Michelle Shores 12/20/24 Michelle Shores 12/20/24

We’re Off On A Grand Adventure!

I’m excited to let you all know that Bud and I are off on Grand Adventure! This trip is part Christmas with family, part book research, part family history research and a whole lot of dreams come true! You won’t believe where we are going! I can’t wait to share it all with you!

If you are not already following me on social media please do so. You can find me @mshoreswriter on Facebook, Instagram and X. I’ll try to post there as often as I can about what we are up to and where we are!

Because of our extended travel itinerary my weekly blog will be on pause until we get back.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

Michelle & Bud!

Michelle Shores 12/13/24 Michelle Shores 12/13/24

Until We All Got Older And Realized It Was Stupid!

Stream between the towns of Steuben and Gouldsboro Maine

I think I’ve mentioned before that Bud is full of stories from growing up in Downeast Maine. I could write a whole book on his childhood!!

One of the places Bud mentions often in his stories is a place called Whitney Parrish Stream. Story after story, whenever he mentioned this stream I began to see the place as the Downeast Maine equivalent to the Mason Dixon Line. Bud grew up in the town of Steuben. The western most town in Washington County. The adjoining county, known as Hancock County, started to the west of Steuben, in the town next door, Gouldsboro. This meant that Whitney Parrish Stream not only divided the two towns of Steuben and Gouldsboro, but it also divided two counties, Hancock and Washington.

For some reason, known only to the adults of the time, Bud, his siblings and his friends, all living in Steuben in Washington County, had to be bussed to a consolidated high school two towns over to the west in Hancock County. In doing a little digging (ok I asked Bud’s cousin Myrna) I learned that in 1953 there were only 17 students left in the Steuben High School and that’s when the decision was made to close the school and bus the students to the new consolidated school, Sumner High School, in Sullivan. What makes no sense to any of us now is why? See there was another consolidated high school, Narraguagus High School, just to the east of Steuben in the town of Milbridge right next door and in Washington county! When I quizzed Bud as to why the kids were sent to Hancock County to attend Sumner when there was a perfectly good school in Washington County he didn’t seem to know. Whatever the reason was, the students from Steuben had to cross Whitney Parrish Stream every day to go to school. Thus began Bud’s childhood memories of this make shift line in the sand.

From what I can gather the crossing of Whitney Parrish Stream only went one way. The kids from Steuben could cross it to go to school, but the kids in Gouldsboro, or any other town in Hancock County, could not cross it to interact with any of the Steuben kids outside of school. The power of this stream seems to have also carried into the high school culture itself. From what I have surmised from the stories is that the kids from Steuben, the only kids in Washington County who had to go to school in Hancock County, and thus had to cross the stream to get to school, were never really accepted by the kids from Hancock County at the consolidated school. You know the old phrase being from the wrong side of the tracks? This was similar only it was being from the other side of the stream. At least that’s the way Bud remembers it and because of that, his stories of his teenage years are colorful, full of night time raids through the forest, and frequent mentions of Whitney Parrish Stream as the boundary of their world.

With my love of history, coupled with my fascination of human behavior, I began to wonder if Whitney Parrish Stream had always carried this mystical demarcation between Hancock and Washington Counties. Was it really as important in the local culture as Bud remembered? Did everyone in that area use the stream as the defining point of where their boundaries were? And if it was, who was Whitney Parrish whom the stream was named after? The research hunt was on!

First thing I learned was that it was NOT Whitney Parrish Stream. When located on Google Maps it clearly shows it as Whitten Parritt Stream. When I pointed this out to Bud he looked at me oddly. “That’s what I said.” I rolled my eyes. For the record I’m still struggling to learn the Downeast Maine version of English. If you don’t believe me go back and read my blog “They call it a Haith” it will help you understand my struggle. So quickly my research switched from looking for someone named Whitney Parrish to someone named Whitten Parritt!

There is no one named Whitten Parritt. So the stream is not named after any one individual. So that blew my imaginings of a crusty old Downeaster chasing the kids from Hancock County off his land, in the 1970’s, hence the reason why it became the dividing line in Bud’s memory. So I dug deeper. That’s when I found a mention of Whitten Parritt in a 1790 report to the Massachusetts Court of General Sessions of the Peace. This report was filed with a petition to improve a road. I was thrilled! This meant that there was a long history here and not just something recent. I love history!!!

The report to the General Court stated that the road, which was thought to have been originally built in 1783 by Loyalists escaping to Canada after the Revolutionary War, was approximately 18 miles long and ran from Steuben in the west to Addison in the east. The report gave the road various names along its course. Known as Whitten Parritt road it was also known as Baker, Downes, Townsley, Tracey, Oakes, Guptil, Campbell, Fickett and Damon Road. I found that piece really interesting, those were all surnames. The report also stated that there were settlers living along this road so I surmise that there must have been 10 - 12 homes along the road and depending on who’s house you were in proximity to is the name the road was known by at that place. All of these surnames must have been the settlers along the road. 10-12 homes in an 18 mile stretch of road meant no one was close to their neighbors!

The report stated that the road started on the western boundary of Washington County in the town of Steuben at “what is called Parritt’s Mill Stream.” That’s the stream!!! I found it!!! But in 1790 it was known only as Parritt’s Mill Stream, no Whitten. So now I knew I was looking for two individuals with the surnames Parritt and Whitten. My research rabbit hole got deeper and Bud’s amusement with my quest grew.

Thomas Parritt arrived in Steuben in 1770, twenty years before the request for road improvements. He came before the Revolutionary War even started. He was from Scotland and came to the area of Downeast Maine by way of “Canada” is what I found. Not New Brunswick, which is the Canadian province that borders Maine, but from Canada. I then found references that he had been a residence of Nova Scotia in 1770, so he must have came from there straight to Steuben. He and his wife Lydia had nine children, although I haven’t been able to learn how many of them were born in Steuben or if they came from Nova Scotia or Scotland has a family unit. What is known is that Thomas purchased the land on the western edge of Washington County and built a mill on the stream that would eventually carry his name. Well his name and that of someone else. The mysterious Whitten.

Hours, I literally spent hours trying to find a Whitten in Steuben that could have been a business partner of Thomas Parritt’s, or at the least owned land near the stream. Zero. I kept coming up empty handed. Until it dawned on me that the stream divided two towns, two counties! Maybe the Whitten I was looking for wasn’t in Steuben, or even in Washington County, maybe he was next door, on the other side of this line, in Hancock County! Sure enough I found him easily! Phineas B. Whitten, the same age as Thomas Parritt, born in York Maine, married in Kennebunkport Maine on Christmas Day 1770 to Hannah Joy, and their first child was born in Gouldsboro in 1772.

From what I can gather, at least the road, where it crossed the stream, has always been known as the Whitten Parritt Road, probably since the 1770’s, because these were the two families that lived along the road in that section. They had done so 10 years before the Loyalists even used the road as a means of escape, 20 years before the request for improvements. The stream we know was known only as Parritt’s Mill Stream in the 1790 report to the Massachusetts General Court. So when did the name change there to match the road? That’s harder to say.

I have a copy of the 1881 map of Steuben. This is a great map because it shows the names of all of the town’s residents and where they lived. If I look at the names written near the stream I find no Parritts at all. Lots of Smiths! A Tracey, a Bunson and a Perry, but no Parritts on what would have originally been known as Parritt’s Mill Stream. There are three mills listed on the stream, but the names are generic, “Steam Mill”, Saw & Stave Mill” and also a “Spool & Stave Mill”. Near these mills there are two households though, “A. T. Whitten and O. E. Whitten.” So 90 years after we know the stream was known as Parritt’s Mill Stream there are no Parritts living there but there are two Whittens. I think it’s safe to say somewhere during those intervening 90 years the Parritts sold their mill interests or possibly even removed from the area, as there are only 2 Parritt households in the entire town of Steuben on the 1881 map. When one or both of those things happened the stream assumed the name that the road had always been known as. Whitten Parritt Stream is named after the road that was known as Whitten Parritt Road in the area where Steuben and Gouldsboro adjoin each other and where the counties of Hancock and Washington meet.

When I showed all of this to Bud he was impressed. “You found all of that?” he asked me. I nodded, pretty satisfied with myself. Goal accomplished, I had found the origin of the name of the stream. “Still doesn’t explain why the stream held so much significance to all of you kids though.” I said. “I was hoping I could find some tale of a family feud or something, you know like the Hatfields and the McCoys, to explain why the stream was so important to your boundaries. What I really wanted to find was a historical reason behind it being a boundary marker.” He shrugged his shoulders, “Ya well, we all thought it was important at the time, until we got older and realized it was stupid!” That made me laugh!

If you’d like to see the stream for yourself, you can, just take a drive up Route 1 through the town of Gouldsboro and into Steuben. The picture above is the actual stream. There’s a small turnout and you can walk down through the forest a bit to access the stream. Bud and I stopped there a few weeks ago. I figured after all of my research I wanted to see the place for myself. I took the picture below of the trees around the stream. None of the trees in there look much older then me, so I imagine that 200 years ago there were less trees and more mills! At least we know the Parritts had a mill there!

The road, now modern day Route 1, pretty much follows what would have been the original road. The road the Whittens and Parritts built in order to settle in that area in 1770. The road that the Loyalists used and expanded upon in 1783 to escape to Canada after the War for America’s Independence. The road that in 1790 needed improving as it became a major thoroughfare between Steuben and Addison. History comes alive when you realize it still lives all around you!

This is my last blog for a bit as Bud & I take some much needed time off. If you are not already following me on social media please do so. You can find me @mshoreswriter on Facebook, Instagram and X. I’ll try to post there as often as I can about what we are up to! I’ll resume writing my weekly blog when we return to working more instead of relaxing!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

Michelle Shores 12/6/24 Michelle Shores 12/6/24

The Case Of The Strong Female Character

I’m on all of the social media platforms. I use each one of them differently for various reasons. Each one has a different audience and I can reach a wider group by using them all. For example I’m on X (formerly Twitter) but I don’t use it to interact with my readers. I use it mainly to network with other authors, creep around the edges of the book publishing world, and to listen in on what others are chatting about in the universe of literary pursuits. There are a lot of literary agents there, you know the Gate Keepers to the world of traditional publishing. Publishing used to be the higher sanctum of a select few. We’ve all heard the stories of authors sending out their manuscripts to hundreds of agents only to be rejected over and over. Thankfully self publishing has changed that landscape for many people, other authors like me. But Traditional Publishing is still a big business and the agents are still the gate keepers too letting in the authors they deem worthy.

Scrolling through X I see lots of agents posting. They will post that they are no longer accepting queries because they received over 250 overnight. Or that they are accepting queries …”next Tuesday but only between the hours of 2 -6 pm”. Many of them will post about what they are specifically looking for, such as “Now accepting queries from authors who have written sci fi romance with magical unicorns with manes of purple and blue hair.” I’m being silly of course but that’s really what I see. Agents in Traditional Publishing are looking for very specific things that the industry algorithm has indicated will sell.

Last week I saw several agents posting about accepting queries from authors with strong female characters. Insert Michelle’s huge eye roll. I just recently had an experience with the phrase “strong female character.”

Back in October I was at a book signing event with a couple of other authors when I overheard one of them trying to grab the attention of two young ladies walking by.

“Hey! Are you interested in a book with a strong female character?” my fellow MALE author said.

I actually felt my body cringe when I heard him. I felt the remark was incredibly inappropriate. It was sexist in my opinion. Why should girls be interested only in books with strong female characters. Isn’t it possible they might be interested in a book with a strong male character? With his off the cuff sales pitch he had basically labeled these young ladies in one fell swoop. Girls only read books about other girls. What he was essentially saying was that these young ladies would only be interested in a story where the woman was the hero, the victor, the conqueror. I struggled for the rest of the day to stand beside him. From a sales perspective I get it. You say whatever you need to say to get someone to take a look at your book. But his comment really bothered me.

So you can imagine how I felt when I saw agents saying the same thing!

Look, I’m not anti strong women. I’m actually a very strong woman. You have to be pretty darn strong to raise five children, self publish an award winning novel and then turn a campground around from run down to top rated in one season! So my problem is not with strong women.

