Salamanders, S'mores, and Seclusion

Last week was my kids’ April vacation from school. We don’t normally go far during this week when the weather here can feel like spring or winter – or both in a matter of hours. Maybe a short visit to Acadia, or a couple of days in Boston. Still, the idea of not being able to go ANYwhere this year weighed heavily on all of us.

Without the normal weekend travel to late season skiing and early season soccer this spring, without practices and playdates, without even the daily journey to and from school and the office, we’ve become used to being home. Lucky for us, home is in a really beautiful place with plenty of space for spreading out. Most of the time, we’re OK being here. But school vacation – even when school is being done from home – is supposed to offer a time to get away, even if briefly and not very far.

So, we got creative. A couple of weeks before the break, I suggested camping in the woods between our house and my in-laws’. I didn’t have a plan beyond that vague idea, and I figured one of my children, maybe two, would be excited about this to varying degrees. But all three immediately jumped on board and went into planning mode.

It was a gift to have something to think about beyond school assignments and chores, beyond missing friends and sports, beyond the news that permeates so much now and can be simultaneously frightening and utterly confusing.

A week before vacation started, we took a whole-family walk into the woods. My husband, who grew up exploring this terrain, led the kids to a spot tucked into the trees, where Bowen Brook curves around a level area perfect for pitching a tent (or two). The kids declared this the spot and set to work building a fire pit of river rocks in the sandy ground next to the brook, with just enough space for our family to sit around it.

All that week before vacation, the kids discussed what to bring with us, who would sleep in which tent, and what we would eat for dinner (hotdogs cooked on sticks over the fire, of course). We kept an eye on the long-range forecast to see which days would likely be the best for camping. What I had hoped would be a mild change of scenery for a couple of days became a happy distraction stretched over the course of a couple of weeks.

On the chosen afternoon, we headed into the woods after lunch to set up camp. The girls worked together to pitch my old backpacking tent. My son and I put up the big family tent. Sleeping pads were unfurled, sleeping bags laid out, a few extra comforts from home tossed in. We schlepped in firewood and camp chairs, along with extra layers to allay the nighttime chill. As I got the fire going, the kids set off together – first downstream, then up – to explore.

All their lives, my children have been in these woods – first carried or pulled across the snow on sleds, then toddling in rain boots and stopping to inspect every leaf and bug, now walking with the dog or riding bikes. This is not unfamiliar territory. Somehow, though, making these woods into our overnight home – rather than simply passing through – made if feel, if not unfamiliar, in some way new.

The kids played in the water, moving rocks to build canals, happily discovering salamanders in that space where water and land merge. They gathered sticks for kindling and cut beech branches for cooking hotdogs and marshmallows. They jumped across the water, climbed up and over downed trees, played and laughed together.

I have two teenagers and one not far behind. We’ve been in the same house, nearly constantly together, for seven weeks. Most of the time we are all OK, but it is certainly not always easy. I abscond to my office and work for chunks of time, all the while wondering if they are doing their schoolwork or playing a game on a screen. Visits with grandparents, all thankfully within a mile of us, include social distancing rather than the normal hugs and snacks and playing games. None of us has hung out with friends in nearly two months.

Like most everyone these days, we are all a bit more, well, sensitive than usual. Buttons are pushed, tempers flare, feelings are often easily hurt.

But for two nights in the woods, there were no squabbles. Nobody sulked up to their rooms to be alone or picked a fight out of boredom. We hung out by the fire. We ate s’mores. We played cards. We talked. And then we crawled into our tents, with a gazillion stars overhead and a burbling brook for a lullaby.

For those two nights, it felt OK to be set apart from the rest of the world, from even the rest of our small community. We were at home in the woods, in a place at once familiar and fascinating. We were mere minutes from our backyard, but it felt like the perfect getaway. 

Original content published by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul. This essay appears as Meghan's May 7, 2020 Close to Home column in the Littleton Record. 

