It was a blast, and I plan to do more of it this spring, summer, and fall. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago, I visited a book group on Monday and the local senior citizen club on Wednesday, my first two book events since November, and I’m still hearing from new readers who have just discovered Just Like Glass.

For the first year or so after it was published, it was fairly rare for anyone to ask me about my future writing projects. I think most people realized that, after spending a bit more than sixteen years, off and on (mostly off, I admit) writing my first book, I needed a bit of time to, well, just bask.

[Incidentally, if you Google the word bask, the first definition is, not surprisingly, “lie exposed to warmth and light, typically from the sun, for relaxation and pleasure” and the example given of that usage is “sprawled figures basking in the afternoon sun.” The second definition is “revel in and make the most of (something pleasing)” and the example given for that sense of the word is “he went on basking in the glory of his first book.” I am not making that up. Clearly, when you publish your first book, basking is expected.]

But recently, there’s been a change. Since sometime last fall, at each of my events, during the question-and-answer period, someone has raised a hand and asked, “Are you working on another book?” or “Tell us what you’re working on now,” or “When will your next book be out?”

It’s a compliment; I know that. Often the question comes with an ego-stroking comment like “because I can’t wait to read it” or “I want to make sure my library gets it.”

I love these eager readers of my work, and I want to give them an answer—and a new book--that will keep them from forgetting about me. I don’t want to be a one-hit wonder, after all.

And the truth is, I am working on another book…sort of. It’s a novel—working title: Banned Books—that I started writing about two years after I first began my research for Just Like Glass. I actually wrote 50,000 words in thirty days—my own personal National Novel Writing Month, although I did mine in February (plus the last two days of January) instead of November.

That was February of…2010. Sixteen years ago. According to the timeline I established in writing Just Like Glass, I guess that means it’s about time for that book to be done.

It’s not.

For a while, I went back and forth between the two projects, working on whichever one grabbed my attention. Even though I sometimes went years without opening the document on my computer, each time I did, I would think, hey, this has potential! Over time, I added another 22,000 words to Banned Books, and I can sort of see the end in sight.

Eventually, though, I started to feel strongly that Just Like Glass was the book I needed to finish before I could concentrate on writing anything else, and about two years ago I got serious about it and got it done.

Then I basked. And basked some more. And “went on basking in the glory of my first book.”

Even before people started asking about my next project, I had made up my mind that a year was a good length of time to spend basking, and that when November of 2025 rolled around, and Just Like Glass turned one year old, I would buckle down and rededicate myself to the novel.

You know how people are always saying they were going to do such-and-such, but then “life got in the way”? Well, life got in the way.

I had my second knee replacement surgery in October, and, two weeks later, my husband had a biopsy. In the five months since, he has had 35 medical appointments, and I’ve gone with him to all but two or three of them.

I have acquired an almost encyclopedic knowledge of medical abbreviations, from MRIs, PETs, and CT scans to ADT/ARPI therapy. I can pronounce things like Abiraterone, Darolutamide, and Lisinopril, and tell you what they do.

My role as Captain of the Cancer Ship is probably my most valid excuse for not making any progress whatsoever with the novel, but there are others:

I have a ridiculous compulsion to exercise every single damn day, cook and bake from scratch, and make at least some effort to keep up with current events. I have dozens of unanswered emails, three knitting projects in progress, and a long list of unfinished projects around the house. I spend way too much time playing with my phone. My part-time job takes up full-time space in my head. We’re getting a puppy.

For the past several months, I have started each day’s Wordle with the word “TIRED.”

So no, I’m sorry to say, I haven’t been working on my novel lately. But ask me again, maybe in another sixteen years.

In the old black and white photo, six girls are gathered in Donna’s living room, below a paint-by-numbers picture of a deer grazing beneath some birch trees at the edge of a lake. It’s late November, as evidenced by the pile of birthday presents Donna has been opening just before her mother posed us for the photo.

I’m in one of my growing-out-my-bangs phases, and I’m wearing some sort of bell-bottomed plaid jumpsuit that my mother made, with a zipper up the front, and I have a white turtleneck on underneath.

This was not, I assure you, the fashion, even in 1969. It may be that my mother, despairing of ever getting me into a skirt outside of school or church (where I didn’t have a choice), combined a perfectly normal jumper pattern with a homemade pattern cut from newspaper, perhaps a tracing of my older sister’s bell-bottom jeans, and conceived what she believed to be an appropriate birthday party outfit.

Most of the other girls are dressed considerably more fashionably, especially Veronica, who wears white bell-bottoms with a white blouse. From the knees up, her pants are printed with small daisies, but on the flared lower legs, the daisies grow huge, transforming into a bold and riotous print that can only be described as mod. We are all a little jealous.

Debbie’s bell-bottoms are equally enviable, with a wide border print at the bottom. It’s hard to tell from the blurry photo, but the print might possibly even feature paisleys, my favorite motif at the time. But whether or not they actually have paisleys, her pants are definitely, definitely store-bought.

We all wear saddle shoes or Mary Janes from the Buster Brown store, or lace-up canvas Keds, or, in my case, a pair of knock-off canvas sneakers, the kind you can get for a dollar at King’s, the discount department store in the Milford Plaza.

Despite my lack of stylish attire, I don’t recall feeling like a misfit. In fact, I don’t remember any time during the five years I attended West Main Street Elementary School when anyone picked on me for my unfashionable clothes, barber-shop haircuts (which were, as my mother reminded me, so much cheaper than at a salon), or underdeveloped social skills.

I don’t know if this was a slumber party or not, but if it was, we would have slept downstairs in the finished basement, in sleeping bags on top of air mattresses on the cold, hard floor—white linoleum tile laid directly over the concrete. We would have played games like Truth or Dare, listened to The Monkees on 45 rpm records, and drunk orange soda and eaten M&Ms and Fritos with onion dip. We would have been awake until at least two a.m., and possibly until three or even four, and we would have been groggy and cranky when Donna’s mother woke us around ten to tell us that the first of our mothers had arrived to take us home.

Six months after this photo is taken, my mother will decide to sell my beloved childhood home, just two doors down from Donna’s, in a neighborhood so quiet and safe that we could ride our bikes, or play hopscotch and kickball in the street, without our parents giving much thought to what we were doing. We will move to a much smaller house on a much busier road, only two miles away, but it might as well be two hundred. I will attend a different school, where I will know no one, and life as I have always known it will change dramatically, but I don’t know that yet.

It’s Donna’s eleventh birthday, and, except for me, she is the last in the group to turn eleven. I’m the youngest kid in the sixth grade, due to a series of events that began five years ago, when I was caught reading a third-grade-level book aloud to a circle of kindergarten classmates and suddenly found myself, as a somewhat bewildered five-year-old, in first grade.

I will be ten years old for another three months. I will be barely seventeen when I graduate from high school. Eventually, my youth and immaturity will overwhelm my academic aptitude, and my innate but manageable shyness will blossom into full-blown adolescent self-consciousness that will somehow last until I’m about forty. I’ll never again make friends as effortlessly as I did in elementary school. Among the many bad decisions that lie ahead of me, I’ll drop out of college not once, but three times, and it will take me thirty-one years to finally finish the degree I’ll start in 1976.

But on this day in November of 1969, I’m just one of a gang of happy friends, closer to the world of mud pies, hopscotch, and Easy-Bake ovens than that of make-up, gossip, and mean girls. I don’t even know yet that life can be anything but simple, and ignorance really is bliss.

We had to say goodbye—unexpectedly—to my beloved granddog, Eli.

As they say, f*** cancer—the cancer none of us even knew he had until a vet visit yesterday morning.

Eli was a Golden retriever, an irrepressible ball of fur who joined our household on July 12, 2017, seven months after we lost our black Lab, Remy—a loss that affected me so deeply that I thought I’d never again let another dog steal my heart. (I was wrong.)

Eli was special in a thousand ways, but one of the most obvious was that he had no tail. None at all, not even a stubby one. I was always quick to tell people that he had been born that way—it hadn’t been slammed in a door, or, worse, intentionally docked—and that Will had gotten him for half-price because of it. We already had a five-year-old bobtail cat, Roman, so we figured Eli was meant to be ours.

Will was still living at home with us for the first year that he was Eli’s person. Tony and I both let that crazy puppy charge right into our hearts, too, but he was Will’s best friend and constant companion, accompanying him to work from the very beginning. It’s probably remarkable that, in nearly nine years of spending his days hanging out in the archives of a historical society, he destroyed only one historical document, and it wasn’t a really old or irreplaceable one…honest. (Also, Will saved the pieces and was able to tape them back together.)

Eli was very highly food-motivated, a fact that probably meant he could have been fairly easily trained to do some practical tricks, like his predecessor, Remy, who knew commands like “shut the door” and “go back” (which meant he should scoot backwards on his butt, a trick Tony taught him to keep him from crowding the door when we were trying to open it). More to the point, he probably could have been trained not to do some less desirable Eli tricks, like helping himself to whatever food was on the counter or table (or in our hands) at the slightest lapse of vigilance on our part.

It didn’t seem to matter if the food he stole was something he probably wouldn’t have even chosen to eat if we had put it in his own dish—if it was something his humans thought was tasty, he was happy to give it a try. As my daughter Annie recalled, “My favorite Eli story was when he ate an entire bowl of refried beans and then looked at us like, WTF did I just eat?”

Then there was the time he wolfed down, in about two seconds, most of a cooling rack full of oatmeal-raisin cookies and had to be rushed to Lewiston to the emergency vet because, as it turns out, raisins are toxic to dogs.

Just a few weeks ago, when Eli was visiting us for an extended period while Will and Rosemary’s apartment got put back together after a plumbing disaster, Tony and I were having leftover pizza for lunch, and, as I texted Donna, “Eli made a sudden lunge and got my second piece, and when I jumped up to try to grab it back (and yes, I would have eaten it if I could have gotten it back before he chomped it up), I knocked the remaining half of my first piece off my plate and he grabbed that, too.”

And I’ll never forget the time he ate half an apple pie (along with the plastic bag it was in).

Eli’s enthusiasm for food was matched only by his enthusiasm for fun. We learned early on that “a tired dog is a good dog,” and that strenuous daily exercise was the only way to wear him out, which meant that his people got strenuous daily exercise, too.

He was my most eager, energetic, and spirited hiking partner. I couldn’t begin to tell you the number of hikes he took with me, but I’m guessing it was in the hundreds. Sometimes we were with Will, or Tony, or both of them, and sometimes with other friends or family members, but very often it was just the two of us.

Although he racked up many longer, more challenging hikes with Will, Eli’s hikes with me were short, most ranging from two to five miles, and we would go along at our own pace, stopping as often as we wanted to sniff as many smells (him) and take as many photos (me) as we wanted. And, of course, from nearly every hike there would be at least one mountaintop selfie.

All of this hiking and photo-taking, and my tendency to overshare on social media, coupled with the fact that I wrote the weekly Locke’s Mills column in the Bethel paper (and now online) throughout Eli’s entire life, made him something of a local celebrity. Many times I would meet other hikers who would exclaim, “Hey, I know this dog! This is the famous Eli!”

After Will, Rosemary, and I said our heartbroken goodbyes at the vet yesterday morning, Will went home and made the poignant social media post that let Eli’s many friends and admirers know what had happened.

Reactions came thick and fast.

“Such a wonderful dog. Eli loved everyone and everyone loved him.”

“He was such a character and wonderful companion, and he had the perfect family in all of you.”

“I loved watching all of his hiking adventures with your mom. You could tell he was the best.”

“You and your parents gave him such a wonderful life. I will really miss the Eli the Wonder Pup pics and stories.”

“I’m so sorry to read about Eli—the best hiking partner in Maine—and his premature exit from the trail. May he find you often in memories of streams, and snow-crusted mountaintops, and warm furballs by the fire.”

