USELESS ADVICE

All my life I’ve been told I’m a natural storyteller. Usually it was because I was able to verbally communicate with people in conversation and make whatever I was talking about sound exciting. After the publication of my book The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler it became apparent that I was also able to tell a great written story. But it may also be that my mind is constantly overflowing with tidbits, antidotes and useless information. I read a lot. Constantly actually and mostly non fiction or history. So because of that I’m full of useless information. I’ve often said the only good thing about amassing all of this useless information is that it makes me interesting at a dinner party!

So when I saw a question posted online recently about “useless advice” I was intriqued. The question was…. What is a piece of advice that old people like to give, that is absolutely useless in 2023? Seeing as I am probably one of those “old people” I was really interested to know what, if anything, in my collection of wisdom and knowledge, someone else might think is useless. So I decided to read the comments section. That’s always fun!

Below are just the first ten answers. Remember this is advice that is apparently useless in 2023 (at least according to the first ten people to respond).

1. You need to EARN whatever you want.

2. You can be whatever you want to be.

3. Don’t use the phone in a thunderstorm.

4. Go read a book.

5. Work hard and study in school, it will pay off.

6. Wear clean underwear in case you’re in an accident.

7. Learn grammar.

8. Wait an hour after you eat to swim.

9. Turn off the car when you’re waiting in line to save gas.

10. Anything is possible if you just work hard enough.

Interesting don’t you think? I completely understand the shift in our culture, I am after all a student of history and have spent the majority of my life reading and learning about cultural shifts throughout a thousand years or so of time. Nothing stays the same, change is inevitable, and that includes how humans perceive their reality. Especially how one generation finds something absolutely necessary while the next finds it, well, useless.

I can think of an absolutely useless piece of advice that my grandmother, who lived to be 102 years old, gave me once. I’m 100% sure she didn’t think it was useless. To her, a young mother in the 1940’s when routines and regiments ruled, it made perfect sense. She told me “Babies must be bathed at 10:00 every morning.” This was so important to my grandmother, that she felt she needed to pass it on to the next generation, and yet to me it was absolutely useless advice! I raised five kids, four of them boys, and I can tell you no one was ever in the bathtub at 10:00 in the morning every single day. They were bathed every day, but the specific time varied…and everyone lived!

So I get it. With that understanding in mind I looked back over this list of useless advice in 2023 trying not to have a knee jerk reaction to some of these answer that were ruffling a few of my old lady feathers. Here’s the way I see them.

1. If you don’t earn what you want, then exactly how do you get what you want? Asking for a friend.

2. I just so happen to believe that you can be whatever you want to be. I always wanted to be an author. Did it!!

3. Personally I wouldn’t stand outside in a thunderstorm using a cellphone. Just sayin.

4. Please go read a book. I highly recommend The Gathering Room! But if that’s not your kind of book then please go read ANY book. Preferably an older one so you can learn from history and not repeat the mistakes made in the past.

5. Anything in life worth having, knowing, or experiencing is going to require that you work hard to acquire, learn or attain it. That’s just the way it is. And please stay in school, but learn a trade! The world desperately needs plumbers, electricians, carpenters and mechanics!! You’ll be a superstar!

6. This one was my mother’s favorite! I heard it all the time. Accident or not it’s just good hygiene to wear clean underwear. No one likes a seat picker.

7. In this age of AI (artificial intelligent) it could be argued that grammar might not be as important as in the past. I’ll give in to that as far as the written word is concerned. But please learn to speak correctly. The art of a good conversation is already almost completely lost. If we lose the ability to speak to each other using correct word usage then all will be lost for sure.

8. Because I hated this swimming rule when I was a child I always let my own children jump right back into the pool immediately after eating….again, everyone lived!

9. As a child that lived through the gas shortages of the 1970’s I understand where this came from. But I drive a hybrid now, so agreeing with this one, useless.

And that brings us to number 10.

Let me just say this is the one that gut punched me. The useless advice in #10 was Anything is possible if you just work hard enough. That is useless advice?

To me that phrase is the power behind this incredible journey I’m on right now! Dream big people! Don’t let anyone tell you that your dreams are to big! Don’t believe them if they tell you that you can’t accomplish whatever it is that you imagine. Because you can do anything you set your mind to!! It’s hard work to live out a dream, but trust me anything is possible if you want to put the work in. Absolutely ANYTHING. If you can imagine it and you are willing to take a step in that direction every single day, day after day, no matter how many years it takes, you will accomplish whatever you set out to do.

Anything really is possible and that’s not useless advice. It’s called hope, belief and confidence. And those three things can change your life.

Dad’s Cellphone

Recently a childhood friend posted something on social media that caught my eye. It was a screenshot of her cellphone that showed she had received an incoming call from “Dad’s Cellphone”. The call was brief, 1 second really. She had never answered the call because it had barely rung before it ended. It connected just enough to register on her incoming call list that her Dad had reached out to her. What I found so fascinating about this was that her father passed away last fall. That’s right, he is deceased.

In her post she says “SOMEHOW” (all caps are her usage) she had received this call and “apparently someone has my dad’s old cell number.” I thought about that for a moment. That statement itself lends you to believe that she knows the phone has either been deactivated or removed from the cellphone account. How else would the number have been reassigned to a new phone? It would only be reassigned if the number had been deleted from an existing account. Her statement of the number being given to someone else proves she knows her father’s phone is no longer active in any way. If there was a possibility that the phone may still be active then her explanation for what had just happened may have been more like maybe her mother turned it on and called her by accident. But she didn’t think that and she didn’t say that. Instead her logical explanation for this event is that the number has been reassigned.

For the sake of this discussion lets go with her assumption that the number has been assigned to someone else. Ok Dad’s Cellphone number now belongs to a new person. So now this new person, somewhere in Maine, amongst the million or so cellphones that have a 207 area code, somehow accidentally dials HER phone number. A number that this new person does not know, does not have saved as a contact because it’s a new phone right? Her number that is also one of a million or so cellphone numbers in Maine with a 207 area code, plus an undetermined number of still remaining land line phone numbers with area code 207. Somehow this new person dialed her number out of all of those million plus phone numbers. This new person just randomly, accidentally, completely without purpose, dials HER number. Possible? Mathematically, maybe . Probable? Highly unlikely in my opinion.

Her post reminded me of when I lost my step dad, Tommy, two years ago. He passed away in the morning and I rushed to be with my mother. The decision was made that I would stay that first night with Mom. My husband Craig would stay at home but just to be safe asked me if I would call him the next morning at 6:00 to make sure he got up. Knowing myself, and that I wake up at 5:00 every single morning, I agreed because I knew I would be awake anyway. The very next morning I was awakened by the alarm on my cellphone going off at 6:05!! I had somehow managed to over sleep!! As the sleepiness and morning fog began to clear out of my brain it occurred to me that I had NOT set an alarm on my cellphone. I never set an alarm because I ALWAYS wake up at 5:00. I went back in and looked and sure enough there were no alarms or reminders set for that morning or any other morning for that matter!! Not to mention, if I had promised Craig that I would call at 6:00 to make sure he was up, I would not have set an alarm for 6:05! I knew immediately that it was my stepdad Tommy. He knew my husband, how hard of a worker my husband is, his work is his life. Tommy would not have wanted his passing to mess up Craig’s schedule. Tommy would not want to be an inconvenience in our lives. He sure as heck was not going to let me oversleep and not be able to call Craig. Tommy was doing what so many of those that are recently passed do. They reach out to us and grab our attention but they do it in ways that are so subtle that we second guess what we are experiencing.

What I loved most about my friend’s post was that she said seeing “Dad’s Cellphone” pop up on her screen “brought a tear and a smile to my face at the same time” and “this was a precious gift.” She said those things in the same post where she tried to explain, in some concrete way, why this had happened. This told me that her heart believed it was truly her Dad reaching out to her. But her mind, conditioned as we all are by our society, told her there had to be another more reasonable explanation. What if the reasonable explanation is that her father was truly reaching out to her! What if at that very moment he was thinking of her, from where ever he is now, and he wanted her to know that!

My journey, as I wrote “The Gathering Room” and now as I share it with more and more people every day, has broadened my knowledge a bit on just exactly how many people have supernatural experiences. Oh I’m not talking about seeing ghosts or doors that shut by themselves, etc. No what I mean are truly remarkable yet unexplainable things that bring comfort to you or cause you to pause and realize something is happening! Things like Dad’s Cellphone calling his daughter. I’ve said it many times, before I started writing a book about a ghost I was not a paranormal expert. Didn’t pay any attention to ghosts really. The same can be said for anything supernatural. I never gave much thought to mediumship, crystals, or any of those things that the “mainstream” (whoever those people are!) would call fringe. But now….things are different. Not only have I had my own experiences, I’ve also met hundreds of other people who tell me of their experiences! It’s incredible!

Everyone I meet uses different words to describe what they have experienced based on their own upbringing, their own cultural norms, their own education, their own societal standards, their own journey etc, I’ve heard so many words, all of them different, but the person talking to me is using them to describe an experience they had that someone else told me something similar the week before, but used a different word! Words like God, Universe, Energy, Karma, Intuition, Knowledge, Manifesting, Prayers, Angels, Spirit Guides, Soul Circle, Prayer Group, etc etc The list could literally go on and on. But what it all boils down to is simply this. So many people, truly a lot of people, are all experiencing something that they cannot rationally explain. It appears to me that the more open to it that you are, the more it seems to happen to you. Does that mean these people are more Spiritual? More Religious? More Mystical? Again….just words. Take the words out and it all means the same thing. People are experiencing something, from their own perspective, within their own understanding, in a way that is right for them. And I am beyond blown away by exactly how many people that is!

Never Work A Day In Your Life….

I’m sure many of you have heard the phrase “If you love what you do, you will never work a day in your life.” The premise being that if you truly enjoy whatever you do for work, then it’s not hard, it’s not drudgery and therefore it isn’t really work.

When I first started my career in the newspaper industry, I started as a Distribution Manager in the Circulation Department at the Bangor Daily News. I worked with a great group of people from my supervisors, to my co workers to the carriers who got those newspapers delivered every day. The Bangor Daily News in the early 2000’s was a great place! My job required me to be up at 1:30 am some days. Most days my day started at 3:30 am and did not end until at least 3:30 pm or sometimes around 7:30 pm! Sometimes I’d get home just in time to go to bed, snatch a few hours of sleep before getting up and doing it all over again.

Winters were the worst as snowstorms just make everything more difficult. I remember one snowstorm in particular where a couple of the other managers, Richard and Scott, had offered to help me get newspapers delivered because I had several routes that did not have carriers at that moment. I needed the help because it was well over 400 newspapers that needed to be delivered in three different towns! That day the wind was howling, so much so that it was hard to open my car door. It was freezing and the streets were not plowed, not another living soul was out and about. I had already been out for hours delivering newspapers in Bangor and Brewer, before I met up with the guys in Hampden, to divide up what I had left to deliver. Upon pulling into a parking lot and seeing their cars, it was like seeing the calvary, I just started crying. I remember getting out of my car and sobbing “I just can’t do this anymore!” Poor Richard, who at that time was an unmarried bachelor, and Scott who was only 22 and fresh out of college, they had no idea what to do with a hysterically emotional, crying woman! It was a very tough job!

But even with all the difficulties that the job entailed, I loved that job. I loved the excitement of every day being different. I loved the camaraderie amongst all of us. I loved how we worked so well together. I loved all the people I met selling home delivery subscriptions door to door or at trade shows. And believe it or not I actually loved delivering newspapers. The world is a really peaceful place at 3:00 am and it’s a gift to watch the sun rise.

So whenever I heard the phrase “If you love what you do, you will never work a day in your life” I often thought of my first job at the Bangor Daily News. For me that seemed pretty accurate. That was a tough job but I never once woke up in the morning and dreaded going to work.

Recently I was scrolling through Instagram when I heard an audio that was a different take on this old phrase. It goes like this: “They say if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life. But I don’t think that is true at all. If you love what you do you work harder then anyone else. You work nights, weekends. When your friends are at parties you’ll be grinding away because you want to show the world this thing that you love.”

I can see how that applies to my life now! In the past 11 months, since the publication of “The Gathering Room” I have not stopped. Literally, my brain is running 24/7 on ways that I can share this incredible story, this story that I love so much, with as many people as possible!! Yes books sales is one way but selling books isn’t what drives me. It’s not about the money. I speak at book clubs, libraries and at other public events all for free because I just simply want to share this amazing story with the world. Day in and day out. It never stops. I’m working harder now then I have ever worked in my life. And it’s not about the money, it’s about the love for something that I want to share with as many people as I can.

