Today is my sister and brother-in-law’s 50th wedding anniversary!

Les and Bob are the kind of people I would describe, without hesitation, as “the salt of the earth”—a phrase that pops into my head when I think of people who are sincere, honest, hard-working, and kind.

They met at the University of Maine. It was the late 1960s, and the country was caught up in social and political movements—pro-civil rights, anti-war, pro-feminism, anti-establishment—but Les and Bob were not hippies or protesters or, as far as I know, even affected much by “The Sixties.”

They were both pretty busy pursuing practical degrees (him: electrical engineering; her: elementary education) and preparing for practical career paths.

I was about ten years old the first time Les brought Bob home to meet the family.

Like the rest of us siblings, Les was a wannabe Mainer, born and raised in exile in Connecticut, but identifying far more closely with our parents’ state of birth than our own.

Bob, on the other hand, was a Maine native, having grown up in Waterville, and this fact gave him automatic prestige in my eyes.

I don’t know how long they had been dating at the time, but they weren’t yet engaged. I also don’t know why I thought it would be a good idea to conduct a sort of hazing ritual, or why I thought an actual, real Maine native would be alarmed to find the taxidermied head of a black bear on the pillow of the bed he had been assigned in the bedroom my three brothers had shared when they all lived at home.

(Don’t ask me why we even had the taxidermied head of a black bear around the house. It seemed perfectly normal to me when I was growing up, and the only thing I remember being told about it was that it was all that was left of a bearskin rug that had been destroyed by moths. I had no idea of the original rug’s provenance and probably assumed most families had that sort of thing hanging around in their storage closets.)

Bob liked to ice skate, and he was a really good sport about taking his girlfriend’s little sister and a friend or two to a small skating pond in the nearby woods. I’m not sure why we thought it would be a good idea to steal and hide his boots once he had changed into his skates, but I remember that we did. I also remember that he was completely unperturbed about it. (We did eventually return them.)

Bob also didn’t bat an eye (or turn and run) when my mother declared that it would certainly be nice to have an electrician in the family (although she probably added that a plumber would have been even better) and started making a list of small electrical projects around the house and camp with which he could occupy his time whenever they came to visit.

I was twelve years old when Les and Bob got married in the chapel on the UMaine Orono campus on June 19, 1971, and I was a junior bridesmaid. What I remember most about the day was that it was very hot, and there was some sort of mix-up about the time with the organist, and she didn’t show up, so we all processed in silence. She was supposed to have played the song “If,” and I always think of that song when I remember their wedding day.

Despite the nearly ten-year difference in our ages, Les and I fought a lot when I was growing up. With the wise perspective of age, I can now state unequivocally that every single one of those fights (even the one on the train to Arizona in the summer of 1967 that caused her to dig her fingernails into my wrist so hard they left little red crescent marks that took weeks to fade) was my fault.

My sister is not, in any way, difficult or demanding, annoying or argumentative, and I doubt that she has ever, in her whole life, had so much as a mild spat, let alone an actual fight, with anyone else. I, on the other hand, am all of those things, so I know without a doubt that I was the instigator in all of our fights.

When she was in high school, I whined and annoyed her at every possible opportunity, went into her room without permission (and occasionally broke things, then denied it), and teased her unmercifully about a couple of geeky boys who had unrequited crushes on her. I’m pretty sure she was relieved to go off to college, knowing she’d probably never have to share a home with me again.

But Les and Bob had barely returned from their honeymoon to New Orleans and settled into Bob’s family camp on Parker Pond for the summer when my mother, who was taking graduate courses during the early part of that summer, drove me to Maine and deposited me in their care for, I think, three weeks.

My sister, who is pretty much a saint, never complained. In fact, the first day I was there, she suggested that the two of us make a serious effort at détente.

“How about if we try not to fight for the whole time you’re here, and then when Mom comes to get you, we can tell her we didn’t have one single fight?” she suggested.

I agreed, a bit doubtfully.

As it turned out, it was easy, and I remember those weeks as one of the best times of my childhood, filled with swimming, walking, talking, baking, and playing games together. Not only that, but, now, fifty years later, as far as I can recall, Les and I have never again had so much as a mild tiff between us.

Les and Bob spent the first decade of their marriage living fairly conventional lives, first in Massachusetts, then in Connecticut, where Bob worked for Stone & Webster and Les taught school. Then, forty years ago, they made the momentous decision to buy a cute little country store in a small town in Maine.

With their two sons in tow, they landed in Mt. Vernon, where they have made their living and their lives ever since.

Their friends and neighbors who know them don’t need to be reminded of all the ways in which Les and Bob have immersed themselves in their community, but, for anyone who doesn’t know, here are just a few of their contributions:

They ran Mt. Vernon Country Store and a second store, Flying Pond Variety, for nearly 30 years, always with an acute awareness of their central role in the community. It was never “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it”…it was always “Sure, we can get that for you!”

