Of the New Year

          The Christmas cookies Gary left in the tin are like the kids not chosen for dodge ball, standing with large spaces between them on the shiney, echoey gym floor. Some of the cookies are monochromatic, boringly cakey, while others, shaped like an evergreen tree, are embalmed with green food dye.

          I snap each cadaver in half, my hand moving in a downward, circular criteria, like the lazy emptying of a wash bowl, to the last one—iced on the bottom as if it had been dragged in joint compound.

          Across the street the men are finally chipping two large branches that fell from an old tree that have lain across the neighbor's tiny front yard since fall. The noise is like a vacuum cleaner gone mad, or what I imagine is the sound an ocean liner makes as it pushes out to sea. It is what the word droning means.

          I return to the tin, my coffee still warm.

          If there is anything remotely the flavor of black walnuts, 2025 will be a good year. But there is only cinnamon and brown sugar and the taste of butter mixed with flour.

          My mind, left to itself as Gary naps upstairs, returns to the places I walked in my forties. All the different running shoes I've owned show up in the old pictures. I recognize them like the faces of old dogs, standing obediently on the ground, serving me well.

          All those hikes just to find the source of a brook or a forgotten root cellar in the woods. I saw copperheads sunning themselves on the top of a canal lock. I saw the old pillars of the capitol building stacked like junkyard cars. I found a full pack of cigarettes on a bench where someone left them—a New Year's resolution.

          The last, ugliest cookie has delightful chips of pink marzipan on top shaped like rose buds and a not-too-sweet flavor of—yes—(at least) English walnuts. It is kinder to my teeth than the others, and the rosebud candy defies identification: citrusy, foreign, like a forgotten taste—a taste of older Christmases. The icing flakes off innocuously from the bottom like wrapping paper.

          The dog, too, is asleep. All that sounds is the kitchen clock, ticking its first hours of the new year.

          The snow is gone.

Farewell to the Old Jail

Some people believe holding on and hanging in there are signs of great strength. However, there are times when it takes much more strength to know when to let go and then do it.

—Ann Landers

My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them. 

—Jack Kerouac

Don't spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.

—Coco Chanel

* 1993 *

          

          We were living at 5th and Independence Avenue in a second-floor apartment that was split by the common stairway used by the third floor tenants. Some mornings, Gary would forget and iron a shirt with the kitchen door open—in his underwear. The girls feigned their shock. For, in those days, two types of boys climbed the stairs to the third floor: ones with promise and ones only for a night's loving, their faces irreconcilable as hot and cold taps.
          My mother had begun her 12-year approach to death, and there were terrible calls from the hospital. But a vascular bypass suddenly gave her a handful of pain-free years, and she wanted to go back to Maine for a week. I was to accompany her.

          Gary and I had only just started our life in Washington together, and in the bedroom of that apartment (the door on the right as you ascended the stairs) he had slept on the candy-apple-red leather sofa only once after a fight. I didn't especially want to leave our exposed brick, high-ceilinged nest with its Queen Anne mantlepiece and gaudy chandelier. It was an easy walk to the Capitol or, in the other direction, to Eastern Market, with its banks of refrigerated display cases of chickens and pints of cream and hand-made tortellini. Built in 1873, its main hall felt like a Gothic cathedral with fresh sausages and brioche instead of pews. 

          I still have an ultramarine clay vase Gary bought me from one of the potters active in the studios in a wing at the northern end of the building that were like discovered rooms in a castle tower.

          The embers still glowed from my first dreamy weekend with Gary more than a year earlier.

          But, finally, my mother's alternating threats and tears wore me down, and I packed a thick novel and an old French clarinet against the inevitable boredom of a week with my mother in rural Maine.

* * *

          My mother's birth state had been pretty much limited in my childhood memories to an inflatable lobster and a trip on the ferry Blue Nose from Bar Harbor to Yarmouth. On one early trip up from Pennsylvania, we stopped overnight in Sturbridge Massachusetts. Evidently, my mother had only been able to get a single room, and I had to sleep on the floor. My mother took the bed, along with her boyfriend at the time, and I remember her whispering that I'd be asleep soon—subjecting him to what must have been an agonizing wait.

          On another, earlier visit, a (different) boyfriend glamorously flew his own plane up, while my mother and I went by car. The stiff old Kodachrome prints document him as tall and chic in his Polaroid sunglasses, truly a catch. In snapshots taken back home, he is a barefoot movie star, sprawled on my mother's cedar lounge chair with an afternoon cocktail at his elbow while she negotiates a folding aluminum chair beside him, obsequantly. I was pulled from a wading pool for the shot, and—always expressive with her body language—she leans away from me dramatically.

          I also remember live lobsters crawling across my aunt's kitchen floor, but that's about it.

          Now, at 34, I was socializing with my aunt and uncle as if for the first time, and the focus of the week's visit quickly became what seemed to them the bizarre, regressive parental authority my mother breezily took with me: she spoke to me as if to a duller-than-usual child, or a pet dog. They found great humor in the pattern of my habitual, unconscious responses—half fear, half desire simply to shut her up. At 65, no trace of my mother's beauty remained, and only her always-perfect fashion sense kept her from appearing prematurely, irrevocably geriatric.

