Crouseville Cemetery, Maine

There are 5 cemetaries in Crouseville, which is an unincorporated town within the town of Washburn in Aroostoock County, Maine. The population of all of Washburn in 1,500, so fewer still in Crouseville, and clearly more dead people than alive there as well. In 1800 the future Crouseville, Maine, did not have any particular name. In 1826 it was first surveyed by Joseph Norris and the early settlers living along the Aroostook River could not be certain if they lived in New Brunswick, a North American British Colony, or the United States. In 1839, the United States formed Aroostook County. This was an effort by the United States to lay claim to the area. In 1842, the Webster-Ashburton Treaty firmly established the area as United States territory, yet some townships in Maine were administratively part of Massachusetts, the mother state. My great grandmother was a Crouse, and the cemetery has more than its share of Crouse's buried there, but so too are there Woodman's. It sits atop a hill (there is another cemetery across the street, so this is clearly a better spot, or if not that then at least the better view. When my brother was buried there in 1969 you could see all the way to the river, but the pine trees have grown up and obstructed the view, but it is a beautiful location, none-the-less. It is well-tended and, something that is both important to Crouseville and important to my dad--there is a potato field that borders the cemetery just a stone's throw from our family plot. According to my cousin, it is farmed by a 2nd or 3rd cousin.

Burying My Father

I have been lucky in parental support. My parents always made it known that they supported me, and they did so both financially and emotionally, for a long time. I wasn't an orphan when I signed up for Medicare, but I did lose my father that year. The fact that it was a long time coming didn't help. That surprised me, and I am still struggling a bit with it. So it has come to this--the time to bury him, whether I am ready or not, it is time to make it final. My father was not ready to die. The last conversation I had with him was when he agreed that it was time to enter hospice. Intellectually he agreed that he did not want to go back and forth to the hospital any more, but emotionally he was nowhere ready to die. He was, we all agreed, a terrible patient. He became moribound from his congestive heart failure, get rushed to the hospital to diurese, and then wake up and become ever so grouchy about why he was there. He made me promise that when he died that I would bury him next to my brother in a family plot he had bought when he was in high school in Northern Maine. That turned out to be a bit tricky, because the geography of the gravesite left only one spot next to my brother, and my mother was definitely pulling rank and wanted to be buried next to my father--thankfully, they both are opting for cremation and they can share a spot, allowing both of them to be next to my brother. On the other side my brother, who died as a child, is flanked by my grandmother, who died long before I could ever meet her, but I have her genetic mutation. It killed her, but not me, at least so far, but being in that place, with all of them, me and my mother alive, my brother and father dead, was emotionally complicated for me. I feel grateful to have had them, even for the short time my brother live, grateful to be alive, and grateful my family came with me to say goodbye. My father was disappointed that while his mind was clear, his body failed him--I am happy to say that we did not.

Barton Street, Presque Isle, Maine

When my spouse and I envisioned the trip to bury my dad, we did not have a crowd in mind, but our kids saw it differently. My parents had spent the eight years before he died living nearby and my folks had been a constant in my children's lives--they came annually if not more often, and this was the first death in our family since my FIL died over a decade earlier. So there was quite the crew and instead of staying in one of the hotels in town, I got three Airbnb's and one of them was on the street that my mother grew up on, just down the block from the church she got married in. The house here is the one that I knew, but it turns out that my grandparents built it when my mother was in high school and she only lived there a couple of years. They had the property long before that, but were unable to build during WWII--so what I thought of as the family homestead was not so much that, although my grandparents lived there until the mid-70's. The house she lived in growing up was just down the block, and one of the very fun things about the trip for all of us was my mother reminiscing on each and every drive we made between the three houses and to and from restaurants the whole trip--it is very likely her last trip here, and it was really great to see it once more through her eyes. My kids had the opportunity to fall in love with Maine as adults, and we all had a chance to see it as my parents did.

