Twenty Years Home

Twenty years ago this month, I landed in Franconia. This place was already familiar, as I’d spent all of my childhood winters skiing at Cannon and rare summer days splashing in the cool Ham Branch and climbing the mountains nearby.

But it wasn’t home.

I arrived in Franconia late on a mid-October night after a cross-country drive with my mom, who’d flown out to Colorado to make the long trek back East with me. Except for a few boxes of stuff I’d shipped, everything I owned – including my somewhat neurotic cat, Fiona – was crammed into my little Subaru.

I was 27, fresh off a six-month stint guiding horse treks and waiting tables and getting pretty close to blending into a small town on the west coast of Ireland, where I was known alternately as “the horsey girl” or “the Yank who plays soccer.” The five years prior to that I’d spent in Crested Butte, Colorado, working ski town jobs to live a ski town life of sliding through snow all winter and hiking and riding my mountain bike all summer.

I could have stayed in those mountains forever, but I didn’t. I thought – twice – that I was on my way to grad school. Instead, I decided to return to Ireland, the place of my ancestors and where I’d spent a summer during college – a place I’ve seen in my dreams all my life.

Now, here I was, five years out of college, adrift. I’d spent the better part of the past week saying goodbye – first to the craggy coastline and my friends in Renvyle, then to the tall mountains and my Colorado friends. I had developed some sort of hybrid accent during my six months abroad, so even my voice seemed strange. All of my worldly possessions were crammed into a small car. I was essentially homeless and jobless – and broke.

If you had asked me then where I thought I’d be in 20 years’ time, I guarantee the answer would not have been, “Franconia, New Hampshire.” This was just where I was going to crash for a while, staying with my parents, until I figured out the next thing. I thought I’d end up somewhere bigger. Portsmouth, maybe. Or Portland. Or Concord. Definitely somewhere in northern New England, much, I believe, to my mother’s relief.

When I went west to Colorado, my folks thought I’d be gone a season, maybe a year. When I told them half a decade later that I was heading to Ireland, I think they thought two things – one, that I had lost my mind (or at least my drive), and two, that I was never, ever coming home to New England. I may have considered those two things in my own mind, too.

But in that funny way that life has of nudging us in unexpected directions, it was my time in Ireland that led me back to New England. I loved Crested Butte, and for five years that quirky little town nestled into big mountains was home. But I knew I was done waiting tables and working retail and helping to take care of the very expensive, very big houses of people who spent a few weeks a year there. I’d grown tired of the job prospects (or lack of), and of the new crop of 18- to 22-year-olds who arrived in town each fall, even if I’d been one of them not that long ago.

Renvyle had also felt like home. I had friends and work buddies and my soccer teammates. I had green fields and wild hedges of gorse and fuscia and the smell of the sea almost everywhere I went. But I did not have a work visa and was therefore limited in my ability to make a living. I stuck to my original plan of staying for six months, which meant I boarded a plane just weeks after 9-11. I cried miserably at the airport gate and felt as if I’d landed in another world – not returned home – when I arrived hours later in Denver.

Sometimes, those years in Colorado and the months in Ireland seem like a different lifetime. But my time in both of those places, the experiences I had there, the people I knew have become a part of who I am, of the way I think, of how I view my world.

And yet, it seems, I am a New Englander through and through. Sure, I grew up in a different part of New England, in a different sort of town – one with several main highways passing through it, with fast food joints and a real downtown and traffic lights (and even a good old New England rotary). But the landscape of my heart includes old houses and white-painted steeples, farms and forests, mountains and lakes and the sea. I would be lost without apples and colorful leaves in fall, snow in winter, mud and pastel blooms come springtime, and the heat and humidity and sprawling green of summer.

When it was time to set down roots, I did it here, in a place that had not quite been home, but was close. Franconia is partly the sort-of-home of my childhood and fully the one I chose as an adult. It is here that I have spent a large chunk of my life – more years than in any other place – building a career, raising children, growing vegetables, finding a community.

For years, when people would ask me where I was from, I’d hem and haw and give some roundabout answer about growing up in Massachusetts, childhood winters in New Hampshire, college in upstate New York, time in Colorado and Ireland. Now, though, if someone asks, “Where’s home?” the answer is easy: Franconia, New Hampshire.

Original content published by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul. This essay appears as Meghan's October 7, 2021 Close to Home column in the Littleton Record.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

“You know everybody, Aunt Meghan,” my niece told me soon after my brother’s family arrived in town early this month, traveling from Californian suburbia to the relative wilds of northern New England.

