Michelle Answers Questions From Readers!

Truly I am living a magical experience right now! Just the sheer volume of people I meet on a daily basis, whether in person or on social media, is making me feel truly blessed. Often times when I meet people they have questions they want to ask me. More often then not they are questions about the book and that’s good because I love talking about the book!! Sometimes I’m asked questions by other aspiring authors, or my personal favorites, young children that are aspiring authors! A couple of the most asked questions I have turned into previous blog posts. Like the question on whether I think the ghost of Nelly Butler was real or have I seen ghosts myself. But this week I thought I would answer some of the other questions I’m asked a lot but that aren’t related to my book The Gathering Room.

1. When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer? I don’t think I ever imagined myself as a writer as much as I have always wanted to write. What I really wanted to be when I grew up was a Librarian! Specifically one that lived alone in a big Victorian house with cats and rooms full of books! None of which came true and I’ve learned the valuable lesson of always having a Plan B to fall back on. But as a child I never set out to be a writer. In grammar school I wrote assignments as given in class, only one sticks out in my mind, it was in 2nd grade and the teacher gave us photos and we had to write what we thought was happening in the photo. My photo was a little blonde haired girl with her hands on her cheeks and sheer excitement on her face. I wrote that she had just gotten a puppy at her birthday party. I remember this because the teacher brought it to my mother’s attention at Parent/Teacher Conferences and told my mother I wrote very well. I was sitting right there and it was a moment I have remembered for over 50 years! In high school I wrote as a calming mechanism, not that I remember my adolescence as being particularly traumatic, just normal teenage things, but I think I wrote to try to escape the swings of life as a teenager. It was then that I developed my habit of listening to music while I write. A lot of the things I wrote in high school are stories based off the lyrics of the songs I was listening to. Specifically I remember “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey. I wrote a whole story about those two star crossed teenagers who meet on the midnight train. I often think now how ironic the title of that song has become given where my life is now! Don’t stop believing in your dreams people!

2. How long does it take you to write a book? This question always makes me laugh! If I had a life where all I did was write and I had a publisher pushing me to a deadline, I probably could write books pretty quickly! The Gathering Room took me six years to research and write, but you have to remember I was writing that for my own entertainment, there was no pressure to complete it. Similar to my habits in high school, I wrote that story as my own personal escape into history. I was also juggling a full time job, volunteering in Lions Club International, and my helping my husband run his business, Time to write was often found only on the beach in Jamaica during our annual vacation! The Prequel, which I am writing now is a bit different. Thanks to my husband’s urging I no longer work so I have more time to write, in theory! I also have the excitement that all of you have for the next book pushing me to get one out for you! But I’m also still promoting The Gathering Room, which on some weeks eats up 5-7 days of a week! Even with all of that I have managed to get half of the next book written and hope to have it out to you by next summer, fall at the latest. That would mean I wrote the Prequel in about 18 months.

3. What is your schedule when you do write? I have met some authors who write every day from 10 am to 2 pm, or some other time that is set aside specifically dedicated to writing. That’s not my style. Despite the fact that in my “real” life I am the most organized, over scheduled, master of making lists, kind of person. When it comes to my writing I am the exact opposite. As I’ve stated several times I don’t have an outline, a list of characters or anything resembling a well thought out plan! I have a general idea of what I want the story to look like and then I just sit down and let it unfold in front of me! It’s the same with my writing schedule. I will block off days on my calendar for writing and hope that my life allows for me to write that day! When it comes to how much time I spend writing I can’t sit down and write for just a few hours and then get up and walk away from it until the next day. I have to have huge blocks of time because when I write I will write for 10-12 hours straight. Just as you tell me that you can’t put the book down to go to sleep, eat or do household chores. Know that I too can’t stop these stories when they start and I will literally sit in the same position for hours absolutely enthralled with the story that appears on the computer screen in front of me. Often forgetting I am the one actually writing it!! The weirdest part, is that after a marathon session like that, I can go weeks or even months not writing, only to return to where I left off and pick up the story without so much as a glance back at what I wrote previously. It’s like the story is right there in my mind just waiting until I can stop being to busy to get back to it. Totally creeps me out!

4. What would you say is your most interesting writing quirk? Definitely my music!! I can’t write unless I am listening to music. I’m listening to music right now! For some reason music seems to be the portal to which I can slip from this world to the land of the muses! I have noise canceling headphones and the music is loud, very loud! If you ever meet me in person and I struggle to hear you as we speak, you now know why! As I start a writing project I will just listen to music in general, different types and genres, until I find songs that match the intensity of the energy I am feeling from the story as I write it. Each one of these songs gets added to a playlist and eventually I find myself turning to this “writing playlist” when I write. It’s like I have to narrow down the messages from the Universe to what I need to be listening to in order to create the magic. Currently the playlist for the Prequel only has five songs on it. That’s roughly twenty minutes of music, that I will listen to over and over and over for ten hours straight! A fellow author, who admitted she had to write in total silence, recently said she would be very interested to know what my playlist was. As she said that all I could think was she writes in total silence and I write with music blaring as loud as I can get my headphones to go! She’s probably never going to understand from what realm I write or what the playlist does for me!

5. How do books get published? When I was growing up there was really only one way to get a book published, the traditional way, through an agent who represented your book to a large publishing house. We’ve all heard the stories of Dr. Seuss having Cat In The Hat rejected 27 times! Today, with the advent of on demand printing, just about anyone can get a book printed and make it available for sale. For myself I went with a self publishing hybrid, Maine Authors Publishing located in Thomaston Maine. They require a vetting process, meaning I had to submit my manuscript to them for approval before they agreed to take me on as a client. And a Client I am as I have paid for every piece of the book from production to printing to the promotion of the book that you hold in your hand. Maine Authors Publishing does a fantastic job of connecting an author with an editor, graphic artists, illustrators, and then when the final product is ready they contract with printers to get your book printed. I own the rights to my book one hundred percent, but I also own one hundred percent of the financial responsibilities as well! My advice to anyone wanting to publish a book is to research your options, as there are many, both traditional and self published, and then choose the one that meets the goals you have for your experience. Everyone’s author journey looks different and as I have learned over the past year, even that journey can take you in a direction that you need to shift and adjust to quickly! So do your research into what’s out there, plan your financial commitment ahead of time, and be willing to change direction!

6. Where do you get your story ideas from? Recently I had lunch with a woman who asked me, after I finish the Prequel what was I writing next? Oh I got so excited because the next book is right there in my heart and soul just waiting to get out! When I think about it, the emotions, the energy, the drama, I can’t sit still in my chair! In fact I’ve already started the research on it, and it has absolutely nothing to do with The Gathering Room or the Prequel. Totally different direction. The reality is all of my storylines come from history. There is so much history out there that is absolutely fascinating and most of it is unknown. It’s like a vast vault I can return to over and over to find my next project. With a lifetime of research experience as well as reading mostly historical non fiction all my life, I am most comfortable with history and will return to that well over and over for inspiration.

7. When did you write your first book and how old were you? The Gathering Room is not my first book, it’s actually my fourth! However The Gathering Room is my first work of fiction, surprisingly a genre that I don’t much read myself, except for occasionally. My very first book was published in 2002, when I was 36 years old, by Picton Press, a now dissolved publsher out of Rockport Maine. This was followed by my second book, also done by Picton, in 2003. Vital Records of Bangor Maine, Vol 1 Births and Vol 2 Deaths were my first foray into the world of becoming published. These books are actually at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. I’ve been there and seen them for myself, I cried, I’m a book nerd! As you can see from the photo above they are research books filled with the births and deaths recorded in Bangor Maine from 1750-1891. In the early part of this century, before we all used the internet for everything, the fact that I sat for hours in front of a microfilm machine reading ancient handwriting and transcribing it into a word document (on those old square disks no less!) was a valuable piece of work. To have all of that information in a book, with an index, that someone could just open and look for the name of the person they were researching, was fantastic at the time! Seems rather archaic now as typing the same name into the internet would reveal multiple sources of documents in a matter of seconds. But at the time, it was important. As noted above there are multiple paths to becoming a published author, such was the case with Picton Press. Twenty years ago I presented them with the disks containing everything I had compiled and they handed me a $250 credit to their bookstore. I used the credit to purchase other research books that I donated to the Family History Research Center in Bangor. Both of these books are now out of print and Picton Press is no longer in business. I have seen these books show up on auction or used book sites online from time to time. Please don’t try and buy one, unless you have a need for early birth and death records from Bangor Maine. These books are full of just straight up data, lists of names and dates, they are not curl up by the fire type of books like The Gathering Room. Trust me you would be sorely disappointed if you tried to read one! My third book was one that I did as a volunteer project for The Gray Family Reunion Committee out of the Blue Hill area of Maine. Done in 2004 I compiled, from multiple sources of previously published work, family history records on one specific family in Maine. This book, titled The Descendants of Joshua Gray, was a fundraising product for the Gray Family Committee and their annual scholarship fund. I took two previously published books, one from the 1950’s and one from the 1980’s and combined them with current research to bring the family records up to date, as of 2004. I have often said that what I did, picking up the phone and just calling people asking for their personal information, was the last time in history that something like could have been done. Twenty years ago we were just on the cusp of identity theft and mistrusting everyone we met. If someone called me today and said they were writing a book and wanted the names and birthdates of all of my children, I’d hang up immediately! But in 2004 I managed to do just that believe it or not! The Descendants of Joshua Gray was printed by Downeast Printers under the direction of The Gray Family Reunion Committee. To save cost on printing they chose not to include a complete index, instead only printing an index of males with the surname Gray. At the time I was a little disappointed with that, as there are literally thousands of other people in that book, but it was not my project to control. I did it solely because I love history and love researching “dead people”. This book too is out of print, but again not a great read!

