Daddy’s grown-up girl

Joy Clough5 Comments

Whenever I met someone throughout Maine, New Hampshire, and either end of Massachusetts, I’d have to tell Mac. Besides inheriting his passion for story telling to anyone who’d stand still long enough to listen, I believed nothing ever really happened until it got reported back to Mac. And each and every time I did so, he’d puff out his chest like a partridge ready to drum and ask: “Did you tell ’em who you are?”

“Yes,” I’d say in all honesty. “I told ’em who I was.”

I wasn’t Joy McGranahan like it said on my birth records. I wasn’t Mrs. Thomas Clough, even after I took vows, signed a marriage certificate, and had that stamped on my first credit card back when Sears thought women couldn’t be held responsible for their purchases until they had a husband. Even later, when I became full-fledged Joy Clough—writer, mother, successful business proprietor, and wife to a Science Teacher of the Year—that still wasn’t who I was.

“Hi, I’m Joy, Mac’s daughter.” That’s how I came to introduce myself. It paved my way, opened doors, and usually sparked instantaneous recognition. On the rare occasion I’d run across someone who couldn’t readily remember hearing or seeing Mac, I’d have to coax out a recollection. “You know, ‘Mac’ McGranahan? Writes the outdoor column for the paper? Talks about fishing on the local cable channel? Talks about pretty much anything anywhere, but fishing stories and Maine jokes are his claim to fame. Red and black flannel shirt, suspenders…?”

“Oh, yeah, I know Mac!” most folks eventually responded. “He’s your Dad?” They’d shake my hand, assessing the mild-mannered woman who seemed to be holding her own in the shadow of such a character, retell their favorite outdoors with Mac story, and wish us all the best.

There was a time, of course, when I was just Joy, or Joy Joy as he called me when we were being silly, which was most of the time. Back before I called him by his nickname, before I ventured into society on my own, he was just Daddy. I had no relativity, no separation, no real knowledge of my own identity, and no words to label the love and security I saw in the faces of my father and mother as they reached down to hold me, lift me up. For the longest time I figured everybody’s daddy smelled faintly of boat exhaust, took their families to big lakes in Maine named after moose, and played practical jokes on raccoons. I had no clue that some moms weren’t OK having peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and Tang for supper so they could stay on the water till dark, or that, when company came over, some cared if their hamburgers weren’t made out of cow meat.

“Daddy, do you think God is up there?” I asked as we trolled around Moosehead Lake at dusk. Mac looked up with me at the last rays of sun turning the clouds cotton candy pink and, for the first time I can remember, could not pretend to be sure of an answer. “If He is, what do you suppose He looks like?” he asked back. From where I sat watching him steer the boat, silhouetted by lake and sky, I imagined an older, white-bearded guy kind of like him. Able to move mountains when he had to, and stop you in your tracks with his big, booming voice.

“Hey Joy Joy, come see how strong your Daddy is,” Mac would holler. Holding one arm at a right angle, he’d thrust his fist up in the air and I’d grip onto his bicep for all I was worth until he’d flex a grapefruit-sized ball of muscle, heaving my hands out of its way. Then he’d hoist me to the ceiling on one hand, bragging I was lighter than the boat anchor he had to horse back into the boat all the time, and spin me around the room till we were both giggling.

As I grew, so too did my perspective, slowly expanding my universe out and around the man at its center. Who I was evolved from Daddy’s littlest fishing buddy, to his Twist and Shout dance partner, to the young writer whose first stories he published on the Xerox machine in his office and hand-delivered to captive readers. When I graduated from “the little blonde girl who asks too many questions” to scoring my first newspaper byline, he proclaimed: “My daughter can do anything she puts her mind to.” I grew to believe it, too, especially if Mac gave me a big shove in the right direction.

Born near Boston on “the real” Memorial Day in 1928, the son of a tug boat captain and a Scottish immigrant, my Dad’s given name was Warren. But no one ever called him that except his parents and sister who, by nature and necessity, were quiet, temperate people. “I never figured out how he got the way he is,” my Nana, his mother, would tell me. “Up until the time he was three, I could just sit him out in the yard in an old tire inner tube and he’d stay put for hours, afraid to crawl out of it, not a peep out of him. How’d he grow up to think the sun has to rise and set over him? Maybe I should’ve let him have his own room instead of making him sleep on the divan all those years.”

No matter what spawned it, Mac had an ego the size of the biggest bull moose in the herd. Like the huge ol’ christer you see standing in the road and pray he goes around your car and not charging into it. He was always right. Period. And if you tried to sway him toward your way of thinking, he’d wear you down till you’d not only see his point of view, but tell him you were wrong not believing him in the first place. We usually didn’t mind, though, because he’d make everything into a joke, getting us to laugh, at ourselves, at him and the wonder of his all-knowingness. “Good thing I moved us back up here from Massachusetts when I did,” he said. “How else would you have met your future husband, gotten a job, bought a house, had kids? And good thing I keep such a nice boat down on Great Bay. Gave Tom all the more incentive to marry you and take you off my hands!” Yup, Mac, I’d say to myself, becoming your fishing pal was the trump card, way more alluring than my looks or personality! I’m sure what Tom really wanted, God help him, was to be able to tell people he was Mac’s son-in-law.

Technically, of course, he was right. Mac was half the reason I was born in the first place, the perfect complement to my mother, who knew when to stand her ground and when to bend, who matched him joke for joke and, sometimes, fish for fish. If not for his paternal influence, I might never have visited places like Rangeley, never have grown up dreaming of a guy who wanted to live with me in a cabin on a lake, never had Mr. Right waiting for me by the altar while Mac gave me his blessing.

“Smile at everyone as you pass by,” he said, waiting to walk me down the aisle on my wedding day. “You’re beautiful, and every single one of these people is here just for you.” Well, probably some of them are here to see Tom, too, I remember thinking. But I didn’t want to argue, so I rested my hand on Mac’s arm, feeling his bicep tighten under his tux, and went side-by-side with him toward my future.

“Wow, I’m pretty lucky to have a daughter with a place in Rangeley who thinks enough of her father to surprise him with a cake,” Mac told me years later after one of his New England Outdoor Writers’ annual dinners was hosted here. “Everybody realized it was my birthday and they all sang to me!”

“Yup, I told ’em who I was at the Rangeley Inn and they baked it up special,” I said. “And I’m pretty sure they had a Memorial Day parade for you in town, too.” It was the best Mac celebration ever, perfect indeed. He got to eat cake, preside over his fellow writers, and brag about how his daughter “put her mind to it” and got herself a cabin right down the lake from where he’d caught the best brookies.

“How am I ever going to top that one?” I wondered. “I really helped him toot his horn big time.” Good thing, too. A year later, Mac died in the L.L. Bean wing at Maine Medical, just after I turned 40, and mere days after he’d thrown his canoe on top of his Jeep for the last time. When he retired early ten years before, we teased him that he’d fish himself to death. He made a valiant effort but, truth was, he wasn’t a force of nature. Heart disease, his preference for Snickers and Hostess snacks and, I believe, his unyielding approach to life, caught up with him.

Mac’s a lot quieter now, and a much better listener. But I still hear him right around sunset out on the dock talking back to the loons. Once in a great while, when I get to introduce myself the way he taught me, I can almost see him grin and puff out his chest. But best of all, over the years I’ve come to know that the distinction he craved, the recognition of me being Mac’s daughter, was his honor as much as mine. Who I am, who I’ve become as an older woman, is a calmer, gentler, female version of my father with the same warped sense of humor, same need to talk a blue streak, same determination for living life to the fullest where I can see God in the open sky. “My daughter’s just like her Old Man,” he’d brag at social gatherings. And, although I couldn’t agree at the time, didn’t see it till much later, I now accept the claim as mostly true. Minus the red and black flannel shirt with Snickers in every pocket and, most days, drowning out the loon calls, Mac was right.

Happy Father’s Day!

——————————————————————-

For more Father’s Day stories, see:

Dads of daughters
From Daddy’s little girl
Dining with Dad

For more “Rooted In Moosehead, too” stories, see:

Mother’s Day anniversaries

Joy CloughLeave a comment

For more than 20 years, Mother’s Day meant time to go back “upta camp” to rake the leaves, dust off the cobwebs, and watch the lake warm up before declaring it summer-ready and heading back to New Hampshire. Time for my girls to bestow their annual, handmade Pine Tree Frosty gift coupon/card and whatever trinket their allowances allowed, even though I told them to save their money.

“Mumma doesn’t need things,” I’d insist. Being with my family, happy and healthy, and back in Rangeley, was the best possible gift. As my pile of un-cashed ice cream vouchers grew, so did my memories of this fleeting weekend in early May when the promise of warm days by the lake stretched ahead like a mirage. Inevitably school, work, and my maternal duties in my “regular” house crept back into focus so that, by mid-summer, I’d be grounded in truth: I was a split-personality mother leading a seasonal dual existence. My family’s residence—a house with more space but a lot less charm—was three and a half hours away from our true home, our real base camp in Rangeley.

