Category: Family and friends

A moving feast

Joy Clough3 Comments

As a woman who prides herself on upholding nontraditional traditions, nothing is more sacred than my holiday feast. No common turkey for me. Christmas goose? No thank you—still too middle of the road. Years ago, I dumped my old standby of beef loin in favor of a bolder, more exotic cut of roast beast(s). Come rain or snow or dark mountain-top delivery, I now must eat Turducken.

Tur(key) + duck + (chick)en = Turducken. It’s a de-boned chicken stuffed into a de-boned duck, which is then stuffed into a de-boned turkey. The turkey drumsticks, breast and outer skin remain, making it look like your iconic holiday main course. But inside it’s a savory mystery of light and dark meats that Grandma never carried to the table unless she came from down on the bayou.  I discovered Turducken on the Food Network, back when cooking/reality shows weren’t a dime a dozen and actually offered some instructional value. I remember the demo having all the boast and swagger of Emeril Live, the intrigue of Man vs. Wild, and the potential pitfalls of a DIY episode gone bad. I took one look at the succulent end-product the chef presented to the camera and knew I wanted to devour some Turducken. I took a longer look at the chef’s three-hour carving and stuffing procedure and knew I wanted it prepared in anyone’s kitchen but my own.

That’s when I found the Cajun Grocer, voted best Turducken source by The Wall Street Journal. Their website got my mouth watering and convinced me that shipping a 15-pound frozen turkey trifecta was a breeze. As long as I observed their holiday delivery schedule from Lafayette, Louisiana, I could savor their signature creation anywhere in the world. I got so fired up, I even went for their spicy seafood Jambalaya stuffing.

The first couple of Turducken Christmases boosted my confidence. Leery that first year that the thing would arrive on Dec. 21 and be rotten come Christmas morning, I since learned that its hermetically sealed, dry ice-packed shipping box kept it frozen till way after oven time if I didn’t unearth it immediately upon delivery. Thawing it took nearly an ice age! I also figured out that: 1) relying on the little pop-up thermometer for Turducken doneness is not a perfect science; 2) despite how it sounds, Jambalaya stuffing juices make for some awesome gravy; and 3) once I served the concentric circles of sliced meat with all their Cajun fixings, my family would come to expect and highly anticipate a repeat performance every year.

Naturally, I planned for Turducken to be the central attraction at my first Christmas dinner in Rangeley. I placed my order on Dec. 9, and went about the rest of my holiday business, calm in knowing I had already checked off my top-of-the-list item. “Been there, done that,” I said to myself, picturing the square styrofoam container showing up on my porch via UPS just in time for my thawing ritual. It wasn’t till mid-December, after plowing through the rest of my online ordering and a couple of snow dumps, that the reality of my new situation dawned on me. The Cajun Grocer’s holiday schedule showed plenty of time for a regular, good old ground shipment to arrive on the 23rd. But the website’s fine print didn’t say anything about shipping to a private road—across a causeway from a long, dirt town road—that eventually led to a post office and a general store. Ground shipments that couldn’t land in my PO box in Oquossoc (or behind my box in the post mistress’ crowded quarters) had to cover a whole lot more ground now that I no longer lived in the flatlands of New Hampshire. Each UPS or FedEx package destined for my side of the lake required tons of lead time, at least two phone calls, a tracking number that was useless beyond Waterville, a neighborhood vigil, and a backup plan in case the thing never showed up.

After consulting the Cajun Grocer website again and cursing myself for picking the Dec. 20 ship option two weeks earlier, I nervously dialed 1-888-CRAWFISH to get help from the Turducken tech support folks. “I really need this to arrive by the 23rd,” I explained, “and I live in a rural area. If I switch to FedEx second-day air, can delivery be guaranteed by then?”

“Certainly, ma’am,” the customer service woman told me in a sweet drawl. My phone number would be printed on the address label so the driver could call if he had any problems reaching my location. Even though I knew she was picturing southern “rural” delivery and not necessarily my snowy landscape, I paid the $17 shipping upgrade and felt relieved.

By the week before Christmas, I had told my story to the woman at the Rangeley  dispatch, central winter dumping ground for most wayward packages. Tom had even gone there to retrieve a couple boxes that, although they got my hopes up, were not my Turducken. He had also been summoned down to the town side of the causeway bridge to pick up another different package off the FedEx truck. With my feast in limbo as I waited for my phone call with drop-off instructions, I understood why the natives resorted to dried venison this time of year. According to the FedEx tracking site, I had poultry in motion on Dec. 20, as promised. But, after that, my special delivery, had become a Tur-TRUCK-en.