8. What do you like to do when you are not writing? Well when I’m not writing, I’m usually promoting The Gathering Room, helping my husband run his business or helping my son with running his new campground. We work a lot around here! But in those rare moments when I do have time to do what I want to do, it should surprise no one that I spend my time researching! I am constantly seeking knowledge of some kind or another. I have a thirst for knowledge that I don’t think will ever be satisfied. Whether it’s a historical fact that I end up chasing down a rabbit hole for hours, or someone’s obituary that caught my eye and now I’m six hours in on Ancestry.com tracing the family of someone I have no idea who they are but I’ve mapped out 7 generations of their family and I know them all and their stories like we met just yesterday! These are the weird things I do for fun!

Oh and I write a blog every week …. for fun! Because in the end that’s what I do….I write!

This Sheet Music had One Heck of a song to Sing!

In the Spring of 2020 my son purchased a house in Veazie, Maine and naturally found things in the attic when he cleaned it out! I remember we were at his house for dinner when he said, “Oh Mom, I found this bag full of sheet music in that house I just bought. Do you want it?” What a silly child! Of course I wanted it! What made it even better is the owner of the sheet music had written her name on several copies. That, along with the address of the house led me on a quick search where I was able to track down living members of her family and contact them. They no longer lived in Maine but were located out of state. As I do with a lot of things I have found over the years, I want to return the items to the family. This woman’s great grandson was absolutely thrilled to receive the sheet music as his own son had recently begun taking piano lessons!! I was more than happy to ship the leather bag, and it’s contents, to them. But before I did so I asked for permission to photograph two newspaper clippings that I had also found in the bag. I explained to the great grandson that I had done considerable research into not only his great grandmother’s family but also into the individuals mentioned in the clippings. I could find no connection whatsoever between his great grandmother and these men, so I’m not sure why the clippings were saved with the sheet music. He told me to just keep the clippings, he did not want them.

Here are the transcripts of the clippings as seen in the photograph above.

 #1 SERIOUS CHARGES AGAINST BREWER MEN

The arrest of two Brewer girls in this city (Bangor) on Friday, the details of which were published in Friday night's Commercial, has resulted in the lodging of several complaints against Brewer business men and two of these men, Charles Rand and Howard Seeley, were arrested Saturday afternoon by Police Inspector Golden and brought to the police station in this city. Rand, who is said to be 65 years of age is the proprietor of a Brewer lunch cafe. Seeley is a Brewer stable proprietor and said to be 60 years old. The complaint in all four cases was made by Chief of Police Knaide.  The cases will be heard in the Municipal Court Monday morning. 

#2 BREWER MEN PLACED UNDER HEAVY BONDS - NO DEFENSE OFFERED

Judge Butterfield held a busy session in the Municipal Court Monday morning, there being 23 cases to occupy his attention.  Ten of these cases were the result of a gambling raid Sunday night by the police at the Chaison hotel annex on Exchange St. known as the Victoria.  Eight cases were connected with the confession to the police department on the part of two young Brewer girls in regard to their relations with the three Brewer men, while the other five cases were the ususal collection of weekend drunks. A capacity crowd filled the court room Monday morning, unusual interest being manifested in the various cases. 

Presper Bourbon, Charles Rand and Howard Seeley, the three Brewer men against whom serious charges were lodged as the result of the arrest by the local police of two Brewer girls, were held under heavy bonds by Judge Butterfield after a hearing in which the testimony for the state was presented and no defense offered.  Bourbon was held under $1,000 bond on one charge and given a jail sentence of 60 days on the other. The latter sentence was appealed and the bonds placed at $500.

Seeley was held under $1,000 bonds on two different charges, while in the case of Charles Rand, the same procedure was taken as in that of Bourbon, $1,000 bond being placed in one case, a 60 day jail sentence given in the other and bonds placed at $500 on appeal.  Bonds were furnished by all three respondents. 

The two young Brewer girls, one age 15 and the other 17 were placed on probation for six months under City Missionary Jennie Johnson. 

There were no dates on these clippings, but with one of the men involved having such an unusual name, Presper Bourbon, it didn’t take long for me to track them down. The alleged crimes had occurred in April of 1923. Although Charles Rand and Howard Seeley’s ages are listed, one being 65 and the other 60, I had to do a bit of digging to learn that Presper was 66 at the time. What were three men in their 60’s doing with two teenage girls that got them all arrested? I guess I probably don’t need to tell you. Sadly, despite the high bonds (bail amounts) levied against all of these men at the time of their arrests, a month later they were all found guilty of fornication, charged a $50 fine ($893 today) and off they went back to their lives. I’m certain though, that the girls were never the same.

Because I do what I do, I naturally had to follow these men through the pages of history. Having grown up in Brewer myself, the surnames of Rand and Seeley were recognizable to me. But it was Presper Bourbon that captured my imagination and I needed to know more about him. What I found was the tale of a sad man’s life, which in no way excuses him for the crime he committed, but does add another dimension to his personal history that was left unsaid in the newspapers of 1923.

After extensive research I learned that Presper Bourbon was born in June of 1857 in Quebec Canada. Presper, who's orginial french name was Prosper Bourbonnais, appears on the 1871 census for Lancaster, Ontario Canada. He's employed as an apprentice blacksmith. Lancaster, Canada is only 42 miles from Brushton, New York, which is where he next appears on the 1880 census, still working as a blacksmith. Records show that in 1882, at the respectable age of 25, he married Clara Howe of Brushton. It would be eight years before the birth of their first child, Hazel in 1890. By the time of the 1900 census Presper has moved his family to Altamont, New York. Presper now lists his occupation as an engineer in a saw mill. He has a wife, a child, a better job even owns his own home. Life is good for Presper at this snapshot of a moment.

Unfortunately his daughter Hazel dies in 1908 at the age of eighteen. Followed just four years later by the sudden death of his wife Clara in 1912 while they are in Waterbury, Vermont visiting her sister, a notice of which appeared in the local newspaper. Both Clara and Hazel are buried together in Brushton New York. The engraving on the gravestone lists Clara and Hazel’s names, birth and death dates. Presper's name and birthdate are also engraved on the stone, however there is no death date engraved. After the death of his wife Presper, the man with such an unusual name, drops from the historical record for over ten years. He no longer appears on census records or city directories. He does not marry again, so therefore leaves no marriage record to trace. He does not show up again until he is listed in the newspaper after being arrested in Bangor Maine in 1923. Where has he been for eleven years?

If it weren't for his unusual name I would not have connected the Presper Bourbon listed in the newspaper clipping with the man from Canada and New York. But I could not find anyone else with that name anywhere in the United States or Canada. He appears to have no surviving family in Canada, nothing left for him in New York except the gravestone of his wife and daughter with his name engraved on it. And he is a perfect candidate to be in the Bangor area with skills in working a sawmill given Bangor’s lumbering history. In addition, after his arrest in 1923 at age 66 he remains elusive again for another sixteen years, until he appears in a 1939 Brewer City Directory. An absence that would later be explained in his obituary. In 1939 he owns a machinist shop, which would have been a natural trade for someone with a blacksmith and mill industry background. In that year, his final year, he is living in an apartment at 6 State St. in Brewer. Ironically I grew up on State St. in Brewer.

On September 18, 1939 Presper appears for the last time in the newspaper, this time it’s his obituary. He died in a Brewer hospital after an illness of several months. According to what is written he was a native of New York and had been in Brewer for 20 years. It states that he had been a mill superintendent and in his earlier days had built and installed machinery in many mills in this country and Canada. This more transient work life would explain his absence from the historical records for large chunks of time. His obituary, written by an unknown friend or associate, states that he was regarded as an expert workman by his employers and he had many friends. He has no immediate family and will be interred in his family plot in New York.

Recorded history is full of snapshot moments. Similar to when an archeologist opens an ancient gravesite. What they find is what was left in one moment in time. The artifacts that survive there may show an interest or some likeness to the person at that moment. Recorded history, the things people write down whether in legal documents, newspapers or personal journals, are also just moments in time. Recorded at the moment they happened or as a memory. But that’s all history is really, just moments. Humans don’t live for just a moment. Their lives are made up of many moments. Some of them great and marvelous and some of them awful and wretched. We need to remember this about ourselves and others. Everyone’s life is more then just one moment in time.