I came into my womanhood at a time when women were expected to do everything and be everything and conquer everything. Women of my generation were expected to marry. Give birth to children, without epidurials by the way! In my day we did it without any pain medication if we could! We prided ourselves on our birthing horror stories on how long our labor was and if we gave birth standing up or lying in the bed. Then we went right home and did all the housework. Oh yes, keeping the house clean was our job! And it was the beginning of the “all natural” trend but we didn’t have organic anything in the stores. If we felt compelled by society to feed our children healthier foods we had to make those foods, at home, from scratch!!! Not only were we supposed to be strong during this phase of our life but after the children were a little older we were supposed to make sure all of them were involved in activities. As many activities as humanly possible! Gone were the days of our mothers where all they had to worry about was dragging kids to Boy or Girl Scouts. No when I was a mother your kids were expected to be involved in sports, the arts, community and academic clubs and organizations. If your kids were not each doing at least three different activities a week, plus school you were a slacker of a mother. Then once your kids got older and you’d managed to fill out all of their FIFA college forms for them, took out loans for them to attend school and saw them off, well then your parents needed help. So you then took on having to care for aging parents after just having finished caring for children.

Add on top of all of this the fact that we were supposed to have careers too! And not just a job, no these had to be a career where we became someone really great and important. We had to climb corporate ladders, break through glass ceilings, be the first, the best, the smartest, all because we were a woman. Oh and then 50% of the marriages failed so half of these incredible women were then trying to accomplish all of these things as single moms! I’m telling you the stress was intense and the expectations unrealistic for most of us. The reality was a whole generation of women became burnt out. These were incredibly strong female characters living real life on a daily basis. I know, I was one of them, trying to do it all!

For me reading has always been an escape. A place to go to that takes me away from the toils of my every day life. As a really strong woman, I don’t want to read about one when I’m trying to escape! I want to read about women that are pampered, have staff that takes care of everything. Women who meet their friends for coffee in the middle of the day because they have nothing better to do! These are my go to reads. And if there is a handsome swarthy male character in there, who just happens to have rippling muscles and saves the day by the end of the story I am okay with that! As an exhausted strong woman I am perfectly fine with him taking care of everything!

I’m not sure where this need for strong female characters is coming from. I refuse to make blanket generational statements on cultural shifts. As an author, rather than reader, my preference for balanced roles for all my characters is what I shoot for. In The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler I wouldn’t say that Lydia or Nelly were strong female characters. In the end they didn’t ride in on a stallion and save George. All three of them had trials in their lives that they had to overcome, they were strong, it didn’t matter if they were male or female.

In my next book the main female character is Alicen. Again she does not dominate the storyline. She has one heck of a journey but she is helped along on that journey by men, Gavan in particular but also Jeremy. Is she weak because she needs assistance from a man from time to time? Goodness no! I wouldn’t want to have to endure some of the things she does. She’s far stronger than I would be, but she’s not alone in that strength in the book.

I’m not sure I agree with this need for strong female characters. I write balanced characters. I guess it remains to be seen if I will ever fit in the Traditional Publishing world. I don’t write what AI and the algorithms deem worthy. I write what I like to read, and in the end that’s just fine by me!

Michelle Shores 11/29/24 Michelle Shores 11/29/24

Erasing History

Photo credit: iconichistoricalphotos.com and Reddit

As you all know I’m a lover of history, a promoter of history and a defender of history, even the history none of us finds appealing anymore. There are lots of things from history that makes us cringe now when we look at them from our modern day sensibilities. From slavery, to genocide, to racial divisions, to religion, to political opinions that are always changing, there is much in history that is uncomfortable. Even in my own book The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler it was hard to write Lydia, from my modern perspective, as the fifteen year old girl that marries an older man, even though I knew historically it was very common.

I think back to the first time I became aware that people would actually destroy historical references to serve their own political or power based purposes. I watched it unfold on the television as giant statues that had been carved into the hillsides in the Middle East were blown apart by the current ruling group because they felt these ancient statues threatened their current religious views. I remember feeling so sad that pieces of human understanding, even though they didn’t fit the current feeling, were being demolished. If anything at all they were great examples of art if they no longer held a religious purpose.

A few years ago it was all the rage to tear down statues of some of our countries once great heros or statesmen because now they were deemed offensive by modern standards. In other words they were no longer heros or great statesman, at least according to someone in charge of something. I found it rather interesting at the time because one of the biggest perpetrators of the very thing that was driving the removal of all of these statues still remained on our federal currency. Funny how humans think sometimes.

Near Boston I once found a cemetery where the names and dates of certain individuals had been scraped off from their gravestones hundreds of years ago because they, or their contribution to society, were no longer deemed important in the grand scheme of things. I remember commenting to my son that apparently attempting to erase history was not a new thing.

I saw it again last year when I was in England. As we walked through cathedrals built six hundred or eight hundred years ago, statues of once great religious leaders were mutilated in ways that their heads were removed or names chiseled away. On one massive stone altar in particular I saw a whole row of figures carved in relief on the side that had had all of their faces chipped away! Clearly humankind has been at this historical cover up a long time!

So I wasn’t surprised recently when the above photo of the author Stephen King and the very young actress Drew Barrymore, started popping up on social media. This photo was taken forty years ago, in 1984. Interestingly it was taken in my home town, Bangor Maine, at the premier of the movie Fire Starter. I remember that time well. Everybody was buzzing as Bangor’s most famous citizen brought Hollywood to Bangor! I even remember this photo being in the newspaper and how I didn’t think anything about it beyond the fact that there had been a big event with really famous people in town.

But now, forty years on, with our sensibilities either evolved or changed, all of a sudden people are having a real problem with this photo. I think Drew Barrymore herself has stated she was intoxicated at this event. I can’t remember from what, alcohol or drugs or both, but she was nine years old. Let that sink in with a 2024 mindset and you can see why it was popping up in the old algorithms lately. Some comments I saw were bothered by the fact that Drew was in a subservient role to an adult male while in the act of lighting his cigarette. Some noted that it was sexual and gross.

I found all of this fascinating because both Stephen King and Drew Barrymore are still alive, very famous, and very popular. Yet they have left a mark in the historical record with this iconic photo and are now open to being erased by future generations if somebody, somewhere decides their lives were inappropriate. Is it possible that in the future, after they are long gone, someone decides that all of his books should be destroyed or all of her movies never be seen again? Everything they accomplished, all of their dreams and goals realized, all their contributions to society suddenly gone because they don’t fit a future frame of mind? That’s truly sad, because art, like history, should never be erased even if our tastes change.

Sobering thought. Something that everyone should consider when they find history being erased or buried because it doesn’t fit our modern ideas. History is what it is. We shouldn’t go back and attempt to change it or erase it. If we find something that happened in the past that we don’t like, it means we should all learn from it and not make that mistake in future generations. Erasing it doesn’t help anyone. No one learns anything from that. We learn from studying and reading about uncomfortable moments in the past.

Recently I was informed of another piece of history that appears to be on the list of purposefully being forgotten. It was brought to my attention when I spoke in Eastport a few weeks ago. Look up the Colfax Massacre in Louisiana. Attorney Charles Moore, who I met personally, is working hard to get the State of Louisiana to recognize this disturbing piece of history so that it is never repeated again. It seems like a simple solution, place a sign to identify the spot so that it is never forgotten. Yet efforts to do so are constantly thwarted. A few years ago a memorial was privately erected on donated private land so as to memorialize the lives that were lost. Sadly though the memorial had to be installed over a mile away from the site of the actual massacre, which took place at a court house, a state courthouse that is still in use to this day. I’m sorry but we shouldn’t ignore the facts even if it is uncomfortable to think about. We must learn from our history!

Michelle Shores 11/22/24 Michelle Shores 11/22/24

Well At LeasT You Remembered The Turkey!

For those that don’t know, I moved a little less than a year ago. It was a great cathartic event! The typical downsizing of someone my age. I spent weeks before my move sorting through closets, emptying drawers, reaching into every nook and cranny of my soon to be previous home so that I would take only the bare necessities with me into my new place. It’s amazing how much stuff we can accumulate thinking we need it, only to be faced with a situation where you can’t take it all with you! You realize then what’s really important.

At the time of my move my son gave me some great advice. He said “Everything can be replaced.” So with that in mind I really did donate or throw away a lot of things. If I needed something in the future I could replace it with something new. There was no reason to hold on to most of these things. They were, after all, just things. Even my library got thinned out and my beloved nativity scene collection was reduced to just two. My thought process was I would rather clean all of this out now then to leave it to my children if something should happen to me. So off I set on my. new adventure with only a few things and the idea that everything was replaceable.

I’m not really sure what my mindset was at the time I packed, because in the intervening eleven months I have gone to look for something that I know was important and I can’t seem to find it. Only to then stumble upon something I did bring with me that has no value or meaning whatsoever! It’s the craziest game of “I brought this but not that?” What was I thinking?

For example one of the things I noticed was missing was a gift that my dear friend Teresa had purchased for me when I started my author journey. It was a decorative piece, specifically for Halloween. It was a small old fashion looking manual typewriter but someone had highlighted the H-E-L-P keys with blood. Ghastly but just the thing that I loved putting out on my table when I sold books at shows. Everyone loved it!! Just before Labor Day, and nine months after I had moved, I was preparing to set up at Maine’s Odd & Unusual Show. I began to put my table set up things together and that’s when I realized I didn’t have the typewriter. Where in the world had it gone? I tore this house apart looking for it! I remember exactly where it was in my old house. It was on top of the filing cabinet in my office with a bunch of Bangor themed antique knick knacks. All of the knick knacks are here in my new office, but not the typewriter. I can’t imagine I would have left it behind!!! It certainly didn’t fit the category of “everything can be replaced.” But alas it is no where to be found. What I did find though, an unopened package of glow in the dark plastic stars. Really? What in the world would I ever need glow in the dark stars for?

A few weeks ago Bud got the idea he wanted to make a huge batch of chili so that we could have some meals prepared ahead of time. I thought this was a great idea and suggested that I could even pressure can several jars so that we could keep the meals on hand longer. Fantastic idea! As he cooked I went to the closet where I knew I had stored my canning equipment. There I found my pressure canner, jars, funnel even my tongs! But missing from the ensemble was my big white enamel, antique 21 quart pot that I sterilize the jars in. Now where did that go? It was slightly important! I’ve had it for over 30 years. Actually found it on the side of the road in Iowa, it had a chip in the lid but it was perfectly good! Ironically in my old house I stored my funnel and jar tongs in it! So how did they manage to get here but not the pot? No idea! But I did find a homemade pasta drying rack that I think I’ve used twice in the 12 years I’ve owned it. Somehow that made the trip to the new house. Ugh!

Last weekend Bud and I did a book signing at a Sip & Sign event where there were authors and wine makers. It was a super fun event and we bought a bottle of mead from Run Amok Meadery in West Gardiner to bring home. Once we got to the kitchen though we found another item that had apparently not be deemed worthy of getting packed, a corkscrew! After several attempts with Bud’s jackknife and a literal screw from the tool bench in the basement I remembered there was a corkscrew in the campstore that had not sold all summer. I jumped in the golf cart and zoomed over to the now closed up and winterized campstore to find the dusty corkscrew still in it’s place on the shelf. I snatched it and texted my son “Remember how you said everything is replaceable? I owe the campground $2 for this corkscrew!” We also later realized we had no nut crackers, which we needed to use to crack lobster. How do two kids from Maine not have nut crackers for lobster? But somehow I managed to not bring them! Or little cheese knives! I have no little knives to use for spreadable cheeses. I brought three cracker trays but nothing for the cheese. But you know what I did bring? Three halloween costumes that don’t fit! I just don’t understand what I was thinking?

