Snow Magic

Last week the landscape turned solidly to white. It was good for the winter-lover’s soul. The timing even works for the folks (you know who you are) who only like snow for Christmas. Like holiday magic, snow in December covers the starkness of November with glittering brightness.

Trees that dropped their leaves months ago and had seemed simply bare became graceful, the twists and spread of their limbs outlined in a layer of crisp white. Evergreens, their branches drooping gently under a perfect layer of snow, now resemble the frosted trees of a gingerbread house village. The field that before looked cold and dull sparkles white in winter sunlight, a glimmering sea of tiny crystal reflections.

Snow makes the mountains glow. It magnifies moonlight. It amplifies quiet. It inspires joy and creativity in children – and the young at heart. (Trust me, snow-haters, it’s much more fun to go play in the snow than to grumble about it.)

The day it snowed the most last week I had two kids home sick from school. All day they lay on the couch, not wanting to move or eat. Outside, the snow sifted steadily from a gray sky, the white piling up to six inches or more. Late in the afternoon, they could bear it no longer. When the boy child arrived home from school, the girls pulled on snow pants and boots, left the coziness of inside for the chill of out. They rolled snow into huge balls and started forming a snow fort. They shoveled and piled and tossed snowballs toward the dog when her wild antics threatened to ruin the rising frozen fortress.

Over the weekend, after a full day of skiing through new snow, back out the kids went, over to the big hill at their grandparents’ house around the corner. They sledded until it was dark, and then kept going. They shaped snow into start ramps at the top of the hill and, further down, built jumps to fly off. They made endless trudging trips up the hill for the repeat joy of flying back down.

Partly, I know, this full-on love of snow is because it’s early in the winter. Snow in December seems a bit like a novelty in this new season. It’s like the first flower blooming in spring, the first hot day and cool dip in the river of summer, the first perfectly crisp morning of autumn.

“Nothing gold can stay,” the sage Robert Frost once wrote. And nothing white, either. We are embracing the season, wrapped up in the magic of snow while it lasts, twinkling in the moonlight and sparkling in the sun and lining the paths through the woods in perfect, delicate white. 

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 22, 2017 issue of the Littleton Record.

Mowing

I have been helping to mow our fields these last weeks of August, making long work out of what could be done by an experienced operator in a few days.

 This mowing is far from Robert Frost’s contemplative whispering scythe, though the poet kept his own fields just down the hill from ours some 100 years ago. No, our field is long past hay, if it was ever used for that, and is full of an array of wildflowers and brush and ferns. There is nothing whispering about the tractor, which gives a baritone rev when I turn the key, before settling into a deep mechanical purr. Where a scythe would clang resoundingly, I imagine, should its curved blade meet a boulder, the old bush hog instead grinds to a shuddering stop when I fail to avoid those brush-hidden chunks of granite left by the glaciers eons ago.

Probably I should have helped with the mowing long before now, but I have left the task to my husband, who has much more tractor-driving experience, for all the years we’ve been living here. The truth is that I am a bit afraid of the big, green John Deere tractor, with its noises and levers and giant, churning wheels. But I am getting used to driving it, learning how to maneuver around obstacles, though I have left the more challenging spots – like the tumbledown apple orchard with its trunks and low-hanging branches and hidden stumps – for my husband to mow.

Despite still being a bit edgy behind the wheel as I bump along – sitting on the front edge of the seat to reach the tractor’s pedals – I have found that I like the distraction of mowing, the redrawing of the landscape little by little. And while it is certainly not a quiet chore, I have found mowing can be a contemplative one.  

The first day I mowed, as I nervously watched for rocks and endeavored to avoid overhanging branches, a rainbow arced across the sky at dusk to land behind the mountains. Another afternoon the tractor, crawling noisily along, spooked two deer from where they must have been bedded down in the still-tall grass. They bounded in the opposite direction, down the hill and through the row of old apple trees, all lithe bodies and big eyes, their sleek pelts deep amber in the summer sun.

As I trundle along I am rediscovering the anatomy of our fields from the perspective of a tractor seat. I mow down to Big Rock, site of occasional picnic lunches; around the old burn pile, twined now with growing things; as near to the ancient, tumbling stone walls as I dare creep. I mow over rocks and around trees, through unseen ruts and across surprisingly muddy areas, where the tractor’s big wheels threaten to sink (and, indeed, sometimes do) under its heft into the soft ground.

I’ve watched poor meadow voles scurrying away and leaping mice hurdling over freshly cut clumps of grass to flee the path of destruction. One day I stopped to move an abandoned board left in the field and did some scurrying of my own, high-stepping back to the tractor to get away from the startled and writhing snakes I found beneath the wood. Probably they were garter snakes, but I didn’t stick around long enough to confirm their identity.

