Signs of Summer's Eb

Looking out over the yard two weeks ago I noticed spider webs on the lawn sparkling with morning dew That’s been a sure reminder that summer break is past its late-July halfway point and schools will be reopening in a matter of weeks. Today, crickets are chirping in the yard during daylight hours and that’s an August sign that fall is getting even closer. The autumn chill the past few mornings brings a certain fragrance with it and nothing brings back memories more powerfully than familiar smells.

It’s been more than eight years since my retirement, but from ages six to sixty my life was dictated by the academic calendar as student or teacher. These distinctly New England sights, sounds, and smells will always affect me the same ways. I would feel a combination of lament for the fading summer mixed with dread and pleasant anticipation of going back to school. Soon the big yellow school bus will go by my house at 7:00 am. I’ll look up from my reading and remember all those times I’d be heading out the door to follow close behind it. Not anymore though, because I’m no longer captive to the academic calendar. Now I can choose how to spend my day. I can go anywhere, do anything. 

Dawn at Moose Pond in Bridgton, Maine

For example, watching sunlight fill the day with a camera in my hand is one of my favorite things. That’s more difficult from May through July when the sun clears the horizon around five am. I’m usually up by 4:30 but I prefer to shower, exercise, dress, and drink coffee before going out. From late August through November, it is much easier to accomplish that. Being out and about at dawn is usually a solitary endeavor, but sometimes I’ll see another dawn person on my sojourns. I’ll nod to them or perhaps say good morning, but they usually enjoy their privacy as much as I do. They’ll nod back and then we’ll each go our own way.

Twilight at Kezar Lake in Lovell, Maine

Watching daylight fade at dusk is another special time. I like to be out and about then too, but so do many others. Unlike the solitude of dawn, twilight is more of a social time, especially in late summer and fall when daylight diminishes at an accelerating rate — from two minutes per day June to July — to three by end of August. By September 1st those small increments have added up to the point where daylight has diminished by two hours since school let out in June. In early August we see the first leaves turning red, usually on maples stressed by various factors like too much or two little water. Sumacs change early as well and sometimes it starts as early as July. Certain ferns turn yellow and then brown. Soon the sweetish smell of decaying vegetation can be detected after a rain.

Our back field in Lovell, Maine

For months, there’s been a big pile of tree-length hardwood in my back field. It’s hard to estimate but there are probably twelve cords plus or minus, and it needs to be cut and split. I used to do that work every year at this time, and I may go out there and do a little just for old time’s sake — but that’s all. I miss the unique fragrance given off while splitting red oak and I want to experience that again, but I don’t need the wood. It’s all there because I asked someone to cut the trees beyond the field that were getting too tall and blocking some of our view. I didn’t think it would amount to that much firewood, but a former student has agreed to work it up in September.

My daughter and grandson

In a few more weeks people will be donning an extra layer as they go out in the morning. Some may even start a fire in the wood stove. Then they’ll look at their wood piles and think about adding to them. It’s hard to get motivated to do that kind of thing in August when the temperature is in the 80s every day. It makes me tired now to remember myself as a young man spending two August weeks getting out my firewood, hauling it home, and sweating off ten or fifteen pounds in the process. I’ve been heating with oil the past several years and only keep around a little wood for the fireplace. These days I’d rather go out and take pictures to sell — then pay someone else to work up all that wood.

Sunrise at the Eastern Prom in Portland, Maine

Fickle Flirt

Portland Harbor 2017

Spring has teased for weeks now, but New England knows she’s a flirt and not always a pretty one. Snowbanks melt back along streets in Portland to show us accumulated trash the careless have dropped or thrown from car windows all winter. With it are thawing remains of pigeons and seagulls. Little is picked up because we know more snow will bury it again and soon.

My granddaughters in Lovell

Along country roads the melt exposes empty beer cans but thankfully not many. Other detritus is mostly leaves and branches — the benign debris of Nature. Turkey buzzards back from southern climes appear overhead scouting remains of forest animals too old and weak to have survived winter. During seasonal transitions we look forward and back. New England poet Robert Frost reflected on this in A Patch of Old Snow:

There’s a patch of old snow in a corner

That I should have guessed

Was a blow-away paper

The rain had brought to rest.