The first phone call came on Dec. 22. It was FedEx headquarters in Augusta informing me they would not be able to deliver until the following day. “That’s fine.” I sighed, “Just have the driver call me if for any reason he can’t make it all the way up my road.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, ma’am, the driver does not carry a phone,” I was told. No phone? Really? Along moose alley in winter carrying dozens of packages with sketchy addresses? “But my husband just got called by the driver yesterday to go meet him….” Well, turns out, that was the Waterville FedEx guy. My box was on the Augusta truck and the Augusta guy doesn’t use a phone.

The second FedEx phone call came on the afternoon before Christmas Eve. My package was on the truck, but the driver would, unfortunately, not make it to my location that day. Could he drop it off at…(insert an agonizing pause and any number of possible suggestions between here and Augusta)…..the Oquossoc Grocery? “Yes!” I yelled into the phone. My heart soared as I called Tom and Becky, enroute home from skiing at Saddleback, and left a message. “Pick up the Turducken on your way through,” I pleaded. “And if, for any reason, it doesn’t show up, please grab a ham!”

As far as Christmas miracles go, the timely arrival of my Turducken was a small thing in a year filled with blessings. It didn’t require guidance from a heavenly star, just a note to self to back plan better next year. The greatest gift was the family around my table for my first Christmas in Rangeley. We gathered from afar—from over the causeway and through the woods—to eat, drink homemade wine, and top off our feast with pie Tom dreamt about as he picked blueberries back in August. And, of course, we laughed as I told tales of the traveling Tur-TRUCK-en, the latest piece in our rich, but slightly off-center, folklore.

Portraits of Thanksgiving

Joy Clough4 Comments

Back in my teens and early twenties, I thought posing for the family Thanksgiving photo was kind of annoying. Just about the time I’d be digging into my carefully allocated favorite foods—while declining any not-so-favorites still circling past me in the hopes I’d free up some precious plate space—the request would be made. “Look up…over here…and smile everybody!” I’d oblige, mid-mouthful, smiling just enough to not mess up my spearing and shoveling momentum. Even when I became a hostess rather than a guest, I’d pause only for a half-seated pose, saying “cheese” then “Who wants more gravy?” mid-route back to the kitchen.

“What’s the big deal?” I wondered silently. “We all know what we look like. Besides, I already have a shoe box full of these different-year-same-diningroom-table-type shots.” And then, I found the old Polaroid.

Sometime in early motherhood, the little girl things I’d taken for granted became vitally important pieces of a legacy I needed to preserve. And the decades of old Polaroid pictures hiding in the shoe box were treasures worth sharing with my girls. Way down on the bottom, we found one of my first Thanksgivings captured in black and white.

The year was 1958. Nine of us are seated around my Nana’s table: myself, my cousins, my aunt, my uncle, my sister, my mother, and my grandparents. We’re all in various stages of spooning and serving and planning out second helpings when the camera froze us for a happy, hectic instant. I am two-and-a-half, perched on a step stool beside my Nana in a frilly dress I still dimly remember. My mother, seated on my other side, has just turned 30. She’s beaming a wide, relaxed smile while her arm is poised like a safety spring to hold me, her youngest, from toppling over and taking the holiday festivities down with me. Nana, looking over her shoulder with a hasty grin, seems to be saying something like: “Hurry up and take the picture before everything gets cold!” The only evidence of my Dad in the portrait is the burst of his flash bulb in the upper corner of the mirror hanging over the table. Below, three generations of heads turning toward the photographer’s light for a few immortal seconds, are reflected in the mirror, too.

Like all middle-aged moms, I have special Thanksgiving prayers about family and food, love and well-being. Before saying them, though, I think back to that old Polaroid print. It’s in the scanning of the grey setting that my here and now becomes vivid, because all the adults—the grandparents and parents posing at that Thanksgiving table—are now gone. After the flash bulb burst and my Dad sat back down, we all went back to our steaming plates, blissfully unaware that most in our precious gathering would, one by one, be leaving the table way too soon. I imagine my Mum looked up from her holiday feast thinking she was posing for just another snapshot. How could she know she’d already lived two-thirds of her short life?

