Rain

 It's raining.  For several days it has rained on and off. This is the rain I remember of
my youth; clouds gray and hanging low with rain falling all day.  To receive this gift of water just before the ground freezes and the snow flies means our wells will be filled for the coming winter.  Our streams on the property are swelled and gushing with small waterfalls along the path, the song sounding, at times, like children's laughter as the water tumbles over rocks and dead trees.  It's glorious.

Recently we spent a few weeks in California.  The wedding of the oldest boy called us out there.  The event was filled with family, laughter and love and these two amazing humans created a ceremony that was beautiful and loving.  It was up in the mountains outside of LA at a year round resort called Big Bear lake.  The lake, like most of the lakes in CA, was a reservoir created by a large damn.  This lake is surrounded by vacation homes with docks and boats no longer at the waters edge.  You must walk by the dock, now sitting in mud with vegetation growing up all around it, and continue for several more yards before reaching what is now the water line.

This was a theme throughout all of California where beautiful reservoirs had receded 100's of yards away from their original water line.  What was once a big "lake" now looked more like a sorry bathtub, brown and murky waters, complete with a ring around the edge.

The west is drying up.  We felt the intense heat of the days, witnessed the brown, dead leaves on the prickly plants. Hiked through the dust of a parched land.  The orchards and farms are drying up.  They put water into this dead soil to nourish plants vs people.  And the people put water into their lawns.

Do they understand how low the water line of their reservoir is?

Are they aware that their water is running out?

That fires are consuming the forests and smoke is choking the air?

This world is changing fast.  Drastically fast.  

And we are not changing our use of water along with it.

In Maine, it’s raining.  We have water.  But those of us living in the north must face the fact that at some point we will no longer have peaches, oranges and plums all year. The produce aisle is going to be shrinking with its offerings. We will need to eat according to our seasons. We will need to grow our own food. For the severe drought in the West affects all of us

The sun is bursting through the clouds spreading a promise of drying up the rain soaked land. I will take a walk on our trails where the fallen leaves of Oaks and Beech trees have thickly covered the path with their brown coloring that shines in the morning light turning the path into a trail laid with copper. The Birches and Poplar trees throw down their bright yellow, round leaves and look like gold coins strewn on top of the copper. We are rich with the colors of the season.

We are rich with the rains that fill our wells, bloat our streams and raise the level of our lakes.

I will take a walk and stroll along one of our stream trails and be serenaded by its' bubbling song so like the joyous laughter of children.

Be well everyone,

Mary

We saw a white deer the other night.  Native Americans referred to these extremely rare animals that are all white as “Ghost Deers”.  Our deer has a brown head, but its entire body is ghostly white.  

Such a sacred sighting as it ran across the shore on one side of our lake while we sat in our boat noting it.  At first we thought it was a white dog, but none of our neighbors have such an animal.  The realization that it was a deer brought us to our feet.  It disappeared into the trees only to reappear swimming strongly across the lake.  Keeping a very respectful distance from it with our boat we got to see it leap out of the water and disappear into the woods of the distant shore.

So incredibly white.  

Striking in this unusual color

Amazing.

I immediately began to offer a prayer to the setting sun as this sacred sighting certainly seemed to ask this of me.  For the first time in my life I did not pray for any family member or for myself but, rather, I prayed for our country.  I prayed for peace and unity among the people of the current un-United States.  I prayed for sanity to return to the elected officials who seem hell-bent on derailing our democracy.  I prayed for those in need to receive and for the greed in so many blackened hearts to ease so that abundance may rule the land.

I prayed for love to rule, not the hate that drives someone to take up a gun and shoot indiscriminately into crowds of people.  

Or classrooms filled with the most innocent of us, our children.

I prayed for Love to become our religion.  Not a certain God.  Not a set of rules that dictate right and wrong of others who don’t follow, or believe, in these same rules. Or the same God. 

“God is love”, but not if you insist that it is YOUR God who must be the One.