On Mother’s Day 2010, I made a colossal liar out of myself. Sitting in my Adirondack chair watching the lake “turn over” from another winter, I wasn’t the least bit remorseful, though. I’d come to find out there was an even better best possible gift for Mumma. Being right here with my family, happy and healthy, and staying here was all I ever needed and then some. Beginning with that one monumental weekend, I did not need to pack and head for “home” as soon as I got settled in. I was home—for good—a bona fide year-round Rangeley resident! Faith, family, determination, and a touch of insanity bought me my fairy tale. My life was consolidated, my pared-down possessions tucked snugly in my now-just-big-enough cabin. With home base and its newly-added upper stories peeking out of the birch boughs behind me, I faced the lake and let my head align with my heart. I could stay put now way past “camp closing” time, to see the big lake ice over again, to be there still for the next spring turning. “Priceless,” I said, and gave myself a big motherly hug.

This Mother’s Day weekend marks four years since my Big Move. Just before I pulled the plug on my old life (and my higher-speed Internet connection) and left New Hampshire for the last time, I posted the following thank-you note on Facebook:

I will be celebrating Mother’s Day in my “new” home by the lake, sending love to everyone who made the dream possible. To my three mothers….Mum, who gave me life and who shows me every day how love lives on in Spirit; to Prudy, my step-Mom, who helped me love myself as a grown woman while seeing the wonder in all things; and to Ruth, my Mother-in-Law, who taught me just in time, the healing power of unconditional love. To my beautiful, strong, funny, amazing daughters, Helen and Becky, who mother me back, but keep me young at heart and always eager for adventure. (Thank you for chosing me in this lifetime!) And, of course, to Tom, my husband and forever friend. Thank you for the courage to take this free fall, for the wisdom and common sense to bring our “craziness” into the realm of possibility, for keeping my feet on the ground and my head in the clouds, for laughing with me and loving me all ways, and for always  just being with me by our big, beautiful lake.

I’m still saying thanks every day since I wrote that. I thank my three mothers in Heaven for bringing me, collectively and in their own separate ways, to where I am today. I thank my daughters—for knowing I don’t need things because letting me scream like a 10-year-old with them on a mega-coaster or a whitewater raft is better than any trinket. I thank Tom, my best friend, for building this life around me and still wanting to share it with me, even through the long, cold Rangeley winters. I thank my girl friends, my soul sisters, who nurture me like mothers, and love me unconditionally for who I really am. I thank my work family, for enabling me continue my financial security out here in the woods, for helping me prove to myself and the rest of the traditional business world that earning money is just as much of a blessing as having the freedom and the enthusiasm to enjoy spending it. And, more than ever on this Mother’s Day, I thank myself, for just plain being—here and now—hugging myself in my camp chair, at peace with all that I have and have lost.

Forty years ago, I thought my joyful Mother’s Days were over. I’d proudly bought my mother a set of stoneware salt and pepper shakers with some of my $1.80-an-hour paycheck, even though she’d told me to save my money. “As long as you’re happy, I don’t really need things,” she said. “But thanks honey, they’re lovely.” Grinning, she set them in the dining room hutch for “special company.” Fortunately (and unfortunately) I had no way of knowing that was to be our last Mother’s Day. I was 17, madly in love with Tom, getting ready to graduate high school and head into my “best summer ever.” Mum died suddenly a couple months later, leaving me to stare angrily at the salt and pepper shakers and all the nick-knack gifts I’d given her that seemed so hollow. Happy? If happiness was what she really wanted for me, from me, how come she’d just taken all hope of it away with her forever?

But neither did I know then that mother-daughter chats wouldn’t stop, that the wisdom and support would come to find a different, more powerful, communication channel. I didn’t know then that, today, I’d be so relaxed in my camp chair, a mother of two grown women myself, surrounded by what I choose to bring into focus, nurtured by laughter and love that never dies. Happy. Blessed. Rooted in Rangeley—with a huge stack of coupons to the Pine Tree Frosty yet to be cashed.

——————————————————————————————-

For more Mother’s Day messages, see:

 

Terms of endearment (and other gibberish)

Joy Clough2 Comments

Twas nearly 40 Valentine’s Days ago when Tom first called me his little boogma. I was so thrilled to be anyone’s boogma, especially his, that I loved the sound of it. I didn’t even stop to think how he might have come up with such a label but, instead, took it as another sign from the universe that he was my soul mate. I had a brand new word that no other guy was saying to no other girl—one he had concocted on a whim because nothing else fit! In my mind and heart, he was already a part of my family.

Wikipedia calls this neologism—making up a word that only holds meaning for the person who first utters it, and for those who later come to understand its usage. Medical references claim it’s psychotic, probably the result of brain damage or mental imbalance. I call it good old family dialogue and say the medical exerts are full of snash. Our special dictionary is colorful, historic, and only slightly insane. And I’ll proudly add pages to it as long as I can continue to hold a thought and morph it into an expression. Following is an abridged chronology.

dockanoon (circa 1931)
“Please don’t make me go in the attic, Mommy! The dockanoon lives there!”
One of the earliest made up words in family history, this came from my Dad (Mac) when he was about three years old. Late one afternoon, he got a little adventuresome and toddled up to the attic and there it was way up under the eaves, a menacing monster waiting to prey on little boys who ventured out on their own. Much later, he figured out it was a actually a dress form his mother (my Nana) used for sewing, silhouetted by the sun setting through the attic window. He never dropped the word, though, and made sure to pass it down to me and my sister as soon as we became afraid of the dark, too.

oopergawsis (circa 1958)
“Be careful of the oopergawsis when you jump on Daddy’s lap.”
We were just old enough to get rambunctious and still young enough to be scared stiff by dockanoons and other monsters when Mac coined this one. Much later, he’d explain we hadn’t yet learned how boys were different than girls, and the proper terms for their private parts. We hadn’t even had a chance to make up our own naughty names. So, in order to protect himself without getting too graphic, he tried to convince us that an “invisible” monster sat on his lap and was easily disturbed. My sister saw through that story, though. The first time we visited the zoo, she took one look at the male water buffalo, pointed, and exclaimed to everyone within earshot: “Mommy, look at the huge oopergawsis on that one!”

snash (circa 1965)
“I know that you stole all those cookies, so don’t give me any of your snash!”
My cousins and I inspired this word when we were spending the weekend with Nana, our original neologist. We were mischievous preteens, pushing her boundaries and figuring she was too off her rocker to be wise to our antics. We burst out laughing the minute she said it, and snash went down in family folklore as Nana’s gibberish word. Very fitting for someone so easily flustered who wrapped up empty boxes and gave them to us at Christmas. She could remember coming over on the boat from Scotland, but couldn’t remember lunch, so she compensated with Nana-speak. Or so I thought, until I finally looked up snash while researching this post. There it was, right in the Urban Dictionary, common Scottish slang for “verbal insolence.” I stand corrected, Nana! Guess you brought a bit of ancient dialect over on the boat with you and your dockanoon.

gutchies (circa 1974)
“Guess I gotta do laundry so I’ll have some clean gutchies.”
The first time I heard Tom say this in college, I thought it was odd that he nicknamed his undershorts. Then I remembered my own rich history, and was kind of jealous. Why hadn’t I come up with that? It was long before anybody called ’em tighty whities, when only grandpas wore boxers, and I could have been a trend setter. Tom claimed it was his brother’s term, not his. And all these years I believed him, until I finally consulted the Urban Dictionary and learned the truth. It’s a for-real word, supposedly originating in Pennsylvania. Generally not depicting the spiffy, new briefs modeled by Michael Jordan in the Hanes commercials, it can refer to women’s panties, too. Not the Victoria’s Secret variety, mind you, the 12-pack Walmart kind. Who knew?

wlak (circa 2000)
“Jasper’s a good dog, so he deserves a long wlak.”
Some of my most memorable neologisms, including this one, come from not thinking as fast as my mouth is moving. I was attempting to verbally spell out W-A-L-K so our beagle didn’t bust a gasket hearing me utter the actual word. Well, I did better than that by making sure he could never decipher my alphabetic code! Two beagles later, we are still taking the dog(s) out for a wlak.

stugged (2009)
“The table legs were rickety, so Tom reinforced them and now they are stugged.”
I didn’t realize it till later, but when I came out with this one, I was actually following the footsteps of Lewis Carroll and other literary greats in creating a portmanteau—lumping two words together to form a new one. At the time, I thought I was simply admiring Tom’s handiwork. He made a table sturdy + rugged = stugged. Now I use it to describe everything from a well-built backpack to my legs after a long snowshoe.

slub (2012)
“What kind of a slub leaves her wet bathing suit in a lump on the lanai for the rest of the day while she sits and drinks rum punch?”
I won’t confess how many of my portmanteaus I have set free while enjoying a cocktail on vacation. Suffice to say, though, the combination seems to create a fertile environment for some of my most memorable self-expressions. Slug + slob = slub. Somehow, I seem to be more comfortable being a tropical slub than a Rangeley slub. Even with a homemade wine cooler in my drinkin’ jar down by lake, change of latitude, minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit, minus rum does not seem to create the same result. Go figure.