Les put her kindness, dedication, and patience to work as a reading specialist at Mt. Vernon Elementary School, while working a second (often full-time) job at the stores.

Bob serves as the town’s cemetery sexton, which has included taking classes to learn to clean and repair gravestones and painstakingly restoring hundreds of the town’s ancient stones.

Les has been a mainstay of Mt. Vernon Rescue for decades; because she was almost always in town—teaching, tending the store, or working in her huge garden—she was virtually always on call, and still is.

There’s so much more that they’ve done—coaching, babysitting, serving as town treasurer, caring for elderly residents (and feeding their cats). Bob has received the Spirit of America Award for outstanding service to the town, and they were both honored by the Vernon Valley Masons as Citizens of the Year.

Several years ago, Bob—a confirmed “truck guy”—bought himself an early birthday present: a Mazda Miata. I think my practical sister was a bit aghast, but today, they left their responsibilities behind for a few hours, and headed off in the convertible for an anniversary day trip to the coast.

Nobody deserves it more.

Happy 50th, you guys…love you!

For perhaps the third time in the past few months, I received a letter in today’s mail from a young family hoping to buy a lakefront property in Oxford County. They are, they explained, “seeking more solitude and quality family time,” a place to make memories. They are “well qualified and may be able to do a quick cash closing.”

I know, from speaking with local realtors, as well as from the dizzying speed with which two of our kids recently sold their homes here, that real estate in rural Maine has become an extremely hot commodity during the pandemic. Whether it’s a year-round home or a vacation condo, nothing stays on the market for long these days, and I can only imagine how hard it is to find waterfront property. Prospective buyers have taken matters into their own hands, obtaining the names and addresses of camp-owners from local town offices and mailing out a barrage of hopeful letters.

Thanks to the foresight, careful planning, and hard work of our parents, our family has owned just such a property on North Pond in Woodstock for more than 65 years, but if you know anything about me at all, you already know that. You probably also know that our family camp is the center of my universe, and it is emphatically not for sale. So I won’t be replying to any of these inquiries, but, if I were to respond, I might say something like this.

Dear Hopeful Young Family:

Thank you for your letter. You certainly sound enthusiastic and wholesome, and I hope you are able to find the perfect lakeside camp for your family to enjoy, but I’m afraid it won’t be ours.

Here, in no particular order, are ten of the many reasons I won’t be selling our camp to you, or anyone else:

1. Constancy: I was brought to camp for the first time at the age of three and a half months, and while I don’t claim to remember anything about that first summer, when my mother placed me on a blanket in the center of the old oak dining table so that I could lift my head and look out at the lake, I am certain that it shaped me. All of my 62 summers have been spent at camp, and whether I have ten, or twenty, or forty summers left, camp is where I plan to spend them.

2. Memories: Camp is the repository for memorabilia that ranges from my dad’s old suede jacket (last worn by him in 1958) to Twinkles, the shabby stuffed dog I was given for my third birthday; from my great-grandparents’ wicker chairs to the antique hand-crank party line telephone (in use until 1983). My parents’ University of Maine yearbooks are there, and the volumes of poetry my mother used to read to me, and the wagon-wheel lamp my brother Greg made for her when he was in his early twenties. But more important than any of those things are the memories our family and friends have made there over more than 65 years—early-morning fishing expeditions; hot, lazy afternoons in the lake; evenings of popcorn and Scrabble, with the crackly radio pulling in the Red Sox game from some far-away AM station.

3. Grandchildren: My mother loved nothing more than having every seat at the table and every bed in the loft filled with grandchildren. She loved watching them reenact the adventures of their parents—motorboat trips to the store for penny candy; picnics on Rock Island; learning to row the old wooden boat, safely attached by a length of clothesline to a tree on the shore. I have one grandchild, and I want her summer days to be filled with the magic of camp, from rising early to pick blueberries for pancakes from the bush at the water’s edge, to long afternoons in the water, to bedtime stories after sunset.

4. Sunsets: A picture really is worth a thousand words. I’m sure you understand why I won’t be giving this up.

5. Friendship: Just as my mom watched three generations of her own offspring experience the joy of being at camp, she also reveled in seeing their friends experience it for the first time. When our kids’ friends bring their own kids for a day at the lake, I bake cookies and pies and put out an inordinate amount of sandwich fixings and think about how much she would love to be there with us. And, in a way, she is. Some of my mom’s favorite times at camp were when one of her close friends would visit, when she would have the rare pleasure of long afternoons of adult conversation. My own lifelong best friend years ago ceased to be a guest during her stays at camp—every other weekend, all summer—and is as much a part of the family as another sibling.

