POWER FAILURE

Constant drone from my gasoline generator is annoying this dark morning but I’m glad to have it. I’m warm. I’m drinking hot coffee, and I was able to take a hot shower this morning. I wish now, however, that I’d invested in one of those propane ones that goes on automatically when power goes out — and one of those big, submarine-shaped tanks to go with it. They’re much quieter and propane is relatively cheap when purchased in bulk for a tank you own. It’s day two of the latest power outage and I’m thankful again for electricity as I always am when I lose it and have to make my own.

My wife and I went to bed earlier than usual last night. There was no news to watch, no streaming video, no internet. We sipped wine and talked for a while by candlelight, but the drone from the generator disturbed the silence we both enjoy so much. I shut it down and we brought flashlights up to our bedroom thinking we would read before nodding off, but sleep came easily to both of us as we lay there savoring the stillness. However, my eyes opened at 3:00 am and wouldn’t close again. I had hoped the power would return in the night but it didn’t, and I’ll have to go out for more gasoline today to keep things running.

Fryeburg Harbor Cemetery

Only a year ago our economy was surging, prosperity was spreading, and Donald Trump looked like a shoe-in for reelection. No one went about wearing masks outside of an operating room. Now we’re having a second wave of “The Covid,” and it’s yet another issue spotlighting the widening political divide in our country. Reading the police blotter in last week’s Bridgton News I saw more than one item of neighbors reporting neighbors for not quarantining after returning from out of state, or having more house guests than Maine Governor Janet Mills allows under the emergency powers she was granted by the legislature.

Sunrise at Old Orchard Beach last winter

People in rural New England depend on small businesses for their livelihood and a number of them have closed down after the first shutdown. Others are barely hanging on after cutting staff, cutting hours, and looking in vain for more to trim in order to make it through another extended closure. Tolerance for shut downs out in rural New England is very thin.

Fryeburg Cemetery

Just about everyone in the country cooperated late last winter with what they were told would be a two-week economic shutdown to “flatten the curve” and avoid overwhelming our hospitals. Then it was extended “another few weeks” and then “another few weeks” and then “until June 1st,” and then until still another arbitrary date. Our economy was in free fall and never fully recovered even though spread eased over the summer.

Misty Morning Lovell, Maine

People began defying government restrictions and questioning the efficacy of shutdowns. Opposing opinions followed party lines. As the economy sank, so did President Trump’s political fortunes and Democrats nominated Joe Biden. Anti-Trumpism surged and continues unabated while he insists the election was fraudulent. Biden promises to unite the country but many wonder if that’s possible at this point. As we near the winter solstice with its shorter days and longer nights, optimism is harder to summon. Sunshine is scarce, literally and figuratively.

My mother at her 95th birthday last year

And then there’s this: last night five of my siblings and I had a group phone conversation about how to handle our 96-year-old mother’s rapidly declining health. She went into assisted living five years ago, then into long-term care for several weeks but none of us have been able to go inside for visits because of “The Covid.” During warmer weather she could occasionally be wheeled out to a patio wearing a mask, and staying six feet away for not more than an hour. Some nurses allowed one hug at the end. Some didn’t. It’s been tough.

Happier 95th

Last week she suffered a shoulder fracture in a fall and was hospitalized. With pain medication and other medical issues, lucidity is intermittent. At this writing, we’re looking for a hospice facility. She has said often lately that she’s ready to die. My siblings are spread around New England and it looks like one sister has found a centrally-located hospice that would allow up to six visitors during the day and one overnight. If we can get her in there soon, she won’t die alone. No one should, virus or no virus.

So far, I haven’t seen any Central Maine Power repair trucks on my road. As I listen to the drone of my generator, I’m reminded of how much we all depend on each other to keep things running. I’ll hold out hope that we can unite in spite of all that’s going on. I don’t like to think otherwise.

Grave Matters

Digging someone’s grave is an intimate thing, and I’ve done it twice now in just over a year. I’d buried pets like frogs and turtles when I was a boy, and a dog when I was an adult, but never a human being. I’d asked the caretaker at the small, private cemetery what rules or regulations there might be, which were very few. So, I loaded a couple of shovels into my truck and drove over the day before the funeral last spring.