It is speckled with grime as if

Small print overspread it,

The news of a day I’ve forgotten — 

If I ever read it.

Few poets appeal to me but Frost always has, and he knew the tease of March and April. Reading him I see it, smell it, feel it.

Frost in New Hampshire

Warm breezes over Portland Harbor carry a stronger scent of salt water. The sea was whipped up last weekend by a strong storm to our south and helped a full moon, making high tide very high indeed. Wind whipped the white salt spray from tops of waves, but Boston and Cape Cod absorbed most of the fury.

Next to Portland Harbor a mountain of snow melts slowly. Front-end loaders on city streets filled trucks that dumped load after load beside it as bulldozers pushed snow up ever higher up its side. Like the dirty snowbanks that comprise it, no white is visible. It’s a pile of frozen liquid covered with sand that doesn’t melt completely until the end of May sometime.

My back yard

After the flirt of our fickle New England spring comes the snub. By the time you’re reading this another storm will have blanketed everything once again. Then spring will resume her flirting only to spurn us again before April arrives. But our April spring isn’t steadfast either. Frost tells of that in the third stanza of Two Tramps in Mudtime:

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.

You know how it is with an April day

When the sun is out and the wind is still,

You're one month on in the middle of May.

But if you so much as dare to speak,

A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,

A wind comes off a frozen peak,

And you're two months back in the middle of March.

It’s not just ominous buzzards. Other, more agreeable birds appear too. Near the sea in South Portland I’ll see cardinals, but rarely do I see them in the mountains near Lovell.

Out my office window to NH

Frost the poet spent decades in New Hampshire, the mountains of which I see out my office window in western Maine. He describes another spring songbird in the fourth stanza:

A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight

And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,

His song so pitched as not to excite

A single flower as yet to bloom.

It is snowing a flake; and he half knew

Winter was only playing possum.

Except in color he isn't blue,

But he wouldn't advise a thing to blossom.

March brings New Englanders together in town meetings as sap buckets appear on old maple trees. Mud forms atop frozen ground after the sun is high but freezes again at night — over and over before finally drying firm again. Mud doesn’t impede life in paved-over cities but it brings many things to a halt in the countryside. Roads are posted against heavy trucks. Loggers and builders wait for mud to dry, but most of us savor warm spring breezes. Frost wrote about those in To the Thawing Wind:

Come with rain, O loud Southwester! 

Bring the singer, bring the nester; 

Give the buried flower a dream; 

Make the settled snow-bank steam; 

Find the brown beneath the white; 

But whate’er you do to-night, 

Bathe my window, make it flow, 

Melt it as the ice will go; 

Melt the glass and leave the sticks 

Like a hermit’s crucifix; 

Burst into my narrow stall; 

Swing the picture on the wall; 

Run the rattling pages o’er; 

Scatter poems on the floor; 

Turn the poet out of door.

When our New England spring finally exposes the brown earth beneath, my wife is turned out with her boots on to scratch it and coax her buried flowers upward.

Rhythms of Life

“I got rhythm, I got music,” goes the old Gershwin lyric, and I like both. I can’t dance well and I don’t play any musical instruments, but the rhythms of life? I’ve willingly subjected myself to them and I’m better off for it. I’m in bed before nine o’clock every night and asleep minutes after, then I’m up and at it by 5:00 am. That makes me a morning person, but I wasn’t always. During the first half of my adult life I was a night owl who hated to get up in the morning. As a child, however, my daily routine had been parentally imposed — bed at 8:30 pm and up at 6:00 am, so I’ve gotten back to an older, more natural routine.

Day's End Casco Bay

On that note, three Americans recently won a Nobel Prize for medicine because of their research into the benefits of what they call “circadian” rhythm. They claim bad things can result when we upset our daily sleep cycles, things like increased risk of cancer and “degenerative neurological conditions.”