If you remember I said I was “taking time off” to enjoy time with my family in Wyoming. Well maybe I didn’t really take any time off. As noted in last week’s blog post, I tended to be the straggler at the end of the line when we were out hiking. It was on just such a hike, one we did around Taggart Lake, that I again found myself last in line in our group. However, coming up the trail behind me were three young ladies from Baltimore. They were so kind, you know not wanting to pass the old lady huffing and puffing on the trail. So they casually walked with me for a while and we chatted about things. And because I’m always thinking about the book, I somehow turned the conversation to the book and before I knew it all three of them were looking it up on their phones and downloading it on Kindle. Boom! I heard my husband say to my son “She’s selling books back there!” which caused my son’s friend John, who is a mortgage lender, to offer me a job. “Would you like to sell mortgages?” The photo above is of me with the girls at the end of the hike. Three more people, from Maryland, who would not have known about the ghost of Nelly Butler in Maine if they had not traveled to Wyoming! Think about that!

But this ability to be constantly working on what I love was proven even stronger a couple of days later. You see while in Wyoming, and actually the day before the wedding, I managed to break my nose, suffer a severe concussion and ended up enjoying an overnight stay in the ICU at St. John’s Hospital in Jackson Hole Wyoming! Don’t worry I’m fine. But the reason I mention this is because apparently while I was drifting in and out of consciousness in the ICU I was also talking about the book! I have vague memories of asking my husband to get me business cards from my purse so I could hand them out to the medical staff that kept coming in and out of the room! My brain has retained snippets of conversations “I wrote a book.” or “Do you like historical fiction?” “First documented ghost sighting in America. It’s available on Amazon.” I remember hearing my husband laugh and say “she must be fine, she’s selling books!” or my son coming into the room to give me a hug and saying “I hear you are in here selling books.” They tell me I gave the overnight doctor a free book, signed of course, although I don’t remember it! Hope I signed it with my own name!!

And yes, I had taken books to Wyoming! Three of them tucked into my suitcase. Hey you never know when you might need one! Another free book went to the manager, Ann, of the Calico Restaurant in Wilson Wyoming. The rehearsal dinner was held there. Ann had called me to finalize the details of the dinner back in May, on the same day I found out I had won the IPPY Award. She was literally just as excited as I was so I had promised her a free book when I arrived in Wyoming. Sadly I was in the hospital the night of the dinner, so I never got to meet Ann in person, but my family made sure she got the book! I also gave a free book to the sweet make up artist, on the day of the wedding, who miraculously managed to cover up all of my bruises so that I looked somewhat normal. Not sure how we got on the subject of the book, as my memories from that day are somewhat limited, but obviously I was still working it! Still sharing this amazing story with as many people as I can!!!

Because if you love what you do….you may not feel like you are working….but you will work…every day of your life.

Doing it!

There’s a possibility I Lost Mom

So I knew that being in Wyoming, for my son’s wedding last week, would provide me with content for this week’s blog post. Boy you have no idea how much I could write about. : )

But I have this great story about an amazing woman that I’d like to share with you.

For those that don’t know my. mom she is a very active older woman. I won’t give away her age but she is way past retirement age and yet she is still working! After a long career at a major industrial company my mom retired and then promptly returned to the workforce. She became a school lunch lady and was able to serve lunch to her own grandchildren all the way up through their graduations from high school. She became the wicked cool “Grammy Richard” to a large group of my children’s friends. Everyone knew Grammy Richard and she was always greeted with a chorus of cheers in the lunch room or whenever she showed up at sporting events or school activities. She is now serving lunch to her great grandchildren who are in middle school! Outside of a daily work schedule she is also extremely physically active. She walks every day. Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall, no matter the weather, she walks, sometimes miles and miles a day. She is also an avid golfer and trust me when I say my mother doesn’t play golf for fun. She plays to win. Either in the actual scoring of the game or because she has buried you sprinting across the greens. Don’t even suggest that she ride in a cart. Carts are for old people. She is a tiny little powerhouse, at around 5’4” and as fit and healthy as any 20 year old. So when I learned my son and future daughter in law had planned several hikes as part of the wedding week festivities in Grand Teton National Park I knew Mom was going to make me look bad.

The family that assembled for Tristan and Kayla’s wedding were divided into two groups. Obviously all of the younger people were “the kids” and those of us that tended more toward middle age or above called ourselves “the maturists.”

Out on the hiking trails the majority of us “maturists” were content bringing up the rear of our party of 22 hikers. The “kids” were strongly in the lead. On our end of this long snaking train of people there were frequent stops for air. Altitude is no joke! On the kids end there were stops at overlooks where they took photos and waited for the maturists to catch up. Among their number was my mother, Grammy Richard. Every single time I finally arrived at where the “kids” were waiting for us there was my Mom. “You ok?” she’d ask me as I gasped for air, hands on my knees. “Where have you been?”

She would then happily tell me all she had learned about every member of the bridal party. Did I know that Lexi owned horses? That Kate was a school teacher? The twins were adorable, and John, he is such a sweet kid. She was becoming that wicked cool Grammy Richard with another whole group of kids. With each and every stop I realized that while I was struggling along at the back, gingerly stepping over roots and rocks, trying not to break a hip, my mother was chatting up a storm as she hiked up the side of a mountain or two with kids nearly 60 years younger then herself! In fact the photo above was taken at one of those stops. The kids had waited for us to catch up and when satisfied that all the maturists were still alive they started off again, with my mother among them!! As she made her way off down the trail with the kids, she turned around to wave at me! How cute!

Day 2 of our outdoor excursions found us hiking around Jenny Lake. This can be an 8 miles hike around the entire lake. However the kids had decided that we would only hike half way and then take the boats back to the parking lot. The kids, with my Mom among them of course, in the lead. The maturists bringing up the rear. The plan was to finish this hike by noon as the kids had a river rafting excursion planned that they had to get too.

At noon, still deep in the woods, no where near the boats and after multiple stops waiting for the maturists to catch up, the decision was made that the kids could no longer keep waiting for us. Tristan had called the rafting place and asked if they could be late. In short he was told no. They couldn’t arrive any later then 15 minutes from their appointed time. With a bunch of expensive tickets already purchased the decision was made that the kids would press on ahead of us. Basically abandoning the maturists to our fate in the wilderness of Grand Teton National Park.

This was the last picture we took of the kids before they headed off. If you look closely you’ll see Grammy Richard right in the front of the group, with her white baseball hat on. Living life large and having a blast! That was all about to change when I had to tell her she couldn’t continue on hiking with the kids.

As the kids headed off down the trail I had to holler at her from my end of the bridge. “MOM!!” she turned around and waited for me to catch up. “Mom the kids are going to go on ahead because they have to make it to the rafting place by 1:30, so you are going to have to stay with us.”

“I don’t want to walk with you.” she hissed at me. She was literally seething with frustration.

“Why?” I asked her. She rolled her eyes at me and then leaned in. “You walk to slow.” She whispered. Oh my goodness she is adorable. When she saw I was amused by this she said to me “Don’t say anything to any of the others.” Before the day was over I had not only told all of the other maturists but I had also texted it to the kids up ahead of us on the trail! And now I’ve written it in a blog post!! Sorry Mom! But do you know why I’m telling everyone? Because how many people have an amazing mother like I do? Fiesty and full of life and strength!! She is an amazing example of how if you take care of your body and stay active you can live well and strong into your later years. I wish I was as strong as her.

After she realized she had no other options, that she was going to have to walk with the maturists, she just stormed off down the trail. This is the picture I took to send to my sister. I wanted to make sure I had evidence that Mom was being stubborn and striking out to hike alone.

For a while I tried to keep up with her, but honestly I couldn’t. I lost sight of her and texted my sister. “There’s a possibility I have lost Mom.” Every time I crested a hill or rounded a curve I would snap a photo of this little white dot far off in the distance. In one photo in particular there is a vast deep crevice between us. I would text these photos to my sister. “This is your mother!!”

Now Mom will say she was never in any danger, that there was another group of hikers ahead of her, so she wasn’t alone, but from my spot back on the trail I did not know that. It wasn’t until Tristan texted me that they had just spotted a bear with cubs on the trail about 10 - 15 minutes ahead of us that I became worried. Mom was ahead of me somewhere and she did not have bear spray. At that point I told Craig he needed to get ahead of us and try to find her. So there we were, the maturists, stretched out in a long line of individuals, with the oldest one of us in the lead, followed by Craig and Kayla’s uncle Al, trying to find my mother, and then the rest of us with our bad hips, backs, knees and feet trying desperately to finish this hike so we could go home!

Mom was finally stopped by a moose. Tristan had texted that there was a moose on the trail ahead of us. The kids had gotten by it as it stood chomping on the vegetation above the trail. But then it walked down the hill and on to the trail proper and now it was headed straight for us. I hollered this information ahead to Craig and Al, who I could just see ahead of me. I then turned around and walked back to the straggling maturists so that they would know there was a moose on the trail. Just as we all rounded a corner we came upon a cluster of people all stopped, phones out, taking pictures of this bull moose standing on the trail. And there was my mother!!! She was safe. Again she stressed to me that she was fine. That I was over reacting. She probably felt that way, but she wasn’t the one that would have to explain to my sister how I had let her go off hiking alone! Clearly we were looking at this situation from two different perspectives.

Eventually the moose meandered off the trail and we were able to get past it. Mom didn’t get to far ahead of us again because we had made it to the dock where the boats would take us back to the parking lot. I was exhausted! Mom, on the other hand, looked like she could have continued on for the remaining 4 mile hike around the lake. As all of us sat down in the boat I watched her. She was so full of life and energy. She was laughing at the wind and rain as we sped across the lake. Kayla’s uncle Pete was getting drenched by spray coming up the side of the boat. We were all cold, tired, sore and wore out….except for my Mom! As we all struggled to find our way from the boat dock into the parking lot (believe it or not we managed to get lost in the parking lot and had to call Tristan for directions!) I’m sure we made a scene! This group of four middle aged couples all showing signs of aging followed along by this spry, super energetic, clearly in command of all her mental faculties, older lady!!! This is where my mom would say “Don’t call me old!”

I am very lucky to have her for a mom. She truly is the coolest!!

DO I BELIEVE IN THE GHOST OF NELLY BUTLER?

Photo credit: Sullivan-Sorrento Historical Society

My book “The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler” has turned out to be a popular book club selection and I find myself speaking in front of book clubs more and more often lately. I love these because they are informal, personal kind of events. I love in person events!!

Recently I was speaking to a book club at a library and one of the gentlemen there asked a question of me that I didn’t know how to answer. The question was “What do you think really happened?” Honestly I was completely taken aback. No one had ever asked me that. When I failed to reply immediately he tried rephrasing his question. “Do you think the ghost of Nelly Butler was real?” I appreciated him trying to clarify the question for me but I still didn’t have an answer. I think I answered something like, “Truth be told I guess I never really thought about what I think of the situation.”

When I first came across the history of Nelly Butler and then began to research it further and deeper, I think I was to caught up in wanting to know about the people involved. So I didn’t think to much about if the ghost itself was real. And as I began to write the story that I saw in my imagination I was focused on making sure it made sense, that the characters were developed, that I had the history accurate, that it was authentic. Again I never thought much about the ghost itself. The past year, since the book was published, has been a whirlwind of activity and my attention has been focused on promoting and marketing the book. Of course now too I’m working on the next book. So I guess I’ve never really stopped to think much about if the ghost was real.

I’ve said this many times since the book was published last year, I am not a paranormal expert. I’m not a paranormal investigator that happened to have stumbled upon a historical ghost. I am a historian that wrote a story about a ghost. There is a difference. Honestly until everything happened with the book I never really thought much about ghosts.

Do I believe in ghosts? I will tell you that never, ever, ever in my life have I seen anything that I would call a “ghost”. Nope, no white wispy visions of women drifting across the room. No dark shadowy figures of men lurking in hallways. To me those are the descriptions of what a ghost is. Scary and unexplained and I can categorically state I have never seen a ghost in that sense!

That’s not to say I haven’t experienced strange happenings myself, such as the recent event with the sound machine at Lumley Castle or the voice I heard right behind me at Skipton Castle both while I was in England. As much as others have said to me “Oh my gosh you saw a ghost!” I don’t think of either of those experiences as a belief in ghosts. Certainly I experienced something! That is for sure! But would I call them ghosts? No I would not. To me ghosts are scary and I was certainly not afraid in either one of those situations. Befuddled and confused by what was happening sure! But I never felt uneasy.

