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The Work of Edie Clark

My Weekly Post

To Pave or Not to Pave

March 16, 2011
Tags: town meeting, democracy, frost heaves
Last week we had our annual town meeting here in this town of 885 registered voters. New England town meeting is often held up to be “America’s true form of democracy” – but it really isn’t anymore, at least not on any grand scale. Most of the important decisions about the way we live our lives or the way our tax money is spent are made now at the state or federal level. For instance, no one calls to meeting a vote on whether or not we should go to war in Iraq or on health care or whether we should still get the social security we worked so hard for all our lives. The issues we vote on have decidedly less impact. Some New England towns have even forsaken the whole idea of town meeting. Fortunately, our town has not. Each year we gather in the town’s elementary school cafeteria to look over the warrant articles presented to us for our approval or disapproval. If more than 200 people show up for town meeting (about 20% of the population), it means we have something important to decide, such as a new school or some other expensive need. This year, we had only twelve articles to consider, nothing huge, so there were chairs available. One of the articles on the warrant was the question of whether or not to spend $70,000 to reconstruct the one-half mile of road that passes by my house, the paved portion of which is about one mile in total. Indeed, the road which I believe was first paved in the 1960s and has only been repaved once since then, is downright hazardous. The section just east of my house is a confusion of dips, bumps, launch pads, and deep holes. I’ve mastered the dodge-and-weave necessary to navigate without breaking my axle but the surface of the road changes as the weather changes, making it hard to really know what I’ll encounter on this particular morning . A few hours before town meeting, I saw my good neighbor to the west walk down the road, wearing her orange reflective vest and carrying a yard stick and a pencil and paper. This made me curious.

When she got up at the meeting to speak in favor of the article, my curiosity was resolved. Apparently she had measured every hole and crack in the road. She inventoried eighteen different potholes and reported the exact measurement for each crater, some of which were a foot and a half in width and six inches deep. She also counted the cracks, which mimic seismic activity. She held the microphone firmly and spoke strongly in favor of having the road repaired as outlined by the article. I agreed the road needs repair but I was not so sure this should be done. Her house sits well back from the road but mine does not and, especially in the summer, I am constantly astonished at the speed at which some cars take this road. In spite of the holes (there’s a reason why they are called “frost heaves” – the frost in the ground heaves the pavement up and out and, for the most part, the thaw pulls it back together, as of the road truly breathes), cars hurtle past my house, some of them in excess of 50 or 60 miles per hour. I shudder for my little dogs who, in spite of my best efforts, are sometimes perilously close to the road. Just past my house, the road turns to dirt and I always listen for the sound of their tires hitting the dirt. It’s fairly profound.

The town’s proposal was not only to reconstruct the road but to do it in stages. They proposed to scrape up the old pavement, grind it, add culverts and then, over this road laid bare, compact a 12-inch layer of crushed stone – in the context of this town, a major highway project. And that would be the end of it for a while. Money for the pavement would be “addressed in a future year.” In other words, we would become a dirt road, at least until the town authorizes the application of new pavement. Times are tough. What if they never did?

Assuming the project made it through to completion, I had two worries, one was speed: if people go that fast on a badly decomposed paved road, how fast will they go on a nice new smooth stretch of pavement? And, for the time until the pavement would be approved, at least a year, maybe more, the dirt kicked up from the road would make quite a difference for me in the house cleaning department.

I spoke about my concerns, though not as passionately as my neighbor. But others voiced concerns as well. One wondered how many people ever use that road and another felt that spending money like that was foolish. When the question was raised by the moderator, a voice vote, aye or nay, delivered the decision: Nay. I felt relief.

It’s nice to know we have a little bit of say in some things. I'll continue to practice my dodge-and-weave. And I won't complain.
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A Night at the Oscars

February 28, 2011
Tags: Segregation in the South, Sand Dollars, Crab Trap take-out, St. Simons Island Georgia
Last night, I watched the Oscars which usually gets me to thinking about Georgia at this time of year. My parents made an annual pilgrimage there to a place called St. Simons Island. They rented a place where they sat out the months of March and April in that sun-drenched place before reluctantly returning to their northern home. My mother disliked winter and craved this hiatus in the South. When I was growing up, we used to make the four-day trip to southern Florida in the car, a big station wagon which my father piloted along narrow state roads, past sharecropper’s cabins where tenant farmers walked behind mules turning the spring earth with hand-held plows and past gas stations that had separate bathrooms for whites and “coloreds.” This was all new to me as none of the public bathrooms at home were segregated in that way. I think back on this as if to another century, not that I feel so old so much as I’m so amazed at how quickly and dramatically our country has changed. My mother hated the segregation and we would talk about this in the car as we drove. What she really cared about was a clean bathroom and these were very hard to find along our route. All bathrooms and motel rooms were thoroughly inspected by my mother before any of us were allowed to go inside. We often stopped at many before finding one that she found acceptable. She couldn’t do anything about the segregated bathrooms but this was something she could control, at least to some extent.

In the Carolinas, we often passed “Indians” in tribal dress, selling baskets by the side of the road. The roads were two-lane, narrow, no breakdown lane, and these women, always women, would be sitting in the dirt or else on a small stool as close to the pavement as possible, stacks of baskets surrounding them. We would always stop and my mother would choose a basket or two. She didn’t like the baskets so much as she wanted to help these women sell what they had and hurry home to safety. I still have some of the baskets, interesting creations woven of reeds.

Once we crossed the border into Florida (a great cheer would arise from inside our car), there were miles and miles of orange groves that smelled like the best perfume. By then, our windows were all rolled down and we were all happy. Even now, so many years later, it is very easy for me to summon the smell of those groves on the newly warm sweet air we had driven into from the cold of the north. Occasionally there were roadside stands that sold big bags of fresh grapefruits and oranges. We bought webbed sacks full of both and pushed them into whatever space was left in the back of our overloaded station wagon. Every day we were down there, we ate grapefruits and oranges (which weren’t really orange but rather a greenish orange – my first realization that some produce is dyed to make the fruit more appealing).