Leading Traditions

When I wander into my children’s elementary school these days, I am always astounded by the adorable smallness of the kindergarten and first grade students. More than once this year I’ve remarked, “They’re so tiny!” to another parent or teacher, who then reminds me that my kids were that little once, not all that long ago.

Then I remember how big the 6^th graders seemed when I first walked into school with my two kindergarteners. The “big kids” towered over the littles. They moved confidently through the halls, laughing and talking all the way, oblivious to how BIG they were.

Now my two oldest are 6^th graders, and even my own littlest is one of the “big kids” now, in 4^th grade. The kids who were 6^th graders when mine started kindergarten are now high school seniors – “big kids” in a whole different way.

There were several aspects of being 6^th graders my older two children happily anticipated as they started this last year of elementary school. Sixth grade is the culminating year at their school, their seventh school year traveling the same hallways, playing on the same playground, and following the same schedule.

Finally, they would be the BKOC – the Big Kids on Campus.

One of the things I love about their school is that the older kids are encouraged and guided to become leaders in various activities. While they were looking forward to a new teacher, FIRST LEGO League, and just being the oldest, the kids were most excited about the responsibilities that come with being in 6^th grade: leading mixed-age Peace Groups, working with the 1^st graders on various projects, planning and orchestrating the school-wide end-of-the-year Festival of the Arts.

Last week, the 6^th graders helped the 1^st graders carve pumpkins. The older kids also paired up with their 1^st grade partners during the annual Halloween parade through town – one of my absolute favorite Franconia traditions. With no littles of my own needing help with costumes or maneuvering the route, I joined the crowd of parents, grandparents, friends and neighbors gathered to watch the procession of super heroes, princesses, goblins, and vampires stroll through town.

I watched as one of my sixth graders (the other was in Boston for a different parade) shepherded her two 1^st grade charges from candy bowl to candy bowl, the littles each holding tightly to her hands.

It’s not quite true to say the transformation from wide-eyed, gap-toothed little kid to self-assured, take-control big kid surprises me. I’ve watched it happen, gradually, over the years. What’s surprising is how quickly those years seem to pass. When I close my eyes, I can still see my own 1^st graders, small and sticking close to my side. When I open my eyes, those same kids are nearly as tall as I am and branching out more and more, realizing little by little that there’s a whole big world out there.

As much as my 6^th graders are embracing this school year, there is also some trepidation about what comes next, as they worry about being ready for middle school, leaving the familiar boundaries, stretching just a bit into that bigger world. I’ve watched other classes of sixth graders, though, and I know once April vacation hits, these kids will be looking more forward than backward. They’ll be ready for the next step, eager – if still anxious – to move on.

For now, they’re busily preparing for the upcoming FIRST LEGO League competition and starting to plan for Festival of the Arts. And they’re looking forward to their next project with the 1^st graders, building gingerbread houses in December: a sweet tradition, in more ways than one.

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 8, 2018 issue of the Littleton Record.

Field Tripping

With summer vacation perched promisingly on the horizon, it is school field trip season. This was apparent last week in Boston, where I traveled with my older two children and their class for a full day of city exploration – and where around every corner we found a new group of school kids following some similar agenda.

Not Franconia's skyline.

Whether it’s touring the big city or taking a closer look at a local landmark, the kids always look forward to field trips. Partly, I think, this is because they are sprung from the confines and routines of school. Mostly, though, it’s because they get to explore some new place – or a familiar place in a new way.

Over the years, the kids have been on an interesting mix of school trips, and I’ve been lucky to tag along on lots of them. Among their favorites they list the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury, with its engaging planetarium discussions and eclectic range of displays; the state house in Concord, where they sat in the Senate chambers and high-fived the governor; and the Squam Lakes Natural Science Center, where they’ve learned about animal habits and habitats.

Last week, my younger daughter’s class visited the Flume Gorge in Franconia Notch State Park. While the Flume is just down the road from school, many of the kids had not been here before the field trip.

