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.

Trail Talk

Over many years of reading many things, I have written down phrases that resonate with my mindset at the time I read them. One of these, jotted onto a pink sticky note and stuck to my desk some time ago, is a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature: “In the woods, we return to reason and faith.”

Into the woods

I go often into the woods, seeking – if not reason and faith – at least the quiet space to let my thoughts drift where they will, to regroup both mentally and physically. I feel lucky to live in a place where I may wander wooded trails that branch from my own yard or from downtown or from unmarked entryways along any number of nearby roads.

So the prospect of a master trails plan that would link some pockets of existing trails to each other, create a few new ones, and connect these pathways to town centers, schools, and other community centers and recreational outlets is exciting. That’s just what the local Friends of Profile Trails group has set out to do in Franconia and surrounding communities, retaining renowned trail-builder John Morton of Vermont-based Morton Trails to assist in the effort.

I attended an informational meeting hosted by the group last week and was impressed to see in attendance not only interested locals and the dedicated group undertaking the endeavor, but also leaders from the Division of State Parks, U.S. Forest Service, and the Forest Society, along with representatives from the more local Ammonoosuc Conservation Trust and Adaptive Sports Partners of the North Country. All have a vested interest in the development of a comprehensive trails network.

So, in various ways, do all of us who live, work, and recreate here.

The day after the meeting, before picking kids up from school, I went for a run with the dog in Fox Hill Park, exploring a new trail that traverses recently conserved property now connected to the town-owned park. How lucky I am, I thought as I ran along the Gale River, then up through a mixed and leafless forest and toward a view of Cannon Mountain, to live in a place where it is so easy to hit the trail – and to quickly resurface in town or at home or to work.

In this area of the world, many of us have this gift of easy access to trails. Residents of downtown Franconia can explore the network of paths branching through Fox Hill, of course, and I often run into familiar faces there. Those in the Easton Valley can walk or bike to and through the labyrinth of trails traversing Forest Service land. Others are easy distance to town forests and private property open to public access and conservation lands that are local favorites.

Spending time on these trails, in the woods, is a good way to retain a sense of reason in a world sometimes seemingly gone mad – and to find faith in many things. Developing a thoughtful system for connecting these trails so they may be used for both transportation and recreation will make them even more valuable.

I have walked the paths winding through the woods closest to home countless times. Sometimes I go alone. Usually I have a good dog for company. Often I have gone into the woods with my children – first carrying them, then walking slowly as they toddled along, and now keeping stride as we explore together.

We find many things in the woods – signs of the changing seasons, hints of the animals who pass along the same track we follow, wildflowers and tiny mushrooms and newly formed brook ice with intricate patterns. And with each journey, perhaps, a bit of the reason and faith Emerson found in a different landscape so many years ago. 

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 24, 2017 issue of the Littleton Record.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

“You know everybody, Aunt Meghan,” my niece told me soon after my brother’s family arrived in town early this month, traveling from Californian suburbia to the relative wilds of northern New England.

I certainly don’t know everyone around here, but small town living generally includes a considerable awareness of who your neighbors are – and where they are and what they are doing and with whom. If you’re looking for anonymity, this is probably not the place for you. But small towns are pretty good at taking care of their own.

As I drove around with a car full of California and New Hampshire kids, my own children and I remarked that so-and-so’s car was at the post office, we waved to friends, we stopped along backroads near home to greet a neighbor now and then. For the California kids, who live in a place with a steady stream of strangers flowing past, I guess that aspect of small town-ness seemed quaintly odd.

I have lived most of my adult life where everybody – or a relatively large percentage of folks I come into contact with, anyway – knows my name, or at least my face. In Crested Butte I moved within various social and work and skiing circles, but there were large areas of overlap among these. Even if everybody didn’t really know everybody else, a general sense of familiarity permeated the scene in this small ski town.

In the village where I lived for a summer on an Irish peninsula, I was known by several names: “the Yank” who worked for the Diamonds, the “horsey woman” (because I was a horse-trekking guide), the American girl who played soccer with the Connemara Coasters. While everybody there didn’t know my name, they all seemed to know who I was and what I was doing. It is hard to hide a newcomer in a small village where people are intricately related, especially a newcomer with a strange accent.

