We got home mid-afternoon, released the cat, picked beans, flopped on couches, took showers. I made an enormous vegetable and macaroni salad (tomatoes, cucumbers, roasted eggplant and zucchini, fried onions and peppers, a soupçon of leftover ribeye steak, bowtie macaroni, and lots of basil and mint) and a big bowl of blueberries and raspberries and whipped cream. We listened to baseball and played some games. Everyone was tired: it was an emotional visit, but also the hot dust of the fair was wearying. Yesterday we watched horse pulls and some dreadfully acted professional wrestling. We avoided the Maine Republicans tent and ate hot dogs and French fries. We visited with my dear friend Linda, who I know I've mentioned here before: her daughter and grandchildren were murdered by her son-in-law; it was a giant Harmony tragedy; as a family, our feelings about Linda are very powerful. But then again, staying with Angela in Wellington was equally powerful. She is a deep friend of my heart; our families are intertwined; her little homestead in the woods is one of my favorite places on earth. We were young mothers together and now we are aging mothers together, and we talked and talked about everything, and there were no bars, and it was glorious and it was exhausting.
She texted later about feeling a little downcast after we left, and we, too, felt a little downcast. That burst of feelings . . . joy or sorrow, a complex olio of both: it requires convalescence, I guess. Our life in Harmony was so intense. Maybe when you live in that sort of place--remote and difficult, on both a geographic and a human scale--every drop of love feels like a lake.
* * *
Today I'll slowly get myself back into town life. It's supposed to rain all day, though it hasn't started yet. I might go out to borrow a groundhog trap. I might take my exercise class, or I might skip it. (I am pretty tired, though that's no excuse.) I might do some housework. We might go out to eat. Who knows?
In all of my flurry about going north, I never mentioned another lovely thing that happened: my friend Carlene Gadapee published an essay about my collection Accidental Hymn in the online journal Vox Populi. It's more than just a review; it's a close reading of the book, and I am so enormously moved and grateful for her loving words.
2 comments:
Lovely review, insightful explication -- thank you, Carlene!
It is finally raining here, although perhaps too late for my parched cucumbers. Rain on the roof and flowing through the gutters is such a beautiful late summer/early autumn soporific lullaby.
During the late 70s, we were part of an in-migration of young back-to-the-land homesteaders/artisans/trust fund hippies fueled by The Whole Earth Catalogue, Mother Earth News, and Helen and Scott Nearing. Divorce, cocaine, various religious/spiritual quests, and the "flush" Reagan years splintered and divided us pretty irreparably. Most of us moved on; there are only a few individuals left in that valley who are still attempting to "live the dream." Hard to summon up the memories of food co-op, contra dances, play group, craft fairs. Only a few of us are left who have the same spouses, and we all now have grandchildren who may or may not know what it is like to dig the soil, use an outhouse, climb into freezing sheets, exist without a phone.
I was not a classic homesteader: we arrived there in the early 90s and were a decade younger than the youngest of the original hippies. Though we were cordial with a number of them (and very close to a few), we were always in the fringes of that community and of the local hierarchy. It was an odd no-man's land. Of course we did develop friendships on both sides, often because of our children. But we had a well and electricity and a septic tank, so we weren't real back-to-the-landers. And we were from away, and were arty, so would always be strange to the locals.
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