I certainly don’t know everyone around here, but small town living generally includes a considerable awareness of who your neighbors are – and where they are and what they are doing and with whom. If you’re looking for anonymity, this is probably not the place for you. But small towns are pretty good at taking care of their own.

As I drove around with a car full of California and New Hampshire kids, my own children and I remarked that so-and-so’s car was at the post office, we waved to friends, we stopped along backroads near home to greet a neighbor now and then. For the California kids, who live in a place with a steady stream of strangers flowing past, I guess that aspect of small town-ness seemed quaintly odd.

I have lived most of my adult life where everybody – or a relatively large percentage of folks I come into contact with, anyway – knows my name, or at least my face. In Crested Butte I moved within various social and work and skiing circles, but there were large areas of overlap among these. Even if everybody didn’t really know everybody else, a general sense of familiarity permeated the scene in this small ski town.

In the village where I lived for a summer on an Irish peninsula, I was known by several names: “the Yank” who worked for the Diamonds, the “horsey woman” (because I was a horse-trekking guide), the American girl who played soccer with the Connemara Coasters. While everybody there didn’t know my name, they all seemed to know who I was and what I was doing. It is hard to hide a newcomer in a small village where people are intricately related, especially a newcomer with a strange accent.

When I first moved back east, I found it disconcerting when strangers would stop me at the grocery store or in the ski lift line or during some social event and remark excitedly that they had known me when I was THIS HIGH. Not having been paying close attention at the age of 6 or 7 and having traversed two decades since then, I would smile politely, usually having no idea who my friendly accoster was.

I’ve been here long enough now that I am rarely approached by unknown, long-ago acquaintances. These people have long since become familiar. But it is still nearly impossible to navigate local errands without some delay from bumping into someone who wants a word – or several.

A quick run into the post office to check the mail can take half an hour. Stopping at the store for a carton of milk on the way home might consume just as long. I’ve even been waylaid on early morning jogs when I run into neighbors and slow down to chat briefly, while trying to catch my breath. You simply learn to expect delays – and how to politely run away when you don’t have the time to be distracted.

The last afternoon the California crew was here, I took the kids down to the river for a pre-dinner swim. I ran into a friend there, the only other person we saw, and had a chat while the kids and dogs were splashing and exploring and looking for interesting rocks.

On the way home, there was what constitutes a traffic jam on the narrow backroad: three cars traveling in close procession toward us, plus a couple of pedestrians and a dog in the road. I yelled a greeting out the window to the first car, which contained summer friends we hadn’t seen yet this season. A bit further along, I greeted neighbors who were out walking the dog. I noted another neighbor outside doing yardwork.

“Yep, you know everyone,” my niece confirmed from the passenger seat, no longer surprised by this phenomenon.

Later that evening, one of those neighbors sent me a text. She’d found a camera on the bridge by the swimming hole and determined from the photos on it that it belonged to one of us. It did, although we hadn’t yet noticed it missing. Personal item returned practically before it’s even lost? That’s just a benefit to living where everybody knows your name.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the July 14, 2017 issue of the Littleton Record. 

Dog Tales

Last week I was interviewing a guy for a story I’m writing and realized we were neighbors once, nearly two decades ago and more than 2,000 miles from here. The first hint was when he said he’s lived in Crested Butte, Colorado, for the better part of the last 40 years. But it was his mention of having golden retrievers – a long line of them, now in the 12th generation – that ultimately tipped me off.

Hey, neighbor, wanna play?

It’s safe to say I’m a dog person, the kind who crouches down to greet canines at just about every opportunity – at holiday parades, during walks through the neighborhood, along hiking trails. I will often ask strangers the name, age, and breed of their dog without seeking a bit of intel about themselves. Dogs make good conversation starters – and great company.

I knew three of my interviewee’s dogs, from the seventh and eighth generations of the ongoing line, back in my ski town days, when I was living in a basement-level apartment across the street. Chipeta, Moki, and Dillon – a mother and two siblings – would often amble across the traffic-less road and sit at the top of my front steps, dropping a tennis ball down the stairs until I either came out to play or let them in to hang out.

They were mellow and sweet and – most importantly – provided a doggy fix to a dog-loving girl who was without a dog.