Caught up in the excitement of being outside on a gorgeous day, the kids seemed somewhat oblivious to the natural beauty that attracts people from all over the world to this place virtually in our back yard. These kids are, after all, growing up surrounded by green things and mountain views. But trips like this give them a chance to learn a bit more about the natural history around them.

Between scrambling across the many glacial erratics along the path, feeling the cool mist from water spilling over the 45-foot-high Avalanche Falls, and clambering through the Bear Cave and the Wolf Den, the children paused – ever so briefly – to notice wildflowers blooming on the forest floor, chipmunks scampering near the trail, woodpecker holes drilled in neat rows into a birch tree, and the calling of a barred owl from somewhere nearby.

The next day, this chaperone went from meandering through the natural wonders of the Flume to pounding the pavement – and cobblestones – of Bean Town. The Boston trip is an annual tradition at my kids’ school, and one the fifth and sixth graders look forward to all year. It’s a long day – starting with boarding the coach bus just after 6 a.m. and ending some 15 hours later when the bus pulls back into the school lot.

This year’s Boston trip included a walk along the Freedom Trail. The students toured Paul Revere’s house and listened to the tale of Revere’s midnight ride at the Old North Church, wandered through Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, scaled the 294 steps to the top of the Bunker Hill Monument, and even got to climb aboard the USS Constitution before returning to Faneuil Hall Marketplace for dinner.

Any one of those places holds enough historical import to fill a book.

Beyond the history, though, and the chance to take a first-person look at some of the things they’ve learned at school, the Boston trip is an experience these country kids – and their chaperoning parents – don’t have every day. The busyness and noise of the city, with all the unfamiliar smells and its skyline of tall buildings rather than tall mountains, is so starkly different than the pace of home.

Just as city life seems distant from our more rural existence, so does history often seem distant when considered from the pages of a book. But walking along the route of that history makes it a bit more real. It is easier, then, to notice the connections between the past and the present, this place and other places.

One of these is that the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill monument was laid by the Marquis de Lafayette in 1825. Lafayette, though French, was a hero of the American Revolutionary War, and when he toured this country five decades after the United States had declared its independence, he was met everywhere he went by adoring Americans.

The day after he visited what would become the Bunker Hill monument, Lafayette headed north, to New Hampshire. The mountain that occupies a large portion of the horizon here in Franconia is named in the Marquis’ honor – Mount Lafayette. My children’s school is named for the mountain, which they can see from the playground. Mount Lafayette stands at the northern end of the Franconia Range, which traverses south across Mount Lincoln to reach Mount Liberty and then Mount Flume, down which Flume Brook flows to reach the Flume Gorge.

How fun to join field trips to a place close to home and one farther away – places connected, even if obscurely, through the threads of history that wind from city to town, over mountains and along rivers, from long ago to now. 

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 June 8, 2018 issue of the Littleton Record.

City Fix

If you asked my son his favorite part of being in Boston last week, he’d tell you it was looking out on the city from the top of a tall, tall building. That, or the 14 firetrucks surrounding our hotel, lights flashing, as we stood outside in our pajamas with other guests while firefighters extinguished a small fire on our floor.

These are things that just don’t happen in Franconia, and we filled our three days in Boston with experiences we’re unlikely to have at home. What I have always loved about traveling – whether to a nearby city or a foreign land – and what my children are learning, is that visiting other places bridges the divide between the familiar and the exotic. Both – familiar and exotic – are, of course, relative perspectives, altered by time and knowledge and new experiences.

My children think nothing of being able to run out the door into lots of space for playing and exploring, or of gazing at a gazillion stars in a night sky unhindered by light pollution, or of riding their bikes down the middle of our sparsely traveled road. But to these small-town kids – and their mom – everything about the city seems exotic: the tall buildings, the subway, the stoplights and constant buzz of traffic, the people moving everywhere.

The first time we took the kids to Boston they were preschoolers. They stood in the window of our hotel room with palms and noses pressed against the glass, peering down at the busy streets and sidewalks several stories below. We were only a couple of hours from home, but for all the wonder of country kids in a big city, we may as well have been on the moon.

