By Agatha Winslow, Altar Guild Correspondent

MILLBRIDGE — At Willow Bend Community Church, the flower calendar taped inside the kitchen cupboard door is treated with more reverence than most committee minutes. It is also, according to everyone who has ever tried to schedule around Mother's Day, completely broken.

The sheet, laminated in 2008 and rewritten in dry-erase marker ever since, shows three surnames — Hargrove, Pell and Davenport — stacked on every Mother's Day square from 2012 through at least 2031. No one remembers who put the first name down. Everyone remembers who put the second and third.

"It's not a booking," said altar guild chair Myra Hargrove, 67. "It's a memorial. My mother always did Mother's Day flowers. When she passed, I kept the date. That is not the same as fighting over a casserole slot."

Pell family spokesperson June Pell, 59, disagreed only on the details. "Our grandmother funded the first brass flower stands in 1987," she said. "We have the receipt. Laminated. In a binder. We bring the binder."

The Davenports, who joined in 2011, say they simply signed the first open square they saw and have been "grandfathered in by confusion" ever since. "We offered to take Father's Day instead," said Tom Davenport, 44. "They looked at us like we'd asked to redecorate the baptistry."

For fourteen years the church has resolved the conflict the same way: all three families "sponsor" the flowers, the florist delivers one arrangement, and a vase of silk carnations that nobody likes sits on a side table as a peace offering. The silk carnations were purchased in 2015 during what the minutes call a "trial of shared stewardship." They have never been retired.

"They're dusty," admitted deacon-at-large Harriet Quill. "We've washed them. We've fluffed them. One year somebody put a real rose in with them and it looked like a hostage situation. But if we throw them out, someone will take it personally."

The florist, who asked not to be named because "I still deliver to all three houses," said the standing order is always white mixed with pink, no lilies, card line blank. "I used to put three cards," she said. "That caused a hallway incident in 2018. Now I put none. They argue about who was implied."

A proposal to rotate Mother's Day among the three families in a six-year cycle was introduced at a February board meeting, tabled in March, revived in April and lost, 5-4, after someone pointed out that 2032 would land on a Hargrove year again and "we'd just be back where we started, only with better math."

At press time, the 2027 square already listed Hargrove / Pell / Davenport in the same order as every year before it. The silk carnations remained on the side table. Quill said a fourth family had inquired about Easter instead.

"Easter is open," she said carefully. "We checked twice."