Category: Seasonal celebrations and observations

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.

Weather…or NOT!

Joy Clough4 Comments

I’m not sure who the audience is supposed to be for most National Weather Service “special advisories” in my area. Especially this one from last June, typical for the time of year when temps start creeping up like we might actually be rounding the corner from not still spring toward maybe a stretch of summer soon:

Special Weather Statement for Northern Franklin County (June 15): The warm air temperatures this weekend in the 70s and lower 80s may cause people to underestimate the dangers of the cold water temperatures, which are currently only in the mid 50s. The cold water temperatures can quickly cause hypothermia to anyone immersed in the water when the water temperature is below 60 degrees. The average submerged person could lose dexterity within minutes and be unable to accomplish simple tasks. Anyone on small boats, canoes, or kayaks should plan accordingly if recreating this weekend and use extreme caution to avoid this threat.

It was the real deal, dominating the online weather forecast with so many capital letters and exclamatory symbols it might as well have been an all-points bulletin about a serial killer on the loose or an SOS to all ships at sea.

“Seriously?” I said. Sitting there in my shorts, all-season fleece jacket and slipper socks, I got the feeling that whomever the national weather authorities thought they needed to alert, they weren’t from around here.

As a seasoned Rangeley resident, I know that May typically translates to “May I please put away my hat and gloves a few days before my Memorial Day cookout?” Then comes June-uary when, even if I get a few of those almost-summer teaser days, I’m not gonna dig out my bathing suit anytime soon. And I’m certainly not gonna go and immerse myself yet. Not intentionally, anyways.

Coming up to Rangeley and places like it as a kid, I used to intentionally immerse myself in the lake as soon after ice-out as possible. I didn’t have AccuWeather radar or emergency bulletins to warn me not to “underestimate the danger.” I didn’t even have the sense that God gave geese, or so I was told. But I had my Dad, standing on the dock as I cannon balled past him, hollering something about being a numb skull and going into cardiac arrest. I could barely hear him, though, with the cold, cold water closing over me, making my heart nearly stop and my head go numb.

It didn’t take too many summers for me to realize why waders and wet suits were popular things. And why my parents waited for those rare 90-degree days to do the Mom and Dad swim-shuffle up to their waists and back to shore. Not because they were old. Because they were wise.

Before my Big Move to Rangeley, I used to pay pretty good attention to weather advisories. That’s because doing so could grant me official National Weather Service permission to “work at home” instead of slip-sliding down the turnpike to spend eight hours in an office cubicle. It could also clue me in to an ensuing snow day. That way, I’d keep one eye open the next morning for the best weather-related “news you can use” in a house with teenagers and a teacher husband—the list of school closures. When our town finally scrolled across the TV screen, I’d authoritatively announce that they could all stay in bed and then I’d shuffle back there myself.

Out here year-round now, I barely bat an eye. Seeing a generic weather “statement” is kinda like when I’m sliding into a 180 in the Subaru and the little red squiggly icon flashes on the dash to tell me, officially, that my road surface is frozen and I need to exercise caution. Ya think? Geez, so glad I got that super helpful validation so I wouldn’t be befuddled and skidding toward a snowbank at the same time!

Who needs to click on the little red exclamation banner across the online Rangeley forecast to read the painfully obvious? Not me. Something about having snow piled past your window sills imparts an innate sense of knowing. Nor’easter coming? Got it. Freezing rain turning to snow to rain then back again? Been there, doin’ that. Even on the days I try to ignore what’s all around me, a few steps off the back porch keeps me up to the minute on current conditions in my area.

Yup, after fourteen winters and almost-summers on the Big Lake, I instinctively already know. Or if I don’t—promptly and precisely—I act as if I do. Meaning I assume I’m gonna need a Gore-Tex coat, a few layers of fleece, socks up to my knees, waterproof gloves, all-terrain footwear, three different hats, zip-away pants, an umbrella, a shovel, a couple flares and a cell phone, even if the only coverage I might get is with the flashlight app.

Try as they might to encapsulate my local weather into a one or two-line forecast, the nerds at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, hardly ever hit it right. That’s because—to borrow an analogy from my software development tech writing days—it’s like nailing Jell-O to a tree. There are just too many ever-changing variables to squish into a blanket statement. Mountain currents, lake effects, you name it. Efforts at articulation usually end up with too little too late or somewhere in La La Land.

It’s still a fun guessing game, though, logging on to look, getting the meteorological low-down on what I can see coming across Bemis from town, or what the really big Great Lakes are supposedly sending my way. Then I concur with Tom, my resident Charlie Lopresti, and try to plan accordingly. Most days, it goes something like this.

Me: What’s NOAA saying about today’s weather and the possibility of outside activities?

Tom (on his NOAA-defaulted laptop): It’s fine if you don’t mind getting wet.

