Category: Retirementality

Beyond the cataract curtains

Joy Clough4 Comments

You know that feeling when you finally peel aside your dingy thermal window shades and behold the world all around you again? And you wonder if everything was always that bright, or if you’ve just been transported out of your Maine winter mole hole into a vibrant new dimension where the grass really is greener and the yonder the greatest blue ever?

Well, I sure do. I’ve got it major big time right now, and I didn’t even need to wait until May, or whenever almost-spring-but-not-quite-summer arrives back in Rangeley, and I can finally let some full-on sun inside. Because this year, I went way beyond what I could pull off with rolled-up cabin curtains and Windex. I went and got my eyes fixed!

“Didja see that over there?” When folks asked, my default answer was always no…not really. Oh, I’d follow your pointer finger and say “Yeah…wow,” or something moderately convincing till you stopped asking. But what you saw as an eight-pointer or a spike buck or an obviously too tame fake archery target was, for me, just some deer-shaped thing off in the distance. And the bald eagle in my front yard? Well, he had to be soaring pretty low for me to give him the recognition he deserved.

Over the years, I did my best to take full advantage of whatever optometric assistance was available. I got my first pair of glasses, the smallest pair of sparkly blue cat-eye specs, when my third-grade vision test revealed I had the eyesight of a poor little school mouse. After that, each time I couldn’t work my way down the eye chart, I’d work my way up the spectrum of corrective lens technology. I wore contacts back when most people couldn’t imagine how I could “leave something like that” in my eye. I had huge Eighties aviator glasses with so much reflective glass in them that, if I wasn’t careful where I set them down in broad daylight, they were a fire hazard. I graduated to Transitions and Progressives, and whatever other fancy lens labels were in fashion for making me feel better about paying a premium for brown-tinted granny trifocals. Every few years, I’d get a new prescription and a new pair of bright red Zennis…until that just wasn’t enough anymore.

When my eye doctor first diagnosed cataracts, I was surprised. That was something that happened to old people, I said, not me…not yet, anyways. She set aside her little thousand-volt floodlight, met my bleary gaze, and politely replied, “Yes, you.” She said I was right about the “old” part, and wrong about the “not yet” part, because the vast majority of lifelong spectacle-wearing, almost-septuagenarians like me form little dark clouds inside their eyeballs, also known as cataracts. (Turns out teeth and toenails aren’t the only things that get yellow and brittle with age. Your crystalline lenses do, too, but who knew?) However, cataracts are mentioned in the same breath as surgery for good reasons, she said, and I was one of them. Intraocular lens implantation could give me a nearly-perfect shot at nearly-perfect vision. And thanks to all the visionaries making it the safest, most common surgical procedure performed, I had more choices than ever. I could desire an outcome and actually see it come true.

My mother never lived long enough to wear out her eyes. And my father got by after middle age with a pair of readers or, in his case, fly-tyers. So, pretty much everything I knew about cataracts came from older friends who’d suddenly show up barefaced, or trying out new ultra-generic glasses they hoped did the trick, because that one pair was all Medicare paid for after surgery.

“What are your glasses-wearing goals?” the surgeon’s assistant asked during my pre-op evaluation. “How clearly do you expect to see at different distances without them?

“Well, I don’t need to be up there with the yard eagle,” I told her, “but I am tired of being a bat. And I don’t mind wearing reading glasses when I need to, as long as I can find some sparkly red ones.”

“You’re gonna be thrilled with what we can do for you,” she said. It was the first time thrilled—and anybody doing something beyond confirming I needed stronger magnification hooked onto my face—was part of any eye doctor visit. Matter of fact, the only time in 60 years I’d been even moderately elated about the eye doctor was at Halloween when there was a bowl of chocolate eyeball candies out on the check-in desk.

But this wasn’t my regular eye doctor. This, according to their motto, was “Tomorrow’s eyecare today,” a time warp I wanted to enter as soon as I set foot in the one-stop, exclusively all-things-eye-surgery center in Portland. “Best Place to Work in Maine,” the sign in the lobby said, and even though it was still blurry, I knew why. It was the happiest place this side of Disney World, where people like me came to see like they were kids again. Swarms of ’em. “We’re a well-oiled machine,” the staff agreed when I marveled at how efficiently they processed patients. More like a magical metamorphosis machine, I thought, with a steady stream of silver-haired, squinty folks coming in the front like stoic army ants, then out the back with huge “mission accomplished” grins ‘neath their bug-eyed “I just had eye surgery” sunglass shields, to return a week later, barefaced butterflies beholding their new world view.

“After this, it’s gonna be more beautiful than ever for you up in Rangeley,” my intake nurse said when I arrived for surgery. The entire staff knew exactly where I lived, why I needed a different post office address in Oquossoc, and how to pronounce both, which comforted me almost as much as the pre-op IV they promised would make me feel okay about the cutting tools they were about to put in my eye. “Yeah, I’m out on Mooselook,” I told one OR nurse. “Meguntic,” another one chimed in. And I knew I was in really good hands.

Then voilà! There I was, heading back up the mountain the next day, a brand new Clarion Vivity Toric UV intraocular lens, or IOL, implanted in my right eye, looking forward to getting my left eye matched up in two weeks. Until then, I had one good eye on the Technicolor road to Oz, and one bad eye still stuck in dusty ol’ Kansas. But the good eye was so very, very good, I barely noticed. “Wow…look, snow flurries,” Tom said as we came up over the Height of Land. As expected, my right eye felt like Angel Falls at spring break-up. But despite the gritty, gushing waterworks ‘neath my post-surgery sunglass shield, I was able to look. Like never before. And even though Tom had just uttered the “S” and the “F” words so early in November, I saw the loveliest, pearliest, whitest snow flurries dusting the evergreens, the turf browns, the late autumn auburns, and the granite greys all the way down to the bluest blues of my mountain lake home.

“Was it always this blue?” I started asking over and over. I figured I was missing some hue definition and clarity. But I had no idea I’d been blind to an entire spectrum of watercolors, of sky blues, mountaintop blues, and every other shade of Bemis shoreline blue. By the time I got home, I sounded like an oddly upbeat local R&B artist warbling on and on about the bluu-wooo-wooo-a-wooo-ooo’s. Imagine Bob Dylan getting enthusiastically tangled up in them, or Billie Holiday becoming a super happy, albeit off-key, lady singing ’em, and that’d be me.

My world hasn’t been this colorful since I replaced my basic box of school-issued crayons with the biggest box of brand-new Crayolas I could afford with my allowance! And I haven’t seen such an immediate return on any investment since. “Don’t cheap it out, Mom, it’s your eyes,” my daughters advised when I explained my lens replacement options and associated costs for anything above standard. I figured I didn’t need the super spendy, still experimental option for potentially becoming eagle-eyed everywhere all the time. But I didn’t want to settle for the refundable government-issued option either. So, as promised, I stretched my self-worth and out-of-pocket pocketbook a bit beyond standard up toward spectacular, paid for a heaping dose of well-being on top of what Medicare deemed medically necessary, and got my football-shaped, myopic eyeballs fitted with custom, crystal-clear, crystalline IOLs just this side of bionic. For less than what I spend on my mud season vacation, I gave myself a lifelong sightseeing staycation!

Then I spent a whopping $8 on two pairs of shiny red reading glasses I leave around the house, just in case I need to read something smaller than my arm can reach. Yup, the whole not being able to read stuff close up arm maneuver I thought was counter-intuitive, I get it now. Right under my nose no longer automatically equals clearer, and I’ve joined the Where the Heck Are My Reading Glasses Club. At least now I can see far and wide enough to find ’em, though.

“Wow, I always thought that was maroon,” I said the first time I saw my dining room tablecloth through fresh eyes. “It’s really somewhere between garnet and vermillion.” My tropical colors mixed with splashes of reds and shades of provincial blues and greens interior decorating scheme had always been sort of Rangeley meets Key West. But I had no idea I lived in a custom Crayola palette of wild watermelon, atomic tangerine, robin’s egg, shamrock, and all shades in between.

I was experiencing what the cataract crew called the “wow factor”—a kaleidoscopic rush of the highest definition brightest brights and whitest whites in recent memory. My clothes popped, my cabin walls glowed a rich, honey gold, my beloved birch trees stood iridescent. And no more dreaming of a white Christmas, I was living it already in sparkling splendor. But, also wow, was some not-so-shiny stuff I started spotting in my periphery, the darker, dingier side of 20/20 after decades of telling myself my house looked clean enough. Like all the windows I’d pronounced okay this year so I could ride my bike nonstop during optimal fall cleaning days. Wow, was I wrong! Because ya know what else is white besides snow and birch trees? Fingerprints on glass. Last winter’s dust backlit by this winter’s sun. Ashes on cobalt, AKA Rangeley mountain blue, woodstove tiles. Beagle belly fur mixed with cottony balls of Maine coon cat fur. My own fur! Turns out the hair color I saw in the mirror had been a fake shade of cataract blonde, and I was, in fact, an arctic fox. And talk about mirrors! Suddenly seeing myself in all my wintery white-skinned glory as I step out of the shower is definitely a mixed blessing.

It’s been a big adjustment for sure, graduating from worn-out monochrome technology to high-def 4K rez. For a week or so, my brain was recalculating more than a new GPS app with the “avoid dirt roads” option turned on. Thankfully, though, I’m dialed in now, recalibrated, my knack for seeing good in all things hardwired for success. I can look beyond whatever smudge accumulated from another year in my forever home, out at my beloved birch trees and the chickadees I used to think were eye floaters. I can smile barefaced in every mirror, glad to be reflecting back, to see and still be seen, at peace with the antique parts that can be fixed and the steady performance of those that can’t. I can enjoy my best-lit Christmas in years, blessed with the eyes of a child filled with Christmas morning wonder again in the winter of my life. Thanks to tomorrow’s eyecare today, I’ve left dusty ol’ Kansas behind for a new life in balsam-lined Emerald City. And the way I see it, even the dark season out here, also known as the Big Grey Bucket of Suck, is gonna be at least fifty shades better this year, filled with pewter, slate, and plenty of festive field mouse greys.

Dishwasher power control drama

Joy CloughLeave a comment

“Hi, my name is Joy, and I have dishwasher control issues.”