The mystery as to why these clippings were saved and found among the sheet music of a young woman, who was in her 20’s, at the time they were clipped, will remain just that, a mystery. I found no connection what so ever between her and the men involved. Neither was there any connection between her parents and these men. Her neighbors and these men. Or anyone that she associated with even later in life. Was she somehow connected to the two unnamed teenage girls? Possibly. That connection we may never know unless it surfaces in someone’s private journal some day. It’s also possible that this young woman didn’t cut these clippings herself. They may have been cut by someone else and over the years scooped up and stored in the leather bag merely because they were made of paper like the sheet music. Or it’s possible that the bag contained sheet music she may have received from some one else and the clippings could have tucked inside one of those. As with most things in history, finding a few answers just leads you to more questions.

Where In The World Is Nelly Butler?

(Photo Credit: Pintrest)

Anyone that has followed along on my journey as an author knows that we didn’t expect much from the release of my book The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler. We wanted books for the family and hoped to sell a few to friends and through Maine Authors Publishing’s website, maybe get into a few Maine bookstores. I wanted to be on Amazon, just to say I was there, but I had no illusions of grandeur as we went into this.

Just as I started the publishing process, I met a man who worked in the publishing field and I told him I was self publishing my book. He told me that the average self published book sells about 100 copies. If it’s a really good one it might sell 500 copies in its lifetime. So this was my starting point. I knew full well that 400,000+ new books a day go up on Amazon. Think about that for a minute. 400,000 brand new titles to choose from, every, single, day. Right now there are 12 million ebooks on Kindle. Twelve million! The reality was clear, especially for an unknown, self published author such as myself. Stay in your lane and don’t expect much. So I didn’t.

That is until we sold those first 400 books easily and I blew past the 100/500 self publishing standard I had been told to expect, before the book had even been out 6 weeks! What amazed me the most though was where these books were going. Until I actually started selling books in person at craft fairs, very few people here in Maine knew about my book that was based on a piece of Maine history!! I’ve said it many times the book sells far more outside of the State of Maine then it does locally.

I think one of the things that is driving that is the topic. The paranormal is very hot right now culturally and The Ghost of Nelly Butler is a pretty awesome piece of paranormal folklore. So that helps a lot. But believe it or not I have found that this blog actually is driving quite a few people to finding the story of Nelly Butler here on my website. That’s right this weekly blog.

About mid way through every week I’ll usually check the analytics of my website to see how much traction my latest blog post has generated. For the record the blog about losing my mother while hiking is still the most read blog on the website. Mom is a powerhouse! The reason I check the read views of the blogs is to try and see trends in what people find interesting and what they don’t. I do want to write things that interest you all!! Like I thought my blog about my laundry would have been quite boring but actually it got more reads then the one about AI and the future of books. Fascinating!

In the analytics I can also see what are the biggest sources of traffic leading people to my blogs. There are the things you’d expect like social media posts or the email blasts that go out with the link for the blogs in them. But what always surprises me is that those are not the main source for how people find my website, my blog or my book. Most of them are finding me directly. Meaning either they are searching for Michelle Shores, the Gathering Room or Nelly Butler specifically, or they are searching the internet for something else. A certain topic of some kind, and my website or blog is popping up as a result for that search. Unbelievable!

If you think the 400,000+ books a day on Amazon or the twelve million ebooks on Kindle are a massive number, just try to fathom the vastness of the internet as a whole and what has to be sifted through every time someone searches for something. Like if you search “Is it possible for old people to hike?” what are the chances that my blog about Mom is going to be a search result? I find it very interesting that the blog that comes in second for driving people to the website is the one titled “Never work a day in your life.” Makes me laugh! I can just see people searching the internet for “How to never work a day in your life.” and then getting my blog as a result! But hey they are reading it!

When I check the blogs for reader interest I also check where visitors to my website are coming from. Or to be more specific where their IPO address is, because that’s all I can see. That and the time stamp and amount of time they stayed on a page. All fascinating for a data nerd like me! Again I’m amazed over and over how few Maine visitors I get and how far and wide Nelly’s story is reaching people.

Just in the past 24 hours, and remember my blog posted last Friday, so nothing new to see here folks, I had visitors from Ilinois, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, California, and on and on. I have over 100+ visitors to my website every day, the majority of them outside of Maine. How is that even possible? In the great vast wasteland that is the internet how are these people finding me? It blows my mind!

Today’s geography check also revealed a surprise!! I had a visitor from Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape, South Africa. Seeing this was a shock so I clicked on the little world map thingy and in the past 30 days I have had international visitors from South Africa, Poland, Germany, The Netherlands, Boliva, three from Canada, three from the Philippines (WHAT?) and seven from the UK.

Milions upon millions upon millions of bits of information and books are out there. And somehow the story of Nelly Butler’s ghost is rising to the top and getting noticed. Mathematically it doesn’t make sense. Could there be supernatural forces at work here? I don’t know about you, but it just kind of creeps me out!

Well That Worked Well….

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So back in April I was really struggling to come up with a name for the main fictional character in my next book. If you remember correctly, although my next book is based on a real family and on the very real events that happened in their lives, I needed to create a fictional character to carry the heaviest parts of the story. I am ever mindful that I am writing about real people. Historical fiction is just that, it’s my imagination based on the historical documentation, but it’s still fiction. I just try to be as respectful as I can be to the individuals that are someone else’s ancestors.

So in April, even though I knew the attributes of my fictional character, I couldn’t come up with a name for her. So I reached out to all of you! You responded with so many names that honestly I will never need to go searching for names again! I saved that list! And even though I did not choose a name from the list, all of that creative energy from you all eventually led me to the name that was needed. Her name is Alicen. Which I should let you know auto correct doesn’t like! I’m constantly having to go back and add the “n”.

Well Alicen and I need your help again! If you remember Alicen is a young woman who comes from a family with a bit of a mystical background. There are already rumors about her and her family being involved in things that raise a few eyebrows. The setting is 1600’s England and the possibility of being accused of witchcraft is ever present for any woman, man or child that is perceived as being different from the rest of the community. Enter the Familiar.

Familiars are animals, often associated with accusations of witchcraft because the accused is said to have spoken to these animals, or cared for them in ways not normal to the treatment of animals at the time. From the 21st century it’s easy to look back and see these Familiars were just beloved pets. Similar to my own dogs, Susan and Douglas, who are like children to me. I refer to them as my kids, I talk to them often and if I were living in the 1600’s I would most certainly be accused of witchcraft based solely on my relationship with my dogs! In a time of hysteria, like we see with accusations of witchcraft, anything could be turned into evidence to prove a suspicion. Folklore grew up around these animals and many medieval tales exists of them speaking or changing into the shapes of other beings. All very helpful when you are writing historical fiction about a mystical family!

So it is that I knew almost from the beginning of writing this story that my fictional character was going to have a Familiar. Alicen is not a witch and I don’t want to lead you to assume the next book is about witchcraft. It’s not. But Alicen does have a lot of suspicion surrounding her and one way I can make that more believable is to give her a pet, a very unique pet, that others of her time would have considered a Familiar.

I thought the Universe had literally handed me this concept on a silver platter back in May while speaking to a family member. During this conversation this family member said to me “I would love to be written into your next book!” I laughed, but immediately thought of how unique this person’s name is and it would actually make a really interesting character. I could probably do that. From nearby, another family member, who finds joy in teasing, hollered out “Make her a turtle!” Everyone laughed but in my heart I thought, a Familiar that is a turtle and has a really cool name. BINGO! (Not to mention the turtle is my spirit animal so….there’s that!)

A few weeks ago I wrote the scene where the Familiar makes it’s first appearance. I wrote the character as a turtle. But boy, it was a struggle. It just didn’t feel right. And then as I thought more and more about the future of this animal and how it will fit into the overall story, a turtle just didn’t seem right at all. So I did a little research and settled upon a hedgehog. They are native to the part of England where the story is set and a hedgehog seemed a bit more “pocket friendly” then a turtle, if you know what I mean.. So I’ve written now for a week and half with the Familiar being a hedgehog. But I’m still unsettled. It just isn’t feeling right.

As I sat here this morning contemplating what this week’s blog would be about I thought of all of you, and the help you gave me in choosing Alicen’s name. Since YOU will be the ones reading the next book it occurred to me that maybe I should reach out to you all again for help.

What animal do you see as Alicen’s Familiar? What would be the most believable to you if you were reading the story? This animal will bring great wisdom into Alicen’s life. This animal guides Alicen as she takes her place in the great story of her family. This animal needs to be transportable, as Alicen will find herself on the move soon. This animal relates itself as the female gender in it’s first appearance to Alicen

So let’s see what you all can come up with! I’m open to all suggestions as this point so let me know. You can leave a comment on the social media post where you found the link for this blog. Or use the contact form on the home page of this website and let me know what you think! I’ll let you know what I decide in a couple of weeks!

So You Think You’re a Writer?

Newsflash, that’s not a picture of me! That is in fact Margaret Atwood, she’s an author, best selling and award winning, incase you didn’t know. Honestly, I never knew who she was until today. That’s right ,I was this many years old (to use a phrase from social media) when I learned who Margaret Atwood was. Doesn’t mean I had not heard her name, because I had and I’ll explain that in a minute. But I literally had no idea who she was, what she had accomplished or what she even wrote until today, when I sat down to write this blog. True story! If you don’t believe me, read last week’s blog and you might begin to understand why I have no clue who really famous authors are!

