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.

On the Run

Each November, as daylight retreats toward the solstice and the damp chill of winter encroaches, I put away the running shoes. And each April, as the snow disappears from my ski route through the woods and the sun warms toward t-shirt weather, I pull them back out and – despite the painful protests of my hip flexors – take once again to running the back roads.

I do not love running, but I have dabbled in it, off and on, for many years.

In high school, I took to jogging between soccer and track seasons. (In the latter, I was a marginally speedy sprinter and a decent long-jumper, but never ran more than 200 yards at a time.) A couple times a week, I’d don the headphones of my yellow Walkman, pop in a mixed tape, and head out on a loop around the neighborhood, which I figure measured about a mile and a half.

During college, I often ran a route around campus on weekend mornings, when it seemed I was the only one awake. Jogging became a way to pass the time and get some exercise while I waited for my friends to wake up and go with me to the dining hall for a late breakfast.

The summer I spent in Ireland I ran occasionally, heading up the narrow road, turning down a lane that led to the beach, and coming back on the sand. I usually had the beach to myself, but the locals thought I was mad (Irish speak for coocoo) to run without the purpose of chasing a ball around a field.

In my Colorado years I left all running (except on the soccer field) behind and took to mountain biking, though I was never hardcore like many of my friends there. Still, I had my favorite loops, including one I could ride from home. It took about an hour, traversed a gentle river, passed by an old mine, and wove through a grove of aspen trees in a perfect mix of uphill, downhill, and flat.

The first summer I moved back East, I bought a road bike and learned the joys of pedaling for hours along pavement. I developed biking friends – people who liked to ride and had large blocks of free time during the warmer months to hit the road.

Sadly, that road bike sits dusty in my garage now. I haven’t given up on someday getting back into riding, but that day does not seem like it will be soon, large chunks of free time being as scarce as they are. My mountain bike, though, still sees sunlight during the summer, generally on family outings. At 20-plus years old, that bike is roughly double the age of my children.

It was after having those children that I started to run again.

I run now because it is easy – at least schedule-wise and logistically speaking. To run, I do not need to block out an hour or two or three. I don’t need to pump air into tires or remember to carry a spare tube in case of a flat. I don’t need to load the bike into the car and drive to a trailhead.

To run, I just need to lace up the running shoes, grab the dog’s leash, and head out the door. And so I run. Not far, and certainly not fast, but enough. Enough to get the heart pumping and the lungs sucking in fresh air. Enough to feel as if I am staying strong. Enough to keep track of the natural shifts in the local landscape as the seasons evolve from one to the next. Enough to clear my mind.

I don’t always love running. Indeed, sometimes it is hard to find the motivation to get started. But I am always glad, once I return home, that I have – if only for a short time and a small distance – been on the run.

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 12, 2019 issue of the Littleton Record.

The Swear Jar

The first time I heard my mother swear I cried. I was probably 12 years old, too old to be crying over swear words spoken under duress and without malicious intent. But something was obviously very bad if Mom was uttering a four-letter-word.

We were driving in the family minivan, which was front-wheel drive, through Franconia Notch in a storm blending snow and sleet, with a slick sheen of black ice glossing the pavement for good measure. Dad asked how the driving was. Mom, clutching the wheel in the dark, answered with a variation of what my kids would call “the S word.”

Fast forward a generation to children who do not shed tears at the utterance of swear words. My kids are familiar with all the most oft used four-letter words, and a few others. Partly this is because they are at that age where swear words are fascinating in their sheer naughtiness. Partly it is that my older two children are on a reading tear that progresses through several books a week, which means they have moved on to more adult content, which includes, sometimes, minor league swear words. And partly – I’m not proud to admit – it’s because their mother has a potty mouth.

I do not drop swear words into everyday conversation, but I do sometimes slip up on the language front. To stem the tide of the bad words I utter, this summer I implemented a Swear Jar.

My children think this is great fun: Mom plops a quarter in the jar every time she commits a verbal violation. (So, rarely, does Dad, as well as other visiting grown-ups who are caught by my gleeful children in adult conversation using the occasional adult vocabulary.) They think the jar will be filled in no time, and they will subsequently be rich with shiny quarters. I’m just hoping it helps me clean up my language.

