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.

Vacationland

For the past 17 years I have lived in places where other people vacation – a tiny town surrounded by tall peaks in Colorado, then a seashore village in the west of Ireland, and finally settled into the White Mountains of New Hampshire. For many years I did tourism-based work: waitressing, guiding horse treks, retail jobs in ski stores and gift shops. And like most anybody who lives in Vacationland, I have occasionally been frustrated by visitors who drive too slowly while looking at the view or ask questions bordering on the absurd (“At what elevation do the deer turn to elk?” is among my favorites).

It was a refreshing role reversal, then, to travel to another Vacationland last week, exchanging the quiet mountains of home for the sandy beaches, busy ice cream shops, and whimsical mini-golf courses of Cape Cod. Here, I became the rubbernecking, out-of-town driver, peering first to the landscape of the sea and salt marshes, then to the perfectly picturesque Cape houses with their neat cedar shingles and hydrangea hedges ranging in hue from pale pink to cornflower blue and deep purple.

On the Cape in summertime, it seems the tourists outnumber the locals, but it’s easy to pick out the houses where year-round residents live. There are nameplates on the doors, sprinklers set on timers to water small lawns in the wee hours, plastic-wrapped Cape Cod Times tossed onto driveways each morning, and neat fences containing backyards with patios and swing sets.

At our home in New Hampshire, surrounded by an untamed apple orchard and wild berry brambles, we are regularly visited by moose, deer, and bear – the wildlife tourists to the area often hope to see. The week before our Cape Cod vacation we had one bear, looking for some discarded cooking grease, spend a bit too much time a bit too close to the house. We’ve also had bear cubs in the sandbox and a juvenile moose in the perennial garden.

By these large animals, my children are unfazed. But the small, lightening quick eastern cottontails of Cape Cod were fascinating. We looked for – and often found – them everywhere: the mini golf course, the back yard, on the way to the beach, on evening walks through the neighborhood. Each glimpse of brown ears and fluffy white tail elicited gleeful exclamations of “Bunny!”

An even bigger treat was the seals we spotted in the waves off Monomoy Island, where we happily traveled with friends who have a boat. The seals seemed as curious about us as we were about them, their round, black heads staring at us from the shallow water before ducking into the ocean and popping up again a few waves over.

Wading through tide pools, the kids found hermit crabs, a starfish, huge snails, mermaid’s purses, rocks in all sizes and colors and rubbed smooth by the ocean, and more shells than would fit in their plastic buckets. These things may be as common to Cape Codders as bear and moose sightings are to us, but for my New Hampshire kids, the treasures of the sea are new and wonderful and will be remembered fondly until our next visit.

This was our third annual trek to Cape Cod, and it’s become a week my children look forward to all year. For them, it’s a chance to sleep in bunk beds, play in the waves, and go for a boat ride or two. For me it’s a cherished family tradition and happy change of pace. Salt water and sea breezes are good for the soul, in the same way that clear mountain air and vistas are, or paddling along a lake where loons sound their wild cry and sunlight glints off quiet water.

No matter where you find Vacationland, a change of scenery and break in routine can be refreshing, invigorating, recharging. I count myself lucky to live in a place where a breath of fresh air is available any time from the front porch, the windows frame a stellar mountain view each day, and you’re more likely to be delayed talking with a neighbor at the post office than stuck in a traffic jam.

Still, it’s nice, sometimes, to get out of town. It was a joy to spend a week at the beach. And it was a blessing to return to the mountains, a Vacationland for many, but simply home to me.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul and posted to her Blog: Writings from a full life. This essay also appears in the Aug. 9, 2013 edition of the Record-Littleton.

Talk about the weather

Storm a' brewing over the mountains last spring.

There’s nothing like a big storm a’ brewing to stir up excitement and get folks talking about the weather. All around town this morning, Hurricane Sandy has been the topic of conversation and uncertainty. How windy will it get? Will the storm blow back out in time for Trick-or-Treating in two days? Will we lose power? Did you hear about all the schools closed in Massachusetts and the roads closed in Connecticut?

Everybody, it seems, loves a storm… as long as they know they’re out of harm’s way. And that if the power goes out, it’s only for a day or so. In the relative safety of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, the anticipation of a big windy storm is more welcome now, in this otherwise weather-boring time of year, than during the frigid winter (unless the winter storm brings lots of powder snow, of course). No need to worry about frozen pipes – or frozen toes. As long as your loved ones and your home are safe, it’s something awesome to behold the power of nature from the safety of your living room.

At our house, we have the pots and the bathtub filled with water. The flashlights and candles are ready to go. There’s a fire set in the fireplace just in case. The cupboards are filled with peanut butter and pasta enough to last days, and I have the reserve coffee-making system in place (my priorities are clear).

