Tag: Transitions

Oh, my, what a summer!

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

This has been a summer unlike any other in my life, and it’s not over yet. Here in northern New England, the first weeks of September are typically among the best, especially for swimming in the ocean, though the water still hasn’t warmed up enough for that where I’m now living. It’s still in the upper 50s, like most of the nights.

Dawns here, beginning around 3:30 at the summer solstice, are often spectacular. The sun’s still not in sight but screened by Campobello Island in Canada and is already reflecting light off the Bay of Fundy into the sky.

While the Red Barn’s been posting mostly what I had scheduled before we landed the 1830s’ Cape where I’ve been living since the beginning of the year, blogging has felt like a special kind of housecleaning for me – this is the cycle I’ve left behind while gathering a ton of new material that will be featured in 2022.

One difference is that I’ve been largely on my own up here, but not alone. There’s teamwork involved, with visits as well as daily phone calls. And Zoom’s kept me in touch with many good friends and introduced me to more.

There’s a respect I get in being a year-’rounder in a small city where three-quarters of the population is what Mainers call Summer People. Now they’ll soon be going-going-gone and we’ll get back to our more essential, barebone state – what I call the remote fishing village with a lively arts scene.

Still, summer is when this place takes on a special life, one that often feels like a big daytime party that attracts people from all over the country. (I’ve seen license plates from all but seven states, but wouldn’t be surprised if Hawaii shows up.) And this has been the first time I experienced that as well as the ideal of summering on a Maine island. (We are connected to the mainland by a pair of causeways that lead through the Passamaquoddy’s Pleasant Point reservation.)

Here are ten highlights of my summer:

  1. Exploring unspoiled nature. The deep forests and rugged shorelines with their breath-taking views keep stirring up memories of the Pacific Northwest, which I left more than four decades ago. OK, my legs aren’t what they were back then, and the trails here are more arduous than the ones in the Cascades, so my jaunts have been slower and shorter – I’m simply ever-so-grateful to have this back in my life every week. And then I’ve been pleased to introduce these gems to the rest of the family on their visits. Oh, yes, I shouldn’t overlook the joys of being behind the wheel while driving along the rolling tree-lined terrain, an experience that has me reliving my first years of driving or later traipses in Upstate New York and Washington state – my, it does take me back but is here right now, once again.
  2. Fathoming the sea. It’s not that I haven’t been around ocean before – Dover, for instance, is on tidal waters – but this is the first time I’ve lived only a block from maritime activity. Many mornings I wake up hearing the foghorn on the New Brunswick side of the channel, one I can glimpse through our neighboring houses via our windows. Most days I get out on the Breakwater downtown, with its active fleet and cluster of sports casting for makerel. Better yet is getting out on a whale watch in a lobster boat or taking the passenger ferry to the town of Lubec and back. And then there’s beachcombing and tide pooling.
  3. Celebrating the Fourth. With the Canadian border still closed, this year’s festivities in Eastport were only half of what they’d normally be, but Old Home Week was still included, with its parades, contests, street dance, and reunions. I slept in through the annual blueberry pancake breakfast at our modest airport but have heard only raves from those who attended from our full household. As for the big show, I’m a stickler about fireworks – it’s not simply bang-bang-bang but a live-arts installation with the entire sky as a canvas and requires all the fine timing a good comedian relies on – and Eastport’s work from the Fish Pier definitely delivered. Next year, we’re looking forward to the additional pyrotechnical show on July 2, Canada Day, honoring our neighbors in New Brunswick across the channel.
  4. Enjoying a real-life Cheers. With the opening of Horn Run Brewing, downtown has a new social center. The place has a distinctive pub air, rather than a bar, and the marine views from indoors or the deck are bewitching. Rather than serving its own food, the brewpub encourages patrons to bring their own, especially from the new Bocephus gourmet sandwich shop a block away or Jess’ food truck, when she’s in town. The Horn Run has proved to be far more popular than its business model projected – it even ran out of brew on the Fourth!
  5. Meeting a lot of fascinating characters. Not just people, but eccentrics and others who bring experience and insight to even brief introductions on the street or out on the Breakwater – or at the Horn Run, for that matter, or a forest trail.
  6. Taking weekly yoga beside the harbor. The outdoor hatha sessions have been mercifully gentle, but it’s still humbling to have to confront what 45 years of neglect can inflict. And then, for the first time in our years together, my wife and I got to do the exercises together – twice!
  7. Sharing live music again. Rehearsing on Zoom just ain’t the same. But some informal gatherings in Pembroke were magical – one featured sea chanties and folk instrumentals, another focused on Sacred Harp shape-note singing. First-class chamber music recitals returned to the Eastport Arts Center, along with a knockout jazz trio and vocalist beside the harbor. And then there were the weekly gospel sings in Lubec.
  8. Delighting in art. In addition to its own resident painters, photographers, sculptors, and crafters, whose work is featured in galleries lining Water Street, Eastport welcomes artists in residence who work in a storefront studio downtown and engage the public. One had color samples for passers-by to use in identifying the color of the harbor and sky that she then used in painting a canvas mural of a day-by-day progression. Another collected strands of rope from the docks and shoreline to create an installation, albeit more modest than the mylar creation that filled half of the old North Church. I’ve been impressed as well by some of the locals as I drop in for the newest work on the walls.
  9. Cooking on my own again. I got truly spoiled, I’ll confess, and will never measure up to her immense talents, but it’s been fun reengaging in my own cooking again. I’m still rediscovering the basics, but in a kitchen quite unlike the one we left – I miss cooking on natural gas, and the induction hotplate and convection oven are tricky, as is the Montgomery Ward stovetop. My flavor-set’s been more Japanese than my wife’s Eastern Mediterranean take, but garden fresh produce and seafood are surprisingly scarce here. The weather’s been mostly cool, with only a few days above 80, so my usual August-September cuisine of tomato sandwiches never manifested. Lettuce, however, has proliferated, so big salads have been a staple. Now, if lobster prices would finally come down! I still haven’t indulged there.
  10. Seriously revising my next book. I should have been suspicious when the book seemed to write itself, but reactions from a circle of beta readers to my big history of Dover Friends Meeting and its bigger context in early New England sent me back to the drawing board. I’ve been engrossed in refocusing and restructuring the work, a project that’s been tedious on my end but quite satisfying when I revisit the results so far. It’s taken on a whole new tone, with a voice and presence quite distinct from what my professional journalist’s training would have permitted. How refreshing!