6. Magic: High up on the unfinished pine wall of one of the tiny bedrooms of our camp, there is the print of a boot. It is there from a time, in 1955 or 1956, when the camp was still being built, when someone stepped, with a muddy—or maybe greasy—work boot, onto a pile of pine boards that would later be used to panel the bedroom. I am certain the footprint is my father’s. When I wake up in the morning and see it in the dim light, I imagine my mother awakening alone in that same room for 45 summers, looking up and seeing that same footprint, and I imagine I know what she thought and felt.

7. Promises: On the night that my father died—suddenly, leaving my mother a young widow with four children, not even yet aware that there would soon be a fifth—my three brothers sat with her at the kitchen table after the stunned neighbors had left, after my sister had been put to bed. My oldest brother, who at fourteen had just been told (by their well-meaning pastor) that he was now the man of the family, said shakily, “I guess now we’ll have to sell the camp.” My mother spread her hands on the table and looked at each of the boys in turn and said, “We are never selling the camp.”

8. Proximity: When I was growing up in exile in suburban Connecticut for ten months of the year, I longed constantly for camp. Very early on, I vowed that I would never live anywhere but Oxford County, Maine, and I’ve been right here for nearly 45 years now. Best of all, for the past 32 years, I’ve lived just three miles from camp, close enough to walk or bike, close enough to go there in all seasons. “Some year,” my mother would say, as we were packing to leave camp on Labor Day weekend, “I’m going to sit right here in the fall and watch the leaves turn color.” Later on in life, she did, and now I do, too.

9. Wonder: Once, when I was in about the middle of my sullen adolescence, my mother climbed the stairs to the loft and woke me in the middle of the night and said, “Come see the Northern Lights.” We made our way to the beach, climbed into our old canoe, and pushed it off the sand, out into the still, dark water. We paddled until we had a clear view of the northwest sky. For a long time I had forgotten what it meant to experience such a pure sense of wonder, and that night, the feeling was restored to me. Decades later, I remembered everything, and wrote a poem:
   

   One night you woke me late
   And said, Come see
   The Northern Lights. I feigned sleep;
   I was so snug—
   and smug. But then I thought,
   Why not? And I came barefoot
   Down the narrow stairs.
   We pushed the canoe off—
   Skritch—over the sand.
   The hem of my nightgown brushed the water
   As I climbed in the bow.
   (You were in charge:
   You took the stern.)
   The lake was black.
   The trees were black.
   The sky was black,
   Pricked with stars—
   No moon.
   Our paddles dipped, and dripped,
   Not silent as the Indians’, but hushed
   Enough to hear the bats
   And the crackle of someone’s campfire
   Down the lake.
   And they were there, in the northwest sky—
   Green, yellow, and red
   (Just like Robert Service said).

10. Sweat equity vs. instant gratification: I realize that this may be a tough one, but if you really want to make memories with your family, the thing to do is to find yourself a little piece of land and set to work clearing brush, pulling stumps, and leveling a building spot. From the photos you included in your letter, I can see that your boys are hearty-looking; they clearly like being outdoors and will probably enjoy sleeping in a tent for a few summers while you get your camp built. At six and eight, they’re old enough to learn to swing a hammer, and in a year or two, they should be able to use a Skil saw with some supervision. Your camp will always have a few quirky characteristics that come from being built by a family with no real idea of what they were doing, but, trust me, it will feel more like yours that way.

I wish you the best of luck with your search!

It seems that almost everyone has a flying squirrel story. Here’s mine, along with a few of the dozens of comments, stories, and dire warnings I received when I posted my photo on the Maine Wildlife Facebook page.

When I got up a few mornings ago and found several balls and skeins of yarn knocked to the floor from the cubbies in the spare bedroom where I store my fairly extensive yarn stash (every knitter has one), I naturally blamed the cats. After all, when plastic bags end up strewn around the house, or when pens, paper clips, TV remotes, and cell phones mysteriously disappear and turn up under the couch, they’re the usual culprits.

I had just started picking up the yarn and stuffing it back into the cubby with the rest of the stash when there was a frantic scrabbling from behind the skeins, and I suddenly found myself face to face with a flying squirrel.

It’s rather startling to come unexpectedly face to face with a wild animal in your yarn cubby, even if that wild animal is all eyes and ears, small and furry, and very, very cute.

I’m not sure which of us was more alarmed. I may have jumped and shrieked a bit; he didn’t. In fact, he froze in place for long enough for me to get my phone and take several photos (because, you know, Facebook-or-it-didn’t-happen, right?).

He even stayed frozen long enough for me to go to the basement stairway and locate the old fishnet that came with the house when Tony bought it 35 years ago. (Although the previous owners had never specifically mentioned sharing their home with assorted wildlife, it probably should have been a sign when he discovered that they had kept a net conveniently close by.)

