Welcome to Port Ellery

Port Ellery, Maine, is a little harbor town way up the coast, Downeast, where the fog comes in every afternoon and everybody knows everybody's business, except for the business that really matters. It has a lighthouse, a white church on the hill, a ferry twice a day, the best chowder in New England at the Harbor Light Diner, one of the last sardine canneries on the coast, and two families who have hated each other since the summer of 1969.

Hi! I'm Stacy McCaffrey, I'm 20, and I'm a junior and a communications major at a state university in Pennsylvania. I grew up watching the soaps every afternoon with my grandmother, who has followed Guiding Light since it was on the radio, and who still hasn't forgiven anybody for taking Another World off the air in June. (Neither have I, Gram.) So when my roommate dared me last Christmas to write my own, I said fine, and I've posted a new episode every Monday since January 4. I haven't missed one yet, not finals, not spring break, not Labor Day. Gram reads every episode the day it goes up. My aunt prints them out for her.

Port Ellery is rated PG. There's kissing and there's slamming doors and there's a lot of people standing up in church at the wrong moment, but nothing your grandmother couldn't read. Mine does.

The Story So Far

Thirty years ago, Theodore Kennard bought the Posey family's wharf out from under them for back taxes, and built the cannery's north wing on it, and Mark Posey never forgave him. The Kennards have lived up on Gull Hill ever since, and the Poseys have fished lobster out of the harbor below, and the two families have not sat at the same table since.

Then, last Valentine's Day (Episode 7), Eric Posey, a lobsterman, asked Kimberly Kennard, a second-grade teacher, to marry him, on the end of that very wharf, in the snow. She said yes. Her father said a great many things, most of them loudly.

Meanwhile: a stranger got off the ferry on a foggy morning in January (Episode 1!) to be the new harbor master. Leland Palmquist says he's from Aroostook County, keeps to himself, and has been seen asking questions about the cannery, about the old wharf, and about the summer of 1969. Kimberly's brother Christopher runs the cannery office, but his wife Valerie, who is from Boston and never lets anyone forget it, has been secretly talking to a company in Montreal about selling it, and turning the waterfront into condominiums. Eric's sister Pamela, a nurse at the clinic, is married to Doug Warford, the cannery foreman, so they spend most of their marriage arguing about whose side they're on.

And in July (Episode 28), Charlotte Kennard, cleaning the attic, found a bundle of old letters, dated the summer of 1969, from Helen Posey to someone she called only "T." Charlotte said nothing to anyone. But the next week she took Eric's coffee cup from the diner when no one was looking, and her husband's comb from his dresser, and mailed them both to a laboratory in Portland.

The results came back on Labor Day weekend. The wedding was the Saturday after that. You can probably guess how that went. If you can't, start with Episode 36!

Gram's Shows

People ask what I watch. Mostly, what Gram watches. She's had Guiding Light on in the afternoon for as long as anyone in my family can remember, and before TV she listened to it on the radio as a girl. When I was little and stayed with her after school, I'd sit on the floor in front of her chair with a box of Ritz crackers, and she'd explain who everybody was and who they'd been married to and who was secretly whose sister, and I was hooked for life. I'm not going to tell you what happens on her shows, because if you watch you already know, and if you don't it would take a week. I'll just say: everything I know about how to end an episode, I learned from her TV.

If you love soaps, or if you think soaps are silly and want to be talked out of it, go read The Soap Opera Digest of One Woman. A lady named Gloria has watched daytime dramas for thirty years, and her page is a defense of the soap opera that I want to print out and hand to my Media Studies professor.

Write to Me!

I love getting mail about Port Ellery, even when you yell at me. Especially when you yell at me. (To the lady in Ohio who wrote to say she will never forgive me for Episode 30: I know. I'm sorry. It had to happen.) Tell me who you love, who you hate, and who you think set the fire. I read every one of them, and sometimes they change what happens next.