And I live here. I am getting older or the days are getting shorter. Right now actually both. It’s November.
I don’t want to be anywhere else, especially not now. Maine is so big and varied and exciting. It’s all I need. Either way we don’t get as far from home these days. Dont get me wrong it is beautiful here but- it’s familiar in a different way from Baxter or Cobscook Bay. I create fairytales about those other places that are bigger than those of home.
Here I am surrounded by blue jays, crows, cardinals and nuthatches, Witch Hazels, oaks and pines. I shrunk my garden this year to raised beds full of herbs and zinnias, two perennial beds and a rhubarb. I have the favorite iris and peonies and one rose dug in a holding bed until Spring. Yes, Spring will come.
We created two names for our lesser journeys years ago, we called them poking around and a little farther out, adventures.

One of my earliest memories, when I was three or four was being set down in a low beach chair and my grandfather casting a twelve foot bamboo surf rod out past the breakers, pushing the rod in the sand in front of me, showing me how to feel for a strike on the line and walking away. I don’t remember ever catching a fish or feeling one but I sat there patiently with my thumb on the line for a long time. I never sat still so it was amazing that I would sit there at all.
I caught my own sunnies when I got older. I remember learning to gut them with my grandmother. There was fishing almost every year of my childhood but we lived in the city most of the year.
Every summer we spent at least a week in Ocean City and there were day trips from my great grandparents house nearby. My mother’s family was from a town just inland. This was still home even though my grandparents had moved to the city way back during the Depression for work when my mother was five. Old pictures of my mother, grandparents, and great grandfather were often fishing from docks in nearby rivers. My great grandfather had a boat he fished every day. We had the beach.

Our summer vacation was almost always the beach. The beach was part of my family’s home place, the southern eastern shore of Maryland. It was thirty miles from my great grandmother’s house and my great aunt’s and my cousins and their mother, my godmother. Family lived for centuries all over that area as farmers, carpenters, preachers, and storekeepers. There are plenty of family stories that involve fishing, and hurricanes in Ocean City. The only picture I have of my father and mother in love was at the beach when I was a baby.

There was one summer after my brother was old enough and my parents were long divorced, when my mother decided we should do something different and go to the mountains for vacation. I hated it as only a a ten year old could. It was dull in color and damp. It smelled wrong. I had no one to play with. There was nothing to do.
The beach on the other hand was freedom. I was let loose in shorts and a bathing suit. No socks, no shoes. Adventures happened. The only thing we couldn’t do was go in the ocean without someone watching. We did that once at the age of supreme stupidity and had to be herded in by the life guard. He was the older brother of one of my friends. Later he became a bay pilot. I loved that idea accept girls could be bay pilots.

In the early years after my mom started teaching school after my parents were divorced we would go to the beach after Labor Day. It was cheaper. We used to sing “Ain’t Got A Barrel of Money” “Side by Side” riding down the road.
We stayed at the Admiral on 9th Street and Philadelphia Avenue. It was kind of like a motel but it had several floors. Our room had a bathroom, a little kitchenette, a table and chairs, and a bed that folded down from the wall. Jim slept in a Kiddie Koop. We brought a cot after Jim outgrew it. My mom and I slept in the bed. I remember the bathroom had a tub because my mom would sit in it and read after putting us to bed.

In the mornings my brother and I would play outside so my mom could sleep in. As I got old enough, I guess that was eight, Jim and I would walk down a block and across the avenue to the donut shop. They made donuts right there and it smelled really good. We would get a bag with one for each of us. I probably got cinnamon. I remember carrying the warm bag back up the street.

My mom always told the story about the time I came back with a ten dollar bill I had found on the sidewalk. My mom was ecstatic because we needed that money for gas and the bridge toll. She wouldn’t get paid until the end of September. I don’t remember that but it really shows how tight things were and how my mom found a way to get us to the beach each year despite the circumstances. The beach was that important for all of us, Jim for his asthma, and mom for the relaxing. She had a deep and long history with the ocean and passed it on to me.