Once my sister and I grew up and went away to college, we no longer accompanied our parents on this journey but they continued on without us. Sometime in the 1970s, they decided to shorten the journey by going to Georgia instead. They found a place that they liked near the water on St. Simons and went there every spring for the rest of their lives. My life was too busy to be able to spare the time to join them, though they always hoped I would come. But after my husband died, so young, it appealed to me to make the trip down to visit with them for a week or two. I flew in to Savannah and took a shuttle from the airport to St. Simons. The scent of oleander greeted me as soon as I walked out of the airport, Spanish moss hung from high branches of trees along the highways, and bougainvillea were in bloom when I arrived at their place. The sun was hot on my arms, so recently liberated from the sleeves of my winter coat. Even at their ages (high 70s, early 80s), they brought their one-speed bikes with them and we went on slow, leisurely rides beside salt marshes and on residential streets with wealthy domiciles, carefully landscaped and blooming abundantly at that beautifully nascent time of year.

My father always had sand dollars to give me once I arrived. He searched for them on the beach – they are the same color as the sand and so are easily camouflaged – and spent time cleaning them and bleaching these perfectly shaped, sand-colored discs, delicate but strong. He liked to find broken ones too, to illustrate the amazing structure of their interior, a web of supports, almost like a fort. He stored these featherweight treasures in coffee cans, stacking the dollars like pancakes with carefully cut-out pieces of paper towel set between each one. Sand dollars remind me of my father. I rarely found any on my own but then, I didn’t need to, he kept me well supplied. Today I have them on a small table in my dining room, memories of his fastidiousness as well as of a warm southern mid-winter getaway.

It seems as if every time I went down there to visit them, it was Oscar time. And so this became part of our agenda while I was there. Whenever there was something special, a birthday or holiday, Dad enjoyed mixing up a pitcher of whiskey sours (his own recipe – quite lethal) and he would do that for Oscar night. We’d put salty snacks into bowls, have take-out from the Crab Trap on hand, and settle onto the couch for this annual evening of Hollywood entertainment. Don’t ask me why, none of us paid too much attention to the movies, especially my parents. But we enjoyed the gowns and the glitter, all of it simultaneously dazzling and ludicrous. And we made notes about movies we might want to see sometime, though in those days, it was not really feasible to see a movie again once it had left the local movie house, unless they decided to bring it back for one more run, which sometimes happened. Inevitably, we would all fall fast asleep in our seats, awaken to see if anyone lasted to find out what was Best Picture, Best Actor, but we’d always have to listen to the morning news to find out.

And so it is that when the Oscars come on TV for their annual gala, I think of my parents, biking the sandy side roads of St. Simons, picking up sand dollars from the endless stretch of beach near their house, and indulging in whiskey sours with Crab Trap take-out while watching an entirely other world on display. In the past week, we’ve had another foot of snow descend upon us and more is falling as I write this. A flight to Savannah is tempting but there’d be no one to happily greet me and no coffee can of carefully stored sand dollars for me to take home in my carry-on. I’ll fall asleep watching the Oscars before the winners in the major categories have been announced. Some things never change.
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Buried

February 14, 2011
Tags: snowbanks, roof shoveling, ice dams
There is so much snow here now that Mayday, my 20-pound schnauzer, can walk on the crust of the snow over to my living room window and look inside. She puts her paw on the window, a window that most of the year is way out of her reach. I get the feeling she is as surprised by this as I am. The snowbanks are so high that, when I look out the window, I hear cars go by but I cannot see them. A strange deprivation since there is so little traffic on this road, I am used to looking out and knowing who it is, driving by. If I see an unknown car, I am curious. Of course. But being closed off like this, it is as if one of my senses has been switched off. This morning when I went out with the dogs, I could hear a pack of coyotes reveling close by so I hustled us back inside. But where were they? They sounded close enough to touch. Looking around, I could see nothing but blowing snow.

This is not the “snowiest winter” – not by a long shot. Not yet. In April of 2000, we had a storm that dumped three feet on top of what was already a record-breaking amount. At that time, I took an indelible ink Sharpie and drew a line where the snow stopped almost to the top of my downstairs window. The line is still there and it’s about three feet short of where we are now. But that was April and we are still in February so there is plenty of time to break records.

It’s all anyone talks about. The snow. I have been so entranced with the beauty of it, you might say I’m obsessed with taking photos of its shape and form, the way it stays on the branches after a storm, the way the roads narrow with each storm, big clumps falling into the road from atop the high banks. Coming out into traffic from a side road, the banks are so high, visibility nil, is nothing short of Russian roulette. The snow that has fallen to date is so light and fine that sometimes, on a windy day, clear blue sky above, the town plows have to come back around, as the wind has blown the snow back and closed the road as if it had never been plowed before.

With all this snow, people worry about their roofs caving in. It’s a legitimate worry, especially if one’s roof is flat, which, in this climate, should be illegal. Many schools are built with more or less flat roofs as are warehouses and factories. This does save money in construction but it doesn’t if the building caves in, which some have. To combat this, people get out and shovel their roofs or else hire someone to do it. (I heard about one elderly man who was fleeced by some eager young roof shovelers to the tune of $5,000 – modern-day highway robbery.) Driving along, I see many hardy men up on the snowy rooftops, heaving shovelfuls of snow onto the ground. I have seen men up on these flatter roofs driving snowblowers around which makes me wonder how on earth they get the snowblower up there. I went last week to have my car serviced, parked alongside the building and went in, only to be greeted by a chorus of mechanics, urging me to quickly move my car. I looked out and saw my car was sitting underneath an enormous row of icicles, each one tall and thick as a man. I returned at my fastest pace (more like a shuffle across the ice-covered parking lot) to drive my car away out of danger. When I did, the young man I had not seen before resumed his effort to dislodge the ice dam by banging on it with a long muffler pipe. I (and my car) was saved but others have not been so lucky. One man I heard about was in serious condition having endured the savage blow of these javelins known as icicles. Another person was up on his roof, shoveling. He went down with the big load of snow, a suburban-style avalanche, and was temporarily buried, just his hand sticking out. Fortunately his neighbor saw his hand and came to his rescue. The buried man’s nose and mouth were crammed with snow. He recovered. A heavy snow load on the roof of an old barn can act as a kind of euthanasia for an old structure that has not been shored up or maintained over the years. Driving by some of these landmarks, we watch to see when the day might come and then, one day, it’s down, shock and relief, all at once.