After I made the connection last week, I pulled out an old photo album to look for pictures of the golden trio. Stuck amid images of a 20-years-younger me, I found a few shots of the neighborhood dogs – including one of the three of them lined up at the top of my stairs, an old tennis ball at their feet – along with other pups who filled the void during my dogless years, that time between when I left my childhood home and the dogs I grew up with and when I got my own first dog.

Otis and Boone – a golden retriever and a black lab/golden mix – accompanied me on countless hikes and backpacking outings. They belonged to friends, and I sometimes dog-sat for them when their people were away. Ike, an age-hobbled, perpetually smiling yellow lab, was another of my dog-sitting charges. Chelsea was the next-door-neighbors’ mutt, who ran alongside her people on long mountain bike rides well into her old age.

The ski shop where I worked in Crested Butte had a host of shop dogs. Bella was a slightly gawky Bernese Mountain dog who belonged to one of the shop owners. Ruby, a yellow lab who went with the other owner, was Bella’s older, more distinguished counterpart. Rounding out the mix was Honey, a sweet golden who tagged along to work with the office manager.

Around the corner from the house where I lived for four years, there was a huge malamute named Ullr, after the Norse god of winter. Ullr howled daily with the noontime whistle and was always up for a belly rub. I was happy to oblige as I passed the inn where Ullr kept watch, finding contentment in his general doggy happiness and the feel of fur on fingers.

Then there was Ben, a smiling, slightly shaggy, black dog who lived with the family I worked for when I left Colorado and overshot New England by a few thousand miles to land, briefly, in the west of Ireland. Ben loved to play soccer and would join me and the family’s two boys in our evening games in the barnyard. That combination of a dog to pat and a soccer ball at my feet lent a sense of the familiar in a place far from home.

I haven’t thought about this cast of dogs for a long while, but that random blast from the past brought them all back to me. Like good dogs everywhere, this canine crew offered unconditional friendship at times when I was without my own doggy sidekick, easy company during skiing and hiking explorations, and simple stress relief through belly rubs and ear scratches.

It’s been more than 15 years since I moved back East, which means all those dogs are now long gone. But I still can picture them in the old, familiar places, can still see in my mind’s eye their dog-smiling faces and happy anticipation about everything from hikes to biscuits to the noontime whistle.

They weren’t my dogs, but they’re all locked into my heart’s memory just the same, friends from other times and other places.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the January 13, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.

Skiing Through Black Friday

The idea of joining throngs of hyped up shoppers the day after Thanksgiving has never appealed to me. I’m not much of a shopper to start – I can barely stand grocery shopping – and I don’t do well in crowds. For all my adult life, I have lived in places where it is easier to get into the mountains than it is to find a mall; this is one of the many things for which I am thankful – on Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and all the other days.

Far from the madding crowds: scoping out a new season.

While the hoards of Black Friday shoppers rise early to stand in line, my family, if all goes well, will be making our way to the mountain for opening day of ski season. When there is snow on Thanksgiving weekend, I ski. That has been true since my immediate post-college years when I lived in Crested Butte, Colorado.

During those ski town days, I usually spent Thanksgiving working, then joined friends – and friends of friends – gathered in someone’s living room for a hodgepodge of holiday dishes and traditions around a makeshift collection of card tables and mismatched chairs. Most of us were far from home and family, working odd holiday hours in a town where shops, restaurants, and ski lifts were open on Turkey Day.

People showed up when they could, after or between shifts, coming together in the comfort of good food, friendly company, and talk about the fresh ski season. Back then I was thankful for being in the mountains, living in a beautiful place with other people who embraced that beauty and loved exploring the wide-open spaces around us. I was happy to have a job that included daily ski breaks, a decent place to live, and people to gather with on this holiday of giving thanks, even if they weren’t quite family.

I’m not sure I even knew about Black Friday until I moved back East. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention before. Or maybe this national day of shopping has morphed in the past couple of decades into the consumeristic beast it is now. In the modern era of constant connectivity, you don’t even have to leave the house to buy presents, and online shopping has its own special holiday in Cyber Monday.

Well before Thanksgiving, I started receiving texts and emails touting Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, sometimes from stores where I’ve never even shopped. They can send all the advertisements they want, I still won’t be buying today, and probably not Monday either. My holiday shopping tends to be on the small scale (even with three kids) and as local as I can make it.

During the Black Fridays I worked as a reporter, I spent a good portion of the day after Thanksgiving popping into those local shops in the post-parade crowd of Main Street Littleton, talking with local business owners and shoppers. The resulting story was generally a combination of fluff (what were the “hot” items this season) and substance (how important were Black Friday sales to these small shop owners).