That is, I imagine, how I’d come clean to a support group if the opportunity ever arose. Haven’t found a local chapter for this sort of thing yet. But, if and when I do, it’ll probably be in Farmington or further down the mountain, well worth the gas money to find enough dishwasher density per square mile, and the like-minded souls standing sentinel by them. Meanwhile, though, I must rely on my internal psychoanalyst for help.

“Let’s think back on how this issue began to manifest,” she says calmly. “When did you first notice your behavior changing? When did your reaction to your dishwasher start becoming a controlling influence on your day-to-day life?”

I call her Amy, short for Amygdala, as in brain cortex emotional response amygdala, because I rely on her to keep that tiny center of my reptilian brain from transmuting into the Creature from the Black Lagoon. She is serene, soothing, rational, professional but still approachable, and just a tad pushy—my voice of gentle authority and reason. She’s always on call whenever I need her, showing up in her sensible work lady shoes and layer upon layer of “casual Friday” fleece, pen poised over notepad, ready to record, underline, and asterisk as necessary, and, ultimately, organize my situation into an actionable, bulleted list. I’ve never seen her living situation, so I can only guess how she applies all her therapy cred to her outside-the-office self, but I imagine she has no problems nerding out over her dishwasher or with any other appliance fixation detracting from her perfect work-life balance.

But, as Amy herself always says, such assumptive comparisons only detract from figuring out how to live my best life in all its imperfect splendor. “Every soul has dirty laundry. And dirty dishes,” she reminds me, her tone somewhere on the tough love side of touchy-feely. “It’s what you choose to do with your pile, how you respond, that creates harmony…or turmoil.”

I first noticed I might have a problem sometime in my early thirties. Before that, back when my first dishwasher was the size of a trash compactor, I was fine. Operated with one knob, its only custom option being a magnetic faceplate I slapped on to make it match my harvest gold kitchen, I barely gave it a second thought. But later, as my Corelle place settings grew with my family food prep obligations—and the possibilities in my local Sears showroom progressed, seemingly, into Jane Jetson territory—so did the complexities of my absorption. Did I need to upgrade to the model with the control panel that looked like it was designed for the space shuttle command center? Should I do like the TV commercial and cram everything in there and run it every night just to make sure my favorite spatula and fry pan were always at the ready? Or should I implement a just-in-time, hybrid construct based on my low level of aversion to washing things almost as big as the sink right there in the sink? Eventually, I adopted a sink-plus-dishwasher-when-needed approach. But, for whatever reasons, I decided the “when needed” part needed to be calculated and monitored according to a rigorous, but allusive, set of standards. My standards.

“It was almost full, so I just let it run,” I remember Tom saying when I came home one Saturday to the unmistakable sloshing, pumping, and swirling of my dishwasher in mid-cycle.

“How?…Why?” I muttered, not yet able to recognize, never mind admit, feeling any type of way about the situation. I’d only been gone a few hours, long enough for him to dirty one, maybe two, lunch plates and, perhaps, a fork or two. And last I’d looked, there’d been enough viable space in there to handle dinner and, best case, breakfast tomorrow! I bent down, putting one ear closer and, sure enough, the surging already underway in there was suspiciously vacuous, definitely not the sound of sudsy water sluicing over strategic formations of tightly packed dishes.

I yanked the door open mid-slosh, flung my fogged-up glasses on the counter, and craned my furrowed, steamy brow inside as the spray arms rattled to a stop above gaping holes in proper, practical placement. Each rack was like a hollowed-out version of a honeycomb I should never have deserted.

“You call this full?” I challenged, pointing at all the available nooks and crannies, mentally retrofitting a cereal bowl here, a mug there, until I could deem it really, truly, 100 percent loaded. A warm, clean cloud of vindication mixed with a twinge of gratification I didn’t yet fully understand seeped under my skin. And even the beep, beep, beeping of an interrupted wash cycle could not dog-whistle me away from digging in and standing my ground—until later that night when it was, in fact, actually, unmistakably full and I’d proclaimed it so with exaggerated hand gestures and loud, snarky comments. Like if a Price Is Right girl with too much attitude got recast onto an episode of My Strange Addiction, that was me.

“Well…that wasn’t really skillful,” Amy said after I’d calmed down a bit. “Does it really matter if you save a bit in electricity and soap at the expense of people’s feelings? Let’s get you to a place where you’re okay with allowing him to help with the dishwasher, even if it isn’t perfect. Next time, let’s take a step back and remember RAIN.”

Amy likes to remind me about RAIN, not the April showers or the Clapton love song kind, but the Zen wordplay kind that’s supposed to empower me to reign in my crap and focus on self-cleansing. When I feel the queen bee in me emerging to hover over the dishwasher, I gotta hang loose long enough to Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture what the heck is happening…and why.

“Yeah, I see you, my winged alter ego, making a beeline for the dishwasher. I recognize what you’re all about,” I gotta say. Then I gotta allow the experience to “just be” without judgment and/or drowning it out with worse, unskillful choices until I can investigate it down to its tangled roots and, ultimately, nurture my way toward calm compassion. It’s taken years, but I am getting better at the recognition and detachment-enabling parts of that process. And when I do get triggered and can’t manage to just walk away, I know how to engage in quiet, covert dish reappropriation exercises that are self-soothing and non-toxic. So I guess you could say I’ve moved on to mastering the investigative self-acceptance half of the equation and I’m on the lifelong learning track.

When it comes to investigative introspection, I’m writing the book on How Did I Get the Way I Am?. It’s a self-help autobiographical work-in-progress mystery with so many side annotations that my pre-digital Dark Ages newspaper editors would call it “messy copy”, and my online software support editors would deem it pre-beta, “for internal use only.” Especially the How Did I Get the Way I Am With Dishwashers? chapter. That one’s under constant revision, but I’ve rough-drafted a few hypotheses.

A lot of it, of course, boils down to the ol’ nature versus parental nurture premise. How does the way I naturally came into the world, combined with how I was or wasn’t nurtured, affect my conduct around dishwashers? Well, for starters, my nickname is Fidget. As in the proper noun form of “moving around restlessly, nervously, or impatiently.” Tom gave it to me soon after our first date, back when Dingbat and Meathead were household names and Fidget sounded relatively cute and unabrasive. Most days, he still keeps his tone affectionate when he says “Don’t freak out, Fidget, I ran a load of dishes for you.” Kinda like when Jamie in Outlander tells Claire “Dinnae fash yerself, Sassenach,” and manages to calm her down. I wonder, though, if it wasn’t the 18th century and Claire had to watch Jamie heedlessly loading a dishwasher, whether she mighta just fashed herself back through the stones. Hard to know. Meanwhile, I’m glad my real-life husband stifles his Archie Bunker eye rolls when I go dingbatty over the dirty dishes.

So, yeah, there is a fair share of figetation factored into my basic personality, skewing my domestic composure and balance. I’m not your classic neat freak, though. I believe a little bit of clutter has character, that out of sight is definitely out of mind, and clean enough means never going after anything with a Q-tip, an old toothbrush, or any sort of freakish Swiffer arm extension. My housekeeping style is more about sanity than true sanitation, about the pure, fresh comfort I find in the illusion of having control over my surroundings. It manifests in Mug Shui (what my family calls the favorites-first preference with which I select my daily coffee mugs from the cupboard), my penchant for outward-facing can labels (born from my first apartment where no cupboards meant Campbells and the Jolly Green Giant became colorful kitchen accents), and my unshakeable belief that omnipresent police monitor whether or not my bed is made. And by jeezum, doesn’t my figetation favor the dishwasher!

But, why, specifically, do I laser in on my GE PowerQuietPlus and not my other appliances? Well, like I said, I have some rough theories. One of my favorite Christmas memories was my mother getting her first dishwasher back in the mid-Sixites. My father led her blindfolded out to the garage to behold the miracle of emancipation lying within the giant Sears box. Built-in under the sink wasn’t a thing yet, but Mum was so tickled to be away from the sink that she happily wheeled it over to the faucet and back again. I also remember coming of age during the 1970s energy crisis when, suddenly, “running everything all at once” like a dishwasher and/or lights and a refrigerator made the electic meter on the side of the house churn through dollars like nobody’s business. Back then, nothing was digital or smart about the meter. It was a GE glass-domed gizmo with a perpetual motion horizontal wheel that looked like a mini circular saw buzzing through your kilowatt hours, rapid-fire flipping the black and white numbers display that, come the end of each month, added up to an electric bill that would send shock waves and vows of reform throughout the family. Sometimes I’d find my dad outside peering at the damn thing while it whirred away like a demonic hamster was stuck in it. He’d do the old guy pocket change jingling thing, wishing he could somehow put a couple quarters in there and take some of the sting out. That was right about the time he started blow dryer shaming me into not wanting to come home from college. “Why do you need electricity for your hair?” he’d yell up to the bathroom, suggesting I leave a couple quarters beside the vanity to pay for my vanity. Needless to say, the dishwasher only got powered up when we were down to our last plate and fork.

Eventually, we all calmed back down, but not before I’d made the neural connection that automatic dish cleaning was an indulgence to be approached with reverence and moderation. I got married, got my first house, and graduated up from apartment-sized to family-sized models of my own. Very slowly and methodically, of course, until I made The Big Move to Rangeley to live out my “last (fill in the blank appliance) I might ever need to buy” years in my used-to-be camp cabin.

“You’ve got a dishwasher and a dryyyyyer? At camp?” my mother-in-law said the first time she saw my retrofitted, renovated kitchen. She had this way of overly emphasizing the word dryer so her lips recoiled along with the rest of her, dragging it out to rhyme with “why.” As in “Why does my daughter-in-law need a dryer when there’s perfectly good free air all around her?” To her, energy crisis meant having more than one thing plugged in and, heaven forbid, operating at once. And vacations, she’d remind me, meant “a sink with a better view” and no hot running water. Having evolved along that same path myself—with memories of bathing my babies in a Rubbermaid Roughneck tub filled from the lake, and the unbridled joy of any water finally flowing out of a faucet still pretty fresh—I thought I’d paid my dues, too. But in the eyes of the powerwashing while penny pinching pioneers of the previous generation, I was a bit spoiled. Not Kardashian spoiled, kilowatt-hour spoiled. Because I was upta camp racking up the kilowatt hours like they were S&H green stamps I couldn’t redeem for stuff I really needed.