The final straw came last week as I was putting away the Halloween decorations and getting the Thanksgiving ones out. I put away my scary, spider covered Scentsy burner and dug out the Turkey shaped Scentsy burner. Then I reached deep into the box for my pilgrim salt and pepper shakers. I’ve never used them as salt and pepper shakers, they have always just sat on the table representing that very first Thanksgiving. The woman in her black dress with the puritan bonnet on her head. The man dressed in rustic autumn colored clothing and his black hat. I’ve had them for close to 40 years now. Well until I didn’t. See the Pilgrims weren’t in the box. There were dozens of ghosts that hang from trees that I never put out. Half a box of fake brightly colored leaves. Several scarecrows that I don’t really like and a candy dish that I really don’t want to put out because I put candy it in and then eat all the candy myself. But the Pilgrims are not there! The Pilgrims who have been with me through everything are gone!

I stomped down the stairs with my lone Thanksgiving decoration and Bud saw me fuming. “What’s wrong?” he asked me. So I explained the situation to him.

“Well at least you remembered the turkey!” he smiled.

Michelle Shores 11/15/24 Michelle Shores 11/15/24

I Told Bud I Was Writing A Blog About Leaves

When I told Bud I was going to write a blog about leaves this week he said, “Why because they are so annoying?” I had to laugh because that is exactly the reason why I decided to write about them!

All my life I’ve lived in the “city”, or what we in Maine would consider a city. I’ve never lived “outside of town.” So at most, as a child and as an adult, I’ve had around six leaf bearing trees in my yard at any given location. I like trees. In the spring their little buds of green give us hope that winter will finally break and it will start to warm up. In summer trees provide us with shade from the sunshine that we waited all winter to see but now for some reason complain about. In fall the bright colors of the trees, especially on the sugar maples, are breathtaking, and then they all fall off.

Like I said, I am a city girl, so six or so trees in my yard has never been a problem to clean up after. In fact, I’ve always looked forward to raking the leaves, Fall is my favorite season. A few years ago I took my leaf raking to a whole new level when I bought some use plastic leaf mitts. These are like rakes for your hands and they give you the ability to scoop up huge, and I mean huge, piles of leaves and place it into the composting bag. I even got a little stand for the bags, where you can clip the bag into the holder and it stands upright without assistance. You can bend over scoop up a huge handful of leaves and dump it right into the mouth of the bag that is being held wide open for you. Great system! Truly!

If you know me personally, or have picked up from reading this blog, I’m a bit particular when it comes to certain things. Like over the top particular in the way that I want things done. The raking of the leaves has always fallen into this category. I never hired anyone to rake my yard over the years. Just like I don’t hire anyone to mow my lawn. There are some things I just need to do myself because I’m so particular. I will say over the years, as I’ve gotten older, the prospect of having to go out into the yard in November and rake up the leaves has lost a bit of it’s magic. But it’s a chore that must be done and so I have always done it thoroughly. Seeing as I’m a city girl, and I only ever had six or so trees, I was the house in the neighborhood that was raked spotless. Not a single leaf was ever left scattered about my lawn. I’ve been known to even go out and hand pick up leaves that had the audacity to blow into my yard after I had raked up all of my own leaves. Year after year I went into the first few weeks of winter satisfied that I had gotten every leaf picked up from my yard.

And then I moved to the campground.

With fifty-five acres “outside of town” let me just tell you I have six trees within a six foot radius of my front door. This is not a city girl’s house. There are thousands and thousands of trees here. And it’s not just my own yard I have to clean up. With 130 camping sites that’s basically 130 yards that need to be raked. Trust me I’ve tried. It takes about one hour to rake a campsite. Do the math. There is. not enough time left between now and when the snow flies! Not to mention three playgrounds, three bathhouses, the mini golf, dog park and on and on. I have never seen so many leaves in my life! Don’t get me wrong, the Fall colors out here were stunning! But when all the leaves began to fall they piled up waist deep in some places!!

I quickly realized that my lifetime of leaf raking expertise was going to be put to the test!! Little did I understand.

Take the mini golf as an example. I took this picture this morning. I have raked this mini golf THREE times! Once even resorting to the leaf blower and blowing everything down over the bank where Bud then mowed over all of the leaves with the lawn mower to mulch them into tiny pieces. Three times I have cleaned up the leaves to my very particular standards, scooping up leaves and making sure there is not a speck of leaf to be seen. Only to find this mess the next time I turn around. The trees are bare! I don’t know where all of these leaves are coming from. Deeper in the woods I guess. Like little mice scurrying out from all of their hiding places they blow from deeper in the forest out into the open expanse of my new yard.

The reality is that I will never get them all. My city girl standards of having the cleanest, leaf free lawn in the neighborhood cannot be applied here. There are millions upon millions of leaves here! I am conceding defeat! I’ve come to a truce of sorts with the leaves.

To me the above picture is now my standard of a very nice clean yard! I look out my kitchen window at this and think “It’s looking pretty good out there!” If I can see more grass then leaves, then that’s well enough! They say to the path to happiness is learning to let things go. I agree with that. I’ve learned to let a lot of things fall away that I used to think were so important.

Leaves. You’re now on the list. I’m letting you go!

Michelle Shores 11/8/24 Michelle Shores 11/8/24

“That’s The Craziest Thing I’ve Ever Heard!”

Yup, that’s me in the photo above, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

A couple of weeks ago I had a wonderful opportunity to speak at a library’s book club meeting. I love book clubs! Usually when I attend these most everyone in the room has already read the book or is part of the way through it. So they have questions and I get the chance to talk about some of my favorite characters and scenes from the book. This is a diversion from my routine of having to tell people the key selling points of the book and why they should buy it!

At this book club a very nice gentleman in the front row asked me “ What is your writing process?” I had to laugh, because I’m not your typical author so therefore my process, if that’s what you call it, is far from typical! I mean how do you explain to someone you don’t know that when you sit down to write you literally leave this world and step into a world you aren’t even sure exists but that you know it must because where else would this stuff come from? Saying all of that without sounding like you are crazy! It’s tough.

So I told him (please reference the photo above). I don’t sit at a desk. I sit in a chair with my legs extended in front of me. This can be a lounge chair on a beach somewhere, a solid chair and a foot stool in a library or my own comfy chair and ottoman at home, but I have to be stretched out. I then place my laptop on my legs, put my noise canceling headphones on my head, turn the volume up as loud as it will go, and play music!! He shook his head in disbelief, laughed and said, “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard!” I know! Right?

He then asked me what I listened to for music and I told him usually only 5-6 songs that play on a continuous loop. I don’t choose the songs, they will choose me. I’ll find one or two in “Suggested for You” playlists that the algorithms choose for me on Apple Music or I might hear one on the local radio station in my car. It’s really random where I pick them up, but they definitely find me. It’s not about the lyrics for me, it’s about the cadence. That seems to be the common denominator in them, the cadence of these songs all match the intensity I feel while trying to write. It’s the drum beat to my marching orders. As I was explaining this to him I said, “And it’s really that simple, I listen to the music and then I write what I see.” That’s when I heard a woman in the back of the room gasp, lean over to her friend and whisper loudly, “She writes what she sees.” There was a tinge of awe in her voice. You know that mystical, creepy, oh-my-word-can-you-believe-it kind of tone.

I thought about the woman’s comment the whole way home that night. For me, writing what I see is exactly how my book The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler unfolded and it’s exactly how the next book came to life as well. I see the whole story in my mind like a movie. I don’t have an outline, character development cards, a flow chart. Nothing. I just write what I see. From start to finish, only thing missing is the popcorn! Her comment really made me stop and think about what I “see”. How is it possible that I really do see these things. Actually see what is happening. How is that possible?

Take for instance a scene in the next book. It’s a shipping office in Bristol England, it’s 1635. I can sit here right now and see the interior of that building as if I had been there many times, as if I were standing in it at this moment. It’s opulent, because this particular business if very successful financially. They specialize in shipping goods to and from the expanding markets in the New World. The whole feel of the place is that it’s operating on the cutting edge of everything that is happening in the world at that moment. Exploration and colonization, that’s where the money is to be made.

In my mind, what I see when I walk into this building is dark stained wood walls but the space is not dark. There are huge windows that run floor to ceiling. The panes in the windows are perfect squares that stack neatly one on top of another until you get to the rounded tops of the window casings where the panes become more curved. The glass in the panes is wavy and distorts the view of the ship masts that can be seen in the harbor beyond. There are rows and rows of desks with a clerk at each one. Their heads down as they scribble away in ledger books, dipping their feathered quills into inkwells stained black. Their jobs are to keep track of everything that is being unloaded and loaded onto the ships seen in the distance. Everything from fine woolen linens from the north to colonists wishing to escape the overcrowded cities for a fresh start in the New World.

The man who runs this machine has his office high above, where if he steps out of his office door he can stare down on the clerks below him. An intricately carved wood railing decorates the walkway between him and the open space. The stairs leading up to his office are in the back corner of the first floor. They are iron filigree steps and curve in a spiral as you ascend them. The bronze railing is highly polished and smooth to the touch. As you arrive at the top of the walkway you see the clerks down below but if you look up the ceiling is painted in a beautiful mural of the high seas. There, ships battle storms, ride upon the waves, or drift in the calm waters of tropical islands. The colors are vibrant and stand out agains the dark walls. The turquoise and blues of the sea contrast with the white of the billowing sails and clouds. Each ship represents one in the fleet of the shipping company. Their figureheads and names delicately painted just large enough to be identified.

Upon entering the office of the man you are struck by the back wall that is lined with bookcases and filled with hand sewed leather bound books. The man’s desk is a massive piece of mahogany. This wood is native to the newly discovered sub tropical area of the New World and this desk represents this man’s wealth as well as his status. The man himself is seated at the desk in a chair that hearlds back to a different time for him. The chair is a sea captain’s chair and it is the only thing in the room that speaks to the man’s origins in life before he found himself surrounded by luxury. The chair and the lines on his face, they belie the years he spent before the mast. Fighting against the wind and the sun to forge his own future, one where he learned every detail of the shipping industry so that he could someday rule over it. This is a man who built his own empire.

How is possible that I can see this? That I can so easily see this building, this room, this man? How does something like that happen? It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of!

Michelle Shores 11/1/24 Michelle Shores 11/1/24

A Truly Frightening Story, Or Is It?

I know technically it’s the day AFTER Halloween, but I think we’ve got room for one more scary story. Don’t you?

I often say I don’t believe in ghosts, and truly I don’t. I don’t believe in the stereotypical, Hollywood created, images of white filmy apparitions floating around the corners of abandoned houses. I also don’t believe in anything frightening, demonic or evil causing terror. Nope I’ve never seen it, never felt it and therefore I don’t believe in it.

What I do have a very strong belief in is an unseen part of our world that truly does exist. This unseen world is inhabited by our departed loved ones and other beings we can’t yet describe. Bud calls them Spirits. I believe this world, and the beings that reside there, are right here with us, just in a form we can’t see with our human eyes. Why do I believe in this? Because this is a realm I’ve “seen”. Not with my eyes but with my soul. In that way that I like to call my knowing.

Recently I had time to give my kitchen a good deep cleaning. As is my habit when doing mindless tasks like housework, I listen to podcasts on my Alexa. I only listen to a few, but my all time favorite is The Best Of Coast to Coast AM. This is a spin off of the original radio program that was, and probably still is, on air in the middle of the night. I became a fan of the radio program years ago when I was working as a Distribution Manager for the Bangor Daily News. Often times my work day started at 1:00 AM if I had to be out there delivering newspapers myself. In those dark and lonely early morning hours I found this radio program that talked about UFOs, Witches, Big Foot and all kinds of magical things to be quite entertaining! I’ve been a fan ever since.

So here I was recently cleaning my kitchen and listening to an episode of Coast To Coast AM on my Alexa. This particular episode was about how our deacesed loved ones sometimes use technology to communicate with us. Let us know that they are still with us. The woman speaking was rattling off all kinds of examples of electronic devices acting strangely or cell phones receiving calls or text messages from departed souls. As I listened to her I thought back to when my step dad Tommy died a couple of years ago. How myself, my mom and my sister all had strange things happen with our cellphones. I thought too about a high school friend who posted on Facebook recently that she received a phone call from her father’s cell phone even though he had passed away a year or so ago and her mother had deactivated the phone. All of these situations certainly fit the profile.