Over and over, I heard what Eli had meant to so many people. And I heard what I knew in my heart to be true—that, while his life may have been too short, it was a wonderful life, and we were his perfect family—and it comforted me. Thank you all for loving him, too.

The last thing I felt like doing yesterday afternoon was going for a hike. It’s hard to think about bundling up and hitting the trail alone when your heart is broken. But I knew that both my heart and my head needed it; there was just so long that I could sit around the house crying and reading condolence messages on my phone.

So in the late afternoon I headed to Buck’s Ledge, a place where, for as long as I can remember, I have gone to find peace, comfort, inspiration, and hope…and now, the spirit of a crazy puppy who, in his short life, taught me so many important things, among them:

Always be ready for a new adventure.

Take time to stop and smell the roses—or sample the blackberries—along the way.

On a hot summer hike, never pass up an opportunity for a cooling dip.

There is no bad hiking weather…

…and a little mud never hurt anyone.

The best hikes always end with ice cream.

And always, always, always—if you love someone, let them know.

Eli the Wonder Pup—Gramma’s good, good boy—I hope you always, always, always knew how much you were loved.

My own love of reading started early, too. One of my writing group’s recent prompts was to “tell about your most special Christmas gift, and what made it special,” and while I’m not sure the gift I described receiving nearly sixty years ago was my most special one ever, in a way it really was my “key to the treasure.”

It’s Christmas morning, 1966, and still very early. I am seven years old and I can’t get back to sleep. I wonder if my sister is awake in her bedroom on the other side of the bathroom, or my brothers, bundled under piles of blankets in their big, cold room down the hall.

Maybe it’s almost time for us all to get up and go downstairs to see if Santa came. If he did, the stockings we hung beside the fireplace last night before bed will be bulging with small, interestingly-shaped packages, with a candy cane at the top and an orange in the toe.

We always bring our stockings to the big table in the dining room to open while we eat breakfast, carefully averting our eyes from the presents under the tree as we carry them past it, saving our first glimpse of those for after we’ve eaten and the dishes have been cleared away.

Because she knows it’s hard to wait, my mother will have set the table the night before. She will have sliced the grapefruit into halves, loosened the sections with a special curved knife, and topped each half with a bright red cherry before placing them on a tray and sliding it into the refrigerator, ready to be set at each of our places as soon as we come downstairs.

The rectangle of sky I can see through the high dormer window above my bed is still black, but at this time of year, on school days, I have to get up in the dark to get ready, so maybe it’s almost 7:00 already. I feel for the flashlight on my nightstand and aim the beam at the clock on the wall across my tiny bedroom.

Darn, it’s not even 4:00 yet, hours before sunrise and too early for even my early-rising family to appreciate being awakened. I flop back onto my pillow and fix my gaze on the window, wondering how I’ll ever be able to wait until the sky lightens to gray.

After a few minutes, I get up to use the bathroom, slipping through the low, hobbit-sized door that leads to it from my bedroom, the one I call my secret door. The other way in and out of my room is through my mother’s bedroom, and I don’t want to wake her up, because I’ve just had an idea.

I leave the bathroom by way of the regular, human-sized door and creep down the dark staircase as quietly as I can, wishing I had brought my flashlight. When I push open the door at the bottom, there’s just enough light from the streetlights coming through the dining room windows to keep me from bumping into the table as I pass through to the living room.

In the wide doorway between the rooms, I stop short. The lights on the Christmas tree in front of the big picture window are on, bathing the room in soft color, and by their light I can see that the stockings hanging from the mantle are filled to overflowing, and the floor around the tree is piled high with packages.

Knowing I could get in trouble—I’m not even supposed to see them yet, let alone go through the pile, looking at all the tags—I nevertheless abandon caution and start digging. I’m thrilled to see my own name on so many of them, although, as the youngest in the family by nearly a decade—the only child, really, in a family of adults—I’ve almost come to expect that this is how it will be.

I give each package a gentle shake and try to guess what’s inside. One box that gives an intriguing rattle might be a game with lots of small pieces, or a kit to make some kind of craft. Another is the right size and shape for a jigsaw puzzle, and the muted sound it makes when I shake it could definitely be from the cardboard pieces sliding around in the box.

I’m tempted to loosen the Scotch tape on every one of them, just enough to expose a corner of the box, but I don’t let myself go that far. If I were caught doing that, I really would be in trouble, and, besides, none of these packages is what I’m looking for just now.

I unearth two or three wrapped boxes that are almost certainly clothes, then bury them again in the pile, hoping I’m wrong, or that, at least, they’re not underwear and socks. Then, under another probably-clothes gift addressed to my sister (who actually thinks new clothes are somewhat exciting, especially if they’re store-bought instead of homemade), I find a flat package, too slender to be a box, and slightly heavy for its size.

It can’t be anything but a book, exactly what I’ve been searching for, and this time I do loosen the tape, very cautiously, and only the piece that holds the flap of wrapping paper, folded to a point, in place at one end, being careful not to tear it. I peek in, just to be sure, and see the edges of the pages and a yellow cover.

I carry the book, still wrapped, to the couch, where I sit down and slide it ever so carefully out of the paper and onto the coffee table so I can read the title. Key to the Treasure. Tucking my bare feet up under my nightgown, I open the book and, by the red and green and yellow and blue lights of the Christmas tree, begin to read.

I only intend to read a chapter or two, just long enough to get sleepy; then I’ll slip back upstairs and crawl into bed, and no one will ever know. But the book turns out to be a mystery, the first one I’ve ever read, and I find myself turning page after page as I wait for my eyelids to grow heavy. It’s beginning to grow light outside the windows when I finish the last chapter and close the book. I slide it back into the paper, press down on the tape to securely reseal it, and push it deep into the pile under the tree.

As I tiptoe back up the stairs, I can hear my mother moving around in her room. Holding my breath, I slip into the bathroom, then through my secret door, and dive under the covers of my bed, just as the door that connects our rooms opens.

“Merry Christmas!” my mother says.

I open my eyes, stretch, and give what I hope is a convincing yawn. “Is it time to get up already? Do you think Santa Claus came?”

Low down leavin’ sun / Done did everything that needs done / Woe is me, why can’t I see / I’d best be leavin’ well enough alone?

The music is coming through the wall from the apartment we rent out in the front half of our house, and the voice is unmistakably that of Waylon Jennings. The song is “Honky Tonk Heroes,” from his album by the same name, released in 1973, when I was fourteen years old.

I never bought that album. But I did buy “Lonesome, On’ry and Mean,” released the same year, and “The Ramblin’ Man,” which came out a year later. It was a short walk downtown from my high school in Milford, Connecticut, to Fladd’s Music Store, where I bought albums—vinyl, of course—by the likes of Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, and Kris Kristofferson.

Kris was my hands-down favorite, and I’d been madly in love with him ever since my brother Andy had given me his first album for my thirteenth birthday. It may have been a one-sided love affair, but that didn’t make it any less intense. And it would last for the rest of his life, more than fifty years.

There were over a thousand kids at Milford High, and if I had to guess, I’d say that, out of all of them, I might well have been the only one who listened to country music. In general, suburban teenagers of the 1970s were heavy consumers of disco and pop music, which were in their heyday. You could buy a 45 rpm single for around a buck, or you could hang out at the local pizza joint and play your favorite pop songs on the jukebox, three plays for a quarter.

Albums, on the other hand, cost real money, seven or eight dollars, but buying them was the only way to listen to the songs I wanted to hear—not just the country hits I could hear on the radio, but the lesser-known work of the artists I loved. It took a lot of seventy-five-cent-an-hour babysitting jobs to be able to buy a new album, but the hours I spent sitting on the floor of my bedroom, hunched over the liner notes and lyrics, memorizing every word, made it all worthwhile.

When I did listen to the radio, it was to the local AM radio station, WFIF, which played country music almost exclusively. I created my own scratchy mix tapes of my favorite songs by calling in a request, waiting for what seemed like forever for it to be played, and recording it with my cassette tape recorder.

(On Saturday mornings, though, when WFIF played three hours of polka music, I tuned in to WTIC, from Hartford, instead. I didn’t mind being considered eccentric for my taste in music, but even I had my limits.)

My friend Maria, who for a few years wore all black and listened to bands like T.Rex, Alice Cooper, and Pink Floyd, was nevertheless willing to indulge my quirky musical preferences. Her mom was a country music fan, and she took us to a couple of concerts by little-known country bands who came to Bridgeport.

No one anyone had ever actually heard of came to Bridgeport, but we had fun, and, undeterred by our own complete lack of musical talent or education, we were, briefly, inspired to form a country duo. I had a harmonica and what was known as a Jew’s harp (a term that I hope is not now considered offensive), both purchased at Fladd’s Music Store, neither of which I knew how to play, and Maria had a razor-sharp wit and what seemed to me a remarkable talent for songwriting. The Country Hicks rehearsed in my bedroom and recorded our songs with the same cassette tape recorder with which I created my mix tapes. Fortunately, no evidence survives.

For my sixteenth birthday, my brother Greg took Maria and me to see Johnny Cash at the Hartford Civic Center, my first “big” country concert, and the last one I’d attend for about 30 years. June Carter Cash was part of the show, too, along with their then five-year-old son, John; I can still remember them all singing “Look at Them Beans” together on the stage.

During the 1980s and ’90s, when I was kept busy mostly with working, getting married, divorced, remarried, and raising kids, I didn’t go to concerts, or even buy new music. At some point, probably in college, I had recorded all of my favorite 1970s albums onto cassette tapes, which I continued to listen to in the car, and occasionally on a Sony Walkman borrowed from one of my kids.

I somehow managed to completely miss the fact that four of my biggest country heroes had formed a supergroup in 1985 and performed together for ten years as The Highwaymen. By the time I noticed, thanks to the country music videos I discovered on TV around 2005, back when we still had cable, Johnny and Waylon were already gone.

I was running a little bakery at the time and playing music pretty much all day for the first time in a long time. I bought The Highwaymen’s albums on CD, and put them into heavy rotation, along with solo albums by Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and Waylon Jennings, and just about every album Kris Kristofferson had ever made, prompting one of my daughters, who preferred modern country music, to observe, “Mom only listens to old guys and dead guys.”

I was too late for Waylon Jennings; I never got to see him in concert, but I’m so glad to learn that, more than two decades after his death, he’s still being listened to—and, apparently, he has fans, like my tenant, who are too young to even remember him when he walked the earth.

About three decades after I’d seen Johnny Cash, I went with Tony and Will to see Willie Nelson in concert at the Augusta Civic Center—a big, glitzy, sold-out show with an audience that featured more red bandanas and long braids than I’d ever seen in one place before.

And Kris Kristofferson…I saw Kris in concert five times, and if it could have been fifty, it wouldn’t have been enough. I have a rule about not leaving Oxford County, and certainly not the state of Maine, without a damn good reason, but once, when my daughter Annie was working for an airline, Tony and I flew—standby!—to Salt Lake City and drove from the airport to Park City in a snowstorm, arriving just in time to catch the last half of his concert there…which should tell you something about the depth of my devotion.

I don’t listen to music of any kind much anymore. Nowadays, it’s usually NPR, an audiobook, or, more often than not, welcome silence. Sometimes I tune in to the Maine Public classical music stream, but usually only when I want something akin to white noise in the background.

But tonight, when I hear Waylon Jennings’ voice coming through the apartment wall, it tugs hard on something I thought was lost to memory. Suddenly I’m sixteen, sitting on my bedroom floor, studying the lyrics as I listen, and, somehow, I remember them all.

Piano roll blues, danced holes in my shoes / There weren’t another other way to be / For lovable losers and no account boozers / And honky tonk heroes like me.

