what word shall it be?

after astrid and willa went back to texas i discovered a piece of creased notebook paper written in pencil and submerged in a pile of odds and ends. as i held the paper portion of the accumulated stuff over the recycle bin—ready to release my hold and let it all slip away—i stopped. i decided to leaf through the detritus to verify that it was, in fact, junk, and not something of value in need of being saved. i'm glad i took the time to do so because under the advertising circulars, magazines, and envelopes enticing me with offers of credit cards, vinyl siding and replacement windows, i found this small gem, a gem from the mind of a young child on vacation in a place she had never before experienced.

astrid had begun to form ideas off the letters that spell "maine" (is there a name for doing this? an acrostic or something?) and then, at some point, seems to have been abruptly interrupted. she might have left her writing behind to eat dinner, or to head out on a fun excursion, or to get ready for bed; or she might have been distracted by her sister or the dog or the lure of a campfire and s'mores. whatever the case may have been, she never resumed her writing and the paper was forgotten and abandoned.

as i read the words i had found, i smiled. the girls had only left two days before, but already the events of the previous fourteen days had formed themselves into a prized collection of memories, the kinds of memories that are sweet and persistent and insist on being mulled over.

for your information, maine, it turns out, is "mainly cold"and yet it is also an "amazing place"; it is where imaginings and dreams are sparked, and the "not a warm sea" stretches to the horizon.

but then what? what about the last letter of the word m-a-i-n-e? what about that final "e"? astrid's writing suddenly ends, leaving the sorry looking "e" hanging there, and leaving me wanting more. what else were you going to say, little girl? the incomplete "e" stands by itself, lonely and unfinished at the bottom of the page. what could have come next in her thought process about maine? what might she have been thinking? what would the "e" have become? what else could she have added?

perhaps the "e" might have started off the word enjoyable. or energetic. or easygoing? or how about exquisite, extraordinary, eventful? maybe excited to explore someplace new. maine overflows with all these words.

or eating perhaps—we did a lot of that. the girls tasted lobster for the first time, although willa didn't particularly care for it. but that was fine with me—i love lobster and got to devour her leftovers.

i have taken the delightful piece of work and, for the time being, have tucked it away in a safe place. perhaps the author might finish it at a later date—at least i hope, i really hope, that's what will happen.

i would rather be in bed

~ today, maybe because i'm lazy or maybe because i'm busy or maybe because it's national poetry month, i'm re-posting this scribble of mine from last summer.


i would rather be in bed, in my hand we, the drowned,
flipping the pages of this mighty fine yarn about muscular danish
sailors and their lust for the murderous sea
but then i change my mind as i often do and find

i would rather be eating lunch with pear snapdragon
that silly girl who i love but who is too busy
to eat a crumb of this nice buttery tart,
warm and filled with lane's prince albert apples,
apples so fresh they practically sing about their past life
as round, juicy ornaments decorating a queen's garden.

i reckon i would rather be on a maine beach
hot sand sifting through my naked toes,
or washing my hands with finn's fruity soaps,
pink lather dripping down my arms and onto the floor.

i would rather be walking in the shade on tremont street
sharing a joke with buddha in boston or touching the fallen rose petals
in a graveyard along the thames where dusty springfield sleeps.
maybe i would rather snip lavender blossoms in chawton
and press them, dry and flat, onto a bookmark for you, my friend.

i would rather win than lose a midnight battle with scaly prehistoric reptiles
and small cats hidden in a wardrobe, a dream that leaves me sweaty enough
to turn on the air conditioner until they turn off the electricity due to high demand.
we plunge into darkness and heat, a three-year black-out.
when at last we're reconnected—for now anyway, until we really run out of juice—
nbc reports the heat wave is stuck in missouri.

wouldn't i rather plug the long, black skinny cord of the cd player into the wall
to hook up to my friendly neighborhood power grid for entertainment?

my act intensified, juggling cd's in a three-ring circus, my life, vexed,
trying to choose between chopin and lady gaga, or the fleet foxes
and joni mitchell, spinning, spinning, and making money under a well-lit bigtop.