I then remembered my trip to England last year and how I had spent the night in Lumley Castle, reported to be one of the most haunted castles in England. How I had turned on my sound machine that I always travel with and wondered if sound at different frequencies bothered ghosts? Only to have the machine shut off all by itself!!! I’ll never forget that moment, with my toothbrush dangling out of my mouth and toothpaste dripping into the sink. I was not alone in the room of that 13th century castle! In my mind I formed the thought of an apology but that I wasn’t going to sleep without my sound machine on and whoever was with me would just have to live with it. At that moment the sound machine came back on! It was all rather interesting, but not scary.

All of these thoughts were running through my mind as I went about listening to the podcast while wiping down the kitchen counter and then moving on to hand washing a pan in the sink. I had unloaded the dishwasher already and put in the morning’s coffee cups but there was no need to start the dishwasher until after dinner later in the day. I did however need to hand wash the cast iron frying pan. As I turned on the water and began to scrub the pan I thought again about the beings in our unseen world and did they really try to use electronics to communicate with us. I wondered if these beings were always with us? Was someone here with me right now?

I had no sooner had this thought when the dishwasher to my left started beeping like crazy! I turned and could see it cycling through the different washing options very fast. I should tell you this is a brand new dishwasher. It was installed when I moved into this house in March. We’ve never had a single problem with it and it has never acted this way before. I immediately reached for my phone, which was on the island behind me and hit the video record button! I wasn’t going to miss a single minute of this! After recording 10 seconds of video (I’m fully aware of the attention span of social media!) I then tried to press a few buttons to get it to stop it’s mad dash through the cycles, to no avail. Suddenly Lumley Castle popped into my head so I took my hand off from the control panel, took a deep breath and formed the thought “I know you are here, please stop.” You could have knocked me over with a feather when immediately the dishwasher stopped.

Here is the video I took. You can hear the water in the sink still running from where I was scrubbing the cast iron pan. You can also hear the podcast in the background as well.

I’ve had some pretty incredible experiences in the past two years but this was by far the best. I wasn’t scared. It was more of a reassuring. A knowing that the things I have been shown, taught, made to understand over the past two years are real. We are not alone, ever. We are watched over and if we could just slow down and open our minds to the possibilities that are out there, we will see them. And most importantly be blessed by them.

Ghosts, or whatever you want to call them, are the same as everything else in life, it’s all in your perspective. If you perceive this situation with my dishwasher as something scary then that’s what it is for you. If you perceive it as something truly remarkable then it proves there is more to this life than we understand. I prefer the latter!

Michelle Shores 10/25/24 Michelle Shores 10/25/24

That’s A Really Smart Guy!

I’ve mentioned. many times, either here in this blog, on social media or while speaking in public, that I don’t have a college degree. For many years I would say it was something I regretted in my life. I regretted not having that opportunity to go to college. The cards were just not on the table for me, so I missed out. I no longer say I regret that twist in my life. To be honest, I don’t regret it at all anymore. Mainly because I learned along the path of life that inner peace comes from not having regrets. But I also came to no longer regret not having that degree because I have never stopped learning. My thirst for knowledge is just as strong today as it was when I was 18 years old and graduating from high school. The only difference is that I learned that the path to knowledge doesn’t come in a one size fits all classroom model. I’ve said it many times, I may not have a piece of paper that says I’m smart, but I’ve never stopped learning.

I only bring this up because a couple of weeks ago I had the extreme pleasure of meeting a very smart man. You could tell just by talking to him that he was intelligent, highly intelligent. I was signing books at the Fryeburg Fair, not exactly the halls of deep academic thought, but the deep fried oreos were amazing! This man stepped up to the table, not to have me sign a copy of my book for him, but to ask me about the publishing process. You see he had written a book, a real life story about the first time DNA was used in a court trial. The DNA evidence wasn’t used to convict anyone, but to prove the innocence of the accused.

I found this very interesting because I had only heard of cases where DNA was used to find someone guilty. His story seemed to be the opposite of everything I was familiar with. I love it when something challenges my way of thinking! This man was extremely passionate about his subject. He told me all about it and in doing so he used impressive vocabulary words! I love words, so naturally that is what I picked up on first. He was a smart man and what he wanted to know was how to get his book published. I explained that I was a self published author and then told him about everything that choosing to go that path entails. I could see him grimace at the financial burden doing it this way would cost him. I mentioned other avenues, traditional publishing, querying to agents, crowd sourcing, etc. He openly admitted that he felt trapped in his station in life because of his socio-economic status.

This man openly explained his situation to me. In our world today we would use words like “marginalized” or “less advantaged”. He was honest with me that he is surviving at government funded income levels. He’s basically what we would call “in the system”. Yet he had never been educated in the traditional sense, same as I have not, but he was so smart. You could tell that immediately. How had this gentleman, and that is what he was, an articulate well mannered gentleman, how had he not found a way to pursue his goals when he clearly fit the criteria for every program out there? All of the years he had been in “the system” how is it that no one else had noticed his intelligence and pointed him toward a different program than just subsistence living? It infuriated me to be honest.

I gave the man my card and told him to use the contact form on my website if he wanted to reach out to me. I’d be more then happy to help him navigate the world of getting his story published. At that moment Bud stepped up and you could tell the man felt very comfortable around Bud’s down to earth demeanor. Immediately they started chatting away about what I affectionately call “guy stuff” and before long the man was telling Bud about a mechanical part he had invented. I marveled at him as I watched his mind switch from speaking to me about literary pursuits to chatting with Bud about mechanical functions. This man was multi faceted. His knowledge, his intelligence, his level of understanding was well rounded and not just focused on one thing. He was a very smart man. But by the standards we currently live in, he would not have been judged smart. He had no degree. He held no job. He had no successful career. He did not look the part of a well educated man that is so stereo-typical in our image driven world today. It’s safe to say that most people, myself included if I’m honest, would have not even noticed him in the hustle and bustle of life. He was that unassuming.

As someone who has been shunned myself in certain circles, by certain individuals and even by certain organizations, all because I don’t have that special piece of paper that says I’m smart, my heart broke for this man. He and I shared a similar struggle, but his path was much more difficult than mine is at the moment. As he walked away I was grateful for the time I had spent with him. Grateful that I could add more one interesting individual to my long list of people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting.

Meeting him also helped me to more deeply understand that we are all smart. Intelligence comes in many forms. Knowledge does not belong to just a select few. Nor is education acquired in only one form. There are a lot of very smart people out there who’s voices are never heard. Find those people. Share a conversation with those people. They are the real gems in life.

Michelle Shores 10/18/24 Michelle Shores 10/18/24

Lost And Found!

If you haven’t been following me on social media, you might not know that I just spent my first summer running our family campground. I had so many new and interesting experiences that it was mentioned often that I should write a book about them! But I figured a few blog posts here and there but be more fun!

I learned things this summer that I never thought I would learn. Things like how many days a sweaty human can sit in one spot on a bed before you have to throw away the sheets! Or children left alone at the free coffee station will in fact open 47 french vanilla coffee creamers into a cup and then drink the sugary liquid straight. I learned that there are a lot of really wonderful people in this world. And I also learned that there are a few people that are never going to be happy no matter what. Most importantly I learned that every single person that drove down our road to our campground had a story and a reason for finding us, and that was the most amazing part of my whole summer!

This past spring, as I set up the campground for opening day, I was pretty confident that I had thought of every last detail to make this the most magical experience for families, but I was wrong. I missed one crucial thing. I never thought of a Lost & Found box. So as you can see from the photo above, unlike everything else here that met the highest of standards, my Lost & Found box ended up being a random cardboard box that I scrawled “Lost & Found” across one flap on a very busy day when I needed something to dump the random pieces of life into.

And that really is what a Lost & Found box is. Those random things in our daily lives that end up not having much meaning because we are willing to lose track of them. So as I closed up the campground this week I found myself sifting through the items in the Lost & Found box and wondering how they ended up there.

Take this item for example. Not sure if this is really Ariel from The Little Mermaid or just a knock off but she wins the longevity award for residing in the Lost & Found box the longest. She has been with us since the 2nd week in June. I only know that because that’s the week we opened the pool and she got left behind on the pool deck that first weekend. It’s one of those mini boogie boards, like some kind of flotation device. You can tell when you grasp it that the styrofoam inside is cracked and broken. Not really sure why her owner just didn’t throw it away in the trashcan provided poolside. Maybe it held some kind of sentimental value to them and it was too hard to throw away. Here we are months and months later. It was a good summer Ariel, or Ariel wannabe, but I had to throw you out.

This hat wins the Furthest Traveled Award. I had to google Marten River, it’s located in Ontario Canada. I remember the woman who had this hat on. She came in the office as they were checking out to tell me how much she had loved staying here. They were quick stop campers, just here for a night as they traveled on to somewhere else. It was a busy weekend and I can’t always remember everyone by name. She ran in to use the Ladies Room before they hit the road and she left her hat on the sink top. It would be a couple of hours later before we found the hat and no way of remembering who she was. I put it in the Lost & Found box just in case she called looking for it. But that was in July and we never heard from her again. Maybe she lives near Marten River, or will travel there again, and can grab a new one.

These two pairs of shoes are my favorites out of the whole box! Only because I keep thinking of the family that left them behind. Did you really go home with two children in bare feet and not notice? I only say this because I raised 5 kids and I can tell you if I had been somewhere and then loaded everyone into the car and noticed that two of them were missing shoes I would have stopped everything to find the shoes! We found these shoes down by the jump pad, where kids are required to remove their shoes before jumping. We found a lot of shoes, sandals and socks there this summer. All of them got claimed except for these two. In all fairness to these RVing families. It’s possible, as the kids climbed into the truck to leave, that mom and dad thought the shoes were inside the camper, only to realize when they got home they were sans shoes.

Then we had a large assortment of these things. Toys. We found lost toys at the playgrounds, around the pool deck, left in the arcade, even in the bathrooms! I felt bad for these toys. I often thought of the toys under Sid’s bed in the movie A Toy Story. These were similar, the cast offs, the not loved, the not valued enough to keep an eye on kind of toys. In some ways I felt sorry for them. But the moment was fleeting and these all went in the dumpster.

Of all the things I thought we’d find this summer it was the lack of sunglasses and eyeglasses that shocked me. An entire summer and only this one pair got left behind. The good thing is that whoever left them also left the case so the glasses at least felt a little bit at home during their time in the Lost & Found Box. I will be donating the glasses to my local Lions Club International for their eyeglasses program. They don’t take cases so sadly this lovely sea themed case went to the dumpster.

And finally we have our winners. Of all the things that got left behind these were the only two that held enough future use value to join us again in 2025. The velcro toss & catch game went into the community lawn games box and the dive sticks will be out on the pool deck next summer just in case anyone wants to give them a try.

We also had some larger items that were casually discarded outside of the dumpsters. You could tell their owners felt they still had some value, but not enough value for them to want to keep for themselves. Things like two trash bags full of really great towels. So freshly washed that the scent of laundry soap gave me a headache! I donated those to the Humane Society. We also found two perfectly good trash cans, with their lids! Not sure who felt they needed brand new trashcans in here when we have 5 dumpsters, but when they pulled out they left them behind for us. Sadly we don’t need them either…we have 5 dumpsters! So I’m going to have to find new homes for those.

Bud was particularly thankful to whoever left a brand new oil filled electric space heater next to the dumpster!! See we have a really nice pool table in the Rec Room that he hasn’t been able to use much this summer because we’ve been so busy. He’s mentioned several times now that when we close up for the season he’d like to leave enough free space around the pool table so he can come over and use it. I pointed out that there is no heat in the main building, might be a bit chilly! Well now …. all of his heating problems have been solved.

Michelle Shores 10/11/24 Michelle Shores 10/11/24

Live In The Moment …

One year ago … one year ago yesterday to be exact, my life took a turn I never saw coming.

It was October 10, 2023…. I already felt like my life had been turned upside down from the publication of my book The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler. The experiences I had, the people I had met, the places I had been to, my goodness I never thought any of that would happen to me in my life! I often said I couldn’t believe any of this was real because I was just somebody’s mom! Hahahaha. I still feel like I’m just the mom.