Now that we’ve been to Boston together a few times, there are favorite city places my kids like to revisit. This trip we hit the Aquarium and meandered through Boston Common to the Public Garden to see the Make Way for Ducklings statues. We rode the T, an underground adventure complete with escalators and weird subway smells. We wandered the crowded food stalls of Quincy Market, searching for lunch, and marveled at all the offerings: pizza, sushi, chimichangas, chowder, lo mein, nan, lobster rolls, gelato – a virtual world tour of tastes in one building.

We ventured on new explorations, too, walking the length of Newbury Street (so many shops!) from the Public Garden to the Prudential Tower, where we took the elevator to the 50^th floor. From our bird’s eye view, we studied the city laid out far below: the Common where we’d just been, the Charles River, Fenway Park, the blue and yellow finish line of the Boston Marathon painted across Boylston Street and awaiting the runners who would cross it in a few days.

Even from that height it was easy to see the history woven into the city’s concrete cloth. The past is everywhere, of course, but in Boston it is on plain display, tucked conspicuously into nooks and corners throughout the city. Our first night in town we walked by the Old State House, a 300-year-old brick structure surrounded now by towering glass buildings. From its balcony, the Declaration of Independence was read two weeks after its signing in 1776. The narrow brick pathway of the Freedom Trail ran along the sidewalk by our hotel, on either side passing ancient cemeteries containing the remains of such historic giants as Paul Revere, John Hancock, and Sam Adams. There are statues rising from squares and plazas all around the city, and historic interpreters dressed in Colonial garb regaling onlookers with tales from Boston’s Revolutionary past.

Around all of it, the modern city buzzes with activity and myriad new experiences there for the having. During this city fix, the kids took their first taxi ride, complete with the sudden stop-and-go of city driving. And they saw their first big show – The Wizard of Oz (a journey of a different sort) – in a real theater.

After three days packed with sights and sounds, tastes and smells, new experiences and lots of pavement walking, we returned home, tired and filled with thoughts of all the things we’d seen and done. We settled back into our familiar space, the sounds of cheery robins and spring peepers replacing the steady, noisy hum of traffic, the view now of clouds drifting across craggy mountains rather than tall buildings.

The kids were both sad to leave Boston and happy to be home. By the end of our visit, the city had become a bit more familiar, and there were more things we wanted to do. That’s a conundrum I’ve often had when visiting other places: the more I learn and see, the more there is I want to explore. Still, at the end of each journey, I know where I want to be. As Dorothy discovered in The Wizard of Oz, “There’s no place like home.”

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 April 22, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.

The Power of Om

We gather each week, a collection of men and women, 20-somethings to 60-somethings, business owners, teachers, parents, athletes. Some of us can barely touch our toes, so tight are our hamstrings. Others have the lithe bodies of dancers, bending easily into each pose. If you threw us together anywhere else, we might seem a hodgepodge of folks with little in common. But in the upstairs room of this barn, tucked behind a house off a side street in Littleton, we gather to practice yoga.

As the pre-class chitchat fades, Rose leads us in a chant of Om, the shortest of words, drawn into a long sound which is supposed to represent the union of mind, body, and spirit. In other words, Om equals yoga.

I first encountered yoga when I was living in Crested Butte, Colorado, in the 1990s. The yoga studio in that little mountain town of uber athletes and beautiful people was next to the tiny health food store, and so in my mind yoga became an extension of eating whole grains and downing shots of wheat grass. For many practitioners of yoga, it IS an extension of a lifestyle of pure foods and actions.

For me, yoga practice started as a way to supplement my more active athletic endeavors, to bring more flexibility to my body and calm to my mind. I started with videos by Rodney Yee and Patricia Walden, finding my way into imperfect poses in the sunny light of our loft living room. After I moved back East, I found a Thursday evening class in Franconia, which was both invigorating and informative. But then life got really busy, and yoga was left behind.