I’m in a good place now, though, a place of self-nurturing and affirmation where I can honor my legacy and see my dishwasher for exactly what it is: an acceptable extravagance. Fifteen years later, the blush of newness might have worn off the ol’ GEQuietPowerPlus, but it still lives up to its name. Twice a week, of course…no need to go off the rails just because I can. And I think I’m getting my control issues under control. When I feel at all triggered, I admit that, yup, I am a retired technical writer who used to thrive off reordering the messiest, most scrambled engineering puzzles into tidy little procedures. I cut myself some slack when I don’t know what day it is (name or number), but I can tell you, based on a fine-tuned calculation of available slots and crevices, the precise moment my next dish cycle should start. I even kept my world from tilting off its axis during a tough transition to phosphate-free detergent, serenely shifting from my Great Value value-sized bottle of liquid to those teeny tri-colored packets. What, exactly, goes on with those tiny little cubes? Whatever is it, it’s beyond any time-released, super-concentrated phenomenon I’ve ever had to figure out. So, for the most part, I’ve stopped trying.

“The dishwasher doesn’t care,” Amy reminds me if I start to wonder too zealously. “The dishwasher can’t make you feel anchored and validated. You make yourself feel that way by what you tell yourself when you load and unload it.” That helps quiet the back-to-front, top-to-bottom, mug shui first-in-first-out dialogue in my head that’s ever scheming to outsmart my CMP “smart” meter at all costs. For now, anyways. And, on occasion, I’ve also managed to relinquish dishwashing control to Tom and he’s done fine. Just fine. I can even have calm, detached conversations about what used to send me into a tizzy.

“Have you seen what you can do with these new dishwashers?” my girlfriend asked the other day. She was showing off her WhirlpoolTurboTech 9000, and she was in my kitchen, nowhere near hers. “I can auto-start it from this app, monitor its wash and dry time, select speed booster or energy-saving express mode, plus all these other features I haven’t figured out yet, and I can control everything remotely. Home Depot is having a huge sale right now. Sure would make a nice Christmas present if you need an upgrade.”

I leaned away from her phone, drank my coffee from my Tuesday cup, and smiled. “I’m good,” I said, “All set for now.” And I think Amy agreed.

Fresh amazement

Joy Clough1 Comment

Forgetting is not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, forgetting things like when my out-of-town guests are showing up or where my next turn is in one-way city traffic can be problematic. But temporarily forgetting how far I’ve come and what it has taken for me to get here? That’s fine. As long as I remember to remember. Because when I do, and do it right, it’s a special kind of magic. It’s fresh amazement.

Fresh amazement. Sure sounds good, right? And you know what? It feels even better, way better than worrying whether I’m just a dunderhead.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my thinking. Or, as Nana used to say, “lack thereof.” Unlike poor Nana, I’m not wrapping up empty boxes with Christmas paper or waiting for the streetcar to take me back to Malden. And I’m glad to report that I aced my annual wellness exam brain teaser like a trooper. “Apple, monkey, table!” I proudly parroted back at the nurse—–proof I can retain random words while doodling a clock face with big and little hands in the right places, then walk across the room, and touch my toes—–and, therefore, am not currently exhibiting cognitive shortcomings, hereditary or otherwise. So no worries about drawing a complete blank or going Nana flakey anytime soon, which left me not so much questioning my brain’s working capacity as I was its working order. As in why, with so many mundane details in there front and center, do I have to try so hard to keep hauling the monumental ones out of the archives?

Why do I need constant reminders of hard-won progress? How is it that I can readily recall what I wore, said, ate, and sang along to on any particular day way back when, but need sticky notes and other props to keep the big stuff from falling through my cranial cracks? What’s the point of forgetting how good it feels to feel really good, then remembering, only to forget again?

These were the questions seeding the early stage of Rooted In Rangeley story germination—-where I don’t know what I’m trying to say but I do know there’s something potentially profound planting itself in the ethereal mumbo jumbo of my inner ramblings. Something New Age-y that still made good sense. Something both thought and laughter provoking. Something may be of value to others beyond myself.

Searching for answers, I took a psychoanalytical deep dive into reasons why the human brain, mine in particular, keeps handy what it needs for any given moment and stores the rest for retrieval and reuse. I read about recency bias, adaptive forgetting, and other innate tricks it uses to keep me safe, sane, and not whirling out of control like some backwoods R2-D2. Nothing really struck me, though, until I came across this pearly nugget: “Of course you can’t remember everything, every feeling you had about every single day. If you did, you’d spend each waking moment in an endless cycle of reliving the past with no focus or scope for the present. You’d have no relativity, no room for retrospection, no reawakened emotions. What fun would that be? You’d have no fresh amazement.”

Bingo! There it was. Amid my Psychology Today meets the Tao Te Ching search for share-worthy stuff, a nifty little word combo so spot-on it took whatever the heck I was aiming for and nailed it perfectly. Fresh amazement.

Fresh amazement is the upside to temporarily forgetting past hurdles to throw my energy at new ones. It’s why it’s OK, I’ve decided, to keep glancing over my shoulder and shoot for the next brightest spot on the horizon as soon as I emerge from the shadows. It’s a fleeting state of renewed awe and appreciation, a glass-half-full zone worth every prompt and reminder it takes for me to always return there. And lately, it’s why I have an unused pair of walking canes hanging up in my home like prized 3-D art curios.

“Sayonara, suckers!” I told the clunky “assistive device” canes, super stoked to be swapping them out for a new pair of sleek, portable hiking poles. But instead of putting the rehab grade, tripod-tipped set back under the bed or up in the attic, I left them hanging out in plain view. Because while I might not need to use the old poles, I very much need to see them. Every day. As I’m grabbing my “everyday” ones and heading out and around. As I’m remembering to feel fresh amazement with every step.

When I retired the ol’ clunkers earlier this summer, I promised myself—-for the second time in a row—-if I was able to walk again “like normal” I’d never ever take it for granted. Like normal, you see, means getting where I want to go using one, sometimes two, walking sticks with occasional, sometimes epic, trips along the way if I don’t pick my feet up and start shuffling. In my case, it means powering through being born with mild cerebral palsy, then growing old with whatever wear and tear gets factored in along the way. It means finding balance, literally, between allowing myself to atrophy and pushing myself to exhaustion and more injury. Most importantly, it means remembering to pat myself on the back when it feels easier to just badger myself.

And that last part, the remembering the right way part, is almost as hard as putting one foot solidly in front of the other. “Remember when you could do power aerobics or ride a regular mountain bike in skimpy Spandex and high-top Reeboks? That was awesome!” I’m apt to tell myself with Chris Farley wistfulness and a vision of my 30-year-old self prancing around in my head. But that never leads to a good place. Reminiscing about my all-time personal best as I’m slipping into my comfy workout/wind pants and Dr. Comfort sneakers to go for an e-trike ride or a slow but steady walkabout does not bring fresh amazement but, actually, quite the opposite. I can get stuck in a state of stale indifference or, worse, rotten dejection. That’s when I need to bring my comparisons into the not-so-distant past, away from the leanest, sturdiest, most badass me, back to the still going pretty strong at almost 70 me—-who’s way better than she has been recently. That’s when I re-amaze myself. And that’s where props come in handy.

One long, mindful look at my clunker canes hanging by the door—-or at the empty corners of every room where I used to park Rosie (my bright red, all-terrain rolling walker)—and I recall just how badly I needed them and how desperately I had to muckle on, afraid I was getting closer to a wheelchair with each step. I remember the sadness of having my legs betraying me, of my mind losing control over my muscles, the pain in my old, achy hip, and my tired, bewildered spirit, the relief of finally getting the right kind of professional help, and daring to believe I might get better. I can see myself walking out of Maine Medical with a brand new Wonder Woman hip and, more recently, learning how to walk again after a nasty drug—-meant to calm my restless legs at night—-backfired, turning me into an anxious, clumsy rag doll unable to do so on my own. I feel myself recovering, twice in a row, and the superhuman sensations of the pain subsiding, the struggle easing—-of picking my head up, planting both feet, and getting back to being my old self.

I didn’t have such poetic words for it at the time but, man, when I was able to get back down to my lakefront without Rosie or the clunkers, using just my own steam and my everyday hiking poles, that was a whole new level of awesome! Has been ever since. As long as I watch my feet and the sleek red poles keeping ’em steady—and I remember to remember when that didn’t seem possible—my focus realigns and my path opens as wide as the Big Lake in my front yard the first time I took it all in again.

“Watch where your feet are going,” I’ve been told my whole life, advice I’d never thought I could put to positive use. Mostly because it came right after I stumbled and, often, right before I walked into a tree or a wall trying to watch where my feet are going. So it wasn’t the sort of advice that made me feel newly marvelous. But now that I’ve watched my feet and legs come close to going nowhere without a lot of help, I’ve found the right context, the right way to remind myself to watch, compare, and realize that this and all blessings are fleeting. I feel joy in every moment of moving forward in my own special way. I feel fresh amazement.

And while walking wonder is such a go-to source, being right in front of me and all, it turns out that fresh amazement is, actually, all around me. I just have to keep my mind and eyes open, keep finding my own answers to the old question: Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone? Yes. But if you’re lucky you get some of it back and, when you do, you know enough to hang on to it hard because it could be gone again in a second. There’s no app for that, no customizable pop-up to spark that kind of mental clarity. That’s OK, though, I never have to look too far for more prompters.

“Wow, remember COVID,” I say to myself every time I see the stack of masks, unused test kits, and the tiny, go-anywhere clip-on bottles of hand sanitizer in the corner of my cupboard. “Remember how wonderful it felt when you stashed this stuff away because you were able to start going places again without being scared you might die?” Yup, sure do. And if that doesn’t fill me with fresh amazement, there’s plenty of other cues close-by: All the half-full bottles of awful prescriptions I’ve stopped taking for good. The pile of bigger girl pants gathering dust. The ancient dog bed where our fifth “best beagle ever” sleeps by my side. The useful space on my countertop, in my fridge, and in my life, now that I’ve given up drinking once and for all. The luggage I’m happy to unpack when I return to my home sweet home that stays right where I can grab it for my next adventure. And then there’s always the calendar, and the yin-yang Rangeley weather to stir my awe and appreciation.