But on that day one year ago everything changed. I had been contacted by WABI TV, the local TV station, to do an interview. Halloween was approaching, my book is always popular around Halloween because at it’s core it’s a ghost story. So I wasn’t surprised when they reached out to me. I agreed to do the interview but I wanted someone from the town of Sullivan to be included. Specifically I wanted someone from the Sullivan Historical Society involved to speak to the actual history behind my story. I did not want this interview to be a book promo. My book sells just fine by itself. What I wanted from this interview was what I had wanted from the beginning. Using the vehicle of fiction to shine the light and attention on the actual history.

So I reached out to Tobey Crawford at the historical society and asked if she would do the interview with me. She eagerly agreed, as I knew she would. Tobey had been an early supporter of my book. She had invited me down to Sullivan to speak at the historical society’s meeting in December 2022, only three months after the book had been published. I had such a great time and was so impressed with the organization that I wrote out a check right there and became a lifetime member of the Sullivan-Sorrento Historical Society! And when I got my first social media “hater” Tobey worked tirelessly online trying to clear up historical inaccuracies in that person’s perception. This person felt the Blaisdells were not being portrayed accurately. My strategy in dealing with this person was to just let it be. I don’t do drama. But Tobey felt strongly that this person needed to be reminded that history belongs to everyone and no one person could claim a history as their own. I finally relented and told Tobey if she wanted to respond to go ahead. I remember Tobey’s comments and how eloquently she stated the facts that this person was misconstruing. I knew she had my back on this one. I trusted Tobey. I was glad she was my friend.

It was Tobey who also worked with Acadia Seashores Campground and Flanders Bay BBQ to put together an event in July of 2023 that brought me back to Sullivan to speak to a barn packed with people. It was the largest event I had ever done. And it was Tobey who messaged me just before that event to let me know that there would be Butler and Blaisdell descendants in attendance when I got there. I was so excited! That night Tobey brought a wonderful display of historical items that we set up near where I was speaking. Again I was thankful for Tobey and her support of me and the book. So naturally she was the person I wanted with me when I did an interview on location in Sullivan.

In the days leading up to the scheduled interview with WABI, Tobey and I spoke many times about locations she wanted to take the TV crew to. The Blaisdell Cemetery, the Blaisdell’s basement where Nelly’s ghost had actually appeared, things like that. We also talked about the actual Butler and Blaisdell descendants who had been at the Flanders BBQ event back in July. It was Tobey who gave me the phone number of Bud Means, the man who is George Butler’s 4th great grandson. Turns out Bud was also the Chief Selectman for the Town of Sullivan. It would be great if he did the interview with us too! Well this was just getting better and better! Not only would the historical society be represented but now the Town itself would have a spokesperson. I remember my first text message to Bud. “Tobey Crawford gave me your phone number. I’m the author that wrote the book The Gathering Room. WABI wants to do an interview on the 10th there in Sullivan. Would you be available to do it with Tobey and I? Do you even want to?” Thankfully he said yes!

So on the morning of October 10th I found myself standing in the parking lot of the Sullivan Rec Center with Tobey and Bud waiting for WABI to arrive. It was a weird experience for me. Not going to lie, I was kind of starstruck. Imagine spending six years of your life imagining what George Butler was like and now here you are looking at his great, great, great, great grandson. Absolutely freaky!!

When WABI finally arrived we started filming Tobey first. I wanted this interview to be all about the history and the best place to do that was in the room that held all of the records. It was my first real shock of the day. That moment when Tobey turned to me and let me hold the actual records bearing George Butler and Abner Blaisdell’s names. I don’t think I have ever smiled so much in my life. Again, six years of my life had been obsessed with this history and now I was holding the real documents in my hands!

From there we went to the Blaisdell cemetery and Tobey pointed out where she thought Lydia’s parents were more then likely buried in unmarked graves. I was so thankful she was with us so she could point this out. Obviously I would have never known this for myself. She was invaluable that day. The camera was set up and it was my turn to be interviewed. I remember even saying on camera that this was all so amazing. The shock of where I was, who I was with and how my life had gotten too that point was a lot. All of a sudden the reality of the situation hit me. I was standing on Blaisdell burial grounds with a Butler descendant.

I remember the way the sunlight shone through the trees. The way the wind was blowing. The way everything in my life, at that moment, felt like it had come full circle. What had started out as just me reading a bit of history and wanting to let my imagination run with it for my own entertainment. To it becoming a six year obsession where I felt like I lived with George, Nelly, Lydia, and the rest, as real people. To the book becoming a real thing that snowballed into something bigger than I could have ever dreamed of. To this moment in time where I was standing there, in Sullivan, in a cemetery watching a TV crew talk to a direct descendant of my main character. My eyes filled with tears, I was so grateful to whatever force had moved in my life to let me experience all of this. What a magical life!!

It was in that moment that I walked over to Bud and asked him if he would do a selfie with me. I was certain he thought I was crazy, but I didn’t care. He was literally a total stranger to me. We had been together for all of a couple of hours at this point but hadn’t said more than a few words to each other. I had spent the two hours staring at him if you want to know the truth! To me he held rockstar status, and honestly I never thought I would see him again. So I wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity to get a selfie with him.

As we stepped toward each other and I raised my camera up high (I always take selfies with the camera higher then my chin!) I smiled, he leaned in and something changed. I snapped the photo, he stepped away, he looked at me and I looked at him. Something had just happened in that moment. We both felt it. It was a moment that I have never forgotten. A moment that I caught on camera. Just like you can’t explain what faith is or why you believe in something so strongly. It was one of those moments in life where it’s obvious that words have limitations. But in that moment something changed. The only English word that comes close to describing what happened to us in that moment is “knowing”. That moment meant something. We didn’t realize at the time what it meant, I only felt strongly that it wasn’t just an ordinary moment. Because we were strangers I didn’t say anything and neither did he. It would be months, and many other mysterious happenings before we found ourselves in a place where we could talk about the cemetery selfie and what it had felt like to each of us. In that moment we both “knew”.

From the cemetery Tobey led us, Bud on his motorcycle, the WABI crew in their van and myself in my car, to the site of the Blaisdell’s home where Nelly’s ghost had appeared. It is private property so we couldn’t go walking around, but Tobey assured us the cellar hole of the house was just off the road there in the woods. I remember snapping several photos of trees and being thrilled with that! Pictures of trees! But it was what Tobey told me laid beyond in those trees that held my fascination. Again my mind turned back to the six years I had spent imagining all of this and here I was standing on the same land that all of them, George, Lydia, Abner and Nelly’s ghost had traversed all those years ago. My whole body shook from the excitement of what was happening to me that day.

WABI had interviewed Tobey with the historical records, me in the cemetery and now it was Bud’s turn at the location where Nelly’s ghost had actually appeared. I stood back and watched as they got just the right lighting, waited for the wind to stop blowing, talked to him about the questions they would ask, and all the while I just kept staring at him. How could any of this be real? This man’s ancestor had been a pivotal figure in a ghost story that some say is the first documented ghost sighting in America. We were standing near the location of the sighting of that ghost. Standing on land that Lydia Blaisdell herself had walked across. Maybe it’s because I’m a history nerd, but I was having the best day of my life! I was living in this moment and absorbing all that I could!

After Bud’s interview we all headed back to our cars, that was it my “one moment” was over. I remember shaking Bud’s hand and thanking him for coming. It was really an awesome treat for me to meet a direct descendant of George Butler’s! I remember hugging Tobey and thanking her for helping with this. It had turned out exactly as I had wanted it to be. A spotlight on the Town of Sullivan, its history and the unique ghost that has forever haunted that area.

Little did I realize it was just the beginning of the most magical part of my journey yet! One moment that changed the course of my life. A life that had already swung in a direction I never imagined, now just took a sharp turn in a moment. A moment that I will forever be grateful that I lived in! I was focused on that moment. Not worrying about yesterday or fussing over tomorrow, but fully present in that moment. I could have missed a very important message that came in that moment if I hard been focusing on what I had to do next. Thinking about my grocery list, or did I need to do laundry? All of the mundane things that rush through our minds every day. If my mind had been anywhere else that day I would have missed it.

There is so much out there for us …. slow down, focus on the moment you are in. It could change your life.

You can watch the interview Bud and I did last year for yourself at the link below.

https://www.wabi.tv/video/2023/10/13/tale-nelly-butler-comes-full-circle/

Michelle Shores 10/4/24 Michelle Shores 10/4/24

Samhain And Why I Am Looking Forward To October!

As I’ve mentioned many times before, for the majority of my life I lived under a rock, metaphorically speaking of course. I read a lot of books, had my own ways of viewing things, and wasn’t exposed to a lot of mystical ideas that would have been considered, well, strange in the world I had grown up in. That all changed when my book The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler was published. Suddenly I found myself thrust into a world of ideas and concepts that I had never imagined I would be pondering upon let alone watch unfold in my own life!! One of these historically accurate concepts is the ancient festival of Samhain. It’s Celtic if you don’t know, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Satan. Which if you had asked me about it say, oh, 25 years ago, I would have probably told you that’s what I thought it was. I would have been wrong.

I think somewhere in the far reaches of my mind I knew that our modern day Halloween was connected to some pagan festival, but I never paid much attention. With my understanding on the history of Halloween rudimentary at best, I was intrigued last year when the word “Samhain” started popping up on my social media feeds. Funny how algorithms work. When I look at Bud’s social media feed it’s always full of basketball and weight lifting videos! In mine I find folklore, crystals and ghosts! I wonder how that happens?

For those of you who are wondering, Samhain is pronounced “sow-wen”. There, I got that out of the way. This ancient festival time celebrates the end of summer and the time in the season when the earth is heading into it’s dark time. That time of year I dread because our days are the shortest! The ancients believed it to be the start of their new year, which I find odd. Spring has always seemed like a better time for a new year to me. Ancient cultures also believed that during this time of year, the month of October specifically, was when the veil between this world and the next was at it’s thinnest. When communication between the two worlds, earth world and spirit world, was easiest. All of this communication building up to that one night of the year when the spirits from the other world can enter this one and walk among us. And there you have Halloween.

But this idea that the weeks leading up to that night, the weeks in October, are ripe for communication with the spirit realm intrigued me. I began to think of all of the things that have happened to me in October that have seemed “weird”.

Halloween, October 2015 - The night I read A Documentary History of the Nelly Butler Hauntings by Marcus Librizzi. The history captivated me and I can only describe it as I became obsessed. For weeks afterwards I researched and researched and researched. Until that fateful night when I woke up in the middle of the night and made the decision that I would just write what I thought had happened. Me…write a fictional story when I had never written anything before in my life. The idea, so preposterous at the time, but it seemed to be the only way to stop the obsession that had taken over my entire being. The result a woman who has never written anything writes a novel that captivates just about everyone that reads it and then wins four national book awards. Tell me that wasn’t a sign from another world.

October 2021 - I am offered a job at the Maine Tourism Association. Now I know that seems rather mundane but here’s the thing, From the moment I saw that job listed on Indeed, to the first phone interview, to the follow up in person interview I just KNEW that was my job. I was going to work there. I had never been more certain of anything in my life. Yet I had no experience in tourism or hospitality. Logically there was no reason for me to think I had a chance to get that job, let alone KNOW, like deep in my sould KNOW that I was going to get the job. But I did know, an other worldly kind of knowing. It made no sense to me at the time, I had done other job interviews and never been certain I was getting a job, but this one struck differently. I got the job and six months later Jane from Maine Authors Publishing called the Maine Tourism Association to ask about advertising her book festival. I answered the phone. I took that call and learned from Jane that people could self publish their own books. What a great idea because I had written a little story I wanted to have printed up into a book for my family and friends. It was a phone call at a job that changed the course of my life.

October 2022 -

A.) One month after the release of my own book fictionalizing Nelly’s story, my whole world exploded. I never imagined the story to take off like it did. Never imagined I would be appearing at events, signing books or being interviewed. During that time I often said I felt like the book was on a journey of it’s own and I was just following it’s lead. It was clear there was some other entity driving the direction of my life from that moment on.

B.) It was also the month when I would meet Susan Blaisdell, although not any relation at all to Abner and Lydia Blaisdell in my story, she gave me information on how the Blaisdells arrived in Maine. I found it fascinating and I began to research the Blaisdell family further. She told me she had seen a post about my book on Facebook but we never did figure out how she had seen it or who had shared it that we both mutually knew. It was as if Susan had been sent to me.

