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.