Gods rule my heart, filling me with joy and gratitude. These Gods offer me gifts of a white deer, a Bald Eagle, the cries of the Loons, the slashing of the dark woods and fields with the bright lights of Fireflies, a dome over my head, evidence of the Universe, on crystal clear nights.

I prayed for our country.

I prayed for all of this. 

Which is also offering prayers for myself, my family, my friends.

For all of us.

I also pray for another sighting of this miraculous, rare individual who we now know shares these fields, woods and lake with us.  The chances for an Albino deer being born are 1 in 30,000.  I don’t know what the statistics of seeing one is.  I leave it to be extremely rare!  

A once in a lifetime sighting.  

A gift ... from whatever God you may believe in.

 

 September 2021 Dave and I organized a trip to the Maine north woods that, with a little planning, offers camping on a completely secluded beach on a seven mile lake.

This group of friends wanted to spend four days and three nights camping.  There is no internet or cell phone service out there.  For some this was a little concerning, for if any emergency might arise we would be unable to dial in for assistance.  This is what Dave and I love about these trips!

The second day of our trip rain came in the morning and lasted on and off all day.  Dave is the tarp master so we were all hunkered down much of the afternoon under a tarp, playing cribbage and eating too much.  As the evening gray turned into the dark of night the storm intensified and the rain became torrential!  The wind picked up and began to howl.  With the rain pounding the tarp and the wind smacking into it we could barely hear each other talk.  We all stood in our head-to-toe rain gear, staring out into the darkness, marveling at the streams of water running off the tarp. The ground under our picnic tables was awash, making it impossible to really stay dry.  Dave closed the tarp down and secured it; we all knew we were protected until we got brave enough to head to our tents.    

As I stood there with everyone,  feeling the power of this storm, I had this intense need to get out into it ... to escape the protection of the tarp and stand in the dark alone with this storm surging and pounding my solar plexus!  As I walked out into the abyss everyone gasped and began yelling for me to come back, that I was crazy!  Maybe I was at that moment.  But what these people didn't know about me is that I've always gone out into the storm.  

Growing up my siblings and I would go down to the beach when the tropical storms of August, remnants of hurricanes further south, would come up the coast whipping the ocean into a frothy frenzy.  We would strip off our protective outerwear and go out into that surf with its gigantic waves!  Holding hands, digging our heels into the sand to keep from being swept away by the undertow, we would scream and duck the oncoming giants.  

I've also been one to go straight out into a blizzard, with winds that turn soft, feathery snowflakes into lashing little knives that cut into my bare face.   Leaning into the gale I would turn to the sting of the harsh snowflakes and walk into the storm.  Always feeling more alive.

And so, I walked out into the night as rain pounded our little campsite and the wind whipped the lake into caps of white topped waves.  I screamed into the gale, knowing my friends couldn't hear. Opening my arms to the torrential rain I felt that storm beating into my chest and the rain streaming down my exposed face. I felt more alive in that wild moment. I was a wild child opening to the power of the night, the power of the storm, and embracing it.

In the morning the lake was calm and like glass.  Loons called warnings as an Eagle flew over.  Clothes and tarps were laid out on rocks in the sun to dry.  Over breakfast everyone made a comment about my going out into the storm, "Mary, last night you were drunk!".  

I only smiled.  

Perhaps I was drunk, drunk on the power of that night. Drunk on the feeling of being so alive when standing out in the storm. Drunk on the gratitude I felt about my life at that moment and being able to stand on this secluded beach with great friends and experience being wild!

WATER

 Water.  It’s an amazing substance too frequently taken for granted for all the magic it brings to this earth.  Water is chemically known as  H2O.  Two Hydrogen and one oxygen.  The universal solvent.  It is life.  It is found in every living thing on earth.  It exists in three states: solid, liquid and gas.  Solid will melt to the liquid state and the liquid state will evaporate into the gas form.  It tends to break its own rules though.  The process of sublimation has the solid form going directly to the gas. 