Amend wet with frost bitten, wind blown, dusty and/or burnt, and we pretty much have a custom, regional AccuWeather forecast. Most days, it’s good for whether or not we decide to head out, hang back, stock the pantry, or stoke the woodstove. Except for that really, REALLY wet stretch back in December, when sure ‘nough the creek did rise, taking us by surprise, and our bridges and all land access in and outta here along with it.

“Forget about NOAA,” I told Tom as we sat in the truck on the stranded side of what used to be the Bemis causeway bridge. “We need Noah…the guy with the big, biblical rescue boat!”

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 ↩︎

Kineo’s gift

Joy Clough6 Comments

Kineo, our ancient beagle boy, passed on to new adventures a few days ago. He died on my birthday.

Your dog dying on your birthday sounds like the saddest blues song ever. And it was. But there were gifts in it, too. Between my tears, squeezed out from heartache, I am able to acknowledge the timing, the lessons about beginnings that eventually must turn to endings, and back to new beginnings. I am accepting Kineo’s gift.

Kineo was the first and last thing I “did” each morning and every night. “Thank you for being my dog again today, and for being the best dog ever,” I’d say, wrapping him in a velvety hug. Then I’d regale him with an ever growing litany of noble titles before going to get my coffee or going off to bed. You’re welcome, he’d snuffle, his big brown eyes pouring the depths of his love right back at me. And he’d keep on keeping on—for days, weeks, years beyond what a seasoned beagle owner in her right mind (or any dog owner) could reasonably expect. He was two months shy of turning sixteen.

It almost got to be a joke, how he’d keep needing his annual shots, his celebratory cans of Ol’ Roy gravy dinner, and another five-pounder box of biscuits. I’d mark the calendar for his birthdays, then his half-birthday and, finally, his three-quarters birthday just before Mother’s Day. I’d do the dog-to-human years calculations thinking nobody must have told him he was pushing a hundred and twelve. Until there was no more fooling Mother Nature.

In the end, Kineo gave me the gift of one more boat ride, of watching his ears flap softly in the breeze as his nose tried to hoover out every last early summer scent coming off the lake. He devoted all of his days to making the best of mine, of ours. He shared the wonder of living every moment close to the earth, far from worry. And the grace of going peacefully, gratefully, when the time was right. He came to us a dark, stocky little puppy, ready to live up to his rugged Maine mountain name, and left a wizened, lumpy old hound happy to just waddle around after us and sleep in the sun.

On the afternoon of my birthday, Kineo listened mostly with his heart as I smiled through my tears, kissed his old grey head, and whispered one more time. “Thank you for being my dog again today, and the best dog ever. My Lord Bemis camp beagle, ruler of the afghan realm, the far rug regions, the tall pillow plateaus, the deep, dark blanket bayous, the vast, uncharted forest floors, and all the known couch counties. For being my sultan of the Subaru, titan of the Toyota, baron of the biscuits, guardian of the garden, and prince of the porch piddles. For living in regal beagle splendor all of your days, until this last day, Mumma’s birthday, the twenty-seventh day of May in your sixteenth year Atta Doggonie.”

And then we closed the circle.

Home groan…Easter grass

Joy CloughLeave a comment

With all the strides made lately toward ecological awareness and responsibility, how come green cellophane Easter “grass” still shows up on the store shelves? Isn’t it a bit ironic that McDonald’s has been forced to develop an environmentally sound alternative to Styrofoam while employees at Bunny Turf, Inc. are still shredding up heaps of neon green strips with a half-life of 200 years?

Back when I had to deal with the stuff as a necessary evil of young motherhood, I told myself I’d like it better if it was somehow recycled—re-purposed from some equally annoying product. Instead of making all those strips from scratch, I always thought the Bunny Turf people should maybe reuse the see-through parts of the Publishers Clearinghouse envelopes I threw away by the truckload each year. Add a little green dye, chop and re-bag it, and presto…one bothersome by-product replaces another! But by June, still finding the glossy clumps rooted in my carpet and underneath my couch cushions, I’d see the flaws in that thought process. No commercially recycled product could ever come close enough to the real thing, I realized, since there was no way of recharging each teensy fake blade with a thousand volts of static electricity. And without that characteristic cling lingering long after the Cadbury eggs have disappeared, the product just wouldn’t be genuine Easter grass.

Of course I didn’t always hate the stuff. I once welcomed its emerald plasticity as a sign of the season the same way I embraced cotton candy on opening day of the fair, Twinkies returning to my lunch box, and those bright yellow and orange corn syrup kernels that came out of hiding each Halloween. I even liked the feel of it, stuffed all springy and bright in my basket the night before Easter, full of promises even better than anything that was bursting forth in my back yard. By morning, this special nest would cushion my stash of chocolatey eggs, little pink and blue marshmallow chicks, and whatever else I could grab before my taller, faster sister plucked it out of hiding.