Although it hasn’t worked for mice, red squirrels, or the ermine that found its way inside one winter, we’ve successfully used this net to remove errant bats on a number of occasions. When netted, bats usually fall obligingly into the narrow pouch at the bottom of the net and stay there until they can be released outside.

It turns out that flying squirrels, when netted, do not fall obligingly into the bottom of the net. Instead, they cling desperately to the mesh with the teeny, tiny claws on their teeny, tiny fingers and toes, refuse to be shaken down, and leap out at the first opportunity, sometimes straight at the face of the person holding the handle of the net.

This is disconcerting, to say the least, when one is that person.

Getting this furry invader into the net, at least at first, wasn’t the problem, but keeping him in the net turned out to be impossible. By the time he had escaped and been recaptured a couple of times, all three cats had come tearing upstairs and were following the proceedings with opportunistic interest, and I was just about equally afraid of having a flying squirrel attach itself to my face or having to watch the violent demise of my inarguably adorable new friend at the hands (and claws, and teeth) of the three vicious killers with whom I willingly share my home.

Although I had the idea that I could grab a nearby towel, throw it over the net, and carry it downstairs to the door, I would have needed at least one more hand, or a couple less cats underfoot, to accomplish this.

I should mention that this is not my first flying squirrel rodeo. Every year, from late fall until early spring, the cats and I occasionally hear something running around in the walls and attic, and every time I hear it I think, gee, that sounds too big to be a mouse.

But since I never have to go into our attic (which is an unheated crawl space filled with nothing but insulation and, I guess we can assume, rodent nesting material and probably more rodent poop than I care to contemplate), when I’m not actually confronted by a flying squirrel in my living space, I can maintain a blissful state of denial. (It’s even easier for Tony, who is too hard of hearing to notice the scrabbling noises. And as for the cats, as long as the invaders stay out of sight, the mystery of “What the Heck Is in the Wall?” just adds a little excitement to their dull indoor lives.)

The first time I actually saw one was two years ago. I was sitting in the living room, reading, when it emerged from who-knows-where to eat a bit of leftover cat food at the foot of the stairs. The cats didn’t happen to be in the room, and the squirrel and I both chose to pretend we hadn’t seen one another.

Since then, I’ve come upstairs more than once to find one or more cats stationed outside our bedroom closet, leading to me to believe our house guests have a secret pathway somewhere in there that lets them go back and forth from the attic, although I’ve looked for it to no avail.

After a few failed attempts with the net, the squirrel ran into our bedroom and disappeared under the bed. By the time I had pulled everything out from under the bed, it had relocated to under the dresser, in a space too small for the cats to squeeze into, which is where I left it, since I had to get to work.

When I got home, there was no sign of a living squirrel and, I was glad to see, no sign that the cats had caught up with him while I was gone. In fact, everything seemed back to normal, so I concluded that our furry friend had found his way safely outside or, more likely, back to the attic.

The next morning, however, I came downstairs to find all three cats staring intently up at Tony’s jacket, which he had hung over the top of the open door to his office. Then I noticed that the jacket was moving, ever so slightly, as if swaying in a breeze. Our house is old and drafty, but not that drafty, so I had a pretty good idea what was going on.

I thought maybe I could reach up, gather up the jacket, yank open the outside door, and toss the jacket, squirrel and all, out onto the doorstep.

With one hand on the doorknob, I cautiously lifted the jacket, only to find the panic-stricken rodent clinging to the edge of the door. He took one look at me and, clearly remembering the net episode of the day before, launched himself off the door and into Tony’s office, with the cats in hot pursuit.

He made a couple of laps around the room before jumping into an empty cardboard box, which I quickly upended, but not before he had shot out from underneath it and headed down the basement stairs with Roman close behind him.

I ran down after them in time to see the squirrel make it safely through the chicken-wire wall that separates the cat-friendly zone of the basement from the cat-free zone.

Convinced he was safe for the moment, and already late (for the second morning in a row), I left for work, after filling Tony in on the latest developments.

A couple of hours later, he called to say that the squirrel had come back up from the basement and led him and the cats on yet another chase. He was finally able to trap it by cornering it in the bathroom and upending Eli’s food dish over it, then sliding a piece of cardboard underneath. He escorted it out the door, and reported that it was last seen racing away over the snow.

I’m sure it was back inside by the time I got home from work.

So long, 2020. In the words of the Sanford-Townsend Band (a one-hit wonder from the 1970s—a mostly confusing time in history that I call “my era” and one that Tony professes not to remember), don’t let the screen door hit you on your way out.

Or, to paraphrase the Grateful Dead, what a long strange year it’s been.

I don’t think I really need 1970s rock bands to remind anyone that 2020 was, in general, a Very Bad Year.

People couldn’t hug their friends, visit their grandchildren, go to live performances, sing in church, or eat in restaurants.

Everything was canceled.

