BRACED FOR NEW ENGLAND WINTER
Author: Jnana Hodson
In downsizing to a remote fishing village in Downeast Maine, this eclectic writer feels everything's coming together.
RETURNING TO THE SCENE
Just pondering all the people who’ve come through the meetinghouse doors in the three decades I’ve been here. Some have moved on to other parts of the country. Others have become committed parts of the fellowship. But suppose the remainder might eventually come back?
In my own life, too: how many would I greet joyously, with curiosity about how their lives have since progressed? How many others would I curse, or at least address perfunctorily? And how many would feel the same toward me?
ICY LANTERN
CAPITALIST INTERVENTION
You know the Front Page tradition. But how much do you see about behind-the-scenes reality where newspaper reporters and editors are instead besieged by the very corporations that have gobbled up newspaper after newspaper, and city after city? My novel follows a band of idealists recruited to a family-owned newspaper by the promise of professional excellence and a competitive spirit. Through ever-more demanding workdays and a twist of fate, they ultimately overpower a monolithic neighboring rival, only to see their smiling publisher sell out to a media conglomerate. As their moment of glory disintegrates into surreal management games, unethical directives, and excruciating budget cuts, they struggle to save as much of their hard-won victory as possible – and painfully come to know themselves, their trade, and their neighborhoods in a much different light than they had just months earlier.
~*~
To find out more about Hometown News or to obtain your own copy, go to my page at Smashwords.com.
LADY PEPPERELL’S CORNER
This “dower house,” a Georgian gem built in 1760 by the newly-widowed Lady Mary Hirst Pepperell, sits at a sharp turn in the road a mile from Pepperell Cove in Kittery, Maine. Through her Bostonian roots and marriage, she was one of the richest, most powerful women in New England.
The mansion faces a Congregational church built in 1732, the oldest house of worship still in use in Maine.
OLD PEPPERELL AND BRAY
With its shelter on the tidal Piscataqua River and proximity to the Atlantic, Pepperell Cove in Kittery, Maine, is a scenic marina these days, for both working fishermen and leisure-time sailors. It was originally a hive of shipbuilding as well.
The docks are reached by the lane beside Sir William Pepperell’s 1733 gambrel mansion.
It’s adjacent to 1662 John Bray house, considered the oldest surviving residence in Maine.
EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT
If you want a clue to a person’s educational achievements, don’t ask about degrees or where they went to college. Rather, ask, “What are you reading now?”
The answer will tell you whether the individual has curiosity and intellectual growth, and where those are occurring. Having no books on the list, for me, would be reason for concern. Where are their horizons and challenges? Or even their guilty pleasures?
I’ve met too many people having a slew of degrees who are still unimaginative hacks, whatever their field. And I’ve met people having nothing more than an elementary school education who are well read and have minds to match.
Reading, I’ll insist, is a discipline that needs to be engaged if one is to have credibility as a thinker. Any idiot can have opinions, but a reasoned analysis, well, that’s a much different matter.
By the way, just what are you reading these days?
HOME SCHOOLING
I married into it, the homeschooling. Expected the kids would be hunkered down at their own desks a certain number of hours each day, the clock running. But that’s not how it was. No, the version (and there are many, I’ve learned, spanning the range from strict fundamentalists to loose unschoolers) I married into had piles of books and academic exercises and online resources and, well, I was surprised by the end of my first year to find out how much of what we’d told the local school superintendent we’d cover, we actually had – just not on the schedule we’d intended. Sometimes it came about as an impromptu trip to a museum – an outing in Boston, for instance.
I was also surprised how many group classes homeschoolers actually take. The taekwondo, for one, or the weekly White Pine outdoors lore, for another. Music lessons, anyone, or soccer?
Another component came on Thursdays, when the Dover Homeschooling Resource Center convened in the Quaker meetinghouse – about 100 parents and children – for a range of activities my wife dubbed “lunch-hour” or “recess for the homeschoolers.” It wasn’t all fun and games, either, despite some intense chess matches. Some of the older kids formed a science fiction group that read, wrote, and discussed the field.
My kids have some fond memories of their experiences across a number of activities.
Much better memories, in fact, than I carry from my public school days.
CALICO AS COCHECO
Calico – cheap cotton cloth printed in a figure pattern of bright colors, as the dictionary says – was a renowned product of the Cocheco Millworks in Dover, New Hampshire.
The city was not alone. Throughout New England, red-brick mills clustered around rivers seemingly anywhere a dam could be constructed – sometimes leading to factory compounds more than a mile long, like those at Lawrence, Lowell, and Manchester (itself famed for its denim, which gave rise to San Francisco-based Levi Strauss).
Sometimes, the operation would be much smaller, supporting little more than a village.
Upstream, existing ponds were enlarged to guarantee sufficient water flow through the year. Altogether, their commerce left its imprint on the landscape and its character while financing the legacy of the Boston Brahmins.
Likewise, the rain and snowfall flow through many of my poems. It’s not just water over the dam on the Cocheco River, after all, that’s noticed.
INSIDE THE MILLWORKS
