Author: Amy Wight Chapman

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Molasses Crinkles like Mom used to make

Today, it’s been eleven years since my mom died.

“I’m thinking about your mom today,” my best-friend-of-almost-50-years texted this morning. “Makes me want to make molasses cookies.”

My mom passed down a lot of great cookie recipes—oatmeal raisin cookies, peanut butter cookies cross-hatched with a fork before baking, a powdered-sugar-dusted concoction that was a favorite with my nephew Keith, chocolate chip cookies (which she always called Toll House cookies, because she was old enough to remember when Ruth Wakefield of the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts invented them in the 1930s). But her molasses crinkles were a lunchbox legend.

As soon as I read Donna’s text, I could think of nothing but those molasses cookies. Fragrant with ginger, cinnamon, and cloves and baked to just the right degree of chewiness, they melt in your mouth.

I don’t have a copy of the recipe written in my mom’s own handwriting (although there’s probably one at camp), but it was one of the first recipes I copied into the now-tattered half-size loose-leaf binder in which I began to collect favorite recipes when I was 18.

I don’t know where this recipe came from originally, but I’m sure it’s very old. I copied it word for word, so it still includes old-fashioned phrases like “roll dough into balls the size of large walnuts” and “bake in a quick-moderate oven.”

I have to admit that I often don’t bother to follow one of the most important lines of the instructions, and it’s the part that makes them molasses crinkles, rather than plain old molasses cookies: after you mix and chill the dough, form it into walnut-sized balls, roll the balls in granulated sugar, place them on a greased cookie sheet, and flatten them slightly with the bottom of a glass (dipping the glass in sugar between cookies so it doesn’t stick), you’re supposed to “sprinkle each with 2 or 3 drops of water to produce a crackled surface.”

When I was in college (the first time), a friend’s mother sent her a box of cookies she called gingersnaps. They were spicy and crunchy and delicious, and they did snap when you broke them in two, just like store-bought ginger snaps, the only kind I’d ever had before. I asked for the recipe, and it wasn’t until years after I had painstakingly copied it onto page 38 of my recipe book, under the heading “Sue Mackenzie’s Mom’s Gingersnaps” (and made the recipe many times), that I realized that her recipe was identical to my mom’s molasses crinkles recipe on page 15, only baked a bit longer for crunchiness, and without the sprinkle-with-2-or-3-drops-of-water step. (Also, according to this recipe, you can roll the balls of dough in granulated sugar “if desired.”)

I made molasses crinkles today (of course!), and I did everything just the way my mom always did. Well, okay, not quite. I always substitute butter for two-thirds of the Crisco shortening in her recipe, which makes them even more melt-in-your-mouth delicious. Besides the fact that butter is almost always better in cookies (and the fact that, unless I’m making whoopie pie filling, it’s hard to bring myself to even look at a cup and a half of Crisco, let alone put it in a recipe), Crisco is no longer the frugal option it used to be. In Mom’s day, it was cheap—far cheaper than butter, and even cheaper than margarine—which I’m sure is why she used it in baking. Nowadays, it rivals butter in price-per-pound. I could probably still buy margarine more cheaply, but, despite having been raised on it, I won’t touch the stuff. Sorry, Mom.Molasses_cookies

Almost-like-my-mom’s Molasses Crinkles

Mix together:

1 cup softened butter

1/2 cup Crisco

2 cups brown sugar

2 eggs

1/2 cup molasses

Sift together and stir in:

4-1/2 cups flour

4 tsp. baking soda

1/2 tsp. salt

1 tsp cloves

2 tsp. cinnamon

2 tsp. ginger

Chill dough for at least two hours. Form into balls the size of large walnuts. Roll balls in sugar and place 2 inches apart on greased baking sheets. Sprinkle each with 2 or 3 drops of water to produce a crackled surface. Flatten with the bottom of a glass, dipping it in sugar between cookies. Bake in a quick-moderate oven (375 degrees) just until set, but not hard, about 8 minutes. Cool on cookie sheet for one minute, then on wire racks.

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Another April, long ago…

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Seventy-three years ago, on April 6, 1942, my parents got married. It was a Monday, at 2:30 in the afternoon. (Why they chose to get married on a Monday is a mystery to me; maybe it wasn’t that uncommon back then, or maybe the church was tied up every weekend with all the couples who were rushing to get married before the husbands were sent overseas to fight.)

My father was nearly 30, and my mother had just turned 22. Both had graduated from the University of Maine, but they were several years apart and hadn’t met there. In fact, although they were both Maine natives, they met, in the summer of 1941, in Connecticut, where my father was working as a metallurgical engineer and my mother was working for the Aetna Life Insurance Company (and living at the “Y” with several other girls from Maine).

From all accounts, it was a whirlwind romance; my mother told me once that my father produced an engagement ring on a Labor Day weekend trip home to Maine, barely two months after they had met. “I said, ‘Oh, no, Bill, it’s too soon,’” she told me, “and I made him keep the ring until Christmas.”