My friend Jamie has a farm in western Massachusetts with a chain of barns. One she uses the most is a building like a WWII Quonset hut. The inside is cavernous. She uses it as an indoor riding rink for training horses or just to exercise the horses in winter. It has other uses, including storage of trucks, tractors, boats and a myriad of tools. One day last week, it went down in a single moment. From inside the house, they heard a “thud.” That was all. When they went out, the big old structure had pancaked. The good fortune was that all the horses were outside, and no one was inside – as they certainly might have been. Momentary gratitude. But in the days that followed, they learned that their insurance policy does not cover collapsed structures (most don’t). So they are busy trying to recover what has been lost in the rubble. The remains look like a crown, the big round hump of the snow-covered roof in the middle surrounded by the splintered supporting beams which splay outward in a jagged circle. A casualty of this winter’s storms.

In all of this, wind has been my ally as it blows the snow off my roofs, eliminating the need to shovel. I do have a row of icicles outside my bathroom window. They thicken and lengthen with each passing day and, if things get worse, they will cause damage to my inside walls. I think about calling the young man with his muffler pipe to come over and bang on it. But the trade-off is roof damage which might require a new roof come spring. A gamble. While I ponder these odds, I take a photo of the ice bars on my window. I am going to send the photo to my cousin. Every time he comes to visit, he complains that I don’t have curtains, insists that I need to get curtains. But I hate to block my view of the field and the tall pines that lead up the road to my house. In all seasons, this is poetry. I am not so afraid of someone seeing in (since I have no neighbors, I don’t know who that might be) as I am of not being able to see out. For now, the icicles have shuttered my view. So I will show him my new curtains. If we all get our wishes and spring comes early, they will be gone soon enough.
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The Joys of Below Zero

January 31, 2011
Tags: below zero
A week or so ago, I woke up to remember that I had forgotten to buy milk on my way home the night before. Tea without milk is no way to start the day. I reluctantly emerged from my down comforter, opened the front door, and let the dogs out. WHOA! I took a look at the thermometer on the porch – which always reads a bit high because it’s protected: 18 below zero. I let them right back in, got dressed, loaded up both woodstoves, and started the car to get it warm before setting off for the store. Outside, in temperatures like that, my usual surroundings turn otherworldly. A rim of hoarfrost coats everything, even the ice on the trees. The exhaust from my car rose like clouds from a factory. Nothing moves in this cold stillness. Over the years I’ve learned that in temperatures like this, if I take a mug of hot tea and throw it into the air outside the door, it will rise up like a cloud. If I blow bubbles out into the cold, the bubbles turn to ice and will shatter on landing like thin crystal. Those are the fun parts. I’ve also learned to carry essentials in the car with me: extra gloves, hat, socks, wool scarf, snow boots, a shovel, can of sand, container of kitty litter, granola bars and a small bottle of brandy (my father’s advice to me thirty years ago when I first started going out on assignment in northern New England – the bottle he gave me then remains in the emergency kit).

When the car was warm, I herded the dogs into the backseat and we set out. With all the snow we have had, the road was snow-covered. It was still dark. The snow under my tires made eerie sounds like ghostly voices crying in pain. As I turned out onto the road, my headlights lit up the surface of the snow which appeared to be sprinkled with glitter. Or tiny diamonds. Once out onto the main road, I joined the other cars making their way through the frigid darkness. Everyone’s exhaust was making vapor trails, and in the parking lot to the store, everyone had left their car running so there was a kind of cloud that hung over the market, a mist of commerce.

Inside the store, there was a hush. No one wanted to say what we say to each other all the time: “Coldenufforya?” That would be too absurd. So we traded expressions, raised eyebrows or little shakes of our heads. It was enough. From the cooler (which seemed warmer), I took the desired milk from the display, somewhat more grateful than usual, as if I’d gone on safari to reach this one object. And now it was mine. The cashier and I grinned at each other knowingly and I was back out into the atmosphere of below zero. My friends in Iceland had written – it was 40 degrees F. there. In Iceland the thermometer hardly ever drops below zero – something about the Gulf Stream. My friend in Alaska, however, does us one better with forty below. Her husband died two winters ago, leaving her to run their greenhouses and keep their wood heated log home warm and shoveled out in the winter. She had written that week of her struggles to find dry wood. A young friend was bringing a truckload of big pine rounds for her to split. Which she did. She sent photos of some of the knots she encountered. I felt like a queen with my protected woodpile, right outside my door, all nicely split and ready to be transferred into the two big woodboxes inside. When both are full, I can keep the stoves purring for a week or more.