Years and years ago I had an experience one night. I’ve always described it as I wasn’t dreaming but I wasn’t awake either. I saw a group of people, all dressed in white, standing at the end of my bed. One woman in the group spoke to me, calling me by name and then gave me very specific instructions. It was a very interesting experience and her instructions proved to be remarkably accurate when I put them into action the next day. So much so that I have never forgotten the experience or her instructions to me. Then, a few weeks later, I received a handful of old family photographs that I had never seen before. They were mailed to me by a distant cousin. In this packet of photos was one taken of an old oil painting. The painting was of the woman who had spoken to me that night in my bedroom. She was my great, great, great grandmother. I had never known what she looked like but realized at that moment she was the woman who spoke to me. But was she a ghost? I never thought of that experience as a ghost sighting either.

In the early 2000’s I bought an old house in Bangor that had been built in the 1850’s. Over the years it had been cut up into four apartments. I bought it with the plan to turn it back into a single family home and I set about doing just that. I worked on renovating the house myself in the evenings after work, or on the weekends. A lot of the time I was there in the house by myself late into the night. Often while I was there working I would hear footsteps in one of the bedrooms upstairs. It was clearly someone pacing back and forth. I would go up there and look, but of course there was never anyone there. I later learned that the original owner of the home, Ephraim Sweet, had lost his first wife shortly after moving into the home. She had died in childbirth. Since all births were home births in the 1850’s it’s likely she died in that house. Probably in that room as it was the largest of the bedrooms and had a fireplace. So was this another encounter with a ghost? Some might say yes, but I didn’t view this experience in that way. Again I was not scared by the sound of these footsteps. Rather the feeling I got was that who ever was walking up there was very happy that I was returning the house to it’s original state.

Many of you reading this might say that I have seen or heard ghosts, I’m just in denial. Fair enough. I guess I just feel that to claim you have seen a ghost you need to be scared, like we are as children hearing ghost stories. I’ve never been scared in the situations above or in countless others that I have experienced in my life. For me these experiences hold a deeper meaning then just a ghost sighting or a story. To me what I have experienced proves that there is something supernatural in our every day world. Something we cannot explain. I believe each of us has the ability to participate in this unseen, unknown world. If we would just slow down and take a look.

So do I believe the ghost of Nelly Butler is real? I believe something supernatural definitely happened. I don’t believe it was a hoax or mass hysteria. I truly believe that those that said they saw something…saw something. And those that said they did not see anything….did not see anything. I believe that those that thought Nelly’s instructions were a message from God were experiencing something according to their own belief structure. Was it a ghost? I’m not willing to use that word because I don’t think I would have been afraid had I been there. I’m willing to say I believe that a supernatural, unexplained event happened and yes I believe it was real for those that were open to it.

How would you answer the question? “Do you believe Nelly’s ghost was real?”

While you are thinking about that let me tell you there will be no blog post next Friday, June 23rd. I’m taking some time away as my youngest son is getting married next week and I’m focusing on family. See you all when I get back and I’m sure I’ll have an interesting story or two from the wedding to share with you on June 30th!

All my best.

IS THAT A GRAVESTONE?

This week I thought I’d share an interesting story that happened to me around Halloween a year or so back. You all know it was Halloween 2015 when I began writing the book “The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler.” This week’s story, also centered around a Halloween when something weird happened to me. Which, I guess, appears to show a trend in my life. Not sure how I feel about that, you know, Halloween as a defining moment in my life. I can’t say that I’ve ever been a real fan of Halloween, you know as a holiday or otherwise.

As a child Halloween was something I looked forward to for the candy aspect. I never really liked dressing up. I never put a lot of thought into my Halloween costumes. Mostly I dressed up with what I could find around the house. My mom’s makeup would be used to make my face look somewhat like a clown or the always popular scarecrow. That was good enough and out the door I went to get as much candy as humanly possible in a matter of hours.

As the mother of five children I began to actually loathe Halloween. Never one to worry about a costume, I now had to come up with FIVE of them annually. The pressure was to much, I’m not really creative. Inevidentably I had five clowns or scarecrows going out the door. Some years we got a little more creative. I remember one year I wrapped toilet paper all around my oldest son and called it a Mummy! Worked great until it the light rain started falling. Then he molted.

The other problem with Halloween was the candy. Five children, bringing back into the house, as much collected candy as humanly possible was a little overwhelming. At first, while they were away at school, I would break into their bags and eat as much as I could. You know, with the goal to get it out of the house sooner rather then later. A few years of that and I just couldn’t stomach it anymore and neither could my waistline! So I resorted to actually just throwing it away one little handful at a time.

No I’ve never been much into Halloween. Which is why it seems really strange to me that one of he most defining moments of my life happened on Halloween 2015 and followed a few years later by this experience.

It was Halloween 2021. By now I don’t even participate in Halloween traditions at all. The children are all grown. The grandkids all live far away. I stopped handing out candy in 2015 but even if I wanted to now, there are never any little children walking around our neighborhood. It’s a quiet night. A non event. Just another passing day on the calendar.

So it was that around this time, on one of those passing days around Halloween, my husband and I went to look at a piece of property to purchase. My husband renovates older buildings and creates modern, more spacious apartments. So this building had been brought to our attention as a potential candidate. It was a very large old house. Built in 1879 as a single family home but at some point broken up into a duplex with a separate apartment upstairs. The original front door was still intact. Two separate doors that opened in a big, sweeping grandeur! Both doors had full length frosted windows, etched with flowers and vines. The windows filled nearly the entire top half of the doors and were rounded on the top with the most beautiful decorative moulding. In each room hung the original lighting fixtures. Fixtures that, at one point had been gas, but later converted to electricity, they still hung from the original tin ceilings. They were heavy, made of cast iron with beautifully etched glass shades over each light bulb. There were built in bookshelves and a grand staircase that led no where once the house was chopped up into two apartments. But so much of the original charm of this Victorian house was still there. Although run down, and in need of serious repairs, you could still see the grandeur that this house had been when it was built.

We look at a lot of old houses like this and I always like to imagine the people who had the house built. What were their hopes and dreams for this home? Often when we buy one I will research and try to learn about the people who have lived in these homes over the years. Once I found that my husband’s great, great grandfather had lived, for a brief time, in one of the buildings we bought! In another I found a woman who had resided in it that was from my own family tree, although not directly related, but still, always a little weird to find. Makes one stop and think. Are we somehow always connected to the energies that existed? How do this things that happen, things we often refer to as coincidences, is there another explanation?

That line of thinking, what is a coincidence and what isn’t, played out pretty seriously as we finished looking the house over and stepped outside. As my husband began talking to the Realtor about the price, how soon we could close, etc. I happened to notice what looked like a gravestone leaning up against the garage. Now mind you this property was pretty overgrown and I couldn't really tell what it was as I looked at it from the driveway. But hey, I love cemeteries and I’m always a sucker for a good gravestone so my interest was peaked.

I walked over and kicked away an accumulation of leaf litter and pulled at some overgrown weeds and sure enough there was, what appeared to be a gravestone. Excited by this I hollered to my husband “Hey look there’s a gravestone over here!” He did what my husband always does in these situations, and rolled his eyes. The Realtor on the other hand had a completely different reaction. “Oh my word Michelle get away from there!”

Now I’ve never been bothered by death, cemeteries, gravestones or even ghosts for that matter! So I wasn’t about to heed her advice. These things don’t even register for my husband so he went right back to his conversation with her, not the least bit concerned that his wife had just stumbled upon a gravestone. I turned back to the stone to try and get a better look at it.

I bent down and pulled away more of the overgrowth around it. It was small and I quickly realized it wasn’t a gravestone at all but what would have been used as a foot stone in marking graves during the Victorian era. Seemed reasonable given the age of the house. Foot stones were generally engraved with just the initials of the deceased person rather then their entire name and birth/death dates. So it was with this stone, there were three initials carved into it. But when my mind registered the initials carved in to it, my heart jumped in that really cool way it does when something really otherworldly happens to me! You know a coincidence.

You see the initials carved into the stone were, M. E. S. They were mine!!

When I pointed that out to my husband and the Realtor she literally jumped into her car and started to back out of the driveway. I remember she rolled down the window and hollered back at my husband. “I’m getting out of here! I’ll meet you at my office to finish this conversation.” And she was gone, in a flash of squealing tires. My husband shrugged, accepting that his wife has some kind of weird vibe and walked toward our car. I followed, with only one backward glance at my own gravestone. “Honey we have got to buy this house!” I remember saying.

In the end we did buy it and it is now a beautifully renovated duplex that is home to two families. There is a really sweet young couple and the other tenants are a retired woman and her mother. They love the place and enjoy decorating the big sweeping porch with flowers and bird feeders. It’s good to see the house happy again.

I brought my gravestone home. I’ve set it up in my yard, under an apple tree. I like it. It doesn’t bother me in a creepy or spooky way at all. I mean it doesn’t have any dates on it! If it did that would be to much even for me!

Karma is, well you know, even for Susan

We’ve all heard it….Karma is a …… well you know. Or Karma is the best kind of revenge. Karma is the universal law of cause and effect. People who create their own drama deserve their own Karma. And on and on…there are dozens if not hundreds of them. As I’ve aged though I’ve seen it over and over again. Karma is real and it can happen to anyone.

Take Susan for instance. Susan, for those of you that don’t know, is my 5 year old Yorkie. That’s her in the picture incase you were wondering. I love this picture because it’s so classic Susan. She’s six pounds of 100% attitude. She loves me, my socks, preferably dirty ones, and food in that order and that’s about all she will tolerate. She’s the Queen of our home, she tells everyone else what they are doing and don’t you even try to walk by our house because she will literally scream (and she does scream, not bark) at you from her spot in the big picture window in the living room, until you have passed on by. She is a woman in charge and she has full command of everything.

That is until we brought Douglas home. But before I explain that, I need to back up to 2018 when we first brought Susan home. See back then we already had another dog. His name was Remy and he was a Maltese. Remy was six years old when we thought, and it was our idea not Remy’s, that he was lonely. Not really sure now what led us to believe that he was lonely, but we somehow got on that idea and clung to it. Remy had a great life. He was an only dog and he was spoiled rotten. He slept in our bed, rode in a basket on the front of my bike, went to work with me on occasion, got a Halloween costume every year and went Trick or Treating (true story!) and even had an underground fence that encircled not only our yard but also the neighbors. He was free to roam back and forth from our house to theirs, couch surfing, eating more treats or even staying for sleepovers if he decided he didn’t want to come home when I called for him at night. He’d sit on their porch and just stare at me. “No mom, I’m good, I’m staying here tonight.” And he would, sauntering home in the morning whenever he felt like it. He truly had it made. The thing with Remy though is he never quite looked happy. Maybe that’s why we thought he was lonely. We used to say he was a grumpy old man in a dog suit.

So in 2018 I brought home this one and half pound little ball of fur that you could hold in one hand. Susan. She was so tiny and cute. I remember we set her on the floor and Remy just stared at her. “What am I supposed to do with that?” From that moment on he did everything he could to avoid her. He sat up on the back of couch when she was to small to get on the furniture. Once she had mastered the furniture he would move from one spot to another to try and get away from her. Or better yet just go to the neighbors. As Susan grew bigger she realized he wasn’t fond of her. Didn’t matter to her one bit. She had already made up her mind that this grumpy old man was going to have to take a back seat to her. For the next four years all I can say to describe it was that she made Remy’s life a living… well you know.

First of all was the bed sleeping arrangement. Susan at first slept in a crate until she was house trained, but after that I thought we could let her sleep in the bed with us, just like Remy did. No that wasn’t happening. She would fight him to the death for any spot on the bed that he tried to lay on. It didn’t matter how many times he moved, she wanted all of the spots! So at the ripe old age of 7 Remy had to learn to sleep in a crate. Why didn’t we just crate Susan and let Remy sleep in the bed? Susan screams. No one was getting any sleep. She had seen the glory of the bed and wasn’t letting him have that luxury above her. So crates for everyone! Then there was dinner time. Susan would eat her food so fast I don’t think any of it actually touched her lips. Then she would go after Remy’s dinner. And on and on it went. She fought poor Remy for everything. Toys. Space on the couch. Even the beloved neighbors. Worst of all was the race to the door to be let out to go to the bathroom. She had to be first. Always. If she thought Remy was in any way getting a little bit of a lead on her she would attack his face. Growling and snapping. Once outside she would do her business quickly and then run back up on the deck. Guarding the door, not letting him even come back in the house. To pass her he had to face a gauntlet of screaming and snapping of teeth.

