I Just Can’t Comprehend This!

Photo Courtesy of the Sullivan-Sorrento Historical Society

You’re going to have to sit down for this one! Are you sitting down? I’ll wait. Ready? Ok…you are absolutely not going to believe this!

Most everyone has heard me say over the past two years that I’ve experienced some pretty phenomenal things since I started the journey of publishing my book The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler. Literally I’ve been dragged from my mundane, very logic based world into a world of mystical experiences, the unexplained, the fascinating and the down right what-the-heck-is-happening-here? kind of life. Seriously, I’ve gone from fact and reason to carrying crystals in my pockets. Not kidding you!

I remember last summer I finally crossed over a line where I said to a friend “Ok, these are no longer just coincidences. There just can’t be that many coincidences!” I’ve reached that point of acceptance. If you’ve seen me speak in person you’ve heard me say things like “I’m no longer in control of my own life!” or “There is a power in this book that I don’t understand.” or “This book is on a journey all of it’s own and I’m just along for the ride!” Oh and what a ride is has become!

Two weeks ago I let everyone know about my latest adventure, Pleasant Hill Campground. When I’m in the office greeting arriving campers I always make sure to tell them we are the new owners and I hope they enjoy their stay with us. This inevitably leads to the next question “What made your family decide to buy a campground?” I explain that I was working as the Advertising Manager for the Maine Tourism Association when I decided to self publish a story I had written. You know print a few books for the family and friends. It went viral on social media, won 4 national book awards and now sells all over the world thanks to Amazon. I quit my job last year to focus on experiencing a book tour and now here I am General Manager of the family campground! Then I point out that my book is for sale right here in the camp store!

Shameless plug. But if you know me you know that marketing and sales strategies literally course through my veins!! This has led to several copies of my book already being purchased in just the first two weeks the campground has been open! Captive audience clearly! Readers who are reading my book right here in the campground have something that most of my other readers don’t have. They can come and talk to me about the book while they are reading it! Think about that! You are reading a book and the author is walking by you! You can ask her anything! I thought the book tour last summer was fun, this is so much better!!

This past weekend, during a couple of these conversations, and then a bit of digging on Ancestry.com, I realized I had something truly bizarre happening here at the campground. I had two very special people staying here! One of them was a direct descendant of Abner Blaisdell, Lydia Blaisdell’s father. The other one was a direct descendant of George Butler.

Let that sink in!! I wrote this book, that seems to have a life of it’s own, a power of some kind, and then randomly actual descendants of the main characters show up at my campground on the same weekend. A campground that wasn’t even on my radar when I wrote the book, let alone even last year! One step leading to another, to another, to just one more weirdly strange event. Unbelievable!!

I sat last night with a friend marveling over this bizarre turn of events. What a coincidence! Except I’ve come to realize there are no coincidences anymore. There can’t be. Coincidences require statistical logic and I moved past that months ago. I reached up and rubbed the piece of protective oak my friend Connie gave me that hangs around my neck. This is no mere coincidence. That’s when my friend pointed out another thing that I might want to consider in all of this.

I chose to write my second book about the Blaisdell family and in doing so had to travel to England for research. I traveled to Lancashire, to the origins of the Blaisdell family. My next book begins their story in the 1400’s right there in northwestern England. I learned later, after further research, that in the 1200’s the Butler family actually owned the land that the Blaisdells would live on 200 years into the future. The land I stood on in 2023. The land I researched and wrote about. The Butlers and the Blaisdells, two families connected together as far back as I can tell, to medieval England. Two families that in the 1700’s would be drawn together in Maine by the incredible story that some believe to be the first documented ghost sighting in America. A story that I fictionalized in 2022 and now in 2024 I find these two families brought together again, by my book, by my campground. As my friend pointed out, “Michelle you are clearly the epicenter of whatever these two families are locked into.”

Epicenter of what though? What is it that these two families have going on? It’s 2024, I’ll agree that I’m caught in the middle of something happening now, but what about the previous 800 years? I wasn’t around for any of that! Or was I? Depending on your belief structure I guess I could have been involved in this all along or brought into this now for a purpose that I just don’t understand. Yet? Ever?

Over the past two years as I’ve met people, marveled at strange happenings, met Butler descendants, met Blaisdell descendants and seen things unfold that just seem to incredible to imagine I’ve often exclaimed that I feel like the odd man out. I’m not a descendant of either of these two families. I have zero connection to them, their origins in England or their final settlements here in Maine and yet my life is obviously being intricately intwined with theirs!! Why?

As I texted a few close friends about having Butler and Blaisdell family members in the campground over the weekend, a couple of them texted back with these words of caution. “If the ring shows up you should probably get out of there!”

Hahahahaha…. now that’s funny!

Moose Gray & The Internet Trolls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Many Closets Does One Really Need?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are You Just Happy All Of The Time?

I remember once someone asking me “Are you just happy all of the time?” The comment caught me off guard because, at that time, fifteen or more years ago, I was struggling with alot on my plate and if someone had just straight up asked me if I thought my life was a happy one I may have had to think long and hard before I answered. But this was a different kind of question. Was I happy all of the time. That answer was easy and immediate, YES!! For the most part I am happy all of the time. Doesn’t mean that my life’s journey has always been a happy one, I’ve had ups and downs just like everyone else. But I strive to be happy every day, no matter what is happening around me.

So when I saw the above picture on social media the other day it caught my attention. I read over the 7 Quick Tips for Happiness and thanked my lucky stars that I was raised by a mother who also chose to be happy every day as well as a grandmother who lived by these seven items even though she was born in 1910, long before the list would have showed up on social media. My gratitude for the women who raised me is very deep. From a very early age I was taught that your attitude is everything in life. Whether it was that tough love phrase that all of us born in the GenX generation heard “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about” or my grandmother’s motto “Keep your peace.” either way I learned that how I managed my emotions, my attitude, played a significant role in how I perceived my life. That’s the key word there, perceived. No one’s life is perfect. Everyone has struggles, but how you perceive your life is the key to your own happiness.

These seven tips really are the key to happiness. You don’t need me to explain these things to you, they are all pretty self explanatory and who wants a preachy female telling them how to live anyway! Right? But what I will tell you is that I have applied all of these things in my life, on a daily basis. Some I excel at, like ignoring what people say about me. Others I struggle with, the letting go of things. My brain is wired to overthink everything! But it doesn’t matter that I’m not perfect at all seven of them. What matters is that I try every day to achieve them and because of that I am happy all the time, I truly am!

I want to share a quote with you that I found twenty years ago. I think it goes well with these seven tips that just appeared to me this week. The quote I keep taped to my wall where I can read it all of the time. Maybe you will find it beneficial as well.

“The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important then the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company, a church or a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past, we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the string we have and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you…we are in charge of our Attitudes. ~ Charles Swindoll

Have a great day! Be Happy!

Why Do I have This?

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about my efforts in helping a friend with their family history research. In that post I made the point that not all information can be found on the internet. Yes the internet is a vast data bank of easily accessible information, but not EVERYTHING is there. There is a lot of really important documentation, particularly pertaining to family histories, that hasn’t be digitized yet or is written in an old letter sitting in someone’s attic somewhere. Little did I know three weeks ago that I was writing about myself!

I’ve recently moved, but before doing so I thought I did a pretty good job of culling items so as not to move unnecessary things. I weeded out all of my books, which was a monumental task. I made the hard decisions on things that were nice to have but not really vital to my survival. I made a lot of donations to my local thrift stores before everything was packed. However, this week, as I was still unpacking boxes in my new home, I came across a cardboard flat that not only contained items that I can’t believe I brought with me, but that I have no recollection of packing in the first place. Heck I don’t even remember ever buying them!

For those that might not understand, a cardboard flat is like the bottom of a cardboard box. It’s only about 2 or 3 inches high. Usually used in retail stores, these would have held three six packs of canned beverages. Or maybe a dozen or so of canned vegetables or something like that. In this case my cardboard flat is from Anheuser-Busch, which I find very funny as I don’t drink beer! So this must be the original flat these items arrived at my house in. But how that happened, or when that happened I have zero memory of! And I’m still amazed that these passed the “important enough to take to the new house” test. When I mentioned this odd situation to a friend it was pointed out to me that my life lately has been just one odd situation after another anyway! Why should I be so surprised that a mysterious box has decided to attach itself to me? Point well taken! So what is the reason for this box? My friend said “There must be something in there that you need to write about.” Interesting concept!

I found this cardboard flat in the box full of my old journals. Again I have no memory of saving it when I was deciding what was coming with me and what wasn’t. Obviously my journals were important enough to be brought to the new house, but this cardboard flat was laying on top of all of the journals. Like I had placed it in the box last. The flat is full of old handwritten letters most dated in the 1860’s. There are also hand written deeds, like the ones in the photo above, that date to the 1840’s!! There are also pages of someone’s family history, hand written on the most delicate of paper. Clearly very important family history items, but here’s the thing, it’s not my family!!! In fact I have no idea whatsoever who’s family this would even be!!! All of these records and letters come from the town of Canaan, Maine. A town I have absolutely no ancestral connection to, in a county that I have no ancestral connection to, in an area of Maine that I have never even lived in myself! Why in the world would I have a box of historically important documents from Canaan?

A slight hint comes from a typed sheet of paper that the deeds from 1848 were folded inside of. It says “Lot #1 - This auction includes four original documents from the Moore estate. Please read the descriptions carefully and email me with any questions before bidding. All items come from my smoke free home. Please check out my other auctions as there are multiple original documents and genealogy from this estate.” Clearly these items were purchased from an online auction. But did I purchase them? If I did I have no memory of it. And even if I did, why would I? Again not my family history! Did someone else purchase them and give them to me knowing my love of history? Possibly, but given my love of history and the fact that I was living only about 30 minutes away from Canaan for the past ten years, and that I’ve spoken at the Canaan Library regarding my book The Gathering Room, I would have thought I would have had ample opportunity to deposit these items in their rightful home!! It still makes no sense why I brought them with me while moving away! If you know me you know how meticulous I am, trust me when I tell you my packing and moving was just as meticulous as everything else in my life. This mystery box is mind boggling!

As my friend noted, there must be something in here that I need to write about, so I randomly chose a few of the letters and will share some of them with you. Because maybe, just maybe, my purpose in all of this is to get this information on the internet!! Maybe something in one of these letters is exactly the missing piece another researcher is looking for sitting with their laptop on the couch scouring the internet until midnight looking for the answer! Who knows! Anything is possible right?

Dec 10, 1864

Dear Mother & Father,

I want you to come down here just as soon as it comes sleighing, for I want to go home with you and stay until Charley comes up after me. I want Father to get my furniture ever so much. I have to sleep up in an open chamber for want of a bedstead to put downstairs and it is cold enough to freeze the tail off a brass monkey. And then I want you to come and make me a visit. I want you to leave things so as to stay a day or so if not more. I want you to bring my page and eardrops and that yarn you were going to spin for me. I am going to learn to spin next summer and then I am coming home to weave it with you. We will see who will make the best cloth and suppose you think you can. But I will give you a try, I’ll be now what do you think of that old lady? I must close now, come just as soon as you can in the sleigh. — Mary (unknown author it was in the papers belonging to the Stephen Moore estate)

Canaan, October 28, 1867

To Mr. Silas M. Barrett,

Dear Grandson, your kind letter of May the 12th is now before me the contents of which affords me much consolation in this distressing hour. To hear of your own and your beloved wife and son enjoying good health without which a profession of other earthly things would be much depreciated. Also to know that your beloved Mother with her family connections were well. We had written to Stephen in Kentucky, a letter dated April 1, 1866 and this letter was returned to Elder Parsons which he…….

Letter written by Stephen Moore to his grandson Silas Barrett, it was never finished and never sent.

South Natick, Massachusetts October 14, 1863

Dear Brother, Sister & Friend,

It is long since we have had communication yet I hope these few lines will reach you and find you all enjoying comfortable health at this time. Mr. Dredge is quite unwell, with a severe cold, but through the summer he has been well as usual. Taken care of the farm, gathered in the harvest and got through with ——ing, so I think we have been much favored. His cold is getting better, I think will be well in a few days. We received a letter from sister Martha which I enclose for your perusal. It is altogether so good and so acceptable. I forward it to you knowing you will derive much satisfaction in it. And as I could not have the satisfaction of seeing you this summer I enclose my representative, they tell me it is a good likeness. It was taken last week. I intend sending one to England that our friend there might be enabled to discern the difference between now and then. My health has been very good this summer. Mrs. Dredge is much the same as usual. She sometimes complains of increasing infirmities, but I think we are all wonderful blest. We are all advanced in life. We have large and long experiences to communicate and I am thinking it will take an eternity to recollect and repeat all the goodness and mercies our God has bestowed on us all along through our long lives. We as a family are scattered far and wide yet I believe in answer to the prayers of our dear departed parents that we shall be gathered in to the fold of Christ. I have been accustom to think of and look to you as an elder brother who has large experience and well qualified to instruct and enlighten and guide the inquiring mind. I had hopes Brother Philip would have vistied us before this. I have not yet given up thoughts of seeing him this season and yet hope he will come. If he comes he will visit you in Maine.