Worst of all, millions of people got sick with COVID-19, and, in the U.S. alone, hundreds of thousands died.

In so many ways, it was a Very Bad Year.

But, at least here in my little world, not every single thing about 2020 was terrible. In fact, I can think of a few actual benefits I derived from a year in which, due to circumstances completely beyond my control, I was forced to do what I’ve been telling people for years was one of my life goals: to never leave Oxford County.

When I was growing up in Connecticut, tortured by the knowledge that I was, at heart and soul, a displaced Mainer, I was so enamored of the idea of moving to Oxford County to live that I announced I was changing my middle name to Oxford. (I was also enamored of Little Women, declaring at the same time that I was changing my first name to Beth, and I spent most of fourth and fifth grade signing all of my school papers, correspondence, and such, “Beth Oxford Wight.”)

Yes, of course I’m very glad we made that trip to North Carolina to play with our granddaughter in February before the pandemic hit! And I enjoyed my visit to Cumberland County for a birthday celebration in early March with three dear college friends, an evening on which we talked about life and love, politics and our past, retirement and remodeling—everything except the one subject that would, within a week, become almost the sole topic of conversation at every gathering (if we could have actually had gatherings).

But since my birthday I’ve left Oxford County exactly three times, and I’m pretty much okay with that, because it turns out that Oxford County really does have everything I need.

It has my home, which has always been my refuge. Although I know many people will say they have suffered greatly from “cabin fever” during the pandemic, that hasn’t been the case for me. I get outside for a walk or hike nearly every day, I’m fortunate to still be able to go to work, but I’m always very happy to return home to my sanctuary.

Just three miles away from home, Oxford County has our family camp, the place I call the center of my universe, because it is.

Thanks to a lack of “Things To Do” last summer—no weekend festivals, no public events at work, no out-of-town shopping, and, best of all, no pesky in-person meetings, I got to spend more time at camp than I have in years. Although we missed our usual camp visits with my siblings and other friends and family, we added Donna to our COVID pod and she drove up from Portsmouth every other weekend from Memorial Day until mid-September to isolate at camp, do projects with me, and enjoy our very favorite “activity”—doing absolutely nothing on the deck or dock.

A couple of decades ago, I used to think a trip to Lewiston/Auburn, or even Portland, every week or two was a necessity in order to obtain groceries and other essentials. Then, for a number of years, a weekly 45-mile round-trip to the Oxford Hannaford and Walmart, which usually takes me at least four hours, seemed inevitable, as did the convenient fast-food lunch that often accompanied it. I had, long before the pandemic, reduced that to once or twice a month, but since the beginning of March, I’ve been to Walmart just once and Hannaford twice.

Everything I need in the way of food has come from our local grocery store (which probably does have an official name, but which is variously called “Bethel Shop’n’Save,” “The IGA,” or “The Foodliner,” depending on how long you’ve lived here), or from farmers’ markets, farm stands, and other local food vendors.

A trip to get groceries now takes me well under an hour. I’ve become addicted to perfect bagels from DiCocoa’s and delicious takeout from Le Mu Eats, and I just realized that I haven’t eaten fast food in over ten months. (Ice cream cones definitely don’t count.)

And Oxford County has endless opportunities to get outside and play, in all seasons. In 2020 I hiked, walked, ran, and snowshoed a total of 1,272.8 miles. On top of that, I swam, paddleboarded, canoed, kayaked, and biked. I embraced the mantra “no bad weather, just bad gear” and I’m sure I breathed more fresh air in 2020 (a lot of it hot, cold, wet, or snowy) than I ever have before.

Now that I’ve wrapped up another year without breaking my insane streak of consecutive days of exercise (3,194, as of today) and spent several hours digging into the data I recorded in my mileage log, with my FitBit, and on Facebook, I’ve discovered that, of my 127 hikes in 2020, 124 of them were right here in good old Oxford County. (One was in Raleigh, NC, pre-pandemic, and two—one in Franconia, NH and one in Kennebec County—account for two-thirds of my trips outside the county since the beginning of March).

In fact, it turns out that 96 of my hikes—a full 75%—were in either Greenwood (where I live) or Woodstock (where our camp is). If I plotted them on a map, they’d probably fall within a five- or six-mile radius of where I sit right now.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that I’ve done 124 different hikes in Oxford County—I tend to return to my favorites again and again—but staying close to home, plus my recent discovery of the PeakBagger app for my phone (great maps!), did allow me to make some rewarding new discoveries (as well as some scratchy, buggy bushwhacks I don’t intend to repeat ever again in this lifetime) right here in my hometown(s).

