OGUNQUIT, Maine — The view from here is summertime lovely, the sunshine shimmery, the sky the sort of nautical blue you never see even a quarter-mile from the shore. A solitary sailboat, bouncing on flukey breezes, creases the ocean. It is July, the month of our national holiday, and much of the nation is on holiday.

It would be a crime against nature to be here in Maine, a state so favored by nature, and to read anything but a book rooted in Maine. It’s the setting for so much of our national literature, from Kenneth Roberts (hardly known anymore, but a staple of my childhood) to Henry David Thoreau (whose musings about Mount Katahdin might be as much of statement about nature, and human nature, as his meditation from Walden Pond) to Stephen King (whose writing ranges from horror to Red Sox home runs).

And so I have at hand this holiday something old (E.B. White’s “One Man’s Meat,” about his coastal saltwater farm) and something new (Adam White’s “The Midcoast,” a splendid first novel set in his Maine hometown of Damariscotta). The two Whites aren’t related, but a passage from the elder White’s book, published in 1944, struck me, almost guiltily, during my respite of trivial, peaceable pursuits in this time of terror and trauma. In it, he speaks, almost apologetically, about his essays, themselves written “while engaged in trivial, peaceable pursuits, knowing all the time that the world hadn’t arranged any true peace or granted anyone the privilege of indulging himself for long in trivialities.”

Also at hand is “Chickens, Gin, and a Maine Friendship,” a collection of the correspondence of White, whom you likely remember from “Charlotte’s Web,” and Edmund Ware Smith, a writer almost, but unfortunately not, forgotten today.

The letters, written between 1956 and 1967 — basically the period between the Suez Crisis and the Six-Day War, though neither merited mention in those letters — were given to the Skidompha Public Library in Damariscotta 42 years ago. Befitting their value, they were salted away in a safe-deposit box. No one thought to retrieve them until 2018. Reading them is dipping into a time capsule, summoning the way of life of two writers who spent much of their lives in Maine. Take a peek at what they put to paper, friend to friend:

Having put a book about semicolons on the non-fiction list, I feel that my work is done, and I can now just curl up with a bottle of Poland water and let the world go by. — E.W.S., Oct. 15, 1959

No writer survives without a copy of “Elements of Style,” the guide to syntax and usage William Strunk Jr. produced in 1918 and White revised, and revived, in 1959.

That was a hell of a fine northeaster, depositing 13.6″ hereabouts — nothing to challenge in my jamas. While it was building up, Joe French and Moose Millward came down in their truck and installed a new Schoolhouse Stove for heating my barn workshop. — E.W.S., Dec. 31, 1959

The weather, and winter heating, were the principal preoccupations of Maine then. The weather, and winter heating, remain among the principal preoccupations here. There are four seasons here; the suntanned visitors sometimes forget that. But it is winter that defines Maine.

Am at the moment observing at close range a pair of redstarts working themselves to the bone to launch one cowbird nestling … Here in this tiny family circle we see the triumph of promiscuity and irresponsibility over fidelity and zeal. — E.B.W., July 2, 1960

These men were obsessed with birds — out their windows, in their henhouses, on the dinner table. White may have been a keen observer of avian culture, but his meditations on the fragility of fidelity and zeal mark him as a keen observer of human nature.

We have just drawn plans for and are beginning work on a henhouse, for about two dozen birds … Once in a while in the big markets you buy a chicken that tastes like arnica, a thing we want to avoid. But we hear that nowadays most feed is full of medicines of various kinds. Do you know if you can buy the pure stuff, and if so, where? — E.W.S, Nov. 21, 1960

It seems that when the Smiths visited the Whites, the chicken dinner was especially juicy, prompting the Smiths to wonder whether “part of their flavor might have been due to feeding the fowl with non-medicated, non-antibiotic grain.” The couples were 60 years ahead of their time.

Send a recipe for a lime rickey to me. I do not know how to build a lime rickey and do not wish to go ahead blindly. — E.B.W., Feb. 8, 1962

Like the prolific Smith, the lime rickey is all but unknown today. That’s a pity. We will fix that before this column ends.

Last word from you was a June 3 postcard snooting my egg production figures and bragging about your hen with the busted hip. My hens have no broken hips, and how a reliable poultry man would break a hen’s hip is beyond me. Shame on you. — E.W.S., Aug. 27, 1964

They shared an obsession with chickens. Both raised them. Theirs was a friendly competition. But a competition nonetheless.

White died in 1965, Smith two years later.

Now back to the lime rickey. Within living memory, you could walk into a drugstore — not CVS or Walgreens, but one owned by a local pharmacist — and sit down at a soda fountain. There, a high-school student in white shirt, black bow tie and folded-paper hat — it might have been Bob Dole, had you lived in Russell, Kansas, and been a habitue of Dawson’s Drug Store in 1940 — was the soda jerk who was accomplished in creating a refreshing blend of lime, seltzer and maybe cherry syrup.

But that’s probably not what Smith had in mind. The two were fervent gin advocates, and surely were corresponding about the cocktail version of the lime rickey — basically the same thing, with a lusty gin infusion. Both might have known the cocktail was mentioned in “The Great Gatsby.”

Today, several videos on the web would have provided Smith with ample lime rickey instructions. Instead he wrote a letter. A stamp cost 3 cents when they started their correspondence, 4 cents when they stopped. But what was inside their envelopes was priceless, not even remotely trivialities.

David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.