When I got home, I backed the car into the driveway, the tires squeaking like new leather. I got out, an extra effort to open the door. Even oil seems to freeze up at this temperature. My nostrils stuck together as if with glue and I could feel the air in my lungs, a strange sensation -- I could actually envision the parameters of my lungs. I opened the back door of the car and let the dogs out. They always follow me back into the house. It’s not that far to the door but as I got to the door and reached to open it, I realized they were not in step with me, as they usually are. I turned around to see Mayday, who will turn 15 in two weeks, literally stuck to the concrete floor of my porch. She looked at me pitiably and I rushed to rescue her from her frozen pose. I carried her inside. The little one, who is just two, was standing on the snowbank, holding up her paws as if to say, “How can you expect me to walk on this horrid dry ice?” The expression in her eyes made me feel as if I’d just read a full length tragedy. She also was hustled inside, where the stoves were radiating that welcome heat and the kettle on the stovetop boiled with vigor. At times like this, I like to make the equation. I went to the thermometer on the living room wall. It read 70 degrees. If it was 25 below outside, that means that the difference between the outside and the inside (just one thin door between the two places) was 95 degrees. That’s how powerful my woodstoves are.

Yet, when the temperature drops below zero, friends write in concern – are you OK? Yes, very much so, thanks. How can you stand it? Well, I always hate to sound like a Pollyanna when I answer that question. But I kind of like it. In fact, there’s something exhilarating about navigating through this weather. It’s usually still, often comes at the time of the full moon, and everywhere I look there is exquisite beauty. I occasionally venture forth with my camera – not for long but long enough to snap some photos of the cold, which is hard to convey in images. But once back inside, I’m beautifully warm and slightly triumphant.

Maybe I’ve just lived up here too long. A friend has gone to New Orleans to visit her son and she writes of how cold it is down there – probably forty degrees. Above zero. But she’s in an uninsulated house with inadequate heating. That’s how they build them down there. I remember living in Philadelphia and being colder than I’ve ever been, a horrid damp coldness that felt much colder than the twenty degrees reported. Up here, it’s all about dressing right and having a good, insulated house, and, in my opinion, a woodstove. Other than that, the essentials include wool socks and wool sweaters (the old maxim: wool saves, cotton kills); a big supply of good, dry wood; flannel sheets and a good lofty down comforter for sleeping at night. A couple of warm dogs are a bonus. (I am not one of them but I know people here who sleep with the window open, even on below zero nights. I once knew a woman who slept with the window open an inch or so, wearing a hat to keep her ears warm. She liked it like that.) Once you’ve got all these things, you need little else to stay warm and happy. Oh and I also recommend having a good supply of milk so that you don’t have to go out before dawn on the coldest morning of the year.
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The GPS of Life

January 1, 2011
Tags: Roman calendar, New Year's Eve, celebrations, Coll's Farm
Happy new year to my friends out there. As I write this, it is 2 a.m. on the first of January, 2011. Up here on the hill, it is a fairly mild night, dark as pitch. I am not up at this hour because I’ve been out reveling. If I were not connected to the rest of the world by internet and television, I would not be aware that this night is different from any other. But it is that strangest of holidays wherein we demarcate the passage of time. Just knowing that other cultures have different calendars should be enough for us to know that ours is by all means arbitrary, ours being based on the Roman calendar laid out more than two thousand years ago, not particularly relevant to today. The Chinese, the people of Middle Eastern cultures, the Celts, all have a different time when they celebrate the passage of another year. Most of these calendars are based on something in the natural world: lunar cycles or solar cycles or, closely related, the cycles of the seasons – the farmer’s year. This is the one that makes the most sense to me. But these are all ancient calendars. If we were to create a calendar now, it would have to be based on the post-industrial age, the age of computers and the internet, which would mean the calendar would be seamless, a 24/7 roll-up of minutes, hours, days and weeks – everything would be a continuous flow of productivity and distribution, manufacture and shipping being the hands of the clock that moves in its perpetual cycle. No moment in that calendar would be different, one from the other. I am certainly glad that we haven’t moved to a calendar that reflects the reality of our daily lives, so divorced from the soil and from the skies, particularly the night skies. I’m also grateful that my life here remains tied to the earth.

Earlier I went out to the store, a place called Coll’s that was once a farmstand but that has morphed into a small grocery store. The building’s in the same location, with the henhouse and the sugarhouse nearby and fields all around. They have a few narrow aisles of groceries but a much bigger section for vegetables and fruits, which is why I like to go there. Their produce is better than what I can find at the supermarket and they have a very nice selection of organic goods and natural foods. And they have a container of Mejoul dates, big fruits, still moist in the center – you can pick out a few or many, as you like. I was looking for something extra special for New Year’s dinner. I chose an especially nice-looking pork chop, sweet potatoes, and Brussels sprouts. And four of those plump dates. At the counter, they sell especially large dog biscuits, on the order of the enormous cookies sold singly these days. So I added in a couple of these for Harriet and Mayday.

Whether I am with someone or not, and whether I agree with our calendar or not, I like the way we pause to observe this passage of time. It’s interesting to me, how excited some people get at the prospect of a new year coming. It seems that the worse the year has been, the more interested people are in celebrating the crossover into the new year, in this case, the new decade. The worse the year, the more intense the celebration. I’ve been part of gatherings where some people throw something into the fire to get rid of its bad energy. I’ve been a part of gatherings where people will shout things like, “Good riddance, 2004!” to see the end of a year that brought grief or agitation. Recently divorced people seem to especially love the new year. As human beings, we are forever tantalized by new beginnings, the hope of redemption. And so we give ourselves that hope each year, that possibility that things can and will be better, that we can be better. It’s really the only way to go.

At home, I unpacked the small bag of groceries as the last light of the day played across the mountain’s western flank. At this time of year, the late afternoon light is rich as gold, like stage lights illuminating every tree, every stone in the wall, every wave in the field. In the living room, I started to take down the decorations, the small tree, the lights, the plump little snowmen that circled the base of the tree. I gathered up the gifts I had been blessed with: hand-knit mittens and an Icelandic cookbook full of new and different recipes from my friends in Iceland, an amazing handmade birdhouse from my neighbors, a jar of homemade jam, a pair of warm socks, three new books to read – all an abundance of generosity, new things with which to start the new year. I worked on this for a while, putting everything back in its place and restoring order to the room. I filled the woodbox in the kitchen and stoked the stove. It wasn’t that cold, which was a blessing because it has been extremely cold during the month of December, but it was good to feel the room brimming with warmth. I put the potato in to bake, steamed the Brussels sprouts, and put the pork chop under the broiler. Things smelled pretty good.

