Author: Jnana Hodson

In downsizing to a remote fishing village in Downeast Maine, this eclectic writer feels everything's coming together.

Smyrna / Smyrna Mills

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

First, at the general store and then the produce market, the dim light the interior required some readjustment for us. We expect electrical illumination, after all. Instead, this was truly natural, apart from a few white-gas lanterns.

What we’re used to is like the sun came indoors, even the first 30-watt bulb in a store.

Or so my brilliant travel companion observed.

~*~

Light brown Amish
sheds, barns, homes
the men with mustaches!

~*~

As we’re backing out of the parking
two Amish kids
stare at me through a window in a door
but don’t respond to my wave:

Did I look like I belonged to another Plain people?

Maybe from somewhere in space?

Even though I was driving a simple white car?

Looking for God in the details

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is often credited as the origin of the quip, “God is in the details,” but the phrase actually goes back much earlier.

Still, however tedious but essential, details do extend to the minutia of building and sustaining a marriage, a family, and a wider community. You can also apply it to any number of other things, including business, sports, the fine arts, politics.

In researching Quaking Dover, I am left with many gaps in the records of Friends’ godly endeavors. When, for example, did Dover Friends cease to run their own schools?

In addition, in writing a history, the details can drive one mad.

May I suggest the devil’s at work there, too?

Heads up!

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Oh, my, so much has happened since the Common Ground Fair at the autumn equinox.

The week that followed, when I was out in the schooner, introduced so much, and two days after I returned, the big renovation project on our house finally began.

Many of those developments will be presented in weekly posts after the New Year. I do need time to digest the implications. Remember, I spent too much of my professional life as a journalist in the immediacy of daily chaos. I do value a longer view.

For now, there are other bits to catch up on as well.

Life is feeling very rich, indeed, if I don’t let it become overwhelming.

Election reflections

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

These shoulder elections, where nobody’s running for national office, are still important.

In small places like Eastport, getting someone to run even unopposed for local office can be a challenge. We had all the bases covered, although the surprise was when a write-in candidate won one of the two city council seats.

I can’t imagine that happening in a bigger setting, but who knows. A write-in for president? My!

Statewide, a radical proposal to take over the two widely hated electrical utilities failed. Big money is hard to comprehend, even if we’ll be paying it one way or the other. The frequent storm outages won’t be going away, nor will the continuing higher-than-national bills customers here receive. Somehow, I don’t think the issue will be going away, despite the lopsided tallies.

Just how much do those emergency home generators cost altogether, anyway, as insurance against the current setup? It’s not that many households before we’re talking billions.

Otherwise, the initiatives moved in a progressive direction, including the right-to-repair measure.

I am relieve to see opportunities for right and left to come together at a local level, however gingerly.

 

Still facing those relentless deadlines

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

It’s been more than I decade since I retired from the newsroom and its relentless deadlines, but those still haunt my sleep. Typically, I’m called back again in an emergency. In reality, that would violate my pension.

 

A SATURDAY NIGHT SHIFT. I’m doing something like makeup except that they drop additional tasks on me. I’m supposed to do three letters-to-the-ed pages but can’t do it. Am no longer trained for the new procedures, tech changes, passwords, etc.

In one, I run into out-and-out sabotage.

In another, I’m in charge but the deadlines have really moved up. Of course, I’m having trouble getting set up and in gear, can’t find stuff, and run behind. About 10 a.m. the rest of the staff starts showing up, wanting to know what to do. I’m trying to get one editor going on the Back Page but I can’t find a sheet of paper of any kind in the entire newsroom to show her the quick-and-easy way to get it done.

No paper at the newspaper? I awaken rattled, more than once.

 

USUALLY, I’M TRYING TO PAGINATE but don’t know the new computer system at all or don’t have the right passwords or other access. Maybe there aren’t even enough computer terminals or chairs. Sometimes that even takes me back to the yellow carbon-paper layout pages we used long ago. Still, the approaching deadline leads to panic and my feeling obsolete and incompetent.

 

OR I’M FILLING IN ON OBITS. (I want to write that as “orbits.”) But the office is different and it’s a new computer system, so I’m putting all the obituaries on one computer file to cut and paste in later, which is where the trouble kicks in around deadline. Nothing’s working right. (As a category, this is also akin to the old trying to make a flight or trip or finals test.)

On top of everything, the time card issue comes up (paper cards, not the computerized one … which would have been another nightmare) and I realize I can’t accept pay for this shift because of my pension clause. I’ve resolved to compromise and have the pay sent to charity, this case the Santa Fund.

 

IN OTHER VERSIONS, I haven’t been filling out timecards and thus haven’t been getting paid … since it’s direct deposit rather than a check, there’s a delay in my discovery.

That leads to frantically trying to find timecards and wondering how I’ll ever tell the company much less tell my wife and face her wrath.

In reality, my last stretch there we’d gone to electronic timecards. Now those could be a real-life nightmare!