The photo from 1958 is now archived somewhere in the moving boxes I have yet to unpack. Someday, I’ll take it out of the shoe box and preserve it like it really deserves, stuck for posterity amid the prints of my daughters’ birthdays, holidays, vacations and everything in between. By mid-February, I figure, I’ll be more than ready to take up scrap booking to get myself through my first Rangeley winter. Meanwhile, I’ve got a  slide show playing in my head of the most memorable year of my life. It’s been another year of challenge and loss, of beauty, hope and abundance, of my wildest dreams unfolding before me. This Thanksgiving, as I pause, smile, and really look at my family around the table, I will celebrate being there with them. I will give thanks for my daughters, now grown into beautiful, strong, amazing women who mother me back while keeping me young at heart. I will commemorate this year as one of great balance, of growth and simplification. While my home and lifestyle became comfortably smaller, my world once again includes my sister and my niece. And I’ve gained a new love and understanding for Tom’s brother and sisters, making my extended family closer than ever. I will give thanks for all of them, especially Tom, my husband and forever friend—the center of my beautiful collage. I will sit still for the annual picture, aware that it IS a big deal, being another year older sitting around the same old table.

I will never lose sight of my old Thanksgiving Polaroid. It’s a necessary backdrop for me. In contrast, though, my here and now is too vibrant for me to dwell on portraits of my life gone by. Spirit willing, I picture myself in my 80’s surrounded in living color by my family and friends, focused on the blessings right in front of me.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Be blessed.

(For more on Thanksgiving, see Quirky Turkey.)

Happy half anniversary

Joy Clough2 Comments

When my girls were toddlers, we originated half-birthdays – celebrations marking six months till they turned another year older. Giving us a good excuse to eat cake and act silly in the middle of winter, this tradition stuck into adulthood. “Happy half birthday!” I still shout into the phone, picturing my half-birthday girl treating herself to a cupcake with one festive candle. Posting on Facebook, or planting a candle in a cookie is also acceptable, as long as the sentiment is expressed.

“What’s a half birthday?” one of Helen’s friends wanted to know last January after I acknowledged the occasion on her Facebook wall. “Duh…It means I’m 26-and-a-half years old,” Helen explained, “going on 27!

Tom says my ability to recall dates is a female thing. Whether it’s the specific day back in 1973 he finally asked me out – or when we bought our first car, brought a new beagle home, or traveled to a particular destination – I can rattle off the date like it was yesterday. I can’t say with any certainty who I met or what I read about just yesterday, but ask me to list significant occasions and I’m a savant.

“Hey, I’ve been living in Rangeley for exactly six months today!” I announced recently. “It’s my half anniversary!” We were driving down a dirt road covered with mixed precipitation, which triggered my internal almanac. Half a year had gone by since moving day in May, when I was driving down that same dirt road (covered in mixed precipitation) with the last load crammed into my Subaru!

Why does my date recall click in semi-annually rather than waiting a whole year? And how can I calculate lunar cycles when I can’t even finish a crossword puzzle? Beats me, but I think it has less to do with my gender than it does with my ability to filter my world through the eyes of an overgrown six-year-old. I romanticize the past and dream about tomorrow. Each day I learn something new, I surprise myself. If I’ve been sad and suddenly someone tells a joke, I remember the moment I stopped crying and started laughing again. And, while the kid part of me is doing that, the adult part of me is doing a daily assessment of where I’ve been and how far I still want to go.

It was almost 30 years to the day I’d moved into my house in Rochester that I left it to move to Rangeley. Three decades of birthdays, holidays and weddings I’d celebrated there, mixed in with passings and other sad anniversaries, too. My first house had endured all my momentous occasions and my trivial ones. It sheltered my family, watched us grow. While packing, I thought I’d mourn leaving just a little bit. I thought I’d want to linger in my kitchen near the door frame that tracked each girl’s height from birth through high school with pen carvings in the wood. Instead I felt relieved, ready to start my new life in my favorite home on the lake. As I drove away for the last time, I could almost hear the girls in the back seat, chattering about Indian Cove and s’mores and all the adventures they’d have when we finally got “up to camp.”

I did indulge in a brief period of feeling sorry for myself a couple days after I moved in my last load. I was standing in my new kitchen, watching Tom drive away, and I was as mournful as the beagles to see him leave. His retirement from teaching was still a month away and, weekdays, he had to live with his sister until school was out. Meanwhile, the beagle boys and I had to hold down the fort.