Little by little, I have mowed swaths through the tall, dead stalks of lupine that two months ago were filled with purple blooms and are now covered in seed pods dried to a mottled gray-brown. Mingling with these gone-by flowers are lofty tufts of bright yellow goldenrod and late-summer asters in white and purple, which I lament knocking down mid-bloom.

It is not all destruction, though. The patch of blueberry bushes still producing a few fruits I have left untouched, for now. Same with a few of the blackberry brambles, whose fruits are just ripening. If we don’t get to picking them, surely the bears will. The other day I stopped the tractor to break a section of pin cherry off so I could save a goldfinch nest – long abandoned at this point in the season – to admire its perfect cup, which once held eggs and growing chicks, and the birds’ method of affixing the nest to the tree by spider web silk.

And, with the destruction comes rejuvenation. Left unmown, the fields would revert to forest more quickly than it seems possible for trees to grow. In a section of the field that was not mowed last year the pin cherry and brushy willow saplings have grown bold and tall, requiring multiple passes with the bush hog to knock down. In another few years, these trees and others, the berry brambles, the scrubby bushes would align to block the view of the mountains, swallow the old apple orchard completely, change a habitat that has been, if not constant, at least similar for many decades. 

So we mow, contributing to the cycle our fields have grown into: from winter snow to the dull hues of early spring before color creeps back into the landscape and the fields’ grasses and ferns and flowers grow as high as our knees, then our waists, then our shoulders and beyond, blooming into summer before being cut down to do it all again.

There is no whispering scythe here, but the fields hold poetry just the same.

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 August 25, 2017 issue of the Littleton Record.

The Library

Tucked among a collection of family photos in our living room is a picture of my friend Liz and me when we were little girls. We’re standing outside our hometown library on a rainy summer day, knobby knees sticking out from shorts, raincoats buttoned up against the weather. She’s holding an umbrella under which we’re cozied up, peering at the pages of an open book.  

Liz lived close to the center of our town, and we rode our bikes all over together – to the store that sold penny candy, to meet up with other friends, and, as the photo evidence shows, to the Westborough Public Library. I still remember this library of my childhood hometown. There were bright, wide steps just within the side entrance – modern stairs of linoleum leading down to the children’s section, others up to the main floor, which back then was a couple decades shy of its centennial.

When I picture the inside of that library, the memory includes that comforting, musty aroma of old books and polished wood common to libraries everywhere. A sense of calm, intermingled with expansive curiosity, settled over me each time I arrived at this place full of books. It’s a sensation I still get when I pass through the heavy doors of a library and breath in that bookish scent: what stories will I discover today, what exotic places, what new information?

Thank goodness (and good teachers) my children love books as much as I do. Their yen for new reading material is well satiated by the school library from September through May. But come summer, the kids ask often to go to our town’s Abbie Greenleaf Library. There, they know, they will find shelf upon shelf of books: stories about cats and horses, volumes on tropical rainforests and science experiments, tales of wizards and orphans and epic adventures.

Last year the kids got their own library cards, carefully signing their names, then tucking the small laminated rectangles into their wallets. They took to carrying these wallets – my son’s a black, faux leather zip case, my daughter’s a pink canvas tri-fold bedecked in white hearts – with them whenever we went out, just in case we swung by the library.

We made several trips to Abbie Greenleaf last year and have been a few times already this summer, the kids perusing the shelves of the children’s section for just the right book. They have learned to look up titles in the library’s online catalog – or, even better, to ask the librarians’ advice on the next good read. Often they are lost in the just-checked-out pages before we have pulled out of the parking lot.

Now that all three of my children willingly read on their own, they are content to sit for a while in the kid-sized chairs and couches of the children’s section while I wander to the farther reaches of the library, searching the long, high shelves for my next reading adventure, running fingers along spines to find a book that feels right, seeking an interesting title or a favorite author, peeking at first sentences in search of one that seizes me by the imagination and sucks me in.

Libraries are more than just books, of course. They are centers of community and learning and research. I have spent many hours in the Littleton Library spinning through the microfiche files of old newspapers, while other patrons read today’s news in the next room. This week I attended a poetry reading at the Abbie Greenleaf Library, a small-town welcome to Rose McLarney, this year’s Poet in Residence at The Frost Place just down the road.

I wonder if Robert Frost visited the library when he lived in Franconia a century ago, if he brought his children here when the building was still new. The collection would have been quite different then, of course. Probably there was no children’s section, and perhaps the rooms did not yet carry the aroma of well-worn pages. Still, it’s nice to think of the poet meandering along the shelves, running his fingers along the rows of books, while his children nestled into a quiet corner to read on a rainy summer day. 