Just as I was taking the potato out of the oven, my cousin from New Jersey called so I told her I would call her back after I ate. Which I did and we talked for a long time, getting caught up, wondering where the time has gone and remembering a time when our parents would dress up in gowns and tuxedoes and go out to celebrate the New Year. Times change, we concluded. When I got off the phone, it was somewhere around 9:30 or 10. I took the dogs out for a walk then, walking into the relative mildness of the end of 2010. The great snow that had fallen just a week ago was sinking into the earth and some bare spots were showing. In the distance, I could hear popping sounds. It took a moment for me to realize someone, somewhere, was setting off fireworks. I stood and listened to the distant festivities. Otherwise, there was just a deep silence around the hills, bright stars and complete darkness. Back inside, I gave the dogs their biscuits and sat with them in the stillness, savoring the sweet treat of those dates. I was trying to figure out what it is about the changing of the calendar that provokes people to dance and pop champagne corks, watch brilliant, dazzling fireworks, shower the landscape with confetti and in general, carry on in a way that they don’t on other nights. I can’t make sense of it. So, for now, I’m going to bed and in the morning, I’ll open up my new calendar, balance my books for 2010, and try to set up the GPS system that my good sister sent me from her home on the West Coast, so I can better navigate these back roads. And find my way through 2011.
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Mending Our Ways

December 15, 2010
Tags: college teaching, thrift, college loans, debt, whaling, Nantucket
On Wednesday nights, I teach a class at a nearby university. A couple of weeks ago, we were reading a text that made reference to the word “mending” – one of my students, a junior, said, “Whoa, whoa, what is mending?!” “Mending,” I said, “like when you mend a hole in your shirt?” I thought perhaps she had misread the word. “Who would do that?” she shot back. I was rendered speechless as the rest of the class offered varying degrees of comprehension or lack of same. Some, thankfully, understood the word. Others were confused and several others said something like, “No one would do that. You just go buy a new one.”

I let them talk it out among themselves as I went into a brief reverie. Just a few weeks before that, I sat in the reading room of the Nantucket Historical Society’s research library. I am working on a piece about whales and whaling which has found me burrowing into such things as old texts on whaling and ships’ logs from the 19th century – yellowed pages bound with twine and covered in marbleized paper, the handwriting faded but perfect penmanship, the l’s and the d’s listing like ships in the wind. One account that particularly interested me was by a man who had gone to sea as a cabin boy when he was only fourteen years old. This was not unusual. I’d been struggling to understand what it was like, to go off in a boat with twenty or thirty men on a voyage that sometimes lasted three or four years. They couldn’t come home until the hold was filled with whale oil, the precious substance that lit the world and oiled its machines back then. A young boy like that would leave a boy and come home a man. This was his education, plain and simple.

Another thing I’ve struggled to understand is how they managed to keep their clothes clean, hauling 60-ton whales aboard sometimes more than once a day, blood and guts as much a part of each day as the wind and high seas; and rendering blubber over open fires on deck, another part of those long endless days full of stench and offal. So this fourteen-year-old explained that the first and as it turned out most important lesson he was to learn in those early weeks of his first voyage was to take care of his clothes. Whalers only brought with them two sets of clothing, kept in their small lockers. These clothes were to last them until they returned home. If their clothes were damaged beyond repair, their only choice was to buy new from the captain, depleting the already minuscule wages they received. In that way, some of these young men returned home after years at sea in debt to the ship. If I had brought this up to my students, I would have been laughed out of the classroom. And, rightly so. I would have been guilty of the same sin my parents and grandparents engaged in by telling me that they had walked miles to school when I had the comfort of a school bus.

Many generations divide my students from the lessons this cabin boy learned at sea. They have nothing comparable or even remotely similar in their lives. Clothes are disposable. Truthfully, few of us do mend our clothes anymore, though I am capable of doing so when need be and, for that matter, I keep the little sewing box full of spools of colorful thread, needles and pins, and a small pair of scissors that belonged to my great grandmother. The box always reminds me of my mother’s skills at mending. (I have to admit I like the box more than I like to mend.) Most of us just buy new, blithely putting it on the credit card, in debt to the company store just the same. And so the word “mending” fades from our language.

But then I thought this: none of us, even a single generation ago, imagined student loan debt that runs tens of thousands of dollars and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. That makes the cabin boy’s voyage across the seven seas and the debt on his return home seem like a bargain. Indeed, there is much that needs mending.
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The Death of Our Queen Mum

November 28, 2010
Tags: big families, small towns, long lives
A snow squall came whipping in this afternoon, pretty much out of nowhere. Whiteness blanked the mountain. A wicked wind scooped some of the paper bags of recyclables I had just loaded into the pickup, and took them up up and away. I don't know where they went. I was in the garage, in the process of charging the battery in the tractor -- it did not see much action this summer as the ground was so dry, no grass grew -- and once it was charged, there was nothing to do but take it for a spin in the back field, even though the weather was most inhospitable. I didn't want it to lose the charge that took so long to gain but it was a bitter fling, snow stinging my cheeks and the wind biting right through my pants.