On that lonely afternoon in May, those weeks till Tom could join me for good seemed like forever. But I bucked up, marched away from the window and got busy. I unpacked till the sound of tape being ripped off a box top made me want to cry. When I got tired of stocking cupboards, I blasted WTOS and danced around my kitchen in my PJs. At night when I could finally bring myself to turn the TV and the radio off, I put the wind-up alarm clock from our Moosehead cabin next to my bed, lulling myself to sleep like a puppy. I learned how to bake bread and how to grow flowers. I conquered my childlike cravings for giant gobs of peanut butter and, most days, fed myself dinner salads. I relearned how to like my own company as I watched the lake warm and the lupines bloom. Looking back on it now, that stretch of moving in alone time was a brief blur in the start of my momentous transition year. Before I knew it, Tom had hung up his teacher clothes in favor of jeans and a chamois shirt, and had joined me and the beagles out on the dock to  toast his retirement.

Until a week ago, I’d never determined my own half-birthday, figuring it was a rite reserved for my younger generation. But all the beginnings and endings I’d been through must have given my internal calendar wheel a spin. “Well, let’s see, I had my birthday about a week before Tom got here, so that would mean….”

When I turn 54 and a half this month, I’m psyched for some sort of personal harmonic convergence. Turns out, it happens right around Thanksgiving, right after my six month moving in anniversary, and right before Tom’s. I think I’ll find one of Helen’s candles, stick it into a homemade peanut butter sandwich, and rejoice.

Lasting memories

Joy Clough4 Comments

“What if it was the last time you’d ever see the lake and your camp, would you want to know?”

Our neighbor and longtime friend, Ed, used to pose this question annually. It would be “closing up” time, and we’d be sitting around a stick fire, toasting the end of another great summer season with one or more adult beverages. His favorite movie, “On Golden Pond,” made him raise this question each time he watched it, which he did every winter when he began to get homesick for his place in Rangeley. He always came to the conclusion that, no, he wouldn’t want to know, and Tom and I would agree. Even if we got as old as Norman Thayer in the movie and, heaven forbid, fell ill right on our front porches, we would still want to think there would be one more summer on the lake.

Ed died suddenly one May, just as he was getting ready for his first trip back up here for the season. In his late fifties, active, and in seemingly good health, I don’t imagine he knew as he stood on his dock the previous October that he’d never make it back. Not consciously, anyway.

In years past, come Columbus Day, I’d look down the lake one last time and remember Ed. The Subaru would be packed with canned goods, dogs and dirty laundry to take “home,” and I’d walk as slowly as possible back up the path to start my trip down the mountain until May. I’d say a final goodbye out loud to my camp like it lived and breathed, already looking forward to the day, seven months later, when I’d fling the door open and yell: “I’m baaack!”

Things are different this year now that I’m a full-timer. I won’t have that going away feeling, wondering how my cabin will make it through without me, and I without it. I won’t get that silly conflicted sensation when I speak of “home” and know that, half of the year, my soul is rooted somewhere other than where my physical body must reside. Still, with the leaves turned and the summer folks gone, I find myself thinking back to Ed, to cycles, to seasons come and gone, to wondering: Is this the last day I’ll go outside without a jacket? Is this the last morning my mums will still be yellow when I wake up?

It’s a natural turning, I remind myself, to be reflective and a tad melancholy. As my landmark first-time year of permanency stretches past summer, it’s OK to look back on all my last-time journeys, too. And, I believe, it’s healthy and healing to not forget Ed’s big question. Not to deliberate and brood, mind you, but simply to honor it and not let it float out of my stream of consciousness.

In this season of closing up, of settling in and hunkering down, I’m allowing myself to ponder beginnings and endings. Like many people, I have a legacy of lasts, of losing loved ones, my livelihood, and sometimes even my sense of humor. I have spent repeated “last” Christmases and birthdays with terminally sick relatives, while missing just as many last celebrations with others taken in the wink of an eye. Would knowing – somehow being able to determine exactly – my last times with them changed how I spent those precious final moments? No. My answer, I’m thankful to say, is no. I would have laughed, cried, hugged and loved just the same.