I hiked Buck’s Ledge 30 times, Peaked Mountain in Maggie’s Nature Park 23 times, and Lapham Ledge 18 times. I also made my first-ever ascents of Elwell Mountain, Bald Bluff, Uncle Tom Mountain, Patch Mountain, Tibbetts Mountain, and Hedgehog Hill (all right here in Greenwood) as well as Square Dock Mountain in Albany, Blueberry Mountain in Stoneham, and Doten, Thompson, Hutchinson, and Irish Hills in Hartford.

Although I did complete my first 4,000-foot peak in over 40 years (Old Speck) last fall, for the most part, I guess you could say that I enthusiastically embraced the AMC’s directive to “hike low and local” during the pandemic.

Will, who has spent some time studying lists of local mountains and hills on the PeakBagger app, tells me that there are at least 500 named peaks in Oxford County. I think that should be enough to keep me hiking close to home for a good long time. 

Giant mystery cairn on Hutchinson Hill in Hartford, Maine.

Start with the berries. Go out the front door. (At camp, that’s the door on the lake side; the door toward the road is the back door.) Go down to the edge of the lake and pick two cups of berries from the clump of wild high-bush blueberries that has (without fuss or fertilizer, attention or interference) been producing berries for pancakes, muffins, and cakes for more than half a century.

If you tie a cut-down plastic milk jug around your waist with a piece of clothesline rope, you’ll be able to use both hands to pick; this is helpful.

Go barefoot, and wear shorts, because to pick the ones on the lake side of the bush you have to stand in the water.  (Gramma Wight did not wear shorts. She wore skirts. I do not wear skirts at camp—or anywhere else, for that matter, if I can help it.)

The best time to go is early in the morning, because if you get there before the sun burns off the dew, there will be fairy dresses to admire, stretched between the branches of the bushes and spread out on the little patch of grass behind them.

Use Marjorie Standish’s Melt-In-Your-Mouth Blueberry Cake recipe, from her first cookbook, Cooking Down East. Marjorie says this is “undoubtedly the most popular recipe ever used in my column.” There is good reason for that. 

Marjorie was a great cook, a true professional. She wrote a recipe column for the Maine Sunday Telegram for many years, and her cookbooks are classics. People call her “Maine’s Julia Child.” There’s no real reason to make any changes to her recipe at all, but I modify it with the addition of a crumb topping, because who doesn’t like a nice crumb topping?

You’ll need: two eggs, separated; a half-cup of shortening (next time I might experiment with using butter instead, but today I went with Marjorie’s recommendation and used Crisco); a cup of sugar; a teaspoon of real vanilla; a cup and a half of flour; a teaspoon of baking powder (I like Rumford brand because it’s aluminum-free and doesn’t give your baked goods a weird, metallic aftertaste); a quarter of a teaspoon of salt; a third of a cup of milk; and two cups of blueberries. (Marjorie’s recipe actually only calls for a cup and a half, but I like to use two cups if I have them. The cake will come out just fine, not too heavy or soggy, and it will have a lovely amount of blueberry taste in every bite.)

Separate the eggs and beat the whites until stiff. It’s best to use Gramma Wight’s old Pyrex mixing bowl for this; the red one should be the right size.

If you’re a purist, you can use the ancient hand egg-beater that is hanging on the pegboard to the left of the sink. Be sure to clean the cobwebs off it first; it probably hasn’t been used in a while. But it’s okay to use the electric mixer if you’re not feeling energetic. It’s a lot of work to beat egg whites stiff with a rotary egg-beater.

Add some of the sugar from the recipe to the beaten egg whites to keep them stiff, about a quarter of a cup.

Cream the shortening in a bigger bowl; the yellow Pyrex one is perfect. Before you put the shortening in it, turn it over. That “R. Wight” on the bottom, in faded Magic Marker, was put there several decades ago, so that the big yellow bowl would always be sure to come home from potlucks and picnics, after the cole slaw or potato salad or brownie pudding was gone.

Add the sugar, vanilla, and egg yolks and beat until nice and fluffy. It’s best if you’re able to use free-range local eggs, because they have the loveliest dark yellow yolks. My farmer friend tells me it has to do with the higher protein content of their diet, from eating bugs and grubs along with the usual grain. Whatever the reason, using local eggs will give your blueberry cake a nice, rich color.

Sift together your dry ingredients, but first, measure out your blueberries in a two-cup glass measuring cup—the chipped spout won’t matter—and mix just a little of the flour from the recipe with the berries so they won’t settle to the bottom of your cake; a couple of teaspoons should be enough.

If you still have the green Pyrex bowl that originally came with the set, it’s about the right size to sift the dry ingredients into, but if it has disappeared or gotten broken over the years, the stainless steel bowl that fits into the copper-bottomed Revereware saucepan (for use as a double-boiler) will work just fine.

Add your dry ingredients alternately with the milk, mixing with the old wooden spoon—just dig around, and you’ll find it in the drawer with the sharp knives (don’t worry; none of them are actually sharp enough to cut you), the broken vegetable peeler, and that heavy little glass thing nobody wants to throw out because one day someone might figure out what it is.

