In a community known for helping neighbors and strangers alike, one family is hoping kindness might bring two umbrellas home.

Carrie Jones

May 28, 2026

The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Geddy’s.

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BAR HARBOR—One of the beautiful things about Bar Harbor and the Mount Desert Island regional community is the way people unite to help each other—and even strangers—out.

This week, one family is hoping that same spirit might help bring home two missing umbrellas.

That community kindness happens over and over again on town-focused websites like Bar Harbor Barter and Swap, the Trenton Town Crier, and Friends of Southwest Harbor. People search for strangers’ lost dogs, pick up snapping turtles to haul them across the road, cheer on their neighbors’ kids, or help shovel walkways, get cars out of ditches, or just listen. They help social workers whose clients need essentials.

Neighbors build wood banks to help neighbors stay warm. They create Open Table for people to gather and talk and have a free meal on Tuesdays. They create theater, the Maine Seacoast Mission, live music events, historical societies. They give neighbors rides at Island Connections. They save animals at Acadia Wildlife and the SPCA of Hancock County.

Community members expand libraries (the Jesup Memorial Library is set to have its addition open this June), irrigate softball fields, sponsor events at the Criterion Theatre, and they create parades and ceremonies on Memorial Day to honor long dead soldiers and remember their sacrifice.

That positive proximity that builds community also happens in smaller, quieter ways.

Sometimes those ways even might involve lost umbrellas.

Katya Gunderson is hoping that Bar Harbor can help her find her family’s umbrellas. It’s not just any umbrellas. They are two really special umbrellas that someone took from Bar Harbor, Monday, May 25.

“As silly as it sounds, they have sentimental value to our family,” Gunderson explained. “My father, Ridley Gunderson, founded the company, Sector3 Appraisals, Inc. about 20 years ago. It’s a small company, and my dad worked hard to build it from a single-person venture to a flourishing business employing about 25 people currently.”

Her dad had just a few umbrellas made a couple years ago before he died.

“Each of us (my mom, my two siblings, and my sister in law) has one. My dad passed away suddenly and unexpectedly in December 2025, and losing something so closely tied to him and his legacy (despite them being just umbrellas!) has been upsetting,” she said.

She’s hoping people can help her find them.

They are heavy duty, blue and white umbrellas, much like many umbrellas at local hotels, but a wee bit sturdier.

And these two?

They have the logo of her dad’s company on it.

That’s another reason why they’re so special.

“We were walking around Bar Harbor on this past Monday, the 25th. My brother and his wife each had one (Two were taken.), and they had left them leaning outside the entrance of Cadillac Mountain Sports, in Bar Harbor, next to a couple of other umbrellas. When they came back out, their umbrellas were gone and they saw a few of the other generic ones that the hotels were giving out in their place,” she said.

She’s hoping somebody sees the umbrellas and contacts her so that her family can get them back.

“My family is from New York City, but we have been coming up to MDI at least once a year for more than 35 years, since my siblings and I were small children,” she said.

After someone dies, grief often hides itself inside everyday things.

It might be in a familiar coat, a recipe card, an umbrella left leaning outside a store.

The objects themselves may be ordinary, but the love attached to them is not.

Gunderson says her father always believed people on Mount Desert Island treated one another differently — more gently, more generously — than what they were used to in New York City.

Now her family is hoping that kindness might once again reveal itself, perhaps in the simple return of two umbrellas.

The best way to contact Gunderson if you find her umbrella would be via email, using this email address (katya.gunderson@gmail.com).

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