C.) At a Halloween party I stood and talked history to a man for over two hours only to learn, just as I said my goodbyes, that he was Mark Blaisdell, also a Blaisdell descendant. We later met up and he was able to provide me with more Blaisdell information that would lead me to England.

D.) It was in this month that a huge wind storm would blow through the small village of Bleasdale England and destroy a grove of trees. The grove of trees had been planted in 1903 to protect an ancient Bronze Age Circle that had recently been discovered. For over a century the Bleasdale Circle would be surrounded by trees, but that isn’t how it had looked originally. Like most of the circles in Great Britain, the Bleasdale Circle had been built on an open plain. I wouldn’t learn of the destruction of this grove of trees until April 2023 when I arrived at the site to research it for my next story. It was then that the landowner pointed out to me that I was seeing the Circle as it should be seen, with no trees. “How fortuitous” he said, “that in October all of the trees had been blown down. Almost as if someone, or some thing, wanted you to see it as it should have been!!” Yes, how fortuitous!

October 2022 certainly was full of otherworldly signs and messages, if one was paying attention! But if I thought that was an October to remember I was mistaken. October 2023 would prove to be even more life changing. October 10, 2023 I was able to hold in my hands the actual historical documents, dated 1816, that set in motion everything that became the historical record of the Nelly Butler hauntings. It was a surreal moment to see the names of real people that I had turned into characters in a fiction form. Later that same afternoon I stood in the Blaisdell cemetery in Sullivan Maine next to a man who was a direct descendant of Captain George Butler. I remember not being able to wrap my head around the fact that I was standing on the burial grounds of the Blaisdells with a man who carried Butler DNA! How could this day even be real? But it was real and it turned out to be one of the most memorable October experiences I have had yet.

I say YET for a reason. This year marks my third October since the veil was so obviously thinned for me. I still don’t’ understand why all of this is happening to me. Why at this time in my life I’ve been made aware of another side of understanding. But I have no doubt in my mind at all that something is happening!! I’m much more aware, more in tune with my world and more open to the possibilities of communications from one world to the next. Some one or some thing has a plan and I’m eagerly looking forward to what lies ahead this October!

Stay aware my friends! Look for your own messages!!

Michelle Shores 9/27/24 Michelle Shores 9/27/24

It’s Called A Haith.

A couple of weeks ago Bud & I were driving through the back roads when he said to me, “You’ve probably noticed this too, since you spent years driving for work like I did, but did you ever notice how a lot of small towns in Maine have roads all named the same? You know like every town has a Town Farm Rd.” This caused me to stop and look at the next road sign we came upon and he wasn’t wrong! There was the Horseback Rd, like I had seen in many other small towns.

One would expect most cities and towns to have a Main St. Even an Elm St., Church St. or the ever popular Pleasant St. Many cities especially have all of those numbered streets, First, Second, Third, etc. But when you get further out of the cities and into rural Maine you start to find some similarities that have historical significance associated with them. Take for instance the Town Farm Road. Back in a time when it was culturally inappropriate to be running up debts, and there were no government funded safety nets, if you fell on hard times and got behind in your finances, you or your entire family had to go live at the Town Farm. This is where you would work for your own food and lodging until you could pay off your debts or get back on your feet to be able to provide for yourself and your family. So just about every town had a Town Farm and the road leading to it would have been called the Town Farm Road. Similar reasons can be found for common road names like Ferry Rd, the road that led down to the river where the ferry was! Or the Stagecoach Rd, Horseback Rd or even Railroad St.

I love it that Bud & I have these conversations. We both love history, so often our conversations have a historical tinge to them. So it was nice to have this discussion in the car as we traveled 45 minutes through rural Maine to buy used books at a yard sale. Yes he loves books as much as I do and was willing to drive 45 minutes away to look at some. I am very lucky!

So last night as we drove into town to pick up a pizza for dinner I noticed a road sign that I’d also seen in a lot of other towns, so I pointed it out to Bud. “There’s a road name you see in a lot of towns. The Bog Rd.” He nodded and responded with his Downeast “a-yuh” that I love so much.

“Seems like every town has a bog.” I said “So naturally every town has a Bog Rd.” He was quiet for a moment and then said “Steuben doesn’t.”

“They don’t have a Bog Rd?” I asked him.

“No they don’t have a bog.” he replied.

“What do you mean Steuben doesn’t have a bog?” I asked, “Every town has a bog.”

“Well Steuben don’t.” I wasn’t going to fight him on it. Steuben is his hometown, he grew up there and from the stories he tells I can guarantee you he’s walked all over most of that town either as a young boy looking for something to do or while out hunting! So if he says there’s no bog, there is no bog!

“Well that’s strange.” I said pondering on the concept that just about everywhere else in Maine has a low spot that’s kind of swampy. “I would have thought there would be a swamp or something similar out that way. Just about every where else has a bog.”

“Steuben doesn’t have a bog, just the haith.” he said matter of factly.

“The what?”

“The haith.” he replied.

“What the heck is a haith?”

“It’s a swampy area.”

“So a bog.”

“No, it’s called the haith.”

He drove along the road confident in his statement while I scanned my brain for the word haith. I love vocabulary words, pride myself on being able to pull some doozies out of my hat every once in a while, but I had never heard of haith. So I said “How do you spell that?”

He laughed that deep cheerful laugh of his and said “I don’t know how to spell it, I just say it.” So I grabbed my phone and googled Haith, Hayth, Haeth, and on and on until we pulled into the pizza shop.

“There is no such word.” I said as I got out of the car. My tone indicated that I was right, seeing as I was master of all things word related. I smiled at him as I started to shut the door. “No such word!”

“Sure there is!” he yelled out, with that Downeast twang in his voice. “We always said go over they-ah toward the haith.” I laughed and shut the car door. While I stood in line to get the pizza though, I puzzled over this word in my mind. He was clearly pronouncing it like faith, only with an “h” sound. So it had to be spelled like faith right?

The whole way home, with the smell of warm pizza filling the car, we bantered back and forth about this word. He insisted it was a real word and I said I had never heard of such a thing. Now to be fair to him, Downeast Maine is a culture all on its own. Something I realized shortly after he and I met. One of our very first conversations included him telling me this: “They done put the chase to me and once they caught me, I got all stove up.” I felt like I needed a translator on that one!

After we got home we took the pizza out to the deck to eat and I continued questioning him about his haith.

“Are you sure it’s not a heath. I’ve heard of a heath.” I said. Heath is also a term commonly used in England, the place from whence most New Englanders came.

“What’s a heath?” he asked me.

“Well it’s like a bog, or a swampy area. Could even be an area in the woods that’s kind of cleared out, just growing scrubby low bushes.”

I could see his mind thinking on that for a while. “Maybe, but it ain’t called a heath. It’s called the haith.”

Long into the night I lay in bed thinking about his haith. I thought about the men and women who came from England hundreds of years ago to settle along Maine’s far eastern rocky coast. How their dialect changed and became something distinct due to their isolation. It’s not quite British but not quite Boston either. It’s unique. It’s Downeast Maine. In Bud I hear words and phrases that reflect a time and culture that seems almost foreign to me in many ways. It occurred to me that if there is a bog or swampy area in Steuben it was probably originally called the heath. Over time, and with that deep Downeast dialect, it changed, at least in Bud’s family, to the haith. This seemed to me the most plausible explanation.

There are lots of words in our language that we use to describe the same thing. Soda or Pop for example. Ghost or Spirit. Bog, Swamp, Heath or even a Haith. It really doesn’t matter what sound comes out of your mouth. If the group of people you live with understand you then that’s all that matters. And apparently everyone in Steuben knows what the haith is.

I think it’s interesting that Bud has his own word. In fact I liked the idea so much I decided to write this blog about it. See, if I put haith out there into the vast space of the digital world it will live forever. So the next time someone hears the word haith and decides to Google that…..

Haith: a swampy wetland or area of low growing bushes most likely located in the town of Steuben Maine. Etymology source: Bud

T-shirts available next year at the campground store! ; )

Michelle Shores 9/20/24 Michelle Shores 9/20/24

Oh the People I have Met!

One of the things I have enjoyed most about my journey as an author is all of the people I get to meet. I took that whole experience up a notch when I added the campground to my life! When you allow a couple hundred people to hang out in your back yard every weekend all summer you meet LOTS of people!

If you know me, or have met me at an event, you know I’m super happy, smiling, bubbly, almost to the point of nausea, over the top cheerful, and always positive! No matter the time of day, the kind of day I’m having, or where I am, if you ask me how I’m doing you’re going to get the same predictable answer. I am always “Fabulous in every way!” First thing I learned about running a campground this summer was not everyone arrives here that way! Hence the sign in the photo above that we put up at our entrance. “Happy Campers Welcome! Grumpy Ones Tolerated!”

I will always remember the first person that walked into the office this summer not happy. His vibe preceded him through the door and to be honest I “felt” him long before he even got up to the counter. I was unable to lighten his mood with my incredible charm, nor did my offer of free popsicles for his kids bring a smile to his face. Yes it’s true, the tradition we now have here at Pleasant Hill Campground of giving free popsicles to every kid, all day, every day started with a grumpy camper! This guy was Mr. Grump and he was having no part of any kind of joy at the prospect of camping with his family.

Later that night I found myself still thinking about this grumpy man and it occurred to me that I had no idea at all what was going on in this man’s life before he drove into my campground. He could have had a bad day at work, fought with his wife, gotten a flat tire on his way here, lost his favorite fishing pole, or forgot to pack the can opener! Seriously, it could have been one of a thousand reasons why even free popsicles didn’t bring a smile to his face, and you know what, it wasn’t my fault. My job was to create a magical place where families could make lasting memories. It’s up to them to choose to do so once they are here! Being able to come to terms with that early in the season saved my mental health! It also brought home the saying we see on social media so often. “Be kind to everyone you meet because you don’t know what battle they are fighting.” or something like that. It’s so true, and not until you deal with hundreds of people on a daily basis do you realize just exactly how true it is.

The best part of my summer though was learning that all people are good people. Read that again. All people are good people. I saw that day after day. I wish everyone had the opportunity to see what I saw. The world is full of really good, ordinary, kind, supportive and happy people. The people who don’t make the news headlines. The ones who aren’t fodder for the media. Just families and individuals living their best lives in quiet, positive ways. The world is a beautiful place! Or at least it is on Pleasant Hill in Hermon Maine!!

I want to share some photos with you so you can get an idea of the kind of people I met this summer.

Campers come from all across this country to stay with us. These folks were from Texas and they left me with this beautiful Sea Heart!!! I learned something and felt blessed to have met them!

I had spoken to a family from Canada on the phone when they made their reservation. She was very excited to get here and get a copy of my book. She arrived with this jar of the best honey I have ever tasted in my life! We did a honey = book kind of exchange! She loved my book but I think I got the better end of the bargain. Seriously this is some really good honey!

These folks from Florida were the absolute sweetest! They stayed with us for a month. Deeply religious people who felt that God had truly sent them too Maine. I had the wonderful opportunity one afternoon to sit and listen to their story of how the past year or so had unfolded for them. How they felt they were just being led to where God wanted them to be. They had no plans, just signs and answers kept popping up in their path that led them from one great experience to another. I shared with them my own experiences over the past two years that mirrored theirs. And although we were using different words, the sentiment, the experience, the paths were similar in every way. There is a higher force directing our lives, all you have to do is slow down, look, believe and you will see it. I hated to see them go. They gifted me a beautiful Bible when they left. We have remained in contact. They were huge fans of the book and have worked tirelessly on the road (yes they are still traveling!) to tell everyone they meet about it! Tonight I received a text message from them. They are in Athens Tennessee and met a woman at their campground there who had read my book!!! How amazing is that?

This is Dwayne. He was from Oklahoma, just passing through, on his own life journey. He carved and sold wooden flutes. He was a fascinating man that I enjoyed chatting with. One day he came into the office and asked if he could play for me. The melodious music was exactly what I needed to calm my frazzled nerves on that very busy weekend. It was like he knew what I needed. He was a blessing. I hope he comes back some day.