Gently fold in the beaten egg whites and then, even more gently, the blueberries. You don’t want to crush the berries—Marjorie used a rubber scraper for this step, but you may find that the rubber scraper from the knife drawer has gotten all cracked and crumbly over the winter. If so, don’t worry; just use the wooden spoon. But be gentle!

Spread the batter in a greased 8” x 8” pan. Marjorie says to sprinkle the top lightly with granulated sugar, but I do love a nice crumb topping. So mix half a stick of softened butter with a quarter cup of brown sugar, a half cup of flour, and a half teaspoon of cinnamon. Use a pastry blender—that ancient one with the crazily bent wires that was brought to camp fifty years ago because it “wasn’t good enough for home” will work just fine.

Sprinkle the topping onto the batter and bake it at 350 degrees for 50 minutes, or until it springs back when you press the center.

Put it on a wire rack on the table to cool while you go to a meeting, or out for a walk, or to the dump and the post office. If you’re lucky, there will be a piece left for you when you get back.

My mom, Ruth Elizabeth White Wight, was born on a Friday the 13^th, a century ago today.

She was the eldest of four children born to Leon George and Laura Marcella Trundy White, and the only girl.

Although her parents were living in Bangor, she was born at her grandparents’ home in Searsport. Her mother had gone there to await her arrival, because her father, who worked for the Great Northern Paper Company, spent the work week driving around to remote logging camps to deliver the payroll, coming home on Friday evening and leaving again on Monday morning.

The first of her brothers, Leon Jr. (whom my grandfather called Junior, but everyone else called Shume) was born just 13 months later. Her next brother, Don, arrived three and a half years after that, and Gib was born five years after Don, nearly ten years after my mother.

From what Mom could piece together about a subject that was only ever discussed in whispers, my grandmother suffered from “female trouble” and never fully recovered after delivering her last child. Seven months later, she ended up in the hospital. After a few days, she seemed to be improving, and my mother, as the oldest, was allowed a short visit.

My grandmother was sitting up in a chair, and she told my mom that she was much better and might be able to get up and walk a bit by the next day, and to come home soon after that.

She said, “Ruthie, your hair’s hanging in your eyes!” and, taking a bobby pin from her own hair, she pinned up the errant strands of my ten-year-old mother’s unruly black hair.

The next day, my grandmother suffered a sudden hemorrhage and died.

“I kept that bobby pin for years,” my mother told me, not long before her own death. In fact, she said, it had been in her jewelry box for seven decades, disappearing, somehow, only recently.

(When, later, my sister and I were sorting through her clothing and jewelry, we ran across several bobby pins, caught in the crevices of drawers or tangled in the chains of necklaces. With each one we found, I caught my breath, wondering…but they all looked the same, and who could tell?)

Thus, at the age of ten, my mother became a caretaker, and a stoic. She helped with her younger brothers, changed the baby’s diapers, and endured a series of live-in housekeepers who were paid to keep the laundry done and the floors clean and the children fed, but not to nurture them, listen to them, or love them.

My mom buckled down, excelled in school, and took on far more responsibility than she should have had to. She stayed out of trouble and never rebelled.

Well, almost never. As a teenager, late at night she would sometimes climb quietly out of her bedroom window on the second floor of the square yellow house on Boutelle Road, use the drain pipe to shinny down from the porch roof, and ride her bicycle up and down the streets of Bangor.

She didn’t join up with other rule-breakers, or drink, smoke, or shoplift. She just rode her bike, alone, savoring a small taste of freedom.

She came close to being found out only once, after she rode through a patch of fresh tar, and the housekeeper nearly caught her scrubbing it out of her clothes in the bathtub.

In 1937, at 17, she graduated as the valedictorian of her high school class and headed to the University of Maine to major in English. She expected to have to live at home and commute, but when she was awarded a scholarship that covered her tuition, her father told her she could live on campus instead.

“I felt like I had been set free,” she told me.

She graduated, went to Hartford, Connecticut to work for the Aetna Life Insurance Company, met my father, married, and had four kids in six years. She grew and canned vegetables, baked cakes, pies, and cookies, sewed clothes and curtains and quilts, and knit hundreds of pairs of mittens (literally, hundreds—maybe even thousands).

Sixteen years after they were married, when my mother was 38 years old, my father died suddenly of a heart attack. A week later, she packed the kids into the station wagon and drove them to Maine, to spend the summer at the family camp they had been building for the past three summers.

By the end of the summer, she realized that she was pregnant with her fifth child. Instead of wailing and gnashing her teeth, she decided there was nothing she wanted more than another baby, and she would treat my birth as some sort of miraculous gift.

Against incredibly daunting odds, she figured out how to support five kids as a single parent, kept us all fed and clothed and out of juvenile detention, and sent us all to college.