When I had three children in the space of two years, my life pace shifted from long bike rides and hard skiing to kid-carrying and crawling on the floor. My days were often mentally and emotionally hectic – and physically exhausting, even though I felt I wasn’t actually exercising. (Raising kids is a perpetual workout, but there’s no training regimen, and the challenges change from one minute to the next.)

Then I found Rose. If yoga is the union of a healthy mind, body, and spirit, Rose is the personification of yoga: smart, beautiful, and good. She is both a dedicated student and teacher of yoga, traveling regularly to Boston to practice with Patricia Walden (whose videos introduced me and countless others to yoga) and studying occasionally in India. She is kind in her teaching, but also tough, persuading students to go deeper into each pose, challenging us to improve – at once encouraging and demanding.

I harbor good intentions of extending my yoga practice at home, beyond my weekly class. The most I manage is a few twists here and there, a down dog pose after skiing, a forward bend or two before bed time. Still, my weekly practice reminds me to sit straight as I type at the keyboard, to broaden my chest and breathe when I start to stress about something, to refocus when I need to.

Tuesdays always seem to be my craziest, busiest days. But I know that no matter how hectic my work schedule is or how crazy the kids get, I will get to close out my day with 90 minutes of yoga, seeking poses that will engage my muscles and quiet my mind. I often rush to make class, arriving harried and barely on time. The very act of unrolling my mat onto the wood floor begins the calming process.

At the start of each class we sit, cross-legged, to chant Om. Rose asks us to look inward, to direct our energy from our minds to our hearts. Soon I am too focused on putting my body into the next pose to dwell on the day’s happenings, tomorrow’s tasks, and the persistent to-do list.

My mind focuses. My body moves. My spirit lifts.

A version of this essay ran in the Oct. 12, 2012 edition of the Record-Littleton.

September 11 ~ My Story

I was serving lunch to tourists in the west of Ireland when the first plane hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Every generation has its own defining moments, plays witness to its own acts of violence and kindness. My grandparents came of age in the Great Depression and World War II. My parents’ generation had the violence and social strife surrounding Vietnam and the civil rights movement. Members of my generation know without thought where we were when the first plane hit the first building that Tuesday morning a decade ago.

Much has changed since that moment. Many things remain the same.

Ian, the New Zealander cook in the Clifden restaurant where I was slinging boiled bacon and veg, came into the dining room through the swinging doors from the kitchen to tell me the news: “A plane just flew into a building in New York, mate.” We both assumed it was a small plane, piloted by someone who didn’t have any business flying, and we laughed it off.

But Ian kept coming out of the kitchen with more reports, which grew increasingly alarming and led to unanswerable questions. Two planes into the World Trade Center – in a city as full of Irish, probably, as Clifden was – a third plane into the Pentagon, another crashed into a Pennsylvania field.

Many Americans awoke to the awful news that day, but in Ireland 9/11 happened at mid-afternoon, well into the shuffle of the day. The restaurant, which regularly fed diners ranging from busloads of demanding French tourists to farmers who came from the outlying farms and spoke Irish Gaelic, contained only a smattering of folks that afternoon.

One group left soon after word of the attacks reached the dining room; the American woman’s brother was an airline pilot, and in all the chaos of the news, she was desperate to know where he was and if he was OK. None of us had yet seen the terrible images of planes crashing into tall buildings, black smoke billowing into a blue sky, rubble falling, terrified people jumping from high windows.

Eventually I left the restaurant and called my parents in New Hampshire, where it was still morning. “What the hell is going on over there?” I asked. They couldn’t tell me. No one knew.

I sat in the corner of an uncommonly quiet pub that night with friends, watching horrific images of the attacks on a television thousands of miles away from home. I was the only American in the pub that night. I felt something between nauseated and numb. It was sickening to watch the scene play over and over, to see people who had only been going to work, picking up the newspaper, stopping by Starbucks for their morning hit of java – to see them running, crying as all around them the world fell. And yet we couldn’t stop watching.