New Nobel Laureates

Important as daily rhythms are, I think our annual rhythms are too and this year seems strange. As someone born and raised in New England I like my seasons, all four of them — even though up here in the mountains of Maine winter can be a bit too long. By March, nearly everyone wants it over and all of us long for signs of spring, even the tiniest manifestation, like a glimpse of bare ground between snow storms can be enough to sustain us for weeks, but we got none of those last spring. March was colder than January and April wasn’t springlike either. Summer was fine when it finally arrived, but now it has stretched into October. It feels unnatural.

From Portland Press Herald

One of those new Nobel Prize winners, Jeffrey C. Hall, lives in rural Maine. He’s retired with seven dogs and several Harley Davidson motorcycles in Cambridge, Maine, which is in the geographic center of the state — in the boonies. He’s not a stereotypical scientist with a lab coat, but instead looks just like any other pot-bellied, middle-aged, balding, white-guy, Harley driver you often see on the back roads of northern New England. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Washington DC, he gradually migrated north to New England, first to Massachusetts and finally to Maine. I wonder if he’s noticing how our seasonal rhythms are off this year.

Kezar Lake Sunset

I’ve been living in rural Maine forty years and we always expected the first frost shortly after Labor Day. We’d would get out the winter jackets for Fryeburg Fair week — not every day, but one or two. This year it was shorts and tee-shirts for most of October’s first week. I like wearing shorts with those little socks under my sneakers from June through August, but then I’m ready to don long pants and taller socks come September. We’ve always gotten a few warm days in the fall and they’re nice, but not every day. I’ve had to put a fan on me to sleep in both September and October. That’s not supposed to happen and it’s throwing off my annual rhythm.

Autumn in the Yard

Autumn in New England has its own smells too and they’re comforting to me as my olfactory sense gets stronger as I get older, although maybe it only seems that way as both my eyesight and hearing get measurably weaker. There’s a certain very pleasant scent detectable when I first step outside on a crisp, clear fall morning. I get a burst of energy when the weather cools that I used to expend on things like splitting and stacking firewood. Cool air and autumn breezes would keep me from sweating too much and I liked smelling smoke from a woodstove while I worked. I also liked keeping at it until sunset, then going inside for dinner.

Early snow in the yard

In November, I look forward to the first snow. I can always smell it before it comes and it’s comforting as long as I’ve got all my autumn chores done. November can be cold enough to break out the flannel-lined pants and woolen socks which I’ll then wear right through most of March, or all if it as I did this year because it was often below zero. If the first snow doesn’t come in November it’ll surely come not too far into December.

By then our days will have shortened, but government upset that rhythm by imposing Daylight Savings Time, which ends at midnight, November 4th this year. I wonder what Mr. Hall and his Nobel laureate colleagues think of that. I’d like to ignore the mandated time changes, but then I’d be an hour out of step with the rest of America.

Making Scents

Every home has a smell, some are pleasant, others unpleasant, most are neutral. A relative who liked to flip houses used to bake bread just before the realtor brought a potential buyer on a walk-through. Other people consciously introduce smells with air fresheners or potpourri. Most home smells, however, are an amalgam created by the ordinary activities of living such as cooking, washing, burning wood, and keeping pets. Homes in which people don’t wash or clean very often smell like that.

For years I had a paper route and on Friday afternoons, I’d knock on kitchen doors to get paid for the week. I’d be invited to stand on the floor mat just inside and I’d get a whiff of over forty homes in just a few hours. Many of my customers cooked the same thing every Friday - usually fried haddock or cod - and I’d notice if they changed routine to macaroni and cheese. There were lots of Catholics who didn’t eat meat on Fridays in those days. In summer when windows were open, I could smell homes nearly every day and I began to appreciate how a dog perceives his world with his nose in the air.
We like whatever smells we’ve been conditioned to associate with something good. As a life-long New Englander, I enjoy seasonal change and my favorite season tends to be whichever one is just arriving. Each has its own smells and it’s usually on a warm day in late February when I detect the first scent of spring. Something thaws upwind and a breeze wafts it to my nose. Though I don’t see it, I visualize a south-facing slope under a white pine with fragrant brown needles warming in the sun. A fond memory is tapped and I savor its associated feelings, but then have to remind myself that it’s a tease and more cold is inevitable before a melt can be sustained. A month later thawing days outnumber freezing ones and spring scents dominate. This March has been unusually warm and last Sunday’s gentle showers after seventy-degree sunshine Saturday re-created that sweet smell of soft rain on warm, dry macadam that usually comes only in summer.When I stopped smoking twenty-five years ago, my olfactory detection system seemed to intensify. It didn’t really of course; it just returned to normal. More memories and feelings from childhood were triggered by scents that had always been around me but were masked by tobacco smoke. The only thing that can approach the strength of smell when evoking old moods might be hearing an old song on the radio.

