Curriculum Vitae
WE INHERIT THE PAST WE HAVE NEVER KNOWN
My mothers family all came from the Eastern Shore of Maryland: farmers, carpenters , butchers, teachers and one preacher.
Both my mom’s parents’ families had been there in that place since the 1600s.
I always knew I was from the Eastern Shore even though I grew up in Baltimore. My grandfather had moved to the city during the Great Depression to find work but we went back to the shore every couple of months and summers and holidays. When I was young we went on the ferry.
I went to college on the shore. I always knew I would go back there to live my life.
Instead- in 1984 I got married and moved to Central Maine.
In Central Maine in 1984 being from Maine was a very big deal.. I was “from away”, a flatlander. In the town we first lived in people still brought guns to town meeting and people from away were not expected to speak. We were considered invisible.
At first I was just lonely but then I decided to try to find out what this Mainer thing was all about. I could have joined in the Back to the Land community and stayed there but I didn’t feel I fit. I’d spent too much time in the city and going my own way.
So I watched and listened. I thought I knew a lot coming in but this kind of knowing, the kind that comes from generations on the land isolated, resilient,
and intelligent, this I found unfathomable. Unpenetrable. Such slow patient thought.
Bill and I wandered a lot up and down the countryside on great adventures. We went so many places that now we can name the places we have not gone at all. The Allagash and Moose River and No.5 bog. And the Upper St. John. I am ready to go again to Attean Pond and Moxie Falls. Visiting and revisiting, slower and deeper. What’s new? What’s not?
This year gas prices and inclination has us exploring deeper close to home. Let’s go and see the black terns nesting on Carleton Bog. What is CMP up to? I went up the Verona Island Bridge on my birthday.
That’s the thing about this project. It never ends. It always goes deeper. It always changes.
That said some change is incredibly slow. The bedrock of the Kennebec just here is 400,000,000 years old. The rock folded up on itself about the same time the first bony finned fish climbed out of the ooze.