I bought my daughters their first bags of grass with the same childish exuberance. How precious they were going to be, I thought, prancing around in their little footed jammies looking for what the Easter bunny left and laying it reverently in their very own clump of virgin turf! But somewhere between then and the fifth year I had to rip the long green plastic shreds out of the bowels of my vacuum cleaner, I became less enamored. “I am never buying this crap ever again!” I vowed. “It’s like tinsel on steroids!” As soon as the girls’ Easter haul was eaten and I had re-purposed their baskets, I’d scrape as much of the stubborn tendrils into the trash as possible and pray that my Hoover Wind Tunnel could manage the stragglers. I actually did succeed in removing it from my premises long enough to imagine that, if I put out really big solid chocolate bunnies that year, the girls wouldn’t notice their baskets were bare on the bottom.

“Happy Easter!” one of the Grammies announced the next day, holding out a new basket for each girl. She had been to the dollar store and loaded up on jelly beans, plastic eggs she’d stuffed with spare change, and enough Easter grass for the new millennium. That’s when I gave in, stopped allowing my Easter grass grudge to dampen my holiday gaiety, and finally accepted a few elemental truths: 1) I would not have to buy more Easter grass; but 2) I could also never hope to remove it from my home because 3) the Grammies would always bring more. They had a direct line to the original source, it seemed, plucking from what they began hoarding circa 1958. (I know, because one year in Becky’s allotted clump I found a retro foil Hersey’s wrapper from my favorite candy when I was her age.) Before long, I became pioneer mom for my own “green” movement, stockpiling my ancestral ball and—except for what I lost once in a batch of dirty socks—cramming it all back into a dusty Hannaford bag in the closet. Then, when the girls finally admitted they believed a giant rabbit hopped into their living room with candy only because of the candy part, I dumped the mother lode, bag and all, into the trash and watched Waste Management haul it away.

But it seemed like just a brief moment in time before I wanted it back—that foolish, ancient clump of plastic grass and all the memories that went with it. “I’m so glad you had Easter grass!” I said to the Walgreens clerk the day before Easter some years back. “I like the green, but it’s good you had pink and yellow because I bought my girls these matching pinwheels, too!”

“That’s nice,” she said. “How old are your girls?”

“Twenty-two and 26,” I answered.

Old enough to appreciate how perfect the grass cradled the “big girl” treats their dad decided to hide instead of chocolates. He thought it might be really fun to do one more Easter egg hunt with the girls before we moved to Rangeley. And do it with liquor store nips. He was right.

I have plenty of time, they tell me, before I’ll have to start garnering my own grandma load of grass. Meanwhile, I might just surprise them with a new Easter tradition and load up a couple State of Maine-shaped Easter baskets I saw advertised in Down East magazine. I figure I can load a ton of candy in a big basket like that, stretching Twizzlers all the way from Fort Kent to Kennebunk, and nesting a couple Reese’s eggs down in Eastport. Only thing is, I’ll have to line it all with brown grass to be regionally correct this time of year…and remind them to never assume what’s hiding up around Rangeley is a Milk Dud or a chocolate-covered raisin!

Sweet everythings

Joy Clough2 Comments

I was in the Walmart the other day when I heard an exchange that warmed my heart like only eavesdropping in Walmart could.

“So, for Val’time’s Day, you want candy or flowahs?” a guy asked his sweetie. “You ain’t gettin’ both.”

“Chocolates!” she answered emphatically. “But none of them dahk kind…too bittah. You can save the damn flowahs for when I croak!”

Something told me he wasn’t going to spring for a card to complete his shrink-wrapped valentine. Even so, I wanted what she was getting. Hearing the squeak of cellophane as he stashed it alongside his Bud 30-rack stirred something primal from deep within and long, long ago. Way back—before Hallmarks, roses, romance, and a husband—I longed for a big, brassy display of affection like that. A huge box of Luv U just for me! Then, even if the other girls got double decker, ten-pounder chocolates, I’d have the little teddy hanging off my backpack to prove that, for one special day back in February, I had a valentine.

He waited till she was a safe distance away in search of Pringles, then pondered a display of neon pink, heart-shaped boxes like a man on a mission. Deciding she really was worth something extra special, he grabbed a five-pounder milk chocolate assortment with a tiny white “Luv U” teddy bear taped to the top—a reminder of his affection long after the candy ran out.

“Woah! Where did that come from?” I wondered. Spend a little time among the rows of plastic-flowered fuchsia hearts, and suddenly I was back in junior high craving chocolate nougats and a teddy bear trinket? Head down, I hurried my cart past the giant, extra-postage-required singing cards—averting my eyes to the cupid print boxer shorts and fire engine red nighties—nervous that, by the time I got home, I’d start having a hankering for Monkees reruns and my old lava lamp, too. Luckily, I managed to shake it off, making it back up the mountain to celebrate Valentine’s Day without a cellophane wrapped heart in sight. I had to wonder, though, what part of me could revert back to my lovelorn adolescence so fast and hard that I could almost feel the candy caramels getting stuck in my braces? How much could I actually blame on the mega marketing machine beating inside the Walmart, and how much did I need to admit that, deep down, I still longed for overly sweet, kitsch-coated Valentine validation?