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian author, poet, novelist, etc. etc who published her first work in 1961, that was before I was born, although not by much. She has a BA and an MA, along with 25 Honoray Degrees from institutions of higher learning all over the world. She has won 23 International Awards, and not just for her books. She was awarded Humanist of the Year in 1987. In 2019 she received the Companion of Honor Award and in 2012, she was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for Canada. Oh and she wrote the book The Handmaid’s Tale in 1972. Yes that one. No I have not read it.

But I didn’t know any of these things about Margaret Atwood until today, despite the fact that a quote attributed to her, has hung on my wall for nearly 20 years.

Found that quote in a Reader’s Digest probably back in the early 2000’s. One of two quotes out of Reader’s Digest that literally changed my life, but that’s a story for another day! This quote, as you can see, I tacked up on a bulletin board where I could see it often. For reference, my home office has changed locations four times since I cut this quote out. And it may have even lived on a bulletin board in one or more of the three work offices I have had since I first found it. I’m impressed that I always use the same original tack hole!

The reason why I was drawn to this quote by Margaret Atwood was very simple. I have always felt compelled to write. Have written in some form all of my life. But I grew up in a culture where we were taught that you had to have a college degree to accomplish anything in life. I do not have one of those. So for years and years I never imagined anything I wrote would be for general consumption, because clearly, lacking a college education, I wasn’t smart enough to claim to be a writer. So when I saw this quote in Reader’s Digest it spoke to me. Story telling is human nature and we all do it. This one quote gave me confidence, even if just for my own inner strength.

I meet a lot of people and recently had the opportunity to meet a young man, age 9, who had read my book and loved it. (Momentary pause here…..I will admit when he told me he was 9 my first thought was “Oh goodness did I write anything inappropriate?!” ) In our conversation this young fella told me he likes to write as well and when I spoke to him about my writing process his face lit up like a lightbulb. “Me too!” he shouted. He’s nine, he’s had all of what 4 years of formal education? And yet he writes. Because writing, the art of telling a story, is human nature, we all do it.

A few weeks ago I was at a book signing and a woman stopped by and chatted with me. She was here in Maine on a writer’s retreat (for the record I’ve never done one of those!) During our conversation she shared with me several pieces of her personal life that let me know she was going through some major life upheveal that was very disruptive for both her and her family. Added to this already volatile environment she then let me know that she had recently made the decision to go back to school so that she could become a writer. She admitted, that at her age, the course work was hard and the stress intense. As I sat there and listened to her I could just feel the stress she was under personally as well as with what she wanted to accomplish by going to school. My very first reaction was WHY? And immediately Margaret Atwood’s quote came to my mind. So I shared it with this woman, with the added caveat that I admired her for wanting to get an education but if she found herself at her breaking point, she didn’t need the degree to write. Because writing, the art of telling a story, is human nature, we all can do it.

Often times during my journey of getting my book published, and the past year of stepping out into the world as a Writer, I have felt like a true outsider. In some situations I know this feeling is probably rooted in my own insecurities about not having that coveted degree! But in other situations it is blatantly obvious that I am made to feel the outsider exactly because of that. It is at those times, in those rooms, with those people that Margaret’s words ring true in my heart. Her words buoy me up, help me to stand taller, lift my chin up and know that even though I may not have taken the same path, I have accomplished great things too and I am a Writer.

Whether you write stories out by hand, or bang away at a computer. If you find yourself describing worlds unknown or just setting down your childhood memories that you want to leave behind for your children and grandchildren. Whether you find comfort in using words to express your feelings in poetry or you just need the release of writing about past traumas. Whatever your form, trust me when I tell you…. you are a Writer. It’s human nature, we all do it.

What Do You Read?

Recently I had a reader reach out to me to tell me how much she enjoyed my blog posts. She also had a suggestion for a future blog post, should I consider it. She said she was really interested in what I, personally, like to read. I had to giggle at this, because I’m kind of an odd person. But I liked her idea! So I whole heartedly agreed to write a blog about what kind of books I like and what I normally read.

Since publishing my book The Gathering Room I have found myself in a lot more conversations with people about books and authors then I’ve ever been in before. Frequently I am asked if I have read such and such a book by so and so the author. I always have to shake my head no. Oh but certainly you must have read this and that? Nope, never heard of it. I have seen the dismay and sometimes even disappointment on people’s faces when I can’t relate to some currently best selling author that they know every detail about and I’ve never heard of. Sometimes I have to admit I feel like I’m not part of the “in” crowd.

A perfect example of this is Colleen Hoover. When my book came out last fall I had no idea who Colleen Hoover was, never heard of her. And yet Colleen Hoover’s name is mentioned to me again and again when people talk to me about my book. Apparently we have a similar writing style. So I did an internet search and found out that she is like the current best selling author in the country. She’s a pretty big deal I guess. I’m sorry I did not know who she is. She’s obviously successful so I like being compared to her! But you can imagine my great surprise just last week when I was scrolling through my reviews on GoodReads (yes I do that!) and I spotted this.

This is a screenshot of a reader who shares the books they have read, on the website GoodReads. I don’t know who this reader is, and honestly a year after the release of my book anyone close to me or any member of my family has already read my book. So this reader is a perfect stranger giving an honest assessment of my book, 5 stars! Thank you very much! But if you notice the book this reader read just before mine was a Colleen Hoover book. In fact it’s her New York Times Best Selling novel This Starts With Us, the one I believe they are turning into a movie. This reader gave Colleen’s book only 3 stars. Just as I had no idea who Colleen Hoover was, I can pretty much guarantee that she has no idea who I am!! But, at least according to this reader, my book was the better of the two. I’ll take it! It’s one thing to have people tell you that your writing style is similar to someone else who is hugely successful, it’s another to see a comparison like this. Made my day!

So if I don’t know who the most popular authors in the country are, if I can’t rattle off the titles of the best selling books of the year, then what exactly am I reading? Well the rest of this blog might surprise you!

My number one favorite reading material of all time, and it’s something I read daily, are

That’s right, the Obituaries. I read the obituaries from the Bangor Daily News online, every single morning. And then on Thursdays my husband brings home The Townline Newspaper and I read those immediately. Call me morbid but I just find reading about people’s lives absolutely fascinating! I have read the obituaries for as long as I can remember. No seriously, my whole childhood the newspaper was delivered and the only thing I ever read in it, day after day, was the obituaries, Dear Abby and the comics. So I guess with an interest background like that its’ no wonder I wrote a best selling novel about a ghost huh?

But lots of people read the obituaries every day, that’s why they are printed in the newspaper! So I’m probably not that eccentric. But along this line is my second favorite choice in reading material.

The Maine Genealogist is a quarterly publication put out by The Maine Genealogical Society and is eagerly awaited here at my house. I will literally spend hours reading the abstracts of wills from the 1800’s. Because nothing fascinates me more then reading how people lived, then reading about what they left behind and who they left it to! Honestly I’m really not this morbid in person!

I think it’s safe to say that I enjoy reading anything about people that are dead.

Maybe the reason I don’t know to many current best selling fiction authors is because I don’t generally read fiction. It’s not that I don’t enjoy fiction, I have, at certain times in my life, but if I’m going to sit and actually read I want to learn something so I tend to read non fiction more then anything else. The photo at the top of this blog is just a small section of my bookshelves at home that are crammed with all kinds of non fiction, history related books. I love the history of our country and the Civil War era. You get to far past 1870- ish and close to our own times and I lose all interest, that’s too modern for me. The older the better! This is my current read.

This isn’t exactly a light read. It’s full of detailed descriptions of the life of the Celts and their movements across Europe and into the British Isles going way back to 1700BC. It’s written in a pretty scholarly way but I still find it enjoyable, because, well….everyone is a dead I guess.

I think what I find interesting about this book currently is that it makes me feel connected to the people who built the Bleasdale Circle in England that I visited back in April. Although my next book will feature the Circle in it, I am not writing in a setting as ancient as Celts. But still I’m finding disappearing into the Celtic moment in history comforting and fascinating right now.

As for fiction I have read it in the past, and I suppose it shouldn’t shock any of you that I enjoy historical fiction. Some of my favorites, that still sit on my bookshelf more then 20 years after I read them are

Anything by John Jakes. It’s been decades since I opened these books but they are some of my all time favorites in historical fiction. They hold a special place of honor on my bookshelf and have been packed up and moved from house to house several times since I last read them. Will I ever read them again? I hope so and I hope I find them just as good as I remember them being.

Oldies but Goodies also include these from Dan Brown. I actually read these when they were newly released. A not so very common occurrence for me. See I don’t buy books like other people do. I don’t walk into Barnes & Noble and head for the “New Release” table. So to have actually read the Da Vinci Code when it was fresh off the presses was a bit of a stretch for me.