Surrounded by hustle and bustle, and jotting soundbites into my reporter’s notebook, I longed for the steady hum of the chairlift’s bullwheel, the sensation of skis slicing through snow, the comfort of not being corralled into small spaces with so many people. (My claustrophobic exception is the tram car, where the end result of a top-to-bottom run absolutely justifies the sometimes crowded means of transport).

Lots of things have changed since those early post-college years, geographically and otherwise. My Thanksgivings have returned to a more traditional scene – a day off from schedules, gathering with family, eating too much. These days, I spend my winter weekends coaching 6- and 7-year-old aspiring ski racers. We kick off the season the day after Thanksgiving.

It turns out I am thankful now for some of the same things I was thankful for 20 years ago when I lived in the mountains of Colorado: work that allows me to ski quite a bit, a pretty nice place to live with the beauty of the mountains surrounding me, and the closeness of family. Plus, I get to spend Black Friday on skis.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the November 25, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.

Ski Season Shuffle

We are three and a half months into ski season, with who knows how long to go. Despite the weird and wacky weather, which has brought us more rain this winter than snow, the skiing has been plentiful, and ski season has been busy. Busier than usual this year, because my children have entered into the world of ski racing, and I have jumped back into a weekend coaching gig.

Throw in a smattering of ski writing deadlines, which sometimes involve traveling to other ski areas, and it all means ski season is an all-consuming entity. The mudroom is a muddle of skis and boot bags and helmets. The gear collection spills into the living room, where ski boots are lined up to dry by the radiator, which is piled high with hats, mittens, and neck gaiters.

Notes about night skiing and spring skiing and adaptive skiing are scattered around my makeshift office at the dining room table. House projects we started months ago, including an ambitious plan to shift bedrooms, have been abandoned in the fullness of ski season. Non-skiing plans are delayed to that vague point of “after ski season,” and there are some friends we just don’t see as much this time of year.

This ski-centricity is a phenomenon probably impossible to explain to someone not involved in skiing. But my skiing friends and cohorts will understand: skiing is not merely a hobby, or a way to pass the normally cold and snowy months of winter, or even a passion. It is an inherent, un-extractable part of simply being.

Skiing is why we wake up before the sun during the darkest days of winter. It is why we don innumerable layers on the coldest days of the year and are willing to face the elements, whether sub-zero chill, gale force winds, sleet, rain, snow, or sunshine. It is why we forgo other things to buy equipment and passes and why we stay up late tuning skis. It is something we think about, sometimes dream about, during even the dog days of summer.

Skiing is why I moved west after college, seeking higher mountains, deeper snow, a skiing life in a skiing town. And it is why, when I came back East five years later, I landed in the mountains, why I am here still.

My dad used to tell me when I lived out west, probably in an attempt to lure me home again, that skiing is skiing. Doesn’t matter where you do it, it’s the same. I’d scoff at such a crazy concept as I headed out to ski Colorado powder on a mountain whose base was 5,000 feet higher in elevation than my home hill’s summit.

The snow in Crested Butte is a good bit different than the snow on Cannon Mountain. And it’s different, probably, than European snow and Tahoe snow and Midwestern snow. But it turns out that skiing IS skiing. Yes, skiing powder is different than skiing hard pack (and goodness knows there have been days this season when I have lamented the ice and longed for a deep dose of Rocky Mountain powder). Groomers are different than bump runs or glades. Flats are different than steeps.

But there’s something in the feeling of it all that is intrinsically the same. Skiing is freedom and grace. It is strength and precision and the thrill of self-made speed. It is unbridled joy at each perfect turn – and the imperfect ones, too.

Some ski seasons are longer than others. This one, here in the East, has been particularly challenging in many ways, and there are moments when I feel ready for the busy shuffle of ski season to shift definitively to spring, ready to pack away all the gear and move on to the next season, ready to sleep in and not hurry everyone out of the house for first chair.

But then I click into my skis and arc my way down a mountain and everything else fades away. There is only skiing then, and it is worth a little shuffling.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the March 11, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.

Powder Day Progression

Monday’s mini snow storm serendipitously coincided with a day off from both school and my family’s various ski programs. We woke to a few inches of perfect fluff covering the trees and car and driveway, with snow still sifting steadily to the ground.