~ i found the pink roses and fallen rose petals (june, 2011) in the graveyard where dusty springfield sleeps in henley-on-thames in the uk, a neighborhood oh-so-close to some of my favorite bloggers. 

free therapy

shadow and light. long straight hallways. faces. doorways. empty streets. parking lots filled with cars. rooms connecting to rooms in maze-like clusters. this is what i see. these are on the ragged edges of my dreams.

one of my best friends in high school had a great dream memory. she could zero in on the details. some of her dreams were very short; others long. sometimes her dreams were funny, other times they were full of drama. many of her dreams involved the boys she was interested in. sounds stupid, the stuff silly teenage girls are made of, but the way she recalled her dreams made me feel like i was on some kind of wild roller coaster ride. who knows, maybe her dreams really weren't that interesting and i just thought they were all those years ago.

some people can do that, remember the vivid details of their dreams if they think about them right away when they wake up, and if they then make an effort to commit them to memory. other people, like my husband, rarely recall a dream. (but when he does remember one, it is often rather entertaining. he always insists he doesn't dream. pshaw! everybody dreams.)

i used to be able to latch on to my dream life and it would almost always stick with me, but lately it has been slipping away. i've been having more difficulty remembering my dreams; even when i first wake up, when i try to reel in that night's dreams they sometimes wriggle away from me and slink back into the dark depths of my mind.

but i know my nights are filled with many fragmented, disjointed visions, slices of people and scenes which swirl around in my dreamscape and madly tumble toward me in the darkness. sometimes i wake up sweaty and breathless, wondering where i've been. i keep a little notebook and pen on my bedside table and if i can remember my dream and if i feel like it at some crazy hour in the middle of the night, i will occasionally jot down a few notes. i looked over some of these shards of memory the other day and it's amazing how a few quick, messily written, words will jolt you—well, me anyway—into remembering how a dream looked.

the dream world is a weird place. you close your eyes and your brain blips with all kinds of bizarre and what seems like disorganized electrical activity, but oftentimes your dream sleep ends up becoming a kind of free therapy session, as if you have spent time talking to someone and working out issues. you wake up refreshed, your thoughts more organized, like a burden has been lifted. another night you might be fortunate enough to get a ticket to some nice exotic place where you can be anyone, have anything you want. oolala, what fun!

or dreams can be frustrating experiences; i oftentimes have difficulty finding what i am looking for. then i wake up more in a muddle than sorted out. or i have rapid-fire dreams, compilations of fragments—one unrelated, fast-paced vignette after another. then look out, there are the ones that creep in during the wee hours well past midnight and on toward morning when i arrive at the station and board a train bound for some hellish location populated by ghastly strangers or unidentifiable creatures that make me cry out in terror. where do those startling visions come from? right after a dream like that i feel like i could use some real therapy.

luckily, once you shrug off your sleep and get going in the morning it all fades away and you can't remember what all the fuss was about.

dreams are like skyscrapers pulsing with your brain's activity, bustling with the night-shift workers of your mind. while you sleep your soul is working overtime, diligently occupied in its cubicle, hunched over and busily chronicling the unnoticed mental scraps which were flying around in your head while you were awake.

once in a meadow of blurry poppies

i had a dream one night, the kind of dream which gets stuck in your head for a long time.

it was one of those dreams, as vivid as a movie, presented in brilliant technicolor, with an orchestral soundtrack running along in the background. i had the dream more than once, in fact it recurred several times over a period of years. sometimes little things changed, and certainly i have forgotten parts of the dream and tidied up others in remembering and retelling it, but what i am about to write down is the basic core of a dream i dreamt while in my halcyon days as an undergraduate.

in the dream i was traveling in europe with some other students. i have no idea what country i was in. i stopped at a small store to buy cheese, bread and a bottle of red wine. i pulled a handful of bills (lire? marks? francs?) out of my bag to pay for my purchases and handed them to the clerk. for some strange reason i needed to pay the exact amount, but in my dream that didn't seem strange at all to me. the food simply needed to be paid for with the exact change.