Fifty years ago my parents got an idea to paint the concrete walls and floor of our basement and set up the Christmas tree down there. There were eight of us kids and there would be more room to spread out all the toys and gifts on Christmas morning. Ever since, the smell of certain oil-based paints sends me right back there.
Often my childhood friends and I would build “forts” that were nothing but a hole in the ground with boards placed across and leaves spread over them for camouflage. We’d spend hours digging in the earth with our fathers’ spades. Now, whenever a backhoe or excavator digs a fresh hole, the smell of fresh dirt triggers a memory of the secure feeling I had sitting in the “fort” like a chipmunk in his den.

When catalytic converters were mandated on new cars, I recall the peculiar odor they produced compared to the exhaust from older cars I was accustomed to smelling. Now they’re ubiquitous and I don’t notice anymore. Then someone will start up an old vehicle and that old smell summons those old memories.

It’s almost a decade since I cut my firewood from the stump which I had done for two decades prior, but I only have to fire up my chainsaw, drop a tree and my nose takes me right back there. A freshly-used landing on a woodlot down the street does the same thing when I walk past it. It’s the still-fresh sawdust and the stumps still oozing sap.My favorite smell these days is the sweet scent of my granddaughter. It’s difficult to describe except to say that it’s the same smell all babies who are loved and cared for have. Together with the feel of her soft hair, her laugh and her smiling face, her smell is a reminder, a reaffirmation, a renewal.

Going Inward

Take down the screens. Bring in the firewood. There’s snow on Mount Washington and it’s time to go inward. People who don’t like this are packing up to go south if they haven’t left already. As Tom Rush put it, they got the urge for goin’. Although it can get tiresome in March, I like being inside during late fall and early winter. I feel different outside too. Wearing flannel-lined pants, a quilted shirt and wool socks, I’m protected against the elements inside my clothing even if a chill wind reddens my cheeks. A whiff of woodsmoke from someone’s chimney turns my thoughts to home and if I smell something cooking as I go back inside it feels even better.

New Englanders are accustomed to changing seasons, having four distinct ones every year. Though we see more transformation, each season unfolds in customary ways with familiar sights, sounds and smells bringing memories of seasons past. Autumn chills make us grateful for warm, dry homes and hot food. It’s no wonder Thanksgiving originated here. If we should forget what’s really important, we’re reminded more often than people in many other regions. Changing seasons put us through familiar cycles and, I think, help us to accept the cycles of life more graciously than we otherwise might.

We go to bed hours after it’s dark in these latitudes and a lot of us wake up before it gets light. There’s something about seeing stars still in the sky as the eastern horizon is just starting to become visible. I feel I have time to get ready for the day, that I’ll be able to deal with it as it unfolds. By the time it’s light enough to see, I’m showered, dressed, and drinking coffee.

Daylight is more precious as it diminishes quickly in November. We savor the dim glow before sunrise, the twilight after dusk and evening’s bright starlight. The Milky Way on a cold, clear autumn night will mesmerize whoever turns his eyes upward. Unlike some city folk who seldom if ever see stars, we who live in the woods of northern New England know that they really do twinkle. Usually I’m out in the yard at such times and I can look back at the house and see into the lighted windows. Use to be it was full of children. Now they’re grown and out in the world somewhere, but under the same stars.