Ode to the New England Lobster Roll

Lobster is not quite part of me, but it is certainly in my culture. My parent's come from immigrant stock--we all do, of course, except for the vanishingly few of us who were here to begin with, and even they most likely immigrated themselves, albeit centuries earlier. My kin came with the early settlers to the Massachusetts Colony and were part of the City State of Boston before the Revolutionary War, and moved gradually northward--My mother's family English with a bit of Norman blood, and my father's more what 24 and Me calls "northern Scandanavian" origins--the Scots. They came for reasons of religious independence, but they were certainly living off the land and the lobster was easily caught prey. I learned to both cook and eat a lobster at an early age--as a child my favorite part was the legs--and as I grew older I gained an appreciation for learning to love the crustacean. So on a recent trip to New England, one where we left my dad behind, my mother, my spouse, and I all ate a lot of lobster, mostly as a lobster roll (my favorite, and one of his), and thought about how much he would have enjoyed joining us, and how I will never eat lobster without thinking of him.

Maine Solar System Model

We were in Presque Isle this summer and discovered this wonderful model of the solar system as we drove northward from Houlton. The Maine Solar System—the largest scale model of the solar system in the western hemisphere, and the second largest such model in the world—stretches for nearly 100 miles along U.S. Route 1. The model, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, features nine planets (including Pluto, which was a planet when the model was first established), three dwarf planets (including Pluto, based on its current status and present location closer to the Sun), and seven associated large moons at Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto. Other dwarf planets, to be located north of the Sun at Lille and Madawaska, are planned. You could plan to see them all, but what happened to us is that we saw Saturn (which is hard to miss), then Jupiter, and then it was a question of where are all the rest? Lucky for us, because we were there for purposes other than site seeing, five of them are in and around Presque Isle, and the hard part is spotting them because the planets are all quite small, and then the sun, which is so huge you aren't sure if it is just a huge yellow arch or actually part of the model sun. One thing I will not forget is the scale (as well as the distance between them all), which drives home the scale of our solar system, and really, it was quite fun.

Origin Story: A Return to Presque Isle

In June we returned to what is really the origin of my family, the state of Maine. The occasion was the burial of my father, and while my parents are both from Aroostook County, we have rarely been since I left home almost 50 years ago. The burial of my three grandparents who died in my lifetime, and the 50th wedding anniversary of one of my great aunt and uncles is the sum total of my trips to what was once my family homeland. Maine is a product of the Ice Age. The last glacier was responsible for cutting what had been a relatively straight coastline into the hundreds of bays, inlets and picturesque harbors we know today. The receding ice sheet formed the 2,000 or so islands found off the Maine coast. The region's earliest inhabitants were descendants of Ice Age hunters. Little is known of these "Red Paint" people - so named because of the red clay with which they lined the graves of their dead - except that they flourished and hunted in Maine long before the coming of the Micmac and Abnaki Indian nations. Burial grounds for these earliest Maine dwellers are thought to date back to 3000 B.C. Huge oyster shell heaps on the Damariscotta estuary testify to the capacious appetites of Maine's aborigines. Colonization came to Maine as it did to much of North America in the 17th century--A number of English settlements were established along the Maine coast in the 1620s, although the rugged climate, deprivations and Indian attacks wiped out many of them over the years. As Maine entered the 18th century, Massachusetts had bought up most of the land claims in this wilderness territory, an arrangement which lasted until 1820 when Maine separated from Massachusetts to become a separate state. At that point in time that my folks relatives were there--and maybe that is a bit of where the French in my gene pool came from, with England and France jockeying for control of the region. So while I rarely return, it feels comfortable when I do.

Tea Time

I bought this ceramic tea set at an estate sale for a price so reasonable that I wasn't concerned if the kids were to break it, and it turns out the magic of pouring imaginary tea is a constant across generations. As far back as the 1500s, the Dutch were making Delft earthenware (a soft, easily chipped ware). Then, in 1602, the Dutch East India Company was founded, bringing Chinese tea—and porcelain, to European shores. With tea being pretty much an instant hit, the first tea sets designed for children came out of Germany as early as 1687. Finally, a mathematician and alchemist team hit upon the formula for porcelain, and the Meissen factory opened near Dresden in 1710 (Malone 1976). Unsurprisingly, much of their ware imitated Chinese motifs. The one that I purchased came from Colonial Williamsburg and so has those rather than more traditional themes, but is just as popular in my home as in American homes 300 yearas ago.