          That week, there were a couple of day trips to a bookstore (an old chicken barn) and an antique store in Bangor; clearly her half-brother and half-sister knew nothing about my mother and her abhorrence of anything old. She could barely contain her annoyance.

          But in the unscheduled hours after breakfast or just before suppertime, walking south on Grant Street and stopping—as you could do, 30 years ago—at the ends of the wooded granite points that overlooked Leonard Lake, either from high above it or just level with the water lapping gently at the rock, I marveled at the September sun's reflection blazing off its surface in jeweled cupfuls. I heard the loons' melancholy calls, sourceless yet intimate, and I took pictures of the white clapboard cottages that faced the water, winter after winter longer than anyone alive—their Kelly green window shutters not merely functional but essential when the house was shut tight against the storms of March. 

          Above the narrow road, pine woods stretched back for miles. They seemed to belong to no one—dark as night on a sunny day and redolent of turpentine and peat. In between, open meadows of tall New England asters, just flowering like little purple umbrellas, and striations of goldenrod nodding in the sun looked like an Impressionist landscape—its paint still wet. 

          On these first walks, some embryonic passion was stealing up on me, unexpected, not described to me by anyone else—a northern aesthetic that was completely unfamiliar to me, clear, brash in its odors and the scale of its sky and woodlands—that kept me from touching my book or clarinet the whole of that week, in the autumn of 1993.

* * *

          My uncle turned out to be gay. He was immediately interested in me, and we developed a friendship—based on our mutual capacity for a slightly adolescent humor and his own unobstructed emotional immediacy—that lasted until I reached my mid-forties, when his enjoyment of me petered out. Skipping only a couple of years, for the next decade and a half I visited him in Ellsworth every September, sometimes making a second trip up in May.

          I enjoyed my time with him, giggling together on long car trips up the coast to Cutler, Eastport, and onto Campobello, or walking the carriage roads of Acadia National Park, farting then feigning a cough in a comic attempt to disguise it.

          "That was a FART!"

          He always maintained the tone of indignation—essential to the pantomime.

          His thick hair was the color of freshly fallen snow. His voice could achieve a frightening baritone that projected like a preacher out of a Nathaniel Hawthorne tale.

          In fact, he was deeply ambitious and had racked up achievements that—because of the narrow field of my intellectual vision, an inheritance from my mother—remained outside of our conversations. Nevertheless, as a lifelong school teacher he made my Maine education his responsibility, and I had a tedious afternoon in the museums and government buildings of Augusta (where he had been a state representative). Another whole day was spent driving to a historic village in New Brunswick, where everybody wore 19th century clothing and made candles or manufactured flour.

          The meat pie in the dining hall was unforgettable, and I think of it still today.

          Deale had been the founding president of the town's historical society. Their headquarters was an abandoned brick jail in the center of town built in 1886, and one afternoon—after an especially long nature walk—he took me inside for the first time. The sheriff's residence was the street-facing part of the builing, and the jail cells were behind it, but contiguous. Several metal discs—one in the wall of the master bedroom—could be swung aside to allow the sheriff to communicate with guards or investigate a disturbance.

          I was devastated from my long walk—the sort of exhaustion that seems to slacken all of the body's cantilevers and springs—a hypoglycemic, bone tiredness, and I was fussy and short-tempered as an infant that day. Attic to cellar, I was hearing all the old jail's stories for the first time: Susie the Indian, who could be found drunk on the lonely roads running out of town just so she could be arrested and have a place to sleep and eat for the winter months; the celebrity art thief who broke out with a soap gun blackened with shoe polish; and of the atrocities of the building itself, with its medieval granite-block cells, its trap door into the lightless air above the cell block, and the macabre toilet in the basement that had to be raised—there were steps leading up to it—to the level of the sewer pipes leading (in early days) out to the river behind. A rusted, abandoned radio room in the basement had paint peeling from the walls the size of writing paper.

          All was stillness—the decades of silence broken only by the pointless decorations and scattered bibelots the historians had cheerfully, anachronistically strewn around the rooms of the sheriff's residence. Hand-drawn placards and photocopies tacked to the wall attempted to educate visitors. The small attic rooms had been stuffed with racks of costumes from the local Gilbert & Sullivan troupe, and sets of 50-year-old encyclopedias, Christmas decorations, and boxes of old tools from a physician's office made the floors impassable. 

          Walking out into the Indian summer afternoon, I could smell the place in my clothing, and the mold ached in my nostrils. 

          Deale locked the exterior doors with his habitual fussiness yet seemed reluctant to end the history lesson, chattering on, as we drove to Bar Harbor for dinner, about the impressive city-wide campaign in 1977 to save the building from demolition. Evidently the historical society members had surmounted more serious opposition than shag carpeting and knob-and-tube wiring to create the dark, cluttered rooms of their museum, and the achievement—for all its parochialism—was a source of pride.

          Back home, I wrote an early essay about the building—quite a few years before any of my vivid autobiographical pieces started to appear.