With kind regards your affectionate sister,

H.M. Greenwood

This letter was written to Stephen Moore in Canaan Maine from his sister Hannah (Moore) Greenwood in Massachusetts. Hannah was born October 29, 1791 and was 72 years old when she wrote this letter. The reference to Mr. and Mrs. Dredge is another sister Mary (Moore) Parafit Dredge. The reference to sending a photo to England is because most of the family were still residing in England. Of the thirteen children that included Stephen Moore and his brother Philip and his sisters Hannah, Mary and Martha, all were born in England and about half of them immigrated to America in the early 1800’s.

It always fascinates me to read old letters. You learn so much with just a few words. Like there really was a thing as “sleighing season”. Since the letter was written in December, I’m guessing there still wasn’t enough snow on the ground to use sleighs. That’s interesting!! And in October 1867 Stephen Moore must have had some stress in his life as he called it his “distressing hour”. I think I’m going to use that term more often! And I find it very interesting that at the beginning of commercial photography someone would refer to a photo of themselves as a “representative”.

I will be taking these items to the Canaan Library the next time I am in Central Maine, for this is where they rightfully belong. Maybe someday the mystery will be solved as to how they came to be in my possession in the first place or why I didn’t part with them when I moved. But for now, I”m just going to add this to the long list of weird things that keep happening to me!

I Know You Are Cute And All, But…

This week I’d like to introduce you to my chipmunk. That’s him, or her, as I really don’t know, in the picture above. We have a bit of a history together. Or I’m assuming we do as I think it’s the same chipmunk I’ve been interacting with, but I’m not sure. Let me give you our history.

Early last Fall I had the door open because it was a beautifully warm day, and in Maine we try to capture as many of those as we can, especially in the waning days before winter blows in! I had the door wide open because there was no screen door. Yes I knew I was letting in flies, and probably a few other insects, but it was a small price I was willing to pay to let in as much fresh air as possible. What I didn’t even think about was that my open door apparently was an open invitation to this little critter to come on in as well!

I stood in a room to the side of the door, with my face looking downward at my computer when I caught a glimpse of the chipmunk as it cautiously made its way through the open door and into the building. I’m not a fan of rodents! And I know I’m treading down a path of disagreement with a lot of you on this, but hear me out, chipmunks, no matter how cute, are just bigger mice in my opinion. Somewhere between a mouse and rat. A slightly plump hamster, which I also can’t stand, or a mini guinea pig, also a no no in my book. I get it that they appear all cute and cuddly but I don’t like them. I have a friend who posts annually on social media photos of his chipmunk he has aptly named Chippy. I’m not sure if his chipmunk is the same one every year, but he thinks it is and that’s all that matters. Phil if you are reading this, I’m sorry. My love hate relationship with my chipmunk will never allow me to give it a name.

When I spotted the chipmunk inside the building I immediately ran towards it. Hoping that it would turn around and run out the door it had entered which was only a few feet behind it. Logic would have deemed this the best course of action. Turn around and exit quickly via the way you came in before the crazy lady screaming at you gets any closer. Clearly my chipmunk is not logical. Instead, he or she, decided darting into the interior of the building even further was a smarter choice.

This situation now became a stand off between the two of us. The chipmunk cowering behind a table and a few chairs, me standing there staring at it trying to figure out if I could get across the room to the broom. Because for some reason a broom seemed like a logical solution to me! Clearly this chipmunk and I are more alike than I want to believe. I will admit to speaking to the chipmunk, although I’m sure my words were not kind. Probably ran along the lines of “Well you little bugga! You can’t be in here!” All the while he/she is probably thinking “Well you left the door open!” After a few minutes I decided that the broom was the logical solution and I made a dash to my right to try and grab it. Chipmunk then made a dash to his/her right and ran into another room!

Faced now with the chipmunk having moved even deeper into the building I headed straight for the door of this third room, brandishing my broom before me. “You little son of a ——” I did not finish the sentence because right at that moment, as I swung the broom before me and reached for the handle of the door, convinced the little thing was probably hiding behind the door, Chipmunk decided that the best defense was an overwhelming offense and it literally came flying at me from behind the door! I’m still traumatized by what I witnessed. All four arms and legs were outstetched as it leapt into the air right at me. It’s mouth open so I could see it’s razor sharp teeth. It too yelled at me, more like a screech but if I could translate what he/she was saying into English I’m pretty sure it was similar to the words I myself had already uttered! I retreated quickly from the room before the claws that I could see at the end of those cute little “hands” could sink into my flesh. Chipmunk had won. I resumed my place in front of my computer, keeping one eye on the open door and after about 15 minutes or so Chipmunk nonchalantly walked out of the building tossing a quick look of accomplishment over it’s shoulder at me. As if to lay the ground rules for how our relationship would be. My only thought was game on Buddy! Game on!

So it did not surprise me when I spotted said Chipmunk again at the end of February. Sitting on it’s hind legs at the edge of the driveway. It watched me as I got out of my car. Pretty sure at that exact moment we both had the same thought “Oh it’s YOU!” Clearly my chipmunk is of an aggressive nature because the first thing he/she did was to actually come into my house a few days later. And not through an open door this time! Trust me I am not leaving any doors flung open in March in Maine, no matter how warm our winter has been! No Chipmunk wanted me to know that this was his/her terrain. That I was the invader here. I was the one clearly unfamiliar with the hierarchy and rules of this place. Chipmunk came in through a hole under the basement door. It was then that I spotted the tell tale signs that my house was not my own, no matter how brave I thought I was, broom or no broom.

For the next several days Chipmunk and I stared each other down across the property. The warmer spring like days gave me ample opportunity to be outside and I chased Chipmunk out from around the house several times. Even spotting a hole in the ground near a rock wall that I thought might belong to it. So I stuffed it full of rocks. There! Take that! I felt like a victor! I also felt more in control as I searched Amazon for traps and bait. Add to Cart! Our relationship had clearly taken a dark turn.

Then just a few days ago, as I was out walking the property, Chipmunk and I came face to face. When I say face to face I am not kidding. As noted in the picture above the little bugga was perched in a tree. A tree that I had my eye on and had been purposefully walking toward for a reason. it was an old apple tree and had been on my radar for a while. I was out to mark this tree specifically, so to find Chipmunk in it was only a bonus.

I came to within inches of this tree and Chipmunk never even flinched. Convinced I believe that he/she has the upper hand, that I had retreated last Fall in fear. That I am actually only a guest in my own house as Chipmunk was safely ensconced in the insulation of the basement wall long before I arrived. Said Chipmunk has reached a level of over confidence that will be his/her undoing.

As I stood there staring at it, he/she staring back at me, I was so close that if I had a mind to I bet I could have reached out and petted it’s fuzzy adorable little head. I did not have a mind to do that! It did not move as I reached into my pocket for my phone. So confident that if it just jumped toward me I would run away, it stood its ground on the tree. That’s when I noticed there was a hole in the tree. Ahhhh this tree was it’s home! Maybe like a summer place when Chipmunk is not spending winters in my basement! I snapped a few pictures of Chipmunk before sliding my phone back into my pocket.

I then spoke. “I see you are not afraid of me at all are you?” I asked it, it’s beady little black eyes watching my every move. “Maybe we got off on the wrong foot.” I said soothingly. “Let me introduce myself.” I said moving even closer to the tree, I was surprised that Chipmunk still didn’t move. “I own this place and subsequently I own this tree!” I said reaching forward to wrap the bright orange marking tape I carried with me around the tree. Chipmunk jumped down at that point and scurried into the under brush as I continued to tie off the tape that indicated this tree needed to be cut down. I yelled into the trees in the direction that Chipmunk had run. “I’m cutting down this tree buddy! Cutting it down!”

I’m sure this is not the end of my interactions with Chipmunk. Just as I’m sure I am probably dealing with more then one chipmunk! This is going to be a battle of epic proportions.

I’ll keep you posted!

Am I Protected From Darkness?

I’ve often said that I’m a historian who accidentally wrote a book about a ghost. That’s so true when it comes to my book The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler. From the beginning The Gathering Room was a historical book for me. It was only after the book became such a hit within the paranormal community that I began to really think about ghosts, spirits and specters.

For the majority of my life I have never given ghosts much thought. Oh sure, at summer camp as a kid I listened to the stories around the campfire. Every summer, even into my adulthood, I would wander around Fort Knox in Prospect, Maine and try to see a ghost, as the place is reportedly haunted. I never had much luck. I’ve stayed at the Lucerne Inn near Dedham, Maine another place reputed to be haunted, I never saw a ghost there either. I’ve taken countless ghost tours while traveling or visiting other areas. Nope no ghostly experiences for me! I was with my daughter on one of these tours in the city of Alexandria, Virginia a few years back. Towards the end of the tour, as we stood in a graveyard, darkness fully engulfing us, my daughter cried out as she was certain someone had touched her on the back. We were standing away from the rest of the group and there was no one near us. Sadly if she did have an encounter with an otherworldly being, I missed out on that too.

I’ve spent a lifetime wandering around cemeteries. My earliest memory of going to a cemetery for enjoyment, and not because of a death or a remembrance occasion, was for my 16th birthday. I had just gotten my driver’s license and a brand new camera for my birthday. I drove my friend Nancy to Mt. Pleasant Cemetery in Bangor, Maine and proceeded to take photos of really amazing gravestones, sometimes with Nancy posing in front of them. She was a good friend. Since that day I have returned to cemeteries over and over as a place of comfort, solace and peace. While others claim to have seen spirits or ghosts floating around in cemeteries I have not ever seen a thing. My first husband used to tell me that the reason I liked being in cemeteries so much was because all of my friends were there! Interesting thought, and he may not have been too far off. I will admit to a love of researching people who have lived before my time.

The closest I feel I have ever gotten to experiencing anything in a cemetery was when I moved to Waterville, Maine after marrying my second husband. Trying to get settled in my new community I sought out the local cemetery. I needed to re establish my routine of daily walks in a quiet cemetery. I asked my husband and a few people at my new job where was the best cemetery for a walk and I was told Pine Grove Cemetery. In fact the majority of my new husband’s family were buried there, so this seemed like the perfect spot! Unfortunately this proved not to be the case. On my very first visit there I was confronted with the most uncomfortable feeling. An uneasiness that settled over me the minute I got out of my car and walked a few feet into the cemetery. At first I attributed it to the fact that I was in a new city, a new cemetery and unsure of my surroundings. Naturally I had chosen the oldest part of the cemetery to walk in and at this end the area was covered in ancient white pine trees that blocked out the sunlight. I didn’t do much of a walk that first day, hurrying back to my car as the feeling of foreboding was so strong I wasn’t getting the relaxed walk I wanted. I tried two more times that summer and each time I got out of my car the sense of dread and just something bad would flood over me. It was the strangest thing I had ever experienced because cemeteries were beloved places! It was very odd that I could not get comfortable in Pine Grove.

Fast forward about 10 years and I was now a member of the Waterville Lions Club. As a spring volunteer project we were gathering at Pine Grove Cemetery to pick up the hundreds of sticks and branches that had fallen from the trees over the winter. Our job was to create piles of sticks for the city crews to come clean up later. Surrounded by my friends, and certainly not alone in the cemetery, I honestly never gave it a thought that my earlier feelings of discomfort would return. But return they did! The whole day I felt something that I can only describe as fearful. Clearly there was no reason to be afraid, but I couldn’t shake the fear at all while I hurriedly picked up sticks so I could get the task done. It was then that I decided there was “something” in that cemetery that I was not supposed to interact with. An energy, a being, a force, I don’t know the words to describe what might be there, but it was very clear to me that I was never to go back to that cemetery again. That cemetery, Pine Grove, was not my place of refuge. Instead I found my happy place at the Hallowell Cemetery in Hallowell, Maine. This cemetery too had an older section with giant white pines blocking out all of the sunlight. It even has a weird fountain with 13 goat heads that spit water out of their mouths and have those almost satanic looking eyes engraved in detail! I have seen homeless people in that cemetery. Drug addicts and even a woman passed out on the grass that I had to call 911 for. But I never once felt uneasy there. Never once was I afraid to get out of my car like I felt in the Pine Grove Cemetery in Waterville. There is something evil in that Waterville cemetery, I truly believe that.

