All-in October
Mother I never knew,
every time I see the ocean,
every time —
~Kobayashi Issa~
Happy (mid) November (at this point)!
Sorry for the delay. As Mainers like to say, and one Maine comedian likes to point out, I've been right out straight.
Anyway...
We. Are. HOME!
That is a view just a short walk down the road, across the Damariscotta River toward the Schooner Landing Marina (originally Cottrell's Wharf). And if you click that link, you'll see a picture of the wharf in 1908, along with some of its history.
Here's what the wharf looks like today from the bridge:
It's been a whirlwind getting moved in and settled. Meghan had a lot of the heavy lifting done in the first week, with some help from her family, to be ready for the baby shower a few weeks ago. And I don't think we could have done any of it without all the work my parents put into the house before we moved back. We owe many, many thanks.
This house is old, which is very consistent with the year of anti-inflation. (It's also very consistent with my view of online life — a.k.a., "looking for the cracks." Wink, wink.) But so far, we love it — imperfections and all.
It's already been a month of firsts, on top of a year of firsts: first time checking my own mailbox; first time having trick-or-treaters at our door; first time stacking my own firewood; first time mowing and raking my own lawn; and so on.
Heck — for me, it's the first time getting to know my own neighbors. Granted, I have done each and every one of these things in some fashion many times before, and even at a place called home. But this is different, because now it's our home.
I'm not suggesting that these things can only be experienced if you buy a home. It's that, even though I still don't know what the future holds, every other place where I have lived I have known on some level — usually on the most existential level — to be quite temporary. The fact is, I have always planned to be moving on from where I am, and to do so sooner rather than later. Every place I have lived, and especially every place we've lived in the last two years, has been governed by a "planned obsolescence." Not so for The 1820. (Which, if you missed last month's newsletter, is now the official house nickname.)
So this is a new experience of "home" for me, though not one I have yet figured out. Ultimately, I don't think "home" can avoid being described with a little tautology: home a place that provides at-homeness. It can be as simple, for instance, as watching a bee and a butterfly share the surface of a single zinnia outside the local pub while you slurp on some fresh haddock chowda'. Add to that a concomitant refreshingness of having finally returned to a place you belong, a place you've been looking forward to for some time (and maybe even doubted you'd ever get to), and I think that might be about as good as it gets.
To be honest, that feeling has been a little slow setting in, and I'm not entirely there yet. In fact, there have been just as many moments when I have felt the opposite. For the first couple weeks, I couldn't shake the feeling that this was another place we were only passing through. But we're getting there. One thing that I'm sure helps is that twenty minutes south is the same dock where I have my earliest memories of fishing — and of life in general, for that matter.
Jack and I took the first chance we got to head down there for the sunrise and ... well, it's hard to beat.
Meghan went right to work on Jack's coastal Maine photo shoot. We haven't developed any sort of routine yet, but he's starting to settle in. Of course, he's loving the new backyard. And he's only run off one time, but that was just to see if the neighbor's squirrels were easier to catch than ours. (They aren't.)
I'd love to know what Jack's sense of geography looks like. I don't think he's figured out yet that there will be no more regular trips to the his favorite giant Montana dog park (DP). We're pretty sure he asks us every day to go there. And every day we disappoint him without being able to tell him he'd have to go on another 2,300-mile, 35-hour car ride to get there.
But disappointment is a strong word. While he may have lost his favorite DP, what he got back are his two greater loves: the beach and the ocean!
Here are some things from October that are worth reading or listening to:
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I haven't decided exactly how I feel about everything in Daniel Immerwahr's piece at The New Yorker, Beyond the Myth of Rural America, but it is absolutely worth a read.
A laid-off veteran buying a Rice-A-Roni at Dollar General isn't our favored image of rural life. But it's more accurate than the farmhouse tableau of "American Gothic."
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Mo Perry: "I certainly can't see Palestine or Israel from here."
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"The angel of death is licking his lips." — I have said (here and here) that caution and care are the best policies right now (when are they not?), but Jonathan Freedland's piece in The Guardian is one of the best, most straight forward pieces I have read on the recent attacks on Israel.
It isn't that difficult. You can condemn Hamas and name its actions as evil, even as you support the Palestinians in their quest for a life free of occupation and oppression. And there should still be room in your heart for a Jewish child whose last moments were filled with unimaginable terror — the same terror his grandparents, and their grandparents, thought they had escaped forever.
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When I was in Savannah, I remember enjoying some of the conversations on the podcast Zealots at the Gate. Though I haven't finished it, I think their most recent episode is worth listening to.
And here are some "roof nails" from the commonplace blog:
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A year and a half ago, I wrote about reading Francis Spufford's Light Perpetual. It's a topic very close to my heart.
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On that note, for what are surely obvious reasons, I briefly revisited part of that theme.
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There is always something to do or think about, someone to talk to, learn from, or be inspired by — a thought on the unnumbered and unnumberable potential in the world.
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I finally sat down and finished Jon Meacham's biography of Abraham Lincoln, And There Was Light. Besides being reminded how repeatable and repeated history is, I was also reminded of the unending need to search for goodness wherever you can find it.
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A put up a short article from 1961 about an oscillating bed my great grandfather helped make for a WWII veteran. One of the reasons I loved seeing that article is that it fits perfectly with the essay I wrote after reading Matt Crawford's Why We Drive, and because it fits so well with the theme of anti-inflation!
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Three quotes I will be thinking about for the next year, in anticipation of the voting booth.
That's it for October!
Here's a wonderful and never-unfitting little poem by Naomi Shihab Nye called "Cross That Line." And yes, it is this Paul Robeson (not to be confused with this William Warfield) that she is talking about. In the 1950s, in the midst of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, Robeson and his wife Eslanda had their passports revoked, along with their ability to travel to Canada (which, at the time, did not require a passport). From 1952 to 1955, Robeson sang to thousands, mostly Canadians on the others side of the border, at a concert at the Peace Arch in Blaine, WA, a monument situated on the U.S. - Canada border.
It's a lovely image, and one that Nye captures and enlarges perfectly.
Cross That Line
Paul Robeson stood
on the northern border
of the USA
and sang into Canada
where a vast audience
sat on folding chairs
waiting to hear him.
He sang into Canada
His voice left the USA
when his body was
not allowed to cross
that line.
Remind us again,
brave friend.
What countries may we
sing into?
What lines should we all
be crossing?
What songs travel toward us
from far away
to deepen our days?
Thanks for reading! For more commonplace stuff, you can go to tinyroofnail.micro.blog. Or you can email me at tinyroofnail@hey.com. Or you can just wait for next month's newsletter.