It’s October 26^th, but it feels like late November as I make my way slowly down the 20 steps from the road to the door of the camp. Or maybe I’ve just been spoiled, because most of October has felt more like early September.

Just a week ago, Donna and I sat on the deck in 60-degree sunshine, my first time back at camp since my second knee replacement. When I was here on October 6^th, two days before the surgery, the temperature was in the 70s and I swam for an hour, covering a mile in what I knew would be my last swim of 2025.

Today, it’s 43 degrees outside, and, when I check the indoor thermometer, I see that it’s also exactly 43 degrees inside. And why wouldn’t it be? One thin pane of glass in the windows and one layer of three-quarter-inch pine boards in the walls are all that separate outside from in, and with the shades drawn for the season, there has been no sunlight to warm the indoor air in the several weeks since we closed up and moved home.

A week ago, just getting in and out of Donna’s car and down the steps to camp felt like something of an accomplishment. Since then, I’ve started driving again—yes, even my standard transmission Subaru—and I’m slowly building up my walking distance. Today, I’m planning to walk a mile and a half on the relatively flat and nearly deserted camp road.

But first, I’ve come down the steps and through the camp to the deck to take a look at the lake and, while I’m here, to put away those last two deck chairs, the grill, the pot containing the now-dead basil, the hammock. Until now, I’ve left these few things in their summer places, just in case. But today the chill in the air lets me know: we won’t need any of them again until May. Even though my head knows those seven months will fly by faster than I want them to, the finality of the act, as always, bruises my heart just a little.

I grab my hiking poles from the car and begin my walk. Three camps further down the road, my neighbor Dan is finishing up his own closing chores, and we talk for a few minutes about the bittersweet feeling it gives us to put our camps to bed for the season, and the chilly weather that makes it, at least, easier to admit that it’s time.

Then Dan tells me that he and Mary have missed hearing Peggy’s laughter from the porch of her camp, two doors down, these past three summers, and I swallow hard and nod, because so often I still can’t trust myself to speak about her without tears.

When I pass Peggy’s camp, I think about the conversation Donna and I had a week ago, as we sat on the deck. Not for the first time, we wondered aloud what changes might be in store for us before we return to open the camp next May.

When I was much younger, if it had occurred to me to think about such things at all, it might have been to wonder if I’d have a different job by next spring, or a new car, or if I’d have lost 20 pounds and would feel better about putting on a bathing suit.

Now, I wonder who I might be missing.

When Peggy closed her camp at the end of the summer three years ago, I don’t think any of us—except, I realize now, Peggy herself—imagined that she wouldn’t be returning the following year. Not, anyway, in her physical form—to paddle her canoe past our camp as the morning mist burned away. To sit in the sun, reading on the dock throughout the afternoon hours. To take such joy in being there with her family that, on a quiet summer evening on the porch, her laughter would ring out across the still water.

When my mother left camp for the season for the last time, 22 years ago, I believed she would have more summers, summers when I wouldn’t be quite so busy, when I would find more opportunities to spend an afternoon, or a weekend, or a week there with her.

I always thought there would be more time.

Now that we are older, when we talk about what may have changed in our lives by next year, Donna and I both know exactly what we mean.

Her parents are 90 and 92; her partner is 84.

My siblings are between ten and 15 years older than I am.

And my husband, at 78, is waiting to have the scary-sounding results of last week’s biopsy explained to him by his doctor.

No matter what changes are coming, and when, I know that when they happen, I’ll still be thinking the same thing: I always thought there would be more time.

When I come down the steep stairs to the kitchen, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, my place at the round wooden table is already set, with a bowl of cold cereal in the center of the plastic placemat, which is in the shape of a colorful map of the United States. At the top left of the placemat, covering Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, is a small plate for a slice of cinnamon toast, at the top right, centered on the state of Maine, a four-ounce glass of orange juice.

A cheese spread made with pimentos originally came in these tiny glasses, with a pry-off lid, and my mother has collected at least two dozen of them over the years—even though we never have two dozen people in our house, all wanting orange juice at once. But the little glasses, like the larger tumblers that come inside boxes of some brands of laundry detergent, were free, and Mom couldn’t pass up a deal like that. Besides, we all loved the pimento cheese.

There is a paper napkin, folded into a rectangle, to the left of my cereal bowl, and my favorite spoon, with Mary Poppins and her umbrella on the handle, to the right. The space at the top of the placemat, where Canada lies, is reserved for something special. I take my seat just as my mother places my cinnamon toast, fresh from the toaster, on its plate. I open my napkin, put it in my lap, and look up at her expectantly.

“Here you go,” she says, adding, as she always does, “be careful not to spill.”

With that, she carefully sets the pitcher—my pitcher, the one no one else but me ever uses—on top of Canada, with the handle facing to the right so I can pick it up easily with my right hand, my pouring hand. Unlike my older sister, who has learned to do many things well with either hand, because the world hasn’t yet changed quite enough to easily accommodate her left-handedness, I am solidly right-handed, and my left hand is clumsy. If I had to pour my milk with it, I’d almost surely spill.

My pitcher is in the shape of a bird, blue and yellow, with a red wing; its tail is the handle and its beak is the spout. It holds just enough milk to pour onto a child-sized serving of cereal, and I am very proud that it is all mine, and to be trusted to pour from it all by myself.

In general, my mother doesn’t believe in sugared cereal for breakfast, although once in a while she relents, and buys the variety pack of miniature boxes, the kind you can cut open with a knife along perforated lines, then fold back the flaps and pour the milk right into the waxed paper-lined box. So I know all about Frosted Flakes and Tony the Tiger, Froot Loops and Toucan Sam.

I do like all the unsweetened cereals she buys for us, though. Each kind reacts differently when I pour the milk onto it from my bird pitcher. If I have Grape Nuts in my bowl, I pour the milk and then wait a couple of minutes, eating my toast first, to give the hard little nuggets time to soften up a little. If it’s Puffed Wheat, with the picture of a Quaker man on the box, it floats on top of the milk, sometimes rising right up until it spills over the rim of my bowl. But my favorite is Rice Krispies, because when you add milk, they go “snap, crackle, pop!” I put my ear down close to the bowl to hear them talking to me.

More than sixty years later, the little bird pitcher is still one of my most cherished possessions. As a child I always thought it must be one of a kind, that I had the only one in the world, but a quick Google search reveals that it is a fairly common vintage piece of lusterware, made in Japan and readily available on eBay for under $15. It was originally sold as a creamer, part of a set that also included a similar sugar bowl.

My older brothers say they don’t remember having the bird pitcher as kids, although Greg adds that he has a vague memory of a chicken creamer used by them the same way. “Probably one of us broke it before you came along,” he says.

My sister remembers using it to pour syrup, “but it may not have been around when we older siblings were little. Mom may have picked it up at a yard sale for you to learn to pour.” Also, she calls it a “duck pitcher.” I’ve always thought it was a bluebird, but now that I look at it more closely, she may be right.

With no more rambunctious little boys in the house, my mother kept my bluebird (or duck?) pitcher safe for the rest of her life, and when she died, it was passed down for me to keep. It now sits on a high shelf in my kitchen, safe from counter-surfing cats and bungling husbands, a tiny treasure from my distant past.

The move that came to mind first was the most traumatic one of my life, when I moved across town—and into a new school district—right before the start of junior high…but I remembered that I had already blogged about that, years ago. If you missed it, you can read “Junior high, mean girls, and Campbell’s soup” here: https://www.amywchapman.com/p/junior-high-mean-girls-and-campbells-soup

So here’s what I wrote instead:

On one hand, I haven’t moved into a new home since 1989. That’s the year Tony and I got married, and the year I moved into the house in Locke’s Mills he had bought a few years earlier. That move was only a distance of about eight miles—no moving van required, just lots of loads in the trunk and back seat of my car and a few in Tony’s Bronco, including a couple of trips towing a small utility trailer.

On the other hand, I move each and every year—not once but twice, in May and again in September. That move, back and forth to camp, is only a distance of three miles, and while I may not have to move tables and chairs and beds and bookcases, I do bring a lot with me. Clothes. Books. Food. Cats.

Like most people I know, I have a lot of stuff, and, also like most people I know, most of it is stuff I don’t need. I have a detailed and recurring fantasy that involves being told that, for whatever reason, I must relocate to Australia, and I have one month to pack everything I really, really need for the foreseeable future and jettison the rest.

Then (because this is my fantasy, and I have no actual desire to move to Australia) at the end of the month, after I’ve pared down my possessions by about 90 percent, someone says, “Just kidding—you get to stay right here, in the place you love, but look how much more organized and spacious it is!”

When I moved to Locke’s Mills 36 years ago, I brought with me—literally—everything I owned, as well as two little kids and everything they owned. If you know our story, you know that Tony and I started dating in late June that year and got married in mid-August, making us, quite suddenly, a busy blended family of five with no time to sort, purge, and organize our respective possessions.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, my new home had a full basement and a big barn, which became repositories for extra furniture—we didn’t need two couches or eight end tables or 16 chairs—as well as unmarked boxes of hastily-packed miscellany that I would occasionally have to rifle through when one of the kids remembered that they had once owned a Magic 8-Ball or a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper or a Muppet Babies video and they needed it right now.

During that crazy summer and fall of 1989, and for quite a while afterward, I lived in the midst of our two households’ worth of possessions without paying much attention to the excess. I remember vaguely that every flat surface in the house was always stacked with clothes, toys, books, and laundry, and that jumbled piles accumulated in the corners of every room, but mostly what I remember from those days was being madly in love, focused on the “his, mine, and ours” family Tony and I were creating, and overjoyed about the new baby we would be welcoming the following summer. The challenge we would face to find room for a crib, highchair, changing table, and stacks and stacks of diapers didn’t really cross my mind, and of course we made it work, mostly by shifting some piles around.

Over the next 20 years or so, I focused more on organizing the stuff we had than on trying to pare it down. Certain that lack of storage was the problem, I installed Shaker peg racks in every room and built no fewer than a dozen sets of shelves—bookcases, pantry shelves, toy shelves, closet shelves.

I made valiant attempts to implement new systems: color-coded bins for backpacks, hats, and mittens; wall-mounted pocket file organizers for homework, magazines, and newspapers; mesh hammocks for stuffed animals; over-the-door hanging racks for shoes. Nothing worked for more than a few weeks, but I kept trying.

Meanwhile, new stuff continued to come into the house. When my mother died, we made room for a few pieces of her furniture and some sentimental items, and stored others in the attic space we had made when we added a room in the ’90s. When a friend undertook a years-long renovation of his old farmhouse and stopped by to offer us a cast-off window, sink, or kitchen cupboard, we rarely said no, and our basement and barn filled with potential materials for our own future remodeling projects.

By the time I turned 50, Tony and I found ourselves with just one semi-adult child still at home. Without a house full of kids to blame for the piles of stuff, I had to face that fact that we were both afflicted with lifelong pack rat tendencies, the result being that what should have been a much emptier nest was still bulging with way too many possessions.

It was about that time that I really started to feel overwhelmed and oppressed by Too Much Stuff, and my fantasy about moving to Australia—well, not actually moving to Australia, but preparing as if I were going—began to take shape. That was also when I realized that our May and September moves back and forth to camp provide a twice-yearly opportunity to take a hard look at my possessions. If I can get along without something for four months, do I really even need it? If I didn’t wear something at all last summer, will I wear it this summer? If I brought that stack of books to camp, and now I’m packing them up, still unread, should I bring them back home, or should they go directly to my town’s new “tiny free library”?