“I’m gonna really try to remember this in January,” I said the other day as I basked in the balmy, bright, calm, bugless September air. Moments earlier, I’d been wondering why I couldn’t have weather like that in July and August, how long it would last, why the leaves seemed to be piling up on the deck faster than usual, and blah, blah, blah. Then one of those “this was how things were for you a year ago” type of Facebook flashbacks came on my screen, showing a sleet-covered path down to my grey lake, and me out there in my Elmer Fudd hat and serious jacket already. Outside my real window screen, however, summer was still waiting in all its fleeting glory. So I grabbed my poles, smiled at the ol’ clunker canes on my way out the door, and savored the fresh amazement.

Two-thirds up the line

Joy Clough1 Comment

My biggest guiding principle in life did not come from school, church, or the sanctuary of my Adirondack chair. It came from an appliance store.

And not a Home Depot or Lowe’s—where limitless possibilities of appliances stretch on beyond the do-it-yourself aisles in their own galaxy of stainless steel—but from a small-town showroom.

It all began with a compact washing machine from Sears. I was newly-married and living in the attic apartment of an old Victorian house turned medical building my friends nicknamed The Hobbit Hole. Perched in the eaves above a dentist office waiting room we had to weave past on our way upstairs, our little love nest had quirks, and one major perk: Rent was $25 a week, all utilities included. And, it was right next door to Sears, issuer of my first credit card. This was back when Sears thought women couldn’t be held responsible for their purchases until they had a husband so, according to the card, I was Mrs. Thomas Clough. But, as such, I had enough laundry to decide that the Lilliputian-sized washing machine on wheels with its screw-on faucet hose was way better than trips to the laundromat. And for $25 a week, I could push that sucker over to my kitchen sink, plug it in, and let it use as much hot water and electricity as its dinky little agitator drum could handle.

So in I marched, to the far left of the short line of Kenmores, to the special display space reserved for the smallest budgets and living spaces. There was one compact washing machine in stock and, even though I’d admired it from the window and knew I was already sold, I lifted up the lid and walked around it a few times to seem like a savvy consumer.

“You guys deliver, right?” I asked the Sears salesman as I dug out my credit card. “I’m right next door.”

The next day, patients sitting on the bench outside the dentist office had to curl back their toes and scooch their legs 90 degrees sideways to make room for my first new appliance on its way through the narrow waiting room and up the spiral stairs to The Hobbit Hole. I hoped they weren’t the same patients who, a year or so later, had to repeat the maneuver for my second new appliance: a portable dish washer. Not much bigger than a file cabinet, it had one knob and an optional magnetic face plate that changed it from white into a contemporary avocado-colored appliance. And, when I wheeled it in the corner opposite the washing machine, it doubled as a typewriter stand.

Both machines served well beyond their move out of The Hobbit Hole—past a bench full of patients I hoped had not previously swiveled sideways for my appliances—to our first house. The avocado dishwasher joined my second-hand copper-colored stove and harvest gold refrigerator in my new kitchen where they perfectly matched my vinyl floor. (Yes, in 1979, Congoleum actually sold a pattern with all those colors, enabling me to complete my “psychedelic autumn explosion” decorating scheme.) For a while, my hodgepodge remained functional and stylish—and I remained blissfully outside of the appliance showroom.

“There’s more for your life at Sears!” When I had to start venturing in again, that’s what the new slogan promised. But that’s not what finally drew me back. Dire necessity and the lack of big box store options did. I didn’t need more for my life—not until I replaced my refrigerator that just crapped out in the middle of July, my washing machine that was agitating my nerves instead of my clothes, or my dead dishwasher. And I didn’t need Consumer Reports or much brand knowledge—except that I wanted brand spanking new, and I wanted it now. So I did what any young, blonde woman with a Mrs-something credit card would do back in the days before Google and political correctness. I asked the Sears sales guy for advice. (Yes, in the days of Mrs-something credit cards, saleswomen never made it out from behind the catalog desk far enough to help with appliances, so it was always a guy.)

I’d do a semi-confident domestic goddess stride past the showroom lineup of whatever appliance I suddenly needed—lifting lids, fingering controls, trying to look fussy. Then I’d cave. “If you were buying one of these, which one would you pick?” Invariably, the sales guy would meet me about halfway up the line—past the bare minimum models on the far left, but before the ultra trendy models closest to the store window on the right. “You don’t need a lot of that stuff,” he’d agree, pointing toward the high-end. “Unless you have a huge family, entertain a lot, or want the thing to practically run itself, then you’re better off going with something like this.”

And “something like this” was usually spot on, the best bang for my buck. Middle of the road plus a tad extra. A dishwasher without a control panel designed after the space shuttle command center, but with more than one knob and an on-off switch. A stove that was better than a grown-up girl-sized EZ Bake Oven, but not jacked up with too much Martha Stewart sophistication, either.

By the time I was creeping up on middle age, aiming a few stars up from mediocre had gone from a purchase plan into a full-blown philosophy, a lifetime maintenance policy born of Yankee frugality and the blessed wherewithal to do something special with what I’d inherited and earned. I’d figured out how to apply the two-thirds yardstick to pretty much everything in my career and my leisure. I knew when to slow down a wild sprint, how to go from super-sizing to skimping and back again as needed. Somewhere between what my mother would call “hoity-toity” and “ticky-tacky”—that’s about where I wanted to end up.

And now that I’m two-thirds up the line of my life’s journey, I’m doing better than ever at holding that sweet spot—physically, mentally, and financially. “It ain’t the Ritz, but it sure ain’t the Motel 6, either,” Tom and I say these days as we settle into our vacation destinations. We have enough Rent-a-Wreck memories to keep our sights this side of ultra el cheap-o, and enough savings and foresight to know we can splurge on what we really want to remember when our travels are done. So whether it’s our mud season home away from home or a bucket list excursion, I scroll about two-thirds down the booking site, and away we go. Then we come back to our little cabin and, within reason and good sense, finagle every last ounce of usefulness out of the things we’ve come to call necessities.

Like our 15-year-old stove. Or “range” as they call ’em nowadays—as in price range, meaning a price range this side of four figures only gets you a notch above one on the side of the road with a “still works” sign taped to it. When my newfangled glass cooktop cracked in one corner recently, I was glad my appliances-paralleling-life analogy was more philosophical than literal. “Good thing I don’t have to be thrown in the scrap heap now just because I have some surface cracks,” I said when I found out you can’t do a facelift on a Jenn-Air downdraft drop-in range unless you want to shell out more money than poor Jenny’s worth. So sensibility and the risk of electrocution won out over the argument that old Jenny was still 80% serviceable, and I went into market research mode again. Online this time, filtering by function rather than my usual default of cheapest ones first, I found a four-star range that fit right into my “not just camp anymore” kitchen. It’s Bluetooth-enabled so, supposedly, I can give it cooking instructions from another room if I ever decide to stop doing that to my husband.

This could be the start of the “last one of those I’ll ever buy” phase of life. If so, I plan to slide into it gracefully, pointing my compass a few degrees north of moderation and mediocrity as long as possible. I’ll stop side-eyeing my other not-so-new appliances long enough to look around at where I am—living just large enough by the lake. I’ve come home for good now, to a place where I no longer wash dishes in a bucket or cook on a Coleman, where I’m still making do with a few relics from my Hobbit Hole. And when and if the time is right, I’ll have no problem whipping out my very own credit card like a new-age Sears chick to keep this slightly extraordinary streak going strong.

Odes to sharing the roads

Joy Clough3 Comments

It’s getting to be the time of year out here when sharing the road means 90 percent me and Tom, 10 percent the squirrels. (For those who might not know, “out here” is eleven miles from blacktop–where sharing can be with logging trucks, ATVs, moose, deer, the occasional excavator or cement truck and, during the summer, more passenger vehicles whipping around than the fast lane through the Hampton toll on a Friday afternoon.)

Not too long ago, I would’ve loved to whip through that same toll. Back before I left the land of highways, traffic lights, and hairy commutes you still had to slow crawl past a booth—or, heaven forbid, stop and hand over some real money to a real person—not maintain velocity like you’re running the Daytona 500.

Since my Big Move to Rangeley, with those memories fading and my relativity recalibrating, “traffic” has a whole new meaning. And these days, hairy commutes actually might have hair. . .on whatever I hopefully avoid as it runs in front of me. No more constant wondering about how far the turnpike is backed up or how hard I’m gonna hafta gun it to make my work meeting on time. I still do have plenty of questions, though, just different ones. Like “Jeeeezum, where are all these people coming from?” and “Where the heck do they think they need to get to so fast?” Plus lots of hypothesizing about why most folks can’t be bothered to wave, nod, honk, or otherwise acknowledge there are other humans out and about with them anymore.

By far, though, the year-round guessing game that literally overshadows the rest when taking to the roads out here is: “Do you think they’re haulin’ logs today?” Because you never really know till the answer pops right up on you, but it sure helps to try to be clued in.

“LOOOOOOGGING TRUUUUUUCK!” Tom and I holler to each other when we see one coming, hopefully in time to yield the right of way as instructed on the shared use road signs. Before I started coming upta camp, the only thing comparable to being passed by a loaded logging truck was “doin’ a train” back in college. (No, it wasn’t one of those wild Seventies streaking things. But, yes, it did involve drinking and risky decisions.) Doin’ a train meant getting all liquored up and and sitting on an embankment right over the tracks till the midnight train rolled through Durham, NH. It’s probably fenced off now but, back then, there wasn’t anything quite like the wind-sucking, eyelid-flapping, heart-fluttering sensation of having a locomotive whiz by your face at 75 miles per hour. Until the back roads around Rangeley.

I got a kick out of the recent “Driving in the North Woods” email from Maine Fish and Game. “Always give the right of way to logging trucks,” it said. “Remember, they’re working. You’re going fishing.” (Or pretty much going wherever whenever because we’re retired.)

“Thanks, but no need for reminders,” I say as I hop on my vehicle of choice. No need for Ginkgo biloba, a Luminosity app, or whatever the latest trend is for keeping wits sharp and reflexes nimble, either. Because on hauling days I’ve typically got less than a minute to steer way clear with my vehicle of choice—the bicycle equivalent of a go-cart six inches off the dirt. A recumbent TerraTrike Rambler with electric assist for the “swamp hump” and other gravel-grinding ascents requiring a little extra oomph, it’s been called everything from a buggy, to a contraption, a rockin’ rig, a three-wheelah, and that thang. On hauling days, I call it a good way to maintain my muscle mass and mental acuity.