And on and on my summer went. I’ve often said over the past two years that my book finds the people who are supposed to hear the story. After this summer I can honestly say that the people who needed to find my campground found it. Every single person that drove down that road was led to come here, I truly believe that. We had guests here who recently lost loved ones. Others who had suffered losses of another kind. We had guests that were recently told they didn’t have much time left and wanted to spend those last precious days in this world camping. We had guests that were seeking an escape from the hectic pace of what I call “the outside world.” Every single person I met came here for a reason, and it wasn’t just camping. Some came to heal, some came to connect, some came to relax, some came to find strength. Each one of them had a story of how they ended up here and it wasn’t just “I found your website.” The reasons were varied but each one was magical. They were all led here. All of these good people were led here. Just like Bud and I were led here. The magic continues!

Michelle Shores 9/13/24 Michelle Shores 9/13/24

Have You Ever Wondered if Past Lives Are Possible?

Since my book The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler was published in 2022 I have found myself exposed to a lot of different ideas that I don’t think I would have given much thought too had I not written the book. Things like ghosts, psychics, past lives, etc and etc. I’ve met so many people who tell me their stories of the spiritual or supernatural that one can’t help but be intrigued by these ideas. Nelly’s story alone makes you stop and think about what life after death is like.

When I meet people they usually want to ask me if I think Nelly’s story is true. Do I think it really happened? Yes, I really believe that George, Lydia and all of the others were involved in some sort of paranormal, supernatural, if not spiritual experience. Where I’m still undecided is on what caused it. The next question I always get asked is do I think I channeled the spirit of Nelly Butler when I wrote this story? Oh I don’t think so. I’ll be honest, the whole creative process was strangely bizarre for me. I never thought of myself as a writer, author or even anyone creative! So to be able to fictionalize a piece of history, and in such a successful way, was a unique experience, but I don’t think I was told what to write by Nelly’s spirit. My story is fiction. If Nelly’s spirit was guiding my work, wanted her voice to be heard, don’t you think she would have shown me what really happened?

The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler is written in a very realistic way. I hear that a lot. People tell me the line between fiction and reality is sometimes hard to find. Because of that the next question I get asked a lot is do I think I was Nelly in a previous life? Oh dear! Again I’m going to say that if I were Nelly in a previous life and I was lucky enough to remember that past life, I’d probably have written what really happened and not the magical story that has captivated so many people. The same holds true if you ask me if I was Lydia, or any of the other characters in a past life. I don’t believe so.

That whole line of questioning took off into the stratosphere after Bud entered my life. It’s not hard to understand why. The collision of our two lives, with the book in the middle, brought to life for a lot of readers the love story that were George & Nelly’s lives. So I can understand the “Do you think you guys are George & Nelly?” questions we get all of the time now. I’ll admit there are some moments, when the weird happenings even makes us pause, that we have looked at each other and said….”Do you think?” but then we laugh and shake our heads. Nah, not a chance.

But yet the thought lingered so I approached Bud about this idea of getting a Past Life Reading the other day. You know he is not only a really good sport, but I know he thinks about things just like I do. So I wasn’t surprised that, with one eyebrow cocked, he agreed to do it with me if we could find someone who didn’t know a thing about us. Despite everything we’ve been through, everything we’ve witnessed and experienced, we are both still skeptics in some way. So I set about booking an appointment, made sure not to give the woman any information about us that she could search the internet for and kept our real identities on the down low. Soon we had our chance to learn if we were indeed George & Nelly Butler!

Let me burst the bubble for you immediately….we have never been George & Nelly Butler! We are not them. The trials and experiences they went through in the late 1790’s belong to another two souls, not Bud and I. Neither are we George & Lydia, so that gets that right out of the way.

But the woman who gave us our past life readings didn’t tell us this, she didn’t say to Bud “You are not George!” she just didn’t mention any of them at all!! Afterwards I realized if I had sat there and she had told us we were George & Nelly I would have walked out of there even more skeptical then when I walked in. I would have laid blame on the internet or that she had somehow figured out who we were in real life. Told us what she thought we wanted to hear. Instead her reading walked us both down a path that we had never even thought of but it made so much more sense! We were both wary, was she speaking in generalizations that we were just eager to apply to our own lives? No, she was pretty darn specific! And specific on things that neither one of us had spoken about to each other, to our friends or family, let alone posted about on social media. It was comforting and incredibly peaceful all at the same time.

Whatever your belief structure is, it’s interesting to explore other ideas even if it’s just for the entertainment value. Bud and I walked away from that experience for the better I think. We have talked about it long into the night, on several nights. We do that a lot, talk.

I will tell you this, we may not have lived George & Nelly’s life, but our story was so much more better than that! So, so much better! If past lives are indeed a real thing….. I just may have to write that story next!

Michelle Shores 9/6/24 Michelle Shores 9/6/24

Classic End Of Summer Essay

This is the classic end of summer, whatever you want to call it, essay…. “What I did this summer!”

I ran a campground… but I didn’t do it alone! Bud & I did this most amazing thing together.

I was “Miss Michelle” to about 100 or so different kids every weekend. That was fun!

I gave away, for free, close to 1000 popsicles!

I met Gary, came to terms with Gary, accepted Gary and then enjoyed hiding him every Friday. night (If you don’t know who Gary is, just wait, there’s a children’s book in there somewhere!)

I worked 15 - 17 hours a day, 7 days a week during June, July and August. I have never been so physically exhausted in my whole life. Yet I got up every morning and couldn’t wait to do it all again!

I ached all over, I gained weight, I never ate dinner before 9:00pm and one night Bud and I were eating cold pizza at 12:45 AM!! But I never felt so alive in my life.

I met hundreds of the most amazing people, each one of them adding something to my life. I met some in passing but others left their mark.

I watched God, The Universe or whatever your word is, lead people to this hill, to this campground, to this incredibly special place to find acceptance, peace, healing or that one quality that no one seemed to be able to put a word to. If I heard it once I heard it a dozen times. “There is just something special about this place. You can feel it the minute you get here.”

I was never lonely. Never. Ever. Lonely. And that was the most amazing transformation in my life.

It was most certainly a summer to remember!!

Now that Labor Day has come and gone, things are slowing down. I’m eating normal meals and sleeping normal hours. And I’m writing!

I’ve already started writing the next bits and pieces for another book. Not sure where it will go, or if it will go anywhere, but I felt the need to get those things out of my head.

Next week I plan to start the edits on the second book.

And this week I will resume writing my weekly blog!!! Looking forward to sharing with you some really amazing experiences Bud & I had and there’s more travel in my future. You won’t believe where I’m going!

It feels good to be back!

Michelle Shores 5/31/24 Michelle Shores 5/31/24

Wait…It’s Friday Again?!

So if you remember a month or so ago I put out the word that I was now running our family’s newly purchased campground and my life might get a bit crazy this summer. I believe I even said I might not be publishing a blog every week as has been my practice for the past year.

Well let me just say I wasn’t fooling around any when I made that announcement. Last week was crazy building up to Memorial Day Weekend and I failed to get a blog written and put out on Friday May 24th. If I thought getting ready for the unofficial start of summer was crazy, the trying to recover in the days following it was even more of a challenge. Thankfully though we did recover just in time for this weekend. It was yesterday, Thursday, when I finally felt back to myself and not so frazzled. If you know me I’m generally in a constant state of frazzlement, so to actually feel frazzled means I’ve gone over the frazzle edge! It was 9:00 last night when it all of a sudden dawned on me that the next day, today, was FRIDAY! Not only did I not have a blog written for this week either, I hadn’t even thought of one!

So yet another week without anything really worthwhile for you all. I’m sorry. I will tell you that Memorial Day Weekend here at Pleasant Hill Campground was a huge success. The place was packed with families! Kids were everywhere! Freeze Pops are free in the office and I think I went through a whole box! Mini Golf had a line because the clubs were all being used. The Bounce Pad never saw a moment of peace from 8 am to 8 pm. And neither did the frogs down in the frog pond! I was whizzing by on the golf cart and saw at least eight kids with nets lining the banks looking for victims.

For those that love reading the idea of staying at a campground run by an author has meant that copies of my book The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler, have been flying off the shelves! I had one gentleman coming in all weekend with yet another question. “So does George marry Nelly?” and then a few hours later. “Is Lydia possessed?” Truly, as a reader, the opportunity to be able to speak personally with the author of a book while you are reading it, has proven to be priceless for many of the folks that were here. I love that!

So that’s it for this week. Know that I am still out there, just not able to be “author” as much as I have been in the past. I’m to busy being “General Manager” or “Miss Michelle”. But I’m having the time of my life. We are thrilled and happy to be tackling this project. I’m thankful for this life! And along the way I’m collecting experiences and meeting people that I’m sure will show up in my future writings!!

Michelle Shores 5/10/24 Michelle Shores 5/10/24

Moose Gray & The Internet Trolls

I love this picture of my grandfather. He’s young, actually a lot younger than I am now! He was at the beginning of his adult life. Dating a pretty young girl he had met, she is the one who took this picture. His name was Arthur and in this photo he was trying to share a piece of himself with this woman he would eventually go on to marry. He is paddling a canoe. I’m not sure on which body of water in Maine he took her too, but his idea of the perfect date was to get this woman outdoors! He loved the outdoors, he was a sportsman. A hunter, a fisherman, a paddler, anything that kept him outside. He loved the outdoors so much that he was given the nickname “Moose”. He owned his own camp on Chemo Pond in Eddington, Maine. He belonged to the Eddington Salmon Club, was involved with conservation efforts on the Penobscot River. Snowshoes and baskets woven in the traditional styles of the original peoples of Maine hung on the walls of camp next to the ice fishing equipment, guns, red and black plaid wool coats and the ever present hunter blaze orange caps. That was my grandfather, Arthur “Moose” Gray, it even says that on his gravestone, right next to the engraving of a fish caught on a hook.

For whatever reason this great love of the outdoors, this sportsman gene, did not get passed on in my immediate family. In defense of the DNA, Moose’s daughter, my mother, never got into fishing and hunting as her brothers did. But as I grew up she did take us hiking, camping and insisted that we play outdoors as often as possible. Hard to be a sportswoman when you are a single mom raising two daughters on your own, working full time and living within the city limits. Not Mom’s fault that I don’t know my way around gutting a deer!

By the time you get to the next generation, my own children, I dropped the camping. Mostly because I’m not a fan of sleeping on the ground, but my boys got a little bit of camping experience in the yearly Boy Scout Camping Trip! I still took my children hiking, or more like, walking around cemeteries. I tried! I did make sure they got outside! But I wouldn’t call anything about my children’s upbringing as sportsman-like. When the last two were in high school I did buy them snowshoes. The ones from Sam’s Club that are mostly aluminum and plastic. We gave it a go on the walking trails within the city park. It was fun! Moose may not have been as impressed.

Enter the 4th generation, my own grandson, and from somewhere deep within biology Moose’s rogue genes have emerged!! My own grandson is fascinated with camouflage clothing, swiss army knives, hunting, fishing and survival skills. I don’t even come close to being able to relate to this. The closest thing I’ve got to camouflage is an olive green sweater with a brown zipper. The grandson is clearly an anomaly in our family of book lovers, computer programers and tax accountants. None of us feel up to the task of helping to support him in his interests. It’s not because we don’t want to foster his passions, it’s just honestly none of us know what we are doing when it comes to this stuff! It’s clear to me though, that my grandfather, Moose Gray, lives on within my own grandson.

Recently the family all took a step in the grandson’s direction, when we bought a campground. He is absolutely in heaven. He sure loves being outdoors among the pines and having the full run of the place before we officially open for the season. I wear many hats at the campground, one of which is handling the advertising and social media marketing. In our most recent ad campaign I chose to highlight our catch and release fishing pond. I think the pond is one of the most beautiful places on the property. It’s serene and peaceful. I actually sat down there for the total solar eclipse we had on April 8th. In the semi darkness I heard an owl hoot. It was magical.