A few inches constitutes a powder day in my kids’ minds, so after breakfast we made our way along snow-greased roads to the mountain. I spent the next few hours chasing my kids around the familiar ski trails of my own childhood, and I couldn’t help pondering the progression of my skiing life – from New Hampshire to the mellow hills of college days in upstate New York, then the deep snow and steep skiing of Colorado, and finally home again to continue the cycle with the next generation.

In Colorado, I worked in a ski shop a few steps from the base of the main chairlift. My bosses were skiers, and they scheduled shifts so that all employees had a ski break every day. It was during my five years in Crested Butte that I learned the “No friends on a powder day” rule. You could make plans, but if someone didn’t show, there was no waiting around; it’s every skier for herself when the getting is good.

A powder day there, whether interrupted by work or not, generally included laps on the Headwall or North Face, searching out new lines and fresh tracks each run, and recounting the day’s best turns over a couple of beers with friends. I remember skiing one perfect, snowy day without stopping to eat, run after joyful run of deep snow and sweet turns, skiing until my legs were jelly. At day’s end I was exhausted, but happy, fulfilled.

In my first winters back East the occasional storm brought a gift of knee-deep powder and soft bumps, a respite from the harder, groomed, manmade stuff. If I could sneak away from work, I would spend an hour or two skiing off the Zoomer chair, short, steep runs as familiar as my own back yard. Sometimes I’d run into friends in the lift line, and we’d ski together for a while. But the no-friends-on-a-powder-day rule stuck: there was no waiting, no adjusting to others’ work schedules. And whether it was a stolen hour or a full afternoon of skiing, I left the mountain with that same feeling of happy fulfillment.

Fast forward a few years, and I found myself with three young children, who I was determined would be skiers. Raising skiers is not for the faint of heart. It starts with years of bundling awkward toddlers and preschoolers into layers of sometimes uncomfortable clothing, coaxing small feet into rigid ski boots, schlepping skis from the car, and getting everyone’s boots into bindings, goggles and neck-warmers properly adjusted, mittens tucked into sleeve cuffs just right.

Pockets filled with chocolate and the promise of cocoa breaks provided extra incentive if needed. But there were meltdowns, of course, sometimes from tired little skiers; sometimes from the skier mom longing for the bigger runs beyond the pony slope.

Back then, I managed to sneak out once or twice a winter to ski with friends on longer, steeper, snowier terrain. On those rare occasions, the old no-friends rule went out the window. I welcomed the kid-free companionship of friends on the chairlift, and we weren’t above taking our own cocoa breaks if the wind was too cold or the lift line too long – or we simply wanted to sit and talk.

More often, though, I spent my skiing days with the kids as they honed their skiing prowess. We spent countless hours exploring kid-sized glades and hucking little airs in the mini park. I have a video of my 3-year-old son cruising down a beginner trail in a power wedge, then veering toward the woods near the bottom. “I want to ski powder,” he said, as he shuffled through an inch of fluff atop the groomed surface of the flats.

Nature or nurture? I don’t know. Probably a little bit of both. Gradually, the kids progressed to longer, steeper trails, the tight glades at the top of the mountain, hiking over the saddle for further exploration of hidden places, a faster skiing tempo.

These days I don’t often get to ski with my kids. The older two have embarked on their first year of race training, skiing with their coaches all weekend and learning how to carve fast, smooth turns into hard snow. The younger one is in a group of more than two dozen of the littlest would-be ski racers, which I help coach on weekends. This all means lots of skiing for each of us, just not together.

So Monday was a treat, an unscheduled day to do whatever we liked, and we like to ski, especially when there’s fresh snow and no overlying agenda. I ran sweep on each run, watching the kids negotiate soft powder interspersed with rigid hard pack, then making my own turns behind them.

The pace is slower than it was during my Colorado powder days, but considerably faster than that not-so-distant time spent on the pony slope. My skiing company Monday was a ski mom’s dream come true, and the thrill of skis through snow just as happy and fulfilling as ever.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the January 22, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.

Under the Guns

If I concentrate, I can almost block out the roar of the snow guns, which are spewing manmade snow beneath an uncharacteristically bluebird New Hampshire winter sky. Soft as silk, the snow sifts to the ground, building cover on the snow whales, which rise like cresting waves in a perfect line down the hill: swelling white whoop-de-dos that offer up continued freshies, last run’s tracks filled in again in the time it takes to ride up the chairlift.