Fredded Shosted Wheat / Shark, Puddle and Fly (ongoing)
“Before you open the new box of Cheerios, I want you to finish the Fredded Shosted Wheat.”
“We used to leave our car at the Shark, Puddle and Fly. Now we take the bus to Logan.”
I blame proficiency in this sort of word art on my mother’s love of spoonerisms. Before Wikipedia defined them as “errors in speech or deliberate plays on words in which corresponding consonants, or vowels are switched,” I knew them as cheap fun around the dinner table. She retold the story of Rindercella and her prandsome hince so often I think it must have triggered the spoonerism synapses in my cerebral cortex. I now carry on her legacy with pride and panache.

camp frau (Present)
“In the middle of winter, when she hasn’t been into Rangeley or down the mountain for awhile, Joy begins to feel like a camp frau.”
This is my own adaptation of house frau, a term I heard my mother-in-law use when talking about living in Germany in her younger years. The house fraus in her neighborhood were stuck in a rut by choice, it seemed, Germany’s version of Donna Reed or June Cleaver without their modern appliances or naturally sunny dispositions. They wanted to be housewives, to have no aspirations greater than polishing silverware and making sauerkraut. The tone she used when she spoke told me my mother-in-law wasn’t one of them, and made me pray to never become her son’s house frau. Sometimes, though, when the days get short, the snow piles up, and I wonder if I’d be a better woman if I swept up around the wood stove one more time, I do feel like a camp frau. But then I remember: Due to temporary circumstances and wanting to live the good life in God’s country, I am a cabin-bound woman, not a camp frau. I am a lucky little boogma.

—————————————————————————————
For other Valentine’s Day posts, see:

Goin’ to town: A Rangeley winter primer

Joy Clough2 Comments

“Goin’ to town. Need anything?”

On any given day, the question elicits a mild adrenaline rush. Even if I’m just back from doing the whole loop, with provisions stacked up like cord wood, the doubts still surface. Gee…what’s left in the freezer? Is company coming? Got milk? Then it’s winter again and I go from backwoods practical to Pavlovian.

Used to be, planning my shopping meant figuring out if I had to hit Market Basket on the way home from work or could wait 24 hours, picking a Rite Aid based on ease of traffic flow, and avoiding both on the day of the month when folks got their Social Security checks. Now, after my Big Move to the outskirts of Rangeley 13 to 20 miles from goods and services, my strategies are no longer about a store, but the store—and how I’m going to get to it and back while still accomplishing enough in-town necessities to make my own Subaru commercial along the way.

“Probably gonna go to town this afternoon,” Tom said the other day. I waited till my heart rate leveled back out and my brain synapses stopped rapid firing, and made a quick assessment. “You can’t!” I insisted. “It’s Monday!” And, being the year-round Rangeley life partner that he is, instead of shaking his head like I’d gone woods queer, he took a moment to rethink his decision. “Jeez, you’re right,” he said. “Let’s wait till Wednesday.”

Part way through our fourth winter up here, we’ve super honed our skills at a mind game I call “information mapping Rangeley-style.” To play, I combine my investigative reporting and technical writing skills, enabling me to gather information no matter how complex, and make it somehow make sense. Then, Tom throws in his industrial logistics guru-turned-science-teacher expertise and, bingo! Mention going to town, and we instantly do a mental decision circuit that, if put to paper, would make my days documenting major product launches for HP and other high tech giants look like child’s play. The thought process (and rationale behind it) goes something like this:

Goal: To get groceries.

Start: Approximately 20 miles from goal destination.
From Point A, getting groceries (AKA “going to the IGA”) is rarely a singular task, a goal in itself. Until we end up with more gas money than we know what to do with, getting groceries without just getting groceries is crucial. Same thing is true for any Point-A-to-Point-B round trips, unless someone else is driving and they don’t want to stop. Also, if Tom or I ever do go to town without going to the IGA, we need a good explanation for why the hell not when we get back home. Example: “Bob was driving and he didn’t want to stop.”

Key objectives/tasks: These are weather and time/date dependent, so we select as many as possible from the following list and aim for the best outcome.
A–Rangeley Plantation Transfer Station (AKA the dump)
B–Oquossoc Post Office
C–lunch
D–hair cuts
E–building supply store
F–bank
G–gas station
H–optional additional tasks as stamina/time/date/weather permits

The following is a sample Rangeley wintertime information mapping exercise with determining factors.
Mission statement: I want to go to the IGA without just going to the IGA.
<Decision 1> Is it a weekday?
If yes: Skip the dump and proceed to the next decision.
If no: Proceed to the dump, but only if it’s not after 1 p.m. on Sunday. Skip the PO, bank and, if it’s not Saturday, hair cuts and the building supply, and then proceed to the next decision.*
<Decision 2> Is it a Monday?
If yes: Skip the dump and the hair cuts and probably lunch (see “Additional tips for optimal success” below), and then proceed to the next decision.*
If no: Proceed directly to the next decision.
<Decision 3> Is it a weekday between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.?
If yes: Proceed to the post office only if you don’t need to pick up any packages and it is     before 4 p.m., then proceed to the next decision.
If no: Proceed to the post office, to all other available objectives, then on to the next decision.
* Footnote: In these scenarios, if remaining tasks are not critical, reconsider aborting mission and restarting on a different day.

Additional tips for optimal success: 

  • A–transfer station (AKA the dump): If it’s a Saturday or Sunday morning and you live in Rangeley Plantation, never under any circumstances leave your house this time of year without your garbage and recyclables. If it’s any other day and you happen to go by the dump and the gate is somehow miraculously open, slap yourself upside the head for not having your garbage and recyclables, or consider going back and getting them.
  • B–Oquossoc Post Office: Consider having the new, limited “full service” hours tattooed on your arm so you don’t get all the way there and end up with your important packages on the wrong side of the closed window. If this is not feasible, pause for an extended moment of gratitude that you still have a post office in Oquossoc (and hope that it will take just long enough for the window to open back up.)
  • C–lunch: To proceed with confidence in going “out to lunch”—the ultimate prize in all goin’ to town missions—first verify that: a) an OPEN flag is displayed outside your selected eating establishment; and b) there are obvious signs of life inside the allegedly OPEN restaurant.
  • D–hair cuts: Honor these appointments and give them precedence this time of year. If not, you could risk getting kidnapped by one of those “emergency makeover” shows next time you do make it down the mountain. However, in the event that you must cancel an appointment due to hazardous driving conditions, take heart. Your loss is someone closer to town’s gain. My stylist assures me her chair never stays empty for long, even in a blizzard. All her in-town customers wait for days when folks can’t risk coming in from the plantations and rush in to fill our slots (while we get woollier waiting for the weather to clear.)
  • E–building supply store: Regardless of other priorities, consider making this stop mandatory. Study all aisles with care, ensuring your ability to find and purchase that one gadget you won’t remember needing till tomorrow—when you’re back home in the pucker brush—shit outta luck.

So there you have it, information mapping Rangeley-style (winter version). Depending on your dietary requirements, and where you place yourself on the spectrum between making do and “gotta go get it now,” your results may vary. The game’s not for everyone, especially some friends from away. “I’m a half a mile from Petco and the Home Depot, and I think I have at least three grocery stores within a mile radius,” our friend tells us every year on the second day of his visit. (His calculations start then because, on the first day, he’s too glad to be back in his favorite fishing retreat to be feeling like he has to justify where he chooses to call home.) Closeness to “stuff” used to be a consolation for us, too, I tell him. Each time I had to leave here to return to Market Basket country, I remember saying “At least I can go get groceries without planning my every move.” That was little comfort, though, when our real home, our ideal situation, was back on a big lake on the outskirts of Rangeley.

As year-round residents, we’ve now become highly motivated to win the goin’ to town game, even though some days we don’t get very far past GO before returning to home base to regroup. “Thank God we have enough boxed wine and powdered milk to last awhile,” Tom remarked after the worst of the recent ice storms. We’d just barely loaded up and headed off towards town when the Subaru started to skid out of control, and we figured we’d look better cancelling our hair cutting appointments then smashed into a tree. If flow charted, it could have ended in a “Dude, you’re screwed” dead end, leaving us longing for the IGA and, perhaps, even our old lifestyle. But, luckily, Tom already factored in the ultimate decision triangle back when the Big Move was first taking shape. Got a pantry? Yes, we sure do, and it’s a game changer! Plus, the fact that he saw fit to give me enough square footage to stock with provisions from as far away as Farmington seems to be earning me bonus point around here. 

The first time my friends lay eyes on it, they do a Rangeley version of the “He went to Jared” commercial. “He gave her a pantry!” I hear them marvel. Yup, he did—so he only has to take me to the IGA if it’s Wednesday, and the road’s sanded, and all the restaurant flags are flying.