To promote the pond I thought it would be nice to take a few pictures of my grandson fishing and make a video out of them. I even found a fishing rod in the attic of the campground which was perfect seeing as none of us actually own a fishing rod. I know from my social media marketing experience that most people view reels for only 4 seconds before they swipe left and move on to the next reel. That’s right, the current attention span of adults using social media is 4 seconds. Sad but true.

So on a beautiful spring evening, when the setting sun was providing us with the most perfect natural light filtering through the trees, I handed the fishing rod to my grandson and had him stand next to the edge of the pond. “Just hold it like you are fishing.” I instructed him. He stood there all decked out in his camouflage, rod in one hand, lightly touching the reel with the other hand. In my opinion he completely looked the part of a young angler. I was so proud of him as I snapped away taking a few pictures. Then I got some pictures of the pond itself, the bubbling stream that feeds it and finally my most artistic idea yet! I leaned the rod against an old log, placed some random fishing tackle I had also found in the attic along with it so that I made a wicked cool still life and took my final picture.

Back in my office I assembled four photos into a video collage template. A picture of my grandson “fishing” in the pond, the pond itself, the bubbling brook and finally the still life against the log. I added some awesome music and was really proud of myself that I had managed to create a four second video that, in my opinion, was pretty impressive. The first picture in the series, the one of my grandson, was only 1.6 seconds. Keep that in mind, it means something later. The other three photos appeared for only .08 seconds each. That’s how brief all of this was. The entire ad was only four seconds.

I posted it that night. I made sure the website and phone number for the campground were easily identifiable. I added text that read “Come check out our catch and release fishing pond!” and then I threw in a bunch of hashtags so the internet would send my ad to anyone interested in #fishing #camping #fishingwithkids #activitiesforkids #RVlife #visitMaine #Maine etc. I went to bed confident that I knew what I was doing in regards to social media marketing.

What I awoke to was enough to shame Moose Gray from beyond the grave! Oh yes my video was getting tons of traction. In fact at the end of the five day run it amassed more plays, Likes, Comments and Shares then any other video I had ever produced! But not for the reasons I had intended. You see that ad became a target for internet trolls, hundreds of them. For in that four second video, but even more specifically in that 1.6 seconds that the image of my grandson flashed upon their screens the trolls noticed things that I never thought of.

First my grandson was holding the fishing pole upside down. Second there was no fishing line. Third, apparently it’s absolutely taboo to wear camouflage while fishing, at least according to the trolls. My lack of sportsmanship knowledge was clearly evident!!! I want to point out that I never intended to post an instructional video on fishing technique!! I posted a 1.6 second picture of a young boy standing at the edge of a pond holding a fishing pole. ONE POINT SIX SECONDS PEOPLE!!! Of the over 28,000 people that watched that video, close to 6,000 of them watched that video repeatedly. Not just watching it once and moving on, but watching it at least twice in a row. Do you people not have anything better to do? Well actually they do….

They found time to post nasty comments about how stupid my grandson was, how stupid the adults in his life were, how sad that this poor kid didn’t even know how to fish! I spent all five days of that ad campaign deleting comments and blocking users every waking hour of every day. It was easy to tell that the majority of them were trolls, but it still didn’t ease the pain that I had let my grandfather down. I didn’t even know the right side of a fishing pole!

From a marketing standpoint any publicity is good publicity so I’m still pretty darn proud of myself that the video was our top performing video ever!!! Sorry Moose, I’ll do better next time with the grandson. We went to the sporting goods store and purchased a proper fishing rod, fishing line and plenty of tackle! We also found someone who knows fishing and he’s going to teach the boy how to do this activity properly. Who knows, maybe he’s the next Moose.

Michelle Shores 5/3/24 Michelle Shores 5/3/24

If You Haven’t Heard…I’ve Got Something To Tell You!

I’m not exaggerating when I say that last year was a year I will never forget. From the phenomenal success of my book The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler. To all the people and experiences I had spending a better part of the year on a book tour. To watching the book win four national book awards, including a Bronze Medal for Best Fiction in the Northeast. To traveling to England for a research trip with my son. To the completion of writing my second book. It was a whirlwind of memories that will most assuredly never fade!

But what was mixed in there, amongst all of that energy and excitement, were seeds that were laying the groundwork for 2024! Over the past several months I’ve often said, either in person or in this blog, “there’s a lot going on in the background at the moment.” and truth be told I wasn’t kidding! It was an amazing thing to watch unfold, each step happening so that the next step could fall into place. Not going to lie, I’ve seen some pretty amazing things happen in my life since I published my book. Evidence of a greater power, a higher force, a guiding hand, angels, God, the Universe, whatever words you want to use, I’ve witnessed it and have come to understand that if we open our minds and our hearts to believing, we will see incredible things happen.

What has been unfolding, and the news I’d like to share with you, is just the latest example of this in my life. It has taken nearly ten months of hard work, shuffling pieces, a few setbacks, a ton of mental and emotional strength, and a belief that I was being guided yet again to get to where I’m am at this moment. I won’t go into all the nitty gritty details. Mainly because it’s one of those “truth is stranger then fiction” kind of things and it as been the suggested that this story would make a great book! Hahahaha, so in an effort to save something for a future storyline, I’ll keep my announcement to the point.

My family has purchased the Pleasant Hill Campground here in Maine and I’m the General Manager. If you aren’t familiar with Maine let me tell you Pleasant Hill Campground is an iconic part of the area where I grew up. It is located just outside of my hometown and has been around almost as long as I have! I feel so unbelievably blessed to be sharing in the the history of this campground. The campground is centrally located for day trips to all of the best parts of Maine. Only one hour from Acadia National Park. One hour from the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument and one hour to the Moosehead Lake Region. Only four miles outside of Bangor, you can have the best of all possible worlds. A quiet and rural campground setting, day trips to scenic areas, yet still close enough to one of Maine’s largest cities where you can enjoy restaurants, waterfront concerts and Bangor’s beautiful downtown.

Now all of that sounds great on a brochure, remember I did work for the Maine Tourism Association before I wrote the book!! But what is impossible to put into a catchy marketing phrase is the feeling that exists here. The positive energy here is palatable. You can feel it the moment you walk onto the property. Every person I have met that has stayed here in the past calls this their “happy place.” They aren’t wrong! For me that feeling of peace, tranquility and just the pleasant vibe, was one of deciding factors in so much that has taken place over the past ten months. I knew I belonged here. I knew our family belonged here. And as we’ve moved through this process, every thing we have done has brought us closer as a family. This has been a remarkable experience for all of us.

Now that’s not to say it hasn’t been a lot of hard work! Pleasant Hill Campground is 50+ years old!! As naturally beautiful as it is here, there was a need for a little bit of shine and sparkle! Okay who am I kidding, it needed a lot of shine and sparkle!! Massive renovations from the obvious, like a new pool to the not so obvious, like utility infrastructure, were done. Just about every inch of this place has been polished up and brought into the 21st century. There is barely an aspect of this place that hasn’t been upgraded.

We opened for the season just this past Wednesday and the response to all of our hard work from the Seasonal Campers was overwhelming. These are the people who have been staying here all summer for many years. Their support, their positivity, their appreciation for all that we had undertaken made us all feel so lucky to be a part of this grand adventure!

So now I’m sharing all of this with you so that you will know why I have had to put my writing aside for a few months. I will be back to writing again next winter! In the meantime if you’d like to come to Maine for the summer I know a great place where you can stay! We also have the cutest little cabins to rent! Oh and I heard they sell a really great book in the camp store! Bet you could get a copy signed! ; )

Michelle Shores 4/26/24 Michelle Shores 4/26/24

How Many Closets Does One Really Need?

So if you haven’t caught on in some of my earlier blog posts or even on social media, I recently moved into a new house, well a “New To Me” house. Unlike most of the other houses I’ve lived in during my life this house is relatively young! I tend to prefer old houses, big Victorians, old 1800’s farm houses, really any house that has a lot of character. I love squeaky floors, creaking stairs, porcelain sinks with hot and cold knobs! I love built in china cabinets, wavy glass in windows, elaborately ornate staircases, fireplaces with massive mantles and oddly shaped kitchens with butler’s pantries! I’m a firm believer in the adage “they just don’t make them like they used to!” So to find myself moving into a house built in 1992 was a bit of shock to my system. I mean there were no slanting floors, drafty windows or basement stairs that led down into the dark abyss!

I didn’t shop around for this house, it more or less found me. If you know me, and my life these past couple of years, you’ll understand. If you are new, just hang on, once you realize how things work around here the fact that a house found me actually makes perfect sense. So this little house in the woods that found me is actually quite perfect despite the fact it is so “young”. Not only is it lacking in all of the unique features found in homes of the era I prefer it is also lacking in white trim. I am a white trim paint fanatic! Every bit of trim, in any house I have ever lived in, has to be white. Nothing but white. Period. End of story. And yet this little house, has no white trim. It’s actually, gasp, oak trim in every room. And oak cabinets. And oak doors, even down to the louvered oak doors on the closets. It was a hard pill to swallow at first, all of this oak. Not that I don’t find oak beautiful, I mean I tore up all of the carpeting and had oak flooring installed. It’s clearly not an oak revolt. it’s just that I’m a white trim kind of girl! That’s all.

One of the features often missing in older homes are closets, which I never really understood. I mean have you seen the size of the dresses or skirts women in the 1800’s wore? Vast amounts of fabric that had to be hung, it couldn’t have all fit folded neatly into a drawer. And yet every old house I have ever lived in would have only one closet per room that was roughly the size of a filing cabinet. One of the great mysteries in life is where they stored all of those dresses because they were not hanging them up in closets the size that we expect in our homes today. The lack of closest in older homes is something I will never understand!

So on the day I walked through this little house in the woods, I was actually glad to see ten closets! Yes there are 10 closets in my new house. Four in the master bedroom alone! And they are huge! The closets, and the amount of storage space in the house clearly testifies to the fact that it was built in 1992. The little house and I were going to get along just fine. The house and I discussed it. I would trade in my love of white trim, and promise not to paint everything white and in exchange this peaceful little house would give me ample closets!

I mentioned in my blog two weeks ago that I had really made some tough decisions on what to bring to the new house and what to dispose of as I packed up. Part of that middle age purge when you realize stuff you’ve held on to for years isn’t really that important. So when the moving truck pulled up to the little house in the woods with the oak trim I was confident that I was arriving in a less materialistic, more slimmed down life. Simpler. I had the bare essentials with me and I was very proud of that fact.

That was until I tried fitting my scaled back personal belongings into the ten closets and thirty-five cabinets and drawers in the kitchen. I know there are exactly thirty-five because I ordered new door handles and drawer pulls, because the cabinets were all oak and I actually prefer white kitchens. But I had promised this little house in the woods that I wouldn’t paint anything white so I swapped out the tarnished brassy looking handles from the 1990’s for sleek, modern black ones. Still, I struggled to find room for my things.

How is it in 2024 that one woman can dispose of nearly three quarters of her belongings, feel like she has just the bare essentials and then still not be able to fit it all into a house with ten closets? How many closets does one really need? Trust me I don’t have a Kardashian worthy wardrobe! I wear pretty much the same handful of black items over and over! I have the usual spattering of pocketbooks and shoes. I didn’t even bring all of my books! Slashed away at my nativity scene collection! Dragged boxes of serving dishes and relish trays to Goodwill. Limited myself to only four small kitchen appliances (I’m sorry I can’t live without a rice cooker!) and five of my most favorite coffee mugs! I’m really living a spartan life here, and yet I still have things sitting on the floor in my bedroom because I don’t know where to put them! It begs the question how in the world did people live with just one tiny closet per room?

I don’t feel that the little house in the woods has cheated me on our agreement that it would offer up ample storage in exchange for me not painting all of that oak white. Closet space withstanding I have actually come to love all of this oak trim. Now that I’m pretty much settled I enjoy the abundance of natural light that floods every room of this house. The massive windows that look out on the pine and spruce trees seem to invite nature right inside. I walk around the acreage and it’s so quiet I can hear the feathers rustle on the crows as they fly over head. The pond is beautiful and whole place just sighs with a breath of peace and tranquility both inside and out. The oak trim is a natural fit and I guess I’ll leave it just the way it is!