But what has changed through these experiences is my certainty that, as the universe  moves in mysterious ways on its eternal timetable, I am left with choices. I can ebb and flow with it, or try to resist. I can assume “life sucks and then you die” or I can declare each new day a possibility. My choice – bolstered, I think, by my choice of lifestyle and surroundings – is to run headlong into life like an overgrown 8-year-old. My answer is to learn from my beagles, who don’t go on first and last walks, but barrel through the woods whenever and wherever we take them like it is the only time they are running free, the only time the ground smells so sweet.

Figure every time might be the last, that’s my strategy. And it’s a strategy that’s working wonders for grabbing the gusto out of everything from food to friendships, from adventures to everyday encounters. Take snorkeling, for example. I loved it so much when I first tried it in Cancun, I cried. “I finally found a water sport I love to do for hours, and it’s in the Caribbean ocean! This is the last time I’ll ever get to go!” That was 18 years, and 15 trips to seven different islands ago, and I still hover, transfixed for hours, figuring each colorful fish is the last one I’ll ever see.

When Big Mike, another longtime friend, came up to visit recently, we had a hard  time remembering the last time we saw him. It was sometime, we guessed, before we got grey hair and eating healthy became a worthy topic of conversation. No matter, though, we just took up right where we left off in college. Tom took him fishing for the last days of the season at Upper Dam. We told the same old jokes and laughed like we’d never heard them before. And the lobster we brought back to the cabin after showing off the peak foliage was the best any of us had ever had.

Going inside…outside

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I’ve never needed much prompting to go to my “peaceful, happy place.”

When I first started going, I wasn’t much more than seven years old. I’d just tumble out of my camp bunk before anyone else and go sit there for hours, at peace with the water lapping against the dock, mesmerized by the mountains mirrored in the calm lake. It was a real location, my peaceful place, one I could occupy by myself with no more than a tiny canvas chair, back when mothers could let their daughters figure out how to keep themselves safe outdoors. I was content to watch the sun dance through the trees and along the green dappled rocks near shore. It was good for me, I’m sure, to just sit there with my hair still bed messy, not worrying or wondering about much. But at that age, there was no context for needing fresh air, for relaxation, for reconnecting with anything. If you’d asked me about healing, I would have shown you a Band Aid on my knee. Was I worried about being balanced? Oh, yeah, I’d admit. If the gym teacher made me try to walk across that scary, skinny little beam, I’d always fall off till she just let me go sit on the bleachers.

Much later, after losing a lot of that innocence and idle time, and losing the parents who used to share my peaceful places, I had to settle more often for returning there in my mind. And sometimes I’d need just a little coaxing from a guided meditation coach or CD to head me in the right direction. “Close your eyes. Breathe deeply, and with each breath, picture yourself in a beautiful, tranquil place where you are totally relaxed, totally at peace….” I’d close my eyes, be a couple breaths in, and poof, I’d be walking down a moss-covered path toward the sound of waves and out to my little canvas chair. I was seven years old again in my special spot. Once there, I felt soothed that life could flow as effortlessly as the lake beneath the dock, that my world could be as secure as the unmoving mountains. For a few precious moments, my mommy could be inside the cabin at the end of the path, cooking breakfast for me and my daddy, who was waiting to take me fishing.

Over the years, I got really skilled at traveling to my peaceful place in my mind. When the physical destination was not possible, I could escape to that oasis in the space of a quiet moment and a couple breaths. This was a very good thing because, while my life hasn’t been what I consider unbearably stressful, or traumatic enough to land me a guest spot on Dr. Phil, I’ve had my share of stuff along the way. And, if I ever get close to running out of stuff, I wouldn’t have to look further than the latest magazines or TV ads to find new reasons to de-stress and detoxify. Who knows, maybe that super stressed out woman in the scented candle commercial has been  sharing the same shoreline with me. She’s kicking off her high heals and transporting herself there, only to run into the “Calgon take me away!” lady who’s been out there since the 1960s trying to drown out her screaming kids and demanding husband. Maybe my metaphysical dock is actually pretty crowded.

I do know that, with more and more people needing to escape society’s pressures every day, teaching my daughters to literally take “out” their feelings with as few props as possible was a parenting priority. I helped them transcend anger, sadness and adolescent frustrations even when a real dock wasn’t available. But, while my intentions came from love, my methods weren’t always yogi-like.

