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  • Published
    December 2, 2018

    Judith Robbins: ‘Now I was the mother’

    Three of my kids and I were driving down I-95 on our way to Shrewsbury, Mass., to visit my mother, their grandmother, whom they called Mummu, a reflection of her Finnish heritage. As we crossed the Piscataqua River bridge and saw the sign welcoming us to New Hampshire, the level of excitement rose. We were […]

  • Published
    December 2, 2018

    Driving a Dodge and thinking about the draft

    It was February 2, 1972 and I was heading home to Las Vegas, driving my Dodge van at night through the dark, winding canyon of the Virgin River Gorge. It was late, almost midnight, and I was coming home from college in Utah. Snow was on the ground, eerily illuminated by a full moon that […]

  • Published
    December 2, 2018

    A child brings them home

    My daughter was one of those kids who said she was never going to leave home. Though she’d gone to college in Colorado and worked summers on dude ranches, Maine was home. She was born here, raised in a sturdy ship captain’s house at Porters Landing. That graceful home, with its wavy glass windows and […]

  • Published
    December 2, 2018

    Visiting and revisiting

    The trip was to visit family. The ride home from these visits has assumed a form of ritual for me. Easy highway driving allows me time and space to put myself back together. I stop in Portsmouth, a beautiful little city to unwind in. What I do depends on where I find a parking place. […]

  • Published
    December 2, 2018

    Lost in the fog

    One cool and sunny spring morning, Captain Elliot asked me for help to sail his old 30 foot wooden power cruiser out of Blue Hill Bay to its summer home, at a mooring in Bucks Harbor. The trip of about 20 sea miles up Eggemoggin Reach should have taken only a couple of hours so […]

  • Published
    December 2, 2018

    Fat Albert’s highway wail

    I had recently moved back home to Brunswick from Rochester, New York after a recent divorce. My father had kindly volunteered to drive with me back to Rochester to help me gather up the rest of my belongings. My husband and I were quite civil dividing up the last of our things and packing them […]

  • Published
    December 2, 2018

    History hiding, close to home

    As I was making my way north from a conference, across from the Delaware River I happened upon something “hidden in plain sight.” How I missed this before, I can only speculate. Anyway, at the Conference, in 2016 in Dover, Delaware, we United Methodists had celebrated the bicentennial of the African Methodist Episcopal [AME] church. […]

  • Published
    December 2, 2018

    Summer promises kept

    “When winter comes, with frosty flowers on the pane, The thought of you will warm our hearts, ‘Til we return here once again.” These are the last lines of our most revered summer camp song, “By a Glistening Lake.” It was sung through sobs on the last night of camp, at what was called the […]

  • Published
    December 2, 2018

    Places change, but not the policy

    “We have the same policy as Grandma,” my 26-year old son says to me from his home in Denver, Colorado, where he lives with his wife. “You’re welcome any time.” He grew up hearing that from his Grandma, my mom, who lives in the San Fernando Valley in southern California, my home from age 6 […]

  • Published
    December 2, 2018

    One encounter, two experiences

    It was two o’clock in the morning and I was tired, lonely. I was supposed to be staying in a Washington D.C. hostel that had bedbugs the size of cats, but in the middle of a humid night, I figured I’d be more comfortable waiting for my 4:30 a.m. train in a cracked, plastic chair […]

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