A Week of Turning

Freeport and Addison, January 24, 2021

When day comes we ask ourselves,
where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry,
a sea we must wade. (Excerpts from “The Hill We Climb,” Amanda Gorman, A.G.)

This fine week, this week of turning away from the past, toward the future, towards new light, began for Bob and me in Addison, that place far Downeast, beside the wild sea, limned by ancient granite cliffs, which itself has been turned towards the past for almost a century now, all the old shipbuilding trades shuttered, the fish stocks dwindling. 

We’ve not spent a lot of time in Addison in winter, believing, falsely, it was revealed this week, that it was a grim and gray and lonely place this time of year.  When we pulled into the driveway in the dark Monday night after a three hour drive, up 95, across the Airline, and finally, bisecting the blueberry barrens, still seeping scarlet and purple in the late dusk, our headlights caught the faces of three deer grazing on the lawn.  One of them was the white pied deer we’d seen a few times in the summer.

“This is a good omen,” I told Bob.  “Maybe things will all turn out all right.  Maybe the Inauguration will be peaceful, maybe our vaccine appointments won’t be cancelled. Maybe the institutions of government will start to work.”  Uncertainty lives with me now, always poised to scurry into my mind and steal whatever crumbs of equanimity I’ve managed to put by, like the big gray squirrel who lives under the porch and darts up the feeder, stealing the food from the unsuspecting birds, driving them into the air.

Our reluctance to be in Addison in January was put aside earlier this month when our friend, L. wrote to invite us to a memorial bell-ringing service she and her husband, J., had planned on Tuesday night, January 19.  The service would be held at the same time as the memorial Joe Biden would be holding at the Lincoln Memorial in memory of the 400,000 Americans who have died of Covid.  J. and L. were inviting all the neighbors to come to the place we call “the Chapel,” and pull the old braided rope that hangs from the ceiling in the cloak room, thus ringing the single bell at its top, sending out a prayer, a song, a lament.  The Chapel was once South Addison’s one room schoolhouse, and once an interdenominational Chapel, and now serves as a community center in the summer where, before Covid, we watched movies, held poetry readings and crooned together in sing-a-longs. 

Inside the Chapel, it was warm, the lights were on, but all the chairs were put away.  Outside, a spotlight had been set on the bell tower.  Neighbors arrived, all masked, their identities hidden, adding a sense of mystery and confusion and an other-worldliness to the moment. Outside, the night was cold and clear.  There was bright energy in the air, there were eager hellos, surprise recognitions, high buzzing voices, the smell of sea and frost and wood smoke.  I had a sense of  hunger.  Hunger for community, for connection and ritual.  People came inside, then went out to hear the bell.  Circles formed.  Why had so many come?  To find a way to mark and wade our grief together, our own sea?  To mark, to hope for a way forward?   

And then I met the four M.’s, three young men from “away,” all with the same first name and one young woman, whose name also starts with M, standing in a dark circle in front of the chapel steps. For years, Addison has lost population, rather than gained.  Houses stand empty.  Employment prospects have been dismal for years.  A few retirees move there, some full time.  But it has remained a place solidly frozen in the past.  But now here are the M’s!  Two of them, have just moved here from Los Angeles, bought a house around the corner from us, one M. works happily at his job in “books,” on Addison’s remarkable 5G internet.  His wife, M., works in film.  The other two M.’s are equally as young, migrated here from the upper West Side of New York City.  Also able to work on 5G. They too are looking for houses here, planning on staying.  All of them have, they say, “fallen in love” with this place. “I have a projector,” one of the M’s said.  “If we can’t be indoors watching movies this summer, we can project the films on the side of the Chapel.  I’d be happy to help.” 

The future has come to Addison.  

So while once we asked,
how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe?
Now we assert,
How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?
We will not march back to what was,
but move to what shall be. (A.G.)

Like everyone I’ve talked to about the Inaugural Ceremony, I too wept.  I wept first for the over 190,000 flags that filled the National Monument instead of people.  I wept for the number of women and black and brown people on the dais. I wept for the fashion: the purples and blues and scarlets and yellows and reds.  I wept for Bernie Sanders’ boiled wool mittens.  I wept for the orderliness of the day. For the ordinariness of the day.

But most of all, I wept for the words. Words which for the first time in four years when spoken by a President, I believed. I wept for Joe Biden’s words of empathy and union and resolve, for Amy Klobuchar’s words so full of generosity and spirit.  The words entered my body like spoonfulls of grace.  I could feel the cells in my body warm like honey, open like red peonies in June.  I could feel the stone fists in my hands, in my heart, in my mind, dissolve, and my arms soften like long waving grass and my shoulders go off duty and lie down and rest in the green grass. Even my eyes, ever so wary, settled into their resting place in my skull.  I could feel the concrete barriers I’ve erected around my whole body to protect it from the daily assaults on decency and truth, dissolve, and rain, or what felt like rain might feel were it August and warm, wash my body.

And, yes, I wept for the words of Amanda Gorman.  But I was much more than moved to weep.  I was bedazzled, enchanted, hypnotized, inspired, awakened, set right, directed, arisen, called.  (And a little jealous!) 

The future has come to our country. Make America Great Again’s nostalgia for the past with its false façade of greatness and refusal to see the violence of that past, is replaced with an honest assessment of our blunders and our wounds. 

If we merge mercy with might,
and might with right,
then love becomes our legacy,
and change our children's birthright.
So let us leave behind a country
better than the one we were left with. (A.G.)

The day after the Inauguration the word “slept” trended on Twitter and the earth beckoned our better angels with this sunrise over Eastern Harbor.

When day comes we step out of the shade,
aflame and unafraid,
the new dawn blooms as we free it.
For there is always light,
if only we're brave enough to see it.
If only we're brave enough to be it. (A.G.)

And yes, yesterday, at 12:45 we got our first vaccine shots.  The squirrels didn’t mess up our car’s engine or crawl into Maine Health’s data bank and erase our time on the books or warm a batch of vaccine and render it unusable.  The Maine Health set up was incredibly organized, fast, informative.  We were given another appointment for our second shot, exactly four weeks out. Two weeks after that, on March 6 — one week shy of a year since seemingly out of the blue the schools and the workplaces shut down — the vaccine will have worked its magic and we will be able to count ourselves among the saved.

I didn’t cry when I got my shot, though the nurse who administered it said many people do. I was instead too busy wondering how it came to be that I am here among all these old people tottering about in the place, all of us wrinkled, brown spotted with age, curved shouldered, bent somewhere in our once so proud bodies.  My future will be short.  I better get to work.