Yesterday the skies were blue when I went to the funeral of a wonderful woman who lived in the center of our town. No mistake, she *was* the center of our town, leading the school board, heading up the effort to build a new school for the town, creating our little library, and, always, holding forth with her strident Democratic point of view. Originally from California, she came to this area in the 1930s to perform in a summer theater. Essentially, she never left. She married into the Colony family, the family that ran the woolen mills in this region, a lofty entry into the rural New Hampshire countryside. When the mills went bankrupt in 1970, the family turned a sow's ear into a silk purse, eventually establishing a historic district, raising the mills up out of their ghostly hollows into a place ranked first as a National Historic District and later as a National Historic Monument. Peggy led the charge. Just about every brick has been polished in the process and Peggy's house, where she lived for 69 years, is the jewel in the crown of this ring of mills. Aside from all else, she was the mother of seven children, all of whom live here in town, either full-time or seasonally, with their families, none of them small. She presided over this massive family (their Christmas dinner could be mistaken for a town meeting) with what her husband referred to as her "iron whim" and what others called her velvet glove. In the last election, when the family was gathered in full, she held a straw poll and asked everyone to vote for either Hilary Clinton or Obama. When the results were tallied, more than half were in favor of Hilary. Those who favored Obama, she declared, her fist striking the table, are *out* of the family.

But mostly, she was celebrated for her positive outlook (nearly every encounter she made, be it ice cream or fall colors or a new novel, she sang out was "the best" she had ever experienced), and for her hospitality -- parties, family visits, stray visitors from anywhere on earth, everyone was welcomed, quite literally with open arms. What was one more? John, her co-conspirator and beloved husband of 65 years, died six years ago. Peggy carried on with spirit. Speaking at her funeral, her son-in-law bemoaned that he had lost the "president of his fan club." The point was, we all had. She boosted us all and boasted of us, as if we were all, this massive number of friends and family chief among her concerns, chief among her foundlings. She was the Queen Mum not only of her family but of this village.

A couple of years ago, Peggy asked me to come over and go for a walk with her. This town is laid out like a harbor, the village homes ringing the shores of a small lake, the lake's outlet passing down and in some cases under the buildings in the center of the town. Long ago, this gush of water was the town and the mill's source of power. Off like a peninsula is the town's cemetery which is called Island Cemetery though it is not an island and likely never was -- part of the poetic aspect of this town. Peggy's house is in the center of the village, high up above the tumbling waters that rush through town and the mill. That day, she wanted to walk to the cemetery and show me her John's relatively new grave. When I got to her house, she came out of her back door, reached out her hand and took hold of mine. This was her custom, a way, it seemed to me, not only of gaining extra support but also of guiding. So off we went, hand in hand, much slower than any walk we had ever taken. We crept our way to the cemetery, one slow step at a time. It was a glorious fall day and the sun was warm, though the wind was a bit chill. But we talked on as we walked and neither of us noticed any discomfort. When we reached the family plot, she talked about each of those who lay there, resting. After she had introduced me to the family tree, she led me a bit further where there was a memorial bench, looking out over the water. We sat there then and talked about our missing men, my husband who had died years earlier at the age of 39 and her husband who had died much more recently at the age of 89. She had the ability to make everything in one's life seem significant and she did that day as well, recalling my young husband to me as if she had known him much longer than she had. We watched the lake waters capping like a small sea. When the wind became too much, we started back through the carpet of fallen leaves to her waiting house and a cup of tea. This is how I remember Peggy, someone who had more family members than most political parties yet someone who could make time for any one of us as if we were the only one.

And she was a realist. Once, about four years ago, as she was about to turn 90, she said to me, "Well, Edie, I am going to be *ninety*! I mean, *this* is getting serious!" I got her point -- I had not thought of it until that moment but, once one turns ninety, the number of years left are likely in the single digits. That is serious. So at that time, she had about three years left. But when she said that to me, she spoke with the conviction of a 60-year-old. And she went on to see Obama win the presidency, whom she did, after all, prefer to George Bush, who, she declared on more than one occasion, ought to be in prison.

In the last year, she'd faded from us a bit which caused a sadness all its own, as if a great masterpiece had been left in the sun and lost its color. Names vanished from her tongue, faces ceased to be recognizable. But she could still laugh and she had not completely lost the sparkle in her eyes. Babies, especially, earned her attention because they signified new life and hope. Once late last summer I enjoyed a soup-and-sandwich lunch with her and two of her daughters. That day, she proudly showed me a two-volume set she had had made for her children and their descendants, the pages filled with her letters and with family photographs, an amazing chronicle of an amazing life. Even though she had printed only enough for her family members, she was determined to give me a copy, which I declined, smiling to understand the pride and excitement she clearly felt in the existence of this, the summation of her life. She wanted so much to share that.

One night about two weeks ago, I was coming home late, passing through the village on my way home. I turned, as I always did, to look at Peggy's house as I passed by. I often looked to see if she was still up, signified by a light on in her big living room. If she had gone to bed, the lights were off downstairs, on upstairs. It was 11 o'clock at night and all the lights were on in the house, something I had never seen before. My heart sank to realize she must have died. Indeed, she had. She got into bed at 7:45 and, shortly after, her daughter had gone in to tuck her in and turn out the lights only to find she was gone. I don't think I've ever known of anyone who had such a fortunate life, which included a companionable and loyal husband, travel to foreign lands mixed with the steady closeness and constant rhythm of a small town, all those children and grandchildren surrounding her until she finally closed her eyes for good, one peaceful November evening. I don't think life on this planet gets much better than that.