i proceeded to dump the entire contents of my very large leather handbag onto the counter in an undramatic and unhysterical manner, as if it were commonplace for people to dump their possessions all over the place to search for change while shopping. the people in line behind me were not in the least disturbed by my behavior, but then after all this was my dream and they had to behave and follow my script.

let me tell you, there was really an incredible inventory in that bag, in addition to the normal items needed for traveling, such as a passport, wallet, gum, sunglasses, a bulging change purse, traveller's checks, camera, extra contact lenses, small umbrella, travel books, maps, notebook, pen and so on.

the other paraphernalia was indeed startling. the bag contained a lamp, a rug, a folding l. l. bean type of camp stool and a smallish watercolor painting (hmmm...large items a bit reminiscent of what mary poppins toted around with her in her large carpet bag?). also, there were several volumes of hardcover books and a soccer ball (for a quick impromptu scrimmage after i paid my bill?). and hidden in the depths of the bag was a tiny dog. (what breed? who knows. but it was a healthy and happy pooch. storing a dog in one's handbag was, again, perfectly normal behavior in my dream.)

dear reader, you may be wondering how on earth i can possibly remember these details after so many years. it is true many people forget their dreams immediately upon awakening. i certainly forget a lot of mine.

but not this dream.

to begin with, as i said, i had the dream several times, and i was fascinated by the fact that it repeated itself almost identically each time, so i made a point to go over it in my mind whenever i had the dream to keep it memorized. i have done that with a few of my more entertaining dreams. i think dreams are interesting places to go to and explore, to have a look around. but why i really remember this one is because it still gives me the shivers. it felt so real. it still does. i often wonder about that dream, its meaning, its significance, if any, to this day.

the dream's action continued as follows. at this point, remember, i needed change to pay for my groceries. i grabbed my bulging change purse off the counter and dumped that out on the counter, too. all silver coins, all from various places around the world, clinked out into a pile. i reached into the shiny mound to pay my bill and.......

....then, as dreams often do, the dreamscape changed. the light became brighter, more intense, and colors were vibrantly painted across my field of vision. i was in a green meadow filled with blurry poppies (pardon the interruption, but no, i was not on drugs) which bloomed in spots and splashes and streaks of red and orange, like brushstrokes in some kind of weird impressionist painting. my cousin was calling to me from across the field. she shouted, "when a pile of silver coins appears, someone you know will receive an important message." was this some sort of game? i called back to her, "what does that mean?" and she laughed her lovely laugh and ran away. infuriating. i thought why is she always running away and i need to get back to the store and pay what i owe.


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ten years later i was married and had a child. my little daughter and i were sitting at the table and i was teaching her the value of pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. the pile of coins made me remember the dream i had. i have never forgotten it, and i even teased my cousin shortly after i had the dream the first time by saying "but what were you trying to tell me in the dream?" after i told her the dream's story. she laughed almost like she did in that unreal world and said she wished she knew because, of course, she didn't have a clue. after all, it was only a dream.

my cousin flew from her home in california to maine one summer a couple years ago for an extended holiday with me in vacationland. after a day spent hiking up the leisurely morse mountain trails and then down along the ocean, we came home, took showers and went out for dinner. as we sipped glasses of wine she said, "you know that weird dream of yours with the silver coins? well i had a dream with silver coins in it, too." she proceeded to tell me her dream was not at all like the dream i had had, but there were two features which were strikingly similar: the pile of silver coins and the message.

she then told me a strange tale. two days after my cousin had the coin dream she did, in fact, get a message. a message was on her answering machine from a lawyer informing her that her grandmother had included her in her will. i knew her grandmother had died, but i didn't know the details. turns out, in her will she left my cousin a few nice pieces of antique furniture and a large, ornately carved wooden box filled with notes and letters which my cousin recalled had been in her grandmother's house for years. my cousin was touched that her grandmother had been so thoughtful to pass along to her this small legacy.

