It’s been a year and a half… and I can hardly believe it.
My – I should say our, because this story is about both my wife, Carol, and me – life has been about personal adjustment and lately just plain old survival, which has left very little time for my writing on Monk? blog. We left our cabin on the Medomak River and moved into a Federal mansion as caretakers for the owners who were in Arizona where they had jobs so they could pay the mortgage on the mansion. It’s a long story, but the precis is the owners tried to make a go of running the mansion as a bed & breakfast, after pumping a great deal of money into its renovation. Unfortunately, their plan didn’t pan out, for a lot of reasons, not least of which was attempting to run the B&B by Jehova’s Witness decorum, which excluded them from Saturday work, as well as not allowing liquor, among other codes of conduct. Well, not everyone is a Jehova’s Witness. You get the picture. They had to close the place and get jobs, which for them was Arizona.
Enter Carol and I. Friends of ours who knew the owners, asked us if we’d be interested in caretaking the place, and we jumped at the opportunity to save money. And so we packed up on November of 2007 and moved into the mansion. We loved it, but it wasn’t easy. The owners had installed an outdoor wood-fired stove, which ate prodigious quantities of of the stuff. Someone had to feed the beast, which we dubbed The Green Monster (it is colored green, and we’re Red Sox fans… forget it if you don’t get it!) and that would be me, sometimes three times a day. It took 4′ logs whole! And last winter it never stopped snowing. Here is a picture of the wood pile. I replenished that pile twice in the course of the winter. Whew!
Food for The Beast
And that’s not the entire wood pile! Anyway, we lasted the winter, but almost didn’t survive the summer.
In August I was out mowing the absurd yard. I say absurd, because the yard shouldn’t be in grass at all, unless you own sheep. Here is a shot of the front yard…
The Yard
I had let a part of the property go to a meadow and it was beautiful, with a number of wildflowers blooming in succession, as can be seen as my lovely Carol walks amid the flowers here. I was out getting the property whipped into shape for a visit by the owners, when I was stung several times by yellow jackets nesting in the ground, and again by a bumble bee I disturbed. Long story short, I was rushed to the emergency room in an anaphylactic shock, complete with full body convulsions and eyes rolling to the back of my head. It was close, but the good folks a Miels Memorial Hospital in neighboring Damariscotta saved me. It’s good to be alive.
To cut to the quick, the owners returned to a rather unkempt yard, because I wasn’t able to get out there and finish the mowing, and they were none too happy. Carol and I were none too happy either with the way they treated us, unwilling to take into account the unintended effects of a few random angry bees. We immediately began looking for a house and found a lovely small ranch on 2 acres in Damariscotta, put an offer in and it was accepted. We moved in in September 2009, and here we are!
So as you can see, it’s been hectic. It’s my hope to get back to my musings on the monastic life in the 21st century and what it means, if anything, to us today. I continue to believe, as you might guess, it means something quite significant.
Good to be back… again!