But no matter how you roll out here, road reciprocity is a win-win situation. If not for the logging companies plowing, grading, and otherwise repairing our surfaces, travel as we know it would turn to bushwhacking real quick. So, even when I’m yielding to Big Blue Pete, I’m grateful. Named by my truck savvy neighbor for his brand new blue Peterbilt 567, Pete’s the rolling backwoods version of the T. rex in Jurassic Park. I can feel him coming before I see him in my rear view mirror, at which point I detour off-road as far and as fast as possible, hunker down, and start singing. Something like “Daddy shark doo doo doo doo doo doo, daddy shark doo doo doo doo doo doo…” to drown him out before dusting myself off and returning to the Country Roads/Low Rider/Beautiful Day tunes that otherwise round out my mental pedaling playlist. After a few such encounters, I figured Big Blue Pete deserved his very own song, sung to the tune of the Monkees theme song:

Here he comes
Roarin’ down the street
You better back away from
The truck named Big Blue Pete!
Hey, hey he’s a logger
And people say he should slow down
But he’s too busy haulin’
To not keep the pedal down
Just thunders right past you
Flying toward a cutting crew
Better keep your wits in high gear
When Pete’s comin’ through
Hey, hey he’s a logger
And people say he should slow down
But he’s too busy haulin’
To not keep the pedal down
No time to be friendly
So quick jump out of the way
‘Cause Pete’s gettin’ three more loads out
Before the end of the day
Any time, or anywhere,
Just look over your shoulder
And say a silent prayer
Hey, hey he’s a logger
You never know where he’ll be found
So you’d better be ready
To beat feet when he’s around! 1

Haven’t seen Big Blue Pete in a long while. Luckily there seems to be a more “sharing is caring” crew of drivers who don’t mind slowing down a bit. They’ve got me singing a different tune—my version of an Eagles classic—while giving me new perspective, their perspective, as they bob and weave around an orange-flagged, laid back e-triker and all the other critters they might encounter.

Well I’m running down the road with a real heavy load
Got a world of trouble on my mind
Four moose wanna ram me, two folks wanna damn me
One bike of the strangest kind!
Take it easy, take it easy
Don’t let the sight of those weird wheels drive you crazy
C’mon lady, I hope maybe
You gotta know that slowin’ down ain’t gonna pay me! 2

I think Big Green Pete, the new guy in town, sensed my empathetic vibe. And it probably didn’t hurt that I gave two thumbs up in the general direction of the truck cab versus cowering and covering my face with my bike cap. He waved at me! No blast on the horn, thank you very much, but an actual palm all the way off the steering wheel as he throttled down past me. And it could have been a road dust mirage, but I’m pretty sure I saw Pete 2.0 crack a smile, too. (Or maybe it was a smirk because I looked like the bicycle circus came to Rangeley and left behind one of its clowns.)

Either way, it’s nice to get a “road wave.” Out here that’s code for “Hey there, g’day, nice to see you,” an acknowledgment that just because we choose to live off the beaten path we don’t choose to do so totally alone. It was one of the first rules of Rangeley road etiquette I learned back when I was a part-timer, before I earned my year-round, dun-colored car exterior (AKA a Rangeley paint job) and the crusty-calved travel pants that come with it. Thirteen years later, I’ve pretty much mastered the “seasoned local” driving salute: Two to four fingers up while your thumb stays hooked over the steering wheel. (Never just one finger up, though. That’s not neighborly.) Most warmish days when the sun is at least partially shining, I trade driving for a jaunt around my e-trike loop, doing a full-on, five-fingered howdy-do. I’m like Queen Consort of the Puckerbrush, wavin’ my fool bike-gloved hand off, hoping any spectators wave back. Sadly, though, this road salutation business seems to be a dying art. Except for some of us old fashioned types, folks just ain’t reciprocating as much. Or nodding. Or even looking. “That’s okay,” I remind myself. “They’re busy getting wherever the heck they need to go. . .faster than friggin’ Big Blue Pete. . .while I’m just out here high-fiving, low pedaling—and singing my version of Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree:

I’m headin’ home on this fine day
And I’m glad to see who else is on my way
So if you catch my hand up
Giving you a big hello
Then you’ll know just what to do
If you do see me
If you do see me
Oh do a little road wave
When you pass by me
It’s been ten long miles
Seeing only trees
If you don’t do a road wave when you pass by me
I’ll move on along
Keep singing this song
‘Cause you’ve got places to be
Too fast for any critters or the scenery! 3

  1. Original song written by Tommy Boyce, Bobby Hart and Jack Keller. ↩︎
  2. Original song written by Jackson Browne and Glenn Frey ↩︎
  3. Original song written by Irwin Levine and L. Russell Brown ↩︎

“Getting Re-Started” (a rough draft)

Joy Clough3 Comments

“I do have a wish list,” Jack insisted. “And the first thing on it is that I wish to never keep a list.”

Fellow technical writers and lunchtime walking buddies, Jack and I spent hours in adjacent cubicles, cranking out checklists, assembly instructions, getting started guides, and other need-to-know stuff for nerds who hardly ever read them. Then we’d blow the dust off with jaunts around the office park, and running debates about bucket lists and other lively topics.

Jack was all set with never having to use his geek skills to plot anything outside the office. Show up for work. Complete assignments. Repeat as required. Collect paycheck. Done. No need to flesh out those simple steps for continued success, he figured.

But me, I was all about the lists. Ever since I had the manual dexterity to hold a pencil, I’d been jotting down must-haves and to-dos. Adding in flowcharts, spreadsheets, getting started tips—anything I could put in my toolbox for laying out the steps for optimal success—got me even more jazzed up. To heck with nerds not paying attention, though! I was getting into self-publishing, following my own instructions far outside the cubicle walls. I’d begun drafting the biggest, boldest rewrite of my life: The Big Move to Rangeley.

Would the house sell so Tom could retire? That was the pivotal question for all arrows pointing to going upta camp for good, triggering next steps and sub-steps stretching halfway up the alphabet till, before we knew it, we’d checked off the myriad of checkboxes and were unpacking moving boxes for the last time. After that the lists got a little woods wacky, the daily flow slowed to a pleasant trickle, and the decision loops became just that. Loops. Into town, out and around the lake, and back in. The sequence of year-round Rangeley “if…then” decisions never got hairier than switching outerwear and/or matching actions to daily circumstances and/or weather patterns. On winter days when, for example, we wanted to go to the IGA without just going to the IGA, if the road was plowed and if it was a weekday between 11:30 and 3:30, then we could proceed further—to the PO, to get lunch, and maybe even a haircut. But if it was the weekend then the flow had to stop at groceries and the dump. We had it pretty much all mapped out. For the first decade, anyways.

When I started hearing about COVID-19, it felt like I was back in one of my engineering meetings, the weekly updates in which the networking gadget gurus would tell the tech writers about a potentially dangerous glitch, and the writers would have to figure out how to advise the public accordingly. Was this a proceed with caution or a stop right now and change course situation? Did it require a couple exclamation-pointed sidebars with further information or the universal lightning bolt symbol of impending doom? Were the operational lights still flashing amber or, heaven forbid, stalled on solid red?

A few months later, I was grateful I had a high tolerance for forging ahead and figuring things out as I went, for marking up action plans on the fly. In pencil, with a big eraser. I put everything I had into figuring out the nerd speak, the CDC coding, and any “subject matter expert” communications from Drs. Fauci and Shah. But even so, planning how exactly to proceed was, as we used to say in the business, “like nailing Jell-O to a tree.”

1) Got masks? Check. 2) Got hand sanitizer? Check. Do I really need to go inside? If yes, then see steps 1 and 2, go quickly, and hope for the best. If no, can someone who is also “with the program” come out and put my stuff in the truck? If yes, then save their contact info and any detailed requirements. Survival, of course, was objective Number One. Beyond that, I knew most other stuff was a “nice to have,” prioritizing and procuring within the old business as usual framework, a luxury. By the first COVID summer, I’d made it up the learning curve far enough to earn the title “Curbside Clough” at the IGA, and be known among friends as a go-to for logistical advice on any given day. And when I actually came back home with, for example, a whole gallon of my specified milk dated within my specified freshness timeframe, it felt better than my best day back in the cubicle.

Never was the power of my pencil mightier, though, than when I finally wrote VACCINE with an exclamation point rather than a string of question marks. A year into the pandemic, I marked the action item on my wide open calendar, and enthusiastically prepped to repeat, as necessary. Because while getting vaccinated wasn’t the initially hoped for “one and done” reset button, it’s a great example of built-in security through redundancy, well worth replicating to keep living by the lake.

Now, although some Jell-O is starting to stick to the tree, it looks like there’ll be no quick solutions for taking up right where I left off “when this is over.” Factor in the still TBD virus variants—plus all the mean, nasty stuff going on outside the scope of these musings—and getting back out there is definitely more herky-jerky than a smooth launch. Accelerate. Brake! Accelerate. Reminds me of Uncle Bob driving his old station wagon and how he’d try to divert from unseen danger way before it got in front of him. That’s fine, though. Because you know that special “somewhere” folks started looking to escape to back in 2020? For me, for us, it’s right here. And, when folks from away suddenly stopped wondering how the heck Tom and I survived so far from the cluster snarl of city things to wondering how they, too, could hole up in a place like this for the long haul? Here we were, socially distancing in fine style, seeing how the original pre-requisites for The Big Move to Rangeley put us in pretty good stead for a pandemic and other scenarios previously unimaginable. We had: 1) Enough resources and faith to believe that enough is enough. 2) A sense of adventure and humor. 3) A vision for a new lifestyle with the guts to follow through when opportunity allows, and the grace to back pedal or change course when it doesn’t. Basically, that’s how we got to this corner of happy and healthy, and how we hope and plan to stay.

