Wiscasset Police Sgt. Kathy Williams will miss her boys.

That’s what she calls the men she’s worked with for years at Wiscasset Police Department and Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office, where she serves civil paperwork on people. Williams, of Edgecomb, did her first patrols for Boothbay Harbor Police Department, about 20 years ago.

After 13 years serving Wiscasset, the Allentown, Pennsylvania native, 58, is retiring. Now that daughter Alexis Burns is grown and graduated from Wiscasset High School, Williams is selling the 20-acre farm where she raised her and rehabilited many wild and domestic animals.

She’s found the large animals new homes; the inside ones are moving with her to Virginia where Williams has family, and the winters are shorter. People there think it’s rough to have four consecutive days in the 40s, she said.

Maine’s rougher winters, like last year’s, are a big part of the appeal to head south while she’s still relatively young, Williams said inside the Wiscasset police station Friday night. She was just beginning her shift.

She’d like to be gone by Christmas, if everything with the farm’s sale and the move fall into place that soon. Otherwise, probably by the first of the year, she said.

She will miss not only her fellow officers, but the people of the area. But she’ll only be a phone call or a Facebook message away, and she’ll be up to visit.

In Virginia, she might take some law enforcement work, serving papers, or maybe doing jail work or court security, but nothing as physical as police patrol.

“It’s time to move on.”

She doesn’t call Wiscasset Police Chief Troy Cline one of the boys. He’s higher than that, she said.

He thinks very highly of her, too.

When citizens come in to the Wiscasset police station to see her, they don’t ask for Sgt. Williams; they ask for Kathy, Cline said Dec. 3.

It would bother him, because addressing officers by their rank shows respect. But he came to realize, Williams is so well-known and well-regarded that, to the community, she’s Kathy.

Cline recalled Williams being instrumental to his own acclimation to the department and the town; she introduced him to everyone and showed him the ropes, Cline said.

“She’s been a valued member of this team ... She’s a very hard worker,” Cline added.

In separate interviews, Cline and Wiscasset Town Manager Marian Anderson cited Williams’ passion for animal welfare, including her service to Lincoln County Animal Shelter in Edgecomb.

“She is certainly very passionate about animal welfare issues and has been a real leader in that in Lincoln County,” Cline said.

Anderson said she got to see Williams’ dedication to animals when the two served together on the shelter’s board.

“And she’s just an amazing police officer, truly. She’s very good with everyone she comes in contact with,” Anderson said. “We are going to miss her.”

Regarding animal welfare’s importance to her, Williams said if you don’t have compassion for an animal,  you’re not going to be someone who has compassion for a person. She tends to get along with people she’s arrested as well as the public at-large.

Cline has posted the sergeant’s job in anticipation of the opening. The position is an important one. A sergeant in a small law enforcement agency like Wiscasset’s is higher in command than sergeants in larger ones, where they may be third, fourth of fifth in command, Cline said. In the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department, for example, a sergeant is below a lieutenant, chief deputy and the sheriff, he noted.

Asked what her favorite part of police work has been, Williams said: “That’s a hard one. It’s a passion, something you either like to do or you don’t.

“You see all the good and you see all the bad. And you’re glad you can be there to help through all of it.”