Why do I cuss? It’s certainly not a product of my own upbringing, during which nary an F-bomb was dropped. If my dad uttered something so harsh as “damn,” we knew one of us was in big trouble. That evening in the car when my mom swore, I thought the world might just be ending.

I don’t remember when swear words wiggled into my regular vocabulary. Maybe it was college, or the gradual increase of swearing in movies and T.V. shows and other forms of pop culture. Probably, though, it started during the five years of my relative youth when I lived in a ski town. Or in the several years after that when I spent (and still spend) a considerable amount of time hanging out with a bunch of other ski coaches, who can toss around the swear words nearly as ably as legendarily cuss-happy sailors. I used to coach all winter with a friend who is also a fisherman, which is close to a sailor, at least when it comes to language usage.

It was in between those two eras, however, during the six months I lived in Ireland, when I first experienced cussing as an art form. The Irish have earned a reputation for their friendly hospitality, but if you spend a bit of time with the locals, you’ll find those lilting Irish voices take swearing to a level far beyond any American ski coach or sailor. They pronounce some favorites a bit differently – replacing a U with an E in one and transforming a short-I sound into a long-I in another – but the gist is the same. And they use words even I can’t bear to utter, tossing them into conversation as if they’re harmless qualifiers.

Regardless of how my potty mouth has evolved, I have made a strong attempt to restrain it since my kids arrived on the scene. Like many parents, I’ve developed verbal alternates to actual cuss words. “Son of a motherless goat!” is great when I drop something on my toe or whack my head on the not-fully-opened back door of the minivan. “For Pete’s sake,” which I may have inherited from my dad, is a good all-purpose expression of frustration. I also enjoy, “For the love of Pete,” alternately, “For the love of all that is holy.”

I am trying to be creative in articulating my annoyances, and the very presence of the Swear Jar inspires me, usually, to take a deep breath before bleeping. It is being filled much more slowly than my kids thought it would be. We’ve decided that if the Swear Jar ever does get filled up (or if I just stop needing it), we will donate that money to some local charity.

Less swearing and a bit of cash for a good cause: that sounds like a win-win, no matter how you say it.

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 October 13, 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.

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.

Telling Time

My watch broke the second week of my first summer in Ireland. Somehow I survived the initial panic of not being able to tell the time with a quick glance at my wrist and adjusted to scanning the city landscape for one of the many clock faces towering above the streets – on churches, government buildings, and in the ivy-ensconced courtyard of the university I was attending.

The Dow clock in 2012, before its facelift.

That was in 1995, and I haven’t worn a watch since. My innate need to be always on time has remained (sometimes aggravatingly) intact, which is, perhaps, unsurprising considering the sheer number of clocks in the world. My phone serves as alarm clock, stopwatch, and timer. My car has a clock, as do the kitchen stove, the microwave, the DVD player, and my computer screen.

Surrounded by the bright, blocky numbers of digital clocks, I prefer old fashioned timepieces, which contain much more character – and, perhaps ironically, a sense of timelessness. We are lucky in Franconia to have one of these in the center of town, smack dab between Main Street and the mountains that define our southern horizon. The clock on the former Dow Academy building, which has told time for the community since 1903, has recently resumed its chiming after a hiatus of a couple of years. When the wind is drifting the right way, I can hear the old clock bell tolling even at my home, two miles away.

The resonating clang reaches me while I am at my desk or in the yard, sometimes causing me to pause and consider what needs to be done at this hour. On summer nights the echoed chiming floats with the breeze through the open window as I read, serving as a not entirely welcome reminder that it’s time to put the book down and turn off the light. In the early mornings, when I linger in half-sleep, the clock’s bell mingles with the distant fluting of the wood thrush from the edge of the forest, the singsong conversations of robins in the yard, and the relentlessly repeated cackle-call of some bird I have not yet identified.

Hearing the ringing of the Dow clock again has made me realize that I missed its sound in the silent interval while the clock was being repaired and restored.

When my children were very young, we made regular forays to the playground in Franconia, where the clock tower stands like a stalwart friend above the swing set and twisting green slides. I became used to marking the time with an upward glance at the clock. How long until lunch? Or naptime? Or a meeting with friends?