Inside, we contemplate things at fireside. Deeper thoughts and feelings come while watching flames turn to embers. Conversation is subtle, personal. Going out into the cold for another armload of wood and returning to fireside renews contentment. We don’t forget the tumult of the wider world, but it’s way out there beyond the town. There are layers between us and it. We can keep it out there and be safe for a time. Then sleep will come and take us to a new day.

Inside, we read. We write letters because writing is personal. It’s still a conversation but we don’t loose trains of thought because the words are right there. We take time to write because the reader will focus as much as the writer. And if he wants, he can go over the words again or share them with others.

This morning, even Baldface is white. Early wet snows like yesterday’s will soak through my workboots if I don’t treat them with mink oil. An old toothbrush works to apply the stuff and it needs to absorb overnight next to the fire or over a furnace vent. With a good pair of merino wool socks, treated workboots will do for autumn. I have 50-below Sorels for deep winter, but they stayed in the closet last season because deep cold and snow never came. Might need them this year though. Winter’s coming, but I’m ready. Going inward for a while is a good thing.

Feeling Small

Used to be the lawn didn’t grow much in August, but this year is different. There’s so much water in the ground that it still needs mowing every week. The field below it has to be mowed once a year and that requires an industrial-strength mower called a bush hog. Last week, I rented one that you sometimes see advertised on TV. It’s a walk-behind unit, not the kind that is attached to the back of a farm tractor. It’s self-propelled, sort of, but it doesn’t have a steering wheel. Turning the thing around at the end of a pass again and again requires more strength and endurance than is left in my 55-year-old body. It’s a two-acre field on the side of Christian Hill and it’s too steep to go side to side, so I had to walk up and down a hundred times behind the machine and hold on to it as it climbed over and chopped up various plants which had grown as tall as I am. Even with numerous breaks to catch my breath, it took a month off the end of my life to finish.

It’s the field’s second incarnation. A farmer named McDaniels created it a century and a half ago. He cleared it and rolled stones down the hill into a wall. Some were too big, so he drilled and split them into smaller, irregularly-shaped pieces that he maneuvered into place on the wall. He must have run out of energy too because he left two big rocks only partially split. Then he planted apple trees. I don’t know how long he worked the apple orchard but eventually he or someone else abandoned it to the forest. By the time I purchased the property it was all woods again. Among the oaks, ashes maples, and birches a few skeletons of long-dead apple trees remained between the stone walls. It took me about a decade to clear it again, cutting trees and burning brush. Many times I sat on one of the walls McDaniels made and wiped sweat from my face as I looked over my work. I imagined that he must have sat there and done the same generations ago. Eventually I hired someone to stump it with an excavator and replant it into a field.

As it would have for McDaniels, the field provides me a marvelous view to the west and I never tire of watching sunsets over Kearsarge in the spring and Baldface in the summer. On clear days, I can see smoke from the cog railway on Mount Washington. Having trekked up and down those mountains I know how massive they are, but when I’m over there and looking back east toward my property on Christian Hill, I can barely make out the hill, much less my field or my house. It helps me realize that my years of hard work are nearly invisible in the grand scheme of things. The hills and mountains are hundreds of millions of years old and my time on them is not much more than the brief, dim glow from a firefly’s butt. Humility is a good thing and I have much to be humble about. If I should forget, someone or something will usually remind me. It might be my wife. It might be a letter to the editor.

All that remained of McDaniels’ work were a few stone walls hidden by woods. I cleared the trees just as he did and constructed a few smaller walls with the help of a friend. Hopefully, they’ll last as long as his. McDaniels also carved his initials on a granite boundary marker nearby. On the other side of Christian Hill, there may someday be a stone with my name engraved in the Number Four Cemetery and somebody else will probably mow around it, for a while anyway.

Though I can see a long way toward large mountains in New Hampshire, I remind myself that what appears a panorama to me is but a tiny sliver of earth’s surface and earth is a tiny speck in the universe. When George Bailey had similarly insignificant feelings about his place and time here in Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” an angel visited to convince him otherwise. I haven’t seen any angels lately and I’m mostly glad I have so little influence on events around me. If it were otherwise, I’d have to take more responsibility for what happens on this planet.