My walk yesterday was through the crust of snow that fell the night before.  Getting out into the morning I could feel the air warming and the snow changing to rain that was immediately freezing on my jacket.  When water becomes super cooled it can exist in the liquid state but below its freezing point, thus freezing on contact with any surface it hits …me, for instance.

Passing a small Beech tree I marveled at the effects of the freezing rain on the leaves that still clung tenaciously to their branches; the dried leaves quake in the breeze, brushing against each other to sound like a Shaman's rattle. The frozen surface of the brown leaves turned them into burnished copper.  The Hemlocks dip with the new weight of ice crystals collecting on their feathery fronds; a glittering of fans over me as I pass through their grove.

My dog,Rosie, and I head down towards the trail we have named “the gorge”.  This trail is narrow and rocky and follows one of the three streams that flow through this land we claim as our own.  Entering into this darker wood with its high bank on one side the rain no longer hits my jacket with a PING as the denser foliage of the coniferous trees shield us from above.  There is a different energy along this trail, quiet, calm.  It’s always green in this “gorge” with the bright green of the mosses that grow on all the rocks and the Christmas Ferns along the trail remain a deep green all through the winter months.  I look for tracks along the stream bed; the small pads of the Mink as it runs along impossibly thin ice that hovers over the flowing water.   A raccoon came down to the deeper pool and the tiny skittering of the weasel tracks show her scampering from rock to rock in search of small rodents or insects hiding in the crevasses.  I love this trail.  The footing is difficult but the mood is always easy.

I can see a fog rising off some of the snow still in the field.  Sublimation.  Fog also hangs heavy over the mountain, clinging to the various ridge lines and obscuring the summit one minute and twirling and swirling upward exposing the summit the next.  Having grown up on the coast of Maine there is a term, “pea soup” that refers to surface clouds so dense you can see only a few feet in front of you.  I remember walking along the beach in this opaque fog.  A beach at low tide in a pea soup fog creates a very small world; one with visibility of only a few feet all around you.   You exist in the moment of one footstep at a time within a monotonous landscape of sand.  Shadows loom up ahead becoming recognizable only when they enter within a few feet, emerging as a large piece of driftwood or another person walking in the opposite direction.  It was the only time that I felt I was truly present in the moment.  Unable to see anything in my future and the past lost to the fog. I traveled, one step at a time, through a dense cloud of water.   

Today the lake looks like molten mercury, smooth, charcoal gray and still.  No loons break it’s surface or call across the shores now.  Winter is here and they have gone to the sea until next spring.  

Soon there will be ice forming on this body of water.  My husband will watch it closely and determine when it is safe enough to walk down with skates in order to glide across the black mirrored surface.   Once the snow falls I will walk across the lake to the opposite shore and the trails on the other side.  The frozen water allows me to walk on top of the lake! Amazing!

I am remembering a friend who once was in love with a man from Barbados.  He came to Maine during the winter to witness “the big chill”.  We took him to a small pond by the beach to experience skating.  He pulled up beside me and grab me around the waist whispering in my ear,
“Mary, how do they do this?”  

“Do what?”

“THIS!?” he said as he gestured to the frozen surface of the pond.  He opened my eyes to just how miraculous “this” is; this body of water that we can walk and play upon!

Water. It is all around us. A wave of water bursting between our mother’s legs introduces each of us to this world. We are water. We can’t live without it.   

 Christmas with a Grandson. 

My memories of Christmas are filled with light, carols, food, lots of family and an obscene pile of presents under the tree.  With five kids in the family there was a lot of gifting going on.  My parents weren’t rich so a lot of the presents were very small, simple gifts wrapped in a big exciting box.  It was the joy of opening and finding this secret that has been held within these wrappings for weeks prior to the morning of the 25th. 

One present at a time was handed out and we all sat and watched the unfolding of the magic held within. One-at-a-time we would slowly work through that mountain of colored wrappings, taking all morning to get to the last tiny box sitting on a bow of the tree.  Christmas morning, there was never a rush to get it over.  We’d waited a lifetime for it to arrive so we took it slow and savored it all.