All of this came back to me this week while speaking with my grandson. Not sure how we came upon the subject but he asked me if I thought Grandpa’s house was haunted. Grandpa being my first husband who still lives in the home we raised our children in, a home that he himself was raised in. I thought back to when we first started dating forty years ago and I would go to his house. I have vague memories of his sister and brother talking about sounds or things that they had seen in the house, but I never gave it much thought, not being very interested in ghosts after all. Even after we married and bought the house from his parents and moved in, I never saw or heard anything myself, but as my children got older, my daughter in particular would tell tales of a man that walked around at the top of the stairs of the second floor. She called him Desmond. She’s very artistic, a creative, prone to a magnificent imagination, so maybe I chalked it all up to that. I was a family history researcher, a lover of history, a lover of cemeteries, I was a stay at home mom during those years, so I was in that house more than anyone else, Certainly if there was a ghost in that house I would have seen it right? I never saw or heard anything.

But now, in speaking with my grandson, I realized this was a third generation that was questioning if there was a ghost in that historic house on French St. in Bangor, Maine. I asked my grandson if he thought Grandpa’s house was haunted. He readily admitted that he too had seen a man on the second floor. He told me that he knew his Aunt had seen this man and my youngest son, his Uncle, had told him that he too had seen and heard things in that house growing up. Why did I not know this? Why did I never see anything?

So this week I’ve thought long and hard about this. My life is not without it’s fair share of unexplainable experiences. I can start with my book The Gathering Room, a book that has truly changed my life! That whole experience is truly unbelievable! But I’ve also experienced feelings of things, like within the Pine Grove Cemetery, or my most recent experiences in England while being in castles. But none of my own experiences have ever involved physical senses, like seeing a ghostly apparition or hearing the things that go bump in the night. And I can honestly say, other than Pine Grove Cemetery, which felt more like a warning than anything else, I have never felt uncomfortable in the experiences I have had. I have always looked at my experiences as an affirmation that there is more to this life then we understand and that we are watched over. Whether your belief is in God, Angels, Spirit Guides or what have you, my experiences have always given me that feeling that I am loved, protected and watched over.

If you have even a limited knowledge of the paranormal you’ll know that the theory is there are good spirits and evil spirits. I’ve also read the theories that you can pick up evil spirits and bring them home with you. Either from visiting haunted places or from something as simple as purchasing an object at an antique store! It’s also said that the more you dwell on these things the more you invite them into your life. In examining my own life, and especially the past year and a half, as the ghost of Nelly Butler and subsequently the Blaisdell family, have consumed my life, it would appear I’m prime for a paranormal take over! And yet I have seen nothing.

This thought has made me wonder, am I protected in some way from the darkness that lurks in the paranormal realm? And if I am, why? And are there others like me? People who live like I do, with a foot in both worlds per se, but never quite cross it into truly seeing a ghost? I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject! Drop me a comment on social media or use the contact form on my website to let me know what you think!

Why Would They Put That In The Newspaper?

Recently I was helping a friend with their family history research. We literally sat for hours scrolling through websites and running down rabbit holes of online searches. “Back in my day” (I find myself saying this a lot to my grandson lately) family history researching with a friend meant a meet up at the local library or possibly a day trip to Augusta to the State Archives. Those were always fun trips because you got to eat road trip food and pack lunches to sneak into the library.

I remember one such trip where the person I was traveling with was an experienced researcher at the State Archives. I was instructed beforehand that we would not be taking a break for lunch. The plan was to work straight through the whole day. So lunch on that day was a sleeve of saltine crackers I had hidden in my research bag. Where I would reach down and pull out one cracker to nibble on. Hopefully unnoticed by the library staff because food was not allowed in the State Library!

Now, in the twenty-first century, researching with a friend means that you sit on the couch, both of you with your own laptops open. You tag team as you scour the internet for information. There are no longer any set hours for researching. None of this only researching between nine to five. Instead I don’t think we even got started on researching until 7 o’clock in the evening. Long after midnight we were still at it. Somewhere in there I had gotten up and walked the few feet to the kitchen and grabbed us a snack or two of cheese sticks and maybe an apple. Although the internet has made access to all kinds of information much easier, in a way it has kind of taken the fun out of things I think. I could have used a really good road trip!

As the two of us sat there that night, running down dead ends and hitting a few brick walls, it became obvious that we were not going to find the information we were seeking on the internet. The truth is the internet doesn’t have ALL of the information. That’s a fact. What we were seeking probably exists somewhere in a dusty old book that hasn’t been digitized yet, or possibly in an old journal, a letter or a family Bible sitting in someone’s attic. The answer is out there, of that I’m certain, it just hasn’t made it’s way to the internet yet! Because of this, after a few hours our interest began to wane and while I sat with my head lolling backwards on the couch, my friend was doing one last check of Ancestry.com.

It was while looking over their own profile that my friend spotted an Explore tab on their profile. “Hey, what’s this?” came the question. I raised my head and tried to open my eyes, as sleep was so close, and if you know me, you know, midnight is a good six hours past my bed time! But open my eyes I did and I saw my friend click the Explore tab! Right before our eyes the screen filled with dozens of images. Most all of them were irrelevant, but somehow the internet Gods, or algorithms had paired my friend’s name with just about anything it thought might be remotely related to their name. Here it all was, just a click away! My friend scrolled down a bit, both of us laughing at the things the algorithms had chosen. But then my friend spotted something actually pertinent, it was a newspaper article from the home town they had grown up in. “Hey I was mentioned in the newspaper!”

I leaned over to get a closer look just as my friend clicked on the image and realized a subsciption to newspapers.com was need. We were in luck! I just so happened to have a subscription. So as I pulled up the website on my laptop and entered my login information, my friend continued to marvel over the fact that they were mentioned in a newspaper. Suddenly I heard. “Wait a minute, this is when I was two years old! Why would I have been in the newspaper when I was two years old?” Ooooo the mystery deepened!

Soon I found the newspaper article and we both stared at it on my laptop. “Well why in the world was that put in the newspaper?” my friend asked me after we had read the article. “That seems really strange.” I had to admit, they were not wrong. This was not the kind of thing you expect to find when you realize you were mentioned in an old newspaper.

Right there before us was the headline: “The following individuals were admitted and/or discharged from the local hospital this week.” This headline was followed by a paragraph of names of people who had all been admitted to the hospital. The second paragraph, the one containing my friend’s name, was a list of names of everyone that had been discharged. I asked my friend if they remembered any family stories of them being in the hospital when they were two years old, because clearly there was certainly no memory of their time in the hospital. Sadly no family story had been passed down either.

As a researcher and historian I have read enough old newspapers to know that a lot of things were considered news that we wouldn’t expect to see categorized as news today. Wedding and birth announcements of course, but also there were often mentions of social gatherings, even private ones! The entire guest list would be printed, often alongside what towns these guests had come from to attend the event, what food was served and even what some of the ladies wore who attended. It was always the ladies who’s clothing choices were mentioned, never the men. Just sayin.

There were columns devoted to who in town had relatives or friends visiting from out of town that week. I love it when I find these and it tells me not only where the guests had traveled from but what they did for an occupation in their life and why they were visiting the local person to begin with. These little tidbits are often just the thing you need to find that will make someone’s family history come to life rather then just be names and dates on a page.

Before HIPPA Laws, it was very common for newspapers to publish stories about someone being sick or injured, especially if it were sensational or scandalous. My all time favorite was an older gentleman who had fallen from a rafter while trying to dismantle a barn. The news article stated he had broken his arm but also “fractured his skull and has been senseless for four days, but is recovering.” It’s not every day that an 80+ year old man fractures his skull, is senseless for several days but manages to recover. This article was picked up and published across five different newspapers in Maine believe it or not. Sadly for the man, he did not recover and died from his injuries.

As my friend and I shut down our computers and prepared to call it a night, I pointed out that it really wasn’t that strange for the list of names to be printed in the newspaper. In our world today we are still publishing private, almost confidential information like that. Rather then it being broadcast by a newspaper, people today are doing it themselves via social media. Think about the things that happen in people’s lives that they so willingly put out there, sometimes for the public to see but if not public certainly for their couple hundred or so of “friends” to see. It’s totally plausible that someone today would bring their two year old child home from the hospital and happily announce on social media that they were home recovering. Or how many posts have you seen that state “Had a great time with friends last night!” tagging everyone that was with them, maybe even tagging the place they were at. This post will usually have several photos that shows what food was eaten, who was there and what everyone was wearing! All the details of a private social gathering, from attendees to food, put out there for a vast network of people to see.

Think about it. Not much has really changed!!

Is That A Want Or A Need? Don’t Ask Such a Silly Question! It’s A Book For Crying Out Loud!

I was having a conversation with a friend today regarding how much “stuff” is too much “stuff”. It might be part of the aging process. I heard my own mother and grandmother say on several occasions that they were cleaning out so there wouldn’t be so much for “you kids to go through” after they were gone. Maybe sitting back and evaluating the material items you have accumulated over the course of your life is a natural progression on this journey. My friend and I are about the same age, so maybe we are looking at things with the same perspective. .

I recently had the opportunity to cull through a lot of things that I thought I absolutely had to have at the moment I purchased them. What I found was that most of those things were not needed at all. They had merely been things I wanted but didn’t really need. It all reminded me of something I used to say to my young children when I was trying to teach them to be financially responsible with their money. “Is this thing you want to buy a NEED or a WANT?” Clearly over the past few years I had spent a lot of money on things I didn’t really need. Because when it came time to take stock of my “stuff” I realized most of what I had wasn’t important to me.

Himalayan salt lamps. Just to throw a random item out there. I had two. Swear to the treetops I needed those! The one that sat on the mantle in the the living room, giving off a soft glow at night, kind of had a purpose, made it easier for houseguests staying in the spare bedroom to find their way to the bathroom in the middle of the night! The wire basket with a lightbulb in it, full of chunks of the pink salts. That looked really cool on the corner of my desk! But I’m not sure it was doing anything else beyond that. I mean the online theories tell you these salt lamps purify the air and remove negativity. I can tell you I have now lived without any Himalayan salt lamps for five months and I’ve noticed no difference in my positive outlook on life!

Bath poofs are another. You know what I’m talking about, those nylon balls of fluff that you squirt body wash on in the shower. Now there’s an item that one could say really does have a purpose. Most certainly falls into the need category for some people. What I found when going through my bathroom closet was that I must have hit the motherlode of a sale, because I had a bag of 20 of them stuffed into that closet! Twenty!!! Why? I can’t even remember the last time I used body wash! When it really comes down to it, I’m a bar of soap and a washcloth girl. So a well intentioned need, wasn’t really that after all. It turned out bath poofs were nothing more then a “I’m a body wash kind of girl” want that never materialized.

My friend and I were having this discussion on stuff as we left a really wonderful gift shop. Honest to goodness the things in that shop were the cutest ever and for about half a moment I thought of dropping some serious money to buy up all of that cuteness and take it home with me. I mean after all, the salt lamps, bath poofs, as well a many other things, are gone, I’ve got room to start over!! Thankfully though I did not buy a single bit of all of that cute “stuff”. It is after all, just “stuff”, and when you sit down and really have to make a take it or leave it decision on your “stuff”, you find that you really don’t need much of it at all.

Unless it’s a book. Or in my case, books! It seems that the culling of “stuff” didn’t exactly extend to books in my life. Boxes of books actually! I could not part with books that I read almost thirty years ago, have not opened since, but you know I might! I just might actually want to read that book one more time before I die, so that book was kept. As were books I bought five or ten years ago and still have not read, but you know, I might! I wasn’t going to part with a book I haven’t read yet! That would be a waste! It became quickly apparent to me that, at least in my life, there is “stuff” and then there are books.

A want might be a Himalayan Pink Salt Lamp or a teal colored ball of nylon to wash with, but a need was a book! Books are most definitely a need because within their pages you can go anywhere, become anyone, do anything! There cannot be a greater vehicle for making your life magical then a book. Books are magic. I’ve learned first hand that one book in particular was so magical that it had the power to change my life. Yes that’s a shameless plug for The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler but it’s also the truth. Literally one book changed my life. For me at least, books will always be a NEED and never a WANT.