Now the children play t-ball and baseball and soccer on the adjacent fields, and I had missed the convenience of telling the time from the large hands and Roman numerals of the Dow clock. I’m happy now for both the return of that convenience and the tolling of each hour, which is somehow reassuring: time marches on, no matter the weather, the activity, the day’s challenges.

When I wore a watch – a habit I picked up when Swatch watches were all the rage and continued until that fateful day in the west of Ireland – I looked at it often, especially if I was running late. The closer I was to the time I was supposed to be somewhere, the shorter the interval between glances. It was maddening.

My son, who is 8, has inherited this need to be on time. Actually, we both prefer to be five minutes early whenever possible. On school days, he looks often at the digital clock over the stove in the kitchen, counting down the minutes until we have to leave the house, impatiently imploring his sisters to finish breakfast and reminding me how much time I have to complete the morning chores. In the car, on the way to games or appointments or dates with friends, he watches the clock, remembering to subtract four minutes from the time displayed because that clock runs fast.

It’s probably a good thing, then, that it was not my time-fixated son, but his twin sister who received a watch as a gift from their grandmother this summer.

It is this child of mine, the one who is much less concerned about what time it is and hardly ever considers the potential ramifications of being late, who has become our family’s official teller of time lately. Her watch is purple and pink and green, its band bedecked with daisies, the analog numbers multi-colored, and the seconds marked by the ticking of a flower.

Telling time is a skill my daughter is still developing. Sometimes when I ask her what time it is, she gives me an answer that is so far off I can tell she has mixed up the minute and hour hands, or become distracted by that ticking flower. Other times she is spot on.

Either way, after so many watch-less years, I’ve developed a pretty good sense of what time it is. I know we’ll get to wherever we’re going when we get there. Still, I often can’t help racing the clock, even if it’s no longer on my wrist. Chances are, wherever we’re going, we’ll be early.

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 10, 2015 edition of the Littleton Record.

Picking Berries

"Can I eat them all?” my 5-year-old asked, staring at a large bowl of wild blueberries we’d plucked from low bushes along the side of a local road. When it comes to berries, this little girl is insatiable, and I

can’t blame her. After all, wild berries picked fresh from the vine or the bush are one of the great joys of summer.

Over the past few years, my family has a built a respectable list of secret and not-so-secret berry stashes: a thick patch of blueberries hidden amid the tangled brush of the southeast field, swaths of thorny blackberry bushes growing through the old apple orchard, and clusters of wild raspberries woven along the tumbledown, fern-ensconced stone wall at the far edge of the front yard.

If one berry spot is lacking, we move on hopefully to the next – the roadside pick where we found the blueberries my youngest was ready to devour last week, or the patch of raspberry bushes at the corner of our road, or the blackberry brambles at the edge of the woods in the front field. So far, our best crop this summer has been the raspberries growing through the thick hedge of rosa rugosa along the curve of our driveway.

“Berries!” called the littlest one (again) as we drove out one morning. I brushed off her claim at first, figuring she must have seen the rusty swell of rosehips within the prickly foliage. But she was persistent (as she often is), so I threw the minivan into reverse to check it out. Sure enough, the first pinky-red raspberries of the summer hung there amid the thorny rosebushes like tiny treasures. I picked the few I could reach and divvied them up between us.

That was weeks ago, and my daughter continues to visit that spot several times each day, reaching through the double thorns of  rose bushes and raspberry canes for each sweet prize, and beseeching the taller members of the family to pluck the berries that hang tantalizingly just beyond her reach.

I spent many a girlhood afternoon myself, once upon a time, scrambling through brambles to reach the berries that grew along the road near home. The scratches along bare arms and legs were a small price for the simple pleasure of wild berries eaten on the spot or saved for breakfast the next morning.

During college, I spent a summer in Ireland, studying history and literature and traveling around. While musing and wandering one day along a quiet lane just outside the village that had been home to my great-grandparents, I made the happy discovery of big, juicy blackberries growing in the roadside hedge. Their sun-warmed sweetness and the casual waves of passing strangers reminded me of home.

This summer, too, we have managed to find wild berries in our travels. During a visit with friends in Maine, we picked our way through some of that state’s famous wild blueberry bushes, located conveniently off the back porch. What the littlest one did not eat by the handful, we saved for breakfast the next morning. On our annual trek to Cape Cod, we discovered a small patch of blackberries just down the road from where we were staying. My children exclaimed at the find and spent 10 happy minutes plucking a colander full of plump berries, enough to last the week.