A friend called Coco

Joy Clough2 Comments

Christmas Day 2012
Christmas Day 2012

I squinted across the parking lot and sighed, letting the humid breeze blow away the last traces of airplane air. There was no rush, really, no need to dash around, check my watch or even wait closer to Tom so we didn’t lose track of each other in the shuffle while he got the luggage. Because, I reminded myself, down here there was no shuffle, no tight schedules, no worries. There was one runway, an outdoor luggage cart with ours in plain sight ready to grab, and a long, lazy month in a beach house just down the road.

I already knew what to get at the small market on the way to the house, which drawers I’d use to stash my stuff before shoving my suitcase under the bed, how I’d lay my mask and fins out on the porch till morning and my swimsuit in the little wicker chair by the deck. I’d sit in the cabana with my daughter, Becky, on her days off from teaching at the Island School, just exactly as I’d done when I’d stayed there over Christmas. It felt so good to be back, to be waiting outside the airport repeating it all in my mind with calm certainty that nothing had changed a bit. While I’d gone home to three months of Maine freezing and thawing, Rock Sound, Eleuthera, Bahamas, stayed exactly as I’d left it.

When it comes to being on island time, I’m usually there before the plane even lands. I feel the change coming over me like a deep cleansing breath and, as soon as I can swap my L.L. Bean boots for Tevas, I’m back in the groove. But today was different. Today was April 16, 2013, the morning after the Boston Marathon bombings—and by the time I made it through the sentinel of security at Logan Airport, past the “what’s going on in the rest of the world” news coverage in the Nassau departure lounge and, finally, to the remote end of this out island—I felt like I’d escaped much more than mud season in Maine.

Hauling his huge rolling duffel packed with more snorkeling and fishing gear than clothing across the parking lot, my husband, Tom, seemed to agree. He looked up at the palm trees with a weary, but expectant smile that told me he’d reached the leg of the journey when horsing stuff around was no longer a hassle. The exertion was now earning him rum drinks.

“Luggage is all here,” he announced, and I nodded. Despite sharing an adventuresome streak that lands us far and wide, we still find comfort in stating and acknowledging the obvious along the way. I, especially, have a need to repeat things out loud to myself—our flight numbers and gate numbers, our departure and arrival times—re-reading them from the itinerary I keep in a giant paper clip in my carry on, reciting them off the airport monitors, again when we get to each gate and, finally, hopping up and echoing the boarding announcements as they come over the PA system. Fidgeting over the reservations, the little details, then freewheeling how they actually come to pass is, after all, how we manage to venture so far off the Carnival cruise line. Once again, a fine-tuned balance of focus and faith carried us from the JetBlue Airbus 320s, through the bowels of the “domestic” terminal, and on board an island hopper turbo prop, leaving the dolphin encounter brochure families back in Nassau.

We also left behind Comfort Inn, McDonald’s, Verizon wireless, and Hertz Rental Car. I did make arrangements for a car, supposedly, the same one we’d driven back December. But I had no rental contracts, no formal agreements, no guarantees. “This is where the paperwork ends and the trust kicks back in,” I reminded myself. The more I scanned the parking lot for the ancient RAV4 that wasn’t right there waiting for us when we landed, though, the more I wished I could rifle through my clip full of printouts for some verification, something with today’s date on it, something official. Visions of the armed guards and bomb sniffing dogs that surrounded me in Boston crept back to mind, and I couldn’t help voicing how vulnerable I felt standing so far from home, waiting for one man to fulfill his promise: “Where is Coco?” I demanded.

You just couldn’t be in Rock Sound for more than five minutes without seeing Avian Morley, AKA “Coco.” Besides being the go-to guy for transportation, his restaurant/bar/conch stand was the most happening place in town. Heck, even Martha Stewart and her camera crew managed to find him, lured from afar to taste his legendary conch salad. Plus, to me, he was the face of Rock Sound, the essence of what it took to thrive on the sleepy end of this out island. The minute I met him back in December, “gotta see Coco” stopped having much to do with practicality and logistics, and became all about wanting to just be around him. Yup, I told myself, if there was one thing I was pretty sure I could count on in Rock Sound, Eleuthera, on the morning after the Boston bombings, it was finding Coco again.

“Hey, hello and welcome back, dahlin’!” he greeted, coming across the parking lot with car keys and a big bear hug. I was struck again by how much he reminded me of someone I couldn’t quite place. It didn’t matter, though, ’cause I’d found Coco again. And the way his huge, easy smile felt the same as looking out through the clouds from the puddle jumper plane to spot my first glimpse of turquoise water, so vivid but tranquil over the long stretches of white sand, was all I needed to know for now.

“Coco! So good to see you again!” I said. “Hope you didn’t wait here too long. And, oh, we do want the car for four weeks, but our bank back home has a maximum per-day ATM withdrawal, so we’re going to have to pay you cash in several chunks so you don’t get hit with a MasterCard or check cashing fee.” He nodded, smiled, and walked us over to the familiar grey RAV4. “No problem, no problem,” he said.

Classic Coco, I thought, climbing back into the banged up SUV. It was hard to tell if the odometer had moved in the last three months since it was still hovering around 200,000, and we were still too hesitant to do the kilometers-to-miles conversion. “You sure this thing has enough ground clearance to get us down the remote beach roads?” I’d asked the first time we saw the RAV4. According to the Eleuthera travel guides, venturing off the Queen’s Highway to explore could be as risky as it was rewarding, and I found myself remembering how a gorgeous tropical view hadn’t helped Tom Hanks much in Castaway.

“No problem, no problem,” Coco said. “Drive slow.”

Hadn’t I heard that tons of times in my travels! No problem, mon. Usually it came across as the island way of saying there really was a problem, but we want you to calm down, chill out, have another rum drink so you don’t notice. That’s what you tourists expect us to say…pay us to say. When the boat captain on my first trip to the Bahamas told me: “No problem, dahlin’ we go snorkeling today,” it meant even though it was hailing and blowing a gale, I just needed to have another Goombay Smash and get on the boat. Even back home at a local concert hall, I heard the manager for Bob Marley’s sons’ reggae tour say “No problem, we’re on island time,” to the volunteer usher ladies (who seemed all the more perplexed by dreadlocks). I’m pretty sure it meant the musicians chillin’ out in their tour van (right next to the police station) an hour after the concert was supposed to start were not experiencing any hassle.

When Coco said no problem, it was different. His way was like a mantra, half lullaby, half chant, a personal affirmation that “every little ting gonna be alright.” Hearing him repeat it over and over, I could believe and make it my own truth—whether I was bouncing down a jagged road in a rental jalopy, or trusting that he could just shut down his entire restaurant on Christmas Day to invite us and a small gathering of other “locals” to dinner. “No problem, no problem,” he said when Tom got his wallet out and tried to pay for the bottle of wine we drank with our turkey with all the trimmings and fresh banana cream pie. “You’re family now.”

Other vacationers told me they came to Eleuthera for the people, by-passing islands with more amenities, but less soul. That Christmas night, as I watched the annual Junkanoo festival, I understood. The residents from Rock Sound, Tarpum Bay, Governor’s Harbor, and the other communities linked together on their skinny strip of limestone between the Atlantic and the Caribbean were family, parading by in one big celebration of life and tenacity, and I was mesmerized from my eyes down to my swaying torso. The costumes drew me in, colorful and gaudy as the tinsel-covered Christmas trees I’d gawked at as a child. Somehow, too, the drum beat and the rhythm of their age-old dance of joyful defiance filled me reverence, the kind I’d get gazing up at stained glass windows in a candlelit church. The brass section tooted by, keeping it upbeat, and I was whisked out of church, back to the roadside revelry. Had I ever been able to leave that moment in time, rooted there near Rock Sound with my family, I actually could have dreamed I was just a bit off Broadway. Then along came Coco, king of his community’s Junkanoo band, dressed like a Bahamian police constable, dancing with all his might and clowning around for the crowd.

It wasn’t until I got back to Eleuthera in April, and I was sitting in Coco’s restaurant watching his Junkanoo video, that it finally hit me. Big Papi! He was the David Ortiz of Rock Sound, Big Papi without the beard, or the bat, or the big baseball salary. Plus, while he didn’t have the same bling as the Boston Red Sox MVP, he lit up that parade route like a shimmer of diamonds. “Can you please make me a copy of this DVD?” I asked Coco.

“No problem, no problem,” he said. But I never saw it, or Coco, again. Coco died in a motorcycle crash in September, just up the road from his last, jubilant march. I heard the awful news as the fall colors were fading back home in Rangeley, Maine, and the air was taking on a chill that made me dream of dancing barefoot in the Bahamas. I’m no stranger to grief, both the kind that stabs me swiftly in the heart, or drains me slowly like a wound that can’t heal. Still, the loss of Coco stunned me to my core. How could I miss someone so profoundly I was pretty sure I was never going to see again? Now that Becky had finished teaching down there and moved to Boulder, I should have been better soothed by happy memories of time spent with a great guy on a laid-back island. People come and go, after all. And sometimes I’d end up wondering things like “whatever happened to that guy who used to work here….he was nice.” I’d find out he’s not coming back, observe a moment of silence, shrug and move on. Not so with Coco. Not even close.