And so, you see, we will miss her, I will miss her. And that is what I was thinking as I drove the tractor through that snow squall this afternoon, how quirky life is, how fortunate it was that this bitter weather had not come up yesterday, how a village is its own world, its own universe, and how nourishing and sometimes just plain lucky this can be, even in death.
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The Ghost of a Dread Past

November 6, 2010
Tags: Lyme Disease, Gluten-free, Butternut Squash Lasagna
The return of my Lyme symptoms was an unwelcome realization. It came on one morning, just as my original Lyme symptoms had, when I woke up and could not bend my left knee. This was how it happened when I first had Lyme but it was a long time before I knew that what was wrong with me was Lyme Disease. What I knew about the disease back in 2001 was virtually nil (I thought it caused achy joints and that it was more like a flu that would eventually go away). Since that time, I have written about Lyme on several occasions and my research and personal interest in the disease has practically earned me a doctorate in the disease. Files stretch the length of my attic. Simultaneously, public awareness has been raised with films such as “Under Our Skin,” (http://www.underourskin.com/) which I highly recommend if you want a crash course in what happens in some of the more severe cases of Lyme. Mine was one of the more severe cases but it was aggravated by my own ignorance (there are sound reasons why the public is largely unaware of the gravity of this disease. Don’t go on the internet, which I did, if you want a clear picture. There is a host of disinformation posted there and it all results in a mind scramble). This confusion was coupled by my physical weakness and a lack of health insurance. So I went it alone. But since, I’ve learned a lot, written an article for Yankee on the subject (posted on my website), and have been symptom free for probably four years now. Until a couple of months ago. This time, I knew what the unbending knee was telling me. Along with it came the telltale symptoms of extreme fatigue and painful body aches. My intake of Advil escalated. These symptoms were nothing like my full-blown Lyme experience but it was surely the ghost of a dread past.

At its core, Lyme is an immune system disease and I have known for some time that keeping my immune system in balance was essential. But this past summer and fall, I’d been on the road a lot, doing talks and readings from my new book. It’s been an exciting time but I’ve lost a lot of sleep as I return home past midnight and rise before 5 to take care of what hasn’t been taken care of in my absence. Eating on the road is usually touch and go but, if prolonged, it is ultimately, a disaster. So it was a train wreck of circumstances. I could have predicted this if I’d thought about it. The pain was not limited to my knee but my back and my legs were so inflamed that, at times, I could barely walk. Sitting was my only option.

My sister happened to be visiting in September. She is an extreme athlete and had been telling me for some time about her new gluten-free diet. Because of all her intense physical exercise, she constantly experiences pain. She told me that eliminating wheat from her diet had remarkably eased her symptoms. My situation with my health insurance had not improved at all. In fact, my premium had been raised from about $700 a month to $900 a month – that is with a $5,000 deductible. Who can afford payments like that? Further, paying those premiums allows no possibility of seeking medical help, since, once the premium has been paid, there isn’t any money left to pay the doctor. I don’t want to get into the plight of a free lance writer or the bleak situation of health care in this country.

When I was first diagnosed with Lyme, I eliminated sugar from my diet, which is highly recommended. Then came alcohol. Not a problem. And so, I knew it wouldn’t be so hard to eliminate wheat. I can’t speak for long term results but after two weeks without wheat, I have to say, I feel heaps better. In fact, I am amazed. The results were immediate. In that first week, I happened to come across a recipe in the newspaper for lasagna made with butternut squash. I happened to have a bushel of that, my most favorite squash, sitting on my porch, waiting to be carried down to my root cellar. I set to the task, made a pan of it and enjoyed it for lunch and dinner. My first gluten-free week was a breeze. I have tweaked the recipe a bit and share it with you now. Even if you don’t have Lyme, which I sincerely hope you do not, try it. I think you’ll like it.

Butternut Squash and Kale Lasagna

1 large butternut squash, peeled
1 bunch kale
1 large onion
3 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and pepper
2 cups diced tomatoes
1 teaspoon oregano or sage
1 8-ounce container of part-skim ricotta cheese
1 cup grated Gruyere, mozzarella, or fontina cheese

Preheat oven to 350.
Peel the squash, cut it lengthwise, and then scoop out the seeds. Place the halves face-down and cut lengthwise into ¼-inch thick slices. Make sure the slices are thin enough. Remove and discard the stems from one bunch of kale. Chop the leaves into small pieces.

Dice the onion and mince the garlic. Saute in the olive oil until soft. Add the kale and cook, covered, for 5 or more minutes. Add salt and pepper.

Lightly grease a 13 x 9 inch baking dish or large cast iron skillet. Cover the bottom with an overlapping layer of squash slices. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Spread the cooked greens over the squash and add another layer of squash slices. Spoon on the ricotta and spread to a layer, then cover that with the tomatoes and the herbs over this layer. Add a final layer of squash. Top with the grated cheese. Bake in preheated oven for one hour. Pierce with a fork to make sure the squash is cooked through. If not, cover with foil (to keep the cheese from burning) and bake until the squash is nicely soft and the cheese brown and bubbly on top.

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Blogger's Dilemma

October 27, 2010
Tags: blogs, e-books, reader response, Pascale, Mark Twain
I have been blogging now for almost two and a half years. As a writer, I wasn’t sure about this thing called a “blog” (short for “web log,” something like a diary online) and I’m still not sure. It’s really no different from a weekly column but my editor urged me not to make it like my Mary’s Farm essays – just jot down something quick, he recommended. That was harder than one might think. It reminded me of when they cut the maximum number of words in my column in Yankee magazine from 750 to 550. I believe it was Blaise Pascale who said, “I would have written you a shorter letter but I didn’t have time.”* Crafting a certain number of words into a fixed space can be challenging – if you want your words to make sense and to have resonance, that is. But blogging freed me of that – the online format allows for a seemingly unlimited number of words. But then, I’m told, people don’t want to read anything very long. Not online, anyway. Hmmm, what could that mean for the future of e-books? While all these considerations were emerging, I kept on blogging, just about things that were happening here, on this particular place known to locals as Mary’s Farm but which has been mine for some 13 years now. A lot has happened over the course of those years.

Even as I wrote, I kept wondering what constituted a blog. How was it different from an essay? I’m still not sure I know. I occasionally read other blogs but I confess I’m not a big blog fan. I don’t read much online. That is a personal choice, even though I accept that the future of all reading lies online. I like a book in my hands but more and more, the delivery system for those words is and will be electronic. Many advantages! Save paper. Save money. Sounds like perfect Yankee frugality to me. But, alas, I love the tactile experience of the printed word, the feel and smell of the paper and of the ink – even though I’m now a blogger, an intimate member of the electronic world. Sometimes not everything makes sense.