I suspect it started back in elementary school, in the days before teachers had to mandate equal treatment during Valentine’s Day class parties. I’d peer into the paper sack taped to the side of my desk, thrilled when it held almost as many cards as the flirty girls with perfect hair got. On good years, when there’d even be candy in the bottom of my sack, I figured out the little hearts stamped “BE MINE” or “KISS ME” tasted way better than the “U R SWELL” ones.

But I’ve always  preferred all things chocolate, a passion lovingly passed down from my first favorite Valentine, my dad. The only heart health he knew was how good it felt to hug and slip each other a Snickers at the same time. In the days before high-fructose or low-glycemic anything, our father-daughter time was sweetened with Skybars, and family outings were fueled by orange slices—not the tree-ripened juicy ones, but the jellied candy kind—my dad’s idea of a power snack. It was my dad who gave me my first Whitman’s Sampler, a testament of his unconditional love and a test of my true feminine will power. How long after I ate the coconut mounds, the cherry cordials, and the other prime pieces could I let the box sit in my room before I’d cave and polish off those lingering dark ones filled with molasses and other things only Grandma really liked? Not long at all, I discovered and, by February 16th, I was using the empty box to store old photos and other keepsakes. I’m pretty sure that was the year I began associating Kodak moments—those happy times surrounded by love and family—with the haunting smell of recently devoured chocolate.

“Must be a girl thing,” says Tom, my husband of 44 years, whenever he sees me enraptured by Lindor truffles and such. Aside from the occasional sack of bull’s eyes he picks up from Mallard Mart, Tom saves his sweet tooth for blueberry pie. “This is the nicest thing you could ever do for me,” he reminds me each time I bake him one and he savors every slice. He could care less about chocolate, unless he’s playing middle man or needs a few pieces for bargaining chips. “If you really love me, just bring me a couple chocolates,” I tell him this time of year. And every year, he looks at me long and hard to see if I’m just saying no with my lips, while my very soul is shouting “Yes, please! Hand over a whole tray of Ferraro Rochers or don’t even bother!”

Yup, it’s a girl thing, all right, all tangled up in hormones, history, and borderline hysteria. And like all girl things, my man observes from a safe distance, teetering between being an enabler and waging tough love to try to snap me out of it. “Hey, don’t you really wanna save some of that for later?” he wanted to know the last time he saw my choco-holic tendencies get out of control. It was our first day of vacation in Hawaii and I was half way through a box of chocolate covered coconut and macadamia mounds.

“No,” I insisted silently, my mouth too busy and my brain too lost in luscious ooey, gooey-ness to speak. Couldn’t he see I was in paradise, for crying out loud—savoring every moment? Besides, the chocolates were a gift, waiting for me in a welcome basket the minute I opened the door to the condo. It was only natural that the pretty box with the palm trees and volcanoes caught my eye before the papayas and grapefruit at the bottom of the basket. But, knowing me all too well, he recognized the behavior. It was the same pattern he’d seen at Christmas when our daughter, Helen, made me rum balls with Godiva brownie mix and enough rum to make Captain Morgan lose his sea legs. “Yum, what a nice thing to give her Mumma,” I sighed, helping myself to just one more until, finally, the question became  less about Helen’s love and more about how much did I love myself. And, if I really did, could I stop shoveling in rum balls?

“Brought you something,” Tom announced, returning home from his last grocery run to town.  I perked up immediately. It was getting close to Valentine’s Day, after all. And, although I’d been fairly adamant about not wanting “a whole ton of chocolates,” I knew he cherished me like no other. He smiled sweetly, and I could hear the faint rustle of cellophane as he reached into his coat pocket and deposited two Lindor truffles into my hand. “Oooh…the peanut butter filled ones,” I said, “My favorite!”

He’d barely gotten his coat off before I called after him. “Got any more?” I asked, mouth full of half-melted heaven. “I’ll make you a pie!”

For more Valentine musings, see:

Resolution recluse

Joy Clough2 Comments

So, it’s the middle of January. Do you know where your New Year’s resolution is?

According to the experts who study these sorts of things, if I’m like most women my resolution went out the window a few days ago. It’s not at the gym anymore, not on the bathroom scale, not in my cupboard next to the Hershey bars I’m supposed to save for summertime s’mores. Phew…good thing I’m not like most women! My resolution never left because it was never here to begin with—not on New Year’s Day, anyways. I never made one. Or at least I never, as they say in the Bahamas, “put mouth on it.”

And, let’s be real. Once again, this isn’t like most years. It’s another year when it’s normal to set my sights on the most rudimentary of triumphs, for being happy I’m “able to sit up and take nourishment,” as my Nana used to say, and “still throwing a shadow.” Pretty sure I’m in good company not making any promises to myself for a while.

