Going through old papers, I find that I’ve written so much. So much more than I ever thought. Some of it was published (really, I wrote all that for Maine Times, for Maine Public, for this and that and that!?).
But most of it never left my house. And now it seems unlikely that it ever will. Much like then when I couldn’t figure out where to send it, how to do that, I still can’t. It’s old. Outdated. I’ve moved on.
Yesterday I found this old essay, written years ago when I was forced to leave my house and the land. My marriage was blowing up. I had to figure out how to keep a roof over my head, move somewhere where it seemed that might be possible, where I could grow old gracefully without climbing up on the roof to chop the ice—no matter I couldn’t have the house anyway.
So here, for you, is a piece of my sweet world, where I became me. I didn’t grow up here. Most people when asked where they’re from name their growing-up place, but honestly when asked where I’m from, where I call “home,” it’s Mt. Chase and Patten. They’re separate adjacent towns but they’re inextricably woven into one in my memory bank. The mail went to Patten. The stores were in Patten. The little library without a Dewey Decimal System too.
Mt. Chase is where I learned to live under starlit skies, to wander woods, to cook, to harvest pigweed and thistle, and to recognize that I can always make something out of nothing. It is where I learned to be and accept me.
NOT FROM AWAY
At the risk of sounding stoned, let me say right up front that I am not from away. Yes, I was born in Boston, attended schools in Boston, and moved directly from those streets to a dirt road in Mt. Chase, Maine, in 1973—part of the mini swell of city dwellers who went “back to the land.” It didn’t matter that we had never been on the land. And in my case, had never even wanted to be. I was not walking around Boston—or specifically, Roxbury and Dorchester—in a flannel shirt and hiking boots hungry for the smell of pine and bogs and the sweetness with which I now know forest floor rots up in first spring.
I followed a husband who was. And now isn’t. Don’t even go there.
Perhaps Mt. Chase and Patten, its bigger metropolis where the mail goes, are an anomaly, but the Beas and Iras and Buddy McCourts of this town never, ever made me feel as if I were from away. Their children and grandchildren still don’t.
In 1973, no one lived with kerosene lamps, numbingly cold water initially bucketed from a stream and later pumped by hand, and, my gawwdd, an outhouse—no one, except us, and Frank and Kathy up the road and deep in the woods, but Frank and Kathy lasted only a few years, one now in Florida, the other in Cambridge.
No one started gardens (huge gardens!) with no, and I mean no, knowledge of the intricacies of even easy gardening, never mind organic gardening on a patch of earth that could easily frost in June and again in August. A patch whose wild roots were firmly entrenched, no tilling in decades. And no one was a vegetarian.
Richardson’s Hardware let these new hippies in town—one with eternally torn jeans and the other with gauze blouses—open a charge account for nails and insulation and the tar paper that would seal us from the winds for well over a decade before we got all the boards on.
Ken & Jeff’s market let us sign for soap and canned goods. Ballards let us run a tab for gas.
We drank Black Velvet with Dick and Marge, ate new potatoes with Irene. I learned how to make bread—edible bread that begged you to eat slice after slice hot from the oven, even though it was made with whole wheat berries ground by hand—from Nancy and Ardeana.
People loaned us tools, gave us boards, helped us tear down barns and lift those old rafters back into a new place, our new place, under skies ripe with the odd bruised-purple sunset that often lays itself out in this nook of time between Mt. Katahdin and Mt. Chase.
Over the years I’ve heard about this “from away” thing and never got it. It doesn’t live here, or here with us. Perhaps because we had no desire to change this place, these people, our neighbors and our friends. We didn’t want to make them like us, and they had no need to make us like them.
Maybe it had nothing to do with us and everything to do with them.
I didn’t get it then and I still don’t. But now that I’m faced with having to move from this house that never locks, can’t lock, has no need to be locked, from this hometown, these hometown folks, I wonder whether I will for the first time in twenty-five years be considered as someone other than just who I am.
NOTE: all photos are mine but honestly I’m a little tech deficient and so rather than resize photos so they’d be small enough to be put here (a skill I don’t have), I just took a photo of them on my screen.