Top student
Good son, good daughter
Good spouse
Careful and caring lover
Loyal and hard worker
Good citizen
Faithful member
Prized customer
Patient and firm parent
Quietly humorous
You know, the model of rectitude
Goodly recipe for disaster
Pinpoints of pain to remind
of deep shame
Author: Jnana Hodson
In downsizing to a remote fishing village in Downeast Maine, this eclectic writer feels everything's coming together.
Fairy tale fact check
there were no fish in the moat
of the slimy castle
as for crocodiles?
Quakers and Salem, Massachusetts
One of the early centers of religious resistance was Salem, at the north end of Massachusetts Bay. Though infamous for the witch trials that began in 1692, it had a long history of dissenters, with the Baptist pioneer Roger Williams the most prominent.
It was founded in 1626, four years before Boston, not by Puritans but rather fishermen, led by Roger Conant from Devonshire, when the English settlers of Gloucester on Cape Ann relocated to the mouth of the Naumkeag River, the former site of an ancient Native village and trading center. After witnessing the mounting fear and despair at the Plymouth colony as its leadership devolved and a quarter of its population departed, Conant was especially troubled by what he saw as the rising violence and fanaticism of its Pilgrim authorities, even after he had moved away to Cape Ann.
Conant headed the new settlement for two years before he was replaced by John Endecott on the orders of the Massachusetts Bay colony and the village renamed Salem, reflecting the Puritan ideal of a New Jerusalem. It grew into an active seaport, becoming by 1790 the sixth largest city in the new nation.
Salem was also ten miles closer than Boston to Dover and soon had had a small but significant Quaker presence.
Its early persecutions were among the most intense anywhere, yet a remnant held on. The Meeting grew and spread, eventually relocating to Lynn and reaching up the Merrimack Valley of New Hampshire.
While Salem is infamous for its persecution of witches – events that ended the Puritan strand of New England Calvinist orthodoxy – I’m convinced that a bigger picture would be a culture clash between the Devon folkways and those of the East Anglia Puritans, something I investigate in Dover to the north.
In that fullness, Salem would be a really hot story all its own.
~*~
Check out my new book, Quaking Dover, available in a Nook edition at Barnes & Noble.
Welcome to Dover’s upcoming 400th anniversary.
Before hearing the sales pitch
my list: Desert Boots so I’ll have a very comfortable pair of shoes at the office, but it turns out that the original kind are impossible to find, and pricey but rather than being upset by that fact today, I found myself intrigued by the hunt, I’ll just keep watching and waiting a jaunty rain-repellant windbreaker to replace the decade-old one my now ex-wife gave me which I’ve never really liked, color or cut, even when it drew favorable comments, it just wasn’t me or a dressy raincoat as in a London Fog, I still wound up buying some nice, and essential, overdue items, including winter boots the old L.L. Bean muck-luck style, but fun and necessary for a New England winter now I can mud it up with the best of the locals and keep my head up and a new wallet as for the Japanese robe or pea jacket very nice cut but still more than the one at the sporting goods store), not yet a consumerist, yrs truly in comfy new wraps
Sign of living in a really small town
His return address was his last name and nine-digit Zip code.
Underfoot
Writing versus real life
There are many reasons I spend so much butt time at the keyboard, as poet/novelist Charles Bukowski once compressed the practice.
I’ve examined some of them elsewhere, but what I’m circling back to today is the necessity of bringing some kind of order to the seeming chaos of what happens to each of us in “everyday life,” at least through the lenses of my own encounters.
What emerges is hardly objective, no matter my training in objective journalism. If anything, I lean on the hopeful side of history. The side we see as progress, even in the face of the clouds of doom.
Long ago I crossed a threshold where I couldn’t move forward without drawing on so much that had accumulated before then. I think of it as turning the compost, to give it air and enrichen future crops, worms and all. Yes, those blessed red wigglers. Or wrigglers, depending on your spelling.
Am I self-deluded? Or is my practice of writing one of prayer, even in the face of so much hopelessness?
What is life, anyway, apart from what we experience subjectively?
So here we are, all the same.
Keep writing, those of you in this vein. No matter the outcome.
Moment of panic
Where’s this week’s Zoom link for our Quoddy Voices rehearsal?
Then I remembered we’re meeting in person.
How you locate where the international border runs between two islands
Pyramids like this sit in prominent spots along the shore. They can seem mystifying enough, even before you see a second one nearby.
At last, I learned the two can be lined up to create an imaginary line running out across the water. The border between the United States and Canada falls where the line crosses a similar line running from islands on the other side. That spot can then be connected to others, at least by some kind of maritime surveyors. It’s another example of connect-the-dots.
The four-sided pyramids are called range markers. They’re a special kind of daymark or day beacon, too.
BAR cars stuck in the woods
Seeing railroad boxcars away from the tracks around here no longer surprises me. Many of them stand beside farmhouses and sheds or even businesses, where they serve as extra storage space, presumably cheap or for the taking.
But this sight along State Route 191 always grabs me.
The Bangor and Aroostook Railroad served Washington County as well as the Penobscot Bay region and the spud country up north.
Jnana's Red Barn 