A Day For The Dead

There are many traditions that have a time to remember those who have passed on. In Mexico in particular and Latin America generally, there is a tradition that is a mash up of the Aztec tradition of honoring the dead and the Catholic All Saints Day--this is a conquistador tactic that has a brutal past, where the Spaniards destroyed local places of worship and built a church on top of it, so there is a grizzly past for this but one that has been embraced in modern times. Celebrants are assured that the dead would be insulted by mourning or sadness, so instead the day celebrates the lives of the deceased with food, drink, parties, and activities the dead enjoyed in life. Dia de los Muertos recognizes death as a natural part of the human experience, a continuum with birth, childhood, and growing up to become a contributing member of the community. On Dia de los Muertos, the dead are also a part of the community, awakened from their eternal sleep to share celebrations with their loved ones. So I take this time to reflect on my own loved ones who have left before me, and to hope that there will be those who remember me when I am gone.

Summer in the Tetons

Our pandemic purchase, if you do not count moving up the date of our outdoor remodel from someday to this summer, was a house in the Tetons. The timing was right in a lot of ways. We were selling the house in town that we had for our kids who were students. The last of them has left a year before and our youngest was so unlikely to want to live there that despite really loving it, it was time to let it go. We had only gone one place the whole year of COVID, which was to visit our only child who lives away. And while we were there we visited the Tetons. It was so peaceful and beautiful, how were we to resist? We did not, as it turns out. We were not the only ones to think that it might be nice to live in such a gorgeous setting, and it was hard to get something that would suit, but in the end we did and this summer we are doing the thing that is great fun. We are bringing the next generation to the mountains. We still have to go to Vermont with them but they will be able to enjoy the West this year.

First Victorian House to the Last

It is our 40th anniversary today. That is a big number. Four decades. Half of a lot of people's lives. Hard to believe, other than when you do the math, and I realize that in order to be close to being eligible for Medicare and also be in the second highest COVID risk category that I am indeed quite old, does it even seem possible. It all started in this beautiful Victorian house on Charlesfield St. in Providence. The house was built in 1869 and had undergone many iterations before we lived there, and a few since we left, but it is a regal house even if we didn't always treat it as such. We found each other there, as well as making some life long friends, and learning how to live with other people in a big way. I learned a lot about myself living in a housing co-op and I definitely learned how to cook for a crowd, skills that have served me well.

Forty years down the road, children grown, we live in this house, built in 1864, during the Civil War. We have returned to a place that reminds us of our youth, and truthfully, it was in pretty similar condition to our first Victorian house when we started with it. This year, the year of the pandemic, has taught me quite a few things, some of them valuable. One is that a sense of community is not universal. It tuens out that there are a lot of people who do not see themselves as part of and responsible to a community. As a health care worker I have been largely spared COVID deniers and conspiracy theorists. I can shut that down within seconds, the stories I know are so sad. It hasn't been an easy year, but it also has not been the hardest we have endured. In the end, I continue to be forever grateful, going back to my mispent youth, that I found the love of my life so early on, and that we had this shared communal experience. May we make progress in 2021.

Tradition!

Weddings can be stressful, or so I hear.  I have never put one together, so I can't say with any sort of knowledge base, but people tell me that.  Certainly the wedding of my oldest son was very stressful for me, but it was all related to the food, which my spouse and I were responsible for.  This time around, we do have the desserts on our plate, but be sure, and we are most certainly not people who decorate wedding cakes, so one more hurdle this time around to go. 
All that said, I really love an event where whole families congregate to celebrate a life event.  All my nieces and nephews will be here, as well as their parents, and some relatives that are more distant when it comes to blood, but who have always made the effort to attend these occasions.  My house has been filled, by larder has been emptied, I have relied on friends and family to help pull this off, and it is a very warm feeling indeed.  Rejoice, even though not everything in the world is well.