I’ve always viewed New Year’s Day—a time of new beginnings—and my birthday—which occurs at about the time that the spring cleaning urge usually hits—as good times to embark on major decluttering projects. With the addition of two more, I now have four times each year when I resolve to go through the whole house and sort, purge, and organize everything. The older I get, the more conscious I am of what an onerous task my kids will one day have if I don’t get a handle on our excess stuff.

I haven’t perfected my system. There are some years when I’m so excited to get to camp that I almost entirely skip the May sort-and-purge, throw everything I think I might need into reusable grocery bags, and just go. There are some years when my annual September melancholy is so overwhelming that I can’t summon up the energy to sort out the summer clothes I haven’t worn and the books I haven’t read and find new homes for them. And I still fight an urge to view the camp as a convenient waystation for items I haven’t quite decided are expendable, something I learned from my mother, as I watched her pack the car with things that should have been tossed out, and heard her declare them “good enough for camp.”

But now, in my mid-sixties, I’m all about giving myself grace, and celebrating the small improvements. Maybe I can’t go through all of my bookcases and sort all of my clothes this fall, but if I can donate two books instead of bringing them home from camp and re-shelving them, and if I can go through one bin and part with a few T-shirts I haven’t worn in years, I’ll consider it a victory.

I picked blackberries today.

I’ve actually been picking a few almost every day, at least on the mornings when I walk around the lake. There are at least three different places where I can count on finding a handful, and sometimes (like when I’ve left camp without remembering to eat breakfast first) they’re the only thing that sustains me on the almost-five-mile walk.

Blackberry bushes often grow up on land that has recently been cut over, allowing the sun in. Actually, the first thing to spring up among the leftover slash from a timber harvest is usually wild raspberries. My mother was a genius at finding wild raspberry patches, and the fastest and most tireless picker. For several years there was a patch along the camp road that we considered our own, where we picked gallons of raspberries, which my mother turned into jam and pies.

After a few years, the raspberries gave way to blackberry bushes, which then gave way to poplars and striped maples and other fast-growing trees, and eventually the forest grew back. No raspberries have grown there for more than 40 years, but when I pass that spot on the road, I still think of it as the raspberry patch.

Then, as now, there were always places along the road to pick a few blackberries. On August 24, 1972, I walked about a quarter of a mile to a prolific blackberry patch across the road from the lots where two camps had been built a few years earlier. I put on long pants and a long-sleeved shirt, tied a cut-down gallon plastic milk jug around my waist, and set off.

I was thirteen. I was an odd and solitary adolescent, and going off alone to gather blackberries was just one of many odd and solitary practices I engaged in that summer. I had just survived two years of junior high hell and in less than two weeks I was headed to high school, which promised to be every bit as hellish.

I had a lot to think about, and during my last days of summer vacation I spent even more time than usual by myself. I took long, broody walks and contemplated the unfairness of my life, puttered around in various boats while trying to figure out how to get my mother to leave me in Maine when she went home to Connecticut on Labor Day weekend, and climbed up to Buck’s Ledge to lie on the moss and write bad, angsty poetry.

Anyway, on that day, 44 years ago, I came in through the back door of the camp with my bucket of blackberries and my slumped shoulders and my best adolescent sulk.

My mother was just hanging up the phone (it’s not important to the story, but I can’t help but note that it was THIS phone, one of the last hand-crank phones in the U.S.), and she turned to me and said, “You have a niece!” and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and positively beamed.

I’d been an aunt since the age of eight. I already had two nephews, and although I was pretty thrilled with them, I’d been secretly hoping for a niece, just as my mother had been secretly hoping for a granddaughter. I know she was imagining the tiny sweaters she would knit, and I think she started cutting fabric that same day to make the first of that generation’s dozens of hand-smocked dresses.

I was imagining all the things a niece and I would do together. I was imagining perfecting my junior-high home ec skills and sewing her a teddy bear, with a pinafore on which I would embroider her name—Katy with a “y.” I was imagining teaching her to bake cookies. And pick blackberries.

I was imagining a little person who would see me not as the glum and lumpy teenager I was, but as something I had never been in my life—cool. Never mind that I had never had even a prayer of being one of the Cool Kids—I would be the Cool Aunt, and that would be a million times better.

First Niece was born in Ohio, which was way too far away. But only a couple of months later, she, along with her parents, came to stay with us in Connecticut for several weeks while they found a house to buy in West Hartford, near my brother’s new job.

Throughout my high school years (which were in some ways exactly as awful as I’d feared) I spent a great deal of
time with First Niece—at our house, at their house, and, in the summers, at camp in Maine. I sewed her a teddy bear. We baked cookies. We picked blackberries.

In a million ways, she helped to make my adolescence bearable. And she thought I was cool.

She actually thought I was cool.

She’s all grown up now. She’s smart, and she loves knitting and books,
and she’s studying to be a librarian. My mom would be so, so, so proud of her.

She’s funny and compassionate and outspoken and a little quirky. I’m so, so, so proud of her.

And I like to think that it’s in some small way due to my early influence that she turned out to be so incredibly cool.

Last month, Tony got a letter. The real kind of letter that comes through the U.S. mail, handwritten on stationery, in a coordinating hand-addressed envelope with a stamp in the corner.

I knew it was there in our box even before I went to the post office. I subscribe to “USPS Informed Delivery,” and every morning I get an email telling me what I have for mail, complete with photos. Most days, it’s a bill or two and a couple of pieces of junk mail. Although it’s only 200 steps from our door to the post office (yes, I’ve counted), there are days when it’s raining or snowing or slippery, or days when I don’t leave work in time to catch the post office open, so it’s nice to know that I’m not missing much if I don’t make it there every day.

But these days, a real letter is good reason to make an extra effort, especially since I recognized both the stationery and the return address right away.

“You got a letter from Groovasaurus!” I told Tony, and I made sure to pick up the mail and bring it back to camp, where he read it, chuckling a little, and passed it over to me.

“Dear Tony,” the letter began, “Yesterday marked the 18^th anniversary of the completion of the Appalachian Trail for me!”

Just one sentence in, and I was instantly transported back 18 years, to the day in mid-June when I grabbed a few whoopie pies from the case at the little bakery I was running out of our front room and headed for Gorham, New Hampshire. There, I was to meet up with a couple of AT through-hikers I’d never met, pick up Hugo, a stray mutt that had been hiking with them ever since Virginia, and bring him home with me for the next couple of weeks.

It was 2007, and our friend Ryan, a.k.a. Guthook, was through-hiking the AT with a goal of summiting Katahdin on June 30, just in time to go home to Belfast, Maine, for a couple of days before he was due to fly to California for a summer job. I’d been following his progress through his online trail journal ever since he’d left Springer Mountain on February 24^th, and I’d promised that when he got close enough, I’d pick him up from the trail for a shower, a home-cooked meal, and a night in a real bed before dropping him off in the same place the next morning.

The day before we planned to pick Ryan up at the AT trailhead in Gorham, he called to tell me he had connected with a couple of other through-hikers, and they had a big favor to ask. Hugo, the stray who had adopted Groovasaurus and hiked 1500 miles with him, had suddenly become ill.

Groovasaurus and his human hiking partner, FedEx, got off the trail in Gorham and made an appointment with a vet, where Groov got the bad news that Hugo was suffering from Lyme disease. With painkillers and antibiotics, he would recover, but his through-hiking days were over, and it looked like Groov was going to have to leave the trail, too, falling less than 300 miles short of finishing. Was there any way that I could pick Hugo up and let him crash with us for the two weeks or so it would take them to make it to Katahdin?

So there I was, at the Gorham town common, looking for two unfamiliar scruffy hikers and their even scruffier canine companion. They weren’t hard to spot, and we exchanged quick introductions, loaded Hugo into my car, and made plans for me to pick them up, along with Ryan, at the AT trailhead the next day. Then they headed back to the trail, and I headed home to introduce Hugo to our black Lab, Remy.

As it turned out, all three of the hikers ended up spending three nights with us. We picked them up in the afternoons and dropped them off in the mornings, first at the road crossing near Gorham, then two nights later in Grafton Notch, and then on the East B Hill Road in Andover.

I'll probably never hike the Appalachian Trail myself, but listening to these boys, hearing the awe in their voices as they described the views from Mt. Washington and Old Speck, and the sincerity of their gratitude for the kindness of strangers they had encountered along the trail, gave me a taste of what it must be like—minus the blisters and the bugs.

Hugo and Remy became instant friends, and Hugo seemed happy to have a vacation from the trail. They got to spend two weeks together at camp, where Hugo recovered and the two of them had many excellent adventures (and one not so excellent one, involving a porcupine). Hugo was a sweet dog, and none of us minded that every time he got wet, we were reminded that when he adopted Groovasaurus on the trail, he had recently had a close encounter with a skunk, and that the full name his hiking companions had given him was “Hugo Smells!”

Although he was only 22 years old when we met him back in 2007, Groovasaurus was something of a philosopher, responsible and wise beyond his years. He was also, we learned, already three and a half years into his personal journey with sobriety. He and Tony connected immediately, and had some long conversations about (as Douglas Adams would say) “Life, the Universe, and Everything.”

We stayed in touch; through social media and occasional letters, we got to watch Groov grow up. He’s now married, with three beautiful kids, and head of the planning division of the city of Laramie, Wyoming. (And I’m happy to be able to say that Hugo enjoyed a long and happy life as a beloved family dog.)

Four years ago, Groov and his family took a vacation to Maine, connected up with Ryan, and, 14 years after they completed the AT, we had a wonderful reunion at our camp. (Yes, there were whoopie pies.)

Reflecting on his life in the 18 years since his through-hike in his most recent letter, Groov told Tony, “I have been able to ‘live life on life’s terms’ and have not had a drop of booze or anything else during that time period…I can confidently look back and say I’ve truly ‘lived’ through those years and have felt what needed to be felt and ‘grown’ in times where I needed to grow.”

I’ll always remember the summer of 2007 as the time when just a little bit of AT magic rubbed off on me by association. We put over 300 miles on our car, whipped up enough homemade macaroni and cheese, cinnamon rolls, burgers, salads, homegrown asparagus, pie, cookies, and whoopie pies to feed a small army, and took in a dog we'd never met for a kid we'd never met.

In return, we got three evenings of trail stories, the chance to spend time with the kind of kids who can make you forget everything you've ever heard or thought about the cynicism, laziness, and self-absorption of the younger generation…and a rewarding lifelong friendship. It was a good trade.

Today would be my father’s one hundred and thirteenth birthday. Although I never met the man who died more than eight months before I was born, I think about him often, and always on his birthday.

Back on June 22, 2007, when I mentioned in an email to my siblings that our dad would have turned ninety-five that day, my brother Greg wrote back, “Dad would be ninety-five? Holy crap, what’s that make me?”

I'm sure that in the minds of my sister and brothers, our father is frozen in middle-age, exactly as he was when he died, a week before his forty-sixth birthday, and it must have seemed strange to them as each one reached and passed that age.

Not surprisingly, not many concrete artifacts of my father’s life remain after sixty-seven years. I have only a relatively few pictures of him, and it occurred to me recently that, although I would easily recognize my mother’s handwriting anywhere, I don’t believe I’ve ever read a single word written in my father’s handwriting.

I have his gold pocketwatch, a gift to him on the occasion of his graduation from Gould Academy in 1930; in high school I added to my reputation as an eccentric by wearing it on a chain around my neck.

Here at camp there is a homemade four-foot spirit level with “W. Wight” engraved into the wood; it was handed down to my father, William, by his father, Walter, and, before that, to Walter by his father, Walton, who worked for a time as a stonemason in Boston.

There’s a formal portrait of the whole family (minus me, of course), taken when my sister, the youngest at the time, was about six, and the three boys were awkward adolescents. When I was growing up, the portrait always hung in my mother’s bedroom, where I would often go to look at it, and I confess that my own absence from the carefully posed group always rankled.