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 8, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.

Waxing poetic

My daughter, who is 7 years old, has started writing poetry. This new interest seems to have grown from a poetry project in her first grade class, in honor of April being National Poetry Month and in preparation for the school’s upcoming Poetry Night.

There is a history of poetry here, of course. The White Mountains, and the forests and fields and villages around them, have inspired countless writers and poets, including Robert Frost, who lived for a time down the road from where I live now. My daughter’s recent poetry, not surprisingly, is inspired simply by the happy thoughts of a 7-year-old.

So far, she has waxed poetic about rabbits, dogs, cats, and the month of April. In one poem, she combined all of those things: April rabbits/April dogs/April cats/I love them all. Sometimes she writes her poems into big hearts she’s drawn on the page. She likes to use her new sparkly pen and write in her new sparkly notebook. She is a girl who loves to throw a little sparkle into everything she does.

Before my daughter wrote poems, she wrote books. These tended to center around seasonal themes – the bats and ghosts and witches of Halloween, the sand and seashells of a summer trip to the ocean. When she feels like writing, she sits down within the lively din that is nearly constant in our house, touches the end of her pencil (or pen) to the side of her mouth, opens to a new page, and just starts writing.

I love that my daughter writes. In this, she is like me. I have loved to put words on paper since I was old enough to climb the tall pine tree in the backyard of my childhood home and sit there with my notebook, surveying my world, thinking thoughts, writing some of them down.

In many other things, my daughter is quite different from me. She has, for instance, this confident sense of style that allows her to pair patterns and colors and textures that seem outlandish, but somehow work for her. While she struts like a fashion diva, I walk like a tomboy. Where she manages to always be fashionable – even on the soccer field or in the sand box – I can’t even manage to be fashionably late, preferring instead to be a few unfashionable minutes early to everything.

For the first two summers after my children were born, I worked as a docent at The Frost Place, that house just down the road where the great poet and his family lived nearly a century ago. It was there that I realized how powerful, and how meditative, poetry can be. I spent many a quiet afternoon reading Frost’s poems, his words strung together in timeless lines and stanzas. I already knew “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by heart and “The Road Not Taken” nearly as well.

In those summers, I discovered other Frost poems – “Revelation” and “Reluctance” among them – and other poets. One night, there was a reading with three contemporary poetry greats: Maxine Kumin, Galway Kinnell, and Donald Hall. I don’t remember which poems they read that summer evening, but I left Robert Frost’s old barn feeling both contemplative and euphoric. That is the power of poetry.  It is in song lyrics and music, in really well-written prose, in nursery rhymes and children’s books. It can be soulful or silly, graceful or gritty, straightforward or nuanced with hidden meaning.

The first lines I ever memorized came not from a poem, but from a famous passage in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” which I was required to learn for a high school English class. I remember the lines all these years later because they seem relevant now as they were when I was a teenager: “This above all: to thine own self be true,/And it must follow, as the night the day,/Thou canst not then be false to any man.” (There is a lot of other good stuff in that speech by Polonius, but I didn’t have to memorize all of it.)

Be who you are, and the rest falls into place. Those are good words to live by, I think, words I’d like my children to heed as they find their way in the world. I don’t know if my daughter will continue to write poetry, or if this is a fleeting interest. But I hope she’ll stay true to her sparkly, fashionable, confident self. And I hope she’ll always find a bit of poetry in her life.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings from a full life. This essay appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the April 11, 2014 edition of the Littleton Record.

Changing pace

The merit of changing life’s pace hit me several summers ago, when I spent a few afternoons each week working as a docent at The Frost Place in Franconia. I’ve always enjoyed stopping to smell the roses – both figuratively and literally – but I had recently entered into a new stage of my life, one that involved two babies and plenty of hectic.

Five months earlier, I had become the mother of twins. After several years as a small-town newspaper reporter, with a finger on the pulse of the local communities and a schedule as unpredictable as the news, I was immersed in a new reality of relatively sleepless nights and baby talk, dirty diapers and midnight feedings, caring for two little beings when I’d only really ever had to take care of myself. I’d started doing a little writing from home, but getting out of the house – by myself – was emancipating.

Some days at the farmhouse just down the road and around the bend, where the poet Robert Frost lived nearly 100 years ago, were busy with visitors. Others were quiet, and I would be left alone with poems to read and a couple acres of semi-tamed field and forest and garden to explore. I began noticing wildflowers I’d maybe seen before but never really looked at closely, finding monarch caterpillars munching leaves in a thick stand of milkweed (and, later, their chrysalises, then emerging butterflies), trying to identify the array of birdsong floating through the air and creating its own form of poetry.