They were married just a little more than three months later, in Bangor, where my mother had grown up, and where her
father still lived. For their honeymoon, they traveled to Littleton, New Hampshire, in the White Mountains (yes, in early April!), where they stayed at the historic Thayer’s Inn, built nearly a century before.
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Flume honeymoon

If you look closely, you can spot my mom, sitting on the railing at the top of the gorge.

They snowshoed up the trail to the Flume Gorge; from the photos they took, it was a spring not unlike this one, with plenty of snow still in the woods.

On their way back from New Hampshire, they stopped in Bethel to see my father’s mother and grandmother, who ran a RWW_returning_from_honeymoon_1942small restaurant (Farwell & Wight’s) together. They strapped on their snowshoes again and hiked up a mountain, to the old Farwell homestead (abandoned nearly two decades earlier, when my great-grandparents moved down into town). There, they liberated an old spool bed, already an antique, which was first theirs, then eventually became my sister’s, then my niece’s, and is now in the guest room at camp.

They moved into a tiny, boxlike house in Newington, Connecticut, then, after the kids started coming—four of them in the next seven years—a bigger house with a bigger yard (and a sidewalk running all around it—a racetrack for my brothers’ bikes). Eventually they moved to Westfield, New Jersey for my father’s job.

From my mother’s accounts of those years, I think she loved being a young wife, raising her family in a place filled with other young families, baking up a storm (“a pie, a cake, or a batch of cookies, every day”), coffee-klatsching with the other neighborhood wives (“we’d all get together and call in our grocery order, and they’d deliver it to wherever we were having coffee that morning”), taking camping trips in a leaky tent with all the kids and the family’s cocker spaniel.

Then in the mid-1950s, itching to get back to Maine for at least part of the year, they bought a lot on North Pond in Woodstock and started to build a camp, and that quickly became a major focus of their lives. My parents always knew that one day they would retire together “to a house on a hill in Bethel,” and spending their summers on nearby North Pond was a step in the right direction.

My mother was married for just over 16 years, and was a widow for nearly 46. I never knew my father, who died a week shy of his 46th birthday, and more than eight months before I was born. My mother wore her rings until the day she died, and I believe she always considered herself my father’s wife.

The day after she retired, in June of 1982, my mother left Connecticut for Maine, there to stay for the remaining 22 years of her life (except for her trips to Alaska and Colorado and England and Scotland and France and Germany and Australia…).

She started a journal that day with these words: “June 22, 1982—Your 70th birthday, Bill, and a very good day to close out my Milford life and get ready to carry out our dream of retirement on a hill in Bethel!”momanddad

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I Heart Locke’s Mills…and I have a column!

I have a new writing gig! I am (at least for now) the weekly correspondent to The Bethel Citizen for Locke’s Mills, the village where I live.

Note: Just to clear up any confusion, it’s true that I am a resident of the town of Greenwood, but I also live in the village of Locke’s Mills, just as people who live in the village of Bryant Pond are also residents of the town of Woodstock. It’s a Maine thing, I guess. Wikipedia says: “The village of Locke Mills, on State Route 26 in the northern part of Greenwood, is the town’s urban center and largest settlement.” To further muddle things, most modern mentions of the village call it “Locke Mills,” but our local historian, Blaine Mills, points out that all historical references from the 19th century call it “Locke’s Mills,” so that’s what we put on the signs that welcome visitors to the village, and that’s what I try to remember to call it.2015-03-23 001 2015-03-23 001

For writers, the weekly column is often considered to be a sort of holy grail—the most sought-after outlet for their writing. After all, as Peter Cole wrote for The Guardian, columns “are defined by ownership; the column ‘belongs’ to its author who has that ultimate journalistic luxury, a slot, guaranteed space over which he or she presides and has, in some cases, near total control over content.”

Wow, heady stuff! The “ultimate journalistic luxury”!

I’m taking over the Locke’s Mills column because my friend Betsey, who has written it for the past few years, has given it up. A couple of weeks ago, she wrote in her column that it would be her last one, and encouraged anyone who wanted to take it over to contact the editor.

Remarkably, no one has (so far) expressed interest in the fame and fortune that go along with being a correspondent for the local weekly. Since I already write features and cover school board meetings for the paper, and since I hated to see my own town village, where I’ve lived for over 25 years now, go without a local column (and since someone asked me if I would do it, and I’m very bad at saying no) I decided I would take it over.

When I was growing up in suburban Connecticut, my family subscribed to The Citizen by mail, to keep abreast of the news during the long ten months of the year when we couldn’t be in Maine. The local columns were always my favorite part of the paper.

Back then, there were correspondents from settlements like Middle Dam, Magalloway, and Greenwood City, and I used to like to read about whether the ice was out, where the smelts were running, and who had paid a visit to whom, and to imagine what life was like in those exotic places.

But Locke’s Mills has always been the village closest to my heart. It was the place my sister and I came to by motorboat every day in the summer from our camp on North Pond, leaving our aluminum Duratech Runabout tied to the rickety dock at  Bob’s Corner Store (and, before Bob bought the store, Lee’s Variety) while we walked barefoot along Route 26 to get our mail at the post office.

If it was a hot, sunny day, we would scamper as fast as we could across the burning pavement in front of the gas pumps, to get to the cool grass of the tiny town common where the war monument stands.

