Moving to a new community three years ago meant meeting new neighbors, and Eastport, as we’ve found, can be a friendly place, even for us who are “from away.”
But one of our abutting neighbors was very-hard-of-hearing, as my wife discovered in attempting to talk to her, and ignored my attempts of waving in greeting. In many ways, she resembled my late asocial mother-in-law, not only physically but also in a heavy cigarette habit. Don’t know if she rolled her own, though. Still, she seemed to relish her independence and had a support system that included a few handymen I could approach with problems to address. Which they did.
We did worry about her occasional drives to the grocery or doctor or wherever. She could barely see over the steering wheel while puffing away, for one thing. And her backing out of the driveway did appear questionable. Still, she eventually returned home, apparently unscathed. I did see her one day in the IGA parking lot receiving a lot of help packing her trunk with her purchases.
I did wonder about her living in a big house all by herself, though that’s not uncommon in a town that’s largely elderly.
So flash forward to a day before what was left of Hurricane Lee was to hit town and I looked out the kitchen-sink window to see a police officer nosing about, checking her car, knocking on her door (and receiving no answer). No surprise there, her lawn-mowing and snow-removing crews got much the same.
Still, he was persistent, making repeated calls from his cruiser after trying all doors and walking around the house.
The next thing I knew, an hour or two later, was a white glove through her apple trees and the black SUV before the blanketed gurney came into focus.
Even before the obituary, an online search gleaned details that she had been born in Eastport to the manager of the local Newberry’s store and, when it closed, moved by stages to Upstate New York, and then, after college, to San Francisco before the Summer of Love and a career in banking.
And then, in retirement, she returned to her roots – from the City on the Bay, as we say, to the City in the Bay.
Her maternal side ran back to a family of Loyalists who fled to St. Andrews, a neighboring community in New Brunswick, before relocating to Eastport early on, while her paternal line was Pennsylvania Dutch by way of Virginia.
The family’s eventual obituary adds details.
~*~
In the aftermath, masked family and friends have been working steadily over two weeks to collect bags of trash and purge the house, including a colony or two of rats. (The rodents, it turns out, are well established in our end of town today – one more challenge to address.)
This also raises the question of just how much I leave to others after my own passing, and how much I need to clear out before then.
In the meantime, other questions loom, including the meaning of life for each of us.
We do wonder who will be living there next – hopefully not one more Airbnb but a real family with kids.
Onward! As I like to say.
Not that I wouldn’t love hearing the rest of her life story.
Jnana's Red Barn 