My usual way of acquiring books is not to find them at a bookstore. Nope, the most common way for me to acquire a book is to walk into Goodwill and find out what color tag is 50% off that day. Let’s say it’s blue. I then walk to the book section and scan the shelves for blue tags. If I spot one I will pull that book from the shelf and see if it interests me. The majority of the time I buy used books only when they are 50% off! I also buy books at yard sales. The Kennebec Valley Historical Society has a wonderful used book sale during the summer months and I will buy bag loads of books there. The book on the Celts that I’m reading now I got at a library that was giving books away free! We won’t tell Craig how many books I brought home!

Because I’m buying used books the majority of the time it means I’m reading books that are years, sometimes even decades old. Which is the explanation of why, although I’m reading every day, I had no idea who Colleen Hoover was! Maybe I’ll read her books in 2043! This was the case with Outlander by Diana Gabaldon.

I first became aware of Outlander, as a used book, twenty years after it’s original publication! I then quickly read all of the books in the series and was right there as the author’s world began to explode with the Starz TV series and all things Outlander! It was thrilling at first, but as I tend to be more solitary than a follower of the masses, I lost interest in the whole thing once it caught on with everyone else. I’ve held on to these books for two reasons. One they are very good stories and very well written. But the most important reason I’m devoted to Diana Gabaldon is because when I sat down to write The Gathering Room I told myself that I wanted to write a story like Outlander. Not the Scottish, time traveling story but the way Diana writes, keeping you glued to the story page after page. I wanted to write something that a reader couldn’t put down and then was sad to see end because they wanted more! I wanted to write that kind of story because that is what Diana had done for me. I love it when readers tell me they couldn’t put my book down or they can hardly wait for me to finish my next book. Those are the times I think I have come close to the level of excellence Diana Gabaldon set.

Also new to me, but probably very familiar to everyone else is Ken Follett.

I found one of Ken’s books at a used book sale and in reading the back of the book realized it was part of a series. I spent a good hour pouring through all the bins in that barn trying to locate the rest of the books in that series! I haven’t read them yet, mainly because they are to close in time period to the prequel I’m currently writing. I don’t want my mind to be mixed up with someone else’s story when I’m trying to write my own! So I look forward to reading these when I’m done writing!

If I had to pick my favorite book of all time it would be this one. I first read Martha Ballard’s diary years ago. And I’ve returned to it over and over. It literally transports me to the banks of the Kennebec River during the late 1700’s and early 1800’s. For me this book is the perfect example of why we should write and exactly why I write, as I have kept a daily journal all of my life. Martha kept a diary with no other intent then to record her daily actions. Yet those humble pages turned into one of the most valuable pieces of historical documentation on the lives of women during that time period. I love this book.

So there you have it. I’m a morbidly cheap book buyer that prefers non fiction to fiction. When I do read fiction it’s historical fiction. I don’t read romances, trade paperbacks, or a thing I just became aware of, a “cozy”. I don’t read the current best sellers, instead preferring to find them decades later and enjoy them all by myself without all of the hoopla. I guess you can say I’m definitely not with the “in” crowd and I’m obviously very late to the party on most of these! But I like it that way. I have been inspired by some great authors and have written a book that is currently being compared to other great authors. So I’m happy with how things have turned out.

So now the question is, what do you like to read? Drop a comment on one of my social media platforms and let me know!

Quicksand, Not As Much Of A problem As I Thought It Would Be!

Recently the algorithms on social media have decided that, given my age I guess, I need to see all kinds of posts and memes about being a member of Generation X, whatever that means. Despite this obvious recognition of my age, I have enjoyed the walk down memory lane as I see pictures of ice creams on push up sticks, reminders of how we stayed outside until the street lights came on and how utterly bizarre it is, to the most recent generation, that we were babysitting our siblings at the tender age of eight years old.

What really surprised me though was how many posts I saw about being traumatized by the thought that we would be swallowed up by quicksand. It surprised me because I myself thought, as many others have expressed online, that quicksand would be more of a problem in my daily life then it has been!! Clearly by the number of posts I’m seeing I have not been alone in this fear. So how is it that an entire generation become afraid of quicksand?

When I stopped to think about why I was afraid of quicksand I had a vague memory of the 1974 children’s science fiction TV show called Land of the Lost. This show, which aired on Saturday mornings, followed the adventures of Rick Marshall and his two children Will and Holly. This family find themselves trapped in an alternate universe inhabited by dinosaurs, primate type people and the dreaded humanoid/lizard creatures called the Sleestak! I was almost certain that I remembered a scene in that show where Rick and his children are being chased by the Sleestak and Rick falls into a pit of quicksand and there is a desperate attempt by Will and Holly to pull him free before the Sleestak can get to them. But I searched all over the internet and I could not find any reference to this scene. So apparently it wasn’t fear of capture by a Sleestak that terrified an entire generation.

My next thought was that the culprit might be Scooby Doo, I mean Fred, Daphne, Thelma, Shaggy and Scooby were forever being pursued by ghostly or otherwise evil beings that would find satisfaction in them being trapped in a pit of quicksand. Right? But again online searches found only one image of the gang standing in a pit of quicksand. It wasn’t very traumatizing looking, and the monster that probably had been chasing them was also standing next to them. So not very terrifying.

So I decided to search “quicksand scenes from 1970’s TV shows” and that’s when I hit the winner. There I found the meme I have attached above, along with several other grainy photos, of the Skipper from Gilligan’s Island trapped in quicksand. After a bit more digging I also found that quicksand was very prevalent in many of the westerns that we watched. Is it really possible that a quicksand scene or two, from television shows meant that an entire generation would be in fear of imminent death by quicksand? It would appear so because I am not alone if social media comments are any indication! I sat and pondered this thought, which made me think of other things from my childhood, that I was deathly afraid of at the time, but have since completely forgotten.

Things like the Bermuda Triangle. As one influencer on TikTok, who is my age said, “Is this still a thing?” He’s not wrong in asking this question. The Bermuda Triangle, was a geographical area on a map between Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico where numerous planes, and ships all vanished into thin air! I remember being so afraid of the Bermuda Triangle that I did not want to fly to Disney World in 1978 for fear our airplane would be swallowed up by this mystical force and we would never been heard from again. I remember checking books out of the library in Junior High (that’s what we called Middle School back then) and reading every thing I could get my hands on about the planes and ships that had disappeared. Where had they gone? Crashed? Shipwrecked? Or taken by a UFO in an alien abduction? Or even better, swallowed up by a worm hole in space or maybe a portal to another dimension!!! And then suddenly all references to the Bermuda Triangle disappeared, like the planes and ships themselves. Why?

I also remember being deathly afraid of Piranhas. You know the fish that only lives in South America but somehow me as a child, growing up in the far north region of North America, where it is so cold in the winter that it actually hurts your face, thought being consumed by this tropical fish was a real possibility. I lay blame for this fear on the magazine National Geographic. It’s bright yellow cover was very enticing to the child waiting in the dentist office. This magazine had pictures of this terrifying fish. Photographs of their razor sharp teeth blown up and out of proportion! Clearly this was a real threat to my every day life and avoiding freshwater, even this far north, was a better safe then sorry strategy. Funny thing, again I am not alone in my generation of having this fear. I read several comments where others shared that they too were in fear of this fish! How were we all so collectively brainwashed?

Clearly all of these fears, along with the Loch Ness monster, Big Foot and Alien Abductions, have faded from my daily life. I swim easily now in freshwater with no fear of being eaten alive. I travel by airplane across the Atlantic Ocean with no thought whatsoever that I’m not going to make it home. And until the algorithms reminded me of it, as an adult I have never given quicksand a serious thought.

Which makes me wonder about all of the current fears we are being exposed to as adults. Can those of us in Generation X stand as an example to everyone else? From our experience as children we have learned that if we just wait long enough all of these new fears will soon pass away, never to be thought of again. Trust me on this….I have experience.

History Is According To Those That Write It

My children grew up hearing me say the words that make up the title of this week’s blog. “History is according to those that write it.” I started saying it somewhere around the late 1990’s. I don’t ever remember reading that phrase anywhere, although it’s possible that I did. But I think it was more that in my own personal study of history I realized that what is recorded, what we consider “history”, is really based on what someone wrote. Even if it’s just the plain facts, with no emotional investment, it’s still the facts according to the one person that wrote it down. Writers are the recorders of history.

I was reminded of my thoughts on this, how history is perceived according to those that write it, just last week while reading my newly arrived copy of “Archaeology Magazine”. Inside was a very fascinating article on The Bog People. These are the bodies of deceased individuals that have been found submerged in the bogs of Northern Europe and the UK. Some of these people died thousands of years ago, some more recently, well at least recent in historical terms, they died 400 years ago. Bogs, you see, have a unique set of chemical things going on and because of that the bodies, in most cases, as well as clothing and other artifacts are preserved in an exceptional way. Such it was with the body pictured above, Windeby Girl. The photo I’ve attached is an artist’s rendition, you can find actual pictures online of what the body really looks like, if you want to go look. But for me, out of respect to the deceased person, and to those that might be bothered by photos like that, I chose to go with the drawing instead.