From there, we’d walk on the edges of Mellen Kimball’s and Willard Farwell’s lawns, beneath the maple tree near the dam, then along the edge of the mill’s gravel parking lot, where we’d often find wooden treasures to pick up—dowels or glue pins or a screwdriver handle with a bright red enameled finish—to add to our collection.

Back in those days—the 1960s and early 1970s—the mill was running two, or maybe even three, shifts a day, black smoke pouring almost continuously from the tall smokestack. Although there were often acrid whiffs of paint and glue in the air, there was also always the quite pleasant scent of burning hardwood sawdust. It was a smell I associated with summers in Maine, and one the year-round residents of Locke’s Mills probably associated with prosperity.

Before they were torn down, there were several big old houses along lower Main Street, and there would often be kids playing on the porches or steps. I was shy and tried not to look up as we passed, but if one of them called out hello, it gave me a little thrill, as if I were really part of the town, not just a summer visitor.

Since we were here for only two months, we didn’t have a post office box. Our mail came addressed simply “General Delivery, Locke’s Mills, Maine” and we had to go to the post office window, presided over at various times by Connie Blanchard, Mac Packard, or Joyce Hathaway, and ask for it.

If my mother had asked us to pick up hamburger or chicken for supper, we continued on to Hathaway’s Country Store, where Willy Hathaway ran a first-class butcher counter. Then we walked back to Bob’s, careful to watch out for broken glass or metal pop-tops along the road (although by the end of the summer our feet would be tough enough to step on almost anything with impunity).

At Bob’s, we picked up bread and milk and the Lewiston Sun that had been saved for us, our last name scrawled on the upper corner of the front page. Then we counted out our change to see how much we could spend on penny candy from the huge wood-and-glass case in front of the beer cooler.

Sliding doors on the back opened to give us access to red and black licorice twists and shoelaces, Tootsie Rolls, Atomic Fireballs, Mint Juleps, Bit o’ Honeys, Squirrel Nut Zippers, Smarties, and SweetTarts, with which we eagerly filled the tiny paper bags that were kept stacked on top.

When Lee owned the store, he would open our bags and dump the contents onto the dingy hardwood top of the checkout counter, sorting the pile with a grubby finger as he counted, but once Bob took over, he just asked us how much we had in our bags and took our word for it. We never would have dreamed of cheating him by so much as a penny.

Then we’d carry our purchases back to the boat, tuck them up under the deck, and head home. My sister, who drove the boat, always arrived back at camp with her bag of penny candy still full, while most of mine seemed to somehow disappear on the trip.

Now the Locke’s Mills column is mine, in which to write about nearly anything I want. Most of the local columns in The Bethel Citizen are short, tending to run between 200 and 500 words, and my editor suggests a “mix of news/activities and mild opinion.”

In my first column, for this week’s paper, I wrote that “I hope to continue Betsey’s tradition of making this column a mix of local items and town office news, with some of my own thoughts and opinions thrown in for good measure.”

Chances are there will be a good dose of sentimental reminiscing about my favorite village, too.

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On becoming a badass

I am almost 56 years old. I am overweight, I’ve never been remotely athletic, and physical work has never been my favorite thing. Exercise and I were not always on particularly friendly terms.

But this winter I’m becoming a badass, and I owe it all to firewood (and snow removal, but that’s a post for another day).

We heat our rambling, somewhat ramshackle, late-19th-century house with wood, and only wood. There’s an oil furnace in the basement, but we haven’t burned a drop of oil since 2004, when we installed an outdoor wood furnace.

Last winter, before the sap rose, Tony cut three loads of tree-length firewood and had them delivered to our yard. The pile sat there throughout the spring, summer, and early fall, until we moved home from camp and fired up the wood furnace.

Tony scrounges a certain amount of furnace wood throughout the winter—tops and limbs and the occasional dead hardwood. But the bulk of our firewood comes from the prodigious pile—about 20 cords—that gets unloaded beside our driveway every year. More than half of that pile goes into our furnace. We cut and split the rest and sell it, usually by the quarter-cord, to people who run out of dry wood in late winter.

Years ago, Tony had a firewood business that included three dump trucks of various sizes and a conveyor for loading them, and he delivered hundreds of cords of wood every season. Now that we no longer have a dump truck, all of our firewood is sold as pick-your-own. Think of it like driving to a farm to pick apples or strawberries or corn, only a whole lot less convenient.

People who don’t have trucks borrow them from friends, get friends to haul their wood, or make multiple trips with the trunks of their cars full. I once saw a subcompact car leave the driveway with a full trunk, the backseat stacked to the roof with firewood, and another sizeable pile on the front passenger seat.

All the wood we sell has to be cut into 16-inch blocks, split with the woodsplitter, loaded into our ancient and ailing garden cart, pushed across the driveway, and stacked in this specially-sized shed Tony built several years ago. Each of the six sections holds two quarter-cord stacks.

woodshed

Tony does the sawing. If it’s a weekend, and Will is home, he does the splitting; otherwise that’s Tony’s job, too.