* * *

          "Bring your camera."

          Just before one of my visits in May, Deale told me I needed to set aside a couple of days to take pictures for a book he was writing on Ellsworth. I packed the ancient digital camera, with its old-fashioned viewfinder and 72 dpi output, and accompanied him around town as he described the shots he wanted—pointing and waving his arms like a movie director.

          I never saw my uncle bored, or less than enthusiastic about something. There seemed to be no darkness to his personality, and even his anger had at its resolution the goal of a better understanding between individuals or an end to some minor injustice.

          Downtown, I crouched into the side window of the old five-and-dime store and snapped a picture of my reflection as I followed my uncle to the next subject. 

          All my jobs had been in big-city publishing, and I was a little dubious that Deale had a genuine, professional agreement. But that fall, he told cheerful stories about Tammy, his editor, and before long my copy of the attractive, 8 ¼ x 11 ¼ clothbound book with its bright aerial view of the city on the dust jacket arrived. Deale's handwritten inscription read: To William P. Fogle, my Photographer, my Nephew, and, most importantly, My friend. Thanks Nephew. With an Uncle's Love. Deale B. Salisbury.

          When he died five years later, a display case was created by a local carpenter that held a photo of Deale, a copy of his book, and a clipping of his (substantial) obituary. It was brought to the Old Jail in the back of a pick-up—me and a young friend of Deale's hugging it for the entire ride to protect the glass.

          But when we got to the jail, suddenly I couldn't go in. To enter would have been to acknowledge Deale's death, to physically shift into a future that did not include him. The building was synonymous with my uncle, and to enter it would feel like walking on his grave. I sat on the front steps for about 20 minutes as the others worked inside then walked back to where we were staying.

          Leaving Maine that summer, I never expected to return. 

          I sobbed as we turned onto the interstate in Brewer.

* 2017 *

          It had been necessary for us to refinance our home three times to afford two new roofs, two furnaces, two hot water heaters, replacement windows, and a concealed central air system that sent out whispers of cold air through circular holes in the wall the size of a trombone mouthpiece.

          Gary and I had settled into a flawed communication style, so that it took me a couple of years to understand that his retirement the following summer meant we would no longer be able to afford our mortgage. Either he was incapable of bluntness or I listened only with the ears of my presuppositions—one of which was that this was our home for the rest of our lives.

          Another was that our relationship would last until our deaths.

          We spent the first six months of 2016 on realtor.com, flopping down at the PC after work every night to compare our finds of the day and firm up our list of possibilities. Like the planchette of an ouija board, our budget guided our house search. From the first, the old clapboard houses of Hancock and Washington counties in Maine became a possibility.

          To this day I am uncertain whether that came about because of a desire on my part or simply that the listing prices seemed absurdly low for the square footage and the charm.

          There were many of what can only be described as infatuations—in both Pennsylvania and Maine—before we settled on a house in Ellsworth.

         The sheer ghostliness of this unanticipated outcome, its poetic rhyme—the John Steinbeck quality—remains with me still. I have interpreted it at different times as benevolent fate, as an hereditary challenge, and as black humor on the part of God. My mother, aunt, and uncle had been dead for years, and I returned to a city that held only memories of the generations of my family.

          But the memory was warm and full of respect, and the people I met after we moved into the house on Elm Street were invariably impressed—and somewhat incredulous—that Deale or his more popular sister Leah, who had been Vice President of the major bank in town and a sort of social anchor for her generation in Ellsworth, had left behind any family.

          I returned to Ellsworth as leftover royalty, a Romanov who had escaped the firing squad.

* * *

          In the 24 years that had passed since my first adult visit to Maine, I had become an accomplished clarinetist. I had purchased a quality grand piano, had been published three times, owned my first dog, lost and gained back 25 pounds numerous times, and had become a heavy drinker. Thus my first attendance at a meeting of the Ellsworth Historical Society, in August 2017, is not a distinct memory. The meetings were (and still are, as far as I know) held at 7 p.m.—cutting deeply into my wine time.

          What I can remember is that Darlene Springer, herself an author of an important book about the destructive 1933 fire in Ellsworth, was giving an impromptu slide show and finished with an image of the City Hall frieze I had taken when Deale was writing his book.

          "The author of that photo is with us tonight."

          Thus I was introduced to the tiny group of older people seated around the foldable tables. The meeting was held in an early 1800s farmhouse the Historical Society had been gifted some years earlier. Spacious, sunny, and tatooed with mantle clocks and breakfronts, it quickly became a Victorian dollhouse through the work of the Society's president, for whom the wallpapering and painting—the placement of bone china cups and old radios—became therapy, a back door out of her full-time job and chores at home.

          Sometimes, meetings were held in the large kitchen at a round oak table with chairs upholstered in pumpkin-colored velvet. The board of directors had shrunk down to a handful of the surviving original members, while downtown no donations or grants could outrun the Old Jail's deterioration—a symbol of the aging of the Historical Society itself.