Windeby Girl’s body was found in 1952 in a small town in Northern Germany called, conveniently, Windeby. Local workers, harvesting peat out of a bog, found the body and alerted local authorities. It was quickly determined that this wasn’t a recent crime and so the archaeologists were called in. They declared that the body was that of a young girl because she was slight in stature and had delicate features. Her head appeared to have been shorn and there was some kind of blindfold covering her eyes. The research efforts done by the archaeologists included referring to early historical writings done by the Roman historian Tacitus. In the first century AD Tacitus recorded descriptions of the Germanic tribes that populated Northern Europe. Tacitus was a writer, he recorded his observations. His writings became history that other researchers then referred to. History thus became according to Tacitus, the person that wrote it.

Tacitus wrote that these Germanic tribes often executed criminals and transgressors and disposed of their bodies in the bogs. The archaeologist in 1952 formed a theory based on Tacitus’ writings. They decided that Windeby Girl was an adulteress. To punish her, the members of her community, had shaved her head, blindfolded her and drowned her in the bog. They wrote this theory down and it became historical fact. A few years later another body was found in the bog nearby, it was that of a male, obviously the illicit lover of Windeby Girl! This just proved the adultery theory of the archaeologist and it was now all cemented into history. It was written down and it became history.

This history was accurate and accepted for over 50 years. Then in the mid 2000’s, with DNA testing at their disposal, researchers from North Dakota State University tested Windeby Girl and they found out that the body wasn’t that of a woman at all! The body was actually that of a male, a very malnourished male, and that he more then likely died of natural causes. The blindfold over the eyes wasn’t a blindfold at all, according to the new researchers. It was simply some kind of headdress that had slipped down over the young man’s eyes as his head shrunk after his death. Even the shorn head theory was replaced with a new theory that maybe his hair had fallen out because of his physical condition at the time of death, or possibly lost in the bog over the centuries, or maybe even damaged during excavation. Then to totally destroy the adultery history of this body created in 1952, radio carbon dating was done on the other male body thought to be the illicit lover of Windeby Girl. It was learned that he had actually lived 300 years before! So the bodies were in no way connected to each other at all. Windeby Girl is now called Windeby 1, given that she’s actually a guy. And the former lover is now known as Windeby 2.

Was the Roman Tacitus wrong when he wrote down what he knew of the Germanic Tribes in the first century AD? Not at all. He wrote down what he knew and because it was written it became history. Were the archaeologists in 1952 wrong when they determined that two star crossed lovers were put to death for not following the community’s standards? Not at all. They wrote down what they knew, based on their research and knowledge at the time, and because it was written it became history. Are the researchers from North Dakota State University right or wrong in their statements of the two male bodies found in the bog that lived 300 years apart? Not at all. Even if later evidence shows a different theory. The NDSU researchers have written down their findings and it has become history, for now.

Because, after all….history is according to those that write it. So what are you writing?

Find Stuff, Learn History!

Most men have hobbies. Golf. Hunting. Fishing. Model Trains. What have you. But my husband has a rather unusual hobby. He buys old buildings, tears them completely apart, usually leaving just the outside walls, and then rebuilds them. I’ll never forget the day he started on his very first project in 2017. I arrived home from work to find him standing in the second floor of a building he had recently purchased. I pulled into the driveway and got out of my car. There he was waving at me from the second floor of the house next door. The reason I could see my husband so clearly was because he had torn off the roof and most of the exterior wall of the second floor of the building! He was standing in what had once been our neighbor’s bedroom!! The remaining wallpapered walls seeing sunshine like they had never seen before! The whole room now open to the sky. My brain struggled to make sense of what I was seeing, wallpaper shouldn’t be that close to blue sky and clouds. But there stood my husband, in the bright sunshine, waving and smiling at me from the open edge of a gaping hole in an otherwise normal looking house. He was so proud of himself. I could almost hear him saying “Hey Honey look what I did! I tore off the roof!” I had to laugh. It’s what he does, tears stuff apart so he can rebuild it.

When you are tearing apart old buildings sometimes you find some really interesting things. Inside the kitchen wall of our neighbor’s house Craig found a chunk of scrap wood. Written on it in pencil was a date and the words “3 days since Willy died.” Lying beside the wood, in this spot within the wall, were two very old Hershey Chocolate Bar candy wrappers. Craig brought these home to me, knowing full well that I was going to research the heck out of them until I learned the history. The wrappers were from 1906, which matched the date written on the wood. Willy was a young man by the name of William and he had died from diabetes, at the age of only 13 years old, exactly three days before the date written on the wood. So the phrase “3 days since Willy died” was pretty accurate.

Willy came from a very close family. He and his widowed mother were living in a rental apartment on the second floor of a house. His aunt and uncle, and two cousins, all lived downstairs in the apartment on the first floor. It must have been a great childhood growing up with your cousins nearby. At the time of his death though, Willy’s aunt and uncle were building a brand new house just up the street from where they all currently lived. This new house would become my neighbor’s house, and ultimately my husband’s project when he bought it. It appears to me that Willy’s cousin, John, only a year older then Willy, may have sought refuge in the house his parents had under construction after Willy died. In his grief over Willy’s death, John may have wanted to memorialize his cousin in a way. Maybe John had eaten the two candy bars alone or with another cousin or a friend of Willy’s. To honor Willy, John then placed the wrappers inside the unfinished wall, writing his feelings, 3 days since Willy died” and the date on the piece of scrap wood. I’ve often wondered why Hershey Chocolate bars? John would move into this house just a few months after Willy’s death, living there until he became an adult and moved on to his own home. He always knew that his memorial to Willy was silently hidden in the kitchen wall. Did anyone else know it was hidden there? Hidden until the day my husband tore down the wall and found it, 111 years later that is. So as not to disturb this memorial to Willy, I typed up what I had learned of the history and together my husband and I placed that along with the scrap of wood and the two candy wrappers, inside the new kitchen wall when the building was remodeled. I like to imagine someone else finding that story someday and I hope whatever changes they make to the house, they continue to honor Willy’s memory by leaving John’s memorial to him just as we did.

My husband recently tore apart another building and he found more stuff! As shown in the picture above he found a metal advertising sign for the Harvard Brewing Company of Lowell Massachusetts. It’s not in the best of shape, having spent probably a 100 years or so under the sub floor of a house, but I still had to research it. Boy what an amazing history the Harvard Brewing Company has!! In 2020 Ryan Owen wrote a great article on the history of the brewery for his blog “Forgotten New England.” and in 2017 the Lowell Sun newspaper had also done an article entitled “Remember when? Harvard Brewery”. Both of these written histories gave me a lot to think about in regards to my husband’s latest find.

Havard Brewery was started in Lowell Massachusetts in 1893 and appears to have been somewhat successful until the start of Prohibition in 1920. Although they tried to stay afloat financially by selling soft drinks and “near beer” by 1925 the decision was made to restart production of beer and sell it illegally. It didn’t take long for the government to figure this out and there was a huge raid on the plant in Lowell in August 1925. Reading the historical account was like watching a ganster movie in my mind! Federal Agents trying to beat down the front door of the brewery while employees smashed barrels of beer inside, the floor covered in 5 inches of beer. All of this beer flooding down the front steps, washing away the agents who had finally gotten the door open. Barrels full of beer were rolled into the stream behind the plant in an effort to get rid of evidence. Police chasing down delivery trucks in the middle of the night, finding them in cemeteries offloading the illegal beverage to runners who sped off at the sight of the authorities, smashing their cars into ditches and escaping on foot.

Legal problems faced everyone involved with the brewery and eventually it went bankrupt and fell under bank ownership. That was until Prohibition ended in 1933 and beer could legally be produced again. The brewery was reopened and production was full steam ahead for a few years. Until 1941 when the brewery was purchased by an immigrant with a very German sounding name. Although he was born in Lichtenstein, anti German sentiment was strong in the USA in 1941, and poor Fritz Von Opel got caught up in the Enemy Alien Control Program. Arrested while on vacation in Palm Beach Florida with his family, for no other reason then for having a German sounding name, Fritz was charged for being a “potentially dangerous enemy alien.” Under yet another government program, this one the Alien Property Custodian Act, the federal government took possession of Harvard Brewing Company and all of it’s assets.

Fritz Von Opel fought for years to get his business back, all the way to the Supreme Court actually, but the federal government continued to own the property until 1956 when it was finally sold to a private investor, unfortunately that was not Mr. Von Opel. He never did get the brewery back. In 1956 there wasn’t much left anyway, the buildings had been stripped of their equipment. A fire in 1957 destroyed most of the buildings and then the rest were torn down in 1963 to make way for a new Sears store. Today, in 2023, a Target store sits on the lot in Lowell Massachusetts, hiding all of the secrets of the history of the Harvard Brewing Company.

This history is all very interesting, although I find parts of it very disturbing in many ways. But that’s what history is supposed to do, make us stop and think about what things were like before the time we currently live in. Learning history is supposed to make you think, to wonder if people lived in a time really any different from our own? All of this made me think of a t-shirt I saw advertised on line recently. Printed in big text on the front of the shirt it said “Learn History! And realize people have been doing stupid things for thousands of years!” I loved that!