Today I am thinking about the man who, without ever knowing me, has had such a profound influence on how I’ve turned out, not just through the obvious fact of genetics (“I remember your father...he had a round face, too,” one older lady told me when I first moved to his hometown to live), but also through the ways in which he shaped the other members of my family, and the folklore about him with which I grew up.

“Everyone who ever met him loved your father,” I remember my mother saying, and it made me want everyone to love me, too. “Your father could do anything,” she said, and my mother could, too. Between them, they made me determined to build bookshelves, rewire lamps, hang my own sheetrock, paint my own house.

Today it is also forty-three years from the day my mother began writing her “retirement journal,” the journal which began, “Your seventieth 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!”

When my siblings and I discovered that journal after our mom died, I think it was the first time that any of us realized that throughout her forty-six years of widowhood—nearly three times as long as the sixteen years they had together before our father’s death—our mother had never stopped conversing with our dad.

Perhaps more than any other single thing, it was those first lines, written by my mother on my father’s seventieth birthday, that made me decide to write a book, and to tell her story in her own words, as I imagined she would have written them.

Not long after my mother’s death, my best friend, Donna, wrote to me, “I’ll never forget when Greg read out loud the first line of your mother’s journal at her funeral. It was a side of your mother I feel guilty saying I never thought about—a woman who missed her husband and thought about him always. Her dreams had gone wildly off track, yet she forged ahead and created a happy, funny family that love to be together, and other people love to be with them.”

Tonight, on my dad’s birthday, I sit on the porch of the camp my parents built together, with the help of my siblings—because to be a Wight means to be able to do anything—and I am, as always, filled with gratitude for their legacy.

Father’s Day was a non-event for me when I was growing up. I remember telling anyone who asked about my father (and it was something people asked little kids about a lot back then, especially in suburban Connecticut, where virtually every family looked the same: two parents, an older or younger sibling or two, a family dog or cat), “My father died before I was born.”

I didn’t feel deprived. I had three wonderful much-older brothers, several fine uncles, and a grandfather who, although he was rather gruff and reserved, told me stories about the Maine woods, lifted me up to pet the deer head on which he hung his hats, and taught me to play croquet in his backyard.

My friends’ fathers worked a lot, came home tired, watched TV, carved the roast on Sundays, fixed the occasional dripping faucet, grilled hamburgers, and disapproved of their daughters’ clothing choices. My mother could do all of that and more—she built shelves, repaired the lawn mower, installed a toilet, and rewired lamps. She emptied mousetraps, baited fishhooks, and cleaned white perch without flinching. She showed me the official way to keep score of the Red Sox games, and took me to Fenway Park. I almost never thought I had missed out on anything.

But for about a couple of years, when I was a teenager, I was privileged to have a wonderful, special relationship with a short, rumpled, absent-minded-professor-type with shaggy hair and a trench coat. (No, I’m not talking about the TV detective, Columbo, although I was a big fan of him, too, and some people commented on the resemblance.)

Jack Saboeiro was my sophomore biology teacher, and hands-down my favorite teacher of all time. Funny, quirky, thoughtful, and sensitive, he made science, a subject which had never held much interest for me, suddenly seem fascinating and essential. He filled every class with bits of his own unique anecdotes and world view, and taught us all much more than the life cycle of a fruit fly and how to dissect an earthworm.

As a teacher, he was fair, engaging, open-minded, philosophical, and wise. As a human being, he was kind, compassionate, respectful, and perceptive.

I called him “Sir,” like Sidney Poitier in “To Sir, with Love.” I think he liked that.

My high school had a tiny Portuguese custodian named Gemma, who appeared in the halls late every afternoon with a bucket and mop. I don’t think she spoke English, and I don’t think any of the students ever bothered to do more than nod to her. In fact, we barely noticed her. But whenever he saw her, Mr. Saboeiro, who spoke fluent Portuguese, made it a point to stop and speak with her. He may have been the only person at the school who did.

My junior year, I had chemistry with the dreaded Mrs. McCann, and I hadn’t made it more than two or three weeks into the class when I realized that I was in way over my head. Mrs. McCann was known for homework overload, challenging classes, killer tests, and a lack of patience. I was terrified of her.

Finally, after a particularly frustrating chem lab, when I was in, as my mother would have said, “a bit of a snit,” I decided to drop the class. After all, knowledge of chemistry was nothing I was ever going to need—I already knew I was going to be a liberal arts major in college. I needed one more science credit, but the physics teacher, Mrs. Nicholson, was known to be an easy A, so I figured I’d just skip science my junior year and take physics as a senior.

When I saw Mr. Saboeiro, whose classroom was across the hall from my homeroom, I mentioned that I was going to the guidance office to drop chemistry.

“No, you’re not,” he said.

“Yes, I am,” I said.

“No, you’re not,” he said.

“Yes, I am!” I said. “I don’t understand anything about it, and everyone else gets it but me. I’m going to flunk the class anyway, so I might as well drop it.”

“Don’t go to the guidance office now,” he said. “Come to my classroom after school.”

When I got to his room after school, he took my chemistry textbook, a sheet of paper, and a pencil, sat me down at a lab table, and I’ll be damned if I can remember now anything he did or said—all I know is that it was absolute teaching sorcery. It was as if I had been trying to read that chemistry book upside down in the dark, and now it was right-side up, under a bright light. In a large-print edition.

I got through chemistry. Whenever I ran up against a wall, I hauled my textbook and lab notebook into Mr. Saboeiro’s room and he set me straight. Not only did he have me convinced that I could pass the course, he believed I could get an A, and I did. In the spring, he told me I could take the chemistry Achievement Test (now they call it the SAT 2) and do well, and I did. More than that, he convinced me that the study of science, all science, was valuable and interesting and even a little bit magical.

Pretty soon I was spending nearly every afternoon in Mr. Saboeiro’s classroom. Sometimes I brought along a friend, but often it was just the two of us. We talked about chemistry, of course, but also so much more—biology, physics, environmental science, evolution, philosophy, religion, politics, the state of the world. I shared my adolescent angst with him, my brilliant analytical theories, my incredibly astute assessments of the world condition. As hackneyed and cliché as most of my ramblings must have been, he listened to all of them, and always made me feel that I had something interesting to say.

I wish I could remember the specifics of even one of our conversations, but I can’t. I only know that that year changed me for the better, in ways I’m still figuring out. It wasn’t that he taught me everything I needed to know—but more that he opened the door for me to learn everything with a whole new perspective.

If I am even a little bit wise, Mr. Saboeiro deserves much of the credit.

In 1975, after my junior year, he left Milford High and moved to Arizona, and in the decades that followed he lived and taught all over the world—in Brazil, Greece, Hong Kong, Portugal. I never saw him again, but for the next 35 years, wherever he was, we stayed in touch through cards and letters. Always a Darwin fan, he traveled to the Galapagos Islands—probably the world’s most coveted destination for a science guy—and when my daughter Annie was born he sent her a tiny Galapagos Islands t-shirt.

When Mr. Saboeiro passed away in Florida in 2011 at the age of 83, he was still teaching, substituting in every grade from kindergarten through twelfth. His obituary included this line: “His teaching career was notable for his personal involvement with his students, to whom he became a mentor as well as a teacher.”

There are certain people who born to be teachers…and fathers, mentors, philosophers, and friends. Jack Saboeiro was one.

When I’m asked why I’ve never considered living anywhere but in New England, one of the reasons I cite is that we have four seasons. I suppose people in many other parts of the country also believe that they have four seasons, but I don’t think it’s the same.

New England—specifically, northern New England—is the best place to experience the dramatic changes that occur four times each year, and the New England lexicon has evolved to include weather words that everyone here recognizes and understands.

When we hear the word “crisp” used to describe a cool fall day, we all know exactly how the air feels on our skin, how it cleanses our noses and lungs when we take a deep breath. Where else do people talk about being able to smell the coming snow, or about the “bluebird day” that often follows a winter storm? Would people in other places know what we mean when we remark on how the air suddenly feels “soft” on the first day of real springlike weather?

Each turn of the seasons brings its own kind of promise. Just as we start to tire of the heat, along comes the fall, scouring out the cobwebs, leading us to think clearly and make all sorts of ambitious plans. Fall is filled with projects and harvest celebrations and, often, a lot of social contact; by the time we’re ready for a long metaphorical rest, winter descends, right on cue, giving us permission to hunker down and make soup. Then spring—who could deny the heady promise of spring, when trees are budding, green shoots are pushing up through the recently thawed earth, and everything is new again?

For me, though, it will always be summer that holds the most magical promise. From my earliest memories of packing the car for the long trip to Maine from Connecticut, usually the day after school let out, to the excitement I still feel each year in May as I count down the days to “camp opening weekend,” summer has always brought a kind of life so different from the one I live during the rest of the year that I might as well be a different person entirely.

Whether I’ve been preparing to travel three hundred miles to get to camp, as I did for my first eighteen summers, or three miles, as I have for the last thirty-six, summer has always meant being here on North Pond, the place I call “the center of my universe.” It has meant waking up early to see what kind of day it is, hoping for blue skies and warm sun, but firmly believing that a chilly, rainy day at camp—a day to keep a fire going in the woodstove and curl up with a book—is still better than a sunny day anywhere else.

Summer at camp means thinking about projects: my parents and siblings started building the camp in 1955, but four decades later my mother was still telling visitors that “it wasn’t finished yet.” The steep, narrow stairs to the loft, she explained, were built “to get by with until we could build a real staircase” and the reason most of the windows don’t open is that they are old wooden storms, picked up cheap and fixed in place “until we could afford real windows.”

In the years after my father died, my mother completed a number of camp projects on her own, or with the help of my older siblings. Some of these, like the flush toilet she singlehandedly installed in one marathon session to replace the old outhouse, or the screened porch that was added in the sixties, are, inarguably, real improvements. I’m less sure about others, like the flimsy, dark 1970s paneling and the homasote board ceilings my mother thought gave the place “a more finished look.”

Nowadays, we do more thinking about new projects than we do actual execution of them, because another constant of summers at camp is a sense of freedom and a lessening of responsibilities. For my mother, a school librarian who raced to camp each summer after nine months of teaching, that freedom meant time to do projects. For me, working at a job that is busier in the summer than it is the rest of the year, the formula is a bit skewed. I’m more likely to tackle a project at home in the winter, and to jealously guard my time at camp—to think better of that long-planned linoleum replacement project, opting instead for a swim, a paddle, or a nap on the deck.

No matter what kind of upheaval the rest of my life has been in, no matter what kind of weather we’ve had, and no matter how I’ve chosen to spend my time at camp, every summer here has offered something unexpected, each one has been different from all of the others, and every single one has been a gift.

When, just as my mother did every morning for fifty summers, I rise early at camp and look out at the lake to see if it is steaming, or choppy, or smooth—if the surface is, as she always said, “just like glass”—I never cease to be grateful, or to marvel at the promise that each day here holds.

As I imagine my mother felt each year as she crossed the Kittery bridge on the way to camp for the summer, and as I wrote for the ending of my book, Just Like Glass—which is, really, Mom’s book:

“The camp—our camp, Bill’s camp—is waiting for us, with windows to be thrown open, blankets to air, and a winter’s accumulation of cobwebs and mouse droppings to be swept away. The summer stretches before us, shimmering and indistinct, like the highway in the sun.”

Happy Mother’s Day! (Okay, I’m a day late, but it’s because I was too busy celebrating yesterday to finish writing this.)

If my mom still walked the earth (dispensing advice, knitting mittens, reading to kids, installing plumbing, recaulking windows, and just generally improving the world by her presence), she would be a hundred and five years old. Although my head knew better, my heart always thought she would probably live to be at least a hundred. Or maybe forever.