“Go outside now and don’t come back in this house until you’ve figured out how to calm yourself down!” I’d yell if either one had an explosive moment of teenage angst. And they would, even in January, and even when the only sanctuary they could find was beneath a fir tree at the edge of the backyard in Rochester. Becky got so good at it that she stays outside now, as an Outward Bound instructor, teaching others how to center themselves in nature. It probably didn’t fit anywhere on the job application, but she’s told me since that her timeouts in the backyard gave her a solid foundation for promoting the benefits of wilderness therapy.

“Don’t ever haul that old tree away that’s laying down next to the brush pile,” Helen, now 27, told me during a recent visit. The cedar had been a favorite hiding spot for her and Becky to play “wilderness Barbies,” dressing up their dolls in fern and leaf costumes. In between checking the minnow trap, swimming, and building sand castles, they’d go there to dry off in their special thicket, not needing too many other props, and not caring that somewhere else, kids were playing Nintendo.

No, the tree’s not going away and the dock’s staying put too. And, now that our special spot in the woods and by the water is also home base year-round, we all need even less coaxing to surround ourselves in peace and quiet each day. Sitting there, I can still hear my little girls giggling and splashing, or shutting out the rest of the world as they wait for a fish to pull their bobber under. I know when they join me in person, they let the setting bring them back, too. And I know a big reason why we have sought out this space together is because we’ve never really left.

I won’t ever be seven years old again, at least not physically. And I won’t really be able to share my waterfront with my mother or other loved ones passed. But when I breathe deeply and listen to the waves, she is there. My dad is right there, too, being uncharacteristically quiet as he appreciates the morning air. My wonderful step-mom is sipping coffee and smiling, looking down the lake to where the water meets the sky. My mother-in-law, the last to leave, is admiring the new paint job she applied to the 20-year-old bench that now sits proudly facing the best view. If the light is just right, I think I can even make out the “Reserved Seating” sign.

Finding community

Joy Clough2 Comments

Isolation, we’re figuring out, is more a state of mind than a geographical predicament.

It is a valid concern, though, voiced regularly by those closer to bigger lights and brighter cities. “What do you expect to do all by yourselves way out there?” That’s what they wonder out loud, anyway. And even though we rattle off our list of comings and goings and the lakeside decathlon of events we engage in on any given day, silently they seem doubtful. What they’re really saying behind their raised eyebrows and nervous giggles is: “Yeah, but summer’s not going to last forever. Then what?”

Sure, it’s only September still, but as fall begins and we enter into the “then what” phase of this wonderous experiment called early retirement, we don’t feel loneliness encroaching. Call us naive, totally in denial, or just plain stupid, but we don’t expect to be lonely, either. Right from the early planning stages of deciding to live in Rangeley permanently, building a new sense of community has been just as important to us as building a newer house. So far, we’re finding what we came looking for.

When we moved, we went from being two of the 30,000+ residents of the City of Rochester, NH, to becoming new additions number 154 and 155 in Rangeley Plantation. (Technically, you see, we live in a “suburb” of the Town of Rangeley given the Maine-unique distinction of a “plantation.” I always thought the name stood for a place with tons more trees than people. But, according to Wikipedia, in colonial times when Maine belonged to Massachusetts, this term described a “minor civil division.” As far as I can tell, when Maine split off on its own, places like Rangeley Plantation kept the name and a lot of summer folks, but dropped all other Massachusetts correlations.)

Soon after settling in, we went from numbers 154 and 155, to Joy and Tom, or just “the new folks living on the old Upper Dam Road all winter.” And in the four months since, we have mingled, been entertained, reciprocated, and basically hung out with people more frequently and more intensely than we did in the 35+ years we spent packed closer together with them in Rochester. Why? Well if you’re a Rochester reader and are about to stop because you’re feeling this is a Rochester vs. Rangeley “the grass is greener and the people sure are swell” comparison, please don’t. I love you and want you to still spend gas money to come see us because you were included in the friendship intensity I just mentioned. And, if you’re a Rangeley reader, please don’t stop because you think I’m saying you aren’t above and beyond what neighbors should be. You are. You see, I don’t think there’s such a thing as a geographical cure for loneliness. I believe you get what you look for in people, no matter where you go, if you choose to look. I believe people are giving, open and nice to be around unless and until proven otherwise, and I trust them to believe in me the same way. Whether I’m talking to the clerk at the DMV or someone I meet out walking, that’s what I put out there and, in large part, what I get back. So, the difference – the reason Tom and I are more closely knit with friends even though we moved “away” has not been so much a change in attitude or a change in population. It’s been a sharpening of focus, a recommitment to building relationships and the luxury of time to make it possible.

