A slug slips into a pool of beer in Kathryn Olmstead’s garden. (Photo for the Bangor Daily News by Kathryn Olmstead.)

This is what happens when a University of Maine professor — my former adviser there and the editor who published my first story in Echoes magazine — retires. She experiments with beer. In her garden, with two fists clenching brown bottles of Bud, she slugs it down the garden patch.

Kathryn Olmstead, who hasn't aged since the day I met her, when I was in tenth grade at Houlton High. (Photo by John Clarke Russ of the Bangor Daily News.)

Read more about it in Kathryn Olmstead’s latest column at the Bangor Daily News: Garden slugs prefer Budweiser over imported brands. It’s from just over a week ago, and I just heard about it today on NPR’s weekly radio news quiz show, Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me.

More info:

• Echoes magazine, the Northern Maine Journal of Rural Culture
• Kathryn Olmstead columns for the Bangor Daily News