I used to make plenty of New Year’s resolutions. Loud assertive ones. I’d wake up January 1st feeling the traditional tidings of discontent—mildly disgusted and moderately depressed—ready to throw my bad habits to the curb with the Christmas tree. Most years I’d vow to break the food-filled hand to mouth reflex I’d acquired over the holidays. I’d hop out of bed, into my sneakers and sweats, and throw my body into gear before my brain realized what was happening. For a couple weeks, I’d even manage to combine abstinence with exertion. But then I’d hit the “Yeah, right!” wall, too hungry and tired to mark any more milestones. The bold new leaves I turned over would quickly lose their brilliance and I’d decide to re-root myself in complacency.

Don’t get me wrong, I can still find plenty of room for improvement. And I do love the raw challenge of a brand new calendar just waiting for me to log my pounds lost, miles metered, or whatever weekly results are inching me toward a lofty goal. But I now believe in taking a quieter, slower approach. “Keep ’em guessin'” is my new motto.

“Hmmm…what’s different about her?” folks may be wondering, if I’m lucky, this time of year. “Is she losing weight? Maybe she’s just trying a new hairstyle or she’s doing yoga again.” I maintain the suspense and keep on plugging away in stealth mode until sometime mid-year when, if I’m lucky, I can admit to some sort of victory.

Those of you who know me can attest that, while slow is my style, quiet is definitely not. My true nature is to vocalize my issues and regularly broadcast my successes. I instinctively want to proclaim my resolve to my friends, neighbors, the bank teller, my hair dresser and whoever happens to be with me in line at the IGA. External validation does drive me. It inflates my ego and boosts my self-confidence. But, if it backfires, it can burst my bubble and send me into a downward spiral faster than a bald tire slamming through frost heaves on Route 17. In my old-aged wisdom, I now trade the possible agony of public defeat for the inner thrill of silent victory.

The last time I made the mistake of boasting about the “new me” was in 2000. Not only was it a new year, it was a new century, and I got caught up in ushering in its challenges with my office mates. One coworker in particular, who was competing in some sort of Iron Woman competition, seemed to seek me out as a captive audience for her training and self-denial sagas. On the fourth consecutive day of her announcing how much she could bench press and how little she could eat, I got competitive, too. “Well, I just bought a Torso Track,” I blurted out. “I’m up to 50 reps on it a day and I do Abs of Steel!” (For those of you who didn’t get suckered into the Suzanne Sommers infomercial, Torso Track was an abdominal crunch machine you knelt on. You then gripped onto rolling handle bars and slowly inched yourself forward into push-up position. If you were lucky, you got ripped, six-pack abs. If not, you got back trauma.)

“So…how’s it going?” Iron Woman wanted to know each time she’d stop me in the cafeteria and start eyeing my midsection. Ashamed to admit that my right wrist was the only thing that got ripped before the Torso Track began gathering dust, I’d ask her what kind of lettuce she was eating that day to quickly change the subject. Lesson learned: When tempted to blab about my bold new beginnings, or whatever bad habit I’m bringing to a screeching halt, I bite my tongue. Public disclosure might feel right, but that rush of self-importance will be over in an instant. On the other hand, not having anything to show for my resolve by February can haunt me for the rest of the year.

So…no more New Year’s resolutions for me. I now make “concentrated efforts.” And, if I begin doubting that my small, behind the scenes achievements are actually adding up, I remember my old penny jar. Actually, it wasn’t really a jar, but a quart-sized mug with my name and my sorority logo on it that I kept atop my dresser in memory of more decadent days gone by. Clink…clink…clink…it went from holding beer to collecting loose change and, before too long, I’d accrued $22.49, a ball bearing and some fishing hooks. It was enough for take-out Chinese food and for the pre-Coinstar bank teller to wish she worked at a branch without a coin rolling machine. Of course, I see my life as grander than a giant beer mug. But the notion of suddenly brimming over with measurable results from discreet, everyday sacrifices really appeals to me this time of year.

Since it’s no longer on my dresser, I’ve resolved to find a Rangeley replacement for that old mug. With more catch-all containers than I could cart up here during the Big Move to Rangeley, I gave it to Salvation Army. I’ve got my sights set on finding an old blueberry bucket or syrup jug or something else suitable for chucking change into. Meanwhile, I hope another sorority sister named Joy who shares my philosophy has inherited my mug. And I sure hope she lives closer to a Coinstar machine and take-out Chinese than I do.

A Rain-geley White Christmas

Joy CloughLeave a comment

You know those Hallmark Christmas scenes so snowy-white perfect you stare at the picture longer than you read the inside of the card? Where the snow blankets the cutesy log cabin, lays a flawlessly glistening path for the storybook critters lingering in and around the puckerbrush, and sparkles off a trim little balsam that somehow got all decked out at the end of the dock?

That’s how I figured it must be upta camp this time of year. Down in the flatlands, I’d sing along with Bing just knowing Christmas in Rangeley was white. Dreamy creamy white. With just enough frost on top of the fluff to glitter like a happy holiday wish from a friend who cared enough to send the very best.

Then I moved here year-round and changed my tune.