Now before you think I just let all of this happen and never advocated in Remy’s defense, don’t worry I did. When Susan was a year old I enrolled her and Remy in an 2 week training course with our much loved (and truly a life saver) dog trainer Chelsea at Peace and Unity Pet Services. Susan got an attitude adjustment!! Which she needed because the first dog trainer I took her too she bit on the first night! We didn’t go back. But Chelsea wasn’t taking any attitude from Susan and at the end of the two weeks Susan had been taught there were consequences to her actions. She didn’t become an angel but her and Remy settled into a kind of tolerant way of living with each other. She still had to be top dog. And she still nipped and bit at him occasionally but it wasn’t as bad as it had been.

Last year in February of 2022 we lost Remy to heart disease. We decided right from the beginning no more dogs. I wasn’t going to put another dog through what Remy had endured having to live with Susan. No way! Susan was an only dog. And at first that seemed to be working. Honestly at first I don’t even think Susan noticed Remy was gone. And if she did it was probably something along the lines of “Well I finally got rid of him!” And then six months after we had lost him, Susan dropped into a deep depression. I mean real deep. She was just so sad. It was like all of a sudden she realized Remy was gone. We went back and forth on if we should get another dog. I even talked with Chelsea about the idea and was it a smart decision. In the end we decided to go ahead and give it a try. We would get a puppy.

Enter Douglas. He’s a poodle mix and about three times the size of Susan. He was adorable as a puppy and Susan has loved him from the day he arrived. Infact the day we brought him home she was so excited she ran around and around the back yard until she made her self sick and had to stop to throw up! I have never in my life seen two dogs that LOVE each other like these two do. And I mean LOVE!! They snuggle. They cuddle. They share toys. They even kiss each other! It’s the cutest thing.

But with Douglas’ arrival came another visitor that Susan never saw coming. Karma. See as much as Douglas loves her, and he does, he’s just a big old goofy teenage boy. And how do goofy teenage boys let girls know they like them? They tease them!!!

Douglas nips at Susan’s legs when she walks by. He takes toys from her only to fling them back at her face. And when he does I swear I hear him laughing. When she makes her way to the back door to go out to her business Douglas is right there, literally riding her back the whole way. He towers over her so he makes a point to step over her, on her, around her and then I swear to stick out a foot and trip her! He’s not being mean, he just is truly teasing her. Once outside, while Susan is trying to find just the right spot, Douglas will dart in yapping. He will dance around her, throw off her concentration and just when it looks like she has found the right spot, he will pee on it and then bound off with a literal skip in his step and giggling! When I am sitting in a chair and Susan has settled herself in HER spot, which is my lap, Douglas will come along and sit down as well, right on top of her. He will sit there, his bum firmly planted on her back until she gets uncomfortable and gives up and moves. I’ve watched him creep stealth like around the dining room table to only come flying out of no where as she walks by. He launches himself at her, almost with a karate kick, until she goes flying, screaming and he’s just got the biggest smile on his face.

What transpires between Susan and Douglas is not anywhere near the level of what poor Remy endured. Susan loves Douglas with all of her heart. You can tell that. And he loves her. But Douglas is giving back to her, in a loving, playful way, much of what she dished out for many years.

The other night, Susan stood stock still in the living room as Douglas danced around her. He kept reaching out and tugging on her ears and then jumping back, barking at her that he wanted to play. She stood so still, just staring at me with this “Mom make this kid stop!” look and all I could think to say to her was “Susan, Karma is a….well you know!”

Well Ain’t That Somethin’!

If you haven’t heard via the social media blitz that went out, I’m guessing the giant photo above caught your attention!!! That’s right The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler just won the Independent Publishers Bronze Medal for Best Fiction in the Northeast Region. My goodness… I’m still struggling to even type that without my eyes filling with tears. Holy Cow!

The Independent Publishers Book Awards, most commonly referred to as the IPPY Awards, are a set of national book awards presented to independently published books each year in a variety of categories. This set of prestigious awards have been held annually since 1996 and aim to highlight and recognize excellence in independent published books. I cannot even begin to describe my feelings on receiving this award. This is just unbelievable really!

Most of you are well aware that I wrote The Gathering Room pretty much for my own entertainment. After coming across the non fiction The Nelly Butler Hauntings - A Documentary History by Marcus LiBrizzi in 2015 I became obsessed with this little known piece of Maine history. After researching for some time and not being able to satisfy my curiosity on the lives, emotions and relationships of all of those involved, I decided one night to just write what I thought happened. Write it for myself. Write the book I wanted to read.

So I wrote for myself and that evolved into…. wouldn’t it be cool to have a published book for the kids and grandkids. You know a legacy thing to leave behind when I’m gone. I will never forget the day Jane Karker from Maine Authors Publishing called my office at the Maine Tourism Association to ask about the best way to market their annual Book Festival in the tourism sector. After answering her questions I had a question or two for her! You see, I had never heard of Maine Authors Publishing, heck I had never even heard of self publishing! At that time I was still thinking in order to get published I would have to send out my manuscript to hundreds of agents and be rejected over and over! After all Dr. Seuss was rejected 27 times before he finally published The Cat In The Hat. I could certainly only hope for odds that good!

Jane explained to me the world of self publishing and I sent her my manuscript that night! So from there this idea of a book moved on to ….. we can do this ourselves and sell a few books to friends to help pay for this! Before I knew it I was working with an Editor (I’m apparently a horrible speller and a lover of commas!) and a Graphic Artist to design the cover. I got an Illustrator to draw the map of Taunton Bay in the front of the book. I did my part by printing the area off of Google Maps, taping it to my bathroom window (best sunlight) and tracing the shoreline onto another piece of paper! True story!! From there it went to layout and I was faced with decisions on type of paper, placement of the numbers on pages, indentations of paragraphs and on and on. A million things you never think about when you pick up a book to read it! But the amazing thing about being self published is that every decision was mine. I have been in complete control of this project from the start, something that doesn’t happen for authors in traditional publishing.

Initially we ordered 400 books. I wanted books for my family of course and then we hoped to sell books to friends and maybe a few local bookstores through the catalog that Maine Authors Publishing puts out twice a year. One of my sons is a computer guru so he set up a website for me so I could take online orders and I nearly made myself sick trying to learn about e-commerce! I remember worrying at the time that I would be stuck with boxes of unsold books. That after I was dead and the kids came to clean out the house they would find all of these books! Their comments would be “Oh yeah remember when Mom wrote that book? It just never sold.” I hate wasting money and the thought of all of this money going to waste on an unsellable book was a major concern that I battled with in the dark hours of the night more then once during that time! And then somewhere along the line the book, and the incredible story it tells, took on a life of it’s own. I was not longer in control. Oh sure I was still making decisions but “the book” had plans. It had a destiny that I was not aware of and still to this day don’t completely understand! Everything I imagined this journey would look like was thrown out the window and I have been given an experience that I never saw coming!

Those first 400 books were gone in a matter of days. GONE! I remember calling Maine Authors Publishing three days after they had shipped me the books to tell them I needed to order more! Apparently the normal procedure is to wait a week or two, as there is always a big burst of sales when a book first comes out, but after a couple of weeks you can pretty much tell if you are going to need more books. I couldn’t wait a week or two, I needed more books now! From there we had to keep ordering books, first by the hundreds and then finally we began ordering books by the thousands! Here we are only 10 months later and I still can’t order books fast enough to keep up with the demand. I never expected that!

And now an IPPY Award! I could never have even imagined this happening!! Never. I wrote a book for myself, that has become a bestseller and now has won a national book award! Who’s life am I living?

I am beyond grateful for this whole journey. And thankful to each and every one of you who have read the book, who have supported me in your positive comments, feedback and reviews. For the folks who show up at vendor fairs, festivals, book signings, speaking engagements or book clubs, I thank you! I cherish the personal interactions I have with all of you more then you will ever know. I love sharing this amazing story with all of you!

So now we must ask the book where we go from here? What does it have in store for me next? Movie? HBO? Netflix? If there is one thing that everyone says about the book is that it has to be a movie!! What amazes me about that is that I hear it from people who haven’t even read the book yet!! Truly!! People who haven’t even read it tell me it has to be a movie. What does that say? And what about the prequel to The Gathering Room that I’m currently writing? How will that play into all of this? Oh my goodness!

If you would like to view the IPPY Awards for yourself you can find them here at this link, 2023 IPPY Awards just scroll down a bit to the Regional Category.

They Call Me A Panster

I love this picture. It’s the plains of the Bowland Forest in Bleasdale England. I took it myself the day we visited the area. In fact, I love this picture so much it might actually be the cover of the next book! But don’t hold me to that. As I learned when writing my first book, The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler, sometimes what I think is going to happen, isn’t exactly how it turns out in the end.

Let’s talk about this picture for just a minute. What dominates the photo is the hill in the background. This hill is called Fair Snape Fell and you’d do well to remember it along with the notch you can see in the ridge right about in the center!! So far it’s playing a very prominent role in the first 10 chapters of Book 2 (yes I’ve written 10 chapters already! That’s 17,000 words!) Strangely until I traveled to England and stood on this plain and saw this area for myself, I really had no intention of Fair Snape Fell even being in the next book! Oh I had seen it’s name on Google Maps. Thought it was a quirky little name in a British sort of way. Thought it might be cool to include the name somehow but I honestly didn’t plan on writing much about the area that sits in the shadow of Fair Snape Fell, let alone 10 chapters worth!! And yet….here we are!

Recently I was talking with someone about how my day spent writing had unfolded and she said to me “I just find the whole process fascinating.” That really caught me off guard, because “writing” just comes so naturally to me I don’t think of it as a process let alone one that someone would find fascinating! I just sit down and I write. I literally sit in front of my computer and watch the story unfold in my mind and I write what I see. Which I learned makes me a Panster. What is a Panster? A Panster is a writer who has little to no outline for their book. They just have an idea and start writing. They write by the seat of their pants!!

Many writers draft out how their story will unfold. Some do storyboards, fill the walls of their offices with how each scene will play out. Others use index cards or spreadsheets. There are as many different ways of drafting a story as there are writers writing them. Unless of course you are a Panster. Then you just sit down and write. That’s exactly what I do…I just write. For those that know me personally you know I’m an extremely organized person. I take organization to a cosmic level! Everything in my “real” life is orderly, efficient and structured. I am the Queen of Lists!! Everything I do has to be laid out in a List first! I start my day each morning by making a list of what I need to do that day! So how is that I don’t write that way? I have no idea.

Before I started writing Book 2, which will be the prequel to The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler, I had a vague idea of what the story would be about. I was aware of the ancient timber circle located in Bleasdale England and knew that I definitely wanted to incorporate that in someway. I knew I wanted to fictionalize the fascinating real lives of the Blaisdell family from their origins in Bleasdale England to their arrival in what would become the State of Maine. And I knew that in doing so it might help explain how Lydia Blaisdell found herself at the center of what would become the first documented ghost sighting in America, or at least in a fictional way. But what that was actually going to look like…I had no idea! I honestly believed and still believe as I’m currently writing, that it will unfold just exactly as it’s supposed to. Is that a little weird and supernatural in it’s own way? Oh probably!

Take Fair Snape Fell for instance and the ancient timber circle that would have sat in the foreground. My original thought for Book 2 was that I would mention the ancient circle in a prologue. I would use a prologue to kind of lay the ground work that the Blaisdell family has this mystical origin that stems from this ancient circle. A couple of pages at most, then the rest of the entire book would be about their journey out of England and across the ocean to the new world. Well here I am 10 chapters and 17,000 words later and I’m still on the plains of the Bowland Forest! That’s a pretty big prologue!! The story has unfolded into a much deeper, more gut wrenching understanding of the family origins and their connection to that circle and Fair Snape Fell. Any thoughts of a prologue are now out the window!

So what’s it like to actually write as a Panster? I’ll give you an example. Tell me this doesn’t give you the chills! It did me! This week I was writing about the main character standing in the ancient circle. I can literally see it in my mind. The plain similar to the picture above only with these giant timbers driven into the ground to create the circle. As the character is standing within the circle, the sun rises over Fair Snape Fell. As it breaks the ridge the beam of sunlight shines through the notch in the center and directly into the ancient circle, similar to what we know about Stonehenge on the Solstice. It’s an awesome sight and my fingers are flying across the keyboard trying desperately to accurately describe what I’m seeing when all of a sudden, in my mind, the beam of light shines on an ancient symbol carved into one of the timbers. Wait! What? Where did that come from? An ancient symbol? I did not plan this. Of course I didn’t I’m a Panster, I just write. I don’t know anything about ancient symbols!! I push back my laptop and stare at the screen. What kind of symbol? What does it mean? How will that play out in the overall story? Who’s idea was this??

Hahahaha I’m not kidding you, that is exactly how it happened. Life as a Panster! I write what I see! So dear Readers, it appears that we now have an ancient symbol that will more then likely weave its way through the whole story! I’ll give you a hint….in some ways it resembles a ring!