Now the raven lamp is another story…… I said I was working on this “stuff” thing, I didn’t say I had mastered it yet!

A Dishwasher, A vacuum And A TV walked Into A Room….

I think I’ve mentioned several times that I basically live under a rock, unaware of how quickly the world is changing around me on most days. Despite a career in marketing and advertising and despite a year and a half going through a social media frenzy with my book “The Gathering Room- A Tale of Nelly Butler” and all that has followed because of that…I really do feel old and out of touch on most days.

Take for an example my week this week. I found myself in need of having to purchase a few bigger ticket items. You know those kind of household gadgets, gizmos and appliances that we don’t buy often, or at least I normally don’t. They are the kinds of things you buy on an “as needed” basis. Well, this week it appeared I needed several of them all at once.  

First up was a new dishwasher. I remember my grandmother had a friend who had died in the early 2000’s at the age of 101. When they sold her house, all of her appliances from the 1940’s were still running and in excellent condition sixty years later! They were pink too! Wouldn’t it be awesome to have all pink appliances now? I would love that! But alas, not only are today’s appliances not pink, they also don’t last for sixty years either, so enter a new dishwasher into my life.

Thankfully a very capable appliance man came and installed the dishwasher for me, but as he prepared to leave he handed me the booklet and I noticed a giant QR code on the front cover. “Just scan the QR code and you can set up the dishwasher yourself.” He said to me. Set up the dishwasher? Didn’t he just do that by hooking up all of the hoses?

I quickly thumbed through the booklet and realized that although I had bought this model because I was thoroughly impressed with the added jets under the utensil basket and the really cool third shelf, this model also came with “Wifi and Smart Assist.” Why do I need Wifi on my dishwasher? And what is Smart Assist? Isn’t it smart enough already that it washes the dishes while I’m sleeping? Let’s just say I did not scan the QR code. A dishwasher should just wash the dishes not access the internet.

The dishwasher that connects to the internet was followed the next day by a new smart TV. Now, I do understand that TVs must connect to the internet, and my grandson, who is 14 I should add, assured me that the TV I bought was very easy. “You just basically plug it in Gigi and it will connect to the internet all by itself!” Now that sounded like something I could do. I will admit I struggled a bit with the Styrofoam and getting it out of the box, but finally it was plugged in and came to life.

On the screen was a giant QR Code with the instructions to scan the code to finish setting up  the TV. All of a sudden this didn’t seem like the TV was going to be doing this by itself. I was being forced to scan the QR code or have this large piece of electronic equipment sitting idle in my living room. With my phone I scanned the QR code and twenty minutes later, after entering a credit card number, my Apple ID and password, selling my first born son and agreeing to Terms & Conditions that no one ever reads, the TV was connected to the internet. I also had the added benefit of feeling tremendously exposed. Like all of my devices were now connected but I somehow got the sense that they had all known each other for a long time and were just adding the TV to their little friend group and I was the outsider! At that moment I really longed for that 12 inch black and white TV from my childhood. The one with the yellowing plastic shell that had rabbit ears antenna on it. The one we wrapped aluminum foil around in hopes of getting a better picture. The one with the horizontal hold button on the back that my sister and I took turns holding so that the picture wouldn’t jump all over the screen. I never felt like that TV was watching me or talking to the phone that hung on the wall in the kitchen. I wondered if my dishwasher felt left out.

The final straw for me came this morning when I opened the box of my new vacuum. Pasted inside the box was a large sticker with, you guessed it, a QR code! At this point I should probably tell you that I have a thing for vacuums. In my early adulthood, when money was tight, I was known to take vacuums apart and replace parts from other ailing vacuums. I had quite the closet full of vacuums and vacuum parts! Good old fashion New England ingenuity kept my house clean for many years.

So as I stood there staring at the vacuum in the box I was certain that I did not need a manual let alone another blasted QR code to explain to me how to put this thing together. What shocked me the most about this QR code though was that it was for downloading an app to your phone! Now I’m not opposed to apps, I have many of them on my phone, but my vacuum does not need to be connected to my phone. There is nothing that an app for a vacuum could add to my life at this moment. There is an app for a vacuum? I had reached my limit on modern technology!

As I walked through the kitchen I passed by the dishwasher and wondered if I should introduce it to the new vacuum. Smart or not, I decided I wasn’t going to do that! I then placed the new vacuum on it’s charging dock in the hall closet and closed the door. As I turned to walk away I spotted the TV in the living room watching me. Silently recording that not only had I not properly introduced the vacuum to all the other gadgets in the house but I had also denied wifi access to this new comer, same as the poor dishwasher.

I suspect I’m now on “a list” somewhere.

Support A Self Published Author Today…And No, I don’t Mean Me!

I don’t usually post a photo of my own book The Gathering Room on my blog. But today seemed appropriate, and it’s not for shameless self promotion. I have a thing or two I’d like to say about writing and publishing a book. Let’s just say I’m a little hot under the collar about this one! Thankfully I have my own website and I’m going to use it!

As I’m sure all of you are aware I am a self published author. In April of 2022, when I started my journey of getting what I affectionately called “my little story” published, I had never even heard of self publishing. It should be noted that I more or less do live under a rock, so I was still thinking the only way to get a book published was to query to an agent, get rejected and then hopefully find someone to publish your book. But the world is a different place in the 21st century, as I was soon to realize. The world of self publishing has opened up avenues of opportunity and experiences for millions of would be writers out there. People just like me who grew up as book lovers, always dreamed of writing a book of their own and now they can!

This self publishing world is filled with different ways of bringing your dream to life. You can literally go it alone and do everything yourself or you can elect to use a hybrid service, like I did with Maine Authors Publishing. If you choose to go it alone and do everything yourself you can truly publish whatever you want. There is no one standing over you telling you your content won’t be appealing to the masses. Or this needs correction or that should be done differently. You alone are in charge of everything from the writing to the editing to the layout. Write it, print it, get it in electronic form, get it out there into the digital world and hope someone reads it.

In my case, using a hybrid service, my manuscript was vetted, similar to traditional publishing where someone checks it first. It passed the “this will sell” test. Then there was editing, revisions, meetings with a graphic designer on the cover, the layout and then it went off to be printed and magically appeared on Amazon (thank you Nikki because I can honestly say I could not have figured that out myself!). Either way the process is exhausting, stressful, and most of all expensive. When you are a self published author you are carrying the financial responsibility of the whole project yourself. This is often why you will hear people comment on how self published books are of an inferior quality. Both in product design and also in content. Self published authors all have real jobs, where the bulk of their take home pay is going toward living expenses! Whatever they can scrape up to make their dream of publishing a book a reality is a sacrifice. Sometimes they have to cut corners. Use a lesser quality paper or choose to edit their book themselves, rather then hire a professional, to save money. Yes sometimes those choices make a less then perfect book, but it’s their dream they are living and they are beholden to no one except achievement of their own goals. I’ve met self published authors who took out second mortgages on their homes, used their retirement savings, or took a second job to cover the costs. Being a self published author is not for the faint of heart. You have to be one strong willed son of a gun to be able to do this!

This brings me to why I’m actually writing this blog this week. One of the very first things I experienced as a self published author was walking into a library to donate a book, yes donate a book for free, only to have the librarian roll her eyes at me, take my book, set it aside and not give me so much as a thank you! I was crushed! This experience was followed by requests from several people online that I get my book into a specific local independent bookstore. I approached the book store twice, on two different occasions, only to be rebuffed. This I was to find out, was going to be my new normal in lots of book stores. And even after a year of the book being out there, with a phenomenal sales record and winner of several prestigious national indie book awards, I still had another librarian reject my offer of speaking about the book in her library and she coldly told me “there are so many of you self published authors and so many of those awards that it means nothing.” Let me just tell you I quickly learned who my “tribe” was and who wasn’t, and the ones that fall into the “not my tribe” category might surprise you. But for all the bookstores, gift shops and libraries that do stock my book you have my utmost gratitude!!!

Now I’m not telling you this for you to feel sorry for me. Please don’t, I am having a tremendous experience and I’ve sold thousands and thousands of copies of my book, here in Maine, across the country and around the world. I am not your typical self published author nor is my success typical. I’m telling you this because it is reflective of what other self published authors face every day and they don’t have the success rate that I have to fall back on for courage. I follow many self published authors online and if they sell one book in a month they are thrilled. And I see post after post of the struggles they have trying to gain respect for their work. This was never more evident to me then in a conversation I had with someone just a few days ago, and why I decided to write my blog about this.

In this conversation I was asked if I knew another local self published author. I in fact did know them, which was unusual because as noted above anyone with determination can publish a book now so there are thousands of us just here in Maine! But I did know this author and when I confirmed that I did, I was asked if I had read their book. I had read it and said so. The person I was speaking with then asked me if I had liked it, but before I could answer they launched into their own declaration that the book was awful and then proceeded to tell me of having this exact same conversations with others, who they named specifically as if I would be impressed by this, who also thought this book was awful. I was stunned because this person speaking to me, of all people, should know that not every book is for every reader. That we all have different tastes and that is why having a variety of books is wonderful! Writing is art and art is subjective. And the “others” that this person spoke of, I had already figured out were not part of my tribe, so their opinion of my fellow author’s book fell on deaf ears!

But what bothered me the most from this conversation came from my perspective as a self published author. I know what this fellow author went through to make their dream a reality. I know the struggles and I know the joy of what it feels like to hold that finished book in your hand. See your name on the cover, that feeling that you are now a real author. At that moment it doesn’t matter if the book is good or bad, you achieved your goal. This person I was speaking with has never published a book, and I doubt very much would have the strength to do it. They appeared to be content sitting on the sideline of Life throwing out criticisms to the people who were actually Living! It just irked me to hear them bash someone who had set a goal, worked hard to attain it, taken a financial risk and were now living their dream.

Books by self published authors are just as valuable as traditionally published books. They are full of hopes, dreams and passion, just as traditionally published authors instill into their books. Self published books are pure, unfiltered, sometimes raw but does that make them bad? I’ve read some traditionally published books I thought were pretty awful by my personal standards. Is the quality of self published books inferior? I am reading a traditionally published book right now that I have found lots of grammatical errors in! To the point that I ask myself, did anyone edit this? Are there to many self published books and self published authors flooding the market? Walk into a big box bookstore, who generally don’t carry self published books, how many books do you see in that store? Thousands of traditionally published books that’s what you see. It’s a vast market, there is room for everyone.

The only difference between a traditionally published book and a self published book is the perception of what is valuable. That perception needs to change. For the sake of all self published authors, but specifically my friend who was so brutally raked over the coals. So I’m asking you, can you try and locate a self published author in your area?

And I don’t mean me, I’m good! Really!

Find another self published author to support. If you can’t find one ask me, I know several! But find them and buy their book, post a review online, follow them on social media, let them know you are inspired by what they have accomplished! Find the tribe, join it with me! There is no reason for this much negativity toward one another, it’s tough out there and we all need to be a little more kind.

Bacon!!! It’s Either All Or Nothing For Me!

Photo Credit Pinterest

I’ve been housesitting in a condo for a friend for the past couple of weeks. You know there is a huge difference between going about your life in a building you occupy all by yourself. And then trying to maintain your usual habits in a building full of other people. I learned that the hard way.

My first weekend here I decided I was going to treat myself to bacon for breakfast. My husband eats bacon just about every day, so it’s not like I am unfamiliar with bacon. I just don’t share his devotion to the meat and therefore it is more of a treat for me then anything else. When we first met he was cooking his bacon in the microwave on a paper plate covered with a paper towel. Despite his efforts I still found the microwave oven needed constant attention from all of the grease. That’s when I bought him one of those “As Seen On TV” nifty little Microwave Bacon Cookers! He loves it!

Growing up my mother cooked us bacon, usually on Saturday mornings, or Sundays if our Saturdays were to busy. Mom cooked the bacon in her cast iron skillet. I remember she poured off the grease into an old coffee can that she kept under the kitchen sink. I asked her once why she was saving it and she said “In case we need it.” Seriously have no memory of us ever “needing it” and I don’t think she ever used it!

I cooked bacon for my kids when they were growing up. Bacon for a family of seven is a lot of bacon! I cooked my bacon in whatever frying pan happened to be laying around and was clean. With a house full of five children your priorities take on a different tone, survival being the most prominent, so it really didn’t matter to me what I cooked bacon in, as long as it was cooked.. Because of who I am, I cooked my bacon on HIGH, frying it up quick, fast and extra crispy, because of the million other things I had to do. I usually burned my bacon along the way, causing the kids to cough and having to throw open the windows while the smoke alarms were blaring. No one really complained, they got fed, we all lived.