          The Gary of that period, transmogrifying rapidly in those first years following his retirement, still took an interest in my activities. Together we assembled the first really decent newsletter and tossed ideas like skipping stones across the surface of the oak table. As Deale's nephew, eyes turned to me for support and creativity.

          It was a warm homecoming, at first.

* 2019 *

          Judy's mother had died just before Christmas. The daily trips to the hospital, preparing meals for both her parents, and, finally, the universally life-changing loss of the mother caused her to miss meetings. Decorating and preparing treasurer's reports halted, and her confusion and incomprehension at the onset of the winter of the adult orphan—a winter after which no spring follows—frequently reduced her to tears.

          Typically, not long after, her father, always an avuncular presence around the oak table, joined his wife.

          Thus I became president of the Historical Society that May.

          My first task was the writing of the membership renewal letter. As the outgoing president, Judy wrote a letter that was to be included with mine, announcing the change in the executive and detailing her plans to focus on archival work. The letter, almost the length of mine, felt slightly superfluous and—maybe—just a bit arrogant. Rambling, folksy, it reminded me of her lengthly "From the President" piece that was plastered on the front of that first newsletter Gary and I put together. Had I read it more carefully, I might have understood the limitations of the slot that had been created for me.

          Gary and I bought printer labels and—squatting on the living room floor—stuffed, stamped, and sealed 100 envelopes. It never occurred to me to ask for help from the officers or members.

          This was the organization I had inherited from Judy and from my uncle.

          I jumped into this dehydrated, shallow pool with the only gifts I possessed: writing and graphics. I changed the Society's logo. I designed a new website (over Judy's objections about the expense). At Gary's typically intelligent suggestion, I started requisitioning (and giving) presentations. I responded to and became involved with other organizations in town.

          But it wasn't until I hobbled together my first history video—with a personal plea for volunteers and donations at the end, standing with my arms resting on the chipped and peeling "Ellsworth Historical Society" sign on the lawn—that I entered into a brief period of local fame. As Covid raged, I lost 30 pounds, and as it became safe to congregate again, I routinely appeared at board meetings and potlucks in tweed suits. A week after I took a group of students through the Old Jail, I received a card of thanks signed by all of them. One girl wrote "I love your sweater."

          Yet, the room to the right just as you walked into the entrance to the farmhouse still belonged—with its boutique-y Oriental rug and pairs of reading glasses on the computer—to Judy. Piles of papers and artifacts donated to the Society bore her stickies reading "Call Stockbridge" or "For Museum in the Streets." When a collection of about 30 framed photos mysteriously appeared on the table of the meeting room, I pulled up the rug, put one of the piles into my backpack, and wrote a two-page memo to Judy that I copied and mailed to every board member.

          Judy had been the face of history in the town for over a decade, and no office I might attain to would transfer that status to me.

          It was an old inferiority that was set off inside of me—my mother spitting into a Kleenex and brusquely wiping my mouth after an ice cream cone, the high school friend who always looked better in Gap cords than me, the small army of lovers whose adoration routinely turned to irritation, the so-so annual job reviews, the smirks of liquor store clerks more depressingly familiar than family.

          My relationship with Judy never recovered, and the couple of years that followed saw shouting board meetings and, increasingly, warnings and reprimands from a trickle of new board members, each of them placed into their positions by me, who never knew—or cared to hear—the story.

          Meanwhile, the freeze-thaw cycle swelled the walls of the Old Jail, spitting bricks like clay teeth.

          Everything was falling apart.

* * *

          I abruptly resigned presidency of the Historical Society in August 2022 after a brief, drunken email to Judy brought the ire of two board members who (unknown to me) had been assigned to deal with my increasingly unpredictable behaviour.

          The silence that followed felt like the cauterization it truly was. There was one phone call and a two-sentence letter from the new president. I kept my eye on news articles involving the Society and received their annual appeal letter. In February 2023 I attended an evening presentation at the farmhouse and netted a couple of tepid greetings and a depressing lack of interest in my presence.

          Yet, I got a hug from Judy.

          Perhaps that rambling, folksy emotional style had its function.

          I walked the three miles home on the snowy sidewalks, too embarrassed to ask any of my old pals for a ride.

          As spring came on, I found myself with a series of freelance assignments from the group, including creation of a successful, widely distributed video about the Old Jail that seemed to almost restore my reputation. As I fell back into the familiar network of emails, I got the chutzpah to ask for an at-large board position; there was no reply.

          One Thursday morning as I was pulling weeds with the local garden club I got a text from a board member, in an urgent tone, asking to speak with me that day. We sat at the round oak table in the farmhouse kitchen as Wayne discussed with me—as if speaking in another language—that the group was requesting I return as vice president.

          This was as unexpected as the young lad who suddenly played footsies with me under the table at a very straight Philadelphia club; as unexpected as Gary's first flirty Christmas card; as unexpected as my mother's death—the news reaching me at work hours after she had died because they could not reach her granddaughter.

          That spitty Kleenex scraping across my face.

          I had served as vice president for 20 months without incident.

          In fall 2024 I was asked to return as president beginning January 2025—much like Donald Trump, I joked to myself.