This winter, for the first time, piling the split wood into the cart, hauling it to the sheds, and unloading and stacking it has become my job. Around January, I mentioned that, once in a while, I wouldn’t mind doing something more practical for my daily exercise than walking or snowshoeing or yoga, and suddenly I had a whole new exercise program.

Here are some things I’ve learned since I became an expert firewood hauler/stacker:

I can haul 60 sticks in the cart at a time.

There are approximately 420 sticks in a half-cord.

It takes just over an hour to haul and stack half a cord, which I figure is at least the exercise equivalent of a 30-to-45-minute walk. Maybe more.

But the most important things I’ve learned confirm what Mom always said:

Hard work is its own reward.

Fresh air gives you a healthy glow (and a good appetite, not that that’s ever been a problem for me).

And it really is possible to enjoy being outside in just about any kind of weather, as long as you dress for it. (I always thought that was just her way to get me out of the house when I was a kid.)

I’ve never been a big fan of cold weather, and this winter—especially this month!—has featured a lot of the coldest weather I can remember. I’ve hauled and stacked about eight cords of wood—over 16 hours’ worth—since the beginning of February, so I’ve been out in the cold a lot.

On Monday, when the wind-chill temperature was well below zero, I stacked a full cord. On Tuesday, when it was a little warmer, but not much, I stacked a half-cord of split wood, then spent another hour helping Tony haul several loads of four-foot sticks for the furnace.

I have been well supplied with fresh air and exercise this winter, thanks to that woodpile. I have developed actual biceps muscles.

And—bonus—thanks to the fact that four-foot, unsplit logs are really, really heavy, I’ve learned the proper technique for using a pulp hook, something I never thought I’d master.

Thanks to you, firewood pile, I am now an aspiring badass.

Badass

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Happy Friday-the-13th birthday, Mom

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My mom would have turned 95 today.

She was born on a Friday the 13th, and regarded 13 as her lucky number. She was always especially pleased when her birthday fell, as it does this year, on a Friday.

She also would have been pleased to reach a milestone birthday. After a certain age, all birthdays are milestones, but the ones ending in zeros and fives draw a bit of extra attention. And despite her unassuming nature—blending into the background was something of her specialty—my mom never minded having a bit of fuss made over her birthday.

Since her birthday was the day before Valentine’s Day, over the years she was feted with a lot of lopsided, garishly-frosted, heart-themed cakes. I hope there weren’t many years when she was left with a pile of messy bowls and beaters by a daughter whose interest in baking did not extend to the clean-up phase, but I’m sure there were a few.Scan_20150213 (8)

In 2000, when she turned 80, her birthday fell on a Sunday, and my siblings and I pulled off an elaborate two-day surprise event. We told her that those of us who lived nearby would take her out to dinner on Saturday evening, then surprised her at the restaurant with a small crowd that included all five of us, plus some of her grandchildren.

The next day, while she sat in church, enjoying a few birthday greetings from friends and probably thinking that it had been a nice party, if a bit understated for an 80th birthday celebration, we worked frantically just below the sanctuary. We decorated the basement function room with crepe paper and balloons, brought in platters of food and an enormous cake, and greeted out-of-town family and friends who arrived to fill the space while the church service continued upstairs.

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When she was brought downstairs after church, the party was a complete surprise to her. It was a wonderful event, blending her church family and the dozens of local children she had babysat over the years with her brothers and sister-in-law, nieces and nephews, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and lifelong friends.

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At the time, my mom was vigorous and healthy (she would celebrate her 81st birthday, the following year, while on a three-week tour of Australia and New Zealand with a high school friend), and none of us would have guessed that it would be her last milestone birthday—or, at least, the last one to end in a zero or five.

I’m glad we got to have that celebration, and I wish I were in the kitchen right now, making her a lop-sided, garishly-frosted, heart-themed cake to celebrate turning 95.

I’d even wash my own dishes.

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I had a mother who read to me

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I’ve been waiting all week for today: it’s National Readathon Day! (“Or,” said my son the bibliophile, “as I call it, ‘Saturday.’”)

The idea is that we should all spend from noon until 4 p.m. today curled up with a book. After recently reading the three novels in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series, I’ve been wanting to reread her first novel, Housekeeping. I picked it up at the library this week and have been saving it for this afternoon.

Yesterday I was sorting through a box of my kids’ old picture books, some of which were mine when I was little. I was thinking, for the thousandth time, how grateful I am that I had a mother who instilled in me a great love of reading. Besides reading to her own kids and grandkids, my mom, in her retirement years in Bethel, became “Gramma Wight” to half the kids in town, and she read to them, too.

Just then I flipped open a dog-eared copy of One Morning in Maine and found, tucked inside the cover, the words I read at her funeral, nearly 11 years ago. Here’s an edited version.

My mom, an elementary school librarian, loved words, and she taught me to love them, too. In Milford, Connecticut, where I grew up, we subscribed to two daily papers, and she read both of them, cover to cover, when she got home after a long day of teaching other people’s children to love words.

She loved newspapers, magazines, Scrabble, crossword puzzles, and, most of all, books. She read to me when I was too young to understand the words, and she read to me when I was, in my own opinion, too old to be read to.