One of the books in our small shop in Frost’s former barn – the National Audubon Society’s Field Guide to New England – became my go-to source for information on my new discoveries. At summer’s end, the Dartmouth College intern with whom I had shared docent duties presented the book to me as a parting gift.

The two children who were babies that summer are now 5-year-olds and have a little sister. We look at the book together often, revisiting familiar information and searching its pages to find the new plants and animals we’ve seen or heard. It’s fitting that the book came from a place where Frost lived, as the poet reportedly loved wandering through the local landscape, botanizing all the way.

Life certainly hasn’t become any less hectic since that summer at The Frost Place, with a growing work load of writing projects and three active kids. But as much as life becomes busier with children, it also grows more inquisitive. “Why?” and “How?” are favorite questions, asked endlessly, and we alter the pace of our lives to allow for discovery.

We wander through the fields and forests around our house often, in all kinds of weather, in every season. Moving at a child’s pace, I notice more than I would if I were running or cross-country skiing or biking solo. Looking at the landscape from a child’s perspective becomes a learning experience for all of us.

As we slow down we discover endless wonderful things: the petals of trout lilies curl backwards toward the sunlight, the white springtime blossoms of wood anemones are tinted pink on their backsides, the flowers of the small purple violets growing wild in the woods are shaped like butterflies.

In the spring we listen for the peepers calling from the nearby pond and creep as quietly as we can to the water’s edge; it is never quietly enough to catch one of the tiny frogs in the act of singing. In summer we watch the lupine plants grow higher each week until they burst in purple spikes that fill the back field, and we know where the best stashes of wild blackberries are. In fall, we look for signs of bear along the trail that meanders through the old apple orchard. The tracks through new snow in winter tell us which animals have passed by recently, and we can tell where the red squirrels like to eat by the deep piles of pinecone scales beneath tall trees.

We still get caught up in the craziness of school and meetings, t-ball and swimming lessons, paying the bills and buying the groceries and tending to the endless piles of laundry. But we take the time, especially when things get crazy, to change pace. Change is good, so the saying goes; variety is the spice of life.

A version of this essay appears in this week’s Record-Littleton.

The joys of reading

For as long as I can remember, I have loved books.

I have long relished peaceful summer afternoons filled by a compelling novel, chilly winter days nestled by the fireplace with something good to read, or the simple and comforting act of curling up with a bedtime story.

As a longtime reader, and now a writer, I am happy to get behind the local celebration this month of the National Education Association’s Read Across America program, which strives to instill in children a lifelong love of reading.

For the past decade I have worked as a writer, and so I am sometimes invited to serve as a speaker for various groups. This month I have been asked to speak at a local middle school about my work, and to read at a local elementary school during its Read Across America celebration. I consider these invitations an honor, and I hope the students find in books all the joy and knowledge there to discover.

The first stories I remember devouring were the Serendipity books – magical tales accompanied by fantastical drawings of doe-eyed animals and colorful fairy creatures. These were some of the first books I could read on my own, and I read one after another.

Eventually I graduated to the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, once spending an entire summer day in bed with a stack of compelling mysteries and consuming a large bag of M&Ms and four entire books. Later, it was on to Judy Bloom, V.C. Andrews, and the teenage drama of the Sweet Valley High series. 

Through the years I’ve embraced several favorite authors – John Irving, Tom Robbins, Barbara Kingsolver, Jodi Picoult – reading all the titles I could find by each in the local bookstore or the library. I’ve also gone through phases of reading the “classics,” from Charles Dickens and Mark Twain to Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen. Occasionally I delve into the timeless poetry of Robert Frost (who for a few years lived and wrote just down the road from my home today), or the work of W.B. Yeats, Maya Angelou, and New Hampshire’s own Donald Hall.

Sometime into my 20s I discovered that E.B. White was not only the author of the beloved children’s book Charlotte’s Web, but also a masterful essayist, and I often return to a collection of his writing when I am between books.

With three young children, I now spend lots of time reading aloud – the zany rhyming tales by Dr. Seuss, the wonderfully silly poems of Shel Silverstein, the mischievous adventures of Curious George, and so many others. We’ve even started on some of the Serendipity books, resurrected from my childhood.

Like most parents, I hope that my kids grow up to cherish many of the things that I do. I’d love for them to play soccer and to find joy in the mountains, to travel to other places and explore close to home, to enjoy gardening and stargazing.

But the affection I most hope to pass on to them is the joy of reading. There is no other adventure that has the capacity to take us so far, to expand our horizons to new people and cultures, to carry us to other times and places.

There is nothing like being lost in the pages of a good book. Reading can take us Across America, and far beyond.

From the Record-Littleton, March 16, 2012.