Top Notch

If you ever need to feel appreciated, volunteer to work the last water station on the last leg of a mountain triathlon. That’s what the kids and I did Saturday, spending the morning about two-thirds of the way up Cannon Mountain, just below the final, grueling climb of the Top Notch Triathlon. By the greetings we received from many racers, you would have thought we were handing out rare treasure rather than small paper cups of cool water.

Ready and waiting for thirsty racers.

When I mentioned the idea of volunteering for the Top Notch – locally known simply as “The Triathlon” – the kids were immediately eager. The Triathlon is more than a challenging athletic contest; it is a community gathering, a day where friends and neighbors come together to support an event that benefits the local recreation department. My kids cheered me on as I completed the final leg of the race four years ago, and after volunteering last weekend, they’ve caught the Triathlon bug.

Now in its third decade, the Triathlon attracts racers from local towns and as far away as Alaska. We saw serious, hard core competitors on the mountain last weekend, as well as youngsters accompanied by parents, the local elementary school principal, and the town’s police chief. The results show competitors ranging in age from 11 to 77, and finish times from just over an hour to well over three.

Our Triathlon day started with an early morning ride up the Cannon Mountain Tramway, with the kids remarking several times how strange it seemed to be on the Tram during the summer, rather than when the mountains are blanketed with snow and we are dressed in ski boots and warm layers. With us in the tram car was Jean McKenna, who has served for the past several years as the official finish line greeter on Triathlon day.

Bubbly and welcoming (even first thing in the morning), Jean spends hours handing out bottles of water and words of encouragement for those last few yards of the race. Even when you think your legs will give out and your lungs burst with the effort of making it to the top of the mountain and across the finish, you keep going, if for no other reason than Jean says you can. She ran the race for 13 years before retiring to her finish line post, and there’s no better person for the job.

Saturday morning, we left Jean to her task and hiked to our station, descending a trail the kids had only ever skied. We all agreed the pitch seems steeper when you’re wearing sneakers and walking through wildflowers than when there are skis strapped to your feet and the downward schuss is effortless.

We spotted the first competitor about an hour after the race started, and a few more speedy racers passed within the next few minutes. Some of these took water without slowing their pace, steady and strong. Soon enough there was a stream of climbers, and gradually the intensity of the racers lessened. There were more smiles, pauses to drink the water or refill bottles, brief snippets of conversation. Many racers thanked us for being there. Several made joyful, though tired, exclamations upon seeing us over the rise. Some asked how much further there was to go, and we told them to listen for the cheers from the finish line, which I know inspire tired legs to keep trucking on that final steep stretch.

Several friends passed our station in the crowded middle of the pack, some doing the Triathlon for the first time, others annual repeaters. Many racers were sporting shirts from past Top Notch Triathlons, indicating they’d been here before. One man near the end told us he’ll turn 70 next year. He’s done the race as part of the team in past years, but this year was competing as an individual. He wants to do the same next year, figuring if he simply finishes, he’ll be in the top three of the 70-plus category.

I’m not sure my children realized the uniqueness of an event that encompasses the community, not sure they see the value in living in a place where kids not much older than they are willingly push themselves through the course, or where their school principal climbs mountains, or where the chief of police comes smiling through, well ahead of the sergeant, who pauses to catch his breath and tell us that completing the Triathlon is a goal he’s wanted to accomplish for three years.

Long before the last racers came through, though, the kids asked if we could repeat the experience next year, participate in the day once again as volunteers. But they’re also talking with each other and with friends about putting together Triathlon teams someday, joining the cadre of bikers, swimmers, and mountain climbers toiling through the natural playground in our backyard.

Maybe they don’t yet realize how lucky they are to be growing up here, but they know Triathlon Day is special.  

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 12, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.