The bottom layer of manmade is incredibly grippy underneath the top layer of fluff, the combination of firm base and fake pow like some other version of hero snow. I push off down the steep trail, chairlift to the left, tree line to the right, goggles down, zipper up against the subzero chill, the bliss of sleek turns bigger than the blaring of the guns.

Western skiers would scoff at this zest for manmade snow. I know; I lived and skied among them for five long, lovely winters. I moved west after college with a lifelong ski buddy. We’d grown up together as ski racers on the blue ice and manmade granular of a New Hampshire mountain, in an era when ski racers weren’t encouraged to ski anything other than hard pack. Early in our first Colorado winter, we hiked out to Crested Butte’s Third Bowl. The snow was waist-high, and we hadn’t a clue what to do with all that powder. We flailed. Then laughed. Then floated as we figured it out.

She’s still out there, skiing the deep stuff, while I’m in my 15^th winter back East. Turns out you can take the girl out of New England, but she just might come back to the mountains of home, despite the discrepancy in annual snowfall between there and here.

Manmade snow is an Eastern skier’s lifeblood, a necessity that allows us to carry on down the ski slopes, even if the grass is still poking through the shallow layer of white on the front lawn. Even in a season like we had last winter, where it snowed lots before Christmas, we relied on the manufactured stuff to keep skiing through a late-December rain, holding on until winter returned with a welcome and persistent vengeance.

Thankfully, manmade snow has come a long way since ski areas started lining the slopes with snow guns a half-century ago. This is not your grandma’s manmade snow. It’s soft and creamy and carve-able. I know it’s not the real stuff, the deep powder of a skier’s dreams. But with a start to winter like we’ve had this season, I’ll take manmade bliss over the alternative of no skiing at all. And while this is no powder bonanza, the skiing is good. With the super cold temperatures early this week, ski areas all over the region fired up the guns, blowing their own version of cold smoke.

My last powder day was Easter, the flakes falling fat and fast on the kids as they hunted Easter eggs. That April storm was a surprise, and we took advantage by heading out for a post-egg-hunt family ski day, introducing our third-generation Cannon kids to a favorite, slightly off-piste, not-entirely-secret stash. The kids whooped as much in delight of the new snow as in discovering an old trail through the woods, an adventure that is a local skiing rite of passage.

True to their New England roots, my kids love a good snowfall. Even a dusting of new white has them rushing out the door to sled or shovel or brush snow angels into the fluff. A mere couple of inches, in their minds, constitutes a powder day and has them clamoring to get out on the hill. And true to their New England roots, my kids are not thrown by having spent the first month of this ski season on purely manmade snow. Any day skiing is better than a day not skiing, whether powder or frozen granular, come rain or wind or snow or ice or, sometimes, cold sunshine.

I don’t know when the next powder day will be. Until then, I’m taking what I can get: a man-made blizzard, and the occasional face shot under the guns. 

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the January 8, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.

Holiday Missives

In our ever-increasingly high-tech world, I tend to be on the low-tech end of many things. I don’t Instagram or Snapchat or Tweet. When I called a friend the other day to get directions en route, his response was an incredulous, “Don’t you have Google Maps?” I still write appointments into a paper daytimer, which sits on my kitchen counter and is in no way synced to my phone and laptop.

This low-tech-ness extends to my method of sending Christmas cards. You won’t find me mail merging from a fancy Excel spreadsheet or printing tidy labels from an organized list. Nope. I still use my trusty spiral-bound address book. Judging by some of the names scribbled within, I’ve had the book a good 20 years. Probably longer.

Sorting out the Christmas card list is always a trip down Memory Lane anyway, a journey enhanced by the physical act of turning the pages of my slightly tattered address book. With an electronic list, updates are made with a few keystrokes as friends move or fall out of touch. My little book, which sits idly by the phone for the rest of the year, reveals names of Christmases past – and many other adventures.

I can see clearly which friends have moved several times, because their old locales are scratched off and rewritten wherever there was room. Sticky notes with other address changes poke out in a multi-colored array from the worn pages. Married friends with changed last names often have two entries – with their original names and their newer ones – and I have to take care not to send multiple cards to these twice-entered pals.

I pause, at least inwardly, often as I address the envelopes, wondering what old friends in Colorado or Massachusetts or across the Atlantic have been up to in the months since we last exchanged Christmas cards, trying to figure out how old children I once babysat are now. (I am always surprised when their family cards arrive and reveal these children I hold in my mind as toddlers or grade schoolers are now driving or attending college.)