And then there was the issue of what is appropriate to blog about. It’s supposed to be about all the little seemingly insignificant things that happen. I like nature – I’m surrounded by it and experience some fantastic shows of blizzards, shooting stars, northern lights, lightning storms, and rainbows. All that seems appropriate. And I like to cook. I just discovered a great new recipe last night for butternut squash lasagna, a recipe I might share. That also seems like a natural. But then there are other things that concern me. The political paralysis this nation is experiencing. I probably ought not to get into politics, good way to make enemies. Recently, I experienced a recurrence of Lyme Disease which has been painful and distressing. Do I talk about that on my blog? Probably not appropriate, if for no other reason than that once I get onto the topic of Lyme Disease, I find it hard to stop. So I would limit my words to telling about my extreme discomfort and my disappointment that it has returned, which is the reason I have not been blogging very often recently.

But the best part about blogging is its lightning speed. This is a phenomenon of the electronic age. In the past, writing magazine articles or essays, one set to work on a piece and labored over the facts, the words, the phrases, everything that makes up a good piece of writing. Sometimes the entire process takes months and then there is even more of a time lag while the printing takes place. Between the time I write what I write and the time readers read what I wrote, sometimes as much as a year can go by. Then people respond. It’s somehow a muted experience, to have a reaction so far removed from when I was so deeply involved in the subject. Thinking about it now, that system seems almost medieval. With the blog, I write it and post it. Done. With few exceptions, I write a blog, read it over for any grammatical or spelling errors and then post on the website from here inside my farmhouse. That in itself is revolutionary. No editors see it. No proofreaders comb it for mistakes. No fact checkers sniff around for errors in fact. Out it goes, completely unfiltered. And then, sometimes in the same day, readers respond. This is what is exciting about a blog. It becomes more of a conversation, an exchange of thoughts and ideas. It’s alive. I love that immediacy. I think I’ll keep blogging. Maybe someday I’ll actually get used to reading online.

*I always thought that Mark Twain had said that but I just went on Google and found that both Twain and TS Eliot are sometimes given credit for those words but instead it was Pascale. So easy now to find out just about anything online – score another one for the revolution!
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Monday, Tuesday, Sunrise, Rainbow

September 7, 2010
Tags: 9 to 5, commuting, Holidays, storms, rainbows
These national holidays – Labor Day, Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Martin Luther King’s Birthday – are an odd occurrence for a writer. For those who travel to their workplace each day and live by this other calendar that begins at 9 and ends at 5, these holidays are a respite from that schedule. Writers such as I don’t keep those hours. My every day begins when I rise, which is early because Mayday and Harriet insist on it. They are like clocks, exact in their demands. When I feel Harriet’s cold nose and hear her snuffle into my neck, I know without turning on the light that it is 5 a.m. And it’s usually unfailingly so. If Harriet’s alarm doesn’t work, Mayday comes to second that notion. And so we are up, outside into the still darkness, stars and moon readily apparent, not even the birds have begun their chatter yet. Once the dogs are fed and walked, and the tea has been brewed and poured, the day begins. In this schedule, there are no workdays, no holidays, no weekends. One day blends to the next in a seamless ribbon of time. In each day, then, is a period of about four hours when the house is silent as a tomb, the best time for a writer. Around nine or ten, things start to happen, the phone rings, demands begin. But in that space before, between our rising and the awakening of the rest of the world, comes the great gift of stillness.

It is also a time where, sitting at my desk, I think, I’m so lucky, so few others are privileged see this gradual lightening of the sky, these colors, sometimes subtle, sometimes blazing, as the sun slowly claims the sky. The sunrise is a free and magnificent experience, available every single day. Watching the mountain emerge from darkness, it could be Everest for all the many ways she returns to me, one morning, the light striking sharply on her summit, another, she is shrouded in clouds, or even the days when a circle of pink-tinted clouds sit on her peak like a magical little hat. Each and every day, summer and winter, Monadnock returns in a different way. There is no need to leave home in order to see some of the most subtle yet most moving displays of natural beauty.

We have just had a hurricane pass by us. It was much touted on the television news, which was appropriate because it started out, in the south, as a Category 4, a very strong storm indeed with winds of 145 mph. But as it made its way north, it weakened and by the time it drew up parallel to us, it was just a tropical storm. But, we all thought, we all hoped, it would bring us badly needed rain. It didn’t. Instead we had a day or two of high winds, a few brief showers, and cold temperatures, a bold contrast from the blistering heat we’d been having.

I had friends for dinner on Saturday night. The clouds all day had been dramatic and beautiful, great swaths of white and gray across a blue sky, departing brushstrokes from the now distant storm. As the day came to an end, big dollops of pure white clouds sat on the horizon like whipped cream. We were sitting inside for the first time all summer as the air was so chill, watching the clouds and exchanging our news when a big bar of color rose out of the sky. Rainbow! We rushed outside to see, just a line rising in the sky, no arc, but radiant colors, red, yellow, green, blue. I thought I should get my camera but felt it would be gone by the time I got back. It wasn’t raining where we stood but apparently it was in the distance. The sun was angling down toward its resting place. As the colors began to fade and we turned to go back inside, the show suddenly strengthened and the colorful bar rose into the mythical arch of a full and magnificent rainbow. We all stood in silence as it grew stronger, then widened into a double rainbow, each end landing in the trees. We waited for the unicorns and the pot of gold. These are the ways that the days break in my strangely infinite daily calendar, not a Sunday or a Tuesday or a holiday but a sunrise or a rainbow or a particularly magnificent show of stars in an early morning sky.
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