Sweet Summer

Summer is my favorite season. I say that about every season in its prime, so don’t mind me in a few months, when the leaves are ablaze in the colors of autumn and the air is perfectly crisp and I claim fall is my favorite, or when winter arrives all white and frosty and magical and I announce it is my preferred season, then months later embrace the reawakening of spring as the best. Right now, my love affair is with summer.

At some point, several years into adulthood, it struck me that although I no longer had that last-day-of school excitement, with summer’s carefree days stretching infinitely into the hazy heat of the season, I still thrilled at the arrival of summer. So ingrained was that feeling of summer freedom that I felt it as the days lengthened and warmed as clearly as I had as a kid, even though my schedule of work and responsibility was the same now in July as it was in November or March.

Maybe that lingering sense of summer freedom is because I have always lived in places where summer – with its warmth and color and long days – is fleeting. Or maybe it’s that I have so many good memories of the season from my childhood – hiking with my family, lazy afternoons of reading in the backyard hammock, time in the garden with my mother, catching fireflies just after dusk, sparklers on the 4^th of July by the backyard campfire, countless hours spent kicking a soccer ball, and one epic cross-country journey with my parents and brothers and a pop-up camper. 

Whatever the reason, now that I have kids who fully embrace the joys of summer – kids old enough to put on their own sunscreen and carry their own backpacks, but still a few years away from summer jobs and the dreaded teenage years of being too hip to hang with Mom – summer has regained that sense of freedom and insouciance.

Here are some of the things I love about summer:

·         Jumping into cool water on a hot day.

·         Reading by the big window in our living room – or on the front porch – after the kids are tucked in, as twilight slowly engulfs the mountains, passing through an impossible array of subtle hues on its way to full dark.

·         The smell of roses: heady and heavenly.

·         The sparkle of a thousand fireflies twinkling across the field, as close to magic as anything I’ve seen.

·         Family soccer games in the front yard.

·         Watching my children fall into books and get lost there for chunks of time – bed time, after breakfast time, by the pool or river time.

·         Clean sheets dried on the clothesline and smelling of sunshine.

·         Color. So much color.

·         Flowers picked from the field and the garden and placed in a simple glass jar on the dining room table.

·         Birdsong, even the annoyingly redundant call of the catbird at dawn.

·         Vegetables gathered from the garden: the succulent result of the tilling and planting and weeding and watering.

·         Trips to the ocean.

·         Bike rides through the woods.

·         Outings with friends and our combined gaggle of children.

·         (Mostly) unrushed mornings – and not having to pack lunches every single day.

·         Thunder echoing through the mountains and the cooling rain which often follows.

·         The games my children imagine together, whether they are pretending to be wild animals (sometimes not much of a stretch) or building a fort in the woods by the river.

·         Running in the quiet and relative coolness of early morning.

·         Fresh, wild berries, found unexpectedly and consumed on the spot – or gathered purposefully and tucked into the freezer for less bountiful days to come.

·         Flip-flops. Or, even better, going barefoot.

·         Campfires and s’mores and late-night laughter.

·         Standing atop a tall mountain with my children, who are still discovering how much they can do, how far they can climb – and who still want me along for the adventure.

There are hitches in all this summer freedom, of course. Often the garden goes unweeded, becoming jungle-like while we are off hiking and splashing in the river. All those house projects I swore I’d tackle this season get pushed, once again, to next season’s to-do list. And my work hours are severely diminished in these weeks when the kids are with me nearly all the time.

When I ask my children, though, what they love most about summer, all three place “spending more time with my family” at the top of the list. Perhaps this will not always be their favorite part of summer; certainly they will outgrow this self-sufficient-yet-still-ingenuous phase, as they have outgrown other childhood phases.

So I am taking advantage of these days when they want to do things, go places, explore and adventure together. Someday, I hope, when they have moved beyond the enchanting freedom of their childhood summers, they will still thrill at the season’s arrival, still embrace the simple joys of summer, still remember all the sweet summer fun we had together. 

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 22, 2016 edition 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.