85 Years Ago

My mother was born 85 years ago today.  We are 25 years apart in age, so there is always a perspective of the quarter century between she and I.  When my parents had their 50th wedding anniversary we did a look back at that year, but I had never done it for the year my mother was born.
1934 saw the turning point in the Great Depression in America with unemployment decreasing to 22% (which sounds terrible, but is down from about a third of the population), whereas in other parts of the world  it was arguably one of the worst years of the Great Depression with the world's economy hit rock bottom. As the situation seemed increasingly hopeless, more and more people turned to whoever promised them a better life. At this time in history, the rising leaders used peoples' fears and prejudices to rally support and create a scapegoat for the world's problems.  That sounds familiar.  Hitler declared himself the fuhrer, Stalin was on a rampage, and Mussolini was re--elected, solidifying support for Fascism.  On the other hand, Bonnie and Clyde were caught and John Dillinger was gunned down in a shoot out--the America of old was closing out and our era of rise was beginning.

The Blessing of Siblings

It has been said that one's siblings are the ones who know you over your lifetime.  Your parents are likely to pre-decease you and your spouse often did not know you as a child.  One may have friends who last a lifetime and cousins that you may be lucky enough to know long term, but for sure if you have siblings, they are going to have grown up and grown old with you.
I feel quite fortunate to have married into a family when my spouse's siblings treat me like family.  I met my husband when we were quite young, so it has literally been almost 40 years, or 2/3 of my life that I have known them.  Early on we were getting through school and starting families, but as is so often said, it really does fly by.  Now we are thinking about what we want to do in our retirement and supporting each other as we struggle with the inevitable things that complicate your life after the children leave home.  Through it all, I know that sharing the burden really does make it lighter and asking for help means that you will get it.  So happy birthday to may sister-in-law, who is really one of kindest people I know.

Eggtoberfest 2018

There are many things that can unite a family, but for us, it really revolves around food.  My husband's family is all about the food.  Eating it, talking about it, cooking it, we bond over food in a very big way, and we have passed that on to our offspring. Phew.  Whatever ways we may diverge over the years ahead, at least we have that.
I remember being really shocked when my brother's wife said quite clearly that they do not travel to experience the food.  What?  That is not even remotely understandable to me.  Food is culture and culture, long with beauty, are the two things that I love about travel.  So I am left with traveling with my food priority relatives.
So no surprise that we all had a great weekend recently we had a wonderful time at a BBQ festival revolving around the Big Green Egg in Atlanta.  It was more smoked and grilled food than you could imagine, and all of us together as well.  Divine.

The Power of the Egg

One thing that binds my husband's siblings together is food.  And the cooking of food.  So when it comes to outdoor cooking, not one of us would argue against the Big Green Egg.
I remember when my husband first told me that he was going to buy one.  He did not explain that it was a ceramic kamodo-style grill, modeled on an ancient method.  The earliest cooking vessels were made of clay and found in China, dated to be over 3,000 years old. All over the world these cooking vessels evolved in many different ways, and in Japan a clay pot with a removable dome lid became popular. This device was called a "mushikamado" and it included a damper and draft door for better heat control. It was introduced to Americans after the Second World War, and eventually, it became known as a "kamado" which literally means "cooking range" or "stove" in Japanese.
I love the egg, and so when asked if I wanted to go to a cooking festival revolving around all things cooked in an egg, I acquiesced.

Grandparenting, Year One

And what a fabulous year it has been.  While Our son and DIL do not live very near, they arte also not too far away, and they have been far more adventurous about traveling with their young daughter than we were at that same point in life.  If you wanted to see out first child, you really had to arrive on site, or you were SOL.  So long story short, we have seen our grandchild quite a bit this year, and it has been so much fun.
I know. People say that.  We were not amongst the convinced before it happened to us, but in retrospect, we completely missed the boat on how fabulous this was going to be.  Through this that and the other thing, we were there the day she was born, and while it could have been an incredible pain to have us there, we were graced with the good luck to be able to be useful, not in the way in the least, and to meet her on her very first day of life.  We find her endlessly fascinating and cannot wait to see what year two will hold.