The night Becky called and told us, Tom and I looked out over our lake and toasted Coco, drinking the special Rangeley Red Juice liqueur Tom made from raspberries we picked in the warm August sun. We wished more than anything that Coco could taste it with us, beaming his approval. We drank to living life in the moment—and to the mixed blessing of having a friend like Coco, now gone, who left a legacy of how we’d treat ourselves and others in his memory.

I cried a lot over Coco. And with Christmas coming around again, I’m sure I’m nowhere near done. I am finding comfort, though, in a picture I keep near my desk. It’s Coco, in his element down by the clear, blue water, palms up and arms spread wide, grabbing all life has to give. He sort of reminds me of the the giant portraits that, as a kid in church, I thought only Christ could pull off. Striking a “come to Jesus pose,” He’d conjure up a powerful spirit vibe I figured must be reserved for the Son of God Himself. As an adult, I now believe the spark comes closer to earth. It moves through people like Coco, who show us how to carry Heaven with us, day by day, in our attitudes. Each time I see his picture, I now also know that it’s my bittersweet burden to always remember, to always radiate how he made me feel—instantly special, a forever friend.

No problem, Coco. No problem.

Photo courtesy of Perry Joseph
Photo courtesy of Perry Joseph

 

Just like riding a bike…not!

Joy Clough2 Comments

“It’s just like riding a bike!” With a quick nod and a dismissive hand gesture, this is society’s way of telling us we are “good to go,” that whatever we might be struggling with is doable. And almost everybody hears the breezy little saying the same way.

“Oh, OK then, I got this!” Easy peasy. Piece o’ cake. Not to worry.

Not me. While I have come to understand the gist of the sentiment, I’ve never been able to make a simple translation. I’ve always added my own mental side note: “Easy for almost everybody. A bit of extra work—and maybe some blood, sweat and tears—for me.”

I got my first tricycle when I was five. It was a rugged red and chrome beauty nothing like the plastic Power Wheels of today. My dad brought it home one afternoon, plopped it in the driveway, and said, “There ya go! Have fun.” And, boy, was I planning to…just like Billy next door, and Cindy who lived down by the school and got to race around on the pavement to her heart’s content. I hopped on, ready to ride, but didn’t budge. Unable to push the pedals a full revolution, I just sat there, a coiled ball of “big girl” determination, hoping and grunting, and going nowhere.

The trike went back to the hardware store the next day, and that’s the first time I think it dawned on me I really wasn’t like almost everybody. Oh, I’m sure I knew, deep down, long before. But having no real relativity, no Billys or Cindys in my field of vision yet, I naively went along at my own pace. As a baby, how could I know that dragging orthopedic gear behind me wasn’t the developmental benchmark kind of crawling Dr. Spock had my mother anticipating? And what yardstick could have told me the long expanse between the sofa and my next handhold on the bookshelf was something most toddlers had already walked with brazen confidence?

I was born with a mild case of cerebral palsy. Just a touch. Not enough, thank God, to leave me in a wheelchair or visibly crippled as the diagnosis often implies. But enough to leave me unsteady on my feet, better on one leg than the other, and longing for Keds instead of “special” shoes. In the days before mainstreaming, it was enough to sideline me on every track and field day, to leave me in the bleachers where no one needed to wait for me to catch up, or tell me my two-foot flailing leap across the dirt didn’t qualify as a long jump.

I remember feeling like I’d never take off under my own steam, ditch the training wheels and the worrisome looks, and just fly like the wind. Eventually, though, not so long after my stationary trike trauma, off I went speeding across the school yard on just two wheels, my grandpa doing the “no hands” wave behind me. To this day, with many miles of victory and defeat at my back, the Olympic moment when the pavement rushed beneath me—of seeing my orange tiger handlebar streamers fluttering with every determined push of my pedals—still stands out as my personal best.

“Ramblin’ Rose to Papa Bear. Come in Papa Bear!” Many years later, I was calling from the Oquossoc Grocery, so pleased with myself I used our walkie talkie “handles” to report back home to Tom. I couldn’t use my walkie talkie, I told him, since I was way out of range. I’d just biked 13 miles into town and, after a sandwich and the satisfaction of watching cars go by as I sat at a picnic table drying my sweat-soaked bike helmet hair in the summer sun, I’d make the return trip.

So began my Ramblin’ Rose years when, in my late thirties, I finally figured out ways to use “favorite” and “exercise” in the same sentence. I had two: snorkeling and mountain biking. The first felt so free and graceful I wanted to grow a mermaid tail, but required a plane ticket to the tropics. The second felt gnarly and gritty, never floaty, but was right in my back yard. So, most days, biking was a no-brainer. Using the legs God gave me to propel myself through the mountain biking mecca of western Maine was a matter of natural selection more than natural ability. And, most days, it was better for my body than other choices such as aerobics, especially my metatarsals and menisci, which barely survived my attempts to join the Jane Fonda craze. It certainly was better for my ego, safety, and sanity than skiing. And running? Well that, or my form of it, was something I rarely attempted—reserved primarily for snake sightings and general admission into a U2 concert.

Hard as I tried, though, practice never made biking smooth going. It wasn’t something I returned to effortlessly 20 years after parking the old Schwinn five-speed I used as a teenager when I couldn’t get a ride somewhere. Getting back on the seat took guts, gumption, and overcoming the agony of letting my daughters see that, for their mom, the old “just like riding a bike” saying wasn’t true. Any sort of fluidity in motion required a finely tweaked head start and attention to detail en-route: 1) Carefully swing my “bad” leg up (and especially over) the bike frame and hop on. 2 ) Get my “good” foot cranking. 3) Throw my other one onto the opposite pedal. 4) Hang on, pedal like crazy, and enjoy the ride. 4) When done, dismount without keeling over (See step 1). Thankfully, my mastery was rewarded with many, many family bike trips, even more solo excursions, and surprisingly few dumps or crashes. I celebrated turning 40 with a 40-mile round trip ride to Rangeley and back with Helen, then 13, proudly setting the pace. And, by age 45, I even managed to look my personal best in the black Spandex bike shorts and red rose emblazoned jacket Tom bought for that birthday.

Not long into my 50s though, things changed. I let my bike gather more garage dust than road dirt. I traded my daily rides for walks, and took my biking indoors to the gym. I began to suffer more and more from what a healing friend compassionately called “gravitational insecurity.” Age, loss of flexibility, and being thrown off center by life’s hazards left me more finicky than ever about how I chose to “get out there” without getting hurt. I stayed in shape, wearing out more than a few pair of sneakers and, occasionally, strapping on snow shoes. But I longed for the freedom of the open road, the exhilaration of pushing myself past my own backyard.

“Trust me. I got you and I’m not letting go till you feel safe again,” Tom promised many summers ago. I was on my bike again for the first time in so long I needed him to hold onto my seat and follow me up the driveway like my grandpa did 50 years ago. Eventually I did let him let go. And I did get the hang of the whole pedaling and balancing thing enough for us to take a short ride together. But I was shaking when I got back home, so unsteady that I found the excursion more terrifying than invigorating. “Yeah, right…just like riding a bicycle,” I muttered and hobbled off, leaving it in the driveway. At 57, I was learning the difference between blindly attempting what I should be able to do with my slight disability, and how far I could safely push myself toward what I genuinely wanted to do. Still, retreating to my Adirondack chair for the rest of the afternoon, I felt my limitations closing in on me.

I went back to walking and waiting for my next snorkel vacation. I told myself I’d just have to be OK with enjoying life in prime biking country on foot. And then, just as August gave way to the clear, crisp perfection of September in Maine, I had a knowing so strong it woke me from my trance. “But I want to ride a bike!” I said. “I really, really do!” I wanted to claim the trail on my own terms, and I wasn’t ready to pack it in and park myself on an ATV like so many of my rural neighbors. But what, exactly, did that look like? How could I regain the joy of grinding up the gravel, of gliding past woods and water, while nurturing myself and my needs? I Googled “adult mountain bike training wheels” without much success. I scrolled through online pictures of three-wheelers more suited to retirement communities than God’s country. Then I decided to swallow my pride over “giving up on myself” and ask Tom what he thought.

He didn’t laugh or even smirk and, in the blink of an eye, had me looking at the answer. It was a recumbent tricycle, a TerraTrike Rover to be exact, and he knew this because his traditional bike was bothering his lower back and straining his wrists and he wanted one too! The trikes would take a little getting used to, pedaling from a different angle and all, but they couldn’t fall over and would keep our legs and core in great shape while we laid back and enjoyed the scenery. A few weeks and a trip down the mountain later, and our twin TerraTrike Rover recumbent trikes waited side-by-side in the driveway.