When Mom went to work at the private elementary school she got paid half what the men did. They said that the men needed to support their families which made no sense because my parents were divorced and my mom was a single parent. She was supporting our family. I was eight.
My mom seemed to know what she wanted. She loved the beach and swimming and walking. She loved teaching and the Children’s Hospital. She wanted her own house and eventually got it. And she got equal pay and back pay as well. I don't remember exactly when but I was maybe twelve or thirteen. It was the year I went to a different school or just after. When I was about 14 we moved into the little house. I did not want to move. I liked living with my grandparents. Felt like a real family.

We had lived with my grandparents since I was three. We lived in a three story house on the corner and my room was on the third floor and I liked being up there. She went back to school at night to work on her Masters in Education. I remember feeling oblivious to most of that and resentful. I was in high school. I graduated and went to the first college that would take me away from home.
I am proud of my mom for what she accomplished but I had a hard time with it all. I was confused and scared. My little brother was a hot mess.

From thirteen on I was sad in July and August. My summers were so different from my friends’. My private school friends went to summer camp or ocean cottages, even Europe. July and August were the doldrums of city summer. It was hot and humid. There were trees where we lived but it still was hot. Fans ran day and night. Big loud, jet engine loud, window fans. Toward the end of August we started to prepare for back to school but best of all, for our week at the beach after Labor Day.

I loved the beach in September. It was quiet except for the ocean waves, and friendly. It was like a neighborhood with the same kids always there every year. My mom relaxed and we were allowed a lot of freedom. It was the best.

And now I love September in Maine. Vacationland dies down. Most of the traffic is outbound and the down east coast settles down. The only sounds are lobster boats and seagulls. It’s cooler and dryer. It’s the best world.

I was told that the first place I walked was into the Atlantic Ocean. I remember licking the salt off my fingers. When I cut my foot on a seashell, get in the ocean, my mom would say. My brother got wicked poison ivy. He was sentenced to the ocean for a week. At night he was covered in calamine. When my mom was in her eighties and came to live in Maine I took her to the ocean as much as I could. Even though it was not the same ocean as "her ocean" it made her happy . When she could no longer get down the beach to the water she wanted me to bring her a handful of seawater so she could taste it. When she died I found a little plastic bottle of beach sand in her bedside drawer. When we buried her, my family sprinkled water from her ocean on her grave.

The first probably came in a jar, a baby food jar. The next in a Mott’s applesauce jar. Jars, boxes and cans were a large part of my childhood. We lived in the city and did not buy apples or cider in the fall that I remember. We bought other fruit from the roadside stands, peaches and watermelon and cantaloupe. We got corn. But my grandmother who was the cook in the family and a great one, did not put up food. My grandmother made beautiful cakes, two layer full of eggs and butter and sugar. The icings were so yummy. Birthdays were such a treat. Cookies and Christmas.Years later my mom told me how happy my grandmother was when boxed cake mixes came out. It turned out that my grandmother loved convenience and my mom took it farther.
It turns out I love making applesauce.

The mother who drew a parrot in graduate school and destroyed it, who loved Van Gogh, who loved the wild ocean and birds and hurricanes, she ate cheap cookies.
My mother kept cookies in her bedside table, store brand chocolate chips and M&M chips, chocolate grahams, and in the past few years, Vienna Fingers for my husband, Bill, fourth drawer down in the little bedside dresser she got in college. First drawer- calendar book,emery board, scissors, little Calvert School flashlight key-ring with the key to the lock box, second drawer- tv paper and remote, third- socks now, in earlier years, stockings.
The odd one out is the cookie drawer. My mother was always very tidy. Everything had its place. Food in the bedroom seemed out of character but it was not. As long as I can remember there have been cookies beside my mother’s bed. My brother would steal them. I wouldn’t, maybe because I hated to get caught but more importantly I did not love them as much as they did . My brother’s dead two and one half years now. Mom has been gone nine months.
My brother and my mother had an ongoing game. She would hide cookies and he would eat them. He did not leave any either, just crumbs. It was their game. It was part of their closeness. She and I never had that.
I never really ate cookies like they did. I don't think that is is exactly why she and I were not close but maybe our distance is tangiently explained by the fact that I was a cookie snob. I would wait all year to indulge myself in my grandmother's Christmas cookies . They were like heaven to me. I would savor them, while my brother would devour them and my mom was not partial to them. She would rather eat cheap cookies than admit to loving something my grandmother made. Me, I will not eat cardboard for anyone. It can be annoying.