Cursed Graves & Weird Feet

If you have ever lived in Maine, or even if you’ve just visited here a time or two, you are probably familiar with the cursed grave stone in Bucksport. It’s a very popular folktale in Maine. So much so that when I finished writing my book, The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler, about a dozen people asked me if I were going to write about Captain Buck’s stone next. Although I agree its an intriguing story, I have no plans at this time to fictionalize it. But that doesn’t mean that this piece of Maine’s history, that I grew up hearing about, isn’t far from my mind! And that’s is exactly what happened when we were in England. You won’t believe this one!

So let me bring everyone up to speed on the cursed gravestone of Captain Buck. I’ve added a picture of it to the top of this blog. As you can see there is a foot very visible on the front of the stone. The folktale states that Captain Buck, as the founder of the town of Bucksport, found a woman guilty of witchcraft and had her burned at the stake. As she was being burned alive she cried out that she would curse Captain Buck with a witches curse for all eternity. Or something like that. As is the case with a lot of folktales there are variations. Some say her leg rolled out of the fire and landed in front of Captain Buck. Others say her son cursed the captain and specifically said that his tomb would bear the mark of a witch’s foot! In any event you get the idea. The tale continues on that after Captain Buck died this foot appeared on his gravestone. His family was horrified and had the stone sanded down only to have the foot appear again. Determined to get rid of this evidence of the witch’s curse they replaced the stone, only to have the foot appear on the new stone as well. To this day you can travel to Bucksport, park in the really nice parking area the town has made, and see the stone for yourself. It’s quite remarkable.

As with a lot of folktales the history and facts don’t quite match up with the story. Captain Jonathan Buck died in 1795, ironically the same year that George & Nelly Butler began having trouble with Lydia Blaisdell just a few miles away. It’s often stated that Captain Buck was an honorable man and the founder of the town of Bucksport. That he also built the first boat, but he was only a Justice of the Peace and so therefore would have had no authority to charge or put on trial anyone for any crime. There is also no historical evidence that any one was ever charged with witchcraft in what would become the State of Maine. Certainly there was enough evidence for the townspeople in Franklin & Sullivan to think witchcraft in regards to Lydia Blaisdell, but yet no charges were ever brought against her. So it’s highly unlikely that Captain Buck charged this unnamed woman with witchcraft in his own town either. There is also no records of any witch being burned at the stake in America at all. So as you can see holes are starting to form in this folktale. But the final nail in the coffin (sorry!) on this story is that this monument to Captain Buck was erected 75 years AFTER his death. His real gravestone is in another location in the cemetery and it is unblemished. So as you can see a curse from a burning witch is probably not the answer to why this stone has a foot on it, but it makes a great folktale!!

So what does this cursed tourist attraction in Bucksport Maine have to do with my trip to England? I’ll tell you! We stopped at Skipton Castle on our travels through the beautiful Yorkshire Dales area. It is truly a beautiful and well maintained castle and if you ever get the chance to visit there I highly suggest it. For those that follow me on social media you may remember that Skipton Castle was the location of my ghostly encounter with the disembodied voice that insisted they “needed” the self guiding tour sheet that my son said he did not need. So this castle already held some memorable moments for me!

As we walked around the castle we saw carvings of some kind carved into the stone walls. These were found mostly in the rooms and areas that would have been the work places of staff or servants, the kitchen, storerooms or towers that would have been manned by soldiers. The carvings were of diamond shapes, crosses, one that resembled a tulip and even some that looked like crisscrossed arrows. I snapped photos of each one because I thought they were interesting. Funny the things that people did before they filled their time scrolling the internet!

As we rounded a corner and entered another room I saw something on the wall and it caught my eye because it looked so familiar!! It was a foot!! Other then the fact it was facing in the opposite direction it made me immediately think of Captain Buck’s monument! I even pointed it out to my son. “Hey look! It’s the foot from that stone in Bucksport!”

Like the others it was carved, but this one was outlined in someway and it is most certainly a foot!! Finding it all the way across the ocean, in another country, on the wall of a medieval castle was slightly strange! Could it truly be the symbol of a curse? Could it be something from our history, a universal symbol of some kind, that meant something that we have forgotten? Or could it be some bored soldiers who needed new boots and this was his form of protest? Who knows! I did come home and research Captain Buck’s family history and there is no link to Skipton or the Clifford family that built the castle. So that rules out any connection in that regard.

Whatever it is I did not expect to find it there and honestly I was more unnerved by this foot then I was the ghostly voice from behind me that told me to keep the self guided tour sheets! This foot was just so random. So out of place. Was it a sign just for me? Was it meant to grab my attention because it would be so familiar and if so why? I guess that this goes into the file of creepy unexplained things that keep happening to me! But if you have any thoughts on it, I’d love to hear them!

This summer, if you find yourself out in Sullivan and Franklin exploring the setting of my book (and I’m hearing from people who have trips planned already!), make sure you take some time to drive over to Bucksport and see Captain Buck’s stone for yourself. It’s only 45 minutes away and the town of Bucksport is a great little Maine town! You can also stop in at Fort Knox and the Penobscot Narrows Observatory. I highly recommend that you do!

The Name I Chose Is…..

Well, last’s week blog asking for name suggestions for the main female character in my next book was so much fun! I loved interacting with you all on this! I loved reading all of your name suggestions and I wrote down every single one! Filled two legal size notepad pages! Check out the photos at the end of this post to see all of the wonderful names!

For those that read the blog and knew that I had initially narrowed my own choices down to Susannah, Rachel & Marion - it was a tie between Susannah & Marion. But they only edged out Rachel by one vote!

So that brings us to the most popular names that you all suggested. I say names, plural, because again there were multiple names earning tie votes. The two most popular names suggested were Abigail & Prudence. I must say that as I watched Prudence tally up the votes my heart sank. If there is one name I absolutely cannot tolerate…it’s Prudence! So this one was a bit hard for me to swallow from you all! For awhile there I was cheering Abigail on desperately!

Second place gave me Emma, Charlotte and Patience. Interesting choices but nothing that jumped out to me as THE ONE.

Third place finishers were Victoria, Beatrice, Cecily, Penelope, Olivia, Emily, Catherine & Hannah. Solid, but still not it.

Fourth place was pretty full. Ruth, Elizabeth, Bethany Anne, Rebekah, Charity, Agnes, Edith, Helene, Isabel and Sarah. I must say a lot of you did your homework. If you do an online search for Medieval or Old English names quite a few of the fourth place finishers show up. So nicely done my band of fellow researchers!

Rounding out the list of the most popular were the following names that all got at least two votes: Grace, Nellie, Anne, Eleanor, Constance, Hattie, Clara, Arabella, Eliza, Christina, Mercy, Margery, Violet, Phoebe, Ursula, Pearl and Adeline.

But that still wasn’t all. There were a whopping 111 other names submitted!

There were the names you would expect, what I like to call the Attribute names: Patience, Charity, Comfort, Mercy, Grace & the dreaded Prudence.

There were lots of Biblical names, Deborah, Ruth, Jerusha, Miriam, Judith, Sarah, Esther, Hannah, Joanna, Rebekah and Selah.

There were plant/flower names, Violet, Rose (Rosetta, Rosa & even a Hunter Rose!) Jasmine, Camille, Posey, and Willow.

There were the typical “English” names, Victoria, Elizabeth, Mary, Virgina, Regina, Catherine, Philippa, Beatrice, and Margaret.

There were a slew of names that just made me think of the 1940’s, even though I know originally the names are older, Bertha, Muriel, Mavis, Matilda, Beryl, Priscilla, Harriet, Alice, Lillian, Agnes and Edith.

I found my own grandmothers names on the list, Gertrude, Hattie and Hazel. Even found one of my granddaughters, Genevieve!

There were some I had to dismiss right out of the gate. Nellie and Eleanor as that’s the name of the main character in my first book The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler. Couldn’t really use them again. And Clare is already the star of the Outlander series, both in books and on television.

There were a few unusual names that caught my attention though, Tryphosa, Naomah, Blythe, Vandelia, Sabina and Truly. Always wanted another daughter so I could name her Truly!

But the one that really jumped out at me! The one that made me say “Is this it?” came from Ellen in Marshall, Virigina. She suggested Elspeth. Just the right mix of mystical yet traditional. Unusual but still easy for a reader to pronounce in their mind. ELSPETH.

So is that the winner? Ahhh No. Nope. Not happening.

So here’s a peek into the rabbit holes I end up in while researching. A quick online search of Elspeth found that several women with that name have Twitter accounts. She also is very popular in the fantasy world showing up on websites like Card Kingdom and Wizards of the Coast (don’t ask, I have no idea!). Multiple videos on YouTube portray fantasy female slayers with the name Elspeth. I also found out that the name has appeared in no less then 18 works of fiction the least of which is Sir Walter Scott’s The Highway Widow. So apparently I’m not the only one that likes that name. Sorry Ellen!

But Elspeth lead me to Elsabeth, middle name of another one of my granddaughters. A quick call to her mother and I was granted permission to use it if that’s where I settled. Great! So is that it? No. A little more research and I found that Elsabeth is perceived as a modern variation of Elizabeth because of the Disney movie Frozen. Nope sorry! On we go.

Elisabet? No to close to Elizabeth readers would get confused. Liesbeth? No, how do you even pronounce that? Elsbeth? Prominent in a German painting from the mid 1500’s (Elsbeth Tucher) but to close to Elspeth. UGH!!

So I moved on. The true historical male figure this woman will be supporting in the next book is named Ralph which is Old English meaning “wolf”. Searched “female names that mean wolf” Belvine, Daciana, and Averle. Yuck! I searched “female names that mean magical” and “female names that mean elf.” Nothing, except that I visited multiple baby name websites and will probably be bombarded with maternity ads online now for the next several years!

Oh my word! How can this be happening to me? I went back over the two notepad pages full of names that you all suggested. All of these names! All of your hard work! Why can’t I find the right name? At this point even Susannah, Rachel & Marion seemed awful to me! I was literally back at square one.

I’m sitting at the dining room table, spread out in front of me is my laptop, the notepad with all of your names on it and a second notepad full of scribbles, name meanings, and various names written but then crossed out. My husband walks into the room “Alma” he said “My grandmother had a sister named Alma.” No I don’t like that, but I’ll take a look at your family tree and see if anything jumps out. Online, click through multiple generations of my husband’s family. Nothing. Literally at this moment my head is down on the table and I’m at a loss for how I’m going to write the next book without a main character's name!!

Check your own family tree! Came the thought. (I really need to learn to start listening to my own thoughts!)

What a genius idea. So I switch over to my own family tree and there it is! Like it had been waiting for me to find it all along! An amazing name! Given to a woman born in 1608, which would make her 25 years old in 1633. Didn’t I say my female character was in her mid 20’s in 1633? Is this just a coincidence? (You all know what I think about coincidences!!)

The name is not Susannah, Rachel or Marion, so thank you to all of you that suggested other names! All the other suggestions led me down a more creative path. Made me think deeper, opened my mind to keep searching. This name I’ve found was not suggested by anyone, but that’s okay. All of your suggestions led me there! The name is unique, yet traditional. Mystical but not over the top. The name is of the correct time period and the correct geographical area.

For me, what is so amazing about this name is it’s power as a written word. If you speak the name verbally it just doesn’t have the same impact as seeing it with your eyes. Pronouncing it out loud might make you think you even know someone with this name. I can think of two people myself! But seeing it written, it transports you to a different time, a different place. A place so far from our very own understanding, where anything can happen! Seeing it written transcends the ordinary. Written it becomes the character, a woman who is different from those around her. She is no Mary or Catherine, but yet she is just an ordinary woman of her time. She is a simple woman who possesses ancient gifts in the same way that her name, although sounding simple to us, is written anciently. Written it becomes powerful like the character it identifies.

For me, it’s absolutely perfect!

So what is the name?

ALICEN

I love it!

What Name Do You Choose?

When I was writing The Gathering Room – A Tale of Nelly Butler it was very obvious to me who the main characters were; George, Nelly & Lydia. The historical record, on which my fictional portrayal is based, made bringing those characters to life relatively simple. Their names, birthdates, etc are all real. Many of the secondary characters were also real people who had left behind evidence of their involvement with America’s first documented ghost. The handful of fictional secondary characters I needed to create, Rueben Gray, Lucy Giddings, the servant girl Martha, etc. were small and manageable. They were after all secondary characters. Now that I’m working away on the Prequel I’m faced with a dilemma I’m struggling with. So I thought I would enlist your help!