Many times I can picture the places where I am sending the cards – the view of Paradise Divide from Crested Butte, the happily cluttered house of my one-time soccer coach in Old Harlow, the craggy shoreline and green-gray sea of the Renvyle Peninsula. As my pen puts numbers and street names onto paper, I recall times spent in these places.

If I were to print labels from an electronic address list, I’d lose that conjuring up of the past, which is the best part of sending cards. My method takes longer and can certainly be a bit disorderly, but I like it anyway.

Some of the names in my address book I’ve not written onto an envelope in many years. There are college buddies with whom I exchanged summer letters long ago, before the dawn of email, when notes were sent from mailbox to mailbox year-round, not only at Christmastime. Their names are still in the book, but their addresses have likely changed many times since we last corresponded.

For years I sent a card to the nervous Irish couple I lodged with during the summer I studied at university in Galway. I no longer send the annual missive to their address on Carbry Road, nor have I received one from them in several Christmases. But that entry in my address book evokes memories of my first journey to Ireland, which I spent seeking some insight into my Irish heritage, struggling to learn an ancient language, and embracing legends and fairytales I’d never heard as a child.

There are other names from that summer, too, mostly people I’ve fallen out of touch with in the 20 years since, but a few who still receive a Christmas card from me each year. There are high school friends within those pages, too, and old soccer teammates, former co-workers and longtime family friends. A few of the names in my book belong to people who have died; as I turn the pages, I remember them, too, and our shared stories. It seems right to have their names still written there.

For many of the people on my Christmas card list, this annual exchange by so-called snail mail is our only correspondence. Others I see often or occasionally. Many pop up on my Facebook feed, so I feel as if I have some sense of the goings-on in their lives, even if we haven’t spoken in years.

Some of their cards come with newsy letters of recent events, both happy and challenging. Others are store-bought cards, hastily signed. Many include photos of growing children, beloved pets, and adventures from the past year. Before I open each envelope, I try to discern the sender from the handwriting or the postmark. I am happy to receive each card, each glimpse into the world of the sender, whether casual acquaintance, favorite cousin, or dear old friend.

Sometimes I receive a card from someone who has moved since their last holiday missive. I tear the return address from the envelope and tuck it into my address book where it joins other similar scraps, old notes and letters I’ve saved, and many treasured memories. All stowed away until next year’s Christmas mailing.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the December 24, 2015 edition of the Littleton Record.

Summer's treasures

On the windowsill above our kitchen sink are a heart-shaped stone from the river and a small bouquet of wildflowers, both gathered by small hands not far from our front door. These are summer’s treasures, and gentle reminders – as I’m doing the dishes, making meals, or sorting mail – of the joyful, fleeting magic of both summer and childhood.

The rock came home from a recent visit to the Ham Branch of the Gale River, where my husband and children took the dog for a quick after-dinner dip and brief respite from last week’s heavy heat. No matter how many toys a child has, it seems the simplest things are the most amusing, and rocks are high on the list. This one, gray and bumpy and fist-sized, became a treasure because of its shape and my 4-year-old’s recent fascination with hearts.

Fresh wildflowers appear regularly in our home and change with the evolving season. The small vase that holds them, an old spice jar, is filled in spring with the bursting yellow of dandelions until the variety of summer blooms through the fields. Now we have yarrow and purple clover, birdsfoot trefoil, daisies, and wild black-eyed Susans.

My son noticed a swath of daisies in a part of the field we can’t see from the house while out mowing with my husband the other day. So, as the heat waned in the late afternoon, we all headed down the grassy path cut through the field to see the wildflowers. Along the way we discovered another of summer’s treasures – wild blueberries.

We have lived in this house for nine summers, and last year was the first we found blueberries. Now that we know they are there, we find the low bushes everywhere. We discovered this year’s first blueberries the same day we picked our first peas from the garden and ate them, sweet and small and warm, straight from the pods. Both the berries and the peas are little, and it takes a good bit of effort to gather just one bite. But, oh, what a bite it is!

On shelves throughout our home, there are treasures from other summers in other places – rocks etched with small fossils, found during a climb on Treasury Mountain near my former home in Crested Butte, Colorado; sparkling white chunks of quartz from an old mine near there; jars of seashells from Cape Cod; a bent mountain bike chain ring that recalls a fun and challenging ride; a small gray stone rubbed smooth by the ocean and picked up along a beach in the west of Ireland.