I think it’s a sense of self sufficiency that makes us feel as giddy as we do nervous when a storm is brewing. It’s sort of fun, in an adventuresome kind of way, to lose power for a few hours, or a couple of days – as long as you’re prepared. It feels romantically old-fashioned to eat by candlelight and gather quietly in front of the fire. Reading by flashlight in a quiet house is better than watching the crap on television, anyway.

We know, however, that when an entire region loses power, it’s the folks up here in the boonies who have it restored last.

When our oldest two children were infants, our electricity went out for a few days in April. We gathered in the living room, blocking off cold drafts from the rest of the house with blankets hung in the doorways. We slept snuggled together on the floor, waking every couple of hours to feed the fire – or the two babies.

In those short few days, trapped inside, I read more than I had read in months. There was little else to do, with the rest of the house shut up, unable to run the vacuum or the washer, no power to boot up the computer, and two babies who needed very little entertainment. By day four it was getting a bit tiresome to keep the babes and their mother clean without running water. And then the sun came out, the power came back on, and we went outside to enjoy the rain-washed landscape, the sounds of the chirping birds of spring mingling with the chainsaws of the line workers still clearing trees to restore electricity to neighbors.

This morning, only an hour south of home, schools were closed for the impending storm. Just over two hours’ drive away, Boston, according to news reports and Facebook postings, was virtually shut down today. But here, the other parents I spoke with this morning as we dropped our children at school were hoping to see some form of storm, something to shake up the day-to-day routine just a little bit, an excuse to unplug and gather the family close.

Everybody loves a storm. But I hope my friends to the south are safe; I hope things stay safe here, too. And if the power goes out, I hope it’s not for long; the novelty wears off after a couple of days.

A gaggle of cousins

My three young children, a posse on their own, happily expanded their whirlwind to include their California cousins last week for several days of mountain scrambling, river splashing, family dinners, and endless giggling.

Checking out the catch of the day.

The suburbs of Sacramento are a far cry from the country lanes and cool rivers of Franconia, New Hampshire, and the planned slate of White Mountain activities was filled to overflowing before the plane touched down in the Granite State.

In the four summers that my brother, a New Englander both by upbringing and at heart, has been returning “home” with his son, they have developed a few must-do items that are repeated each visit, along with a few new adventures every year.

The week in New Hampshire is a chance for my brother to give his son – and now his two vivacious step-daughters – a glimpse into his own boyhood summers. It is a chance for the kids – all aged 10 and under – to form bonds and explore new things.

The visitors get a taste of mountain living, being able to wander far and wide without the constant buzz of traffic, exploring dense forest right beyond the backyard, watching fireflies and stars in a night sky not obscured by city lights. The kids who live here year-round are inspired to go to some of the places that draw tourists here, but that we don’t think to visit because they’re simply part of the local landscape.

During past summers, we’ve ridden the tramway at Cannon Mountain (normally a winter activity for us, but just as spectacular in the summer), watched the bears perform at Clark’s TradingPost, joined the throngs of small kids and their families at Santa’s Village, and browsed the world’s longest candy counter at Chutters.

This year, as always, we began the week with the short trek to the top of Mount Baldy in Franconia Notch. This is my nephew’s favorite, and we don’t do anything else until we’ve scrambled over the boulders of Baldy to reach the breezy top and check out the view of Lafayette and the Peabody Slopes at Cannon.

From there, we moved on to more fun – and kept right on moving the entire week. We slid down the chutes at Slippery Rock, paddled the waters of Long Pond and Coffin Pond in canoes and kayaks, splashed happily in chilly Echo Lake, and squeezed through tunnels and caves at Lost River.

The kids hunted crayfish, dug in the sand, and watched a bear wander slowly across a ski trail high above the beach at Echo. At Long Pond, a lone loon braved the noisy bunch, floating near the canoe and then diving underwater to reappear in a new place, and every rock turned in the outlet stream revealed a salamander. At Coffin Pond we watched a heron fly over us and a painted turtle slip from a log into the water as we glided near.

Even at home, there was nary a dull moment. Soccer in the yard, searching for toads and inchworms in Nana’s gardens, finding green sticks with Poppy for roasting marshmallows, swinging on the old Peabody chairlift hanging behind the house, impromptu dance parties around the fire pit with Aunt Laura, and back-to-back-to-back evenings of gobbling up s’mores and watching fireflies.

It was everything summer should be, squeezed into a mere six days. As the cousins headed back to the other side of the country this week, we were all sad to say goodbye. Their visit left us a bit tired and filled with happy memories – and a list of things to do next summer. Let the countdown to next year’s cousin reunion begin!