When I first moved back east, I found it disconcerting when strangers would stop me at the grocery store or in the ski lift line or during some social event and remark excitedly that they had known me when I was THIS HIGH. Not having been paying close attention at the age of 6 or 7 and having traversed two decades since then, I would smile politely, usually having no idea who my friendly accoster was.

I’ve been here long enough now that I am rarely approached by unknown, long-ago acquaintances. These people have long since become familiar. But it is still nearly impossible to navigate local errands without some delay from bumping into someone who wants a word – or several.

A quick run into the post office to check the mail can take half an hour. Stopping at the store for a carton of milk on the way home might consume just as long. I’ve even been waylaid on early morning jogs when I run into neighbors and slow down to chat briefly, while trying to catch my breath. You simply learn to expect delays – and how to politely run away when you don’t have the time to be distracted.

The last afternoon the California crew was here, I took the kids down to the river for a pre-dinner swim. I ran into a friend there, the only other person we saw, and had a chat while the kids and dogs were splashing and exploring and looking for interesting rocks.

On the way home, there was what constitutes a traffic jam on the narrow backroad: three cars traveling in close procession toward us, plus a couple of pedestrians and a dog in the road. I yelled a greeting out the window to the first car, which contained summer friends we hadn’t seen yet this season. A bit further along, I greeted neighbors who were out walking the dog. I noted another neighbor outside doing yardwork.

“Yep, you know everyone,” my niece confirmed from the passenger seat, no longer surprised by this phenomenon.

Later that evening, one of those neighbors sent me a text. She’d found a camera on the bridge by the swimming hole and determined from the photos on it that it belonged to one of us. It did, although we hadn’t yet noticed it missing. Personal item returned practically before it’s even lost? That’s just a benefit to living where everybody knows your name.

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 14, 2017 issue of the Littleton Record. 

Hiking for Nana

My grandmother never climbed a mountain, never stood atop a stony summit and looked out across a landscape of other peaks and hills and unending forests rolling away into the horizon, never felt the tired exhilaration that comes from standing on what feels like the top of the world.

Many years before she was "Nana."

Saturday, I will hike for my grandmother, Marjorie Marie (Thomas) Keegan, who died 24 years ago after a long decline into the fog of memory loss.

With a small group of friends, I will set out for the summit of Mount Eisenhower, one team in a larger effort to put hikers atop each of New Hampshire’s 48 4,000-foot peaks in a 48-hour period. The 48 Peaks event is an endeavor to raise awareness of Alzheimer’s Disease, garner funding for research and support, and pay tribute to the people affected by this disease.

My grandmother never climbed a mountain; in fact, we were told as children not to tell Nana how steep the trails were, how precipitous the drops to the side, when we went on our own expeditions. But she worked her way across many metaphorical mountains in her lifetime. She grew up in an inner-city tenement in Worcester, Mass., coming of age during the Great Depression, and determined to someday own her own house. She went to work as soon as she was old enough, despite her dreams of furthering her education, so that she could help her family. She lost the love of her life to World War II.

She persevered. She got married and waited tables at the local Howard Johnson’s and saved pennies until there were enough of them to build a house. She kept on working – as a school cafeteria aide, then a high school secretary – until my mother, her pride and joy and only child, graduated from college. Then Nana went to a community college and earned her own degree. Through continued frugality, she was able to travel – to Hawaii and Europe and other places she’d surely never dreamed of seeing as a little girl from the inner city.

The one mountain that proved insurmountable for my grandmother was Alzheimer’s Disease, which started creeping in when she was in her mid-60s and I was not yet a teenager. It started with small forgotten things that gradually became bigger forgotten things – missing a turn while driving a familiar route, calling my mom for their regular morning check-in during the middle of the night, leaving the gas stove on with nothing cooking.

She moved in with my family for a few years, then to a nursing home as Alzheimer’s continued its relentless attack. She forgot how to get dressed, how to clean herself, how to act at the dinner table. She forgot who we were, even my mother, calling her “the nice girl who came to visit” when Mom would sit with her at the nursing home.

Thirty years ago, people didn’t know as much about Alzheimer’s as they do now. My grandmother simply thought she was getting forgetful as she got older. Perhaps that was a blessing, that she didn’t know how much she would lose by the end: time with her grandchildren, her independence, a lifetime of memories.