~*~

Let me also add observing deer closeup from my windows. You know, looking up while washing dishes or keyboarding.

This buck, taking off from our yard, is sprinting across the lawn across the street.

Sometimes they hang around long enough I can really study them – a few spotted fawns for several hours, actually I love it when the adults rise up on their hind legs to pick apples from a branch overhead. They’re still enchanting, but when it comes to trying to garden, they are vermin.

This fawn’s just outside the kitchen window.

So how’s your summer been?

One coot to another

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As a preamble to a friend’s retirement, “Congratulations” doesn’t seem quite in order, other than, “Wow, you’ve survived!” Or “Hallelujah,” in a minor key full of wonder. Like making it to the end of a gauntlet.

Chronology doesn’t matter in these matters, older as I am but less mature, the eternal 17-year-old emotionally.

I still have no idea of how it feels to “be retired,” other than there seems to be a bit more space to savor what we’re doing or eating, if we want or can remember to do so. Golf? Tennis? Who has time? And yes, after all those years in the newsroom, I’m still “on the clock,” even when sleeping. Tick-tick-tick, only now there’s more of an urgency of mortality. Well, at least so much of my literary writing doesn’t feel like acts of graffiti.

Continue reading “One coot to another” →

Wrestling with Czeslaw Milosz, fellow poet

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In one poem, which I’ve crunched here from my own journal entry, he replies: “You ask me how to pray to someone who is not. All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge and walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard, above landscapes the color of ripe gold transformed by a magic stopping of the sun. That bridge leads to the shore of reversal where everything is just the opposite and the word is unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned. Notice: I say we there, everyone, separately, feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh and knows that if there were no other shore they will walk that aerial bridge all the same.”

Elsewhere he wrote: “’I could not have had a better life than the one I had,’ she writes to me in February 1983 from Warsaw, Irena who has lived through the occupation of her country by two enemy armies, had to live in hiding trailed by the Gestapo, then adapt herself to Communist rule, witness the terror and the workers’ responses in 1956, 1970, 1976, 1980, and the martial law proclaimed in December 1981.”

I’m not sure I agree fully with his theology, but I completely appreciate the richness of his grappling with 20th century unbelief and its practice with his discovery that there is, indeed, something larger than what we admit – something few other artists in our time have been able to pull off convincingly enough to be considered sound artistically. (Milosz won the Nobel Prize, 1980.)

He also wrote: “To find my home in one sentence, concise, as if hammered in metal. Not to enchant anybody. Not to earn a lasting name in posterity. An unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness.”

And, he quoted from Renee le Senne: “For me the principal proof of the existence of God is the joy I experience any time I think that God is.”

Again, Milosz: “To wait for faith in order to pray is to put the cart before the horse. Our way leads from the physical to the spiritual.” And himself: “My friend Father J.S. did not believe in God. But he believed God, the revelation of God, and he always stressed the difference.”

How existential!