Thus this brings us back to my first weekend here in the condo. Honestly my personality hasn’t changed much over the years, so I’m still prone to doing things fast, always rushing ahead of myself. So into the pan went a couple slices of bacon, knob on the stove turned to HIGH and I moved on to popping an English muffin into the toaster and making a cup of coffee. That’s when I realized the kitchen was filling with smoke from my bacon. Seemed normal, until I realized I wasn’t in my own home! What happens if you set off smoke alarms in a building full of other people? I frantically began looking up trying to locate the smoke detectors, not really sure if I was planning on popping the batteries out of them like we did in the “old days”. What I found was they were obviously hardwired smoke detectors and there was also a sprinkler system! My propensity to burn my way through bacon could have disastrous effects, in someone else’s home, if I didn’t learn to slow down, like right now!

I quickly switched off the stove, shoved all the bacon down the garbage disposal, ran the water on full throttle and flipped the switch to the disposal. I had killed the source of the smoke, but there was still a cloud hovering in the kitchen, and beginning to float out into the open concept layout of the condo. My first thought was to open the windows, but there are only two windows in this condo and they are in the bedroom. There’s an exterior door off the living room and an interior door off the kitchen that accesses the common areas of the building. Yup you guessed it, I flew open both of those doors. Standing there in my big fluffy robe with the giant pink roses on it, fanning the door to the interior hallway back and forth while the door to the exterior was letting in the cold air of a nice February morning in Maine! Pretty sure I looked ridiculous, but at that moment I didn’t care. I had saved the entire building, I was good with that.

So this past Sunday, as I stood staring into the fridge, knowing I had to eat up as much of this food as possible before I left in a week, I was faced with the remaining bacon. I decided I could do this, I could cook bacon without smoking everyone out. So I laid the remaining slices in the frying pan and turned the knob to MEDIUM. At first it began to sizzle pleasantly and I was pretty proud of myself for mastering the art of slowing down. Look at me being all zen-like with bacon! I cooked two eggs in another pan and toasted my English Muffin to perfection. The smell of coffee filled the kitchen and as I took a sip out of my cup, I glanced down at my still partially uncooked bacon in the pan. It was sizzling yes, one might even suggest that it was getting crispy on the edges, but my eggs were cooling on my plate, the English Muffin, losing that fresh out of the toaster feeling and yet the bacon did not seem to care.

A few minutes later, as I sat at the kitchen table eating my eggs and English Muffin, sans any bacon, the whirl of the garbage disposal just now fading away. I realized it was a worthy sacrifice. Bacon I believe is over rated. Apparently I don’t have time in my life for bacon. It’s either all or nothing with me, and in this case, it was nothing.

You Have Far more Strengths Than Weakness

Long before I wrote the award winning book The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler, I was a genealogist, a family history researcher. I hate to say this out loud, because it makes me feel very old, but I have been researching families, my own and others, for 40 years now. Forty years of stories, of uncovering the past, of digging into history to find forgotten or purposely buried bits of someone’s legacy. If you haven’t already surmised during your time here on earth, let me be the first to tell you, there is no such thing as a “normal” family. I’m not even sure why, at this stage in human development, we still strive to attain whatever we think “normal” is. If history is any indicator, it’s an elusive goal.

This was never more evident to me then this week when I was working on a family history project for someone. The bits and pieces I began collecting were, to say the least, traumatic, absolutely horrifying in the emotional turmoil that I could sense must lay behind the cold hard facts listed in the documentation. As I’ve said often in describing my efforts at fictionalizing historical events, I am ever mindful that I’m dealing with real people. Such was the case this week as I sifted through the remnants of what could only be described as tragic. There were real people behind these names. Real people with real emotions, real struggles, real hurt and real lasting pain.

In speaking later with the person for whom I was researching the term “generational trauma” came up in our conversation. I first became aware of this term a few years ago from my daughter who works in the mental health field. I found her description of it interesting and began to ponder my own immediate generations and how their lives had all unfolded. Fascinating. But as a family history researcher my thoughts went further back, beyond my parents, my grandparents and even my great grandparents. Before I knew it I was well into the 1400’s and I had found one traumatic event after another in each generation. I remember saying to my daughter, “We really are a family of overachievers. We’ve been messed up for over 600 hundred years!”

From substance abuse to suicides to unfaithful partners that tore marriages apart. To parents that died young leaving children adrift to family estrangements that lasted 50 years. In one case the parents dying without ever knowing that their son was in fact alive, well and living only a couple hours from them. There were out of wedlock pregnancies, marriages that were denied between young lovers based solely on religious differences. Newborn babies given away to extended family members, the mothers shipped off to far away places expected to start fresh. Sexual preferences that were suppressed in a time less open then ours is now. There were men marrying women who were already pregnant with another man’s child, yet raising that child as their own. There were men returning as war veterans with the associated PTSD we know of today, that brought emotional instability and violence into their homes. There was poverty, food insecurity, and hardships beyond anything we can fathom today in a time without government services. And all of this was just in the past 100 years!

Looking back even further into my family tree I found loss and trauma from the Civil War, on both sides of the conflict. A murder in a moonshine deal gone bad, and its associated prison escape and ultimate death of the accused in a gun battle with law enforcement. I found a woman literally snatched from her home and carried off on horseback in a hail of gunfire in what can only be accurately described as a shot gun wedding! I found a ship’s captain who’s own wife died while he was away at sea. The crushing sadness and emotional trauma causing him to take his own life by walking off the deck of his own ship, sinking into the depths of the sea, on his next voyage, all of his children now orphans. A woman who gave birth to twin sons with one of them, Daniel, dying shortly after birth. Not uncommon in her time period, but she continued to name 3 subsequent sons Daniel, all of them dying within a year of birth, before she finally gave up using the name. Who was Daniel and how much did she love him? Another young woman married at 14 years of age, giving birth to her first child at age 15, again not uncommon in her time period. What makes her story stand out is over the next 20 years she gave birth to fifteen children and then died of a heart attack at age 35. Fifteen children with no mother. Imagine the emotional instability in that household.

And on and on the stories went, through men killing other men with their bare hands during the Revolutionary War, to early settlement of New England and the loss of life from unexpected brutal attacks. To immigration in a new world and one ancestor in particular who appeared so often in the court records of the Plymouth Colony, for terrorizing his own family and others, that it was obvious he suffered from mental health issues. (side note, he had such an unusual name that I used it in my next book!) From there we go back to medieval England and the difficulties and barbarism that we know had to have existed in every day life. Although the paper trail became more and more sparse the further back I went, it was evident to me that “normal” had been replaced with “traumatic” in every generation of my family.

This deep dive into the concept of generational trauma within my own family showed me that clearly LIFE in general is traumatic for everyone, in every generation. As the saying I so often see on social media states, “Be kind to everyone you meet because you have no idea what they are going through.” This proves to be so true when you look at the lives of your ancestors, the generations that came before you, beyond your immediate relatives that you are familiar with. Everyone, in every generation suffers through something. Our time is not unique.

And as is so often with me, while I pondered these thoughts this week I stumbled across another quote. “As you focus on clearing your generational trauma, do not forget to claim your generational strengths. Your ancestors gave you more then just wounds.”

I loved that! That’s why I’ve put it in bold print! It’s so true, because among all of that trauma in my family tree were people who survived. Who did hard things and overcame them. Who settled a brave new world, Founders of many of the towns in Maine that some of you call home. They battled though loss, difficulties, abuse, trauma, all of it to create lives for themselves, that although difficult, were productive lives just the same. In my family tree I have leaders of national organizations and leaders in industry, renowned religious leaders, medical professionals and ordinary folk who shaped the future of the communities they lived in. There are musicians, artists and now even an award winning author.

As I sat and thought about this, ancestral strength, the flip side to generational trauma, I realized it was all down to how you perceive the life you are living. As I’ve said so many times, I believe we create our own realities. You can either focus on the negative or you can focus on the positive. The choice is yours. Trauma is real, many people now and in the past will and have endured it. The take away here is, none of us are alone, everyone traverses a similar road. Kindness, positivity and understanding will serve us all well.

Keep Your Peace, You’re Going To Outlive Him Anyway.

That’s my grandmother in the photo. She was 102 years old when that photo was taken. The one thing I remember most about my grandmother was she was full of great advice. Advice that she had learned, not from the internet, not from an Instagram reel, not even from an advice column in the newspaper. No my grandmother doled out advice she had learned from years and years of experience. Turns out she was pretty spot on!

Nanny (that’s what we called her) would be the first one to tell you she had an amazing life! So often I heard her say that, “I’ve been very lucky, I’ve had a good life.” That’s the first piece of advice from Nanny that I want to share with you, gratitude, because if you looked at Nanny’s life on paper, the bits and pieces of her actual life, it wouldn’t look like she had been very lucky. But lucky she believed she was! Thankful she always was! And she was always positive in the face of some of life’s most difficult challenges! Which probably is the reason she lived to be 102 years, 7 months and 1 day when she finally passed in 2012. When she passed she was the oldest resident of Houlton Maine and the last surviving class member of Houlton Hight School Class of 1928.

Nanny was born in 1910 in far northern Maine. She was the oldest of what would be a family of 8 children, but not all of them lived to adulthood. Her parents never owned their own home. Never owned a car, she being the very first in her family to learn how to drive! She remembered when electricity was installed in their house, one single light bulb that hung from a cord dangling from the middle of the living room ceiling. She remembered taking baths in the big galvanized tub her mother filled with hot water in the kitchen. She remembered her mother feeding the “hobos” (homeless) from the back door, giving them a little of whatever she had but always a slice from the bar of soap. She remembered her father’s handlebar mustache that he waxed and twisted the ends tight and turned them upwards. She came from a far different world then we live in now. But yet her gratitude and her determination to stay positive are timeless.

Nanny’s first disappointment in life, or at least the one I’m most aware of, happened when she was just 12 years old. She was already the older sister to two little brothers and a little sister when her mother gave birth, at home, to a baby girl that died shortly after birth. As Nanny told me about it, “I watched my father lay that little white coffin in the hole he had dug under the pine tree on the front lawn of our house.” In 1922 twelve year old girls were a lot more responsible and mature and adult like then we would expect a girl of the same age to be today. I’m sure Nanny was already helping with the care of her younger siblings, household chores and more acutely aware of what was happening emotionally in the household. I’m sure the house was filled with her many aunts, her mother having a plethora of sisters, but it still must have been a traumatic experience for a 12 year old.

The following year, really only 11 months later, Nanny, still only 12 years old watched her mother give birth to another baby girl at home. This one too only lived a few hours and then Nanny watched her father bury another white coffin under the pine tree on the front lawn. You have to imagine that the death of two babies within a year would have somehow touched Nanny’s young life, left it’s mark in someway. But as she always said, “I’ve been very lucky, I’ve had a good life.”

In 1930, at the age of 20 Nanny married a very dashingly handsome young man. This man, my grandfather, was from a family of all boys, five of them! And as Nanny used to tell me when she would look at my four teenage sons “Your boys get their looks from your grandfather and his brothers. They were all very handsome men!” My grandfather was handsome, I’ve seen the photos from the 1930’s! He was always dressed to the nines, he sported a fancy dress coat, hat and the finest shoes wherever he went. Even though he died when I was only 10 years old, I always remember my grandfather being impeccably dressed. His shoes shined and his hair slicked back. Along with his very debonair appearance came his charismatic personality! My grandfather could talk to anyone! People were drawn to him! He just radiated an energy that made people want to listen to him! He was a traveling furniture salesman during the Depression. Imagine going door to door with doll house size samples of furniture and convincing people to buy furniture when the economy was at it’s worst! But he did and he was very good at it, eventually providing for his family in a very upper middle class way, where he bought a house in one of the best neighborhoods.

Sadly though my grandfather had his demons. He drank alcohol, a lot. Nanny used to tell us stories of how he got very drunk one day and painted himself into the corner of the porch and had to sleep out there all night. Or the time he took apart their car, with all of the parts, nuts and bolts strewn all over the lawn, to drunk to put it all back together until the next morning. Which he somehow did! The other side to my grandfather I only heard about in innuendo, or vague comments from the adults in my young life. Let’s just say I don’t believe my grandfather was always faithful to my grandmother. I also don’t think he was a kind or gentle man. Oh he was to me! I have nothing but loving memories of my grandfather, but I suspect he ruled that house with an iron fist, just a hunch. When I was in my 30’s, and struggling as I went through a divorce, I asked Nanny why she had never divorced my grandfather. She said it was because in her day women didn’t have the same opportunities that women had now. But then she said “I’ve been very lucky, I’ve had a good life.”

