#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
Laverna Preserve
My eyes, in this bed, in this view, wake to the white and blue stripes of an early morning sky. It is cooler. I have not slept well, but I am grateful for morning. Frank and I are up. He wants to go to his morning meeting. I need a long ramble. By 7:00 I am dressed warmly and out the door, up the quiet street. I walk to the trail head of Laverna Preserve and enter for the third time, this time on my own. I choose a walking stick from the branches on the ground. I walk briskly the mile or so to the granite bluff over the ocean, a stunning early view. I am the only one out. I sit and reflect in the sunlight. What I want to take away from this time. I have been listening to the wonderful book on Audible by Molly Howes, whom I know from my hometown, and whom I interviewed recently for the IWWG Open Mic, her book “A Good Apology: Four Steps to Make Things Right.” I love her voice, her wisdom, her clinical acuity, her humanity, her topic. It’s an excellent book, a healing book. This is our day of departure. Frank, who is traveling for the first time on business after 16 months is eager to get home and get organized for Monday; We split up. My daughter, my youngest, rides with me. We make a detour, a road trip to Newport, Maine, where I lived, briefly, with my family as a teenager, and I want to see where the big rambling farm house overlooking Lake Sebasticook stood. It’s gone, been gone for years, and I knew that. In its place is a church, an ugly brick church. But I stood there and described the old house with the wrap around porch and the widow’s walk four stories up at the top of the house. I saw the sweet pond and imagined the barns, the falling down barns, all gone, and remembered sweeping and sweeping them out. And drove up the road past the fields where we picked potatoes and the place where I necked in the Volkswagen beetle one of my boyfriends drove. I drove past the meadow where I planted an apple tree for my first love who died. I drove past the apartment house where my best friend lived, and the house is gone, or radically changed. Drove past my school, drove past the closed storefronts of a dying Main Street. What I loved the most was the beautiful, beautiful view of Libby Hill Road where our house stood, where the ferns and wildflowers and flowering bushes and birches and oaks and maples grow in the dappled light. I saw so clearly this land my father fell in love with and wanted to own, and why he moved us there, even for the short time we stayed. I wanted to be in the old house, holding my daughter’s hand as we climbed the stairs to the second floor, and the third, and then up the narrow passage of stairs to push the plank away and step four stories up onto the widow’s walk and see the vast lake under the wide sky as we once did when the house held us, fascinated us kids, and made my mother miserable with its ugly dilapidation.
I am home now, in this lovely summer rain. And I cannot wait to walk in the drenched and dripping rainy woods of home tomorrow. Frank laughed when I said that: he knows me well.
Lobster Boat