The Prequel, like The Gathering Room, is based on actual events. However we are talking about a much earlier time period. The events that I need to base this story around are there, but not so detailed when it comes to a full cast of characters, especially female characters. Women were notoriously left out of the written record. So, while I know that women had to have been involved in this story it’s not so easily spelled out for me.

Hence why I need your help. I have to create a very important main character all from fiction. She will shoulder most of the storyline in part of the book. While her male character counterpart, who is based on a real person, acts as the supporting player in the story structure. Is she a heroine? Not really. In some ways she reminds me an awful lot of Lydia Blaisdell. She will be the mystical character in this story. At certain times you may love her. Other times you may hate her. Similar to how a lot of you have told me you felt about Lydia while reading The Gathering Room.

So how can you help? I need a name for this woman! I’ve tried for a few weeks now to settle on a name for her and it’s just not coming to me. So I thought I would put a few choices out and let you, my readers, let me know what you think!

Let me introduce you to the character. She’s in her mid-twenties, still unmarried because of rumors of the supernatural that surround her. The time period is 1630-ish and witch trials and fear of witches is a very real thing in her world. She’s English and lives in the Lancashire area of England. She’s a herbalist, having learned the art from her grandmother. She heals the sick using plants and concoctions. Another strike against her during this time period of intense fear and superstition. She’s a very private person. She doesn’t socialize much, preferring instead the quite company of her immediate family or even animals. Some say this is more proof of her evil ways. She’s strong willed but also vulnerable in many ways. Her family call themselves Puritans and adhere to the new faith, although rumors swirl that she and rest of her family may not be as holy as they appear. She comes from a well established family of wool merchants. They are not poor by any means, but they are not of the aristocrat class either. She would be described as plain, unremarkable, in her appearance. As I did when writing The Gathering Room, I did an online image search of of “17th century female England” and then I scroll through the photos until I find one that resembles what I see in my mind. I then use that photo as inspiration throughout the writing process. I have done that with this character and attached the photo to this blog.

So I ask you……What is her name?

I’ve researched popular female names of the 1600-1630’s and I have come up with the names you would expect to find, Elizabeth, Mary, etc. To boring!! So I researched uncommon female names only to find a list equally boring. I have narrowed it down to a few I like. I would appreciate your opinion on this. Could you be swept away to another time with a woman by the name of Susannah, Rachel, or Marion? Or do you have a different option? Who do you see her as? You can let me know by going to the home page here on the website and using the contact form at the bottom to let me know your choice. Or if you’ve found this blog because of a social media post you can always comment on that post with your choice. Thanks so much and lets hear what you have to say! I’ll announce my final decision next week.

There Is Magic Around Us

As most of you know my recent trip to England was planned by my #4 son and his soon to be wife. They did an excellent job of taking me to places that I needed to go for the research of my next book, but also to places that would give me great experiences. One of the things they did was to book some of our lodgings in places that were considered “the most haunted castles in England!”

One of these places was Lumley Castle between Newcastle upon Tyne and Durham in northeastern England. Built in 1389 it’s 630 years old! This was the castle where I stayed in that amazing room with the four poster bed up on a dais and wrapped in plum colored velvet and damask curtains. The bedding was layers of matching plus velvet and there was even a rope hanging near the headboard that turned on the reading lights in the canopy above. Although I imagined it called the servants when I pulled on it. There was a small bathroom just off the room that was completely lined in stone and had the cutest little door. I had to duck to go through it, it’s arch shaped rising to a point at the top but still not tall enough to get through standing up.

It was in this room that I wanted to stay, literally forever. I related to a friend that evening, that depending on your belief system one of two things were happening to me right now. Either I had actually lived in a castle like this at one point in a previous life and my soul had returned and I was finally at complete peace or I have read so much over the course of my life regarding English history and castles that I was actually sitting in something I had imagined a million times, giving me that peace of coming full circle. Either way I had never felt more comfortable in a room. I actually didn’t want to leave the room when my son said we should walk the grounds before dinner. I struggled through the politeness of sitting in the lounge with them afterwards chatting and having a drink. But when discussions of dinner arose I told them that I really didn’t want to stay away from that room any longer and they could go to dinner without me! If I got hungry I would order room service.

So back I went to that peaceful, amazing room where I felt so at home. Most of the evening I just sat sitting up in the bed staring at the room. I tried reading for a while, but I didn’t even want that diversion to take me away from absorbing every single minute of this experience in this room. I wanted to memorize it so that I wouldn’t forget any part of it. Eventually the night wore on and I was getting drowsy and I knew that I need to get ready for bed. As is my habit when traveling I plugged in my sound machine and turned on the white noise. I learned long ago that hotels, motels, resorts, etc can be loud places to try and sleep, so I always travel with my sound machine to ensure that anything that might disturb me is blocked out.

After I turned on the sound machine I walked across the room to the bathroom. As I was doing so a thought popped right into my head. “I don’t like that noise.” Weird thought! Have you ever had a moment like that when a random strange thought just pops into your head? Why would I have that thought? I loved my sound machine! So as I reached to turn on the water in the sink, put the toothpaste on my toothbrush I think to myself, I wonder if ghosts are bothered by different sound frequencies. Logical question since we are staying in “the most haunted castle in England!” and although not an expert on sound frequencies I know enough to know that white noise is different from regular sound right?

I literally had no more poised this question in my mind, “Are ghosts bothered by different sound frequencies?” then the sound machine shut off. Yup I am not kidding you! It shut off!!! I’m standing there in front of the sink the only sound in the room now is of the water running. I’ve got my toothbrush still in my mouth, a little toothpaste dribbling out of the corner, I’m staring at myself in the mirror and I’m thinking holy crap! So I lean a little to my left so that I can peek out of that adorable pointed arch stone doorway into the room. I honestly expected to see someone in the room. I don’t know who or what they would look like but it was very obvious at that moment that I was not alone in that room. However there was no one in the room, that I could see, just the bed as I had left it, strewn with my books and travel pamphlets. The bed side table covered with the wrappers of the complimentary chips and candy bars that I had chosen to have for dinner instead of ordering room service. The bedside light shining softly and my sound machine sitting there absolutely silent!!!

I think I gulped and swallowed a mouth full of toothpaste! I’m not a ghost expert! I don’t study the paranormal. Until this moment I could honestly say I had never had an experience with a ghost. I’m a historian who happened to find a really amazing piece of history that included a ghost story, but I don’t do ghosts personally! However I had heard the term “telepathic” and knew that in some situations this might be how a ghost communicates. Seeing as that random thought “I don’t like that sound” had entered my. mind just before the sound machine shut off I figured whoever this was that was how we were going to communicate, through our thoughts.

So standing there in front of the bathroom mirror, with my toothbrush still frozen in my mouth I looked myself straight in the eyes and I thought “I’m sorry, but I always travel with my sound machine.” And with that simple thought my sound machine came back on and the room was filled with the sound of white noise. Most amazing experience of my life! I followed that up with the thought of “thank you” because apparently whoever I was dealing with was respectful and deserved the same in return. I rinsed out my mouth and toothbrush. Shut off the bathroom light and walked back to the bed. Well this was going to be something I’d remember for a very long time.

I sat there for a long time pondering what had just happened. As I’ve said many times, ghosts are not my thing, so was there another more logical explanation? Were thoughts of ghosts in my mind because I was staying in a supposedly haunted castle? Absoltuely! Was it possible that the sound machine shut off due to an electrical glitch that just happened to have occurred while I was wondering if different sound frequencies bothered ghosts? Possibly, although I don’t remember the lights flickering to indicate an electrical surge. And I can’t explain at all why it came back on when I stated my reason for having it. Again no other evidence of electrical surges were present.

So what was it?

Later when talking with a friend she said “It takes attention to see the magic around us.” Is that the answer? Is magic, just a word for things unseen that we cannot explain, truly all around us and we are just to busy with our day to day life to notice. Are we trying to hard to be logical, to find the answers to everything we experience? Have we lost our faith in things unseen? A belief in a part of our world that we don’t understand at all but has proven itself over and over again to be there. Did I have this experience because I literally had spent hours just slowing down my mind and trying to be in the moment of that room?

I want you all to know that I slept well that night. I slept with all the lights on mind you, but I slept well. I never once felt that the experience was of a dark or sinister nature. No it was almost as if two friends who were sharing the same room for the night were having a discussion on sleeping habits. And I’m glad my companion was accommodating!

Mythical Creatures Of Maine

One of the coolest experiences I’ve had since publishing my book The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler, is the opportunity to read books by other authors that I more then likely would not have come in contact with had I not started this journey. I love that I am being introduced to books by local Maine authors. And let me tell you we have an abundance of gifted and talented authors right here in Maine that have produced some quality books! I’m devoting this blog post to one of those really great authors, Christoper Packard.

I first came in contact with Chris early last winter when he was trying to put together a Book Fair in Bangor. One that turned out to be highly successful I might add! He reached out to me to participate but my calendar was already full that weekend so I had to decline. Earlier this year, while I was in discussions about appearing at an event later this summer, Chris’ name was mentioned as also being connected with the planned event. That brought his name back to the forefront of my memory and I reached out to him. He and I have actually now met in person twice. We were both at a recent vendor show and I have to tell you, Chris tops me in marketing and showmanship! His book is titled Mythical Creatures of Maine and Chris dresses in a fine tweed suit, complete with top hat, round rimmed glasses and pocket watch all while sporting his meticulously trimmed beard. He so looks the part of the sideshow barker waiting to tell you the tales of the creatures he has just on the other side of his tent door. It’s fantastic!!

When Chris first told me about his book he explained that he had grown up hearing his grandfather tell stories of fantastical creatures he had seen in the Maine woods. Chris thought they were just stories his grandfather told him, but as an adult he learned that these were in fact true folk stories shared by many people. Some stemmed from Maine’s history with the lumbering industry, but a lot of them were Native American tales told by the Wabanaki tribes in Maine. Chris has a background in biology and science and he set about to research these tales and find the truth about the creatures related in them.

Honestly I didn’t know what to expect from Chris’ book. I knew he dabbled on the edge of things, similarly to how I do with the ghost of Nelly Butler. I knew of the phrase cryptozoology and it’s association with Big Foot, the Loch Ness monster and other mythical creatures. But what I didn’t expect to find was what Chris wrote in the front of the book before he handed it to me. “All of these stories are true”. Oh don’t say that to a historian Chris!

Truth be told I plunged right into the book the night Chris gave it to me. I was eager to learn about what might be out there lurking in the woods. As a child I spent a few summers at the YMCA sponsored day camp located on Chemo Pond in Eddington. I’ve experienced my own fair share of things in the woods that didn’t make sense. Maybe I had run into one of the creatures myself!

Although some of what I began to read seemed like it could possibly be true, my first indication that these were in fact mythical creatures was reading about the Dungavenhooter. With it’s alligator type body I was very skeptical that this could be living in the darkest corners of Maine’s woods. I mean what would it do in the winter? But it was the Dungavenhooter’s ability to knock people down with it’s powerful tail and remain unseen that made me stop and think. How many times have I been hiking through the woods and someone in the group, myself included, suddenly falls down? Could it have been a Dungavenhooter and we didn’t even know it? Blaming it instead on the wayward tree root!

Next came the Hide-Behind, a creature so stealthy that no one has ever seen it to identify what it looks like. You know you have one following you when you get that uncanny sensation that you are being followed only to turn around and there is no one there. Or the Wedge-Ledge Chomper who leaves behind broken rocks on the sides of trails or fresh rock slides on the side of a mountain. I’ve definitely seen evidence of these!

I read each and every chapter in Chris’ book with eagerness to try and figure out the truthfulness of these mythical creatures. The historian in me wanted concrete historical evidence that they existed in real form. And although there were personal accounts from history, like General Merriam’s account of witnessing a sea serpent, the real truth was there to be found if you only pondered it for a moment or two.

I could imagine a group of men in a lumber camp in the winter of 1865. They have worked in the cold and snow all day and are now gathered around the fire eating their meal. There is no TV, no internet, no social media. Their only entertainment is each other. As the men talked of what had transpired that day someone mentions how that dead tree branch fell out of the tree and landed on poor old Joe’s head. A young, inexperienced man who is spending his first winter harvesting the trees in northern Maine asks what would have caused a dead tree branch to fall out of a tree like that all of a sudden. One of the old timers winks and tells the young man it was an Agropelter. A fearsome ape like creature that swings amongst the tops of the tallest white pine in Maine, throwing down dead branches on the lumberjacks below. The flames from the fire would flicker and glow in the young man’s eyes as they got wider and wider as the tale got wilder and wilder. The others seated around the fire doing their best to suppress their snickers.

And just like that a folk tale was born, shared over and over again, first as a joke, then as a re telling of a comical evening when that young city boy thought he was a lumberjack. Until eventually it is remembered by many people. The Agropelter, and the others, are real until the stories stop being told. Then they become folklore, legends, mythical creatures.