My brother, Dan, died in Florida during March of 2012 of a chronic disease we both struggled with for years. He had lived a long time in North Fryeburg and, knowing death could come soon, told his wife of his wish to be buried there. He’d been cremated and she flew up with his ashes, so I didn’t have to dig a very big hole. She’d asked me to make a box for his urn and that, too, was a solitary, intimate experience.

Mark Woodbrey at Lovell Lumber

Once I had the urn’s dimensions, I went to Lovell Lumber and bought a ten-foot, one-by-twelve pine board. The mill owner, a fellow about my age, silently wrote out the slip for my meager, one-board purchase. “That’s all?” he asked, so I explained what I was making. He paused and looked up at me with a surprised expression and told me he had done the same thing for his brother.

“Hmm,” I said.

St. William's School Tewksbury, MA

 
Back in my garage, I thought about the carpentry projects I’d done for my brother because it wasn’t one of his skills, being in the plumbing and heating business. This would be the last. I wondered if he were observing me while I worked. He was my little brother and we shared a bedroom for many years. I protected him growing up in the neighborhood. As adults we perceived world quite differently in many ways and there were subjects I’d learned to avoid discussing while he was alive. That didn’t matter any more. “Ashes to ashes,” we were told by the nuns at St. William’s School, “dust to dust.” He had come to it sooner than I did.

My Uncle Joe's funeral last year

I’d been to professional funerals where artificial turf covered the excavated soil and edges of the hole, and with a stainless steel frame onto which the casket was placed and lowered by pulleys into a concrete vault. Backhoes dig those graves these days. I was doing it the old-fashioned way, alone with a shovel. Geese flew by in single-line flight, honking. Nature’s seasons mirror life’s seasons. Many poems, many songs compare them. My brother died in what should have been the autumn of his. His wife asked me to deliver his eulogy as well and I pondered that as I made the box and dug the grave. I knew that would be the hardest task because remembrances of my brother would not longer be my own private thoughts and feelings. I’d have to speak them in front of everyone.

This past spring, his son and my nephew, Danny Boy as we called him, died suddenly, also in Florida. The postmortem showed an enlarged heart. My wife and my sisters remembered how sensitive he was as a boy to the needs of his many younger cousins in our extended, Irish-Catholic family. Enlarged heart indeed. He was very gentle, and the world has a way of eating up those whose hearts are too big. The hundred-year-old Irish-American song “Danny Boy” is about a boy leaving his father in Ireland for America and how they may never see each other again. I thought about those lyrics as I dug still another grave uniting Dan and Danny Boy in death.

The area around the cemetery is familiar. I’d collected artifacts there over the years - remains of Indian occupation going back several millennia. If they buried their dead there too, evidence would have disappeared long before. That wasn’t likely though, given that the site was in the Saco flood plain and would have been under water in springtime, so their occupation was likely seasonal. All that’s been found were stone tools, hearths with charcoal, and calcine animal bone preserved by fire.

Cemetery on left, Old Saco on right

Conscious of that, I scrutinized each shovelful of soil but I found nothing in my brother’s grave last year. When I dug his son’s grave right next to it two weeks ago, however, I found chips of Mount Jasper Rhyolite from Berlin, NH just under the turf. That told me it was a toolmaking site many, many centuries ago. Both graves looked just like test pits we’d excavated four years previous within sight of where I was digging with a team of archaeologists and students.

Students in the test pits

British colonists and we Americans who derived from them have been in this area only 250 years or so. Artifacts I’ve found on that side of the Old Saco River go back about eight hundred, probably left by ancestors the Abenaki. Others have been found across the river going back several thousand, and we know relatively little about the people who made them. All civilizations eventually fade away and ours will as well. We’re all going to die of something, sooner or later, and being mindful of that enriches each new day. How we live those days determines how we’ll spend eternity. Meanwhile, a bit of a respite from graves, funerals and eulogies would suit me.