So while I won’t be writing a comprehensive “Getting Re-started Guide” anytime soon, I am compiling some rules for re-entry. So far, I’m planning on:

  • Going forth in comfier clothes. No stepping back into “hard” pants and convincing myself that my social sphere necessitates tightening up my ensembles to the old standard. I’m gonna be stepping out in pants and tops featuring quarantine stretch and the freedom of post-pandemic style. Not the “one size fits all” type things you see in those funky catalogs that also sell plush toilet seat covers, nose hair clippers, and gadgets for remote controlling your life from the couch. But not kind the that cinch me in the middle like a balloon animal just for the sake of fashion, either. Plus no more of those Wonderbra type tops or bathing suits that make me look like a busted can of biscuits wondering where my perkiness went!
  • No longer settling for half-hearted hugs. No more greeting those I want to bring in closer than six feet with a limp, one-armed pat…pat…pat…pat on the back in which I always stop at the perfunctory fourth pat. I’m muckling on for dear life and hugging hard enough that I would’ve snapped outta my pre-Rona duds. I’m gonna be a New Age ambassador of embraces, an adult Play-Doh extrusion toy with arms ready to squeeze, offering counter balance to my hug buddies in this wind storm of change.
  • Fully engaging in whole-faced conversations whenever possible. Not two-faced, but bare naked whole-faced. And each time I do, I’ll remember how uneasy I felt the first time I saw nearly everyone wearing masks, how I wondered if that was really my friend so-and-so under there and, if so, how come she looked slightly sinister. How I gradually came to know that everybody wearing masks truly was my friend in spirit, and so began carrying out in-depth conversations with eyes only, hoping each face’s lower half was as enthusiastically engaged as mine. How nice it is to see and show teeth again, to go back to smiling and pouting and talking people’s ears off rather than talking their eyes out. I’ll never forget those first post-vax encounters with whole faces peeled, when going mask-less felt like I’d doffed my space suit and was free floating. If/when that becomes unsafe to sustain, I am ready with a resupply of masks—KN95s for BA.5, etcetera. They’re brand new—without the left in the glove compartment/Chinese food takeout scent—ready for fresh use, as needed.
  • Relearning social norms and determining my role in applying them appropriately. Am I good company? What IS good company? I can still cook and entertain, right? I might be making what Jack and I would call WAGs (wild assed guesses) to come up with the answers, but I’ll draft a rough plan.

Pandemic proclamations

Joy Clough19 Comments

“Today, I ate a sandwich.”

Not exactly an earth-shattering proclamation. Or is it? Really depends on the context.

My step-mom, Prudy, once had a friend say that exact sentence to her, and it was the biggest deal either of them could imagine. It was back before Facebook, so they were face-to-face friends. Roommates, actually, who spent most afternoons gabbing about health concerns, families, or nothing much in particular. Except for one auspicious afternoon when Prudy’s friend turned toward her, her face radiant in the sun as she sat by the window, and said in a reverent whisper: “Today, I ate a sandwich.”

They couldn’t post, IM, text, or tweet their news. But they did want to shout it from the rooftop, Prudy told me. And, knowing her and her like-minded old lady friends, I believe they would’ve tried. If they hadn’t been stuck at Maine Medical. In the oncology ward. So they used all the energy they could muster boasting to the nurses and anyone else within earshot. After months of chemo, Prudy’s bedside bestie had finally eaten real food. A whole sandwich! The best darn sandwich of her life. And even though Prudy herself was still weeks away from being weaned off IV liquids, she could almost taste that sandwich each time she told the story.

Been thinking a lot about the Sandwich Lady lately. I never got to meet her or even know her real name. But I’ll never forget her, especially now that I really need to channel her life-affirming spunk, her finesse at making the ordinary extraordinary. More than ever, her story reminds me to see silver linings, to tune out idle chatter amid inspiration.

I talk a lot like the Sandwich Lady. Have been for years. Deep into retirement, and living pretty darn deep in the woods, my monologue usually goes something like: Today, I watched the lake thaw. Today, I washed windows. And on real noteworthy days, I include others, add cool modifiers, and switch to first-person plural: Today, we had a Zoom call with Helen and Becky. Today, we did the big town loop, and hit the PO, IGA, and the dump!

Most days, though, I didn’t really sound like the Sandwich Lady. Or act like her and Prudy. “Yeah, today you…whatever,” I’d mutter to my Facebook feed. “And we’re all sharing without really caring about this…why?” I’d chuck most “I’m doing blah blah blah and then I’m gonna yada yada yada” posts into my Whoop-Dee-Do bin and keep scrolling—paging down past the “here is today’s lunch” pics, the afternoon Starbucks “yum!” pics, and the yoga mat in the living room pics. I’d post something ho-hum just to fill the nagging “What’s on your mind, Joy?” space at the top of my timeline, and go about life as usual. Sleep walking in the virtual cloud, shuffling through my normal routine.

But that was all BC. Before COVID-19. Before “life as usual” got blown outta the water like the fireworks finale over Town Cove Park. Before the new normal routine shoved aside the old normal routine like a loaded logging truck barrel-assin’ toward the mill.

No more sitting around asking “So what?” to updates I used to deem useless. I’m too darn busy wondering “So…what the heck?” and “So…how…????” Weeks into “sheltering in place” there is nothing simple anymore about simple announcements, no such thing for me as social media overload. I drink in every drop, reading and reporting posts to my husband, my dog and, especially, myself because I suddenly find the sound of my own voice so reassuring. And whether news comes from a Rangeley friend whose naked face I still recall, or some Facebook “friend” from Australia who I’ll likely never see, doesn’t matter. We are all Corona comrades now and, together, our words make major headlines. Bright lights flashing again on Broadway type news!

“Today, I saw a robin!” I said reverently, my face radiant in the sun as I sat by my office/TV room window. It was the 84th day of April, and I was on day whatever of sporting the indoor Corona-wear I had to trade for the outdoors in the tropical sun drinking Corona and/or rum drinks beach-side wear I’d typically be struttin’ in April. My indoor Corona-wear is an ancient “camp” sweatshirt paired with baggy drawstring pants. I call ’em yoga pants, but that’s more of a stretch than the pants themselves. Because, lately, the only pose I’m doing with any discipline is “seated warrior,” in which I slump lower and lower in my computer chair and hold it as long as I can. That and sun salutations in front of the refrigerator.

It’s all good, though. Because, today, I started a really good book. I sat on my porch in the sun. And, tomorrow, God willing, I’ll get back on my bike. These days, those are pivotal proclamations, ones I shout to the rafters in true Sandwich Lady style. Actually, I’ve probably kicked her style up a few notches and decibels. I’ve acquired a manner of speaking which, like my everyday outfit, is my default mode. It’s not my inside voice or my outside voice because it only has one volume setting. Loud. I call it my anytime voice. Amped up by shouting out the truck window or off the porch from a safe social distance, it lends the proper oomph to my vital pronouncements.

They all seem so vital now, too, all the little thoughts I used to keep to myself, write on a to-do list, or put in a draft that might never get published. Maybe it’s because, thank God, I can’t really see the danger that’s supposedly all around me. But I know it’s there. So I keep trying to drown out the silent approaching threat by repeatedly squawking. About silly stuff that could turn serious. Fidgeting and chirping like a human version of a yard raven. And when there’s nothing specific to broadcast, my outbursts are more primal than ever. “Oh!” I say repeatedly. Or just “OK!” or “There!” No verbs, nouns, or extra syllables. Just me self-soothing with my own echo.

Tom calls it verbal processing. It’s a nice way of saying I could talk the ears off of a jackrabbit. Him, not so much. He’s never been a talker, never much felt the need chime in over my steady drone. Until COVID-19. Something about all this uncertainty and tension has been pressing hard on his TALK button, too. On the phone, online, or on our bicycles yelling to neighbors, Tom’s become a man of more and more words. We’re just a couple of old stereo speakers now, sitting side-by-side in our own private chat room each night—spewing, spinning, and otherwise verbally processing our thoughts.

“Well, today, I read a new virus report,” is usually how the couch dialogue opens. It continues for longer than we’d like in that vein, till we’ve tossed around all our hypothesis about what we think we know and what we hope to be able to do about it. We throw all our fears, our rants and pandemic postulations into our imaginary COVID Cuisinart and process away. And then, in honor of a rule we made on or about the 97th day of April, we stop churning negativity and balance out the awful-izing. Each one of us must express at least three things we are grateful for that day.

There’s quite a bit of duplication between the two of us and from day to day. But that’s OK. Repetition is nice. Especially when we both put just being together at the top of our lists. Tom says he wouldn’t want to be trapped in a cabin in the midst of a global pandemic with anyone but me, and I say likewise. That and our health. Now the weightiest and most incredibly complex object of all our thoughts and deeds, health is right up there in the blessings count. We sure are glad to have that for another day. And we’re thankful that, as far as we know, our family and friends are surviving with their sanity and optimism intact, too.

“Today, I’m grateful we got groceries again!” I said the other night. Not so long ago, talking like that would’ve sounded like I was reading a third grader’s diary. But now it’s far from simple. After seeing snippets of what social distancing food shopping entailed in bigger cities closer to supply hubs and fancy logistics, I wondered what kind of results I’d get way up here in Rangeley. My answer is: phenomenal. Let me tell you, some of those frenzied, bull horn blasted people packing the stores down country could learn a thing or two from the hard-working, inventive, adaptable folks at our tiny local grocery stores! If anyone ever told me I’d be emailing in my food order, calling on my cell from the parking lot for pickup—all the while trusting that my list would be filled without being able to actually see and/or touch each item—I would have laughed and fondly shook my head. But now I’m smiling with pride and admiration! Thanks to my community—to the folks keeping the “social” behind social media and the lifeline that turns online requests into curbside delivery—our pantry, our stomachs, and our hearts are full. We can crawl back into our hidey-hole for a fortnight, if needed, between each virtual forage run.

“Tomorrow, we can go on a picnic,” I said as Tom nodded. “I’m grateful for that.” Like most everything lately, going on a picnic has a brave new connotation. We drive up to the Height of Land, overlooking our sheltering place and the connecting hamlets of friends waiting to hug and high-five us in better times. And we slowly savor every bite of the take-out sandwiches we picked up in town. Because they are the best sandwiches we ever ate.

Thank you to all the people working tirelessly behind the scenes to help us pull through! Stay safe everyone. And repeat after me: Rangeley rises!