I was five months into a six-month stint in the Connemara region of Ireland, and I’d become accustomed to being referred to as “the Yank.” My Irish friends told dumb-American jokes for my benefit. The diners at the restaurant guessed my now confused accent to be anything from British to South African.

There were no dumb-American jokes in the days after 9/11. I would not describe the Irish attitude toward me then as condoling. It was closer to subtle, unspoken sympathy. Few offered guesses at the origins of my accent, perhaps because I said so little. I felt sad, defeated.

I had been looking forward to a planned visit from my parents and younger brother, who were due to arrive in days and who cancelled their trip after 9/11. My brother could not get a flight to Boston from his home in Colorado, and my parents decided not to travel without their son.

I had already been dreading leaving Ireland, which felt as much like home to me as any of the few places I’d ever lived – and much more than some. Now, I wasn’t sure if I should go back at all. Did I want to live in a country so many people hated? A place perceived as so awful that people would volunteer to die by flying a fuel-laden plane into a building of steel and concrete and glass?

Nobody hates Ireland. In Ireland I felt safe. I had the comforting scents of the sea and peat smoke all around me and warm pubs filled with voices I cherished. I had even come to love the rain and think now of Connemara whenever it rains in my northern New England home.

But my family – and my American life – was across that sea. And so a month after 9/11, I packed my bags, said a tearful goodbye to friends, and boarded a plane back to the States. Six hours from departure I was back on American soil at Boston’s Logan Airport. The transition was brutal. For months I had heard mainly Irish voices, which are lyrical even when they’re cussing (which is often). The harsh Boston accents, the smell of airport grime, and my own exhaustion combined to form a mild sense of despair. That there were military police armed with rifles patrolling the airport created in me a sense of edgy confusion – was this Cold War East Germany or good old Bean Town?

From Boston I flew to Denver, where friends collected me very late at night. I slept without dreams that night and woke up, strangely it seemed to me, in America. What I remember most from the nearly 5-hour drive that day, from Denver to the small mountain town where I lived, is the American flags and “God Bless America” signs hanging from every highway overpass. Ten years later, people continue to hang flags and signs from bridges to welcome home local soldiers returned from war.

Much has changed. Some things remain the same.

In the days and months and years that have passed since September 11, 2001, there has been much political divisiveness in our country. That is nothing new, I suppose. Patriotism, despite what some would have us believe, has never been strictly black and white. It is not a matter of love it or leave it, you’re with us or against us. War is not simply a question of right or wrong; there are endless shades to both. I remain conflicted about a war that is in many ways vague, that has affected the lives of so many, that has no certain end.

In the past decade I have returned home to my New England roots, married, started a career, born three beautiful children. I have lamented the wars of my country and the wars of the world.

My brother-in-law, a firefighter in Tennessee, was sent to the Pentagon after 9/11 to help in the aftermath of the attacks. My neighbor lost a grandson, also a firefighter, at Ground Zero. My older brother, an officer in both the California Highway Patrol and the United States Army Reserve, has been to Iraq, has lived amid the hell that is war. One of the quotes he lists on his Facebook page is this one, from the movie We Were Soldiers: “We who have seen war will never stop seeing it. In the silence of the night, we will always hear the screams.” He is still a soldier and a police officer.

Much has changed. Some things remain the same.

As I look upon the mountains of home, sometimes I still dream of the sea in Ireland. I can hear the waves lapping the shore and the happy voices of friends in the pub, smell the smoke of peat fires, feel the cool morning mist against my skin. I have dreamed of Ireland forever, since long before I set eyes on the country’s rocky shores, and I do still. September 11 interrupted that dream, but only briefly. For others the interruption has been devastatingly more abrupt. Lives ended or forever changed. Loved ones gone. Innocence lost.

From the chaos and terror of 9/11 have emerged anger and hatred, war and destruction. That is, I suppose, a part of our human nature. But we have also found stories of love and kindness, heroism and unity. That, too, is a part of our human nature. In our brightest moments and during our darkest days, we harbor hope. We dream our dreams. We go on.

Much has changed. But this remains the same.