Although, as it turns out, my own mom didn’t make it even to ninety (she died in 2004, at eighty-four), I am fortunate to know an amazing number of women in their nineties who continue to set a high bar for so many qualities that would be admirable at any age: adaptability, strength, resilience, courage, creativity, and kindness. In other words, these women, some of them a full three decades my senior, are mentoring me, whether they know it or not.

There are Beth and Rosabelle, who are both members of a local memoir writing group. They invited me to join about ten years ago, and I cherish our friendship.

Beth takes her pesky mobility issues in stride, acquiescing to the use of a walker and a stair lift, but never—never!—to withdrawing from the world. At our last meeting, she told of gathering for a birthday lunch with a group of local women who call themselves the “Nifty Naughty Nineties,” then casually mentioned that, on another recent day, she had driven a three-hour round-trip to surprise one of her daughters. Beth is the vibrant, loving, and much-adored matriarch of a large family, and she writes gorgeous essays about her life that her grandchildren and great-grandchildren will treasure.

From Rosabelle’s writing, I learn a bit more each month about her brave and intrepid spirit—working her way up to become a hospital public relations director, attending college and graduating with a degree at over sixty—and her desire to always keep learning something new, which continues unabated. She has appeared with Bethel’s Senior Players in their annual theatrical performances for nearly twenty years, is a charter member of the memoir group, and for the past eight years has also been a member of Zoom Storytellers, an online group that continues through the enthusiasm of its members, nearly all in their seventies, eighties, or nineties.

There are Amy and Jan, who are also members of the Nifty Naughty Nineties.

Amy is one of those whose birthdays were celebrated at their last gathering—it was her ninety-ninth. In a life that parallels my mom’s story in remarkable ways—from the loss of her own mother at a young age, to the raising of five children, to a beloved family camp built by her husband and kids, to sudden widowhood—she, like my mom, has always “soldiered on.”

No matter what event I attend in the Bethel area, from concerts and lectures to poetry readings and book group discussions, Jan is apt to be there, too, as lively and engaged as anyone half her age. And while I admit that I’ve been quick to embrace my generation’s tendency to blur the lines between “at home clothes” and “going out clothes,” whether Jan is going to church or making a quick stop at the library, she’ll be wearing just the right outfit, always perfectly put together—no Crocs or flannel pants for her!

There’s Debbie, a cousin of my father’s, who recently celebrated her ninety-ninth birthday, too. She raised her three boys in the towns of Freedom and Unity and, with her late husband, ran a general store for decades. She was living on her own until a couple of months ago, when her kids decided she needed help with things like meals and medications. Feisty and independent, she is settling in at a new place, but, in her son’s words, is “still pissed she can’t be alone in Unity.”

Ruth and Joan are two of my penpals. They read my Bethel Citizen column regularly and write to me to comment on my knee surgery, hiking, and other goings-on. Joan, whom I’ve never met in person, doesn’t use a computer; she sends handwritten cards and letters to a long list of friends, to which she added me a couple of years ago. She regularly admonishes me to be careful when hiking alone, and we recently discovered that we are some sort of distant cousins through our respective connections to the Mason family in Bethel. Ruth subscribes to my Substack, communicates by email, and shares stories of the building of her own family’s camp on Round Pond in 1941. Like Amy’s, her family’s history parallels my own in many ways.

Then there’s Marie…Mrs. F…Mom Funteral. She is my best friend Donna’s mom, and she has mothered, mentored, and loved me like her own for nearly sixty years.

I first met Donna on the second day of second grade, when her tiny dynamo of a mother marched her down the driveway of their house across the street from our bus stop and asked me to look after her on the bus. From that day on, we were inseparable, spending all of our afternoons and weekends together at her home or mine, just two houses apart, and Mrs. F quickly became my second mom.

When Donna and I went back and forth between each other’s houses, we always cut through the front yard of the Corlisses’ house in between. The Corlisses had a lot of cats, and a couple of goats, but not a dog, at least that I can recall. Still, one afternoon, on my way to Donna’s, I tripped and fell and landed smack in a pile of dog poop. When I arrived at her door, Donna’s mom could have taken one sniff and sent me back home to my own mother, but instead she just reached for her ever-present bottle of Lestoil. I remember standing in the bathroom while she scrubbed dog poop out of my clothes, and I spent the rest of the day smelling like pine oil.

Mrs. F has spent her whole life in Milford, Connecticut, and she and Donna’s dad still live in the same house where Donna grew up. When we visit them together, her mom wants to hear all about what’s going on in my life, and she still gives me plenty of advice, still fusses over me, and, often, still packs a cooler of food to send home with me.

Donna’s mom was a preschool teacher, and three decades of retirement have not diminished her love of teaching, or her desire to make a difference in the life of a child. When a multi-generational family from Iran recently moved into her neighborhood, she went across the street to introduce herself. Upon learning from the young father that his mother and daughter did not speak English, Mrs. F knew just what was needed from her, and she offered to teach English to four-year-old Neilla.

Now, Donna tells me, “my mother goes over on Wednesdays and Fridays from 10 until noon. Neilla has learned quickly and it sounds like she speaks well. When they’re done reading, my mother teaches her numbers and other things. Neilla and her grandmother are crazy for her.”

My friends in their nineties still have so much wisdom to impart to the world, and to me, and I am grateful for their willingness to share it:

Soldier on. Fight for your independence. Don’t let physical limitations define you, or hold back your spirit.

Keep in touch. Communicate. When you have good advice, offer it. When you love people, tell them so.

Stay active and intellectually engaged. Go to the library. Attend that lecture, or concert, or poetry reading. (And when you go, wear real pants and decent shoes.)

Be kind. Be open-minded. Be generous with your knowledge, your talents, and your compassion.

Never stop learning. Or teaching. Or mentoring. Or mothering.

Happy Mother’s Day to all of the Nifty Naughty Nineties in my life!

I wrote this for my monthly writing group, and it turned out to be a lot of fun to think about what advice 66-year-old me would give to 40-ish me. You should try it!

Dear Somewhat Younger Version of Myself:

You know how you’re always thinking that when you’re older, you’re going to have an orderly life, with a clean house and a streamlined calendar, and without financial stress and physical or mental clutter?

Sorry, but you’re wrong.

I mean, really, how do you expect to go from the disorganized mess you are in middle-age to a level of organization that would be the envy of Marie Kondo? You do realize that Marie Kondo started helping her mother organize their home at the age of five, and launched her own home-organization consulting business at 19, right? You’re already a few decades late in getting started.

I know what you’re thinking: at this point in your life, you still have kids at home and a full-time job. You’re constantly being knocked off course by having something sprung on you. Just this week, one kid’s field hockey game was rescheduled to the afternoon you planned to reorganize the kitchen cupboards, and another kid remembered at bedtime that he needed to bring something to school for a bake sale the next day.

You picture your life in 25 years or so—retired, or maybe working part-time, kids all flown from the nest and thriving on their own—and you think about all the extra hours you’ll have and how you’re going to use them. You imagine well-ordered days, with enough structure for you to be productive, and plenty of time left over to read and knit and walk and rest. Your home will be tidy—right down to an alphabetized spice rack—and your household will run efficiently. Best of all, you’ll finally have all the time you’ve always wanted to write!

I hate to tell you this, but that’s not how it’s going to be. For one thing, you’re going to need to be prepared for a frustrating loss of energy and efficiency over the next couple of decades. You’ve already seen the start of this. Remember how you worked 55 hours a week at two jobs in your twenties, had dinner with friends two or three times a week, and still had time to make your own Christmas cards and tend a garden? Remember how, in your thirties, you got up early, before the kids, and spent a couple of hours stripping wallpaper before making breakfast, packing lunches, throwing in a load of laundry, and going to work?

You’re still pretty efficient now, of course, because you have to be. With a full-time job and a chaotic calendar, if you have a dentist appointment, say, at 2 p.m. on Thursday, you work until you need to leave for the appointment. You might go back to work for a couple of hours afterward, or at least run some errands. The dentist appointment seems like one small thing among many small things that you get done that day.

In this later stage of life, if you have a dentist appointment at 2 p.m. on Thursday, it’s awfully easy for Thursday to become The Day You Go to the Dentist. If there’s something else you need to do on Thursday, even something as small as going to the library, you think all morning about how it will fit around your dentist appointment. Should I go to the library before the dentist, or after? If I go before, do I need to allow an extra ten minutes, or an extra half hour?

Here’s some advice for your future self about time management and living a balanced life: do try to make sensible use of your time, just as you would if you were still working full-time and juggling the demands of a busy household. That will help you avoid thinking back over your day and realizing that the only thing you did was go to a dentist appointment, which, while it gives the day some needed structure, does not provide much satisfaction. Too many days in a row without something satisfying to look back on and say to yourself, “I did something that mattered today,” can lead to bouts of discouragement.

Because we are a family given to bouts of discouragement, they are bound to occur. One way in which you may be able to avoid them is by getting some outdoor exercise every day, unless the weather is really dreadful. (Weather that is only sort of dreadful doesn’t count. That’s why they make boots and parkas and raincoats.) You can use your outdoor time to do yardwork or climb mountains or whatever you want, but try for at least an hour or two of fresh air on almost every single day. It will help you breathe better, sleep better, and feel better. Guaranteed.

Make plans to see other human beings now and then. Become a devotee of the one-hour visit. This is long enough to catch up, but short enough to fit around other things in the day without becoming The Thing You Do That Day. Unfortunately, people talk about seeing friends more than they actually do it. It takes a more definite plan than “Let’s get together for a cup of tea sometime.” It’s better to pin down a day and time and stick to it. If you keep seeing people fairly regularly, you’ll not only preserve your social skills (which, truthfully, were never that great to begin with), but you’ll always have someone you feel comfortable calling if your car breaks down twenty miles from home, or you need a ride to a colonoscopy appointment.

Join some kind of group that meets regularly and has at least one person in it that you like. I know someone who has played ice hockey with the same small group of guys every week for something like 35 years. Even our rural area is home to book clubs, writing groups, knitting circles, hiking clubs, and political organizations. Find your affinity group.

You know how your oldest brother, just like Mom, was always talking about both our duty to volunteer, and the personal satisfaction of being active in local non-profits? It turns out they were both onto something. Somewhere out there, there’s a library or a historical society or a town board that needs exactly what you can offer, and you’ll probably find that when you get involved, you get back as much as you give.

On the other hand, be sure the things you decide to do with your time, and the people you decide to spend it with, are people and things you actually enjoy. The recently retired often become targets for every committee and board that’s out looking for new blood. The whole idea of affinity groups is that you’re supposed to have an actual affinity for the subject, or goal, or activity. And, for heaven’s sake, beware of requests that begin with any variation, even if only implied, of “Now that you’re not working so much” or “Since you have more free time now.” You’ll feel better about the things you spend time on if you choose them on your own terms.

The good news is that keeping up with all of these things—exercise, friendships, volunteer work—is healthy and rewarding and will bring needed balance to your life. The bad news is that your house is probably never going to be spotless and well-organized, and you’re probably always going to struggle to finish projects, pay bills, avoid overscheduling yourself, and prioritize your writing.

Sorry, but that’s all the advice I have for you at this point, but feel free to ask me again in ten years or so. By then I hope to have attained an even higher level of balance and wisdom in my life.

With love,

66-year-old me

You might think that my penchant for solo hiking, coupled with my absolutely terrible sense of direction, would have resulted in my being lost (or, as Daniel Boone would say, “mighty turned around”) on numerous occasions. But, actually, it’s only happened once—it was scary enough to make me take extra precautions against a repeat occurrence.

I emerge from a stand of scruffy, wind-beaten spruces and pines onto the summit of Speckled Mountain. It’s a gorgeous afternoon, sunny, but with fast-moving overhead clouds that create an ever-changing shadow pattern on the bare expanse of rock at my feet and the dense forests below me.