“Sweet ride,” Becky said. She’d been my other biking buddy since way back, and was glad to see me ready to roll again. And I was ready, or so I thought, as I sat down and attempted to take off. But I only made it a couple tire spins up the driveway before the reptilian part of my brain stopped me short. “Woah….definitely not just like riding a bike,” I realized, attempting to regain my old center of gravity and gain some ground with my new age set of wheels. “I can’t!” I said, trying not to notice the disappointment on Tom’s face as he sat watching. Even though flipping the trike was technically nearly impossible, every fiber in my being swore I was going to fall over and never get up!

But Becky, bless her, wasn’t about to let me slump back to my Adirondack chair in defeat. An Outward Bound instructor, she is gifted with helping others dig deep, push through pain, and discover their core strengths. “You’re not going to fall over, Mom, you can’t!” she yelled in her tough love voice, hip-checking my handle bars and fender over and over till she convinced me. Then she helped me practice how to pedal, how to turn, how to stop and start. And, finally, I was off, leaving her in a puff of road dust, squinting behind me.

As it turned out, learning to ride my second tricycle was no more second nature for me than trying to ride my first. But as I heard my daughter’s victory whoop fading in the distance and sped off to catch up with my Papa Bear, I knew it was worth every ounce of extra effort. No, I certainly was not like almost everybody, rambling along at my own pace on my new TerraTrike Rover, the road wide open in front of me.

The power of squirrel media

Joy Clough3 Comments

Hard to believe it’s been three years since I first hit the Publish button on this baby. Looking back, I’m once again thrilled and humbled by those of you who continue to find me, however you can, and apparently aren’t scared off by your first visit. Month after month, you’re growing Rooted In Rangeley deeper and wider, letting my ramblings reach far beyond the tiny corner of the woods from which they sprout!

Definitely a high point in the year was being discovered by and featured on the first-class Rangeley-Maine.com website. It made me feel validated, practically syndicated, and all the more inspired to spread my rustic wisdom beyond folks up here—to those who wished they were up here bad enough to log on and read about it every chance they got. Even other country far away folks were wanting to read about all things Rangeley, I discovered, when a fan from Croatia left his comments and a pretty cool flag icon in my daily stats feed. Then, when a bright Bahamian flag showed up soon after, I knew I’d gone global big time. It made for some pretty colorful blog demographics indeed until my daughter, Becky, moved home from the Bahamas, cutting my international audience in half.

Still, each day adds new surprises to my search term history, evidence I am somehow roping in readers from the farthest reaches of Google and Bing. And just when I think I’ve touched the outer limits of social media, along comes a fan like “evil_squirrel_13” to show me otherwise. Who was he, I wondered, as I followed his crumb trail off my comments section and onto his blog. And why did Evil Squirrel 13 “like” Rooted in Rangeley?

“If you are visiting because I liked and/or commented on one of your posts, welcome to my little world!” his blog explained. Called Evil Squirrel Nest, it was illustrated with his squirrel cartoon drawings and dedicated to all things squirrely. “I do random daily searches for “squirrel” on WordPress, and read the most recent posts containing that word. Even if it has nothing to do with squirrels, I will still hit Like if I enjoy it! It’s interesting to see the variety of blogs and bloggers there are out there on the internets!”

“Wait,” I said to myself, “through the marvel of technology that allows a WiFi signal to beam across Bemis, broadcasting my innermost thoughts from the Bald Mountain broadband tower—out into the same worldwide web used by Steven Hawking and all the great thinkers and doers of our era—I connect with squirrel guy?”

As near as I can figure out, the decoy phrase came from one or two postings. In Signs of Spring, I wrote: “Folks in other social circles are blaming this year’s tough winter on a mixed up Ground Hog’s Day prediction. Back in February, he emerged from his hole and said spring was just six weeks away. The nerve of that wood chuck! How could he and his stuffy handlers come out with all their pomp and circumstance and say that? Aren’t there laws against false advertising? Shadow or no shadow, I wasn’t paying all that much attention. Up here, we don’t have Punxsutawney Phil or anything close. We have a bad ass red squirrel who hangs out in the shadow of the wood shed hogging all the bird seed, and he’s not real prophetic.”

And more recently, speaking of the luxury of Staying Past September in Rangeley, I remembered the years when, after driving uptah camp: “We’d pile out of the Subaru and scatter like squirrels, a flurry of divergent activities fueled by the common purpose of getting going with summer.”

I think it was the squirrel cussing, the rough bad ass red squirrel language that ultimately lured Evil Squirrel to my site. Serves me right, I guess, playing with the power of social media, putting myself out there until—a couple misplaced rodent references later—my cyber network sprouts a branch I never knew anyone would bother to hang out on.

Just kidding, Evil Squirrel, I’m sure we’ll cross paths often. After all, I do live in a cabin in Rangeley year-round and, squirrel talk will, therefore, find its way on my blog regularly. Squirrels eating Tom’s strawberries. Squirrels scurrying around the fire pit and screeching from the treetops. And, especially, the pink little eraser-sized squirrels birthed into a mitten left hanging on the screen porch till their squirrel mamma carted them one by one back into the woodshed. (Right there alone, we’re talking six hits on my blog from the squirrel search engine. Ooops…make that seven!)  

And just so my new fan will know he’s in good company when he revisits, I’ll now pay tribute to this year’s whackiest random blog viewers. By random, I mean these folks are not my regular acquaintances, or those who log on because I wrote the URL on a cocktail napkin they stuffed in their pocket, or even those who get curious because they heard about the “Rangeley blog lady” from a friend of a friend. Here’s to the best of this year’s Rooted In Rangeley search terms and the wayward surfers who found their way to my corner of the lake:

Rooted where? My search engine database is still logging plenty of “rootedinrangeley” attempts and a wide variety of spelling variations on my name and my location. Turns out, I am “routed” here and, some would say “rotted,” but usually just “joy’s blog in Rangeley.” Once I was even found at “My Fork in the Road, Maine.” (On occasion, I do confess to Googling my own self, just because I can. My blog publisher claims it doesn’t add to my reader tally, but it’s still fun to play cyber boomerang with myself now and then.)

Trip advisor (not!): Some people seem to have stumbled across me in their eagerness to discover all there is in to do in here in God’s country, and then some. They might come up in person, but only if they can figure out when the “worst mosquito months in Rangeley” are, what time it actually gets dark here, when will the lake freeze over, will the “Purple Onion” still be serving and, especially, will the transfer station (aka dump) stay open despite everything.

Woodsy Wikipedia: The 2013 award in this category goes to whoever was trying to figure out “What are the white bugs on my windows in Rangeley in October?” Most likely, this query came “from away” because anyone in my audience who really stays put up here past the end of September knows the true possible answers. The easy one is: “Those aren’t bugs.” Bugs, thankfully, get freeze dried soon after Labor Day. What’s white and is clinging to your windows in October is either, a) snow; or b) wood stove ashes blowing back toward your house on a stiff lake breeze; or c) a combination of both.

And the top wackiest surfer prize goes to… If search engines suddenly powered down, everyone knows that all forward human motion would stop instantaneously in its tracks. Never mind blogging, we couldn’t work, drive, shop, eat, date, or learn either. Even so, there are times when Googling is not called for, and stopping to surf the net should not be our first course of action. That’s the thinking behind this year’s wackiest random reader search term award. Because, no matter how much I enjoy having any and all readers at Rooted In Rangeley, I do believe that whoever got here pondering: “How can I shoo yellow jackets from my shorts?” should not have been sitting still long enough to log in and type!

Seriously, thanks to all my readers for another terrific year. If not for all of you, I wouldn’t be Rooted In Rangeley, but forever trapped in the meandering tumbleweed of my own twisted mind.

Washin’ on sunshine

Joy Clough1 Comment

When it comes to curb appeal, our special spot is sort of middle of the road. We’ll probably never earn a spread in Log Home Living. But, with no dead Subarus in the yard yet, none of our out-buildings caved in, and nothing on the back porch that should have been hauled away in the 90’s, we’re not shackin’ up in one of those places out-of-staters like to poke fun at, either.

I do have plenty of yard pride—just not the kind that inspires me to plant pansies where only road gawkers can appreciate them, or makes me feel superior over my lawn-to-weed ratio. My back yard in particular wouldn’t sell much Scotts Turf Builder. But, thanks to my live-in gardener, it yields enough fresh veggies to make me boast. And the front yard—the way it gently slopes down to the lake without much help from man or mower—well that just makes me burst my buttons!

There’s no doubt that my non-lakeside footage stirs a unique blend of emotions. And since last summer, it’s had me seesawing between brief spurts of backyard pride to a lingering sense of backyard bewilderment—settling at last into a bolder, brighter version of sass ‘n swagger I didn’t know was possible. The catalyst? A backyard solar array. Or, let me rephrase that. The catalyst, from my vantage point, was a towering geometric anomaly of super shiny rectangles technically known as a solar array. A year ago May, just when most folks were fidgeting over fertilizer and when to clean their windows, my seasonal to-do list was overshadowed by a two-and-a-half story stack of solar panels propped skyward just outside my kitchen.