Nanny raised three children of her own. I’d like to think as children they were good kids, at least I hope they were! Because as adults they were far from angelic. From their own struggles with alcohol and drugs, to multiple failed marriages, to criminal rap sheets that were printed in the newspapers back then for the whole world to see, and then ultimately losing a son to suicide. It couldn’t have been easy. She faced the loss of some of her own biological grandchildren, through divorce, that she never saw again. And had to accept the addition of step grandchildren that floated in and then out again once those marriages failed. But through it all she would say “I’ve been very lucky, I’ve had a good life.”

For 102 years she kept telling herself that despite everything that was happening around her. Nanny never once gave in to what some would consider a crushing round of blows! I never saw my grandmother sad. Even when she should have been, she would always find the positive side of the situation and made sure to mention it to me. When my grandfather passed away after they had been married for 45 years, she moved on to the next phase of her life. She spent winters in Florida with her girlfriends. Was always there for her great grandchildren, and then the great great grandchildren. She attended sporting events and knitted mittens. But most memorable of all to everyone, was the treat that it was to sit at her kitchen table and have her serve you graham crackers and a glass of milk. Everyone still talks about that.

As a young wife, when I would have spats with my. husband, she’d tell me “Keep your peace, you’re going to out live him anyway.” I always laughed at that. Statistically she was correct I suppose! But “Keep your peace.” that was always her greatest advice, “Keep your peace.” What she was really saying was at all costs keep yourself calm. Manage your stress. No matter what is going on around you, keep your inner self calm and you’ll get through just about anything. It most certainly must have worked for her, because we know now that stress can be a contributing factor in an early death. When you think about what she dealt with for the majority of her life, and yet she lived to be 102, perfectly healthy, never even needing so much as an aspirin, she clearly had mastered the art of keeping her peace! But you know, she was very lucky, she had lived a good life!

As I was preparing to write this blog this week I asked my sister if she had any photos of Nanny that I could use, as everything of mine is currently sitting in a storage unit! She sent me the photo I used at the start of this blog but she also sent me this one. Nanny is in the black and white dress, that’s her friend Natalie beside her (and probably Natalie’s husband Don taking the photo) and that’s my grandfather. These were the days before just graham crackers and milk were served. This was when Nanny served coffee and cookies on the fine china! That’s her Friendly Village dishware set! This is when half and half for your coffee was poured into a creamer and not just the carton thrown on the table, even if it was just your best friends and your husband sitting around with you. But what struck me most about this picture was that I can generally tell the year it was taken. Which means that myself and my sister are now older then our grandparents were when this picture was taken. I made sure to point that out to my sister. She texted me back “No way!!!” Yes way! We are now older then Nanny and Grampy were sitting around this table!

We can all be this lucky and live a good life. I say it all the time, “We create our own realities”…..pretty sure I learned that from my grandmother!

And The Prequel Is Finished!

Fair Snape Fell, Bleasdale, Lancashire, England

If you haven’t heard from the posts that went out on social media this week, let me be the first to tell you…. I finished writing the prequel this past Monday night! Two days ahead of my self imposed deadline! Well actually a whole month ahead of my original deadline, but more on that later. The manuscript sits at 117,132 words, but with edits and revisions that will change. For reference The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler in its full published form, is around 121,000. So from my standpoint I’m just about spot on! The prequel will be close in size and scope to the book that inspired it!

I can’t tell you the sense of accomplishment that I felt Monday night when I finally typed the words “The End”. Getting to those two simple words had taken me just shy of 18 months and a journey filled with a whole bunch of weirdness, unimaginable experiences and a trip through the history of Lancashire England that I never imagined I would enjoy in my life! I can’t wait to see where this book goes from here. If you’ve heard me speak in public you will know that I often say that The Gathering Room is on a journey all of it’s own making. That the book decides where we go and who finds it, that I am merely the person who drives it around, just a spectator in this odyssey. The prequel gives me that same vibe, of something boiling just below the surface. A story that is going to ignite a wave of energy that will take it to places I never even dreamed of. To be honest it excites and scares me at the same time!

Over the past year and a half I have been asked many questions about the prequel, some I’ve answered some I’ve deferred. Below I hope I have answered everything you might want to know, including a title! For those of you who have been supporting me on this journey since the beginning some of this you may know, some will be a surprise! For those of you who have just joined me, this will bring you up to speed. I hope it gives all of you a little more appreciation of the book when you finally hold it in your hand!

So what is the prequel about? The prequel is the origin story of Lydia Blaisdell’s family. If you have read The Gathering Room then you know that Lydia Blaisdell is a real person who found herself caught up in a moment in history that some people consider to be the first documented ghost sighting in America. What fascinated me about the history of the Blaisdell family as a whole was their origins in an area of England that was considered charged with supernatural activity and ancient beliefs. The genealogical history of the Blaisdell family was incredibly fascinating when I began to delve into it. The family originates from an area in England with an ancient ritual circle, similar to Stonehenge, and has an arrival in New England story that just begged to be written. As was the case with The Gathering Room, I am ever mindful that these were real people, making their mark on real history. Yet I write fiction, I always want to make that clear. I write fiction based on historical happenings, but it is still fiction. The prequel is not an actual history of the Blaisdell family and it should never ever be consider as such. If you want to know that there are numerous Blaisdell genealogical websites to look into.

The historical case for Lydia Blaisdell to be involved in something supernatural was incredibly concrete so I fictionalized her character according to the historical record. With the rest of Blaisdells, the historical trail was a bit more subtle in regards to the supernatural. Trust me when I say the research I did was like finding little gems hiding in plain sight, but there was never that concrete, direct link to any of them like there was for Lydia. They. just always seemed to floating around in close proximity to strange happenings! So in respect to those real Blaisdells who walked through history, and all of the Blaisdell descendants today, I introduced more fictional characters into the prequel so that they carry the supernatural parts of the story, leaving the real life characters more as observers of the strange happenings around them. Similar to the way it appears in the historical records themselves. In the end you cannot deny that Lydia Blaisdell herself may have come from a supernaturally gifted family lineage, and that is the theme that carries through the prequel.

What made you decide to write about the Blaisdells? I’ve often said that I felt I was chosen to write The Gathering Room, and 100% I will say the same thing about the prequel. When The Gathering Room was published and the feedback started rolling in that apparently I was good at this writing thing, I began to think about other things I wanted to write. Continuing the story of any of the characters in The Gathering Room was never my intent. I actually have another historical fiction story based in England in the 1620’s rolling around in my head that I really want to write!! But the Blaisdells, or some other entity, had other plans. The people I met, the information that literally just dropped out of no where and landed in my lap, the signs from the universe as some would say, were all just to much to ignore. Again I have felt like an outsider watching someone else’s life unfold. I’m just here for the ride! So I followed the signs, followed the promptings and write a story about the Blaisdells is exactly what I did!

What is the title of the prequel? I have had a title for the prequel since April of 2023, about six months after I had started writing the story. I have never mentioned it, mainly because I know so much can change while a book moves it’s way through the publishing process, and that includes the changing of a title. But as I drew close to finishing up the prequel Monday night I realized I wanted to share with you all what MY title was. Whether that ends up being the final title really doesn’t matter, I just think you should know this really cool story! My title for this story is Henceforth and Unstoppable and how that came to be is one of the most unique experiences of my life.

It began at Skipton Castle in England, as I stood in the middle of a set of stairs. I had stopped to remove my backpack and place inside some self guided tour sheets that we realized we were not going to use. As I stood there stuffing these pages into my backpack a voice spoke to me just behind my right shoulder. Loud and clear I heard “I need that.” Thinking that because I had stopped in the middle of the stairs, I was blocking the passage of another tourist, I turned around, only to realize I stood completely alone on these stairs. The voice I had heard had no earthly explanation. Upon returning home the following week, I was unpacking and found these same self guided tour sheets among a bunch of guidebooks and things. I gathered everything up and was about to take it to my office when, loud and clear, I heard the voice over my right shoulder say “I need that.” Having learned over the past year not to brush these things off! I began to look over the self guided tour sheets from Skipton Castle and I found a phrase in Latin that jumped out at me. After a quick internet search I learned that it translated to the word Henceforth. This hit me like a brick, it was so obvious that this word needed to be in the title of the next book. Henceforth means from this point forward, or an act that will persist indefinitely. The origin story of the Blaisdell family, and if they truly are keepers of ancient knowledge, was certainly one that had a starting point, that ancient circle in Lancashire. And this knowledge or gift had persisted for generations, all the way to Lydia Blaisdell. And if any of the modern day Blaisdells that I had met were any indication, those gifts lived on today. It was an incredible revelation!

Within a few days of this experience I was driving along in my car listening to a streaming music service when a song came on that sent all of my weirdness indicators into high alert. The name of the song was Unstoppable and again I was “told”, “shown”, “made to understand”….whatever you want to call it, that this word also needed to be in the title of the next book. Despite the destruction of the ancient circle in England, despite time, despite cultural disdain, despite modern reasoning, religious theory or scientific explanation, the fact remains that there is a part of our world that is and always will be unexplainable. The story I was writing about the Blaisdells encapsulated that thought completely. If they are anciently predisposed to the supernatural, then it is unstoppable and will continue on, just as it has for generations. Henceforth and Unstoppable

Will Lydia Blaisdell, or any of the characters from The Gathering Room be in the prequel? I was chatting with a friend one day about the prequel and he was totally surprised that I was not going to end the prequel in 1795, where the story of The Gathering Room starts. I had to laugh because the prequel starts in 1433 and the thought of writing over 300 years of history made me want to vomit! The prequel will not bring the story right up to where The Gathering Room starts. The prequel is written in a way that it will stand alone as a fascinating story or it can be read before or after The Gathering Room. The two books can be enjoyed indivdually but are clearly connected. In the prequel you will be introduced to all new characters. Some of them were real people like William of the Forest, a Blaisdell ancestor who took his name from his proximity to the Bowland Forest in England. Some are fiction but based off real people, like Lord Jeremy Thurston who I created as the Under Sheriff of Lancashire. I based him completely from an actual “Lord” that I met while in England. Upon learning that I had met this man, my AirBnB hostess accurately described him as “dreamy” and I knew immediately I would have to write him in! And others are completely fictional, like Alicen, the lead female character who carries the majority of the supernatural parts of this story.

The connecting piece will be the Epilogue where Abner Blaisdell makes an appearance to tie the two stories together. Again it will not matter which book you read first, Abner is there as the bridge between the two. Here is an excerpt from the Epilogue

Abner Blaisdell stood staring down at the stone that marked the grave in front of him. Nearly twenty years on and the pain of losing her that day still burned like fire in his chest. Just thinking back on holding her body in his arms, watching the smoke rise from the cabin as it burned, knowing that he had tried so hard to save her, yet he had failed. He truly had done everything in his power to protect her from this. Closing his eyes to try and block out the memory of that day, he felt a tear run down his cheek. Of course he had known this was a possibility. He had known all along if he were honest with himself. He had grown up hearing the stories of an ancient circle, of orbs, of spirits from other realms, but he had chosen to turn away from them. He had tried to protect the ones he loved by never mentioning the stories, tried to protect her, but in the end he had been unable to stop it.

When will the prequel be available for sale? This is the great question of the universe and I am going to have to ask all of you for your patience on this one! First what I finished writing Monday night is just the first draft, I know from experience that what follows will be edits, revisions, and even more edits. Lots of edits!!! All of that takes time. From there we move on to actually getting the book published. With The Gathering Room I self published because I honestly thought I was just printing a book for my family and friends to enjoy, and then I met all of you!! For which I am so grateful! But the success of The Gathering Room has opened so many doors of new possibilities for me. There is so much more to think about this time around. Pros and cons to everything that lies before me! Originally I was hoping to have a book to you by Fall of 2024, but with some recent developments I can’t say for sure if that will be so. There have also been a bunch of changes in my personal life, yes I do have one of those! That’s the reason why I was pushing myself with a deadline to get the prequel finished. So much happening with a new career move, among a few other things, that I really needed to get the prequel finished to clear up space in my brain! 2024 will be a year of many exciting changes professionally and personally!