Alzheimer’s Disease is ugly and painful and hard, probably most especially for the people who become caretakers – the sons and daughters and spouses. What my mother endured while caring for her own mother, watching as this bright, stubborn, strong woman faded into vast forgetfulness, I can’t fully understand.

For me, there is one painful memory that sticks: the day I visited the nursing home with a group from my high school and my grandmother didn’t know me, didn’t even respond to my greeting. I had known, I suppose, that this was coming, that the Nana who’d adored me forever would someday not know who I was. I just hadn’t known how shockingly painful it would be.

I was old enough when she started to fade that I have a collection of vague childhood memories of my grandmother. Christmas mornings when she’d delight in our happy excitement. Sleepovers at her house, where the stale smell of cigarettes permeated everything and she made us the best grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches. Hot summer afternoons in the screen house in her backyard or on our own back deck. Watching the Lawrence Welk Show together.

She loved Lawrence Welk. She admired a man in uniform – and would have been proud to see one grandson grow up to wear the uniforms of an officer in both the California Highway Patrol and the U.S. Army Reserves and the other eventually find his way into a firefighter’s uniform. She cherished her family – from her beloved older brother and sister to the grandchildren she adored.

I know there are other hikers in the 48 Peaks effort who have similar stories of loved ones lost and memories faded, who will be carrying some person or remembrance with them as they climb. We hike to honor our loved ones and with the hope that this small effort will help prevent others from suffering through Alzheimer’s.

My grandmother never climbed a mountain, but I imagine she would have liked the view from the top, the wild winds there that feel like freedom, the satisfaction of reaching the summit. I will carry Nana with me Saturday, as I do always, holding tight to the memories of who she was before Alzheimer’s, buoyed by her love all these years after she left us.

To make a donation to the Alzheimer's Association, please visit my fundraising page.

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 9, 2017 issue of the Littleton Record.

Mountain Views

I have seen the moon rise over Mount Lafayette many times, watching as its glow first reveals the mountain’s silhouette, then ascends beyond the ridge to illuminate the whole night sky. But Friday was the first time I stood at an elevation of 4,200 feet, nearly to the top of Lafayette, to watch the moon climb from behind that sprawling mountain. From that perspective, on the deck of the Greenleaf Hut with my children, it seemed almost as if we could reach out and touch the full Harvest Moon.

If I close my eyes and imagine a mountain, it is always Lafayette I see: broad and craggy and tall against the ever-changing sky, its wide expanse seeming to reach out and envelop the world in a stony embrace. This mountain is a focal point for town, the view from my living room window, and the namesake of the elementary school from which a friend and I sprang our kids early Friday to embark on one more summer adventure in the mountains.

Up we trekked from the paved parking lot, along the Old Bridal Path, the kids chattering happily along until we reached the ledge where we could look out over the ridge – Lafayette to Lincoln to Little Haystack – we would hike the next day. Munching trail mix, we studied the mountains, so familiar from below, but slightly foreign from this vantage. Then it was up and over “the Agonies” and onward to the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Greenleaf Hut.

“This has been my dream for so long, and now I’m here,” my son told me when we had reached the hut and tossed our packs onto bunks. He said this with the look of happy wonder and slight awe that makes my heart full of happy when I see it in my children’s faces. He said this when our adventure had really just begun.

To be in the mountains is a gift. I have felt this way since I was old enough to know that not everybody experiences this gift – really since I went to college in upstate New York, in a town tucked among hills and lakes, with nary a tall peak in sight. As if to make up for that deficit, I moved to Colorado right after graduation, to a town nestled firmly in the embrace of the Rockies, where alpenglow lit the peaks each early evening of the winter, summer days were so blindingly beautiful they seemed unreal, and the aspen leaves turned the landscape golden in fall.

After five years in Colorado I came circuitously home to the mountains of my childhood. When I was a kid, I took these mountains for granted. Now, even after 15 years of this daily view, its wild beauty often stops me, literally, in my tracks – Lafayette’s craggy mass and Cannon’s familiar contours, the distinctive shapes of North Kinsman and Garfield, the majestic height of the Presidentials.

Some days it is not enough simply to look upon the mountains. Some days I long to be on the summits, to see the world from the peaks rather than the valley. Everything looks different from there; perspective shifts in a way that stays with me even after I return to a lower elevation.