Family lore says that I learned to read at the age of three and a half, beginning with street signs and soon progressing to books, which I loved, too. This was a source of great pride and delight to my mom, although, true to form, whenever I overheard her brag about it, it was always with a tinge of dismay, as in, “She’s always got her nose in a book!”

My mom read me poetry—Robert Louis Stevenson and Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost—and anything she regarded as “good” books—Charlotte’s Web and Little House on the Prairie and Winnie the Pooh.

(She did not introduce me to the Hardy Boys books, but when I discovered them on my own, she was smart enough to realize that, no matter her opinion of their literary merit, anything that kept me reading under the covers with a flashlight long after bedtime had some value, after all.)

These are some excerpts from my old favorites. Perhaps your mom read them to you, too, or—if you are lucky enough to have called her “Gramma Wight”—perhaps my mom read them to you.

“Mr. and Mrs. Mallard were looking for a place to live. But every time Mr. Mallard saw what looked like a nice place, Mrs. Mallard said it was no good. There were sure to be foxes in the woods or turtles in the water, and she was not going to raise a family where there might be foxes or turtles. So they flew on and on.” (Robert McCloskey, Make Way for Ducklings)

“Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night / Sailed off in a wooden shoe— / Sailed on a river of crystal light / Into a sea of dew. / ‘Where are you going, and what do you wish?’ / The old moon asked the three. / ‘We have come to fish for the herring fish / That live in this beautiful sea; / Nets of silver and gold have we!’ / Said Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.” (Eugene Field)

“When she reached the Green Meadows, Old Mother West Wind opened her bag, turned it upside down and shook it. Out tumbled the Merry Little Breezes and began to spin round and round for sheer joy, for you see they were to play in the Green Meadows all day long until Old Mother West Wind should come back at night and take them all to their home behind the Purple Hills.”  (Thornton W. Burgess, Old Mother West Wind)

“Who has seen the wind? / Neither I nor you: / But when the leaves hang trembling, / The wind is passing through. / Who has seen the wind? / Neither you nor I: / But when the trees bow down their heads, / The wind is passing by.”  (Christina Rossetti)

“She held back the swinging curtain of ivy and pushed back the door which opened slowly—slowly. Then she slipped through it, and shut it behind her, and stood with her back against it, looking about her and breathing quite fast with excitement, and wonder, and delight. She was standing inside the secret garden.”  (Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden)

“‘No!’ said Ramona, and stamped her foot. Beezus and Mary Jane might have fun, but she wouldn’t. Nobody but a genuine grownup was going to take her to school. If she had to, she would make a great big noisy fuss, and when Ramona made a great big noisy fuss, she usually got her own way. Great big noisy fusses were often necessary when a girl was the youngest member of the family.”  (Beverly Cleary, Ramona the Pest)

“How do you like to go up in a swing, / Up in the air so blue? / Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing / Ever a child can do! / Up in the air and over the wall, / Till I can see so wide, / Rivers and trees and cattle and all / Over the countryside— / Till I look down at the garden green / Down on the roof so brown— / Up in the air I go flying again, / Up in the air and down!”  (Robert Louis Stevenson)

 

“‘How do you do Nothing?’ asked Pooh, after he had wondered for a long time.

‘Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going off to do it, What are you going to do, Christopher Robin, and you say, Oh, nothing, and then you go and do it.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Pooh.

‘This is a nothing sort of thing that we’re doing now.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Pooh again.

‘It means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.’

‘Oh!’ said Pooh.”  (A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner)

 

“’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe. / All mimsy were the borogoves / And the mome raths outgrabe. / Beware the Jabberwock, my son! / The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! / Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun / The frumious bandersnatch!”  (Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass)

“Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is both a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”  (E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web)

“Pippi had not forgotten her father. He was a sea captain who sailed on the great ocean, and Pippi had sailed with him in his ship until one day her father was blown overboard in a storm and disappeared. But Pippi was absolutely certain that he would come back. ‘As soon as my papa has built himself a boat he will come and get me.’ Pippi was sure that her mother was now in Heaven, watching her little girl through a peephole in the sky, and Pippi often waved up at her and called, ‘Don’t you worry about me. I’ll always come out on top.’”  (Astrid Lindgren, The Adventures of Pippi Longstocking)

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Poetry: Really, it’s not that hard!
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Poetry: Really, it’s not that hard!

EricCantorTomorrow marks two years since “our” local celebrity poet, Richard Blanco, read his poem, “One Today” at President Obama’s second inauguration. Around that time, I wrote this essay about my relationship with poetry. It has become one of my most popular posts, and since the blog where it originally appeared has been replaced by this one, I’ll share it here. And yes, I’m still reading poetry, every day.

January 2013:

For the past couple of years, I’ve been reading at least one or two poems nearly every morning. I’m reading an eclectic mix of poets, from Shakespeare, Whitman, and Longfellow to Ted Kooser, Linda Pastan, and William Stafford. Through poetry, I’m discovering new worlds, exploring new ways to express emotion, and developing and fine-tuning my own literary tastes.