He/she/it/they

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been accused of being unable to understand because I’m a man. It was tempting to respond that she couldn’t understand my need to have a God the Father to relate to as a man who needs a role model and a complete positive (for the most part) male authority figure, and she couldn’t understand because she’s a woman. We are in a bind. But that cheap shot would have accomplished nothing. I still say that Biblical language is not exclusive, if rendered correctly.

The irony here arose in the case of a woman who was being criticized by a man for using Biblical language. Who should know more whether she felt excluded by its masculine nouns? As she said, it’s his problem.

~*~

Oh, my, this was all before some of my most important fictional characters were women.

I had promised myself I’d never do another U-Haul move

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

OK, I lied. Even to myself, as honesty is so central to my values.

Yes, I lied. In fact, as my wife recalls, when we jumped into our little city farm 21 years ago, I quipped that my next move would be in a pine box. Last I checked, I’m still breathing and my heart readings are falling within an acceptable range. Whew!

Oh, yes, back then my new stepdaughters informed me I’d better be nice to them because they’d be choosing my next home.

Skip ahead to now and the plot definitely changed. I’m not yet in a nursing home or eating those institutional meals, either. In fact, I’m enjoying relearning to cook, spoiled as I’ve been.

There were a couple of truck-rental actions where I helped our younger daughter (note the change of degree) and then our future son-in-law as well as a few younger members of Quaker Meeting, but that’s hardly the same of facing all of your own stuff. And I mean ALL.

And in our recent move, like my earlier ones, once more, we didn’t call the movers in but determined to do-it-ourselves.

Not that professional movers could have handled this one.

We were way behind in our sorting, for starters. Or, from another perspective, the move came upon us much earlier than we really expected. So much for the drama queen.

There was no way all of it could possibly fit into our new address in Eastport, even once we get some serious renovations done, so that meant a lot of redirection. (As I once remarked, after settling into Dover, I couldn’t imagine how people could live without a barn – yes, this Red Barn. But here I am.) Some of the mass has gone into our elder daughter’s Antique House and adjoining barn down in York, Maine, but there’s only so much space available there, and I can affirm that it’s jammed pretty solid. That led to renting and quickly packing two storage units, where I sense we’re buying time as much as anything else. Some intense triage will be done there. And the remainder has come up to Eastport with me, including one run with a small U-Haul truck itself. Along with more triage. And the dump, or “transfer station,” is nearly an hour away.

This move – my fifteenth address and ninth state since graduating from college a tad over five decades ago – has differed from the earlier ones, even if I had forgotten how heavy those boxes of books are, as well as the LPs, or vinyl, as cognoscenti like to say. Just noting that makes my lower back ache.

For one thing, this move’s been sequential, rather than a single burst. Each of my dozen trips between the two homes has allowed more goods to come east. In many of the earlier leaps, I hadn’t even seen the town until my job interview, and at least once I filled a truck, drove across many miles, got in town, and started looking for a place to live only afterward. (OK, a few times it was only my car, back when I had really focused.) Sure seems foolish to me now, but funds were limited. I’m grateful things worked out in the end, and it did provide some interesting fodder for my novels. And, oh yes, I was VERY single.

For another thing, my wife and I were moving from only the second home either of us had ever owned, and having a Realtor definitely helped, even in a hot real-estate market. Our new destination, meanwhile, connected to dreams I thought I had abandoned in leaving the Pacific Northwest, as well as some other activities I’ve added in New England. My wife, for her part, had come close to living on an island, and technically, she’s finally achieving that dream after a heartbreaking disappointment.

Emotionally, leaving a location you Barn readers know I truly loved was eased by being already socially distanced, thanks to Covid. Hey, I’m still getting together with those folks via Zoom, and I know I’ll be with many of them through New England Yearly Meeting of Friends even before considering the release of my next book, which is all about Dover’s unique roots. (Please stay tuned, as they used to say on TV.)

I’m also grateful for my goddaughter’s reaction to seeing our old place on Zillow and proclaiming, “Sheesh, the house certainly does clean up well! And that kitchen is truly a dream. I always loved feeling the warmth, whimsy and charm of that house, though I am sure your new place will have all of those qualities and more once you’re through.” We can hope.

She has her own connections to our relocation to Downeast Maine that I’ll skip for now.

So that’s where things stand. Maybe, as a result of all this, my survivors will have less to deal with when I “pass over,” in the old Quaker phrase.

What have your adventures in moving entailed?

Are we finished?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

We writers or artists, at least some of us, push ourselves as far as we can, coming to a point where we no longer know if a piece is any good or not, only that we’ve done everything in its pursuit that we possibly can at this period in our life.

Either it gets published or whatever as is or gets pushed aside, maybe to be picked up later and reworked, maybe to go in the trash. Or maybe Death intervenes.