You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
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.
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?
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 – 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.
So there we were, in one of our informal noontime forums, this one led by an economist. The group itself was multidisciplinary, which made for some lively discussion.
As we analyzed the problem at hand, we saw that there were downsides to every possible solution we envisioned. No course of action was perfect, although some appeared to be better than others. Any way we turned, we’d be making some kind of mess for someone else to clean up or a burden for one group or another to carry.
We laughed, realizing that this is the way most of life actually is. There’s almost always a cost involved, and often unintended consequences.
And then one of our colleagues summed it up in a line that became our institute’s unofficial motto:
Once in a while, economics really does touch on reality.
After moving to the house – and taking up a family – I began facing a profound mystery. Possessions would simply disappear. It wasn’t like my bachelor days, when things returned to their proper places. And it wasn’t always little stuff, either, meaning we couldn’t always suspect the kids.
While I obviously fretted, my wife took the calmer “it will turn up eventually” approach, which occasionally actually worked.
It didn’t take long for me to conclude that we have another room in the house – I know it’s not in the barn – one we haven’t yet located. And I’m certain that’s where all of our missing objects have gone, just waiting to be rediscovered. It has to be quite large, centrally located behind a wall or two. Or maybe even between floors.
There’s one more thing I’m certain of – it will be stuffed to the gills.
My wife has finally agreed with me. And she promises me the room will turn up eventually.
Now, where did I put my glasses?
Hometown News goes behind-the-scenes in the ways decisions are made in reporting the daily life of a seemingly pedestrian community – the kind of place where many of us grew up or perhaps resided. Focused on a family newspaper as it moves to a new generation of leadership, the novel builds on the aspirations of a core of young professional journalists. They share the ideal that aggressive reporting will foster grassroots democracy and an entrepreneurial vision as well as a widespread, healthy community. At most of the nation’s 1,500 daily newspapers, however, the bottom-line corporate outlook has meant that newsroom resources were squeezed to fatten corporate profits, even before the Internet began to erode paid readership. In that business model, readers and advertisers both got less and less for their money, and lively news from the neighborhood went untold. Unlike the Front Page tradition, today’s editors and writers have been stymied more by corporate bean-counters within than by Public Enemies without.
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To find out more about Hometown News or to obtain your own copy, go to my page at Smashwords.com.
As I said at the time …
Your harvest, meanwhile, is most impressive. Just how much land do you have under cultivation? Our little “city farm” is a mere third of an acre, including house, barn, shed, and driveway – all of it having clay soil and partial shade. In a wet spell, our garden slugs rival Seattle’s; they took out most of our potatoes last year – the ones I was growing in barrels, up off the ground. Maddening. And, by the way, you have a longer, milder growing season. Last summer, we came close to buying half a pig from a couple halfway up in Maine – maybe that will happen yet. We are able to support some small-scale agriculture around here, which is satisfying. And there’s a lot of produce-swapping at Meeting – including eggs. Oh, yes, we have an interesting exchange with my wife’s best friend and her husband – the ones I jokingly call my in-laws; we provide them with a lot of seedlings, and since they work a much larger community garden tract, we get a lot of it back for the table and freezer. In addition, she does help herself to a lot of our strawberries, currants, and asparagus. Even some of the irises and daffodils. I really hadn’t thought about the range of connections going on there. Still, there’s no substitute for the taste of fresh food, or having your own, from the freezer, come deep winter. Maybe we go through all of it for a spiritual awareness and gratitude or simple out-and-out holy deliciousness?
To say nothing of all the wildlife we attract, especially around the bird feeders. We rather miss the skunks, and were surprised to find some possums living in the crown molding a story up in the barn last fall. How’d they ever get up there? Just don’t ask about squirrels.
Keep dry, but don’t forget to water the seedlings –