If all of this sounds complicated and arduous, and makes me sound impressive and erudite—as if I have an extensive library filled with leather-bound volumes of verse, where I settle myself ceremonially in an armchair, switch on my green-shaded brass lamp, and don my reading glasses—let me dispel that idea. What I have are paperback copies of Garrison Keillor’s three Good Poems anthologies, and I keep them in the one room of the house I’m certain to visit every morning.

Yes, I confess: I read poetry in the bathroom.

(My mother read Time magazine in the bathroom. In fact, I’m not sure she ever read it anywhere else. Each week, the new issue was carried into the bathroom as soon as it arrived, and remained there until it had been read cover to cover. As a result, when I was growing up, I also read Time almost exclusively in the bathroom. If I visited a friend’s house and saw an issue of Time on the coffee table, it seemed out of place to me, like a roll of toilet paper left out on the kitchen counter.)

Because I’m partial to the poets of New England—Robert Frost, of course, and Donald Hall, and Maxine Kumin—I’m surprised to learn how much poets from other parts of the country have to say, and how their poems resonate with me. Even though I’ve never visited the Northwest, the words of Raymond Carver take me there. When I read Wendell Berry, there I am on a farmhouse porch in Kentucky at dusk.

But I have a lifelong allegiance to New England, and to Maine in particular, and the Maine poets—native or adopted—are among my most revered. Wesley McNair, Stuart Kestenbaum—I’ve heard and read them, here and there, for years now. Philip Booth, Alice Persons, and Kristen Lindquist are new-to-me favorites. (Thanks, Garrison, for performing the introductions.)

I have to admit, though, that until the Big Announcement came out a couple of weeks ago, I had never heard of Richard Blanco, the poet chosen to create and read an original poem at the second inauguration of President Barack Obama. (He doesn’t appear in any of the Good Poems anthologies—the first thing I did when I heard the news was check. I suspect—I hope!—that will be rectified when Garrison puts together his next anthology.)

As it turns out, Richard Blanco lives in Bethel, the next town north of mine. “Holy crap!” I yelled, charging into the den to read the news story to my husband and son. “They’ve announced the inaugural poet! He’s a gay Cuban-American and he lives in Bethel, Maine!”

“There’s a poet that famous living in Bethel?” said my husband.

“There’s a gay Cuban-American living in Bethel?” said my son.

Bethel is a town of about 2000 people. Blanco has been living there for over three years. He’s the co-chair of the planning board there; I’m a selectman here in Greenwood. He apparently gets his hair cut right around the corner from my house. Wouldn’t you think our paths might have crossed by now?

Sadly, no. But that hasn’t stopped me from adopting him wholeheartedly as my new favorite neighbor. Becoming a fan of his Facebook page. Reading every article and interview I’ve seen about him since he so suddenly became famous. Ordering his most recent book, Looking for the Gulf Motel. Hoping that, once the uproar settles down a bit, he’ll do a reading close to home (and sign his book for me).

A lot of people say they “don’t get poetry.” After Richard Blanco gave his reading at the inauguration last week, there was, predictably, something of a backlash: people who dismissed poetry in general with a wave of annoyance and words to this effect: “I don’t get poetry, I’ll never get poetry, so poetry is irrelevant and stupid.” (Or this whine, on Twitter: “What ever happened to a rhyming poem? This poem at the Inauguration doesn’t rhyme at all. It was a glorified term paper.”)

Maybe a lot of people have been unduly traumatized by poetry in their past. They’ve been forced to read, or, worse, read and analyze, poems that actually are complex, obscure, hard to get. When I was in college, I had to write a paper analyzing Wallace Stevens’ poem, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream.” I wasn’t at all sure I was getting the meaning that Stevens intended, but, fortunately, the poem was enigmatic enough to preclude a “one right answer” sort of analysis, and my professor probably wasn’t any more confident about it than I was.

Garrison Keillor, in his introduction to Good Poems: American Places,says, “Americans are impatient with riddles and so they give poetry a wide berth, knowing from Miss Fernwood’s 8th grade English class that a page of writing with an uneven right margin means a series of jokes with no punch lines, a puzzle with no right answers.”

But, like the majority of the poetry I read, Richard Blanco’s “One Today” is not a difficult, inscrutable poem. It is beautiful, heartfelt, and easy to understand. It’s very much a “public poem.” If you missed it, read it, or listen to it: it’s about unity. (There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?)

As Blanco himself said in an interview with Joe Coscarelli for NY Magazine, “I pride myself on creating work that’s accessible….Honestly, I think the poem was even more straight-forward than I typically write.

That’s why I found the knee-jerk I-just-don’t-get-it response particularly annoying. (Even my poetry-baffled husband’s reaction was positive: “I like it. I get it, and I like it.”) And no reaction was more irritating than Eric Cantor’s carefully composed confused expression (and occasional actual lip-curling sneer) throughout the reading.

I don’t believe Cantor actually listened to a word of the poem, because if he did listen to it, and he really didn’t get it, then we should be seriously rethinking how we assess the intelligence of the people we entrust to run the country. No, instead, I think he had spent the previous evening practicing in a mirror to perfect his “what is this shit, anyway?” expression.