A lot of our history is that way too. Stories told over and over until they become accepted. And then once no one talks about them anymore they become forgotten. Look at the tale of Nelly Butler. The description of the ghost itself was not even recorded until nearly 20 years after the fact. How many times had that story been told and re told until it was cemented into the minds of those that had heard it. And now more then 200 years later people every day tell me they have never heard of this story! I’m often asked is the story history or folklore? And I reply could those two things be one in the same rather then separate?

Just as with Nelly’s ghost, all of the creatures in Chris’ book were real to someone at some point in history. Whether that was a lumberjack having a little fun with a greenie or a Wabanaki tribesmen trying to explain the the realities of his natural world based on his belief in the great god Pamola. So they are historical in a sense. Which means that Chris was absolutely correct when he wrote “All of these stories are true!”

If you’d like to purchase Chris’ book, Mythical Creatures of Maine, and I highly recommend that you do, it is available on Amazon.

Walk Confidently Toward The Cake

A lot of people don’t know that I raised five children. I think my bio on my websites says I raised a large family. Yup five kids is a large family! You can imagine there are lots of funny stories that come along with raising that many unique individuals. And unique they are! Each one of them vastly different from the others. So, every once in a while, I plan to throw up a funny or endearing memory on this blog. I asked the kids if there was anything, they could remember that would make a good blog post. No one came up with anything so here we go….they can’t complain as I offered!  

Let’s start with my youngest son. He’s child #4 in the pecking order and he was the fourth boy in a row for us. After having three boys in three years, I decided enough was enough and any thoughts of continuing to add children to our family were stopped. Well that only lasted five years! Then the desire to have a daughter kept plaguing me and we tried one more time. In an age before gender reveals we were neither surprised nor sad when the doctor announced, “It’s a boy!”  I think I just rolled with it! I was a Boy Mom and one more wouldn’t change that!

This son, the baby in a house full of school age boys, was different from the start. I have never met a more determined individual in my life. Born with a basketball in his hand (and that’s a story for another blog) he was determined to keep up with his much older siblings on the court no matter what. But that determination transferred to his life in general or he was just born with a really strong since of determination. Either way it is an otherworldly since of determination if you want to know the truth!

Take the school spring fair as an example. I think he was about six years old at the time. The school that one of his older brothers attended was hosting their annual spring fair to raise money for the PTA. As we always did, we attended all of the events like this as we were very involved in all the school communities.

By this time, I now have five children ages 13, 12, 11, 6 & 5. The minute the sliding door on that minivan opened they were gone. Each one of them shot out of there like rockets, some headed to meet their friends, others just anxious to be the first to scope out the games and food. Soon they would trickle back asking for money to buy tickets and then off again. Occasionally one would appear asking me to hold the prizes won from the fishing game or the ducks in the pond game. I think my daughter came back with a gluey, glitter concoction sliding all over on a piece of cardboard. I was given strict instructions not to tip it until it dried! I set it down on the picnic table in the sun and hoped it dried before I had to transport it home.

In those days we didn’t keep the kids close by, especially at something like a school fair. I sat on picnic tables with the other mothers socializing and our kids were free to enjoy themselves in a safe environment without us hovering over them.

So when it was time to head for home I knew I would have to wrangle up the kids. Corralling five children and convincing them to head for the minivan was a task I was equal too and after some time I had managed to get four of them at least headed toward the parking lot. But I was unable to find my #4 son.

Wondering around the school I stuck my head into each classroom that was being used for games and crafts. I couldn’t find him in any of them and was starting to become slightly worried when I checked the very last classroom at the end of the hall. This room was hosting the Cake Walk and there was my boy standing in line patiently waiting for a turn to walk and hopefully win a cake.

 I motioned to him and told him we had to leave. He shook his head vehemently. So, I walked into the room and up to him in line and told him again it was time to go. He looked me right in the eye and said, “I can’t go yet, I’m going to win that cake.” And he pointed to the table laden with cakes. Standing just slightly higher than all the other cakes around it I saw what had grabbed his attention. It was a cake shaped and decorated to look like a basketball.

“No, no, no. You don’t need that cake.” I said thinking of how much all of that sugar would fuel the chaos that already existed in my house! “And this is a game of chance, you may not even win.”I needed to get him out of line, I had to get home and start dinner!

“Buddy, come on, we have to go.” I pleaded with him. “Mom you don’t understand, I’m going to win that cake.” By now I was very familiar with his sense of determination. When he set his mind on something he could not be swayed. And he was firm in his resolve.  He didn’t say “I need to win that cake.” Or “I want to win that cake.” He said he was “going to win that cake.” Fair enough, I backed off. He was next in line to have a go at the Cake Walk anyway so the wait wouldn’t be long, and I thought this might actually work to my advantage. Losing his dream cake at age six would be a great teaching moment. Might spare him from a lifetime of scratch tickets in the lottery! So, I backed off, stood next to the wall and waited to see him lose.

For those unfamiliar with what a Cake Walk is, there are usually 15 – 20 squares taped out on the floor in a circle or oval. Usually this is done with brightly colored pieces of construction paper. The yellow, orange and red creating a rainbow circle in the center of the classroom.  Each square has a number on it written in black marker and always in those perfectly formed numbers that only teachers can manage to write. When the game starts, the students are asked to step forward and stand on a square. Music is then played, and the children walk around the circle, carefully stepping from one square to the next until the music stops. At this point a teacher will lift a basket full of numbers written on little slips of paper. She pulls one from the basket and reads the number out loud. Whichever child is standing on that number wins their choice of a cake from the table.

They ushered the next round of children onto the squares and my son stood there with a big smile on his face. He waved at me as he waited for the music to start. I waved back thinking how I was going to have to soothe his little heart on the way home. A basketball cake was like a cake made in heaven just for my son. This was going to crush him.

The music started and I watched as his little blond head moved around the room. He took big steps as he reached his foot forward to step onto the next square. Apparently stepping anywhere on the unmarked floor was taboo. Once in a while his arms would flail out as he tried to keep his balance. Eventually the music stopped, and my son looked down at his number. He was on square number 22. He looked up at me and smiled and then turned his attention to the teacher. I held my breath as she reached for the basket. Heard the rustle of paper slips as she mixed them up all good before choosing one. Through the late afternoon sunshine that was streaming through the huge windows in that school I could see the dust particles float between her and I. I held my breath, and it seemed like it was all happening in slow motion. “Number 22!” she announced!

I watched as my six-year-old son walked right toward the table of cakes and pointed to the basketball cake. “That one” he said to the other teacher whose job it was to hand out the cakes. “That’s my cake.” He spoke. She smiled, knowing our family and our love of basketball. As she handed it to him, she said “It’s almost like it was made just for you!”  I watched as the bright orange mound of cake and frosting with its black piping and realistic shape was transferred into his little hands. He looked up at her and said, “It was.”

I’ve remembered this story for many years as I watched that little boy grow into a man, he’s thirty years old now. At the time we all laughed about his sense of determination to win that cake. There was no question in his mind that he was going to take that cake home. It was just a matter of walking the circle and waiting for the number to be called. Didn’t matter which number, it was going to be his number, he knew it even if no one else did.  That was just part of who he was, so sure of himself, even at that age.  But now, as I’ve watched him just as assuredly step into other things in his life and watched those things become realities for him, just as that cake did, I’m beginning to wonder.  

Does he create his own opportunities in life because he is so certain of what he wants? And can any of us do that as well?  Just step confidently toward what you want out of life, fully believing that you will receive it, and because of that belief you do. Could it really be as simple as that?

History Lives In Our memories

Last week I introduced you all to Bangor’s Devil’s Half Acre. I have one more thing I would like to share with everyone and then I will move this blog along to some other topics. Seeing as it’s my blog … I guess I can do that! So if you are a history buff this works out great for you. If not, hang in there, I have other things planned once I get this Devil’s Half Acre all out of my system!

As a researcher I spend a lot of time online or in libraries pouring over little known tidbits of history. I love finding the stories that no one has talked about in hundreds of years. Over the course of my journey to write The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler, I would say I was still researching right up until I sent that manuscript off to the Editor! It was very important to me that the book be as historically accurate as I could make it.

Researching, especially historical research, is some times more then reading old musty books. Often times history lives within the memories that we all have. I’m fascinated by oral family histories, the stories that were laughed and talked about around the dinner table or on cold winter evenings. These stories never, or maybe only rarely, make it into printed form. They are the markers of the personal lives of ordinary people and in my opinion are sometimes far more valuable then the histories recorded in what we would call historical books.

When I was gathering research on Bangor’s Devil’s Half Acre I was pretty certain I would not find anyone alive who could tell me first hand what it had been like living or working on Bangor’s waterfront over 150 years ago! What I was hoping for was someone that had heard the stories passed down through families and remembered them.

I found just that person in John. He attended a lecture I gave in 2008 at the Bangor Public Library. He approached me afterward and told me that his family had lived in the Half Acre and that he knew stories that he wanted to share with me. I set a date to meet with him the following week.

John was, at that time, a very elderly man. I wouldn’t dare make a guess at his age but he must have been close to 90 or more. He walked slightly bent over, his hands covered with brown age spots. If he talked to long he got those small globs of white saliva forming at the corners of his mouth. His glasses were bifocal so he moved his head up and down slightly until he could focus on what he wanted to look at. He had lost most of his hair, but what was left he had made a rather nice comb over protecting the top of his head. His hands would shake when he held the pictures and documents that he had brought to show me. Despite all of the physical signs of his aging his mind and his memory were sharp, probably sharper then mine! He was confident in his topic and he had the paper trail to back it up.

John’s grandparents, on both sides of his family, were Irish and had sold liquor in Bangor when it was illegal. They lived right in the heart of the Devil’s Half Acre on Union St. in between Summer & Broad Streets. This is a section of Union St. most of us can’t even imagine being a street with residential houses on it. If you are traveling north on Summer St., the on ramp to access the Joshua Chamberlain bridge now sweeps through what would have been John’s family home, the street itself lying hidden under fill and beneath the bridge. Their surnames were McCann and Gillohgly and I knew from my research that they were well know to the authorities in Bangor. To have found a living descendant of this family was exciting to me!

John and I spent the afternoon together, he speaking and I furiously scribbling on my yellow legal pad. First he laid out the genealogy so that I could understand who was who and how the characters all fit into the story he was about to unfold for me. Once I had that down he moved on and I began to see the lives of these people, immigrants, so desperately poor that illegal liquor sales was their only hope of survival.

He told me the story of his father, who as a young boy, crawled under the tables, where the men drank in the bars, waiting for them to start fighting. Once a fight was in full swing John’s father would grab up all the money that fell from they pockets as they battled with one another. John assures me it was a lucrative endeavor. He laughs as he tells the story of his aunt, who had a young man interested in her and he wanted to walk her home from school. To ashamed to let him know she lived in the Devil’s Half Acre, she had the boy walk her to the Isaac Farrar mansion further up Union St. and then told him she lived there.

John had brought pictures to show me as well, all of which I had never seen before in any published archives. These were personal family photos, not only of people but of the area. There were very few official pictures taken of the Devil’s Half Acre, given it’s infamous reputation, but what John shows me is full of a wealth of information. Of all the pictures he produces it is the last one that impresses me the most. Not so much the picture, but how John reacted to it. This picture is of a man, John’s grandfather, Thomas McCann. It’s an old photograph of an unsmiling man, typical to the time period. The man is dressed in a nice suit of dark clothes and across his chest he wears a sash. John makes a point of drawing my attention to this sash.

“That’s the sash of the Father Matthew’s Temperance Society.” he proudly said to me as he tapped on the picture with his index finger. I stop and look at him, I’m waiting for more, but it doesn’t appear he’s going to say anything else. So I venture forth with a question. “A Temperance Society?” I ask him. He looks admiringly at the picture again and says “Yes.” Again I wait but he’s clearly not going to add anything more. So I push a little harder. “Thomas McCann sold alcohol.” I said as if I needed to state the obvious hypocrisy that a man who sold alcohol for a living would be a member of a social justice group that denounced the sale and consumption of alcohol. “Yes, yes he did.” John replies staring again at the photo. “But he belonged to a Temperance Society?” I finally had to ask, stating the obvious so I could make sure I wasn’t missing anything. To this John just nods.

I know from my research that Thomas McCann was arrested dozens of times for illegally selling and serving alcohol. Yet here he is proudly wearing the sash of the great Irish Catholic Temperance movement. Apparently John did not see the hypocrisy in this. So I ask him outright if he thought that was hypocritical. He paused for a moment and looked at me as if the thought had never occurred to him in all of his long life. He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. After placing them back on his face he looked at me. “I guess a man had to do what a man had to do to take care of his family.”

