Taking Solace

Over the summer a family friend came up to visit my brother PJ and she wanted to come up the coast to visit Mom and Dad. We all went out to dinner and afterwards as she and I were crossing the street with my parents, she pulled me aside and commented on how good Dad looked. Then she said, “It’s just sad, because he used to like to talk all the time.”  

A friend watching a video I posted on the blog of Dad maneuvering a lawn chair to a spot in the backyard told me she cried when she saw it. I wrote last winter how PJ noted, with some sadness, all the tools in Dad’s garage that he was never going to use again. All remembrances of things past.

Then I thought about it. We all have things we wish we had done, chances maybe we should have taken. In this context, Dad was pretty lucky. As long as I can remember Dad wanted to move to Maine. Anyone who knew him, knew he wanted to move to Maine. Sure, there were things he didn’t get to do in his lifetime like join the peace corps or move to Argentina (these are things I found out he had toyed with in his younger years), but he did move to Maine after he retired from teaching at 55. Retire at 55? How many people do you know have retired at 55? At 42, I can’t even imagine that and yet Dad did it. Not only that, but he retired to the place he longed to live and fulfilled the dream he had of owning acres of land tucked away in the woods. I’m talking here about the Sebec house, the 1^st house Mom and Dad owned when they moved up here. Located just outside of Dover-Foxcroft and an hour north from Bangor Maine, the Sebec house was a great space. More room than they really needed, it sat on 12 acres of woodland filled with conifers, hard woods, soft woods, a little bit of everything. Mom, Dad and my Oma lived there until Oma passed away in 2004. For just over 5 years Dad had the opportunity of his lifetime and he was truly in his glory. He designed walking trails throughout his property, lumbered his own firewood, laid out his flower gardens and all in a remote location where you could only see the one neighbor across the street in the winter time, when the leaves that shielded the house from the world fell down. Never one to just sit around, Dad even got a part time job, taking care of a small farm the town dentist owned. He loved it and would tell us stories about the new pig they got every spring (and then how many pounds of pork they got in the fall), the fences he had to mend for the horses, the chickens he fed, the family’s Great Danes he watched over. Every time I talked to him there was a new story about the farm, a new story about their house. You could hear it in his voice. I could see it on his face every time I visited.   

Eventually the commute to Bangor for church and other things became too much. Once Oma passed away they sold the house and moved to Bucksport, a half hour south of Bangor. It’s a modest house on maybe a quarter of an acre, hardly the spread they had in Sebec. Over the years Dad has made the Bucksport house and yard his own, accomplishing improvements on the inside and shaping a little nature sanctuary on the outside. There are times: however, when we still talk fondly about the Sebec house. Dad really did get to live out his dream and continues to live it out by still being in his house, still living in Maine and that is something to celebrate. Everyone should be so lucky.