The Midcoast takes wearing so many layers in winter, when it and its ghost, the cold winds that underly and undermine spring, are finally gone for about five months, we can’t wait for short sleeves, or at least a single layer of long sleeves; or I can’t, at least. So when we finally went short-sleeved when it hit the mid-80s last week, it felt great, and right. It always does, like we have survived another winter and can get back to just functioning outside instead of withstanding it.

But beware: She or he who is out and about in short sleeves and for some, not me usually, shorts, can be so comfortable and so relieved it is this time of year, they can forget its fickleness. This happened to me Monday. The rain showers were done for the day, the sun was out and, seeing others in them that day, I had to wear short sleeves. Who wants to be overly warm under the sun?

How quickly we forget, or I did. The sky turned gray and winter’s ghost, the cold winds, not the mild ones one is grateful for when it’s hot out, returned! They were not gone for the next five months after all, but were a wisp away, and then back, a reminder this is Maine, and if you want something else, go someplace else.

But it is beautiful and it is home, born, chosen, or chosen again, and so we stay.

And we learn the lesson some of us must relearn every year about now: It is never a wrong time of year for layers. Have the short sleeves underneath, in case they are needed, but otherwise, be glad for, and remember, the long sleeves.

Week’s positive parting thought: It was hard to write a jovial editorial this week, with so much mayhem in the news again, including the latest senseless mass shootings in the U.S. that have ended lives and devastated families; I heard the quaking voice of a CNN reporter in Buffalo Monday asking if this is just what our nation is going to continue be, that this can go on, as it has time and again; and if you are, as I am, still following the news in Ukraine, then, well, it is hard to find happiness in the news.

But Wiscasset had plenty to be happy for last week, including a beautiful outdoor night for Wiscasset Elementary School’s Disney concert that proved prelude to the stunner of an announcement in Augusta the next day: Wiscasset had a Lincoln County teacher of the year, a beloved one in Trae Stover. And thank goodness, the morning after could not have been more perfect weather for the celebration at WES.

I am not sure who was more excited: Stover and her admirers in their appreciation of her and her for them; or me, to get to cover it, and have a buoyant Wiscasset moment to photograph and tell about.

It wasn’t Buffalo, it wasn’t Ukraine, and all each is going through that rightly led the national news this week. WES’s events and a top scholars night at Wiscasset Middle High School were just nice things, among other nice things, that happened in one town in one week.

Sometimes, the sun shines when it is needed most.