This summer I hiked more than I have in years, and I introduced my children to that altered perspective that comes with climbing toward the clouds. We spent many hours together on trails leading up and over tall mountains. There is power in standing on a summit, in knowing you can arrive there of your own free will and effort. And there is humility, too, in looking out on the world from so high and realizing it is larger than we can comprehend.

Spending the season’s final weekend hiking the rugged landscape we see from home and school and town, and all winter from our skis atop Cannon Mountain, was the perfect cap to our summer of hiking. It was a glorious day to be on Franconia Ridge, with blue skies and views forever and beyond.

What an amazing experience to walk along the sprawling mountains and ridgeline so familiar when viewed from below, yet completely novel from this height. How high and lovely Lonesome Lake looks, and how tiny Mt. Baldy. How small even Cannon seems, and how vast the Pemi Wilderness – all trees and endless peaks, rising and falling in static waves toward the lofty Presidentials. Walker Ravine seems exceedingly precipitous when you’re perched above it. Shining Rock is just as dazzling up close as when viewed from several miles away – and a few thousand feet lower.

My daughter sing-songingly declared the adventure “absolutely, positively awesome” as she trekked along the ridge. Every few minutes one of our young, intrepid adventurers would blurt out, “This is so cool!”

It was also long and hard. There was some whining and a few brief tears. There were sore knees and shoulders. And there was joy and excitement and so much wonder and confidence building (the kids’) and overwhelming gratitude (mine) to live in this place and share this experience with my children. Even as I huffed and puffed with the effort, even as the hiking aches set in, my heart sang to be on the mountains on this day and with my children. Mountains, I think, are good for the soul.

What will my children remember from this mountain adventure? I don’t know. But days after we’d left the mountain tops, after we’d made the long descent and emptied our packs and put away our hiking gear, we were all still glowing from the hike. I hope my children will always remember the mixture of elation and accomplished exhaustion that comes with climbing mountains. I hope we’ll climb many more together, adjusting our perspective in a way only possible from the heights of tall peaks. I hope they’ll remember that time they had a front row seat to watch the Harvest Moon rise over Lafayette and see the mountains illuminated. 

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 September 23, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.

Indecisive March

March is such an indecisive month. I think whoever coined the phrase, “If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a minute,” must have done so in March. What other month can bring near-summer temperatures, mid-winter snow squalls, rain storms, thunder claps, and sunny blue skies all in one week?

Snow crocus

Even after such a weird-weather winter, this month has been intensely unpredictable.

The crocuses bloomed last week, the earliest I can remember them opening to the warming sun. And our first robins of the year flew into the yard weeks before their normal arrival date. We’ve had more birds at the feeder than ever before: chickadees and blue jays, nuthatches and woodpeckers, goldfinches and purple finches.

I’m loath to bring the feeder in with so much color and activity there, but I’m sure by now the bears are about, and I’d rather keep them out of the sandbox, which is next to the bird feeder. My kids rediscovered that sandbox last week. It’s been there all winter with hardly a skim of ice, but suddenly, with warmer weather, it was the new hot spot.

Maybe the sandbox is just better in shorts and t-shirts. And that’s what the kids were wearing, casting off their more practical mid-March outfits and digging into the summer clothes as soon as they’d walked in the door from school and dropped their backpacks.

My littlest one even asked for bug spray. I’m not sure if the bugs were actually in the sandbox with her or the request was just an innate response to wearing shorts. Regardless, the kids spent hours in the sand, making some combination of mud-sand whoopee pies and cookies and cakes, digging tunnels, getting thoroughly, happily dirty. It’s the most peacefully the three of them have played – I don’t know, maybe ever. As soon as dinner was in their bellies, back out they went until the dark crept in, later now that we’ve changed the clocks.

The next day dawned sunny and warmish, moved to a sky clustered with thunderheads, and ended with cold and wet. And then it snowed. Back out came the extra layers for skiing over the weekend, the neck warmers and thick fleece shirts. Flip-flops, still covered in sand, were chucked once more into the depths of the closet and replaced again by snow boots.

Yes, we are in that familiar March place, where we might ski or bike or walk along the beach at Echo Lake. Maybe all three in one day. The extended forecast calls for a continued mixed bag of sunshine, rain, snow, warmth and chilliness, sometimes all in the same day.

So, I’ll hold off washing up and packing away the winter gear for a while longer, at least until mid-April. March is such an indecisive month. You never know what’s coming next, and it’s best to be prepared – for a little bit of everything.