* Last Night *

          I don't remember the specific content of the emails, which arrived well after the home bar had opened. Something about a young man I disliked returning to the Historical Society to continue his work setting up electronic systems. Just the name James ripped the bandage off of old pain, recalling his freakish height and implacable smirk. 

          I replied with a single sentence that I refused to work with him and received a longish reply—from one of the individuals who had been assigned, years back, to monitor my behavior. I don't particularly remember that email, either. 

          Suddenly I was typing, and halfway through the composition my writing took an unexpected but oddly familiar turn.

          Awaking at 3 a.m., I remembered that I had withdrawn my candidacy for president and resigned my membership on the board.

          There have been—mercifully—no replies.

* * *

          For the second time, I will relinquish my keys to the Old Jail. For the last time, I have slammed the door in the correct fashion (you don't need to turn the key). I'll not again play the little ship's pump organ on the second floor bedroom nor take a group of amazed teenagers through the cell block. 

          I won't have to talk to myself to quell my fear as I yank open the screeching hall door or sit at the bottom of the steps as a TV crew films another in an endless series of 90-second news items ("Old Jail in Trouble!" "Old Jail Undergoing Renovations!").

          And I won't again see the encased image of my uncle smiling back so broadly, so devilishly, in the photo that accompanied his obituary.

          The bricks are clean now, and water will not again permeate the walls or collapse the second floor ceiling tiles. In time, the windows will be replaced and the roof restored. The rooms will hold displays from various historical societies and organizations in both this and neighboring counties. Next year, or maybe the year after that, the Christmas lights will be placed in the windows again, and visitors will have their cookies and cider.

          So we do go forward, no matter how lengthy or costly or difficult it might be, no matter how painful or humiliating—or just boring and lonely. Because we must.

          The buildings are older than us, yet still warmed by lights in the deepest winter.

Just Before the Fourth

The black-purple fists of the iris,

Which I watched grow on scores of April dog walks,

Have turned to dried tea bags,

Brittle scraps of panty hose

Feeding the seed below.

This is the first time I'm 65,

And time passes so quickly.

The uneven yards are a little difficult

To walk on, and I've used Duff's 35 pounds

As ballast on the steep embankments.

I only remember first dates—

Ferocious mornings in bed, afternoons shopping,

Dinners without booze. But

The middle years have fallen from my memory, collapsed

Onto themselves like a ruined cake—the center did not hold.

Now I say "I don't care" instead of the Lord's Prayer,

Or whatever all that was I repeated, kneeling

Below my grandmother's high bed, her beside me.

I can't memorize snatches of Beethoven anymore:

Only bits of movie dialog. I would like to have been

An actor: my excellent mimicry, my flawless perception

Of flawed personalities, my modest intellect absorbing

Quirks and grimaces instead of current events, delighting in

Not understanding. As if resentment were a muse—eyes closed,

Palms over my ears, I have memorized you. Never change.

I can't believe the fourth is nearly here already. I'm still

Enjoying spring. The iris came and went like the postman,

And the peonies are dropping their spears, little pink cocktail stirs

All over the ground; the full moons jostle for celebrity. Summer

Will bring its fruit, but can I beat the birds to it—before they fly south?

A Spell

          My mother—in her beige and tan pencil dresses and Polaroid sunglasses—kept me for a required number of months then consigned me to my grandmother and her two spinster sisters before I was of school age.

          Until college, I still spent summers with them, tanning flat on a vinyl chaise lounge and reading almost daily letters from a girl back home. She recommended I read Salem's Lot. She loved me.

          My grandmother was in her mid-70s but her two older sisters were well into their 80s, and they had spells. 

          Spell days were dark days. There was no piano practice, and the cookie baking halted, leaving that dear kitchen in a rare state of scentlessness. Aunt Ada took to her habitual dining room chair—in which she always "listened to" television at night. Yet there she sat at noon, her head resting on her hand or tucked onto her chest as if in prayer. 

          It was understood they were terrible headaches. Yet to a child they seemed so much more: the visitation of a demon, some grief without respite, even a sort of penalization—for living too joyously, too selflessly.

          For winking and giving me the heart of her watermelon wedge on those long July afternoons with the honeysuckle vine just on the other side of the kitchen window screens.

          Aunt Mame laid across her mattress in the back bedroom. But instead of reading the dictionary or the Bible—holding the book like an umbrella above her face, her silver-rimmed spectacles like two metal bird's wings in flight from her eyes—she lay motionless and terrified, smelling of Vick's. Composting wood shavings from the factory next door or transplating pachysandra abruptly ceased.

          My grandmother entered the room throughout those days with a revolving selection of broths and elixirs. Sometimes, the evening Bible reading was moved into Mame's room. The mantle clock was kept wound so she could enjoy its tones. Her feet were put onto pillows to reduce the edema.

          Everyone waited out the spell.

          When I was 11, there were no diagnoses, no medical words to translate these betrayals of lungs and stomach. Although the doctor came and went—always addressed by his Christian name—I never heard him say very much. It was as if, in the 1960s, attaining a very old age was itself a frailty, even a sort of arrogance toward God.