Winter’s treasures of rosy cheeks, crisp snow angels, and flying ski runs down a mountain are harder to hold inside a house, just as the colors of autumn fade too quickly, and spring’s emergent green grows soon into full-fledged summer. But summer’s treasures are collectible and happy reminders in colder, drearier days that the sun always shines eventually.

This summer is young still, and many of its treasures yet to be discovered, collected, enjoyed. But summer passes quickly in a splash of the pool or the river, a week at the beach, the sounds of laughter in the sunshine. Most of the blueberries in the field now are still green, offering the promise of many pints to pick in the weeks to come. The peas are among the garden’s first gift in this hot, wet summer, and we’re looking forward to harvesting other vegetables growing there, slowly it seems (and enjoying the farmers’ market in the meantime).

Some of the treasures we gather in this season will fade – the fresh lettuce, the clamor of birdsong in morning, the wildflowers in the jar, the sun-browned skin on our faces. Others will keep awhile. We’ll fill the freezer with the extra bounty from the garden and the field – plump blackberries, blanched green vegetables, and zippy basil pesto. A few more treasures will land on shelves and windowsills. In our hearts and memories we hold a bit of every season – fall’s color, winter’s invigorating chill, spring’s awakening, and the treasures of summer.

Original content by Meghan McCarthyMcPhaul, published on her Blog: Writings from a full life. This essay also appears in the July 12, 2013 edition of the Record-Littleton.

A princess, a purple unicorn, and a knight in shining armor

She’s been a Halloween princess for three years running. First came the purple, butterfly-winged princess. Last year was the soft, silvery snow princess, which brought with it a Halloween snow storm. This year my 5-year-old daughter will be a straight-up princess in a midnight blue dress adorned with fluttery sleeves and plenty of woven golden bling – and a jewel headdress to boot. To a girl who loves to don anything sparkling and glittery, Halloween is a day of blissful dress up opportunity.

Trick-or-Treat! 2011

The dressing up, after all, is what makes Halloween a favorite for kids – and plenty of grown-ups, too. Sure, the candy is nice. But it really comes down to this being a day where anyone can dress up as just about anything, adopting an alternate persona with a wig, a costume, some stage makeup, whatever it takes.

I have never been one for configuring creative costume ideas. For the past two years I have simply, lazily slapped a witch’s hat atop my noggin and headed to the town’s short Halloween parade with my three Halloween kids in tow. With the exception of the year I joined forces with a few girlfriends to go out on the town of Crested Butte, Colorado, as the Spice Girls (I was a redhead back then and, therefore, Ginger Spice), my get-ups in that costume-loving town were pretty abysmal. Crested Butte loves a party, but it loves a costume party even more, to the point that residents have invented their own holidays, just to have an excuse to dress up. A plain old Halloween witch doesn’t cut it.

Anyway, these days my children, thankfully, seem to fall into their own identities as Halloween approaches. This year, the gilded princess will be joined by her little sister, the purple unicorn, and her twin brother, the knight-in-shining-armor. Magical all around.

The princess dress came from the grandmother who loves dress up as much as her grandkids do. That’s how the knight-in-shining-armor (he is not simply a “knight,” but demands the entire title) started, too, with a play sword and shield from Gaga’s collection. Alas, both of those developed cracks, and so a new, complete knight-in-shining-armor costume was ordered and will be on display on Halloween.

The purple unicorn was deeded to us as a hand-me-down from friends. Although it is about two sizes two small, it was an immediate favorite. The littlest one has worn it to preschool, the grocery store, the post office, and anywhere else she could find that needed a purple unicorn. It is named Uni and sleeps tucked into the bed with her at night. Just about everybody in town has already seen the purple unicorn costume, but to suggest a different option is akin to blasphemy as far as my 3-year-old is concerned.

And so we will head downtown this afternoon, my costumed crew and I, with a feathery mask that is no better than an old witch’s hat, but at least it’s something new. For about 20 minutes, traffic will be stopped on Main Street as an escort of fire trucks and police cruisers ushers a parade of ghosts, clowns, pirates and faeries through downtown Franconia. Parents and grandparents will line the street, and workers will emerge from downtown businesses to cheer the Halloween kids.

Then we’ll rest up for Trick-or-Treating and the town bonfire. I imagine the princess, the purple unicorn, and the knight-in-shining armor will return home in some combination of sleepy and sugar buzzed. It’ll probably be tougher than usual to rouse them from bed the morning after. But I bet at the breakfast table the discussion of next year’s Halloween costumes will begin.