I still have my rag doll that Santa left under my stocking when I was five.  I have a very large, black stuffed poodle that I awoke to beside me in my bed on the morning of my fourth birthday.  I have memories of all this from about three years old.  At one years old I remember nothing.

I won’t be supplying my grandson with boxes and boxes of presents this Christmas.  At one years old any object given may simply be that for a while.  I have a file drawer filled with children's books I have collected and saved over most of my adult life. They will be worlds to travel through with him.  We have a home in a secluded valley filled with streams, forests, fields and beaver bogs where treasures hide; British soldiers stand guard to the reindeer lichen, the pixie cups wait for the elves to come sip from their rim and the brilliant orange of witches butter dazzles from the dead stumps.  Barred and Great Horned owls call at night waiting to hear an answering call. Standing on the deck we can answer those wishful callings and draw them closer to us during these silent nights.  

There will be tiny weasel tracks to follow with the coming snow and a sled for gliding down the hill to the lower field.  Gifts of time with each other is what we will share with him this Christmas.  The first wobbly steps of memories being laid before him with people who love him. A love that is equal to the great canopy of stars over our heads at night.

This will be our Christmas for our one year old grandson this year.

And for a lifetime of years to come.

 For my mom~

The greatest gift you gave me, besides my life, was asking me to assist you in your passing. 

As a teenager you and I were like oil and water, I didn't really like you and you didn't really understand me.

When I bolted ... by getting into an old Saab with two men you had never met and we drove away... you believed you would never see me again.  Perhaps I didn't even know if this was true or not at that time.  I was heading for Colorado with a man and a dream.   The mountains still call me.

As I grew I learned how to set my boundaries with you, to my surprise, this had you respect me even more.  You taught me how to be strong, how to never let a man control me, to always have my own money and my own life.  I've been lucky to find men who have loved me and appreciate this independent  nature that you instilled in me.

I always loved you and came to really like you.  Your sense of humor was quick, dry and hysterical.  Your ability to listen and engage with others had many coming to visit you for hours when you no longer could leave your house.  People loved you and enjoyed being in your presence.  You even voted for a democratic president after 90 some years of only voting republican.  Barack Obama made you proud.  You would love the fact that Kamala Harris now commands the VP position.  You were always a woman of power yourself.

You were born in the wrong era, one where men controlled the world and their wives and when women had only 4 choices of a career; teacher, nurse, secretary or mom.  At 28 years old you came late to your last career as mom.  Mom to five children and the wife to the minister of a small town.  Talk about a fishbowl!  You shouldered it well and an entire town came to love an entire family with your help.

So in November of the year 2019 you became ill.  Not horribly ill, nothing that some medicine and a lot of Dr. visits might  not have been able to help you through.  But at 97 years old you saw that your independence and ability to still live alone might never return to you.  So you decided it was time to just leave this plane and go be with all the family and friends who had journeyed on without you. And you asked me to be there to assist you.  Perhaps it was because you had witnessed how I stood by my husband who spent 18 months dying from a brain tumor.  Perhaps you saw that I was capable of doing this and would not try to convince you to stay.  Your youngest and your middle daughters sat with you, laughed with you, helped you begin the month long process of dying ... with honor and with dignity.  There would never be any other way for you.

Today, on Mother's day I find myself wishing I could call you or bring you the Irish soda bread you loved so much (it was your recipe mom!). And to sit in your living room and watch the flock of turkeys parade past your windows as you tell me what great mothers those "old girls are".

I miss you mom.

But I am of you and I carry you in my being.

Always.

Mom with Donna Gray.

Tracks

I love going out with my dog, Rosie, after a new snow has fallen.  I see with my eyes what she "sees" with her nose as she puts it into some animal's tracks and follows it for short distances: the tiny quotation marks with a thin line drawn between them of the weasel, the tight stitching tracks of the grouse, the parenthesis cleft of the deer or the much larger, but similar clomp of the moose.  There is a beautiful coyote who travels our trails with h/her tracks looking so much like Rosie's even with the hind foot drag.  And the smaller, single file padding of the gray or red fox as they follow the staccato dots of the field mouse that disappear into a single hole. 