Blanco himself was more charitable. Asked about Cantor’s obvious disdain, he said, “Maybe he was just in deep contemplation and overwhelmed with emotion.”

Or maybe Cantor has just never gotten over eighth grade English class.

Amy and Richard Blanco

 

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One more resolution for the new year

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We’re already two weeks into 2015, but I’ve just thought up another New Year’s resolution, so I’m going to make it now.

It’s a simple one, just four words: turn envy into inspiration.

This morning, my writer friend Claire emailed the members of our writing group to announce that she had just launched her new website and blog. In her first blog entry, she wrote about surviving two data-devouring computer crashes, replacing her computer, and—most impressive of all—planning and carrying out a week-long personal writing retreat.

Her partner, Deborah, a nurse, was off to Guatemala to spend the week working in a clinic, so Claire holed up in their rustic, off-the-grid cabin, disconnected herself from the outside world, hauled water from the well and wood for the fire…and set up a website, created a blog, started an application for a writing residency, and added thirty-two pages to her novel-in-progress.

I subscribed to her blog and responded to her email right away to let her know how impressed I was by all she had done, and how inspired I was by her successful home writing retreat.

Except that as I typed my email, “inspired” wasn’t the first word that came to mind.

“I’m so envious of your home writing retreat!” I wrote.

“Envious” seemed like the most natural word to use. After all, my first reaction, when I read about Claire’s full week of solitude, was envy. A whole week at home alone to write? Heck, yes, I was envious.

But I started to think about what that word—envy—really means. To me, at least, it has quite negative connotations. In fact, it reflects badly on both the envier and the envied.

The one who envies is saying, in a way, “Poor me, that’s something that I can’t do/have/gain.”

Even worse, there’s a suggestion, implicit in the word, that the person being envied doesn’t deserve what they’ve done/gotten/gained, or, at the very least, there’s no credit given for the effort they’ve put into the achievement. (It’s kind of like telling a marathon winner, “You’re so lucky.”)

That certainly wasn’t the message I meant to send to Claire, who had an idea for a writing retreat, planned how to make it happen, set definite goals for herself, and then took full advantage of the time to accomplish them.

So I changed my words to, “I’m so inspired by your home writing retreat!”

Because if I say, instead, that I’m inspired by what Claire has done, what I’m saying—what I hope I’m conveying, anyway—is, “Thank you for showing me that it’s possible to set goals and achieve them.”

Merriam-Webster defines envy as “painful or resentful awareness of an advantage enjoyed by another joined with a desire to possess the same advantage.”

Being “envious” takes the responsibility off of me and allows me to feel sorry for myself. It takes me back to elementary school, when maybe I was envious that Susie’s father was rich and bought her a pony, while all I got was a goldfish. (Actually, I didn’t know anyone with a pony. Or anyone named Susie, for that matter.)

And it’s true, I wasn’t inspired by Susie’s pony. I was envious. But I was a little kid. And it was a pony. (If there had been a pony, that is.) 

“To inspire,” on the other hand, means “to fill (someone) with the urge or ability to do or feel something, especially to do something creative.”

“Inspired” says that I’m going to choose to view others’ achievements in a positive way, as an example of what I, too, can achieve, if I focus on a goal and work at it.

As I told Claire, “I realized that if I make that same word substitution every time I start to feel envy about anyone, for any reason, it will automatically turn a negative feeling into a positive. So, from here on out, I will no longer feel envy—always inspiration instead.”

Of course, I haven’t exactly done a great job so far with my other ten resolutions for 2015. I sure am envious of inspired by people who actually manage to keep their resolutions.

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Top Ten Signs You May Be an Introvert

introvert_sweaterIn honor of World Introvert Day (and because I don’t have time to write a new post today because I am–gasp!–leaving the house shortly for dinner with about a dozen people [but it’s family, and it’s at my brother’s house, so it’s very manageable for me]) I’m reposting this list of signs that you may be an introvert that I came up with a few years ago on my former blog (harrietthespysblog.blogspot.com).

The Top Ten Signs You May Be an Introvert

10.  You may be an introvert if you think organizing your stamp collection is a reasonable excuse for not going out for drinks after work.

9.  You may be an introvert if you think Henry Brooks Adams was a genius for knowing that “One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.”

8.  You may be an introvert if you’ve ever heard someone use a line like “I’m just not one for crowds” and filed it away in your memory, thinking, that’s one I can use!

7.  You may be an introvert if the statement, “I never feel lonely, except in a crowd” makes perfect sense to you.

6.  You may be an introvert if you secretly (or not so secretly) hate weddings.

5.  You may be an introvert if you can’t believe your good fortune when you get home and find no messages on the answering machine.

4.  You may be an introvert if you’ve ever had to be bribed to attend a party. (When I was about seven, I refused to attend a friend’s birthday party until my mother told me a secret: the prizes for those ridiculous games like musical chairs and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey were going to be…live dime-store turtles! Obviously, this was before the sale of baby turtles was banned due to concerns about salmonella.)

3.  You may be an introvert if, in high school, when couples were slipping into supply closets to neck, you were slipping into them just to be alone for one goddamned minute!