The decision to go solar was almost as monumental as the result, requiring nearly as much wood-fired hot tub contemplation as packing it all in and moving to Rangeley in the first place. We needed better backup power than a generator shaking the bark off the trees as it sputtered through fuel each time a Nor’easter dumped 13 miles of hard sledding between us and the nearest gas station. “It’s the right thing to do, going greener,” we agreed, toasting ourselves with homemade wine and all the tenacity we could muster in a hot tub in November. And, oh yeah, the alternative energy refund bigger than any rebate in our entire tax paying history? Well, there was certainly that, too.

So started the actual planning and design phase—figuring out just what we needed installed to electrify our essentials (and a few of our luxuries) when the power went out in the plantation. (Not if the power went out, but when the next wind gust severed Rangeley Plantation’s grasp on the peripheral reach of Central Maine Power.) The idea was to go from “Oh, crap, the power went out!” and stumbling around the cabin for candles and flashlights, to “Hmmm….power musta bumped. Stove clock says so. We’re running off the battery now!” We weren’t taking ourselves off grid and totally sticking it to CMP. But we’d poke ’em hard enough to feel self-contained, and just a tad superior.

“Not bad for kids who used to leave every light in the house on,” I told myself that winter. As consumers of non-renewable energy, I’d call us comfortably conservative. We prefer paperbacks to battery-operated books. We don’t own phones that talk to us, or laptops smaller than our laps. We do, however, have our share of ghost energy lingering about the cabin. With all the little LED auras glowing each night after dark, it’s like part of us never really leaves the home office. Plus, thanks to our new auto-sensing, super efficient, barely brighter than a firefly bulbs, I still manage to keep my love affair with night lights burning. The time was right to evolve to the next level of conscious consumerism, and we were psyched. By acquiring the technology to make use of whatever “free” energy the sun saw fit to offer each day, we’d be stepping into our power by collecting it ourselves in a way that would’ve made our parents proud—and scared the pants off ’em at the same time. 

“What was that noise coming from the bathroom?” my dad asked each time I came home from college and was bold enough to sneak in a shower.

“It’s a blow dryer,” I’d say. “I use it to dry my hair.”

“I don’t have to plug anything into the wall to dry my hair,” he’d say. “I let the air do it.”

Yeah, but he wasn’t trying to imitate Farrah Fawcett either, I remember thinking. And there was certainly nothing natural or effortless about turning my bangs into wings!

What would my folks say now, coming from an era when anything with a plug never even made it upta camp? In one generation, they’d progressed from the thrill of relying on cloth-corded appliances to the agony of one energy crisis after another. They had a love-hate relationship with gadgets requiring “juice,” which might have prompted them to consider putting a solar collection contraption in the yard. But then they would’ve taken one look at the cost of installation—passed out cold for a few minutes—then gone back to using one or two plugs in the whole house and squinting at their monthly electric bills like night hawks.

“Whaddya think?” Tom asked in early May after I’d been watching the shadows of our solar panel installation loom larger and larger over the kitchen window.

“Where are the beagles?” I asked back. Standing at the sink, I could still see most of the backyard—the mulch pile, the garage, and Tom’s Eliot Colemen-esque hoop houses and raised beds. But my view of my beagles looking back at me from the “porch” of their kennel? Obliterated. I’m not sure exactly what I was picturing during the initial solar installation discussions, but once I ventured outside to take my first look at the real thing, I realized I’d been carrying around a very simplistic schematic in my head. Like when I’d be driving around somewhere and say: “Oh, look, that house has solar panels,” noticing a neat array of them aligned on a rooftop. Our version of that, I knew, would have to be out in the yard versus up on the roof  to catch all possible rays of Rangeley sun shining over our speck of earth. And while I wasn’t naive enough to imagine any outside-the-Louvre-type architecture, I guess I imagined a more aesthetic coupling of symmetry meets sustainability in the Maine woods. “It’s big,” I said, peering skyward, “and…ah…kinda skewed.”

“Didn’t perfect alignment with the sun require geometric balance?” I wondered silently. “The Aztecs and the Mayans sure thought so.” That’s what came to mind as I realized our stack of solar panels reminded me of a giant, unsolved Rubik—one of those puzzles where you try to align the little squares a certain way—and then you finally say the hell with it and walk away.

But nobody ever said embracing solar had to be pretty, I told myself, at least not from an architectural standpoint. It just had to work, to absorb light energy and convert it into wattage. And how that actually happened, at control central down in our basement, was actually quite pretty. The red and green LED indicators, the gauges measuring battery capacity and consumption—I nodded as I crouched next to Tom in the cellar and he pointed out each detail of where and how the magic happened. “Yup, pretty cool,” I said, and then went upstairs to Google it all. Watts, volts, amperage, DC to AC—I still had a lot to learn about the wizardry going on in the back yard and beneath my feet each time I flipped a switch.

“That thing gonna pay for itself?” our neighbor wanted to know the first time he saw our solar array. While Tom stood in the driveway explaining about tax rebates and kilowatt savings and the premise that we hoped to live to be in our nineties, I came inside to do a load of laundry. And then it hit me. The electricity to clean our clothes was being sucked out of the sun, channeled through our Gollum hole of a basement, and right into the side of our heavy-duty, large capacity washing machine! As I pulled out the power dial and let ‘er rip, a song from my winged hairstyle days made me do a special little dance.

“I’m washin’ on sushine! Woah! And don’t it feel good? Yeah, all right now….”

Dads of daughters

Joy Clough3 Comments

It was a Sunday in mid-June when we had to summon my Dad to dislodge a mouse that had been trapped inside the drain in the laundry room sink since early spring. My mother, my sister, and I were standing at the top of the cellar stairs cringing when he finally came up. He lumbered past us with a coffee can bound for somewhere way out back.

“Why am I the one who gets to do these kinds of things?” he asked, flailing the can in our faces. “Just because I’m the only guy in the house? Cause I’m the father around here?”

Ummm….yeah….we all said silently. Dad (AKA Mac) was responsible for plumbing, pest control, and safeguarding the house from intruders. The waylaid mouse met all of those criteria.

I grew up in a one-male household. And, after marriage and two daughters, that status pretty much stuck. No brother tinkering with a truck in the driveway. No son to shatter my theories about the uniqueness of father-daughter relationships. Just Dad, our one-man magic show. Please bear this in mind as you read the following theories. Please also know that my theories took root in the early ’60s when it was expected for females to keep their distance and say things like “Eeeek!”—and socially acceptable for Dads to declare stuff “too messy for girls.” Mine always swore he didn’t miss having a son. But I bet on certain occasions, especially that morning in June with the putrid coffee can, he instantly became a secret liar. If only he’d had a male dependent at the top of the stairs, Mac could have emerged from the cellar with his heart full of gratitude, but his hands empty. “Son, go find yourself a coffee can,” he would’ve said. “There’s a project for you down there.” And the imaginary son of the early ’60s would obey, trying to keep a stiff upper lip and a strong stomach, knowing the chore was ultimately preparing him for manhood—for the day when he’d take a wife and the responsibility for any yucky stuff trapped in his terrain.

When it comes to heroes, a Dad of daughters might as well have a cape and a lightening bolt emblazoned on his chest. Faced with danger and all manner of distasteful duties, he responds, undaunted by extension ladders or jumper cables, by navigating through whitecaps, or even by investigating nighttime noises.

“Yup, it’s a bear,” Mac affirmed. It was a June night back in 1964 and he was peering into the darkness from our tiny log cabin on Moosehead Lake. My sister and I had finally nagged him into determining the source of sounds coming from the front porch. We’d listened long enough from our beds right under the windows to know that, whatever it was, it was much bigger than the raccoon visitors of previous nights. And then we yelled for backup. “Daaaaaad!!!”

In years since, we realized there was nothing even Mac could have done—except maybe spray the bear in the face with the fire extinguisher if it got rambunctious enough to shove the door open. Still, there was something about our Daddy standing in his undershorts stating the obvious that we found comforting.

“Yup,” he said, “and it’s a big bear, too.” After watching it amble away in the dark, he shuffled back to bed himself, grumpy but gratified. Because the only thing Mac was afraid of was not being the rock hard center of our universe. And that was bigger and hairier than any old Maine black bear.

It wasn’t long after I began to watch my husband Tom’s interactions with my own young girls that I discovered it’s not necessarily bravado that stirs Dads of daughters to action. It’s the call: “Daaaaad...” It sounds like a sheep with a bad stomach ache, but little girls have it mastered by age two. And much the same way a dog responds to a high-pitched whistle even though he doesn’t know why, a Dad comes. Instinctively he snatches up a toolbox, a wad of paper towel and/or a plunger along the way, knowing that, whatever it is, if it’s broken, clogged or invasive, it’s his job. From Barbies to bike chains—to those hopelessly gnarled up necklace knots he can somehow unravel with his big, burly fingers—if Dad can’t fix it, it’s history. And if he really isn’t keen on squishing, trapping, or otherwise keeping creepy stuff away from his womenfolk, he has to buck up and do it anyway.