Mourning the Dead

Edvard Munch had a thing about death, and when I saw an exhibit of his work last summer, there was a whole room full of paintings that were about death and dying.  This one in particular really captures how I feel, almost 50 years later, about the death of my brother.
He was born over half a century ago and came home on my second birthday.  I don't remember that part, or when he got polio five months later.  I always remember him in a wheelchair, and as such he was more often home than not.  We were unusually close for siblings, mostly as a result of his physical limitations, and when he dies when I was ten, I was a bereft child living in a house with parents who had lost their child and a remaining sibling who could barely walk and talk.  The loneliness and sadness that this painting captures is so much about how hard, almost impossible it was to move beyond that grief.  It wasn't until I was in college that I could even face that it was a problem and even today, I will sob through anything that I write that skirts on his death.  However, that is not the memory that he would have wanted to leave behind.  So I find joy in my sons, who carry a bit of him inside them, and on this one day each year, I cry.  It is a compromise.

Growing Up With Grief

My brother was born 55 years ago today, and came home several days later on my birthday.  Sadly, he soon contracted polio, and the complications of it killed him eight years later.  That was the first tragedy in my life, having a sibling who was first physically disabled and then gone.  I grew up with it. What happened to me was so much different from what was happening to other ten year olds that it became hard to identify with those who hadn't had something major to cope with.  Then, as now, people don't much talk about the sadness in their lives, and so while it wasn't verbalized, I was drawn to those who shared my silence and my grief.  I didn't know this consciously, but in retrospect it was the beginning of a life long pattern.
The first was a friend whose family had escaped the Shah's Iran.  How they had come to leave their homeland and live near me I never knew much about, but I did know that I was comfortable with them, and they nurtured another love, one of food from multiple cultures.  I never turned down a meal at their table, and my favorite meals to this day are those that highlight food that I do not make well, foods from cultures that are not my own.  The second close friend at that time grew up in a large family of adopted children, herself included.  Her parents adopted those who were hard to adopt.  Her sister had leukemia, another had hydrocephalus, a third was born without functioning limbs.  No one could visit her house and feel that they had the worst fate.  All sorts of unfortunate possibilities were visually on display.
 In many ways I was lucky to learn to cope with this early on in life.  Life is hard and not fair and yet exquisitely beautiful.  I think it helped me be resilient and thankful for what I have, and yet the sadness of loss had not gone away.  So today I once again thank my brother for everything that he taught me in his all too short life.

Slack Time, Family Style

One of my sons is working with a start up that is using the application Slack.  It is an app that was developed for businesses to improve communication and keep some things out of your email inbox.  In an effort to better understand what our kid is doing, we as a family have been slacking.
I am very much an old dog learning a new trick.  I was not what you would call particularly enthusiastic about the process, and it took some coaching for me to even realize how to move from conversation to conversation but now I am in love with it.  There is no sense of urgency to respond like there is with a text.  There are multiple conversations set up with various groups of people in our Slack family, and it is much easier to find them and move between them than it is for me on Facebook Message.  So here I am, in my mid-50s, finding yet another new fangled thing pretty great.

The Act of Giving Thanks

I had the pleasure of spending the afternoon with several of my nieces and nephews recently and they tried to convince me that since Thanksgiving is a day of family that I should really make the trip back East to enjoy it with my extended family.  I let them know that while I loved them all very much, traveling at Thanksgiving is off the table for me.  Just too much craziness with fellow travelers who don't travel often, and shall we say, are not in the mood of the holiday when they are stuck or delayed.  Which in November is bound to happen somewhere.  As a people we have lost the sense of wonder at how quickly we can get places and have replaced it with irritation when that doesn't materialize for us.  So traveling at Thanksgiving is more like hand to hand combat than a celebration.

The fact that we are not together often enough does not change the fact that I love being an aunt.   I am not much of a lover of small children, but I do love teens.  My nieces and nephews are all growing into amazing people doing many cool and different things, and I take neither the credit nor the blame.  It is perfect.  I can just enjoy them.