Now that I know the history of the Harvard Brewing Company it doesn’t solve the mystery of how this advertising sign ended up in the floor of a tiny little house, built in the 1920’s, in Central Maine. Did Harvard Brewing distribute beer this far north? Why would you put a metal advertising sign under the subfloor of a house? Unlike the memorial to Willy in the house next door to us, I won’t be returning this sign to the little house. Not sure what I’ll do with it though, doesn’t really match my decorating style. Suggestions welcome!

Did I Embarrass You? Oops Sorry About That!

I read a friend’s post on social media the other day about unintentionally embarrassing her kids. I laughed because haven't we all done this as parents? Reading her description of it brought back so many fond memories of not only embarrassing the heck out of my own children, but of also being embarrassed myself as a child by my mother. I looked up the definition of embarrass…well actually I didn’t really look it up in a dictionary. Instead I just asked my Alexa for the definition, AI does have some advantages! I found the definition of embarrass is to cause someone to be uncomfortable or self conscious, and as a child I remember a couple of times that my own mother caused me to feel this way.

Before I go any further I want everyone to know that I got permission from my mother to share this story. After all, Mom is now an internet sensation following her hiking adventure in the Grand Tetons. So I didn’t want to tarnish her image, but she was ok with my sharing this and I hope I do the memory justice.

My first memory of being totally embarrassed by my mother was in 1979, I was 13 years old, which I guess is the prime time for realizing that your parents are not cool. The Bangor Mall had just opened and Mom took myself and my sister to the Mall for the grand opening. This was a monumental event. Although Bangor already had a mall, The Airport Mall, which had actually been the first mall in the state of Maine, it was small compared to the new Bangor Mall! This new Mall was built on land that had originally been dairy farms. I remember my dad taking me out there as a small child where we would sit on the side of the road and stare at the cows. But now, in 1979, this land right next to Interstate 95, was prime retail space and this giant Mall had been built that would make Bangor the retail center of Eastern Maine. Canadians would drive south for hours to shop here. During the annual high school basketball tournaments in February, you couldn’t get near the place as residents of every small community, within a 3 hour driving radius of Bangor, came to town. For these folks from rural Maine, coming to Bangor, to see their local high school athletes try to win the coveted gold ball trophy, and then go shopping at the Bangor Malll, one just like the malls seen on TV, was a highlight of their year. We didn’t get out much back then.

Into this setting my sweet mother drove Theresa and I to the Mall. Back then Mom drove a 1974 Ford Pinto. You know the one that they recalled because the gas tank exploded if you were rear ended in an accident. That’s the one! This was a really awesome car. It was white with lime green stripping and a massive window in the hatchback. We once got twelve kids from my high school track team squished into this car that technically only seated four. Seat belt rules were optional back then. I remember Matt lying in the back pressed up against that large window in the hatchback while someone sat on his head, it was awesome, but that’s a story for another day.

Once we had arrived at the Mall the place was packed with shoppers. It was wall to wall people. For those that now drive by the practically deserted Mall and see the acres and acres of parking spaces, cracked and growing weeds, believe me all of those spaces were really needed at one time! Into this sea of humanity my mother dragged her two young daughters so we could witness for ourselves this beautiful new concept. The Mall. Sears had moved from it’s ancient brick store in downtown Bangor to be one of three anchor stores in the new Mall. Here everything that the once great and mighty Sears sold, from clothing to lawn mowers, were visible in the vast brightness of modern retail commercialism. Shiny floors, columns covered in mirrors, row after row of over head lighting and gleaming chrome fixtures just made everything sparkle. They even had real trees in pots with benches placed under them. Like you were outside in a park rather then inside a vast retail oasis. We strolled through the Mall looking into the huge glass windows that displayed the goods that could be found within. There was Spencers Gifts with its black light velvet posters glowing enticingly along side the lava lamps and incense sticks in the window. We were forbidden to enter Spencers Gifts due to the adult nature of some of their products, so it thus became a lifelong goal to walk inside some day. There was K-B Toys with more toys then we had ever seen in our life. Imagine a store that just sold toys! There was Dorsey’s Music Store where you could flip through hundreds of bins that held albums of every type of music created. It was here that I started my tradition of buying a 45 rpm record every week, I think they were 50 cents. Across the way was York Steak House, another place that became a weekly tradition. Here I could buy a #4 meal. A burger, fries and a soft drink for $1.49. Always got that burger medium rare.

In the middle of the walkways of the Mall were little kiosks where you could buy sunglasses or jewelry. It was at one of these that I noticed a young girl, sitting in a very high chair, getting her ears pierced. The clerk was using something that looked like a gun. The earring was loaded into this gun and with a quick punch the earring was driven right into the girl’s ear. She didn’t even cry! I marveled at this technology because only 4 years earlier my Mom and her best friend had sat me in a kitchen chair and frozen my earlobes with ice cubes, then driven a sewing needle through my ears to pierce them, one at a time. I cried like crazy! But I lived and my ears are still pierced to this day!

As our stoll through the Mall continued we spotted Baskin Robbins Ice Cream. This was pretty fancy because this was the first time we were exposed to ice cream flavors other then chocolate, vanilla and strawberry. There were crazy unheard of flavors here like Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, Bubble Gum with real pieces of gum in it and even Cotton Candy! It was here that Mom decided to spend her limited funds on buying us a treat. Both my sister and I got cones with two scoops of ice cream on them. I don’t remember now what flavors we got but I do remember there were two scoops on our cones. I remember this because we had just stepped out of the store and back into the coursing stream of people walking through the Mall when I bit into my ice cream and the top scoop fell right off and landed on the floor!

At age 13 naturally I was mortified by this, but what happened next sealed this trauma in my brain forever. As my mother realized what I had done, she quickly pulled out a napkin and bent to pick up the offending ball of ice cream from the floor. The only problem was that just about everyone in Eastern Maine was in the Mall that day and as she bent down amongst the throng of people, someone kicked it!! Now my little ball of ice cream was sent rolling across the pristine marble tile of the brand new Mall. To compound the tragedy of this event, my mother ran after it! Still holding her own cone in one hand, her ever present macramé pocketbook dangling off her shoulder by its long strap, she reached down again, in and around the legs and feet of strangers, in an attempt o retrieve the ice cream ball when it is kicked yet again. I watched in horror as that little ice cream ball was repeatedly kicked over and over, by unsuspecting participants in my humiliation and embarrassment, and my mother scurried, after it, bending, reaching and failing multiple times to pick it up.

When the ball of ice cream had finally cleared the wing we were in and made it’s way into the even more crowded Center Court my mother gave up. She came walking back to us, napkin still in her hand, my sister stood laughing while I tried desperately to pretend I didn’t know my own mother. The unimaginable horror of this event meant I didn’t even want to finish my still remaining ice cream. I was literally sick to my stomach. I remember dumping the cone, evidence of my mother’s deep dive into uncoolness, into the nearest trash can. The Mall no longer held any sparkle for me, I just wanted to slink away, unseen, to the car and go home. How many people had seen my mother looking so foolish? My mother running through the opulent new Mall chasing a ball of ice cream! I mean can you really visualize anything any more embarrassing to a thirteen year old girl?

Why yes I can, because Mom was able to top the ice cream ball chasing incident only a few years later while walking around Boston when her hip started getting a kink in it! A situation we refer to in the family as “Mom’s Ostrich Walk” or “The Strutting Chicken”. Ask her about it sometime! No really you should!

The Future of Books vs What Does A Successful Author Look Like?

Recently I found an unsolicited ad in my email for a product called Grammarly. It was billed as a “writing assistant.” If you go to their website they claim to be a free service that will help you “generate clear, compelling writing while maintaining your unique voice.” they do this by using AI technology. (Artificial Intelligence). This was the first time I had seen a product like this actively promoted. But again I could be late to the game.

This past spring I spoke at a local high school’s Creative Writing class and while talking with the teacher after the class he mentioned AI. He said he was changing his curriculum for the 2023-24 school year because he had recently issued an essay assignment and every single student in the class had used AI to write their essay. He told me that for years teachers have been working hard to help students to become comfortable with computers and be well versed in the use of technology. He said now children are practically born knowing how to use technology, so the shift in his lesson plans will be to focus on teaching the students to use their own minds to think and create things. What a concept!

Recently while writing my blog I noticed a new feature on my website. It’s a little lightning bolt in the upper left hand corner and every once it while it jiggles. Annoyed by this constant distraction the other day I took my cursor and hovered over the lightning bolt. What popped up was “AI (Beta)” I then clicked it and learned that I could use this AI tool to write my blog. Intrigued, I clicked the start button and a box opened up asking me “What do you want AI to generate for you?” So I typed in “Write a sentence that is witty.” And here is what it gave me:

They say money can't buy happiness, but have you ever seen someone frown on a jet ski?

Well now…there you go, if you are a lover of jet skis, which apparently my AI is, I bet you find that truly witty. I, on the other hand do not. Trust me when I tell you, I won’t be using this lightning bolt to write any further blog posts! I struggle with the idea of using AI in the realm of writing. Oh I don’t mind spell check! Seriously I would be lost without it. And I honestly don’t mind those little blue lines that show up under some of my words that indicate I’ve structured the sentence wrong or that I should or should not be using a common. All very helpful! But I don’t know if I’m ready for AI to write my blog or, gasp….books!