          But when I was still quite young, the sisters recovered. Aunt Mame took up her shovel again, or inspected a peck of freestone peaches with her thumb and forefinger. She buried her apple skins—the cut sections still clinging together like scarlet bandages—under the tall spruce trees in the middle of the deep yard.

          Aunt Ada returned to her letter writing and her ice box cookies with the pecan pushed into the center like the finishing touch of a buttery sculpture.

          I am having a spell today as I write this. I just feel lousey, tired and slightly nauseous.

          There are still, really, no words for what we suffer in our bodies—our physical biography, the thumb print of our pleasures and pain. The state of our veins and hearts at any given moment—energy and exhaustion, compassion and treachery, memories and terrible foreboding—mix without translation.

          We go forward gifted, and flawed.

First Month

Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?

— Scottish folk song

          

          

          The ground is white. 

          It is luminous as a sheet drying on the line, the pockets of shadow cyanotic.

          The driveway shows through in charcoal patches, and the dog and I follow them like stepping stones.

          How hot the macadam was in July!—tipping the rainwater into the sewer grates noisily. January has no movement, except for the tall trees that turn their backs against the merciless wind. Their branches fall like tears into the yards.

          The huge old furnace has failed four times this winter. The silence wakes us at 5. The room is cold. The technicians descend the cellar steps with their tools. Perhaps they ask it to take deep breaths as they listen for congestion. It is being kept alive by the short-term measures and prescriptions that mark the end of life.

          The cat sleeps on the floor grate anyway—the only one of us with faith.

          But the absence of holidays is delicious—no Santa, no Jesus, no gourds. The pointlessness of the month is perhaps its only virtue: January is not a team player. It is a hangover, drawn out until Valentine's Day. It is all fact—unmitigating, disapproving as an ex-lover, hard on the paint.

          The wood is stacked safely in the barn, but the trip over ice is so long—so far away!—in the 4:30 darkness. The birdless sky, the ghostly swinging of the feeders where they had evidently been, the furniture we didn't bother to cover this fall, the headless bird baths and upside-down jardinieres are postapocalyptic. Under half a foot of snow, the hammock frame is shipwrecked on the lawn.

          Outside the kitchen window, the grapevine frozen under the downspout looks like hand-blown glass, and the trigonometry of the frost is lyrical.

          The driver of the big street plow waves at the dog and me as we scurry home.

The Bumblebees of August

          There is no wind, yet the wicker rocker moves once forward, once backward on the deck, lightly pushed by a spirit evidently waiting—like us—for the hummingbirds to appear.

          Audibly, but incoherently—as if from under a pillow—the workmen talk in between the hammer strikes. Their pick-ups are gathered, noses together, in the shallow driveway like perch. The neighbor's apartment house is suddenly the object of consecutive, daily ministrations, as if its crumbling chimneys and rotted clapboards were late-stage cancers. The old house braves its cures, with only a table-sized depression in the shingles where a chimney has recently been amputated. 

          The incessant whistle of the scenic train is silent until Saturday, when the kids will pile again into the old cars that move slower than bikes behind the row of houses, through the wetlands shimmering with black flies, and up into the balsam woods at the junction.

          A tricky little Clementi sonata sits on my piano desk, which I work at like a jigsaw puzzle, trying to assemble a mountain or a winding road from tiny black pieces that appear tossed onto the yellowed page—just thrown there. The dog sleeps under the bench, and I can hear his sweet, sweet breaths. 

          He's the color of a loaf of bread that needs to stay in the oven just a little longer.

          I live from day to day, now. I make no plans, have no aspirations.

          I just enjoy the bumblebees of August, which I will find motionless on the stalks of aster in late September, like a photograph of summer—a memory of hot days.

Goodbye to July

          I told her once I wasn't good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.

—Susanna Kaysen, "Girl Interrupted"

          I faced the week like high school gym class: Wednesday would have been Franklin's 12th birthday, had he lived just two more months, and Thursday was my 64th—ropes danging from the ceiling, a pommel horse, my hands chalked and ready.

          Gary's homemade cards and day-long trips to wherever I pointed to on the map were a thing of the past, like his kisses. I needed to come up with my own celebration, and—perhaps for the first time—my imagination failed me.

          Craving and selfish, lustful and enthusiastic, July 27 was my version of Christmas day. Once, living alone in Philadelphia, I called the best looking boy I knew, told him it was my birthday, and asked him to take me to Kennel Club that night. They were pumping the artificial smoke onto the floor, and we danced to Bon Jovi and Van Halen—until he spotted some good friends.

         The late July day has always been a hall pass, a cigarette break from the disapproval of others that characterized the remainder of the year. Each birthday, I was Ted Bundy in a sling, ensnaring, fooling people into reciprocity with me. Year after year the ruse worked, but this summer was emptier, quieter than any that had preceded it—deadlier.

Sunday

          Not even the tide was with me, so I played my last card with Gary: take me to Wadsworth Cove Sunday at 2:00 and I won't ask for anything on Thursday, when high tide wasn't until supper time. I graded summers by how frequently I swam, and, so far, this one was not receiving a passing grade.