The year was 2010, well past what used to be closing up camp and heading home time. This was home, and I was doing my best to track winter’s arrival at my new latitude with photos and witty observation. “Lookin’ kinda grey with a touch of gloomy out there,” I’d say. “You’d think we’d have fresh powder by now this close to Saddleback.” It was pouring buckets. For days on end. And by mid-December, I said to heck with a white Christmas and started dreaming of a dry Christmas.

The sign at the builder’s supply said “Welcome to Rain-geley,” which I took as a sign that the weird meteorological pattern was a fluke. By next year, I bet we’d all be talking about it like “the white Christmas that wasn’t” and get back to enjoying real holiday weather inside our little snow globe. Well that right there was the start of my learning curve, my uncharted climb toward the cold, hard truth. Turns out that, in Rangeley, typical never describes winter weather. And the only pattern is that there is none. What you see is what you get. Until, of course, you try to dress or otherwise plan for it.

But twelve years of Christmas later, I have learned first-hand where the seasonal boundary in the local saying “down the mountain” starts. It’s on Route 17, a couple miles off the Height of Land, where the Subaru thermostat starts registering something balmier than 28 degrees as it navigates south onto bare, dry pavement again. I’d always known, of course, that these lakes and mountains generate their own weather pattern that outsmarts most AccuWeather technology. It took awhile after my Big Move to Rangeley, however, to realize how soon after Thanksgiving I’d find myself living just over the arctic side of the Great Divide.

And the Big Lake, I’ve come to find out, has its own set of wintery rules not covered in any physical science class I ever took. It doesn’t just “freeze over” sometime in the middle of the first cold spell like I used to picture in my Hallmark fantasies. “Well, the lake must be frozen over,” I’d declare from the obscurity of my living room in southern New Hampshire. Thirty-two degrees…snap…time to freeze over….I imagined the lake just laying there still, waiting for spring when I was ready to return and see it moving again. I now understand that, for my beloved body of water, changing from liquid to solid is a dynamic, fickle process not governed by holidays or thermometers.

“Look!” Tom demanded on one of our first Rangeley December mornings after we’d been blanketed in snow for a couple of weeks but could still hear crashing waves when we ventured outside. I was in my PJs, without my glasses and my first cup of coffee, so he could have been pointing out anything—from the neighborhood moose in my front yard to Bono at my breakfast bar. (Although the moose was more likely and I wasn’t dressed for the occasion, I secretly hoped for the Bono scenario.) “The lake finally froze last night!” Tom said as I squinted in wonder at the smooth sheet of ice that had miraculously appeared sometime in the middle of the night when neither of us was watching. Snowshoeing across to the island would still be a month away, but the lake was definitely frozen solid.

A couple mornings later, Tom woke me up with a new weather report and a different tone of excitement. “I really need your help,” he announced grimly. “We need to move everything off the basement floor. It’s flooded.” I wasn’t sure how dire our emergency was, but even without my glasses I could see there was no more snow coating the trees or piled up on the ground. And I was pretty sure that needing to put on waterproof pants and serious rain boots without ever leaving the house was not the start of a particularly good day.

As I outfitted myself for flood duty, I guessed where Mark Twain was when he quipped, “If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes.” In Rangeley, in December, he wouldn’t have been joking. In a flash, I’d gone from hunkering down in the snow next to my frozen solid lake, to crouching next to my cellar steps, preparing to help salvage my possessions from the four inches of rain and melted snow that had surged through the foundation. I was peering at my husband hunkered down there, cussing and sighing and relaying orders, careful not to rap his six-foot high head on the five-foot low ceiling as he sloshed through the moving boxes we’d left down there until “sometime this winter.” They didn’t hold irreplaceable stuff, luckily, but tons of annoying little nicky-nacks that were too useful to throw away, but not treasured enough to go into safe storage upstairs. Plus CDs—hundreds of CDs and videos we were supposed to sort through “whenever.” As their cardboard containers turned to mush in the rising water, our priorities got shifted, and our day was suddenly repurposed. But, before we could schlep everything up the stairs to dry it off, Tom first had to tackle the most important piece of inventory stored there: our brand new sump pump. Installing it had also been on his “sometime” list since the old one was removed and we turned our creepy dirt cellar into a spiffy storage space with new concrete floors that “never showed any sign of moisture.”

“I knew I should have put that damn pump in when the cabin was rebuilt,” Tom said. I silently agreed. And I made a note to myself that, whenever Mother Nature is involved, “should have’s” need to take on heightened urgency—especially when you live 20 miles from the building supply store selling the extra parts you need for whatever it is you should have installed in the summer. The same store with the “Welcome to Rain-geley” sign out front.

“That’s probably why nature is called a mother,” I mused as Tom drove off to get those extra parts and I rummaged around for rag towels. “Like any mother, she knows you ignore ‘should have’ impulses and act like you’re in command of your own timetable.” You can try to blow her off, but she always gets the last word. Kneeling on my dining room floor, swabbing down picture frames and sponging out CD cases, I felt like a child who didn’t take her earth mother seriously and was now being punished with a puddled-up, pumpless basement.

