thomas urged us to “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” songwriter and poet Paul Simon addressed the darkness as “my old friend.” We can’t escape the early darkness and the long nights of winter, however we choose to react. So we eat, drink, light candles and sing as we watch the sun set, until finally it’s spring.

“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns,” wrote Mary Ann Evans, who later took the pen name George Eliot, to her tutor Maria Evans when she was about 22 years old. Press Herald photographers recorded the rich reds, greens, golds and browns of the season.

It begins unofficially after Memorial Day, with flowers in full bloom in June and ever-lengthening hours of sunshine. July brings the heat, warmer ocean water in the southern part of the state – and the tourists. It begins to slip through our fingers in August, all too soon. Summer in Maine.

Our photographers capture the dreary and the glorious of April before it finally yields to the sunshine of true spring.

Daylight saving time started again on Sunday, leading to dreams of those long summer nights in Maine, when the sun doesn’t set until after 8 p.m. There’s a bipartisan bill in Congress now, called the Sunshine Protection Act of 2021, sponsored by politicians as different as U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Ed Markey, D-Mass., that would make DST permanent. If it passes, we would not switch our clocks back in the fall. Meanwhile, Press Herald photographers took advantage of our lengthening days to look for beautiful light.

Love it or hate it, winter is here, in all its icy glory. When you are freezing outside – your feet like stone, your fingers like marble – consider the miracle of ice. Water, liquid and gas, made solid. Look closely and you’ll find its otherworldly beauty.

Gulls are often maligned as “rats of the sky,” but is that assessment warranted? Isn’t there beauty in their plaintive calls? Aren’t they as evocative of the coast as salt air, foghorns, bell buoys, lobster boats and lighthouses?
Or are they simply too common, too messy and too pushy to deserve our admiration?
Gulls, love them or hate them, are smart, fascinating, even beautiful, as our gallery shows. Just don’t call them seagulls. Birders will tell you there is no such animal.