she put the furniture in her home and placed the lovely box in her bedroom. she had hardly looked at the letters at the time, thinking they were from her great-grandmother. she knew they were very old. the spidery handwriting was beautiful and lavish; lovely old-fashioned inky curls and loops decorated the fragile ivory pages. then for a time my cousin promptly forgot about the letters.

what she didn't know was these were rare letters indeed. when my cousin finally did take the time to sort through and read them she was astounded to find out they were mostly correspondence between a "molly m." and edith wharton. she had letters from molly addressed to edith and edith addressed to molly. the letters made it obvious that edith and molly were friends and they were dated around the beginning of the twentieth century. imagine that - letters to and from edith wharton! my cousin had the wharton letters authenticated; once wharton scholars find out about them all hell will break loose.

but who was molly m.? where did my cousin's grandmother get the letters? what connection did molly have to her grandmother? why did she specifically want my cousin to have the box of old letters? my cousin is still trying to figure all that out.

and you know, the day before yesterday i actually saw a pile of silver coins, not in a dream but right here in town. i was at the laundromat loading dog blankets into a washer when a lady dumped a bunch of coins on the counter and started counting them out - a flash of shiny silver metal piled high right in front of me. i watched with fascination as she pulled out the quarters and stacked them in neat columns, eight silvery quarters in each.....

take a look around

have you ever thought about how little we actually notice about the world around us? you know, the little things. cloud pictures in the sky. the stranger beside us in the supermarket. an intricate spider web in the garden. we tend to focus on what is important to us, what interests us, at the moment. we are often too preocccupied with the daily dramas swirling around our heads to really take in the totality of our surroundings. how often do we hear "i am so busy i don't have the time to...." whatever. everyone is busy, too busy, and our short lives, and probably some important little things, easily slip away from us and are gone forever.

yikes, that was kind of serious, so here's a thought that's a little lighter. i know i could walk into the room with a brown goldsmiths diamond tiara on my head (now that is silly, and not such a little thing, and does judy even sell tiaras?), and if i asked ed how he liked it, he would say that's nice, dear. but first i would have to get him to look up from his iphone or ipad, or whatever, and get him to notice that i had diamonds on my head!  (i am being a bit unfair with this quick example; ed oftentimes notices lots of little things, even before i do, with his keen photographer's eye.)

when i was a teenager, my parents planted a whole row of new bushes in the yard - forsithia, rose of sharon, lilac. they asked me how i liked the new plants. what? where? ha, i could have fallen into those bushes and not noticed they were new. a teenage girl, generally speaking, does not look at landscaping. she looks at boys and clothes, and boys. at that time, what was important to my parents was not necessarily important to me.

today, of course, i notice plants and gardens, whether i am here in maine or elsewhere. it is what i like, what interests me, what grabs my attention. what about you? what grabs your attention? what do you look at, look for, look forward to, dream about, see? do you ever take the time to notice the little things outside your usual sphere of activity, things which are not necessarily something you normally would look at and focus on?

maine coast fairy brunch

today i am daydreaming about what to include in a maine coast fairy brunch menu. perhaps this.....

millet seeds
phlox seeds
sunflower seeds
black eyed susan seeds
acorn shell with water

in order for fairies to notice a meal left for them as they fly around in the garden and woods, and also for them to be able to dine properly, the food should be served in an appealing, natural setting. for example, a good place for fairies to eat is on a lovely bed of moss, a large fallen tree, or, in this case, a nice, flat stone of pink speckled maine granite. do you think a fairy will fly by and see that brunch is ready?

look up. there's a fairy. the fairy sees the food that has been prepared for her. from high above in the trees, she will slowly, cautiously, fly down and eat. welcome to our maine garden, tiny guest. enjoy!

happy weekend kiddos!

note: a delightful book about fairy gardens is maureen heffernan's fairy houses of the maine coast.