For more Corona bright spots, see:

Slow, slow riders

Joy Clough6 Comments

Ten winters after putting down Rangeley roots—perennial roots deep in the arctic strata formerly known as our summer waterfront—we put down tracks. Serious tracks. Boldly going where we hadn’t dared to snowshoe, ski, or ice shuffle before. Faster than a speeding lawnmower. More powerful than the Funtown kiddie train. Almost able to leap aboard in a single bound. And while we might not be shreddin’ it hahd, as Bob Marley would say, we are dicin’ it up pretty good.

“Bout time!” That’s the general response we got from the “locals” this fall when we talked of buying a sled—after ‘fessing up that, no, we never owned a snow machine and, yes, we live on the slow end of the Big Lake. All winter. With nothing but miles of “white gold” between our front door to ITS 84 and beyond. For the past decade.

Usually I’m pretty honed in on anniversaries. From the mundane to the monumental, I’ll be the first one to tell you how long ago something happened, what day of the week it was, who was there, and what they were wearing. Like if Rain Man were fixated on calendar days rather than never missing an episode of Judge Wapner, that’d be me.

As it turned out, though, buying a sled during our tenth winter around the Rangeley sun was more coincidental than ceremonial. More reactive than proactive. Blame it on some kind of decade in a cabin dementia, but my instinctive, proactive time elapse surveillance never kicked in. If it had, our conversation might have been something like “Wow, ten’s a big number. Let’s celebrate with that Ski-Doo we’ve always wanted.” Instead, we just sort of woke up one day in October and, with the reverse of what a bear must feel right before hibernation, saw there was a new third-digit year coming up on the calendar and said “Ya know, a sled would be pretty darn special.” Even more special, most days, than our snowshoes and grippers. And that’s how we knew it was finally time to spice our snow daze up a notch with some horsepower and “helmet therapy.”

Our brand spankin’ Ski-Doo Skandic 600 “wide track two-up” arrived well before the first snow fall, during that twilight time of waiting and wondering also known as sneaking up on another Rangeley winter. Seeing the sled parked in the yard in all its just out of the showroom shininess added a different dimension of unknowns to the season. Would it really snow enough to ride that thing? Or, like the year we bought the new snow blower, had we triggered an inverse weather pattern and insured a winter drought? And what, exactly, were we gonna do with this gas-propelled, snow+machine piece of property except go get yet another registration stickah and reshuffle some shed space for it?

Silly us. We forgot that the only sure way to make Old Man Winter start piling on blankets and blankets of snow is to doubt, even for a day, the inevitability of his arrival up here. In these parts, idle speculation about winter—or any season—is just that. Idle. It’s counter productive right when we need all the squirrel energy we can muster to spring into action, get ourselves set up.

So, almost as fast as the yard turned from brown to white, we got busy. Never having piloted a snow mobile, Tom did some test runs and gave me, the designated back seat passenger, a “just in case” lesson on the controls. We dress rehearsed using our most expensive fashion accessories to date—our state-of-the-art helmets. How to hermetically seal our noggins while adjusting, snapping, sliding, and otherwise tweaking each advanced feature—on-the-fly—according to our ever-evolving safety, comfort and visibility requirements. How to gracefully remove the new-age brain bucket without removing large patches of hair along with it and then dropping it on the kitchen counter like a greased bowling ball. Then we graduated to figuring out how to pull on our new snazzy boots without pulling a neck muscle and before pulling on our sub-zero gauntlet gloves. Finally, I was ready to do a “hands on” demo: How to get all layered up, hop on the back of a two-up, and actually stay on.

Or so I thought. But the real lesson I learned was this: When prepping for your maiden snowmobile voyage, don’t rely on a pair of 40-year-old snow bibs you’ve had since back in your almost-maiden youth. You’ll forget that you used to be able to zip ’em up ’cause you had nothing on underneath except a pair of control top pantyhose, not rolls of wine blubber and uber thick fleece! And you’ll feel like the famous scene from Gone With the Wind where Mammy tries to get Scarlett back in her skinny clothes, minus the bed post and plus at least 10 more waistline inches!

So my first ride kinda blurred past me while, instead of wild and free, I felt like Michelin Mamma, praying the few centimeters of zipper I was able to close over my paunch didn’t let go and send a shower of shrapnel into Tom’s back. “No more snow bunny waist for you, Miss Joy Joy!” I said as I waddled back inside to find me some bigger girl pants, glad to have Amazon Prime and be searching for something less cinched, but not quite Mammy sized—yet.

A few days later, we were finally geared up, gassed up and two-up, ready to hit the trail hard, to roar into the great white open. Well, maybe not roar. What we ended up with was more like a steady purr. Because the next teaching moment came as soon as we hit the trail for more than a test run. It pertained to my spirit of adventure. The same spirit that, back in my pre-Rangeley driving days, made me the proud owner of a Mustang convertible named Joyride, the same one that keeps me wanting to ride the fastest, hairiest roller coasters till I can’t hobble on and off them anymore. Turns out, that spirit dies a quick death when exposed to snow-covered terrain. And my need for speed? On the back of a sled, that’s met and exceeded in first gear. Anything above 25 miles per hour feels like I’m riding the end car on Top Thrill Dragster at Cedar Point. In the middle of winter. Without high tech safety restraints. Yelling things not nearly as endearing as the squeals my daughters call my “roller coaster laugh.” But luckily, my pilot seemed to agree. A couple daring sprints to see “what was under the hood,” and he didn’t need me thumping on his back or silent screaming into my helmet to convince him to slow down.

So much for calling our new sled the Red Rocket! After maintaining about the same cruising speed as a Zamboni, the name just didn’t fit. That, plus when we told our daughter we had a Red Rocket, she made the same face she makes when we ask her to explain a Cards Against Humanity phrase. Said something about that term being synonymous with male dog anatomy. So now we have a Red Rover. As in “Red Rover, Red Rover, send Tom and Joy right over!” Across the lake, around Toothaker, down the Bemis track, and back home. Rambling around, blowing the cabin dust off, enjoying another popular Rangeley pastime. And, yes, getting good exercise!

Before this winter, I agreed with Bob Marley when he said snowmobiling didn’t count as outdoor exercise because “all you need to ride is an ass and a throttle thumb.” Now I beg to differ. Especially in the back seat, you also need vice-like grip strength—in your hands and your legs. Specifically in your adductors, those inner thigh muscles you don’t feel until you ride a horse or haul out your Suzane Somers ThighMaster from the 1980s. Did Suzane ever try muckling onto a vinyl seat while thumping over pressure ridges and scaling snow bankings? I think not. Because, if she had, she would have been a Ski-Doo fitness guru instead.

And talk about an ab workout! I might not be sporting a six pack, but I definitely think I’ll be in better swimsuit shape than your average Jane Sixpack, thanks to my Red Rover workouts. We thought that buying the “deluxe” after-market back seat rest for our sled model would be all we needed to have me riding in style and comfort. We were wrong. Until Tom retrofitted it, I spent most of my ride in a half crunch position I hadn’t achieved since I retired my Abs of Steel video. And all the time I was doing so, I was wondering why the engineers at Ski-Doo didn’t take some safety and design pointers from their cohorts working on car seats. If they had, seeing crash test dummies getting all stove up on the “deluxe” after-market back seat of a Ski-Doo Skandic 600 would have sent them back to the drawing board! Sure, streamlined aerodynamics is important on a two-up sled. But how streamlined is it if you end up needing to duct tape your old college “sitting up in bed” pillow with the armrests and five pounds of foam support to the back of your sled?

Luckily, we didn’t need to go that far. With a little Yankee ingenuity and some more help from Amazon, Tom had me sittin’ pretty, enjoying Rangeley’s winter splendor like never before, looking forward to many more years out and about on our anniversary gift to ourselves and our unique lifestyle. It’s not the stuff that jewelry commercials are made of—the ones that make you believe if you don’t by some sort of diamond studded “still married to my best friend” bling to commemorate your love, you’re doing something wrong. But I’m pretty sure, one time in February when we were avoiding a snow drift, our sled tracks made a big, heart-shaped loop on the lake. And sometime along in there, I got inspired to write a song. A reggae song set in the frozen north, about breaking our own path and moving to our own quirky beat.

Slow, Slow, Slow Ridahs
Sung to the tune of Buffalo Soldier

Slow, slow, slow ridahs,
Won’t go fastah.
We’re just the slow, slow, slow ridahs
Old faht Sunday drivahs.
Moved up from the Flatlands
With no real sled plans.
Bought our first Ski-Doo
Gear that’s brand new.
Ridin’ duo
On days above zero.
Joined the trail club
For a stickah and a raffle stub.
Cruisn’ real slow
Where there’s good snow.
Traded in our bicycles
Feelin’ like icicles!
Toward Bald Mountain
Trail map scoutin’.
Havin’ no fear
Keepin’ it in first gear.
Toolin’ round Bemis
Maybe the ITS.
Slapped by pucker
Motherf*****r!
Still we look slick
Straddlin’ the Skandic.
“Snomos” wild and free
On our four-stroke utility.
Gawkin’ to and fro
Through a helmet window.
Is that an ice bump
Or a buried stump?
But, oh what a cool sight
Our shadows on the white!
Great view of Tom’s head
His neck’s real red!
Out on the Big Lake
Watchin’ out for snow snakes.
Holdin’ on so tight
Can’t feel my frost bite.

Singin’ braaap braaap braaap ba braaap braaap
Braaap braaap braaap ba braaap ba braaap braaap!

For more “Songs of Joy and Tomfoolery” see:

Channeling my inner beagle

Joy Clough3 Comments

All I really need to know about retirement I’m learning from my beagle.

It’s not that I lack two-legged role models. My husband Tom, who should be a poster boy for AARP, is a shining example, as are many friends and family who have crossed this bridge before me. But when it comes to learning from the best, old Kineo dog is my Zen Master.

I always thought leaving the world of work-for-pay behind would feel more eagle-like than beagle-like. I’d soar up, up and away from earth-bound limits and weighty commitments, honing my sights back down on what I really wanted and needed. But then my path toward retirement became as roundabout as a rabbit trail through the pucker brush. And when I finally made it to the finish line, I was channeling b + eagle energy.