“Having the time” to stop in for coffee, to check in on our nearest neighbors, to participate in town and township events, has really been nice. ‘Course we had the time all those years we were commuting to jobs and busy with kids and any number of other things that put friends further down the list, but we didn’t take the time. Now that we have more time, taking advantage of it is a top priority. We’ve joined clubs. We’ve been to three festivals named after fruit harvests, and are reaching the limits of my “friends over for dinner” menus. One new friend has even invited me to join her group of bikers who pedal to the Oquossoc Grocery for muffins and coffee each morning! As the farthest away, with a 13-mile one-way trip on dirt roads to get there by 7 a.m., I can’t imagine what she’d ask me to do if she didn’t like me. (Just kidding. I love my new friend and am sure I’ll accept her invitation sometime between now and July 2012.)

So, while building a sense of community isn’t as cut and dried as building a year-round house, we are just as glad to be surrounded by friends this winter as we are to have R30 insulation in our new walls. We are glad to be finding what we’re looking for – friends new and old to keep us company, to call us by name and ask what’s up as we come out of the IGA or the bank. And when we look over their shoulders while chatting with them and see the gorgeous Rangeley lakes and mountains that are now our back yard, we’ll know we are doubly blessed.

Surprise visitors

Joy CloughLeave a comment

“Yep, I seen it. Long about dusk, it come creepin’ alongside the woodshed, eyes shinin’ through the trees. Wasn’t actin’ like any racoon, no suh!”

Tales like this are the stuff of cabin folklore and, since staying at a tiny camp on Moosehead Lake as a little girl, part of my family history. The locations and casts of characters have changed a bit through the years, but the common story line runs the same. Some “thing” is in your woods, coming toward your cabin, getting closer. Once it’s in your driveway, if you have a driveway, it is officially a visitor or a trespasser. A common property boundary nearly everywhere, a driveway leading up to your lake place takes on heightened significance as a line of demarcation. When there is something in the driveway and it’s not your car, not the CMP guy, not your expected company, or not even approaching on two legs, the actual driving right down to your cabin luxury you were so proud of when you carved that dirt path through the trees turns into a mixed blessing. While whatever it is uses your access route to get closer, it blocks your escape route over dry land!

The best ever nail-biters are stories in which some critter has approached totally without warning, ambling up whatever path leads it toward you, on to your porch. It’s on the porch, snuffling and scratching, inches away from your last barrier between fleeing or fighting for your life — the door inside!

“I heard it come up on the porch, so I peered through the window in the front door and saw its neck fur in front of me! I figured it must have stood at least six feet tall. I looked around for what I could grab in case it tried to bust down the door and all I had was a fire extinguisher and a shovel!” (Infamous bear on the front porch story as told by my dad; Moosehead Lake; circa 1962).

With stories like this woven through my psyche, and buried memories of lying in a bed a couple feet away from the front door where the bear on the porch was showing his neck fur, I try to be vigilant about knowing who or what is approaching my space. Even so, poor vision, and slothlike reflexes usually render me defenseless, peering at any intruder with, as my dad put it, “a dull vacant stare.” Such was the case last Friday as I stood in my kitchen, cozy in my fuzzy pants, planning nothing more exciting with Tom than hanging up the picture I just bought at the blueberry festival. But suddenly, the beagles were bellowing and there was something on the porch, something that hadn’t even come down the driveway, something that was at the door and had already found a way inside!

When I saw who it was, I froze, helpless. BECKY?!! How did Becky, my Outward Bound instructor, world adventurer, based out of Moab, Utah (when she happens to be indoors) daughter get into my kitchen in Rangeley? Wasn’t I just talking to her on the phone last night about the hot weather “out there?” My expression lapsed to another one of my dad’s favorites: the “close your mouth you’ll catch black flies” face. One of those surprised people whose reaction didn’t quite measure up to what the surprise perpetrators had hoped, I didn’t shriek or flail, jump, or fall over. All I could muster was a few stammered half-questions. Thinking back on it now, I remember my mind racing wildly and my thought process going something like this:

  • I know I have a special maternal connection to Becky and her sister that transcends time and space. But try as I might, I don’t think my super powers can materialize her in my kitchen, even if tomorrow is her birthday.
  • Is she alright? She’s just come off leading a 23-day course hiking the LaSalles and rafting the Colorado and is on the verge of a 50-day course. She’s selected to proctor the fall semester, which is Outward Bound-speak for the person in charge who doesn’t come off the trail the entire season. Did she have second thoughts? Had she gone some sort of desert crazy?
  • When was my last trip to the IGA to get groceries and is it possible I have enough food for her?