I'm drawn to the outdoors and to witnessing all that these woods, fields and mountains have to offer up to me. 

As I came back down the mountain side this morning I got thinking about how I am now an orphan; there is no parent to me in this world any longer.  I guess, at my age, this isn't uncommon and more and more of us 'boomers' are facing elderly parents and their eventual death.  

Both my parents nurtured in me my love of all things outdoors.  My mom, raised as a Maine farm girl,  was completely comfortable with cutting the heads off a chicken.  She once validated that they do run around without their head if you don't hold them tight enough while you bring the axe down.  This same woman was terrified of the little meadow vole.   She literally would scream at the sight of one or shiver at the mention of them in my house, stating, "OH!  I hate mice!"

She instilled in me my need to remain independent and not be taken in as just a girl by some boy.  She always encouraged that I go 'double dutch', slipping a $20.00 bill into my pocket when going off on a date in high school.  Somehow it was understood that if I paid my own way I wouldn't "owe" that young man anything.  This teaching served me well as I grew from girl to woman.

My  mother always expected me to be able to do the same jobs my brother did: shovel snow, haul brush, cut down a tree, bury the compost, mow the lawn.  Mom was in her 80's when we finally convinced her it wasn't safe to use her chainsaw when no one was around.  And so I grew, knowing that I was strong and capable of following my own path and carrying my own load.  I have never cut the head off a chicken though ... and to this day I'm not sure I've got that in me!

My dad was a poet and gentle man who was compassionate and caring of others.  He took a career where his poetry could be spoken every Sunday from the pulpit.  His need to care for others could be used in his counseling for those grieving a loss or in the kind discussions of marriage with a young couple.  My dad was far more spiritual than religious. He taught me that God could be felt in all of nature; including the small, fragrant Mayflower or the exotic Lady Slippers.  These treasures needed to be hunted down in the deeper woods.  We were taught to never pick these precious beauties, but rather to worship them in those deep, sacred woods.

The months of the school year were spent in a small town in the foothills of the western mountains of Maine where my dad's church was.  There I learned to paddle and maneuver a canoe, to snowshoe, to downhill ski and to somehow get through twelve years of schooling.  Summers were spent on the coast where my mother had grown up on that farm and where my grandfather (my mom's dad) built a small cape for the newlyweds on a piece of farm land owned by family.  It was this spot with the smell of drying seaweed and the sound of surf surging that I always felt was my 'home'.  It was here that my parents spent the rest of their days after dad's retirement and where my mother stayed after my dad's untimely death.  It was here, in this little cape, where my mother decided, at 97, she was tired, she had lived a good life and it was time to join her ancestors.  And it was here that I spent the few weeks needed to aid and care for her in this process.  Full circle as the mother cares for the child, I cared for my mom .... the natural cycles of birth and death.

It was in these fields that led down to the rock ledges and the sandy beach that dad would take us out at night to stare into the night sky and listen to the call of the Whip-o-will.  Lying on our backs he pointed out the constellations and taught me how to follow the curve of the big dipper's handle to find one of the largest stars in our solar system, Arcturus.  "Arch to Arcturus" he would say, sweeping his arm across the the dipper's handle and landing on another bright speck.  He would talk of infinity, light years and eternity ... concepts as big as that glittering sky that were impossible to grasp and yet opened the mind to what endless and possibility meant. 


My parents encouraged me to go outside and allowed me to run wild in the summers, barefoot and free down by the sea.  They instilled me a respect for myself and also for the natural world around me and all the living organisms that share it.

Today,  I went out into my own spot of earth, living again in the western Maine mountains, and learned of some of the other beings that share this land with me. 

With the greatest respect I send up a thank you to my parents, who taught me how to be in love with it all.