2.  You may be an introvert if the part of a recent party you enjoyed most was the 30 minutes you spent reading the label on the Listerine bottle in the hostess’ bathroom.

1.  And…the number one sign you may be an introvert: if you’ve ever left a gathering to get something from your car and instead found yourself driving home, leaving your purse, coat, and spouse behind.

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So long, 2014

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The last sunset of 2014, as seen from Sunny Rock.

It’s New Year’s Eve, and while I never go out to celebrate, and only rarely stay awake until midnight, I have generally positive feelings toward the whole “out with the old; in with the new” tradition.

Every December 31st is a chance to look back over the past year, remember all the best things about it, and forget all the worst things. And every January 1st is a chance to start over with a new year, a new calendar, a new opportunity to change the things that aren’t working (and keep doing things that are).

Even though I know perfectly well that most New Year’s resolutions are broken (about 92%, statistically, I believe), and even though I’ve rarely done very well at keeping them myself (or even remembering what they were past mid-January or so), I usually make a few, with great hope and optimism. (Once in a while, one sticks: I’ve been flossing my teeth—daily, without fail— for so long that I don’t even remember which year I made that resolution.)

So, in the spirit of New Year’s Eve, and in no particular order of importance, here are two lists: one of ten good things that happened in 2014, and one of ten things I hope to improve in 2015.

Good stuff about 2014:

  1. Tony and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. When we got married in 1989, after dating for only eight weeks, we knew it would last—but it’s nice to be able to prove it to all the people who were too nice to say they thought we were crazy.
  2. Will graduated from college, the last of our four kids to reach that milestone. He got a part-time job in the library at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village (to go with his other part-time job at the Auburn Public Library). We all got to know the Shakers, and, as it turns out, we kind of love them.
  3. I exercised (at least 30 minutes a day) on every single day of 2014, continuing an unbroken streak I started way back in April of 2012. As a matter of fact, tomorrow will be Day #1000 without a miss.
  4. I wrote 87 stories for the Bethel Citizen. Besides covering various events and meetings, I got to interview local luminaries like musician, sign-painter, and long-time Bethel Water District employee Donnie Katlin; retiring Maine Adult Education Executive Director Cathy Newell; and 2013 inaugural poet Richard Blanco.
  5. In June, Tony had a very successful surgery on his eye that ended a couple of frustrating years of double vision and trouble reading. Yay!
  6. I read 42 books, about ten less than in 2013, but still a fairly decent number. My 2014 reading included 25 novels, seven short story collections, six memoirs, three poetry collections, and one biography. I also read at least two poems a day from anthologies, because poetry rocks.
  7. And, because poetry rocks, I joined a weekly poetry group at the West Paris Library, led by the remarkable Rodney Abbott, retired Telstar history teacher and all-around great guy, who gives new meaning to the term “active retirement.”
  8. I got my first freelance piece published, and got paid for it! Although the appearance of my essay, “Just Like Glass” in the June issue of Down East Magazine hasn’t led to a flurry of subsequent publications, at least this means I won’t die unpublished as a freelancer.
  9. I got “out” some. Everyone who knows me well knows that I’m a homebody (or, for four months of the year, a campbody), but in 2014 I attended at least three concerts, two plays (one at Deertrees Theatre in Harrison and Elizabeth Peavey’s terrific one-woman show, “My Mother’s Clothes Are Not My Mother,” in Portland), two readings (David Sedaris and Richard Blanco), and the annual Christmas Cantata at the church across the street from my house (which, in 26 Decembers here, I’d never before managed to attend). I go regularly to Greenwood selectmen’s meetings, as well as my wonderful, supportive writing group meetings. I’m not saying it’s a trend, or that I intend to make a regular habit of it, but it turns out that getting out now and then isn’t so bad.
  10. While I didn’t finish either of my two big writing projects, I did add about 25,000 words to one of them this year, which, when considered along with various blog posts, short stories, essays, and the aforementioned 87 newspaper stories, constitutes a fair amount of writing in 2014.

Resolutions for 2015:

  1. A place for everything, and everything in its place—even if that means getting rid of half my possessions. I mean it this time. Really.
  2. Early to bed and early to rise. Take advantage of morning hours, when I know I’m at my best.
  3. More writing! Create—and stick to—a more rigid writing schedule. Take advantage of morning hours…
  4. Submit more pieces for publication, and grow a thicker skin when it comes to rejections.
  5. Continue the exercise streak, which will be three years old on April 7th. Take advantage of morning hours…
  6. Eat better. Maybe even consider baking fewer cookies. Maybe.
  7. Spend more time with my siblings. Because they’re all pretty great. And I haven’t seen one of my brothers in over a year.
  8. More reading! Stephen King says that if you don’t have time to read, you don’t have time to write. He does not say that about cleaning the house, cooking dinner, or buying groceries. Learn to see reading as valuable work, not a brief reward at the end of the day. Take advantage of morning hours…
  9. Spend less time doing dumb things on line (thus freeing up more time for #3, #5, #7, and #8).
  10. Be nice when possible. (I used to be a lot nicer than I am now, but I’m working on it.)