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 March 25, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.

Powder Day Progression

Monday’s mini snow storm serendipitously coincided with a day off from both school and my family’s various ski programs. We woke to a few inches of perfect fluff covering the trees and car and driveway, with snow still sifting steadily to the ground.

A few inches constitutes a powder day in my kids’ minds, so after breakfast we made our way along snow-greased roads to the mountain. I spent the next few hours chasing my kids around the familiar ski trails of my own childhood, and I couldn’t help pondering the progression of my skiing life – from New Hampshire to the mellow hills of college days in upstate New York, then the deep snow and steep skiing of Colorado, and finally home again to continue the cycle with the next generation.

In Colorado, I worked in a ski shop a few steps from the base of the main chairlift. My bosses were skiers, and they scheduled shifts so that all employees had a ski break every day. It was during my five years in Crested Butte that I learned the “No friends on a powder day” rule. You could make plans, but if someone didn’t show, there was no waiting around; it’s every skier for herself when the getting is good.

A powder day there, whether interrupted by work or not, generally included laps on the Headwall or North Face, searching out new lines and fresh tracks each run, and recounting the day’s best turns over a couple of beers with friends. I remember skiing one perfect, snowy day without stopping to eat, run after joyful run of deep snow and sweet turns, skiing until my legs were jelly. At day’s end I was exhausted, but happy, fulfilled.

In my first winters back East the occasional storm brought a gift of knee-deep powder and soft bumps, a respite from the harder, groomed, manmade stuff. If I could sneak away from work, I would spend an hour or two skiing off the Zoomer chair, short, steep runs as familiar as my own back yard. Sometimes I’d run into friends in the lift line, and we’d ski together for a while. But the no-friends-on-a-powder-day rule stuck: there was no waiting, no adjusting to others’ work schedules. And whether it was a stolen hour or a full afternoon of skiing, I left the mountain with that same feeling of happy fulfillment.

Fast forward a few years, and I found myself with three young children, who I was determined would be skiers. Raising skiers is not for the faint of heart. It starts with years of bundling awkward toddlers and preschoolers into layers of sometimes uncomfortable clothing, coaxing small feet into rigid ski boots, schlepping skis from the car, and getting everyone’s boots into bindings, goggles and neck-warmers properly adjusted, mittens tucked into sleeve cuffs just right.

Pockets filled with chocolate and the promise of cocoa breaks provided extra incentive if needed. But there were meltdowns, of course, sometimes from tired little skiers; sometimes from the skier mom longing for the bigger runs beyond the pony slope.

Back then, I managed to sneak out once or twice a winter to ski with friends on longer, steeper, snowier terrain. On those rare occasions, the old no-friends rule went out the window. I welcomed the kid-free companionship of friends on the chairlift, and we weren’t above taking our own cocoa breaks if the wind was too cold or the lift line too long – or we simply wanted to sit and talk.

More often, though, I spent my skiing days with the kids as they honed their skiing prowess. We spent countless hours exploring kid-sized glades and hucking little airs in the mini park. I have a video of my 3-year-old son cruising down a beginner trail in a power wedge, then veering toward the woods near the bottom. “I want to ski powder,” he said, as he shuffled through an inch of fluff atop the groomed surface of the flats.

Nature or nurture? I don’t know. Probably a little bit of both. Gradually, the kids progressed to longer, steeper trails, the tight glades at the top of the mountain, hiking over the saddle for further exploration of hidden places, a faster skiing tempo.

These days I don’t often get to ski with my kids. The older two have embarked on their first year of race training, skiing with their coaches all weekend and learning how to carve fast, smooth turns into hard snow. The younger one is in a group of more than two dozen of the littlest would-be ski racers, which I help coach on weekends. This all means lots of skiing for each of us, just not together.

So Monday was a treat, an unscheduled day to do whatever we liked, and we like to ski, especially when there’s fresh snow and no overlying agenda. I ran sweep on each run, watching the kids negotiate soft powder interspersed with rigid hard pack, then making my own turns behind them.

The pace is slower than it was during my Colorado powder days, but considerably faster than that not-so-distant time spent on the pony slope. My skiing company Monday was a ski mom’s dream come true, and the thrill of skis through snow just as happy and fulfilling as ever.

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 22, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.

Swimming Holes

It’s one of the great joys of summer: splashing in a clear, cool river on a hot, hazy day. At the advent of the season, when kids can almost taste the freedom of school’s final release and ice cream shops are readying for customers, regional publications put out their lists of favorite swimming holes – the most secret, most scenic, most secluded ones.

Yankee magazine has done a swimming hole list. New Hampshire magazine has, too. Heck, even the BBC published a short list of Vermont swimming holes a few years ago. There are entire websites and Facebook pages dedicated solely to swimming holes. I guess some people are well-traveled connoisseurs of these refreshing summer haunts, but I like the old familiar ones best.

There’s a swimming hole down the road I’ve visited since I was a child, where I return now with kids and dog on the hottest, muggiest days – or just when we need something easy to do away from the house. It’s not the deepest or the most beautiful, and it’s certainly no secret. But it’s conveniently close to home, and it offers endless cool fun on the long, hot dog days of summer.

My brothers and I splashed in this same spot when we were kids. For us, who came to the mountains mainly during winter, the river was a summer wonder. We were used to crossing the small bridge spanning the Ham Branch when its current was concealed in thick layers of snow and ice, a mere silvery sliver of moving water visible through all that white.

Sometimes, though, we found our way north in the summer. On hot days we’d make the short trek down from the house to find the river transformed in its summer color. We built dams and watched tiny fish swim through the water, threw rocks just to see the splashes they’d create. All things kids at rivers have probably always done. Things my kids at this river do now.

Some days we come to the swimming hole prepared with towels and snacks and snorkeling masks for peering through the moving water to see what’s below the surface. Often there are cars parked along both sides of the road, with sunbathers, splashers, and swimmers strewn upstream and down. Sometimes we have the spot all to ourselves.

The best swimming is right below the grated metal bridge, which hums with the occasional passing rumble of car or pickup truck tires. We wander the rocky river islands seeking flat stones for skimming and throw sticks into the deepest water for the dog, who prefers the crispness of winter to the heat and biting bugs of summer. I think swimming is summer’s sole redemption in the dog’s mind.

The spot where my brothers and I used to pile rocks as big as we could carry in a futile attempt to alter the water’s flow is a bit wider now than it was 30 years ago. But someone – or, likely, a series of someones – has extended the dam. Rocks are added and removed probably with each visitor. My children consult with each other as they work on their own renovations to the dam, placing fist-sized stones in the larger breaches, handfuls of pebbles to fill the gaps between, sand and clay to cover it all until the next rain and rising current.

The river flows through anyway, a comforting gurgle of water moving easily downstream.

Other times our swimming hole outings are brief. We stop by on the way home for a quick dip, or run down after dinner to cool off before bedtime. On one such evening venture a couple of years ago, as we stood with our toes in the water, my brother and sister-in-law came floating down the river in inner tubes, along with a pair of friends and a cooler (in its very own tube) ferrying refreshments. Cool rivers on hot nights are not just for kids and dogs, after all.

I’ve visited other swimming holes, of course. There’s one a bit further upstream where we happily slip and slide down gentle, flowing waterfalls, like river otters playing in the waves along the worn-smooth boulders. We sometimes go south to the Pemi, finding cool pockets of water pooled in smooth rock basins carved deep by eons of flowing water. We have found bullfrogs and thousands of tadpoles swimming in shallow concavities near the edge of the Pemi and huge, juicy blackberries nearby.

I have dipped into the deep, perfect pool at the base of Bridal Veil Falls, a sweet reward for a not-too-strenuous hike. One summer during college I leapt from cliff ledges along some Vermont river into the cool expanse below. I have waded into the almost unbearable chill of high alpine lakes in Colorado, enveloped in solitude and impossible beauty.

I am, like most of us probably, part intrepid explorer and part contented homebody. I love to wander to new places and experiences. But often I find myself returning to the familiar, to the places of my good memories. Places like my old standby swimming hole. It’s not the most scenic or secret or secluded. But it’s a darned good place to be on a hot 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 24, 2015 edition of the Littleton Record.

Farewell to Fi

When I brought Fiona home from a pet store in Grand Junction, Colorado, she easily fit into one of my hands. She was the first pet who was all my own, a tiny, impossibly soft tortoise shell kitten who soon proved to embrace a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde persona – all contented, fluffy purring one minute and hissing, biting fur ball the next.  

She was the wildest baby anything I’d ever seen, a little hellion of a calico, and she stayed that way from kittenhood through old age. She scratched the couch and chewed on photographs and believed – as cats seem to – that the world revolved around her. She was also an incredible jumper, an expert climber, a fierce mouser, and loving toward those – human or otherwise – she considered worthy of her affections.

A few days after bringing Fi home, I returned from work to find her atop the refrigerator. How that tiny cat managed to climb up there I’ve never been able to figure, but there she sat, mewing and shivering in the high corner of the kitchen. I lived alone then, and for sport, Fiona would crouch behind doorways and attack at unexpected moments, hurling her little fuzz ball self through the air and attaching to my leg, claws and all.

As soon as Fiona was big enough to go out, she embarked on a long career of hunting. The first time she brought me a dead bird, I put a bell on her collar. She used to climb to the top of a five-foot high post in the backyard and sit next to an old bird feeder there. The feeder hadn’t held birdseed for many years, but from her perch, Fi could survey her domain. She mostly left the birds alone, but she hunted small rodents, even bringing home two bats late one night, leaving one next to my bed and the other in the bathroom, where my roommate had the misfortune of finding it on a predawn trip down the hall. We closed the cat door at night after that.

Once Fi and I finally settled into an old house in a New Hampshire field, her mousing skills were valuable in catching the critters who came in from the cold and wanted to cohabitate with us. Even in her later years, as she grew skinny with diminishing health and deaf with old age, Fi maintained a hunters’ heart. She drove herself nuts sitting in the large picture window of the living room and watching the chickadees flit from lilac bush to feeder and back. Her tail would twitch, just at the very tip, perhaps with anticipation, perhaps with memories of younger, wilder days.

Fi stuck with me through many years and all the changes time brings – several moves, new jobs, a couple of broken hearts, and a changing cast of feline, canine, and human characters.  

She forgave me, eventually, when I left her with my roommates and took off to Ireland for six months. She huddled amongst all my worldly belongings, which I crammed into the back of my Subaru when I returned from Ireland and decided to move back East, barely budging on the days-long journey from Crested Butte to Franconia. She loved me even after I subjected her to a few months of living with my mother’s cat, who was normally lovely, but stalked Fiona with a murderous vengeance, and my parents’ German shepherd mix who was as schizophrenic at Fiona and regularly tried to eat her.

She stuck with me when I brought home another kitten, then a man, then a golden retriever (whom Fiona regularly tormented), and, finally, three small human children, who demanded my constant attention and made lots of noise. While Feargus, the kitten who grew into an immensely plump, easygoing cat, allowed the children to pull on his tail, pick him up, and lie all over him, Fiona wanted nothing to do with the kids for a long time. She hissed at them regularly, glared in a way only a cat can do, and drew blood from each at least once.

But Fi had a gentler side, too. She took care of Feargus like he was her own kitten. Even after he grew to twice her size, Fiona would clean him and settle him down with a firm swat when he got out of hand. She loved to crawl under the covers and curl up by my side, purring away as I read the latest book on the nightstand. She immediately adopted my husband, who does not particularly care for cats, as her own human, usually preferring his lap to mine.

And in her old age, she mellowed considerably. A thyroid issue caused her to steadily shrink until she was a mere wisp of her former rotund self. But as she grew older and thinner, she seemed to also become content. She still ran around chasing toys and flies and whatever else was there to chase, and she terrorized the poor, gentle dog until her final days. But she would curl up on the couch with the kids at any chance, poking them gently with a dainty paw until they pet her. She even allowed stroking by my mother, a cat lover who was perplexed – and vexed – for years by Fiona’s apparent disdain of her. She purred all the time in her last months.

Near the end of last week, feisty Fi really slowed down, and by Saturday it was clear things were not right. So on Sunday, when she looked at me sadly from tired eyes and refused even to purr, I knew it was time, after nearly 16 years, to let her go. Anyone who has ever had to make the decision to euthanize a beloved pet knows the sinking feeling of that choice.

It was a sad decision, but not a hard one. After a good life, and with the help of a kind vet, Fiona’s passing was blessedly quick. I miss her and her crazy ways, but I know that little hellion of a calico will stay in my heart forever.

Original content posted by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul to her Blog: Writings From A Full Life.

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.