Becky, knowing why her mother’s nickname has been Fidget since way before she was born, was quickly over the threshold and answering my questions during a hug with her dad. She wanted a sanity / R and R break before her next assignment. She had flown into Boston the day before, where her sister and brother-in-law, Helen and Jerry, picked her up. She was not in Moab during our last phone call, she was in Portsmouth, talking to me from a hot spot she wouldn’t get a chance to enjoy in Rangeley: a bowling alley. After spending the night at Helen’s, they drove up to the lake, abandoning their car by the road to encroach on foot. They combat-crept through the trees along the driveway, timing their porch landing just right until…..SURPRISE! And yes, she assured, pointing to Helen and Jerry coming through the door behind her laden with plastic shopping bags, they had enough groceries.

“Can I have a Mom hug?” she asked coming over to the sink where I stood, still slack as an empty feed sack. As I grabbed ahold of her for the first time in over three months, she said she also wanted food…..mass quantities of steak, chicken and other non-freeze dried proteins she could eat indoors on a plate. She wanted PBRs (college-speak for cheap beer) by the lake. And most of all, after spending most of her birthdays since she was a teenager out on the trail — missing her family from Grand Teton to the Kennebec River and many points in between — Becky wanted to be home for her birthday.

You can get here from there

Joy Clough6 Comments

So how does an out of work writer and her recently retired teacher husband “leave it all behind” to move permanently to their cabin in Maine? What’s it really like living ten miles from the nearest stop sign and 37 miles from the nearest traffic light on a big lake with a long name that, in Abnaki, means “moose feeding place?” 

Good questions. In the three months since my big transition north, I’m starting to come up with some answers, which I’ll share in the following posts. As they come, I’ll also share answers to things I’m still pondering, sometimes in the middle of the night, and sometimes after embarking on a chore I used to take for granted that now involves bug spray, a change of clothes, a water bottle, an ice pack and an itinerary posted on the refrigerator so loved ones can come find me. I’ll share how I came to uproot myself after living in the same house in the same city for all of my adult life to move year-round to what had previously been my summer camp. I’ll share how I got here and how I intend to stay.

For now, I do know for sure, that my transition from Flatlander to Rangeley transplant would never have grown past a whim without a few prerequisites. To take this leap of faith and begin to make it work, I needed:

  • Enough money and enough faith to believe that enough will be enough
  • A  vision for a new lifestyle with the guts to follow through when opportunity allowed and the grace to back pedal or change course if it didn’t
  • A sense of adventure
  • A sense of humor
  • A logistical, up-to-the minute project plan that would impress even the most detail oriented spreadsheet gurus from my office working days
  • A soul mate who instigated and inspired and, more often than not, just plain took charge of all of the above necessities, and still thinks he wants to pull up his Adirondack chair next to mine when it’s all said and done

Some folks say we’re crazy. Some say we’re “too young” to retire, to which we say we’re “just young enough.” Some say we’re taking a huge risk leaving the malls, the curbside garbage pickup, and ambulances that can reach the emergency room fast enough to resuscitate us.  Even one friend says we’re way to far from a wine and liquor outlet to make this lifestyle feasible. It’s a bit too early to say they’re wrong. The jury’s still out…at least until next April or May when we can, hopefully, still claim victory with whatever  the winter thaw leaves in working order. And if we can’t, and we truly are crazy, let’s hope it’s sweet old Nana who could marvel at the same birch tree over and over like she’d never seen it before kind of crazy. Let’s hope it’s not standing out in the driveway with a shotgun and a tin foil hat kind of crazy.

Meanwhile, I also know for sure I already have the most crucial element in this whole leap of faith, and have possessed copious quantities of it for the past 23 years. I love Rangeley. I love this place, its people, my new-old house here that holds all my treasures. I love the way I feel when I walk down to my waterfront and can still see my daughters as toddlers running ahead of me eager, as I was, to jump in. I am rooted in this land of lakes and mountains. Always will be. With that grounding force, along with the previously mentioned keys to survival, plus lots of blankets, dried beans, homemade wine and stacks and stacks of reading material, the saga begins!