Matthew’s gospel says God knows when a sparrow falls. I’m also aware that He created the hawk and house cat which can hasten the sparrow’s demise. The passage goes on to say that God counts the hairs on my head. It’s also true that He’s making His job easier lately by expanding my bald spot.

Then there’s my philosopher friend, Kevin, who tells me: “Always remember Tom, that you’re unique - just like everyone else.”

Hot Tub Chronicle

Published 11-27-05

Sitting in the hot tub, I can see mountains and stars above them. Coyotes howl and yip in the swamp below, probably chasing down a deer, perhaps one wounded by a hunter earlier today. Occasional headlights show through bare hardwoods along the Shave Hill Road a half mile off and from Route 113 in Chatham further away to the northwest. My wife’s large, unintelligent dog growls at the distant sounds. There’s something charming about being immersed in hot water outside on a cold evening with snow all around. It’s best when there are no lights on in the house behind me and nothing to hear but distant, muted sounds that would not be audible but for the cold quiet around me.

Blinking lights of four passenger jets move slowly from star to star, two going southeast and two northeast. I imagine passengers crowded in those narrow seats and stewardesses pushing carts between them high above the dark mountains. Seems like a lot of planes to be over my lonely portion of northern New England at once; maybe because it’s the night after Thanksgiving and people are heading home. Though it’s quiet now, it was bustling in the house behind me the night before, as my grown children and their partners were here for turkey dinner. My daughter Sarah and her husband, Nate, announced they were expecting their first child - my second grandchild - next August. Life goes on. Bearing children is a sign of hope. Hope is good. I think it’s a girl. We’ll see.

With a barely-audible drone, one jet disappeared in the trees to my left as another appeared over the mountains ten miles away. The worn-down mountains have been there for hundreds of millions of years. Coyotes arrived nine or ten thousand years ago after the ice melted and humans around the same time, but jets have been flying over these parts for only about fifty years. I visualized people in the plane because I’m out in the quiet night alone with nothing else to think about, but it’s doubtful any of them are aware of me. Nobody knows what I’m doing except my wife, who scampered into the house trailing steam a few minutes earlier to sauté the asparagus and portobella mushrooms to go with baked scallops we’d already prepared.

I don’t bring the phone out to the hot tub and don’t play music either. I leave the jets off and I’m alone in the dark with nature, distant jets, a glass of shiraz and my own thoughts. Even a barking dog can sound charming if it’s a half-mile away or more away. In that melieu, it’s surprising what comes to mind. When the kids were little and we had animals, it was my job to feed and water them morning and evening. It wasn’t easy to leave my seat near the wood stove in the old house and trudge out behind the barn to break ice out of plastic buckets and add fresh water, but the animals were always grateful. Though I wouldn’t have walked back there in the cold if I didn’t have to, it was nice to feel the quiet and see the Milky Way above, smell the cold forest and animals, feel the air numb my cheeks and watch the moon rise over the pines to the east. I’d usually enjoy it for a few minutes before going back in. Sitting in the hot tub reminded me of all that. It was much the same except for the smells. Vaporous chorine scent replaced the fragrance of woods, but it wasn’t unpleasant, bringing back as it did memories of my mother doing laundry in the basement of my childhood home. The bleach smell was on clean sheets I’d lay down on Saturday nights after my bath - fond memories I didn’t know were still somewhere in my memory.

For fifteen years, my wife has wanted a hot tub but the idea of sitting in steamy water with other people didn’t appeal to me. It seemed like a yuppie thing. For two years in Massachusetts I was technically a yuppie - Young, Urban and Professional, but I didn’t live the stereotype. However, now that I’ve lived in rural northern New England for twenty-eight years and grown to middle age, I guess I’m a MARPie - Middle-Aged, Rural Professional and I’m not the only one around here. I don’t know yet what the stereotype for a MARPie is supposed to be because I just invented the acronym, but this one likes relaxing in a hot tub. Next time I’m out there, I intend to ponder the MARPie stereotype for part II of the Hot Tub Chronicles.