Closer to home, my children and husband and I keep watch on the berries each summer, looking first for the blossoms, then the bumpy green of unripe berries, and finally the succulence of the tiny, tasty treasures we’ve waited for. Then we set to picking.

While the kids prefer to grab blackberries and raspberries on the fly, before moving on to one of summer’s other distractions, my favorite to pick are the blueberries, tiny and low to the ground – and thornless. It is something like meditative therapy to crouch down in a quiet field and mindlessly plop small berries into a pail until it is full.

Each summer we bake our cache of wild berries into crumbles and muffins, blend them into smoothies, condense them into jam, pour them over pancakes, and package the leftovers neatly into the freezer for later. By far the best way to eat a wild berry, though, is fresh off the bush or the vine, juicy with sunshine, brimming with the sweetness of summer and good memories of past berry picking adventures.

Original content by Meghan McCarthyMcPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears in the August 8, 2014 edition of the Littleton Record.

Finding home

It’s been said that home is where your heart is. If that is true, I have many homes, for I have left bits of my heart in the mountains of Colorado, with the stark landscape and ever-present sea of the west of Ireland, and in the familiar rooms and winding staircase of the dormered cape house that was my childhood home.

When I moved back to New England after nearly a decade of living other places, I figured I’d settle down in a largish town, with plenty of people and job opportunities and things to do. I ended up finding all the people, opportunities, and fun I needed right here in Franconia. I guess I’m just a small town girl.

So, I understood the other day when a friend, recently relocated to small town New Hampshire from big city New York, remarked on how much she loved life in her new community – and how surprised she was by her contentment at small town living. That conversation involved a couple of other recent big town transplants, who talked about how little they miss the mall – where you’re likely to spend too much time and too much money buying things you don’t need anyway – or the traffic, the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses, even the anonymity of living in a bigger place.

Many people, of course, thrive in big cities and love the world of lights and noise and museums and galleries and the myriad other conveniences and luxuries so easily accessible in metropolitan areas. One of the many beauties of New England, though, is that wherever you live, a journey of a mere few hours can bring you to the mountains or the ocean, a city or a small town, hustle and bustle or peace and quiet. It’s a little bit like having it all.

I have friends who have grown up here and never left, some who moved away and came back, and others who, like me, arrived from somewhere else. While I grew up skiing at Cannon Mountain, have lived here full time for a dozen years, and married a local boy, I have no illusion of being a true local. I’m a transplant from Massachusetts, and I’m OK with that.

A friend whose family has lived in the area for generations once told me, in some fit of frustration over an influx of “flatlanders” and their bothersome ways, “There are two kinds of people: those who are from here and those who are from someplace else.” When I pointed out that I fit into the latter category, he fell into a brief, flustered silence, then replied, “There are three kinds of people: those who are from here, those who are from someplace else, and those who came from someplace else, but we like ‘em anyway.”

For hundreds of years, people have been coming from “someplace else” to the White Mountains in search of home. They’ve come for the mountains and the relative solitude they offer, to seek adventure, for the fresh air and cool rivers and quiet fields and forests, for the love of another person, sometimes for jobs, often to find a simpler way of life – to build a way of living that matters.

For me, coming home to New England after years away meant returning to a familiar place and again being surrounded by family. I didn’t fully appreciate that latter bit until I had children of my own. Those children are growing up with aunts and uncles and grandparents literally right around the corner or just down the road. Whichever way we turn out of the driveway, we’re heading toward family.

Once I flew the coop of my own childhood home, it took having children to root me to any place so firmly again. I want my children to have a good sense of home, too, even if this is not home to them forever. And so I have set aside my wanderlusting ways and put down roots, anchoring me to this place, this home, even as my heart sometimes soars with my imagination to other places.

Home, now, is at our dining room table, the same table where I sat as a little girl with my parents and brothers – and where I sit now with my children, cats and dog underfoot, the room filled with the wonderfully unpredictable (and sometimes outrageously exasperating) conversation of children. Home is the backyard vegetable garden, hands stuck into dirt, sun or rain upon my back. Home is the mountains where I grew up skiing and hiking and which my children now explore. Home is in the embrace of those children, my husband, my parents, our family.