What I can tell you is this, the prequel (Henceforth and Unstoppable) will be published! You will hold this book in your hand! It’s to amazing of a story to just let sit in the closet. And I’m pretty sure the universe wouldn’t allow me to do that anyway! Not if past performance is indicative of future success! I’ll keep you updated!

Ancient Whispers from a Hag Stone

One of my favorite parts about writing historical fiction is the research that is involved. I’m a sucker for research. A lover of spending my days falling down one rabbit hole after another. Wandering off into obscure topics and learning all I can about things that I would have never known otherwise. Now that I think about it, that’s really how my first book The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler actually came about! I read Marcus LiBrizzi’s book A Documentary History of the Nelly Butler Hauntings and then went off on my own researching adventure that ultimately led to me writing a fictional portrayal of the history and my whole life changing in a dramatic way! Research is awesome!

As I write my next book, which will be a prequel to The Gathering Room, I have done an extensive amount of research on England, specifically the area of Lancashire and it’s connection to the supernatural. I’m fascinated by the ancient stone and timber circles in Lancashire specifically but all of this wandering around the internet has led me to other folklore and down several glorious rabbit holes. One of which turned out to be Hag Stones.

If you are not familiar with Hag Stones let me clue you in on some of the things the internet taught me. Hag Stones or sometimes called Witch Stones, or Holy Stones, are reportedly (and I say that for a reason) stones that have a natural occurring hole through the middle of them. Wikipedia, never known to wander off into the realm of crystals, hocus pocus or fringe theories refers to them as Adder Stones. In any event, no matter what words you use, they are all the same thing, a stone with a natural occurring hole in it. I first came across them in my medieval England research but then became aware that they are actually found in folklore around the globe. From England, to Germany to Russia and even in Native American traditions.

So how does a hole occur naturally in these stones? Well you need water. Erosion is the number one reason for the holes that appear in these stones, which are usually sandstone, limestone, flint or some other sedimentary stone that was laid down millions of years ago. The holes are caused by water interacting with a smaller pebble and rubbing it until it creates a hole in the stone the pebble is sitting on. Or the hole can be created by just water erosion itself. In addition some Hag Stones are created by a clam!! The Piddock Clam, otherwise known as the boring clam, will borrow into the stone and create a bowl like depression that eventually wears all the way through the stone creating a hole. Because of this the best place to go looking for a Hag Stone is in coastal areas, beaches or rivers and streams where there is fast moving water. Remember that point, it’s important later.

As noted these stones pop up in folklore around the world with similar beliefs attached to them. The more mundane belief, and why they were called sometimes called Adder Stones, was the belief that these stones cured you of a snake bite, Adder being a venomous snake in Europe. But there are far more magical and supernatural properities attached to these stones beyond a mere cure for snake bites! First and foremost is the belief that if you find one of these stones you are very lucky indeed. The reason being is that you, yourself, didn’t actually find this stone, it found you! Legend states that these stones will turn up and be found by the people that will use them.

Hag Stones, Witch Stones or Holy Stones are supposedly also very rare, remember that point too, it’s important later. Only to be found by those who are capable of understanding their magical abilities. What are these magical abilities? Well first off is the hole itself. Reportedly if you are one of the said special individuals who have found a Hag Stone if you look through the hole you can see into the world of fairies! Now that sounds like fun! Look through the hole and glimpse a world of Tinker Bell and her friends flitting from one flower to another leaving trails of glitter all over the landscape! Conversely they also provide the holder with protection from evil entities. Apparently if you are conversing with someone you can look through the hole and tell if the person is a witch! Now that would be a cool tool to have because we’ve all met that person at a party or social gathering that we just don’t vibe with, the one that you just get an odd feeling about. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to whip a Hag Stone out of your purse, hold it up, look through the hole and then know for certain what the deal was?

Obviously I’m joking and making light of the history behind these stones, but the reality is for thousands of years people have believed in them. Believed that they protected you from evil spirits, could cure you of diseases and could give you great wisdom and insight. They were worn on leather strings around the neck, nailed above the door of homes, or placed on windowsills all in an effort to protect and enlighten in a time when people believed more in the unseen world than we do now.

If you are not aware there is a huge market out there for the unexplained, the supernatural, the magical. Sadly Hag Stones are now a marketable commodity that can easily be found on eBay, Etsy and Amazon. Clearly they are not as rare as all the websites touting their magical abilities would lead you to believe. For as little as $2 to as much as $30 you can purchase your own Hag Stone to protect you from whatever is lurking around in 2024. Surprisingly you don’t even need water to make a Hag Stone, a nice drill from Home Depot should do the trick! There are even group pages on social media where people post pictures of the Hag Stones they supposedly found naturally. Photos taken at the beach or along rivers, which would lend you to believe these are in fact true Hag Stones, yet the photos show multiple stones found, sometimes even dozens in one picture. To me that doesn’t seem like they are very rare, even if they were found in their natural state.

Last weekend I had the opportunity to stay with my son who lives in the Midwest. He has a beautiful home in a rural location located near areas dense with fossils. His own backyard being one of them! Because as you may or may not know, 300 million years ago the Midwest was actually a giant sea. My son’s back yard is quite steep in an upward direction as his home was built into a hill. Rare indeed for the flat Midwest. Because of this all the grandkids play in the front yard and just the chickens and the goats inhabit the small flat area in the back before the land rises steeply up the hill. It’s in this steep section of his backyard where a small portion of the hill has begun to erode away. As dirt and rocks fall out of this exposed area, my son has found some of the most amazing fossils!! Typical of what you would find in the Midwest they are fossils of tiny marine animals, aquatic plants and even whole clam shells echoing back to a time when the center of the United States was covered in water.

As I sat in his living room watching him pile rock after rock of fossils onto his coffee table, I marveled at each one, until the moment he laid a Hag Stone down in front of me! It’s the one pictured above. I recognized it immediately from my research and I asked him where he had gotten it. He told me it came out of the hill out back. I made sure again and again that it had truly come from outback and he couldn’t understand my fascination with it. I then explained to him my research on Hag Stones, their magical abilities and if he did in fact find this one among the other fossils then this Hag Stone was naturally occurring and very rare indeed!! Not only had he found it far from any modern source of water but it was likely 300 million years old!

My son, as with most of my children, does not find the world of the supernatural as fascinating as I do, so he quickly pushed the Hag Stone toward me and told me to take it home. “First off Mom I don’t want anything called a Hag Stone in my house. Secondly it clearly means more to you then it would to me!” Gotta love an honest kid!

I now have my very own naturally occurring, not purchased from a website, honest to goodness, rare, ancient Hag Stone!!! In this time of my life, when the weirdest of weirdest things have happened to me on a regular basis, I have to believe that this Hag Stone did indeed find me, just as the legends say. As my life continues to pass through this time of miraculous happenings, signs to obvious for me to ignore, synchronisities that shock me in their preciseness, and the undeniable proof that we don’t understand everything that surrounds us, I’m going to add coming into possession of this Hag Stone to that list. No matter your belief structure, traditional or non traditional. Whatever words you use to describe what you believe. Just keep your eyes open, the unseen world is all around you if you are just willing to seeing it!

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go peer into the world of the fairies. I’ll let you know if I see any glitter!

It’s Not Always Finders Keepers

Back in October I wrote a blog about a bag of sheet music that my son had found in a house he had purchased. (See This Sheet Music Had One Heck Of A Song To Sing 10/6/23) There was a very interesting newspaper clipping in that bag, that I wrote about, but the most important point was that I was able to find the descendants of the woman who had originally owned the sheet music and return these personal items to them.

Finding and returning that sheet music wasn’t my first experience with a situation like that. My very first experience happened almost twenty years ago. I attended an antique auction with a friend and one of the items that went up for bid was a cigar box full of letters written during World War II. Now that era is not really of great interest to me. I’m often asked which time period in history do I find the most fascinating and hands down it would be anything pre 1870. So World War II not really of interest to me. But what did interest me was the possibility that the letter writers were still alive. So I bid on the box until I won and then promptly set out to read all of the letters to try and learn as much as I could about their original owners.

The letters were exchanged between a man named Basil, who had been sent from Maine to an Air Force Officers Training School in California and his new bride, who’s name I have sadly forgotten now, she remained in Maine living with his sister. The letters were full of all of the aches and pains you would expect from a young couple who have been separated in the early days of their love. As well as interesting notes on his schooling and the comings and goings of family members in Maine. None of the contents of the letters were really of any interest to me except the names of as many of the parties involved that I could gather. Armed with this information, and thank goodness the internet, I was quickly able to locate Basil and his wife, both still alive and living in Florida. I remember the day I called and spoke with them, telling them that I had purchased the letters and wanted to return the box to them. Basil’s wife was so surprised! She had remember saving them in that cigar box but over the years lost any memory of what had happened to them. Now, nearly sixty years on, it was such a surprise for them to learn that the letters had survived. I mailed them off to them and heard back later how thankful they were to have them. I heard from Basil’s wife only one more time after that, about a year later, when she sent me a letter thanking me again for the letters. Basil had just passed away and she was so thankful for the opportunity I had given them to relive the early days of their love in his final year.

Another time I had the opportunity to return items to a family was something that I had found in an antique shop. It was a very large and ornate marriage certificate framed in a large filigree, gilded frame. Fancy doesn’t even begin to describe this work of art! Personally I thought it was a bit much for a marriage certificate but it harkened back to a time when milestones in people’s lives actually meant something. Like that all important high school diploma that used to be hung on the wall proudly, so it was with this marriage certificate. It was dated 1880 and the bride and groom were listed, as was the town, which really was only one town over from where I was living at the time. So of course I had to buy it and try to find the family who would appreciate it. for more then just the frame Again I headed to the internet and quickly found a descendant and contacted them. Because we lived so close, literally within a 10 minute drive, the woman and her husband came to my house to pick up the item. They were thrilled with it! I learned that since I had contacted them, they had reached out and spoken with older family members who remembered the marriage certificate hanging on the wall of “Gram’s Farmhouse.” That was until there had been a fire. After the fire no one knew what happened to the ornately preserved document and even less idea how it ended up in an antique shop so many years later. It didn’t matter though, they were just so happy to have it back in the family.

My most recent experience with returning an item or items to a family happened just this past summer, and honestly it was the first time I felt awkward doing so. We were renovating a third floor apartment in a building we had recently purchased. The space had originally been an attic in a big old Victorian era home, but somewhere in the 1940’s the space had been turned into an apartment with the weirdest layout and ceilings that followed the chopped up roofline that you would expect in a victorian style home. Dormers, turrets and the like making slanted ceilings and half walls the norm in this very cramped space. So the decision was made to tear out a closet to make more usable room in the kitchen. As the crew began demolition they found, tucked way in the back of this closet, almost pushed into an unused crawl space, a stack of old papers. Knowing me like they do, someone was dispatched to my house immediately bearing this hidden treasure.

In looking through it all I realized it was just a pile of homework papers that some child had brought home from school, along with a few copies of a Catholic youth magazine. At first I almost threw them away but then I noticed the child had written their name on the homework and even his age. So armed with a full name, an age and a date on the magazines I went to the internet again! It didn’t take me long to realize that this young man, who’s homework I held from when he was only 13 years old, was now deceased but both of his daughters were active on genealogy websites and I reached out to both of them. One lived in Michigan and the other was in Ohio. The daughter in Michigan got back to me almost immediately and we exchanged a few messages regarding her father’s life. Apparently he had lived in that tiny apartment with his mother after his father had left them. His teenage years and young adulthood had not been easy years for him but he had a good life overall. Because of his rough start he had never spoken much to his own children about his childhood. I mentioned to the Michigan daughter that I had also reached out to her sister and she informed me that her sister was away on a cruise at the moment so that’s probably why I hadn’t gotten a response. Off I shipped the homework to the daughter in Michigan and a week later got a nice message back that she absolutely was thrilled to have received even this tiny bit of his father’s childhood and was so thankful that I had reached out. I was satisfied that I had returned another piece of someone’s family history to them.

That was until about a month later, when the sister in Ohio finally read her messages on the genealogy website and reached out to me asking to have the items sent to her. I replied that I had sent them to her sister in Michigan. The response I got was a first for me. Apparently these two sisters did not get along, they were not even speaking to each other! The Ohio sister was very upset that I had sent the items to the Michigan sister. I replied that I was terribly sorry, that I had no idea that there was this ongoing family problem and I simply had mailed the items to the first family member who had gotten back to me. I wished her well and then metaphorically backed quietly out of the room! That was terribly awkward!