Even more remarkably, she turned us all into adults who are, I believe (and I think most people who know us would agree), conscientious, competent, kind, and funny—the qualities we were raised to value most highly, as she did.

Mom made sure we knew we were a real family, at a time when a family without a father risked being seen as something less than whole.

She may not have been able to give us everything we thought we wanted, but she gave us everything we needed, and more.

Happy 100^th birthday in heaven, Mom. Every single day, I think of you, with love.

There is a Zen proverb that says, “You should sit in meditation for twenty minutes every day—unless you’re too busy; then you should sit for an hour.”

I was asked recently to write a few paragraphs for a future issue of our monthly church newsletter on the subject of “Why I go to church.”

With no particular deadline, I’ve been treating this assignment as I do most open-ended obligations, which is to say that I’ve pushed it to the back of my mind and given it no thought whatsoever.

This past Sunday morning I was sitting in church at the start of the service, wondering to myself why I was there. I had left a lengthy and detailed list of things that absolutely had to get done before the end of the day on the kitchen table at home, and attending church was not on it.

My list included such pressing tasks as “Go to the dump” (it’s not open again until Wednesday, and something in the kitchen trash was starting to smell rather ripe), “Write essay for writers’ group” (how many months in a row can I bring a piece of writing that’s either old or unfinished before they start thinking about kicking me out?), and “Make Oreo turkeys” (I know: this one may not sound pressing, but I’ve made these ridiculously fussy creations out of Oreos, miniature peanut butter cups, malted milk balls, and candy corn every November since 2010, and I’ve sent a dozen or so to the Shakers at Sabbathday Lake every year since Will started working there, and this is the last November that he’ll be there, and how could I even think about disappointing Brother Arnold?).

My list also included a number of things that should have gotten done that day, but which I knew perfectly well probably wouldn’t, like making a Christmas tree out of dowels to display ornaments in the Museum Shop at work (I still had another eleven days to get it done before our Black Friday sale, so the project probably wasn’t last-minute enough to rise to the top of my mental panic list), completing the library’s annual fund mailing (a task with which at least five people on the board of trustees had offered to help, but which, instead, I was doing all by myself because I don’t know how to delegate and besides, I wanted it done right), and cleaning the bathrooms (with any luck, now that early winter ice has made my driveway so treacherous, nobody who doesn’t live here will see my bathrooms until spring anyway).

The First Universalist Church of West Paris is more than a century old, and it has the most amazing original stained glass windows on all four sides. On sunny mornings, like last Sunday, the large window in the east-facing rear wall of the sanctuary positively glows. It can lift your spirits just to look at it—even if you’re heading home after the service to take out the smelly trash, and glue Oreos and candy corn together with sticky icing.

Unitarian Universalists are my people, a fact that is brought home to me nearly every Sunday, not only by the readings and sermon topics, and the spirited discussions downstairs over refreshments following the service, but also when I open the hymnal and see that we’re going to be singing about world peace, environmental stewardship, or social justice.

Where else can I go and join a chorus calling for “Bread and Roses,” echoing the voices of the women who marched in the textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912?

Where else will I get to sing my favorite UU hymn—Holly Near’s “We Are a Gentle, Angry People”—and think deeply about what it means to be both gentle and angry, to be “singing, singing for our lives”?

That morning, as the service began, my mind was active, unquiet, searching, filled with random thoughts. I wondered if I would be home by 11:00, and, if I was, if I would have enough time to get out for a short hike after going to the dump, and still get back in time to write that essay and make those turkeys and possibly, although not likely, scrub a toilet or two.

I wondered how I was ever going to get everything on my list done, and if there was ever again in my life going to be a time when I didn’t feel overwhelmed by tasks and responsibilities and meetings and projects and lists.

I wondered if there was anything, anything at all, that I could do, while sitting there in church, that would advance my progress on any of the pressing tasks on the list at home on my kitchen table.

And when I realized that there wasn’t a single thing I could do about any of it, I suddenly understood why I was there. The feeling that washed over me was unfamiliar, but so welcome, as if I had been unknowingly longing for it.

The feeling was stillness.

There are weeks—too many weeks—when just about the only waking hour during which I don’t check something on my phone, fret about falling behind, or wonder if I have my priorities straight is that hour when I sit in church.

I don’t always go, but when I return after a week or two away, sitting in that wooden pew can sometimes feel as luxurious as sinking into a featherbed.

So, although I may go to church for the stained glass, or for the words of the speaker, or for the fellowship, or to sing about bread and roses, or even for the refreshments, there is one thing above all the others that keeps me coming back, one thing I don’t find anywhere else, except perhaps, at the top of a mountain.

I come because I’m too busy to sit in meditation for twenty minutes. I need to sit for an hour.

I come for the stillness.