John taught me a lot that day, not just in the stories of his family but in that I gained a greater insight into the time period. I was already fully aware of the hypocrisy of the prohibition laws in Bangor. How the police would let one person sell alcohol but not another. Or how the wealthy could drink openly but the poor could not. What I had not been aware of was that those who actually sold the liquor were also living double lives. It was a business, they sold it but they were somehow able to separate it from their own inner beliefs.

From the standpoint of a historian John was a gold mine and I was very lucky to have found him. That afternoon as he gathered up his papers and shuffled off I watched him with admiration. He was from another time and because of that he didn’t see things the same way I did. I needed to remember that as I pursued my passion of writing about history. History is full of people that were real and they lived and they made choices and decisions based on the time they lived in. Those decision might seem strange to us now, but they made perfect sense to them. I think that should be remembered.

The Devil’s Half acre

As readers of my book The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler know, the opening pages of this story start with Captain George Butler and his wife returning to Franklin from Bangor. The city of Bangor Maine is my hometown and it is a city rich with history that many would find fascinating!! It’s hard to find anything in the city’s past that holds the imagination more than The Devil’s Half Acre. As quoted from a 19th century Bangor newspaper “…..the half acre devoted to his Satanic Majesty.” (Bangor Whig & Courier, October 29, 1870).

The Devil’s Half Acre, at it’s heyday, was the playground for the weary sailors and lumberman flush with cash. Geographically it would be located along the waterfront. It was an area where vice was a true business venture. Cliche’ phrases, from those who somehow thought themselves above such vices, were thrown at the area in the local press. Words like lust, temptation and sin only touched the surface of the evils that lurked there. Any and all primal desires could be satisfied in this section of Bangor. Liquor flowed despite the laws. Women of all ages and all skill levels were there to satisfy. Gaming houses provided opportunities for increase or decrease of the money bulging in the pockets of the freshly paid. Riots and fighting allowed these men the opportunity to expel pent up frustrations from a life that was hard at best. Murders and suicides were common place.

Years ago I did a tremendous amount of research into the Devil’s Half Acre. I so badly wanted to write a book about this piece of Bangor’s history. But as I so aptly pointed out in a journal entry from 2008… “If I were independently wealthy and could devote the amount of time needed I could finish this book next year. But I’m not, I’m a single mom who’s first priority is to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads.” So the research languished in my files for nearly 10 years.

They say writers write what they know, and as I began to fictionalize the story of the Nelly Butler Hauntings I realized that I could add what I knew about the Devil’s Half Acre into the storyline. The historical record in regards to Nelly’s ghost is clear that people came from as far away as Bangor to see the spirit. So it made sense to me to connect George and Nelly to Bangor. I wanted something dramatic and there is nothing more dramatic then the stories I had learned about the Devil’s Half Acre. And just like that I had a story!! The situation that Edna’s birthmother finds herself in and Nelly’s friend Lucy Giddings are all based on real people that I found in my research.

So how did Bangor’s waterfront earn the name of The Devil’s Half Acre? The late Dr. James Vickery, noted Bangor historian, mentioned that he had found a reference to “Hell’s Half Acre” in a circa 1859 Bangor newspaper called the Jeffersonian. He was surprised by such an early printed reference. Dr. Vickery said he felt the original name was Hell’s Half Acre but in polite Victorian times this could not be printed so the name was changed to Devil’s Half Acre.

There are numerous oral traditions that hold forth that the name was bestowed upon the area by a local religious leader, more then likely in a sermon warning his flock about the dangers of sin. However in all of my research I was unable to locate a name, date or any other recorded written reference to this as the source of the name. Oral history is history just the same and should be added to the fabric that becomes our local history.

What I did find was that Bangor’s Devil’s Half Acre is not unique at all. There are references to the name, and it’s companion name Hell’s Half Acre, all around the world most of them originating in the 19th century. The name is almost evenly distributed in associations with vice, mainly alcohol and prostitution. In 1806 the name was given to an area of liquor dealers in Standfordville, Georgia. In 1807 to a similar area in Miami County, Ohio. An area of rowdy bars and horse racing in Kentsville, Nova Scotia shared the name. Fort Worth, Texas gave the name to it’s red-light district. Manhattan and Chicago also gave the name to their slum neighborhoods. By the time the name became common place in Bangor in the mid 1800’s it was a well known phrase.

Because the tale of Nelly Butler’s ghost happened nearly 50 years before the Devil’s Half Acre earned its name I did not use the phrase specifically in the book. Nonetheless the conditions of Bangor’s waterfront and the people who resided there were no doubt in place long before it was officially named.

I want to end this week’s blog post with another excerpt from my journal entry of 2008. “When I do find time to write, it’s usually just an hour here or there, not enough time to do some serious researching or writing. So unless I meet and marry a man who will let me quit my job, I don’t see this book being finished anytime soon.”

Not going to lie Craig and I both laughed out loud when I came across that!! Funny how life turns out isn’t it? Proof positive that the power to create everything we need and want lies within each of us. All we have to do is put it out there into the Universe and eventually it will happen.

Parenting is not for the faint of heart

I wrote the following story in 2009 for a creative writing class I was taking (I got an A if I remember correctly!). It was later published in the The Townline Newspaper as a guest column. They say writers write what they know and this is true! The following story is exactly how it happened. I did not change the names to protect the innocence.

The click-clack of text messaging was coming in a constant stream from the back seat of my car. Viewing them in the rearview mirror there sat my daughter and her best friend, both of them, heads down, thumbs moving at the speed of light. Every once in a while they would giggled, in unison, which prompted me to ask, “Are you two texting each other?” My daughter looked up at my reflection in the mirror and with a look of exasperation, confirmed my worst fear with a simple blank stare, they were. Which meant that either they were talking about me or talking about something they did not want me to know. Damn technology.

I had put off the cellphone for as long as I could. I remember the first day she came home from school and begged me for a phone, she was seven. Shortly after we attended a school function and I saw little girls, who should have been home playing with dolls, heads down, faces aglow by the blue light of their cellphones.. They could text LOL, BFF, WTF before they could even write. My daughter was the rare child who wrote her papers spelling the word “are” correctly and not just “R”.

When she got to middle school the pressure to comply with the culture was even more intense. She used every opportunity to her advantage. One evening, after a track meet, I was late picking her up, so she went home with someone else and I spent the next three hours trying to find her! When I finally had her safe in the car she said, “If I had a cellphone I could have called you.” I was not going to be swayed, insisting that I had rather enjoyed the past three hours! She needed to remember, she was one of five children, if I lost her, I had spares.

When she turned 14 she began earning her own money through babysitting. Seeing an opportunity to teach her some responsibility I finally relented on the cellphone, provided she pay for the entire thing herself. She has never missed a monthly payment, bought her first phone and then upgraded to the pink model later. She can’t download fancy ringtones or watch movies on her phone. What she does have is unlimited text messaging, and that has created a line of communication that doesn’t involve me.

So the giggling from the back seat continued. I was taking my daughter and her best friend to the movies. The pretense of a conspiracy was grating on my nerves so I began asking the “mother questions.”

“What movie are you going to see?” I asked.

“Nick and Nora’s Infinite Play List” came the reply without a look up from the text messaging.

“Who else is going to be there?”

“Me, Jennifer and Carley.”

“Any boys?” I asked. Silence. I looked in the rearview mirror and I saw two heads come up from their phones and then they stared at each other. “I asked a question. Are there going to be any boys at this movie?”

“Well of course there will be boys at a movie theater mom! Geez, it’s not a girls only theater.” came my daughter’s reply. Oh she was smooth, nice try, but I had been a teenager too.

“I meant, will there be any boys meeting you and your friends at the movies?” I asked again sternly. Silence and then “Yes. Joey Benaossi.”

She said it with defiance, staring at me in the mirror, meeting my eyes straight on. She showed no fear. She had made a decision to meet a boy at the movies and now pressed to reveal that decision she was prepared to defend it. This was a defining moment in our mother/daughter relationship, I had to tread lightly, how I handled this would set the stage for all our future battles. My mind raced through all the boys I knew from the track team, chorus, and even the boys from when she was in kindergarten. But I could not place the name of this new boy. This Benaossi boy, he sounded Italian and visions of a swaggering male meeting my daughter at the movies was driving me up the wall. What if he was in college!! “Who’s Joey Benaossi?” I asked.

It seemed like a reasonable question to me. But the laughter that came from both girls caught me off guard. It wasn’t just a few of those, “we pulled one over on your mom!” kind of giggles, this was deep from the gut laughter. The texting was forgotten momentarily as tears spilled from their eyes as they roared at my expense. “What? Who’s Joey Benaossi?” I shouted, frantically looking in the mirror to try and figure out what was happening. My daughter leaned forward in the seat, touched my shoulder and said, “Not Joey Benaossi, Mom!! Joey, Ben AND Ozzy.”

As they continued to roar with laughter in the back seat, I found myself the butt of their joke. I had met the challenge of this first test of wills with my teenage daughter and proven that I was a moron. I would become the laughing stock of the teenage world. And true enough, every time she leaves the house now and I ask, “Who are you hanging out with?” she replies “Joey Benaossi!” and then laughs. My fate has been sealed.

True story!

Exciting News to announce today!

It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post. Last one was back around Halloween and now here it is almost the middle of March! What a whirlwind experience I’ve been having! Let me tell you!

So the holiday season was a crazy busy book selling time for me! I sold so many books we had to do another printing! It was crazy. I jumped into the craft/vendor fair circuit and met so many wonderful people! Truly it was a great experience. I love to meet people and chat with them about the book. I got to do a couple of events too. I spoke at the Sullivan-Sorrento Historical Society as well as the Clinton Library. I’ve made dear friends from both of those experiences!

In January we snuck away for our annual vacation to Jamaica and I was able to spend some time researching and outling the next book I want to write. It felt so good to be “back in the saddle” so to speak. But that quickly ended as soon as we got home and I had to return to the real world of working a full time job.

In February I teamed up with two other authors, Laurie Chandler and Claire Ackroyd, to work on marketing all of our books. All of a sudden I found myself walking into bookstores and gift shops to see if they would carry my book. Something that I had not had time to do in the fall when everything just took off so fast. Meeting with shop owners and talking to them about our books is very similar to the years I’ve spent selling advertising so I was in my element and loving it!! But again, I was trying to jam it into weekends or the evenings. There just were enough hours in the day!

Then things really picked up again with lots of emails and messages requesting that I appear here or there. Could I speak at this event? Would I meet with this Book Club? Could I do a book signing? Would I be interviewed for a podcast on this date? It became obvious that I could no longer meet the demands of the book and work 40 hours a week.

So I’m announcing today that as of Friday March 10 I will be done working and will focus completely on this wonderful experience that has befallen me! Jobs will always be there, but this truly is a once in a lifetime opportunity and I’m going to seize my moment!!

Stay tuned because I have great ideas for this blog! Let’s see if I can make them happen!

The woman was truly mesmerized

Look at me doing a second blog post this week. I just might be getting the hang of this! Well not really, and honestly I have no idea if anyone is reading them! But I’m putting out content!! Whether it’s being read or not. So what caused me to actually write a second blog this week? I just had one of those moments in life that was just to good not to write it down.

I was doing a book signing this morning at our local bakery here in Waterville. Stephanie, the bakery owner, told me that folks were so excited about my book signing! She asked if I would be doing a reading. Since I’m not a professional author, more like a mom that wrote a book, I had no idea what a reading would look like. So not really sure what to do I got up bright and early this morning, poured through my book and found a couple of examples of things I could read out loud.

At around 9:15 this morning, with several folks milling around waiting to see if I would read anything I finally announced that if anyone was interested I would read a bit of the book. So I set the scene for them and then started reading. I was reading the part where Lydia is standing next to Nelly’s grave and Asa is watching her from the tree line. As with a lot of the book it’s pretty dramatic. I had planned to read two pages, and as I was reading along I just happened to glance up. The woman that was standing closest to me had the most incredible look on her face. I only looked for a moment, as I did not want to break my stride in reading, but she was clearly mesmerized by the story. She truly looked like she had been swept away and was standing before Nelly’s grave herself. Seeing it all for herself. It was that amazing of an experience for her. And for me!

At that moment, and for the rest of my time in the bakery, I truly did not care if I sold another book. It’s one thing to hear people tell me that they loved my book. That they couldn’t put it down. That it was a great escape for them. That’s all well and good. But to look up and see that words that I put on paper have literally transported another human being to a far away place in their mind was just….well… it was pretty darn cool!