Months went by, and I honestly had completely forgotten about this situation when I received a message from the Ohio sister just last week. She wanted to tell me how very thankful both she and her sister in Michigan were that I had sent their father’s homework and not just thrown it away. You see, this much sought after bit of their father’s childhood had forced them to communicate. The Ohio sister had had to reach out and talk with her Michigan sister. In doing so they were able to move on from the homework and discuss the reasons why they were estranged and then ultimately come to realize that their father wanted them to reconcile. So this sister made sure that I knew that. They truly believed that I had found that homework and sent it to them under the direction of their father so that they would mend their fences. She wanted me to know they had spent the holidays together for the first time in years. She thanked me profusely for my part in not only bringing them back together, but in delivering a message to them from their father.

Seriously how much cooler could my life get? Ever thankful for this journey I am on!

You Eat That For Breakfast?

This is not a product endorsement. I’m just oversharing with you all for a moment.

I don’t know if it’s the post holiday blahs, the Maine winter blahs or just simply that my life has suddenly turned absolutely boring, but the past couple of weeks I’ve wondered what in the world am I going to write about this week that will sound interesting to people? Seriously, I thought last week’s blog about smells was going to make everyone yawn and unsubscribe! But it turned out to be quite popular. I couldn’t believe the number of emails and social media comments it generated. I guess it just proves that smells and their associated memories are something that are universally felt.

This week I thought I should probably share with you an update on my progress with the Prequel. It’s moving along a bit faster now that I’m not doing a bunch of promotional events for my first book, The Gathering Room - A Tale of Nelly Butler. Switching gears in my brain from marketing the first book to focusing on writing the next book took a couple of days of adjustment. It comes in fits and starts as they say. Winter certainly doesn’t help! Everything slows down, even your brain!

I will tell you that yesterday, after nearly 4 hours of staring at the wall and producing nothing, the flood gates finally burst and I wrote non stop until almost 9:00 last night. I was determined not to go to bed until every last bit of what was in my head was on my tablet. You all will be happy to know that Edmund was interrogated and caught in the web of his own lies! It’s a pivotal moment in the story. Of course if makes absolutely no sense to any of you at the moment, so you will just have to trust me. It’s good!! The manuscript currently sits at around 79,000 words. To give you a reference point, The Gathering Room is 121,000 words in it’s published form. So I am getting closer!!!

So this brings me to another week and facing yet again the lack of an interesting topic. This morning, as I drifted about aimlessly looking for a blog topic, I decided to ask the internet, “Blog ideas for historical fiction writers.” I found a list of 100 blog topics. Things like “Explain why your book is different than any other book in the genre.” Ummmm, well that seems a little obvious. The Gathering Room is based on the first documented ghost sighting in America. No one else out there has fictionalized the story the way that I did. No one else has a ring!! Oh and it’s written by me! So there are a couple of difference right there!

Another topic idea was “Feature one of your Readers on your blog.” I actually liked that and I began to think about all of you! Of course I won’t embarrass any of you and call you out by name. But I would like to give a shout out to the woman who messaged me, said she was about three quarters of the way through the book, loved it and wanted to finish reading it while physically in Sullivan or Franklin. That was pretty amazing! Or the woman who has shown up at several events I appeared at just to say hello and chat with me for a moment. Sometimes I think she has logged as much mileage as I have across this state! Only she can’t use it as a write off as I can. Bless her! The woman who I met who wasn’t interested in the book so much as she was my “accidental author” story. She admitted that historical fiction was not her genre, but she was absolutely inspired by my journey and how ordinary people can still do amazing things! Hope is not dead!

But the one Reader who truly pushed me forward, and probably without even realizing it, is someone who reached out to me just last week. I was in a funk, as noted above, post holiday, Maine winter, etc etc. I had been talking with my son about this whole author experience. What happened with the book, where it’s going, what the next one will do, other things we had on our plate for 2024 etc and I told him how I was stuck right now. Really hadn’t pushed the ball forward, as he likes to say, in regards to the storyline much over the past couple of weeks. The beautiful part of writing The Gathering Room was that I was writing it for my own entertainment. No deadline. I wrote at my leisure over the course of six years. There’s a bit more pressure with the Prequel and I was feeling it. I told my son that maybe I should just mark “award winning author” off the bucket list and move on to do something else. Of course he vehemently disagreed, but still I was having one of those moments we all face in life.

And then this Reader contacted me on social media. She probably has no idea how important her words were to me that night. Here is what she wrote, just exactly as she wrote it:

“It has taken me a while to finish your book (I was savoring every page & word)…BUT WOW IT WAS SO AMAZING. That last page left me in total AWE! I was like WOW WHAT JUST HAPPENED! Just amazing beyond words!! You are an amazing author who deserves the awards you have received! I am so looking forward to your prequel!! Take care & keep writing its obviously your calling.”

She sent it at 8:40 at night. I was preparing for bed and I sat on the edge of my bed and read that over and over. I cried. I then took a screenshot and sent it to my son with these words. “When you get this just before bed and you realize that maybe you should write tomorrow!.” He texted me back “You sure will!” Not that I ever really thought I would stop, but you know how we all get in funks once in a while. That was mine, and this Reader was tremendously helpful. So the prequel moves on toward the finish line! Thank you!

So that leaves us with the photo at the top of the blog this week. Among the blog ideas for historical fiction writers I found “Write about your morning routine.”. I laughed over this one because in this oversharing world we live in it just seemed so classic. Like of course I’m going to tell you I wake up every morning at 5 AM, put on my big fluffy robe covered in huge pink roses and make my way to the kitchen. There I make a cup of coffee usually in my Queen Elizabeth II cup, but sometimes in my King Charles III cup. I pour exactly two tablespoons of roasted and salted pepitas seeds in a bowl and grab an extra sharp cheese stick from the fridge.

Everything after that? Well it’s super secret author kind of stuff. I can’t tell you.

I Love The Way That Smells!

Yesterday, as I sat in the waiting area at the hair salon, I over head the three young ladies behind the desk talking. One of them was just returning to her seat from a trip to the printer. In her hand she held a stack of newly printed sheets of paper. She held them up to her face, inhaled strongly and then said “I just love the smell of freshly printed paper!”

I smiled. It made me remember those days, long, long ago and the mimeograph machines! How the teacher would come into the classroom, fresh from that secret hiding place in the school where they kept the machine. In her hands would be a stack of papers with the distinctive blue ink shining brightly, all of the pages slightly damp, the corners curling up just a little. As the teacher walked down the rows between our desks she would hand out each new paper to a student and inevitably every single one of us would raise that still warm sheet of paper to our nose and inhale whatever chemicals were used in making that blue ink! Oh the good old days!

I still love the smell of paper too, particularly old books. Nothing sets the butterflies of excitement fluttering around inside of me any faster then walking into a library, used book store or an antique shop and inhaling that distinctive smell of musty old books! It’s like I’ve entered paradise.

I came home from the salon and decided to ask the internet what were some other smells that people enjoyed that might be considered odd. I mean we all love the smell of laundry hung on the line, fresh baked chocolate chip cookies, freshly mowed grass, the air after it rains. But the smell of chemically treated or musty paper was slightly different, what else was out there that people liked the smell of? As you can imagine the internet did not disappoint. Some of the smells I found out there I also like, others I could not, in any way shape or form see how someone would like them. I’ll give you an example and then we shall never mention these again. Armpits, Bare Feet, Blood, Bodily Gases (burps and otherwise), Ear Wax and the most puzzling of all, Belly Button Lint. I’m not even going to ask who actually figured out Belly Button Lint had a smell. I’m just going to put these all in the “gross” category and move on.

Then there were others that I personally don’t find enjoyable, but they weren’t down right gross. Skunks for example. Or Wet Dogs and Old Coins. I’m sorry, the idea of smelling old coins just makes me think of the thousands of dirty hands that have probably touched them. There were some questionable food smells like Steamed Broccoli or Canned Tuna. I get it, those have a smell, but for me personally, they wouldn’t be considered enjoyable. My personal favorite in the not gross category but still questionable was the smell of Home Depot. Seriously I’m heading to Home Depot after I write this just to see if the place really does have a smell of it’s own!

There were a lot of chemical smells in the line up and it really made me realize, from a history of humankind way of looking at things, how so much of our world is full of chemicals now that we find their smells enjoyable, almost comforting! Clean Fresh Air was not on any list that I found, but people do like the smell of Bus Exhaust, Gasoline, Chorline Bleach, Rubbing Alcohol, Ammonia, and Sharpie Markers. Unbelievable! In this category I did find one smell, Plastic Inflatable Pool Toys, that I could kind of understand where the enjoyment factor comes from. Clearly holding an uninflatedted beach ball close to your face as you try to blow it up is going to invoke some childhood memory of summer days at the pool or lake. So that one I can understand.

There were also some chemical type smells on the lists that I actually enjoy myself, for the same childhood memory factor. Dishsoap, specifically for me it would be Palmolive Dishsoap, which I do not buy as I like another brand better, but I have been known to pop the top of the bottle in a store and take a good deep sniff! My mother used Palmolive Dish Soap and every time I smell it all I can see is that old porcelain sink in our kitchen, with the window facing the back yard and a happy childhood. Instant time travel right there!

Another chemical type smell on the list that I fondly remembered when I read it, but I actually haven’t smelled in years, is the smell of a fired Cap Gun. Remember that smell? That was a great smell! We never really had cap guns as children, instead we’d buy just the strips of caps and sit on the sidewalk with a rock and bang away at each little black spot on the red strip of paper. When the rock finally caused the chemicals inside to spark and “fire” that little whif of smoke that curled up toward us smelled so good! It was the same with Pencil Dust, another fond chlidhood memory. Remember when it was your turn to empty the pencil sharpener in school and you stood over the trash can to dump it and let all of those lead and wood particles float up into the air and straight into your nose. Good memories!

Some on the list did bring back really strong memories. Pipe Tobacco being one. I grew up in the 60’s & 70’s literally everyone around me in my young life smoked cigarettes. The gray smoke hanging in a room or the collection of novelty ash trays are never far from my mind’s memories. But it was pipe tobacco that elicits the strongest reaction in me, as my grandfather smoked a pipe. He was amazing, he wore a hat every time he left the house. He was a very stylish man who had grown into his adulthood, and therefore his style, in the 1930’s and 1940’s. He was something special as he allowed me to crawl up into his lap in his recliner, while he smoked a pipe and I dipped into the candy dish he always had nearby. Sadly it was the smoking that took him early. He had a massive heart attack and died at age 65, which honestly now doesn’t seem that old!

But of all the smells, gross, weird or otherwise that I read about yesterday afternoon it was pheromones that grabbed my attention. You know that scent that each one of us has. It’s primal of course and obviously there for a reason. But in humans it is less understood than it is in animals. In the animal kingdom it helps mothers find their babies, aids in identifying friend or foe, and most importantly it aids in the procreation of the species as a basic attraction mechinism. But humans aren’t necessarily attracted to another person based on pheromones, or someone’s smell. In our modern world we are more likely to check and make sure someone visually meets our requirements, are they physically attractive? Or intellectually? Can they carry on an intelligent conversation is far more important in today’s word then if someone’s smell matches your own chemical makeup. Modern humans don’t cling to other humans based on smells, or do they?

I think back to all of those giggling teenage girls that ran around in high school wearing their boyfriends sweatshirts! Even the women’s clothing fashion design “a boyfriend shirt” indicates that women love wearing clothing that belongs to another human. Preferably another human they have felt attracted to. Something that carries the other human’s scent. So whereas the scientists may say pheromones aren’t completely understood in humans, in practice I would say they are alive and well in some form!

As I sat and thought about this it reminded me of my grandmother. She died in 2012 and many of her belongings were boxed up in plastic totes and stored in my attic. One day, after she had been gone many years, I needed to find an old photo that I knew was in one of those plastic totes. So I walked upstairs, found the shelf, found the tote I was looking for and popped the lid off. Immediately the smell of my grandmother filled the air around me. I was shocked that the items in this tote, a mix of her old pocketbooks, cloth hankies, photo albums and hand written letters would smell so strongly of her! I quickly shut the lid so as not to lose my grandmother’s smell. I opened the lid only slightly a second time, quickly grabbed the photo album I was looking for and snapped the lid shut. For weeks afterwards I would go up to the attic and open the lid just enough to stick my nose in and smell my grandmother. It was such a comforting thing! It was like she was right there in the room with me.

And you know, given how my life has unfolded in the past year or so….who’s to say she wasn’t there with me, right? Anything is possible!