          It was a fortuitous, if hasty, plan. Gary's combination of magazines and books, apparently, was sufficient to pass the time as I splashed and dunked—12 again, the gentle surf moving my body as if I were chest high in jello, bearing me southeast. Every few minutes, I would correct my position to be in direct alignment with Gary in his apple green folding chair. He was still, always, despite the past few years, the anchor for me throughout my difficult adulthood, and likely to be so until he slips away, however fate may configure that.

          The afternoon sun on the water entered the wide-open cove without obstruction, so that, facing full west, my toes appeared as if out of a firey glass of absinthe. It was the kind of beauty that could make you cry, suddenly, but then leave you feeling quite fine a moment later. In the distance, the hills beyond Belfast were a low, indistinct, Robin's-egg blue band. A tanker and—after a long while—a small cruise ship slowly passed, right to left, in front of it like tiny rod puppets. I was in that same water, wide as a halibut in my trunks.

          That night I decided to do my birthday as any other Thursday—no special plans. But I emailed my garden club friends with my typically sad humor, a by-product of my insecurity, my habit of auditioning words like one presses a thumb into the stem end of a canteloupe, and about four 5-second pours of Prosecco consumed in quick succession. Coyly, I suggested that I would do my 2 hours of weeding and dead-heading but could there be a few power bars or iced teas afterwards to mark the occasion?

          Just another gimmick, another inducement: Please don't leave me alone on this day!

Monday          

          Around 4:00 I found a box at our back door addressed to Gary. He has a habit of buying little shrubs and plants from catalogues, and I called into him sarcastically then returned to my yard work. It had been another day of not speaking, usually the consequence of an evening I can't remember, and I duck my head and live through them as my just deserts. When he asked me a few minutes later to come and look, his voice sounded odd.

          Our pet food company had sent just short of a dozen roses, along with a simple glass vase and a card that read We hope these flowers bring you a smile and remind you of the love Franklin left on your heart. There was also a little packet of something to help extend the life of the blossoms.

          I fell back into the claustrophobic, unresolvable pain as one leans on a door that has never been properly shut. For the last 12 years, this week—already the favorite of my year—had become "Our Birthdays," my darling Scottie dog's birthday falling one day before mine. This happy coincidence enlarged the celebrations, and there had been special trips to a cabin at the foot of the Blue Ridge in Virginia and trips to Maine.

          But with the terrible separation from this creature—whose odor alone could tranquilize and restore my troubled mind, and whose perfect face I cupped in my hands, sitting on the kitchen floor at the end of every afternoon—came an unexpected, unwanted cauterization that felt like a tool of old age. I had survived this loss rather too easily, and I knew that my frequent questioning was the disturbing of a wound that, as grief would have it, I didn't want to heal. I was discovering a new and somewhat repulsive numbness that sanded off the sharp edges of loss, even as I myself was pointed—toes first—toward the horizon.

          I put the roses out in the mud room so the cat would not get into them.

Wednesday

          Unlike anything I write sober, my drunk emails invariably have consequences. My version of Edward Hyde puts his pain into words still pretty well chosen, so that my friends receive a bitter, pointless text that sounds, on the surface, like Dr. Jekyll's voice.

          I got a reply to my garden club email from an unexpected source. Ritualistically, I opened it and went immediately to the last line to ascertain the extent of the scolding, the damage, with one eye closed. It was a lovely invitation for dinner "on our deck." Elizabeth had recently broken her left leg, and her friend and housemate Ray had been battling for his life since March, yet her email sounded suprisingly anxious to entertain. I couldn't imagine how they would bring it off, but—with my predictable lust for birthday attention—I accepted.

          Hers was an invitation of distinction in this town, which had kept its collective eye on both of them throughout the spring and summer. Ray's illness took Elizabeth away from the triple-layered, persistent schedule of chair-level work with arts organizations, non-profits, universities, and, of course, the garden club, that characterized her life. Meetings had been overlooked, and agendas throughout town were noticeably lighter because of her absence. By June, her life was reduced to waiting rooms and consultations that brought good news—only to be followed by bad.

          But here was Ray, putting ears of orange-yellow corn on the table. I glanced at the kind face we all felt certain we'd lose this summer. When he took the cobs out to the kitchen, I told Elizabeth how gratified I was to see him and to be able to share this meal. "He's a miracle man," she said, with her standard reticence. Indeed, he was something of a celebrity—his body half its size, his speech soft, guarding his strength, his aspect flat and slightly suspicious of recovery, as one might be who had seen death crouched and shapeless at the bottom of the bed, or who had observed the endless whirr of ceiling tiles as he was pushed through hallways, the metal doors of the surgical theaters yielding to the foot of the gurney, the IV riding alongside like a translucent chimpanzee. It must have been an exhausting summer of encouragement and setbacks, and emotion of any kind had probably been discarded in favor of this blank expression of terrible but necessary patience.