Lately I have been haunted by the ghosts of my immediate family, brother, mother, grandmother mostly. It is not so much their voices as their lives , their stories that haunt me through my long lens now. What is, even on my worst days, amazing is that I got out alive. Now I am the only one. My mother and grandmother, both strong resilient women, lived long if not happy lives .
My brother and my grandfather, on the other hand, died at 60 and 67, respectively, and alcohol played a role in each demise. They were both lost souls (I almost wrote lost boys) but different in temperament. My brother died a sad desperate death and he lived the same, loudly and never hampered by the truth. My grandfather went to work every day, failed quietly, and sighed often. He had regrets but he tried. He died because he could no longer breathe. His mother lived until she was 96.
But I digress from the simple truth that I am faced with: I am the end of my line. Two third cousins are the closest and the only ones related to me still in my life if marginally. I did not mother children. I tried once to meet my absent father's clan but that did not work out. I am not easy, especially when it comes to my father. I am now only in touch with my step-brother's wife and she only by the occasional "like" on Facebook.
While all of this gives me great sadness, it also reminds me that my resolve is built on the shoulders of the resolve of my mother , my grandmother, and my great grandmother. That and my stubborn determination to thrive. I got out alive.

She grew up in a tiny rural hamlet on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Her father was a volunteer fireman and he used to take her with him to fires. One rumor that has been passed down is that my great grandmother sent my grandmother with her father so he would come home sober. I am not sure if the ploy worked or whether my grandmother learned young to sit while the men had their whiskey. They probably made a fuss over her. She did love her bourbon in later life and the company of men. It was harmless enough. Men always loved my grandmother. She was beautiful.
So maybe my grandmother loved fires because it was time she got to spend with her father and his cronies. Maybe it was because she just loved excitement and being the center of attention. Music and baseball could light up her eyes too and they were definitely nicer passions.

Girls couldn’t be bay pilots, they said. No girls allowed, they said.

Mending, knitting a life.
Born in 1899 to an Irish mother and a carpenter from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. 
Died in 1987, too many strokes later.
I have no actual memory of my grandmother’s wedding to draw on, 
nor the glamour of life young in the 1920’s or of the Great Depression,
I came much later in her life when she was still beautiful, still strong, but older and worn down by disappointment.
I do remember her making white cake from scratch with coconut icing and watching her darn my grandfather’s socks, and my not learning.
I remember being rocked to sleep to the sounds of Tura Lura Lura, 
my legs dangling in her lap. A family is a knitted thing that sometimes comes unraveled and it did when I was still young.
How could I begin to mend it when it was so worn, 
so often darned, so full of holes, so tattered?
I do not pretend to know. I never learned, 
and they have all gone to ashes.
“And now my heart aches with belated unrelenting love.
Tentatively I have begun again — holding my lover’s hand 
and pondering the mismatched strands of imagined memory, 
spinning tales born of familial longing.”
*Wes McNair

Said by a female voice. It was the tail end of a dream. I woke up and tried to go back, but it was one of those dreams that sunk away from my consciousness instantly. Once my conscious judging mind got ahold of it, it was doomed. I think first draft drawing is getting in the way of spontaneity, of discovering the truth of my work. Doodling is the key according to one of my Roses, now deceased.
Who are my Roses? My grandmother was one who loved roses. She did not encourage me but inspired me. Much later but still some thirty years ago there was a gallery owner who visited my studio and on the way out passed some doodles on a table and said: “Paint more like this.” She never showed my work. I did achieve the looseness of the doodle painting a few times, but not consistently. The looseness would hit my consciousness and disappear.
I have always been in search of the legitimate marks. These are what I look for in art, in music, in poetry, in life.
Then thirty years pass. I see too much studied painting usually buried in layers of paint. Then I come upon Rose Wylie, an English painter who has come to prominence in the last ten years at 70 plus years. Bam!
She has walked up to it and brought it to the surface.
Now the dream, this dream contained no roses but I just thought that I just have to do just that, walk up to the paper and make a mark and then more, then less by erasure. Pencil marks, paint marks, color, change.