Sleep. Eat. Romp around. Repeat. Become enraptured by a leaf. Let the wind tickle your nose and flap your ears back. Drop when you’re weary but scamper while you can. Kineo’s teachings are as simple as they are profound. He’s never read the Tao Te Ching and can’t begin to explain how he walks his path with so much delight and gratitude. And he certainly doesn’t know that “freedom from attachment” is a thing. Still, he shows me “The Way” way better than my shelves full of New Age books and hours of fireside philosophizing.

“Watch and learn from the Beagle Buddha,” I remind myself whenever Tom and I take Kineo off road far enough to unleash him. We’ll be half way up the hill behind our house and Tom will reach down and unhook him from the tether that’s so often necessary for the traits of his breed—a nose and heart as big as the North Woods and a brain the size of a pea. “Good boy. Go on now you’re FREE!” I holler. Then I stand back and watch a live demonstration of the power of letting go.

It doesn’t happen all at once. So bent is he on sniffing every possible leaf and hummock that, at first, he can’t feel the loss of pull-back from his master, can’t shift his own weight into forward momentum. Then, like a lightening bolt, his new reality hits home. He stops, looks up, and a pinpoint of awareness flashes through the dimness of his primal dome. ZING! He’s on his own! His tail wags double time and I swear he smiles. Then, in a nanosecond, he throws himself into overdrive so fast his hind legs almost outrun his head. Woooosh! Suddenly a floppy-eared Taz/Wile E. Coyote shape-shifter, Kineo beats feet off trail. He’ll circle back eventually. But not until he’s celebrated every square inch of his independence.

“Ever wonder where you’d end up if you took your dog for a walk and never once pulled back on the leash?”

I started pondering that quote by author Robert Brault about the same time I started pondering retirement. “Hmmm…I’d end up somewhere deep in God’s Country where I wouldn’t turn around till my legs gave out, or my heart or my belly called me back home,” I thought. I wouldn’t really know for sure, though, until I went from kinda retired to full-on retired. And I was kinda retired, or at least I told myself that, for a long time.

As I said, mine was not a direct route, a threshold I just crossed over one day and then…boom…I was done working. Already a veteran technical writer before my Big Move to Rangeley, I’d been laid off and rehired, had quit and switched jobs so many times I was worn out enough to just fade away and not look back. Then, when Tom retired from teaching and I settled into a new home office steps from the Big Lake—and many miles from anyone needing the “propeller head” networking guides that used to be my claim to fame and a nice paycheck—I was ready to follow him out to pasture for good. Until I got a “remote” writing contract doing the exact same challenging but cool stuff that used to require commuting all over the place. Wonderful manager, terrific customers, most of whom were on the West Coast and didn’t need me at my desk till late morning. Good pay, flexible hours, great projects using the latest in high-tech publishing tools.

“But I feel like I’m retired,” I’d tell folks who wondered when I’d match my husband’s occupational status. “I travel. I make my own hours. I get tons of fresh air and exercise whenever I want. And I get paid.” Best job I ever had.

Until it wasn’t. Six years later, the fulcrum started to shift. Updated tools sent digital book making back to the Dark Ages. “Challenging” lost its cool factor. And customers got really cranky. For awhile, I kept pushing forward in “it’s OK as long as I can travel, take boat rides, and ride my bike” mode—sucking all the goodness I could out of life in a rural retirement community while telling myself I wasn’t getting sucked in the wrong direction when I’d turn my back on the lake and return to my desk. Gradually, though, I began to feel the pull-back—of meetings and deadlines and the never-ending cycle of rewording the same old stuff—more than my freedom. It might be long and really pliable, but I was on a leash, nonetheless. A retractable one. And my collar was beginning to chafe.

Finally, I cut myself loose last May. I got on early Social Security, bought myself a brand new laptop cleared of any company-sanctioned templates or Skype for Business appointments. I was free! Free to write whatever and whenever the “right” side of my brain wanted while relegating its nerdy left side to crossword puzzles in the Mountain Messenger. Free to watch the lake and the open road without watching my watch.

But none of that happened all at once. At first, I just couldn’t let it. I’d been a good, loyal professional too long, was too conditioned to pats on the back from my managers and the sweet treat of a bi-monthly paycheck. Could I actually shift into autonomy, embrace freedom? Or would my ego convince me I needed to fill up my calendar with some sort of busy work that kept me tethered to reward and recognition?

As with most life altering questions, it didn’t take long for full immersion into Rangeley summer to grant me an answer. And, as usual, when the answer hit I was on my bike heading off into the wild blue and green yonder. Suddenly, mid-pedal, I knew in my core that I didn’t really need my watch or my odometer or most of my old habits. A pinpoint of new awareness flashed through my self-induced fog. I was FREE, and I honestly and truly felt free. I’d turn around when I was damn well good and ready, beckoned home by a warm bowl of food, family, and all the comforts that really mattered.

Somewhere back on my New Age self-help shelf I remembered a passage that likened the power of detachment—of letting go with “focused surrender”—to shooting an arrow from a bow. Authentic freedom, it said, isn’t attained simply by releasing the arrow to fly, straight and true, toward its target. The act of pulling back the bow, of grounding yourself and shifting your sights on what you’re aiming for before you actually let go, that’s where the real magic happens. Kineo already knew that. Fortunately, it didn’t take me a dog’s age to catch on. No reading or over thinking required. ZING! Woooosh! Reality aligned with everything I was shooting for when I came to this retirement community in God’s Country. And like my beloved beagle mentor, I began to master the art of moving meditation, to honor the wisdom of returning to stillness.

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For more Beagle Zen, see:

 

Any given Saturday

Joy Clough6 Comments

I was browsing the greeting cards at a local gift store recently when the announcement was made: “Oh….it’s Saturday!”

It came from a woman standing in between the complimentary coffee carafe and the cash register. Her tone was not one of dismay or panic, but rather matter-of-fact with just a hint of urgency. She chuckled, pleased at her own sudden recall, made her purchases and left to go about her business.

“Yup, it’s Saturday, all right,” I thought. And then it hit me. There I was, reading through the same cute moose and hummingbird cards I’d seen repeatedly, wondering which critter went best with which upcoming birthday, and I hadn’t even been distracted by the woman’s announcement. I’d simply nodded in silence. I already knew it was Saturday. And, without even looking up, I felt I knew this lady just as if we’d sat down and had coffee face to face. She must be a local, I realized, and I must be almost one, too.

With house moving check lists, real estate deadlines, and 9-to-5 work weeks behind me, most days I’d be hard pressed to tell you what day of the month it is. I do have a calendar pinned to the refrigerator like everyone else. But unless it tells me it’s time to send off a cute card, pay a bill, or remind Tom to stop fishing and start hunting, I don’t use number dates to monitor my activities much anymore. I’ve switched over to a day of the week system instead. It doesn’t so much matter which calendar week I’m in, as long as I know “What day is today?” (Except when you’re talking about the third Thursday of the month. Everyone knows that’s pot luck dinner night at the Rangeley sportsmen’s club.)

Out in Rangeley Plantation (see my description in Finding Community), Saturday is dump day. It’s also fresh seafood truck day, post office and bank in the morning day, library before 2 o’clock and building supply store before 4 day, and make it to the IGA before last week’s sale items run out day. But, first and foremost, it is dump-is-open-all-day day. As you can imagine, Waste Management curbside pickup stops way south of here, leaving us responsible for our own garbage disposal. I can’t run out to the curb at the last minute in my slippers hauling green bags in one hand and pulling a recycling bin in the other. Tom and I need to haul our own by-products to the “transfer station,” so-called because it’s not really a dump, but a place where we dump all our refuse and recyclables so they can get transferred somewhere else to be dealt with. And, if for any reason, we have a total brain freeze on the dump hours of operation (meaning when the gate is left open), we can’t transfer our garbage out of our garage and must deal with those consequences for another week.

“Jeez, is it Saturday yet?” I wonder long about Thursday during unseasonably mild weather when what’s left of what I bought off the fresh seafood truck the previous week is in desperate need of transfer. (While most welcome in all other respects, Indian Summer is a bummer when it warms the garage after the dump reverts back to its winter schedule. In the “winter,” meaning after Labor Day, I lose the respite of having the dump open for a couple hours on a couple week nights.)

So if our noses haven’t reminded us, our bio-rhythms hopefully have and, come Saturday morning, we load up and head off for the dump. But, unless we are in dire need of emergency garbage transfer, we are not headed just to the dump. Out in Rangeley Plantation, 13 miles from the post office and 20 miles from the hustle and bustle of the Town of Rangeley, we strive to never make the 12 miles to the dump our only stop. We do what we call “the loop.” The loop will take us around to all the previously mentioned places of business. It consolidates our errands and conserves on gas, while preserving our sanity and rural way of life. And, more importantly, it reminds us why we came and why we don’t care so much about forgoing bigger city conveniences. At the dump, we are greeted as “hun” by the longtime attendant who has told me she will sort my recycling for me. A true honor, indeed, in these parts where co-mingling and other offenses have banished others to a lonely life of digging through their own smelly cans and sour bottles. At the post office, we aren’t a box number, but Joy and Tom who have a book from Amazon that was too big to put in the box so is handed over with best wishes for our well-being and weekend plans. On any given Saturday, one of us might stop in at the only hair salon that’s on a pond next to an ice cream store, where we have a good hair day as long as we don’t giggle too hard at the proprietor’s jokes and make him slip with the scissors. In our travels, we might also run into the guy who installed our TV dish and wonders if our reception is OK. He’s the Rangeley installation guy, not the DirecTV contractor sent from Waterville who refused to go up on the roof and told us we were out of luck. Our local guy runs into us in the building supply store or in the bank and wants to make sure we’re happy because, if we’re not, he’d “make the trip out” again. On any given Saturday, our “loop” is bigger now, but connected by people who would go the extra mile with us.

Maybe the woman in the gift store realized it was Saturday since that’s the day they switch over to Back Woods Blend in the free coffee carafe. If she was a renter, chances are she wouldn’t have even been there to make the announcement. Come Saturday, she would’ve hung her head and headed south while a local guy picked up her garbage at her rental cabin and transferred it for her. Nope, my guess was that she was a local and headed out of the store to make it to the dump before the gate closed, and after she got fresh seafood and did the rest of her loop.

“You know, when you retire, every day is Saturday,” our neighbor reminded Tom and me when we were making dinner plans awhile back. “Jeez,” I thought, smiling at the possibilities. “You mean the dump is open every day?”