My first impulse is to scamper over the ledges, exploring every bit of the summit and availing myself of every degree of view. I want to find the geodetic marker that gives the coordinates and elevation, and the post that marks the highest point. I want to use a map on my phone to try to identify the several mountain ranges I can see in the distance.

But first, before I take another step, I untie the sweatshirt from around my waist and hang it securely on a branch of one of the scruffy spruces, just at the point where the trail emerges from the woods, making sure the strong wind won’t carry it away down the mountain. I’m taking no chances about being able to find the trail again when I’m ready to leave.

A year and a day ago, on the afternoon of August 29, 2016, a beautiful late-summer Monday, I planned to go for a hike.

Rather than stick to the short, close-to-home trails I’d been hiking all summer—Buck’s Ledge, Lapham Ledge, Peaked Mountain in Maggie’s Nature Park—I decided to drive over to the vicinity of Concord Pond in Woodstock and hike up Bald Mountain.

I’d done it once, several years earlier, with Tony and our dog, Remy, back when I was in much worse shape. Now, four and a half months into an unbroken streak of exercise days, and after a summer of determined hiking, I figured I’d have no problem making it to the top, and I was right.

In fact, when I reached the summit of Bald Mountain at a little past 3 p.m., I decided to continue on to the top of Speckled Mountain, a trek that entails hiking down into a thickly forested glade, then up some fairly steep terrain to an open summit with amazing views.

It only took me about 30 additional minutes to hike from one summit to the next, and it was well worth the extra effort. I hung out on Speckled Mountain for about fifteen minutes, wandering all over the mountaintop, snapping photos and congratulating myself on successfully summiting two peaks in one afternoon.

It was on the return trip that things started to go wrong. The summit of Speckled is dotted with various bald patches of ledge (the “speckles” that you see when looking at the mountain from far away). They all look pretty much alike when you’re standing on them, and it’s hard to keep track of just where you are.

Mistake Number One: I didn’t pay close attention and accidentally started down a different trail from the summit than I had come up.

Mistake Number Two: Once I had gone some distance down it and realized my mistake, I hated to turn around and backtrack uphill. Besides, I was almost certain that this second trail was one I had seen branching off from the blue-blazed trail I had hiked up, so it didn’t even occur to me that I might be striking off in the wrong direction altogether.

As it turned out, though, the trail I was on came out onto an ATV trail and stopped. In retrospect, I should have turned around right there, hiked back to the summit, and come down the same trail I went up, but—Mistake Number Three—I thought I could follow the ATV trail and end up close to where I had left my car.

I was wrong. I used Google Maps on my phone and figured out I needed to head in a different direction if I didn’t want to end up in Peru (the Maine town, not the country, although with my sense of direction, anything is possible), and then (Mistake Number Four) I decided to abandon the idea of finding an actual trail and just head off in the general direction of Little Concord Pond.

At first, I was following an unmarked path I found leading off the ATV trail, assuming it had been made by humans, but after it dead-ended in a boggy clearing filled with leftover logging slash and prolific blackberry bushes, I realized it had most likely been made by bears.

From that point on, I bushwhacked, continually checking my position on my phone and keeping the tiny patch of blue that was Little Concord Pond more or less straight ahead, except when I had to detour around dense undergrowth or steep ledges that appeared in front of me without warning.

Mistake Number Five was not conserving the battery of my phone earlier in my hike. I had used it liberally, to take photos, post them to Facebook, text my best friend, and call my daughter. By the time I really needed it for important things like a map and compass, the battery was already nearly drained.

When my phone rang and I saw that it was Tony calling, I answered and told him as quickly as I could that I was off the trail, bushwhacking, but pretty sure I was headed in the right direction and hoped I’d make it out before dark. I think I told him to skip the lecture because I didn’t have much battery left. I hung up, and immediately saw the screen of my phone go dark.

Mistake Number Six was not having a compass with me that didn’t depend on electronics to tell me which direction I was headed, but the one thing I did do right was to check the position of the sun, so I knew to keep it ahead and slightly to the right as I made my way west, back toward the pond.

The way out turned out to be a lot further than I expected, and I never did come out onto the trail around the pond. I did eventually come back onto the blue trail, but nowhere near the bottom. Rather, I connected with it at the lowest part of the saddle between the two peaks.

I had never been lost in the woods while hiking alone before, and I had been surprised to discover just how quickly I went from mild annoyance at the inconvenience to full-blown panic at the thought that I might find myself out there alone in the dark. All rational thought went out the window within ten minutes of realizing I was lost. By the time I hit the well-worn trail and saw the familiar blue blazes, I breathed a sigh of relief, but my heightened anxiety interfered with my already deficient sense of direction, to the extent that I had no idea which way to go on the trail. With high peaks on both sides of the saddle, I could no longer see the sun and I was so turned around that I couldn’t remember where I had last seen it before it dipped out of sight.

I ran 25 paces uphill in one direction, returned to my starting point, and ran 25 paces uphill in the opposite direction, hoping to spot something familiar along the trail that would give me a clue. I returned to my starting point again, and ran 50 paces in each direction—was I heading up Bald, or Speckled? I had no idea.

Finally, 100 frantic paces brought me, panting, to the marked junction of the Speckled Mountain Trail and the loop trail that leads to the ledges of Bald Mountain, and I headed down the trail toward Little Concord Pond on legs that were shaky with exertion and relief.

I finally hiked out to my car at 6:30, nearly three hours after I had started down from the summit of Speckled Mountain. As I drove out the Shagg Pond Road, I met Tony driving in, “hell bent for leather,” as they say. He told me that if he had found my car still in the parking lot and no sign of me, he was going to call 911, get up a search party, and head into the woods. He still says he was about the most scared he had ever been that day. That makes two of us.

On this bright August afternoon, a year and a day later, I’ve come back here to conquer my fears, to show myself that I can do this hike again, solo, without getting lost, and to prove that I’ve learned a few things.

I left home with my phone fully charged, and with a handy portable power bank (a gift my brother Greg sent last year, after he read about my close call), stashed in my backpack. I have extra food and water, and, even though the day is warm, I brought a sweatshirt, just in case.

Now, I lift it from the branch of the spruce at the entrance to the trail, knot the sleeves around my waist, and head confidently down the mountain.

I happened to realize recently that this month marks ten years since I took over as the Locke’s Mills correspondent to the Bethel Citizen. At the time, I was also covering meetings and writing features for the paper, and when the previous correspondent gave up the Locke’s Mills column, I agreed to write it, just until someone else could be found to take it over. While my columns tend more toward hiking stories, random musings, and sentimental reminiscences than “hard news,” I’ve apparently attracted a loyal following. In the decade since my first column appeared, I’ve gotten so used to writing one every week that when the Citizen’s publisher announced recently that, beginning in April, the paper would only be printed every other week, I decided to keep right on writing it weekly anyway, and posting it here on my new Substack.

Back on March 23, 2015, I wrote a blog post about my new column, and, in honor of my tenth anniversary as a columnist, I’m sharing it again.

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.

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.

My writing group, which focuses (mostly) on short-form memoir, chose “Chairs” as its topic for this month. I don’t think any of us knew exactly how it would work out as inspiration, but when we read our essays aloud at Monday’s meeting, we were all struck by how conducive such a seemingly mundane topic was to deep reflection, and by how each of our essays turned out. Here’s mine.

Milford, Connecticut, 1966

I tuck one leg up under me as I sit at the breakfast table, the toes of the other bare foot curling around the twisted metal that forms the legs of my chair. The curved wrought iron back is cold against my shoulders, even through my flannel pajamas; the window beside the table faces north, and the draft around it is persistent.

“Where are your slippers?” my mother asks, but I almost never wear my slippers. On the coldest of winter days, I might wear socks around the house, despite the ever-present danger of slipping when I race up and down our uncarpeted stairs, but I prefer bare feet, year-round, indoors and out.

The seat of my chair is a flat wooden circle not much more than a foot in diameter. It offers no concessions to the shape of the human body, unlike the scooped wooden seats of the Hitchcock chairs my mother admires, the padded vinyl-covered chairs in my grandfather’s Bangor kitchen, or even the woven rush seats of our otherwise severe ladder-back dining room chairs.

This chair has no cushion or pad, and the ring of metal that holds the seat in place protrudes just enough to be felt against the back of my thigh. If I sit here long enough, it will leave an indentation in my soft flesh, curved like a smile.

I love this chair. At seven, I am already drawn to anything quirky or unique—Pippi Longstocking is my constant literary companion, and I have turned our sunporch into my personal museum, curating a collection of oddities that range from exotically foreign coins, stamps, and seashells to a mouse skeleton and a real stuffed alligator. Our kitchen chairs bring an undeniable note of whimsy to an otherwise disappointingly ordinary home. The intricate twists and circles of the wrought iron stand in marked contrast to the staid and sensible furnishings throughout the rest of the house.

I love my chair even more because my mother says it is an “ice cream parlor chair,” and although I’ve never actually been to an ice cream parlor, I do love ice cream. When I sit in my chair, I can conjure the image of a restaurant, one without soups or salads or sandwiches, a place whose sole purpose is the serving of ice cream…and it’s magical.

But one of the best things about my chair is that its original home was a store and lunch counter in Bethel, Maine, called Farwell and Wight’s, owned by my grandmother and great-grandmother, who ran the place for more than two decades, serving home-cooked meals, sandwiches, pies, and, yes, ice cream. These two women are legendary in my mind, although I’ve never met either of them—my great-grandmother because she died in 1949, ten years before I was born, and my grandmother because she lives a world away, with my aunt and uncle in Phoenix, Arizona.

They both, at different times, lived with my parents. My siblings all speak about our grandmother, Grammy, as if she is someone they know well, and the older two of my brothers even remember her mother, whom they call Gram. I know that Grammy taught my sister how to cook, and that only reinforces my conviction, and frequent lament, that “all the fun stuff happened before I was born.”

When Gram and Grammy sold their business in 1945, my father, who grew up in an apartment above the store, hauling wood for the stoves and helping out in the kitchen, drove to Bethel and brought six of the chairs back to my family’s home in Newington, Connecticut.

And this is really what imbues my chair with the greatest significance: my father actually touched it. He carried it. He sat in it. He probably gave it its most recent coat of shiny black paint.

My father brought the chairs home for his family of six. For thirteen years, in homes in Connecticut and then in New Jersey, they sat in these chairs at the round wooden table in the kitchen for daily breakfasts, and for weekend lunches, and for any other meals not formal enough to require serving them in the dining room. My brothers sat in them to do their homework; my sister climbed on them when she needed to reach the highest shelf in the cupboard.

Evenings, my parents sat in these chairs as they planned their future together: the family camp they would build on North Pond, their eventual retirement to “a house on a hill in Bethel.”

I wasn’t part of that family of six. The family into which I was born was a different one altogether: five shaky survivors, grieving an unimaginable loss, and telling each other stories to keep their memories alive, stories of all the things I missed by being born too late—campfires and kerosene lanterns, rockhounding and rowboats. They remember so much that I’ll never know—the scent of our father’s aftershave, the rough feel of his plaid wool shirt against their cheeks as he carried them up to bed.

But I’m lucky, I remind myself, feeling the cool iron against my bare toes. Now I get to sit in the sixth chair. Daddy’s chair.

A lot of you probably know me. I’m Amy Wight Chapman, and I was lucky enough to work at Bob’s Corner Store for more than 11 years. I’ve had a lot of jobs since then, but I’ve never had one that was more interesting, more fulfilling, or just more darn fun than that one. From behind that counter, I was able to go from being just a “summer person” (some people called us “summer complaint”) to being woven into the rich and varied fabric that is the community of Greenwood. It’s been almost 50 years since I first went to work for Bob, and I’m still here in town, with no plans to ever leave. I fell in love with Greenwood’s quirks and characters, and, most of all, with its identity as a place where people knew their neighbors and looked out for one another, and kindness and compassion were more important than money and status.