The publishing world has already changed dramatically in recent years. Once upon a time the only way to become a published author was to write something, send out queries to agents, be rejected over and over, Dr. Suess was rejected 27 times for Cat in the Hat. Then hope and pray one of the big publishing houses would pick up your book. Then you would appear on the Today Show and be set for life. On a smaller scale you could get a nice journalism degree and get hired by a newspaper or magazine, probably start on the “human interest” stories and then hope to move up to something better. Dream jobs might have included being a weekly columnist in the local newspaper or even better a syndicated columnist! These were the literary dreams I grew up on.

But the literary world in 2023 is a far different landscape and I’ll be honest, I am a beneficiary of those changes. In today’s world you can write a story, publish it yourself, either alone or with the use of a hybrid publisher like I did. If you’ve got drive and determination you can propel your dream of being an author into whatever success looks like for you. Get your book on Amazon and you literally have a bookstore in every town and city in the world. You can reach readers so far flung from your own hometown it will blow your mind! With digital books, like Kindle, you are not hindered by paper costs or page number restrictions, the amount of books you can sell in this way is, well, limitless.

If you have the desire, and not all authors are extroverts and comfortable with doing so, but you can put yourself out there and speak at events about your book. You can become your own publicist and schedule as many events as you want. In doing this you have wonderful personal experiences with readers. Interacting with real people and sharing your passion with them. You can do interviews and get that “Today Show experience” all on your own! Create a blog and you have instantly become a weekly columnist. Writing whatever you want without a deadline or Editor breathing down your neck. Through social media and email you can send this weekly column out to hundreds, thousands or even more potential readers. All without having to print a newspaper or become “syndicated”. And even in today’s world your little book can become “award winning” and recognized on a national scale, even as a self published author. It all depends on what success means to you, because here’s the thing about success in 2023. Success means different things to different people. There is no longer just one standard for success. We are all capable of great and marvelous things and it shouldn’t be pigeoned holed into one concept of what success is. Your success is truly that, it’s yours! And you can make it look like whatever you want it to be.

I am 100% positive that this changing landscape, that I have benefited from so much, is highly irritating to those devoted writers who have paid their dues so to speak. They got the degrees, they pounded the pavement, they took the jobs that started them at the bottom, they did freelance work or wrote under ghost names just to get something published. They worked hard for years to try and realize their literary goals and dreams in the system that they were in. And then here comes a new system and all of these self published authors, interlopers into their world. A world they thought they knew so well, until it changed. Do they feel like we cheated the system? Took shortcuts? That our work is not as valuable as theirs? I don’t know I haven’t asked them.

So it is that I look at AI. It scares me and I don’t want it to upset my little world that I feel comfortable in. I don’t want it to change how we write books. However, change is inevitable in human evolution. AI is going to change everything we do and that includes writing and the future of books. How will I feel, after I spent six years researching and writing my novel, when someone comes along and writes an even better story in half an hour or less? How will I adjust to a world where it takes me literally all week to write this blog post, when someone else can push one out within minutes of when it is scheduled to publish? Will I feel that these users of AI cheated the system? That they took shortcuts? That their work isn’t as valuable as mine?

I hope I don’t think those things. Because those AI authors will be living out their dreams of success in the system that they are comfortable in, just as I did in mine. So I would like to think I will be kind and wish them all well. However, I do worry, from my perspective here at this time, that this deluge of easily accessible content and information that is coming doesn’t flood us in a sea of our own undoing.

The Old Ways

Each week I start out thinking about what I’ll write for the blog and then just when I think I’ve hit upon something really interesting, another idea will present itself and, well, here we are.

Yesterday, as I was hanging laundry on the line instead of throwing it in the dryer, I began to think about this old way of doing things. Have you ever really thought about it? Saving energy by not using your dryer? I do it all the time, hang laundry on the line that is, even though we have a dryer. But I don’t do it to purposefully save energy, that honestly never crosses my mind. I hang my laundry outside because, well that’s what I’ve always done. So if the weather is nice I hang the laundry out. But things were a little different years ago.

As you may know I raised five children and the majority of that time I didn’t have a dryer. Instead I had long clotheslines stretched between trees in the back yard. Or in the winter I had drying racks, strategically placed over the hot air vents in the house. Do you know how many loads of laundry you have to do in a day for a family of seven? At least three, often more! During this time I learned that if the furnace is really blowing, or the wind outside is whipping, as it tends to do in Iowa in summer, you can actually dry a whole load of laundry while the second load is washing! That first load will be all dry and ready to put away by the time the second load finishes washing. And if you are hanging the laundry outside, and you position the button up shirts just right, the wind will blow them like sails, filling the sleeves and blowing all the wrinkles out so you won’t even have to iron them before hanging them in the closet. I learned all of that because I had to. Not because I wanted to save energy or decrease my carbon footprint or help reduce climate change, or any of the terms we hear today. No I did all of that because back then we couldn’t afford a dryer. I was energy efficient by default.

This got me thinking about other household chores that I did without the modern conveniences that today I just take for granted. Like washing the dishes by hand. I raised five children without a dishwasher either. In my household everyone learned to wash dishes as soon as they were old enough to stand on a chair in front of the sink. By the time they were all school age we rotated dishwashing duty on a daily bases. Seven days in a week, seven people that could wash dishes, everyone was assigned a day. Worked great! Until they went off to college one by one and I had to pick up the slack! Recently I read that it’s actually more energy efficient, and better for the environment, to use the dishwasher rather then wash dishes by hand. I found this hard to believe since my dishwasher runs for 4 1/2 hours and I can wash dishes by hand in about 15 minutes. The article I read said that dishwashers use 3.5 to 5 gallons of water. While washing dishes by hand uses 27 gallons of water. What the heck? Who uses 27 gallons of water to wash dishes? Are they bathing in the sink too?

So yesterday, after hanging the laundry on the line I decided to put hand washing the dishes to a test. Could I wash the dishes, by hand, in the same amount of water a dishwasher uses? I decided to go with 4 gallons of water. I unloaded all the dishes from the dishwasher. I filled one half of my sink with 2 gallons of hot water with dish soap added in. I then filled the other side of my sink with 2 gallons of plain hot water. I washed the dishes in the soapy side and then dipped them in the plain water side to rinse and placed them in the rack to air dry. Worked perfectly! Everything was clean and by letting the dishes air dry I didn’t use any electricity at all. I’m thinking the people using 27 gallons of water, to wash dishes by hand, are letting the faucet run while they are rinsing the dishes. I saw my mother-in-law do that once back in the 90’s. I was sitting in her kitchen watching her wash up the dishes that wouldn’t fit in her dishwasher after a large family meal. I remember thinking at the time how much water she was wasting by letting the faucet run like that. Back then I didn’t have a dishwasher nor would I have ever let the water run continuously from the faucet like that, because well, we just couldn’t afford it. Wasting water by letting it run like that was a luxury.

All this thinking about the old ways brought to mind other things I learned to go without as a young mother, not because I wanted to save energy or the planet, but because at that time, we just couldn’t afford them. Things like paper towels. Never had a single roll of paper towels in our house when the kids were young. I used kitchen towels to wipe up messes and then I washed them and hung them on the line. Tissues were another one! Five kids, multiple colds and flu, rarely did anyone use a tissue. Toilet paper worked just as well, pull some off and fold it up, you’ll be fine. Tissues were an added expense that we just couldn’t afford. Back then my grandmother always bought me boxes of tissues for Christmas, the ones with the lotion infused in them! They were like a luxury. Diapers were another matter all together. At one point I had three children in diapers at the same time. And when they were all potty trained I followed that up with two more children in diapers at the same time! I used cloth diapers. Again not because I was trying to save the planet, but because we just couldn’t afford disposable diapers. And things like diaper wipes? Never even used them. I had small washcloths that I got wet and wiped bums with. I carried them around in a plastic bag if we were going out! Washed those with the diapers and hung them on the line. If there are 35 year old disposable diapers and wipes sitting in a landfill somewhere I can honestly say none of them are mine!

Oh the old ways…..maybe going without, was, well….actually better!

And for those that are wondering, yes that is my laundry hanging on the line in the photo above!! This particular clothesline I purchased on Amazon this spring. It has a spiked holder that you set into the ground, pushing it all the way down until it’s flush with the lawn and then the clothesline post fits into that holder. This way you can remove the whole thing and mow over it in the summer. Or bring it everything inside for the harsh Maine winter. It collapses down when not in use, as seen in the photo below. And comes with a cover if you wanted to cover it when not in use or to store it inside for the winter. It holds several loads of laundry and even holds my king size sheets. I love it! If anyone would like to try hanging your laundry outside, you know, to save energy and all of that, this is a good choice for easy installation and doesn’t take up a lot of space.

I noticed while looking at the photo of my. laundry hanging there, that I always turn my laundry basket upside down over my basket of clothespins. Not sure why really, other then that my grandmother told me to do that! Didn’t seem like useless advice.

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.