          Almost nothing about my mutual work with Elizabeth was discussed, and I was reminded of Maria Callas, who was said to have never sounded a note of music when she wasn't purposefully practicing or rehearsing—so for Elizabeth, there was no wasting of her talents in off-record adjudications or casual advice. There was the rapid, brief batting of both eyes that signified a difficult topic or substituted for emotion, as when the cars roared by her garden in mid-sentence. Yet, there were several subjects that might well have been discussed, as the gap between my hostess and the town in which she grew up widened. The house at the crest of Bridge Hill had become symbolic, and—like any successful or influential person—she had a few opponents.

          When she brought out the raspberry pie with six candles, Ray's weak voice joining in the happy birthday song, I felt like I'd spent a private evening with the Windsors—it was all gaiety and the intimate topics of daily life, no talk about renounced crowns or old scandals.

Thursday

          Tupperware started filling up the picnic table in the park stealthily, so that by the time we were done pulling the yellow leaves out of the clumps of daylilies a picnic was underway. I felt an awkward remorse for putting my friends on the spot. Had I gone too far this time? I ate a blueberry scone, and then another. Then came the bagel sandwiches with salmon and cream cheese, then the watermelon wedges. Whether I had demanded or begged for it, it was a nice little party, and I was digging my fingers into the wooden bench hoping the others were enjoying it as much as me. I'd been awake until after 2:00 the night before, and the sleeping pill I took at 12:00 had flattened the highs and lows of my remarks. My eyes were stab wounds in my face.

          Afterward, a reduced group of us trudged down the conservancy-restored trail to Little Tunk Pond. Marie brought to bear all of her usual magic: the folding chairs with the plastic hibiscus flowers (so she could find them at blues festivals), the inflatable donuts that were marked to look like tires (they were on sale), and the bottle of red wine that had functioned as a point of convergence in our early friendship.

          We had the tiny sand beach to ourselves, and the fish, gathering at our calves, were so thick it felt like swimming in an aquarium. I could feel them, one after another, kissing my back, and my high-pitched curses entertained the group. I often took the part of Puck—bargaining that it might buy me affection.

          Janet asked me, suddenly, What are your plans for this year? The remark landed onto me with a peculiar force of empathy, with a concern for the quality of my existence that exceeded my own refusal to plan or dream.

          That afternoon, Gary handed me a framed picture of Franklin he had manipulated in Photoshop to look like a watercolor painting. I wanted to give you something to honor "Our Birthdays."

          I wept internally, like holding your nose when you sneeze, or refusing to fart. I just lowered my chin to my chest. I felt again the ancient, scratchy wooden door that refuses to latch, opening behind me into an airless place, death crouched and shapeless, just beyond my toes.

          For dinner we got lobsters, and Gary looked the other way when I spent $60 on a bottle of Moët & Chandon.

          I don't remember the rest of the night.

Saturday

          The day couldn't have been prettier for a garden tour. Always with an eye to branding myself, I've made a point of saying "Lamoine—where the rich people live!" My inappropriate, throwaway remarks are often pretty accurate, and Saturday proved it, as we drove from one gated, bay-facing property to the next, pinching the lavender, crunching the sample radishes, oooohing and awwwing over beets and asparagus, and sampling each host's version of iced tea from screen porches that seemed to hang off the houses like multiple choice questions, a maze of lounging options: Do I sit here, on the deck, or on the granite patio that overlooks the bay? 

          It was one of those moments to really dig in to the online psychology that comparison is the thief of joy. Yet these were the same people I pulled out old hydrangea roots with, people who sprayed my legs and back with mosquito repellent as I turned, childlike, in a slow circle. My persistence with the garden club through Covid and dwindling membership gave me a kind of peerage, and I could speak to any one of them quite intimately—if not entirely equivalently.

          I had a little Truman Capote thing going. For the most part, I enjoyed the role.

          

Sunday

          At 4:30, I took my chilled glass of white Bordeaux out into the garden, intending to stand by the tall Jacob Cline Monarda until the hummingbirds came, feeding on one consecutive blossom after another until they were quite near, the chartreuse bodies of the females—so much friendlier—almost in my face. It was always thrilling.

          I heard a car door slam and saw the slim bodies of two dear friends from Boston walking up the steps to my porch. Our texts had dropped off when Josh asked "When are you coming up to the cabin?"

          After the hugs and greetings, there was the inevitable, slightly inappropriate, questioning about the past year: What's going on with you and Gary? Do you think he will leave you? Are you looking for someone else? Is he looking for someone else? Josh and Alan were barely into their forties. It was still all about love.

          I put out a tray Gary had prepared of olives and sausage and cheese and pickles. They overlooked my blueberry-stained shirt and the ever-so-slight slurring of my words. At 7:00, we kissed cheeks and made plans for later in the week. 

          Walking into the kitchen carrying an empty bottle, swiping the banana peppers into the trash, I exhaled the week of Franklin's first postmortem birthday, of my own configured celebration of late July. I felt everything, and nothing. Like Ray, I had seen enough of death to jostle me into a detestable, awed silence that will carry me, borne by the current of my blood, toward next year.

          I think if Gary is still there next July, with a beach towel and a platter of salami and olives and cheese—his head sunk in the Sunday Times—I'll have done well enough.

         I won't ask for more.