That was years ago. And, fortunately, misadventures like that are short-lived in these parts—where I must pour my energy back into what’s actually hitting me in the face at any given moment. Could be anything from rain to sleet to snow to graupel and back again. Graupel, by the way, is a new word I added to my vocabulary somewhere along the learning curve. According to Webster’s it’s “small particles of snow with a fragile crust of ice softer than hail.” And it’s been in my yard more than once this time of year. Not right now, though. Right now, as of this writing, I see in my yard a trace coating of white that appears to be snow-like. It’s blanketing the path down to where the lake’s stopped lapping at the shore and gone really, really still. Couldn’t tell you whether it would sparkle off a lit-up tree out the dock because leaving your dock in for ice-in and ice-out is a teaching moment Tom chooses to avoid. And we gave up stringing lights on outside trees years ago—after we figured out lights UL-rated for outdoor use don’t take squirrels into account.

Right now, the sump pump is working when needed and so, supposedly, is the snow blower. And my White Christmas CD survived the flood to keep me entertained while I open those perfect holiday cards.

Happy Holidays, everyone. Be merry! 

Portraits of Thanksgiving (retouched)

Joy Clough2 Comments

Note: The following is an update to Portraits of Thanksgiving, published in November 2010.

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

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

Sometime in early motherhood, when the little girl things I’d taken for granted became vitally important pieces of a legacy I needed to preserve for my own girls, the dusty shoe box turned into a treasured archive. And digging way down to the bottom, we found a real gem—one of my first Thanksgivings captured in black and white.

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

Now much older and a potential Nana myself, I’ve stockpiled a hefty share of special Thanksgiving prayers. For family and food, love and well-being. And always before saying them I think back to that old Polaroid print, knowing that it’s in the scanning of the grey setting that my here and now becomes vivid. Because all the adults—the grandparents and parents posing at that Thanksgiving table—are now long gone. After the flash bulb burst and my Dad sat back down, we all went back to our steaming plates, blissfully unaware that most in our precious gathering would, one by one, be leaving the table way too soon. Especially my Mum, who looked up from her holiday feast thinking she was posing for just another snapshot. How could she know she’d already lived two-thirds of her short life?

Forever freeze framed in my memory, the actual photo from 1958 is stashed in my attic archives, somewhere amid the decade-old Big Move to Rangeley larger boxes of unsorted knicky-knacky stuff I’m still saving for a someday project. Someday, I’ll take it out of the shoe box and preserve it like it really deserves, framed for all posterity amid the prints of my daughters’ birthdays, holidays, vacations and everything in between. Someday, sometime mid-February, when I’m finally ready to take up scrap booking to get myself through another Rangeley winter. Meanwhile, I’ll keep focusing on the newer pictures playing on perpetual repeat in my head. Set in a storybook of my own making, it stars me and my beloveds during another year of challenge and loss, of beauty, hope and abundance, of my wildest dreams unfolding before me. This Thanksgiving, as I pause, smile, and really look at my family around the table, I will celebrate being there with them, and how blessed I am that the people I can be close to again are the same like-minded souls I want to be close to…forever. This year, I’ll give special thanks for the medical miracles that touched my tiny corner of Maine. For the days we each got vaccinated with huge grins and waiting winter-white arms. And, especially, for the day I walked away from Maine Medical Center and my angels in scrubs with a brand new hip and a heart full of hope, flipping the page on my fear that the next stop was a wheelchair. Those memories shine like a billboard now, fading out the images of what could have been with the light of newfound freedom. And they pave the way for new ones, like recommencing cousins reunions where we update the 60-year-old Thanksgiving picture and toast to grey hair, grandkids and longevity.

I’ll gladly be sitting still for this year’s picture, aware that it IS a big deal to be another year older around the same old table. And I’ll still never lose sight of my antique Thanksgiving Polaroid. It’s a necessary backdrop, a reminder of my essence and my impermanence, a gentle warning that, in contrast, my here and now is too vibrant for me to dwell on portraits of my life gone by. Spirit willing, it lets me picture myself well into my 80’s surrounded in living color by my family and friends, focused on the blessings right in front of me.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Be blessed.

Real life is scary enough

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Who needs Halloween this year? Not me! I’ve been wearing a mask and eating candy for months now. And I definitely don’t need to watch any of those special October freak fest movies. I have more than enough reasons for recoiling in horror and wanting to run somewhere and hide just watching the nightly news.

But long before the pandemic and all the nasty, spooky stuff going on out there, I never required a holiday or anything haunted to scare the bejesus out of myself. 

“You never saw Alien?” someone asked the other day. Nope. Not at the movies, not on the tube, or on the Disney World ride. Never have. Never will. When it came out in the late 70s, I was still trying to unsee the guy who got his eyes pecked out on The Birds from when I was seven years old. I’d hear everyone talking about how this alien creature “just comes busting out” of some guy’s chest and I was all set. Plus it was back when I was starting to contemplate pregnancy and childbirth. And that was all the busting out I was gonna be able to handle.