“Daaaaddy! Keep these bees off my peanut butter and jelly!” my first-born Helen yelled from her picnic log down by the lake. She was about three, and Tom had already plucked her out of the Salmon Falls River, showed her the bears at the Seboomook dump, and desensitized her to mice so successfully that she was catching them in a minnow trap and rolling it back and forth across the cabin floor like her own animated Fisher Price toy. She was a new-age girl child, born to a Dad who stood there right in the delivery room waiting for her to show up, even though part of him wanted to be out in the waiting room with his forefathers. She and I had the best of both worlds, an ’80s “girls can do anything” male role model who still had enough Maine woods machismo to build a cabin around us and shield us from vermin.  On that particular outing, a nest of yellow jackets swarming our picnic was his call to action—one he definitely did not want to answer.

“Come with Daddy, Helen, we’re going inside now!” Tom commanded. His voice was uncharacteristically shaky and, by the time he’d shoved sandwiches back into baggies and retreated, his face was a non-summery shade of pale. I handed him the big can of Raid we kept for just such circumstances, knowing that its super long spray wand would not keep Tom far enough away from bees—his greatest, and pretty much only, fear.

“Daddy got stung really bad when he was about your age while he was playing down by the water at his camp,” Tom told Helen after she’d watched him do his little extermination dance from a safe distance. “But those naughty bees won’t bother you any more, honey. Daddy got ’em!”

By the summer she turned four, Helen was Tom’s fearless little fishing side-kick and a brave big sister in training. “Look, Daddy, a snake!” she said, pointing matter-of-factly to a place on the dock where I spent hours each afternoon, plopped into a beach chair in my lamp shade of a bathing suit, reading and letting soon-to-be-born Becky kick me like a soccer ball. Had I ever seen a snake anywhere near my spot, I’m pretty sure Becky would have been a preemie.

“Don’t tell your Mom,” Tom said to his little comrade.

Then, somewhere along the way when I wasn’t paying attention, my daughters turned from gutsy little girls into bodacious women of the new millennium. “Better than boys,” I’d tell them, because they shooed snakes out of my path and changed their own tires, but still had all-day pajama days with me. All that plus, well, because they were girls. We were having such a discussion on a recent vacation, just the three of us sitting in a rustic cabana, staring out over bluer, warmer water and enjoying our favorite grown-up picnic cocktails, when Becky noticed something burrowing into the sand underneath where Tom was coming to eat his lunch.

“Hmm, looks like they’re ground hornets,” she said.

“Sssh!” I said. “Don’t tell your Dad.”

————————————————————————————-

For more Father’s Day sentiments, see:

My Mom’s special because…..

Joy CloughLeave a comment

“For you, Mumma,” said Becky. It was almost Mother’s Day circa 1991 and she’d just finished her first “uptah camp” breakfast of the season: a Pop Tart skillfully warmed in the toaster oven, our favorite appliance, and handed to her on a paper plate by her big sister. She placed before me a handmade gift which, as usual, was a cross between art and nature and full of kid folklore. This offering was a human image, hand-carved onto glistening paper in shades of neon.

“Ooooh, it’s nice honey! Who is it?” I had to ask.

“It’s you Mumma, you in your bathrobe. Happy Mother’s Day!” How could I not have known? The pointy little head atop the pear-shaped silhouette fringed with hair spikes. The zipper extending all the way down to the crow-like feet. Nobody, not even myself, could ever see me for who I am like my family.

A year or two later, our local paper began running short stories entitled “My Mom” submitted by school children. I remember reading with amusement (and trepidation) some of the sentiments the little nippers thought proper to fit into three or four sentences:

“My Mom has curly hair and green eyes like mine. She works in an office. She likes ice cream.”

“My Mom used to clean house a lot, but now ladies come in a special truck and do it for her.”

“My Mom is a nurse and she takes care of sick people. I am proud of my Mom. Sometimes she gets grouchy around suppertime. She works real hard and needs help. Her hair was gray until she turned it back to brown.”

That was the year Becky’s kindergarten did a similar synopsis, published on a huge scroll of craft paper. “What does your Mom do?” the teacher wrote at the top. The list she transcribed in huge magic marker letters ranged from little kid stream of consciousness drivel about their maternal care givers to the generic “My mom cooks, vacuums and watches Oprah Winfrey.” Somewhere along in the middle was Becky’s response: “My mom goes to Hannaford and types on the computer.” (My circa 1993 priorities in a nutshell, and in the right order, too.) Yup, and in between all that shopping and word crunching, I managed to slap together a few thousand sandwiches, watched her stage debut as a raccoon, and had the alphabet song emblazoned across my brain.

“What would you write about your mother for the newspaper?” I asked Helen. I figured, at age nine, her seniority would afford greater depth of vision.

“Hmmm…I’d write that you love camp, and Dad, and us, and Eric Clapton, but you hate Easter grass…and that you have exactly the same color eyes as mine, only redder.”

So much for aged wisdom! “Nobody has asked you to write anything for the newspaper, have they honey?” I asked, suddenly deciding that was the year I’d settle for magic marker immortalization and hope the media would not be interviewing my offspring. She’d given me my day in the spotlight though when, at age 5, Helen used all her crayons to win the Mother’s Day art contest sponsored by (you guessed it) Hannaford. “My Mom is special because she cares so much about me” it proclaimed to all ‘neath a butterfly-adorned rainbow. No Mommy stick figure to further distinguish me that year, just a short, sweet, primary-colored sentiment posted in the window above checkout aisle 3. And that, plus the $100 grocery gift certificate, was as good as it got back in 1988. Course that was BC (Before Computers), way before I could snap a pic with a smart phone and broadcast my celebrity status to everyone drawing breath. And my babies couldn’t begin texting me as soon as they got manual dexterity and an unlimited family roaming plan either. We didn’t have the wherewithal to universally “like” our kids, to plaster their Facebook walls with little heart emoticons, or to instantaneously show how smiley-faced we were over their ability to share a perfect digital rose postcard with us and 65,312 other one-of-a-kind, “truly soul inspiring” Moms. Back then we had local papers capturing middle class motherhood small-town-America-style, and TV commercials showing kids what they should buy at JC Penney to make Mom look extra special when they took her to dinner at Friendly’s. But, even back in 1988 BC, I do remember attaining some notoriety with my own low-tech social media campaign. “My daughter drew that,” I’d point out to any shopper who happened to wheel past checkout aisle 3. “For me.”

It’s antique artwork now, preserved, framed and hanging above the desk in the upstairs hallway where I store my other Mumma memorabilia. There’s a folder of handmade cards in the top drawer that still gets my attention, even if I’m only rooting around for a pencil. Stuffed full of toddler scrawls, sophisticated custom hallmarks, and everything in between, it holds my personal dog-eared history as seen by my next of kin. Looking back through it all now, I’m glad my daughters took notes, reporting without censure and with a flair for vivid color. Over time, their Mother’s Day messages tracked who I was, how I hoped to be seen, and where I was in my work/life balance spectrum.

“Happy Mother’s Day to the best darn technical writer in the world!” Becky wished me circa 1998 with a creation she printed off our state of the art 300 DPI color printer. It featured a clip art rendition of me, lounging on the beach, snorkel in one hand and pina colada in the other, enjoying the fruits of my new profession with a family vacation. At the time, I remember feeling equally as proud that she put “happy mother” and “technical writer” in the same sentence as I was of the fact that she’d mastered PowerPoint and fancy fonts in the limited time I allowed her to boot me off the home PC.

“Here’s so you can spend Mother’s Day with your favorite people!” Helen proclaimed artfully in another memorable Mumma folder moment. It was during my Mustang years and, with just a bit of help from PhotoShop, she’d morphed our extended family (here and long gone) into my new red convertible along with me and Bono from U2.

After reaching that high-tech pinnacle, the girls’ greetings gravitated away from glitz and back to homespun, to simpler pictorial essays about being my grown-up daughters. Some were spoken, some printed on PostIt notes, some filled all available space in the “blank inside” store bought cards. Each told a tale of love and support, of silliness and adventure, of my special brand of mothering. And the best ones—the ones that said it all—were just words whispered, from younger women to their older one. 

“I think you’re beautiful, Mumma,” Becky said softly. We were sitting side by side on the couch the other night and I’d just made one of my more candid body image confessions. I had to laugh at myself and the fact that, after all these years and all her heart-felt affirmations, most days I still couldn’t bring myself to agree. While I’m glad her image of me progressed from those early zipper-bodied, crow-footed impressions she had when she was four, I still need her mirror to show me at my best—to convince me I’m less Dilbert caricature and more classic da Vinci.

It’s been 30 years now since I received my first Mother’s Day card. It was from Tom, who promised me he couldn’t imagine anyone else being the mother of his children. I remember resting the card atop my hugely pregnant belly, crying a few estrogen-fueled tears, and imagining that maybe, hopefully, he was right. And now, thanks to Crayola, HP, and my two lifelong travel correspondents, I have plenty of evidence.

Happy Mother’s Day!

——————————————————————————————-

For more Mother’s Day messages, see: