New Gig, New Digs

I started a new job last week. Since my twins were born – 13 years ago – I’ve worked primarily as a freelance writer. This has allowed me to (mostly) work around the kids’ schedules, from pre-preschool through elementary school, soccer practices through sick days from school, toddling to as-tall-as-I-am. It’s also meant that most days I have worked from the home office – and sometimes the dining room table.

The new gig allows some work-from-home time, which is great. It also involves two days in an actual, not-at-home, office, which is also great. But it’s a transition. I haven’t had to commute regularly, at least not beyond the two flights of stairs from the main floor to the upstairs office, for 13 years. I’ve gone to work in my slippers, or flipflops, depending on the season, for more than a decade.

Last Monday, I climbed into the car in work clothes and real shoes, full travel coffee cup in hand, and headed along the backroads between New Hampshire and Vermont to a new (to me) office in an unfamiliar town. Along the way from home to work I drive through a handful of other small towns, past houses older than our republic, along fields mowed for generations and rivers older than time.

And then I arrive in a quaint New England village not unlike myriad other quaint New England villages dotting the landscape from the northern mountains to the eastern seashore. There is a tall, white-clapboarded church standing next to a small green, with a general store just across the road from the old house where my office sits. Mine is a room upstairs, on the right, with two green-shuttered windows looking toward the neighboring house, a placement very similar to my childhood bedroom in the 1720s house where I grew up (in another small town in a different state).

My second day at the office, I headed out for a fresh air fix. My colleague suggested I explore the short trail through conserved land just behind the office. So I walked a little ways down a quiet road, then turned into the woods and continued on a path that followed a river (I don’t know, yet, the river’s name) and traversed tall trees and giant glacial erratics.

I was happy to learn of this path so close to the office, and I expect I’ll walk there many times as the seasons shift. Eventually I popped back out onto Route 10, walking past the elementary school and the post office, then stopping into the general store to peruse the offerings.

The driver of the first car to pass me when I returned to the road waved as if I were an old friend. Perhaps she thought I was someone else. But I like to think it’s a small town thing that – like the school and the general store, the church and the common – translates from one place to another. Whatever the reason behind the wave, it contributed to the feeling of welcome I felt in this unfamiliar-familiar landscape, a bit further from home than I’m used to being. 

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 24, 2020 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. 

City Fix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the April 22, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.

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.

Small town heartache

We crossed paths only a few times. The first was during a pickup soccer game out in Easton my first summer in New Hampshire. He was a kid then, a teenager nicknamed Chilly, with quick feet and a big smile. The last was this winter at the local bank during a snowstorm, and he was worried he’d miss his flight back to the West Coast where he was due to compete in a snowboarding event. I wouldn’t have known it was the same kid from the soccer field a decade earlier, this tall young guy in the bright snowboarder clothes, but the smile was the same – big and friendly and real.

By all accounts, that’s how Chelone Miller lived – big and friendly and real. Like his big brother, Bode, he liked to go fast. He liked to fly through the air flipping and twisting with a snowboard strapped to his feet. And he was good at it. Really good. He’d had his share of challenges, including a motorcycle wreck that left him in a coma for a couple of weeks, but he made hitting big airs on a mountain look easy – and really fun.

Chilly died this week, suddenly, unexpectedly. He was looking ahead to the Olympics next winter, striving for a spot on the snowboardcross team. He was looking ahead to a life well lived.

When somebody young and beautiful and full of life dies, we are anguished by the complete, heart-wrenching sadness of it. We look back, yes, at the happy times and adventures. But we also look forward at the empty years, time that should have been filled with that person’s dreams, struggles, celebrations, family, and the process of growing old one day at a time. The death of a young person seems maddeningly unfair.

When someone from a small community dies, the pain is acute. Even those who didn’t know Chelone know his sisters or his parents or his friends, and we are heartbroken for them. We feel helpless, and we are. We want to do something to make them feel better. But there is nothing to do, no words to say, that can make the sadness less real.

“I’m so sorry,” seems grossly inadequate. “What can I do?” becomes a rhetorical question. What can any of us do in the face of the sorrow that comes with the loss of a loved one? Perhaps the best we can do is say that we care, offer the kindness of compassion, and look to the example of living that Chilly provided – go big, smile often, enjoy every minute you can.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, at Writings from a full life and in the Record-Littleton.