Alien and other classic creature features must pale in comparison to the high-tech horror scenes streaming into living rooms these days. I can still only imagine. Maybe I’m some sort of alien myself for avoiding the flicks, while most other folks tune in at every opportunity, choosing to make themselves sweat, shake, gasp, and fear for their lives. I guess I just don’t find cringing on my couch in gut-wrenching terror a particularly good night’s entertainment. Besides, although I spend the bulk of my time living an idyllic lakeside existence, I still suffer through my share of moments filled with dread or apprehension and, by nighttime, I’m ready to settle in with a couple mindless sitcoms.

The adrenaline rush, I suppose, is why people want to watch today’s version of Leatherface buzzing up piles of human kindling with his chainsaw. They get a cheap high when witnessing someone’s dismemberment and their adrenal glands respond by pumping out high-octane juice. But since adrenaline’s real purpose is to boost physical strength—allowing a victim to flee from or fight off an attacker—I can’t help but wonder how it gets channeled through couch potatoes who routinely OD their circuits with terror. If I did choose to watch repeated zombie, creepy crawly, or bloody massacre scenes, wouldn’t I need to put the show on pause, rush out on my porch to scream my lungs out, and come back in for another dose? Wouldn’t I get used to tolerating higher levels of terror, seeking more and more harder core scenes to give me that extra surge of secretions I’d be craving?

No thanks. I’ll be content with hypothesizing about the effects of prolonged make-believe terror. Good thing, because given my baggage and the everyday real life little shocks to my system I manage to pile on, if I watched more than a few minutes of that stuff, I’d end up looking like lakeside Chucky myself! I’m still recovering from all the times in my formative years when televisions were still a novelty and my fun-loving family made me the entertainment: “I told her the UFOs were making the rounds in the neighborhood and our house was next. That got her going!” I never even got a vacation, just a new twist: “Right before dark, I hid behind the outhouse and scratched on it like a big, ol’ bear. She was a couple feet off the ground when she came outta there!” By the time I was 20, my nickname was Fidget. And I checked under the bed a lot.

So, all things considered. I’ve had a steady enough stream of adrenaline coursing through me, thank you very much. A lifetime supply, I figure, administered in various doses by all sorts of jitters and jolts. Here are just a few:

  • Motherhood. Raising two wonderful and remarkably well-adjusted daughters has brought me way more joy than trepidation. But let’s face it. From the moment the maternity nurse handed over ownership of my own new life forms—and on through the gauntlet of gruesome possibilities known as the teenage years—I’ve had some fitful nights and more than a few nail biters. Now that they’re grown women, I can breathe a bit easier. Except, of course, when Helen, who worked at the Portsmouth Music Hall, told me she had been perched on a ladder somewhere near the proscenium dome getting ready for a production. Or when Becky, an Outward Bound instructor based in Moab, Utah, reported that she’d be “entering Dark Canyon” on such and such a day, or “down in Desolation Canyon” on another.
  • Blinking hard and saying: “Sorry, officer, I understand.” Hasn’t happened much, but once or twice is enough.
  • Commuting down Route 128 near Boston. I only subjected myself for short spurts back when I was making a name for myself along the tech corridor, but the flashbacks still give me cold sweats.
  • Being audited by the IRS. Before that, the word “fine” meant I was OK and all was right with my world. Not anymore, and certainly not in the context of a cryptic federal document.
  • Snakes! The hardest part of living in the woods is that, until you get really close, all sticks look like snakes. And vice versa.
  • Watching a pair of loveseats fly out of our trailer on the Maine Turnpike. They were wedged in there with all the logistical expertise that allowed Tom to successfully cart loads up here for more than 20 years. They were a matching set, carefully swathed in bubble wrap to protect their burgundy leather upholstery. Real leather, we were proud to say, to replace a gold tweed recliner and other ancient chairs we weren’t bringing back into our new living room. And they were heavy, built to last…or so we thought until a freakish wind shear reached down like the hand of God and levitated them up and out of our trailer just south of Portland. Thanks to adrenaline-induced superhuman strength, Tom was able to sprint into the center lane and haul the pair of them back over to the side of the turnpike before the next round of semis barreled past. The safety patrol guy that stopped to help said our leather furniture wasn’t the scariest thing he’d ever seen in the middle of the turnpike, but wouldn’t elaborate. When our heart rates returned to somewhere within the range of normal, I told Tom that Flying Loveseats, if nothing else, would make a great name for a punk rock band. Because weird, twisted humor is my go-to, my drug of choice for calming my nerves.
  • Hearing a long-eared owl claiming its nightly kill at the end of our driveway. Before we figured out this Rangeley relative of a screech-owl wasn’t a little old lady being ax murdered, we spent some chilling moments out on the porch in our skivvies wondering what it wanted from us. Now there’s a haunting sound that would give any trick-or-treaters brave enough to come out my way a kick butt dose of natural adrenaline!

Happy Halloween! Stay safe. May your treats be abundant and your laughter louder than your screams.