No one better represented those qualities than Bob, and it was a privilege to know him not only as an employer, but as a mentor, a father-figure, and a friend.

In the spring of 1978, near the end of my sophomore year in college, many of my classmates and I were filling out job applications and crossing our fingers, hoping to land the summer experiences of our dreams.

For some of my friends, that meant internships in their fields of study, or exotic volunteer opportunities that would give them valuable experience and impressive resumes.

My roommate, who had her own lobster boat, was returning to her regular fishing gig out of Cundy’s Harbor, and a free-spirited friend down the hall was heading for a summer of cooking and whitewater rafting at an outdoor recreation center in North Carolina.

As for me, there was nothing I wanted more that summer than to be hired to run the cash register, stock the beer cooler, and pump gas at Bob’s Corner Store in Locke’s Mills.

Previously known as Lee’s Variety, the store had been a mainstay of my summers for as long as I could remember, the place where we traveled by boat from our camp on North Pond to buy bread and milk and penny candy.

Bob Coolidge, too, had been at the store for as long as I could remember. I think he was just out of high school when he started working as a mechanic for the previous owner, Lee Mills, and although he was still a young man when he bought the place 17 years later, he had already been there for nearly half his life.

One summer evening at camp when I was five or six years old, for reasons I can’t remember, my older sister took a red felt-tipped pen to my face, adding a sprinkling of bright-red freckles to my cheeks and nose, and I refused to wash them off. When Bob spotted them on our trip to the store the next morning, he began calling me “Chickenpox,” and he never really stopped.

Although I already knew that Maine was the only place for me, and that one day I’d come home and never leave, at the time, I was just a “summer person.” I always wondered if Bob would forget me during the long ten months of the year when I was exiled in Connecticut, but on my first trip to the store each summer, he’d call out, “Hi there, Chickenpox!” and I’d know I was back where I belonged.

After I graduated from high school and started college in Maine, I spent two summers doing odd jobs for my brother Steve, who owned a small ski lodge, closed in the summer, that always had a deck that needed painting or a yard that needed mowing. Most of what he paid me went into the gas tank of the dump truck he let me drive all over the state.

It was a pretty great job, but I wasn’t saving any money. Since I had recently decided to ditch my liberal arts college to study culinary arts at a technical school instead, and since my mother was less than thrilled with my choices, I figured it might be time for me to start supporting myself.

Bob wasn’t sure he needed any extra summer help, but when I told him I’d take any hours he could give me, he agreed to let me run the cash register on weekends and a few evenings during the week. I would also be part of the all-hands-on-deck crew that took care of the weekly grocery order on Thursday mornings.

Unless I needed a day off for some particular reason, I usually worked some part of each day, seven days a week. On weekdays, except for Thursdays, I would come in at 5 p.m. and work until the store closed at 9, or at 10 on Fridays.

On Saturdays, I worked from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m., and every third Saturday I worked straight through until the store closed at 10 p.m. I came back in at noon on Sundays and worked until we closed at 6 p.m.

Saturday mornings were special, because Bob always went to Jordan’s Restaurant, at the top of the hill, and brought back coffee and inch-thick slabs of toast, made from Ma Jordan’s homemade bread, slathered with butter and jam and wrapped in waxed paper, for our weekly coffee break.

The cases of beer—and we sold a lot of beer—were kept in the dusty basement and carried, one or two or three at a time, up a set of narrow wooden stairs to fill the coolers. Because Bob never wanted “the girls” to be left alone at the store, he arranged the work schedule so that there was always one of “the guys” on duty to lug the beer upstairs and pump the gas.

Evenings were my favorite times at the store. Business was usually brisk, and there was always a steady stream of banter with our regular customers.

I got to know the rhythm of year-round life in a small town, and learned that the four seasons I knew were just the beginning. There was also mud season, when the loggers—and I confess that I had a bit of a thing for loggers, having, early on, declared my intention to marry one someday—spent less time in the woods and more time hanging around the store. There was “the smelts are running!” season, which I’d never even heard of before I worked at Bob’s, but which turned out to be one of the annual social high points of small-town life. In January and February, there was jump-start season, when the weather was, according to my part-time coworker Bob Hinkley, “colder than a witch’s tit” and Bob was kept on a dead run every morning, working his way through the list of people who had awoken to dead car batteries.

Maine’s minimum wage in 1978 was $2.30 per hour, and I think Bob paid me $2.40, which I thought was very generous of him. Except for the weeks when I worked a few hours of overtime, my take-home pay rarely amounted to more than $75, but the truth was that I was having so much fun that I probably would have done the job for free. 

I continued to work for Bob, either full-time or part-time, for the next 11 years. During that time, I watched Lee-ann and Beth grow up, and I think he came to think of me as a third daughter—one who needed frequent rescuing.

When I lived on Bird Hill, I was constantly sliding off my icy driveway in the winter, and Bob soon realized that if he wanted me to report for my shift, he was probably going to have to drive up and pull my car out of the ditch first—one memorably icy winter, it was 17 times.

He fixed up my 1970 Mercury Montego enough to pass inspection with body putty and steel wool, installed a replacement horn on the steering column when the original horn quit working, and kept track of its maintenance needs far better than I did—on an evening when we weren’t too busy, he’d drive it into the garage without a word and change the oil.

He rescued me from bad decisions, and his gentle advice kept me from making even more of them.

It wasn’t just me, of course; from watching him interact with his customers, I came to understand and appreciate the importance of the central role he played in the community.        

As Chris Dunham wrote on the “Greenwood As It Was” Facebook page, “Bob spent his adult life helping his community thrive through quiet acts of service and generosity. So many of life’s problems—automotive and otherwise—were solved by a visit to his store.”

In 2023, Greenwood’s annual Town Report was dedicated to Bob, an honor he richly deserved. I wrote the dedication that appeared at the front of the report, which read:

Although he worked twelve to fifteen hours a day, often seven days a week, at the store and garage, and was in constant motion, waiting on customers behind the counter, pumping their gas and washing their windshields, or performing car-repair magic in the garage, Bob was never too busy to stop what he was doing and chat for a few minutes.

Bob never made a distinction between “locals” and “summer people”—he greeted everyone with the same warmth and treated them all with the same kindness and generosity. If he knew someone was going through a hard time, he offered what was needed, whether it was a listening ear, reassurance that he’d get their car back on the road, or a few groceries on credit until payday. More often than not, people who came into the store carrying the weight of the world left with a lighter step and a smile.

He made the most of his precious little free time, becoming active in the Kora Shrine Funsters and appearing in costume as Pluto at countless parades and functions. In the winter, for as long as anyone can remember, he plowed the church parking lot and the driveway of the Greenwood Historical Society after every storm, never asking to be paid.

Service to his community has always been important to Bob, and because he has always gone about providing it in his typical quiet way, it’s likely that most of us have no idea of the full extent of his contributions to our town and its inhabitants. But if you ask around, you’ll find that nearly everyone who knows him has a story about a time that Bob made a difference in their lives.

One of Bob’s favorite sayings, to reassure people that things will turn out all right, has always been “A hundred years from now, nobody’ll know the difference.”

But, even a hundred years from now, our community will still be a better place because of the difference that Bob made.

In my own life, and the life of this town, there will never be another Bob Coolidge.

Godspeed, Bob, and thank you.

November 6, 2024

I knew what I’d done the second I closed the door behind me, but I tried twisting the knob, just to be sure. It didn’t budge.

It was 6:30 a.m. I was standing on the cold concrete doorstep in a long-sleeved t-shirt, pajama pants, and Crocs, and I was locked out of the house.

I had stepped outside to get the paper, and to take a photo of the sun rising, because, honestly, I was kind of surprised that it did, after the events of the day before. It would have seemed more fitting if the heavenly bodies had all somehow been cast out of alignment, and I had awoken to unrelenting darkness, instead of familiar constellations overhead and a faint lightening in the east.

But no. I had been awake for more than an hour, and I had spent most of that time glued to my phone, doomscrolling through one blood-red chart of election returns after another, when I glanced up to see that the eastern sky was washed in the subtler, less angry reds of sunrise.

Apparently, then, life was going to go on.

The election hadn’t been the only drama unfolding the night before. Six or seven miles away, at the other end of the road on which we live, a man with a semi-automatic rifle crashed his truck into his neighbors’ house, fired shots at the people living there, and set the house on fire before running off. Police issued a shelter-in-place advisory, which I received on my phone, after already having been alerted by social media and texts from my kids.

Hence the locked door. Unless I’m home alone at night, our door is rarely locked. To be honest, I’m not sure I even know where the key is. But, in the midst of dual dramas, one national, the other close to home, anything that could make me feel safer had seemed like a good idea. Maybe a part of me believed that by locking the door, I could lock out the other awful thing that was happening that night, and keep the other terrible news at bay.

I had gone to bed hours before my husband, who had stayed up, watching election returns and clinging to a last shred of hope, until after 2 a.m. Although I sleep with my phone on my bedside table, a holdover from when I had college-age kids and needed, for my own peace of mind, to be on mom duty 24/7, I knew Tony’s phone was downstairs on the charger. He removes his hearing aids at night, naturally, and without them, nothing short of a dynamite blast is likely to wake him.

Even so, I gathered a handful of pebbles from the driveway and started pitching them in the general direction of our upstairs bedroom window. I’ve seen a lot of movies and television in which this is portrayed as an effective way to rouse someone, and the few pebbles that actually hit the glass did make what sounded to me like a fairly loud noise, but I wasn’t surprised when no light came on and Tony didn’t appear.

With all of the unusually warm weather we’ve had this fall, and all of the opening and closing of windows we’ve done, I hoped that at least one of the five large, low, easily accessible windows on the south side of the house might have been left unlocked. But after I unsuccessfully tried the only one that wasn’t covered by a screen, I was able to discern that all of the sash locks were pointed in the same direction, securely latched.

That left only the two much smaller windows on the east wall of Tony’s office, each several feet above the ground, too high for me to climb through, even if I could get one of them open. But, by some miracle, Tony had been working on a project involving a stepladder the day before, and had left it conveniently outside, beside the door.

So I was able to fetch the stepladder, remove the screen from the outside without damaging it, and raise that rather tiny double-hung window to its full opening size, about 18 by 20 inches. All that was left was to climb through, and here is another way in which movies and television have misled me: crime dramas make this sort of thing look a lot easier than it is in actual practice. Suffice it to say that I now know that I do not have a bright future as a cat burglar.

There’s a table against the wall directly beneath the window. In spite of the fact that it was covered with piles of random crap, and in spite of bad knees that don’t bend the way they’re supposed to, I managed to slither headfirst through the window, ending up on my belly, amidst whatever boxes and books and papers didn’t get pushed to the floor.

I was back inside, and all that was needed was a couple of moves harking back to those days when I faithfully practiced yoga. Still on top of the table, I went from Awkward Cobra to Geriatric Puppy to Confounded Cobbler’s pose—or whatever that position is called when you’re finally sitting upright but not sure what to do next—before I was finally able to slide off the table and stand.

Maybe this essay is, in a way, about gratitude after all. Reading it over, I realize how much I have to be grateful for, and how many people throughout the world don’t share these privileges. Kids who care enough to tell me to lock my doors. The ability to feel safe in my own home. Stiff old knees that still work well enough to let me climb a ladder and squeeze through a window when necessary. A warm house to climb back into, and a good breakfast. A sun that still rises every morning, over a country I still believe in.