How lucky I am to be at home here, where my heart is.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul and posted to her blog: Writings from a full life. This essay also appears as Meghan's CLOSE TO HOME column in the January 10, 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.

For the love of the game

I volunteered a year ago, when my kids were still in preschool. Really, I wanted to make sure no one else got the job. Maybe I should have guessed from the recreation director’s reaction that coaching kindergarten soccer isn’t the most sought-after position around.

So, get the job I did, and last week I made it through my first kindergarten soccer practice as coach. Actually, it was a blast. I’m not sure who had more fun – me or the kids. Between the running and kicking and giggling I threw in a few tidbits about proper passing technique and important rules like no hands on the ball.

As I see it, the point of most things when you’re 5 years old is to have fun. If soccer practice is fun, they’ll keep coming, keep learning. And someday, I hope, these kids will develop a love of the game like the one I have fostered since I was a little kid. Of all the sports I have played and watched, it is soccer (and skiing, but don’t ask me to choose one) that has held my attention and my passion for most of my life.

I grew up living and breathing soccer in a field hockey and (American) football town. No matter, soccer was my game from the first kick. One summer during high school I attended three different soccer camps. For a while, after reading that Maradona or Pele or some other huge star had slept with a soccer ball as a child, I slept with a soccer ball, curling around its perfect orb every night. When other girls hung pictures of boy bands on their walls, I put up posters of soccer players.

I spent hours in the backyard working on my juggling skills, honing offensive moves, and building up my left-footed kick until it was stronger than my right. I played through high school, then in college, going from a star on a mediocre high school squad to bench warmer and understudy on a defending NCAA championship team.

I volunteered as a media intern during the 1994 World Cup and nearly died of pure, awed happiness when I was on the sidelines for the warm-up of the quarterfinal between Italy and Spain. Four years earlier, I had watched (on television) the men’s U.S. squad qualify for the 1990 World Cup, the first time they’d made the show since 1950. That summer I watched every game I could on Univision, the Spanish language channel whose football commentator was famous for his enthusiastic and long-winded scream of “Goal!!! Goooooaaaaaalllllllllllllllllllll!!!!” I don’t understand Spanish, and some of the World Cup games were also on American networks. But those channels ran commercials during the matches, regardless of what was happening in the game during scheduled advertising breaks. And the commentators were rotten.

During my post-college years in Colorado, I played with a super fun co-ed team in summer tournaments and winter kick-arounds in an old school gym. We were pretty good on the field, and we won a few tourneys. We nearly always won the Saturday night party, too. When I moved to the west of Ireland for a summer, I was thrilled to find a women’s team comprising a variety of ages and skill levels. Regardless of our footballing ability and the result of that evening’s match, we always sang on the van ride home, our good cheer inserting joy into somber Irish ballads.

Alas, in recent years I haven’t played much soccer, but I did get out to a few pick-up games this summer. And while I don’t know all the big name players like I used to, I’m always happy to stumble across a game on television, and I watch the World Cup and Olympic matches as often as I can.

My kids watch with me sometimes, asking endless questions: Which team do you want to win? Who’s in the blue shirts? Where is the goalie? Why did she do that? We’ve set up a little field in the front yard and the kids love to go out and play there. They think shin guards and soccer socks are really cool. I hope these are all signs of the beginning of their love of the game.

After our first practice last week, which was also an introduction to team sports for many of the kids, a few parents posted photos of their kindergarten footballers on Facebook. They all looked happy, with their shin guards jutting out from skinny legs, their multi-colored cleats, their proud smiles. I hope that joy stays with them through this first soccer season and many more.

After that practice, there was a meeting for all the coaches up through 6^th grade soccer. When I was introduced as the kindergarten coach, the others chuckled knowingly. They’ve moved on to refined techniques and tactics with the older kids. But they know. Most of them coached the little ones first. And they’re still coaching, moving up with their own kids, teaching them the world’s most popular game. I imagine they all do it for the same reasons that I do. For the kids. And for the love the game.

A version of this essay ran in the Sept. 14, 2012 edition of the Record-Littleton.