Mainely Christmas

A Gift from the Sea

Christmas Tree-The Cottage-Wells, Maine

 

Long Shadows-Ogunquit Beach Maine

Season's End Ogunquit Beach

Clouds-Wells Cottage Maine

This is for You-Wells Beach Maine

Tidal Pool-Wells Beach Maine

Skipping Stones-Wells Beach, Maine

 

Starshine-Wells Beach, Maine

Say Cheese, Wells Beach-Maine

Taking Flight Before Sandy-Wells Beach, Maine

Fall Colors-The Path-Wells Beach-Maine

The Path to Wells Beach-Maine

Ogunquit River-Footbridge Beach-Maine

Boothbay Harbor-Maine



Peeling Paint-Boothbay Harbor-Maine

Rocking Porch-Boothbay Harbor-Maine

Rose Hips and Beach Roses-Footbridge Beach-Maine

The Fence-Footbridge Beach-Maine

Reflections-Ogunquit Beach-Maine

  

Footbridge-Ogunquit-Maine

 

Seagrass-Wells Beach-Maine

Christmas in July-Nubble Light-Cape Neddick-Maine

 

A Thorn Between Two Beach Roses

 

Paul and Bill-Cape Neddick-Maine

 

Read more...

The Patient Gardener

When I finally agreed to live with Paul he packed up my ragtag group of furnishings on a snowy winter day and moved them by himself to surprise me while I was at work one day.  He was too excited to wait for me, or perhaps he understood that my involvement would only prolong the process. Walking through my empty basement apartment one final time, I paused at the bedroom door, took a deep breath and turned off the light. “It’s time to stop saying goodbye,” my friend Nancy advised me tearfully when I told her that I was moving again, and that was the thought in my head as I trudged through the snow towards a warm waiting car. I mentally counted; five homes in four years, each time hoping to find a place that would heal me.  “I want to plant a garden,” I told Paul as we drove to New Hampshire and for the rest of that winter I looked through the window at the banks of silent snow and envisioned a border garden in the backyard at the edge of the forest.

When spring came Paul surprised me again by having two tons of dark organic soil delivered. When I arrived home from work I found him sitting in a lawn chair at the foot of the dirt mound holding a glass of wine and smiling as if he were basking in the view of a majestic mountain range.  Cart by cart we moved the mountain to the edge of the forest framing the yard with a serpentine border of brown loam.  We loaded up the border with perennials, annuals, landscape lighting an irrigation system and a fountain.

One night in midsummer we sat on the back deck and surveyed our kingdom.  “I’m just amazed by the mass of beautiful mounds of white flowers,” Paul joked pointing out the one flaw in my master plan.  The sweet alyssum I planted would not grow. No matter how much love and attention I lavished on them, they remained stunted.  “This garden needs a gardener who cares,” he would say to me while planting a kiss on my head.

Eventually we sold the house in New Hampshire and bought our condo in Boston.  No longer any outdoor space for a garden, I planted Alyssum seedlings again in a box of dirt precipitously perched on the ledge of our kitchen windows.  They flourished all summer and filled our home with a subtle sweet scent. I let them go to seed over the winter and in the spring they surprised me by returning in an even larger mound of sweet white flowers.   

Like humans, plants need water, light and nutrients to survive, but it takes something special for them to thrive.  Who knows when a flower will bloom or a heart will heal, but this is how a garden grows; Learn to say hello instead of goodbye, find a gardener who cares, put them in the right spot and they’ll bloom in the most unlikely spaces.

 

Read more...

Imperfection: Less than 100 words

He is not perfect.

These are four words that sink into my heart like a warm knife through butter.

For all of my bravado about being happy and the sweet perfection of my new found life, there are still days when I must admit that life is not perfect.

That he is not perfect.

Because perfection is someone who can read my mind completely and still it lies unread.

Unread by him.

But more so by me.

Read more...

The Whole Tomato

There comes a time when you are alone in your own little kitchen at night, looking at a tomato and think it’s just me, should I slice this and waste half or just go without that can make you think of John Donne.  It is an unlikely comparison but I assure you it makes sense, because John Donne wrote “Every Man’s death diminishes me.”  If that is true, then every person standing alone at their kitchen counter late at night wondering if his or her worth is greater than a whole tomato diminishes my own self-worth. So, I want to tell you what you are worth:

You are worth being kissed.  Not just any kiss but the type that sends pulses of electricity through your body and feels like the answer to the hunger that has been trapped inside of you for a thousand years and sucks so much air from your lungs that you think you will never breathe again. 

You are worth being giddy.  Giddy every time you see him at the end of an absence, whether an hour, a day or a week.  Having your heart skip a beat uncontrollably as his face lights up when he sees you and flashes a big goofy grin.

You are worth being objectified:  objectified by someone who loves you so much that he can’t keep his hands and eyes off of you as you pass through the room. Worth being pinched and slapped on your rear-end because he loves you so much that he can’t see anything but physical perfection.

You are worth being loved unconditionally:  loved by your parents, your siblings, your friends and your other half.  Loved for the person you are and not the person you will become.  Not the potentially new and improved you, but the one on Tuesday morning before you have washed your hair and brushed your teeth.

You are worth a big wedding:  a wedding under a big white tent with a thousand twinkling lights on a perfect June day.  A wedding where friends and family laugh and cry and make embarrassing toasts and drink too much and dance and hug you and kiss you and tell you that they wish they had a love like yours.  

You are worth a marriage that is legal: by the federal government, in all fifty states, in all countries.

You are worth great sex:  Without guilt, without shame but with wild abandon and frequency; sometimes just for the pure animal instinct of it and sometimes for the intimate act of joining your souls, but always consensual.

You are worth a pet name:  pookie, sweetie, boo-boo, schmoopie, honey, handsome, hubby, dumpling, darling or monkey-butt.

You are worth being a parent: No matter how they come into your life, no matter if it is a child a dog a cat or a mouse.

You are worth spooning:  Late at night in your bed when the moon casts soft shadows and in the early morning half-light surrounded by the scent and warmth of his skin when he says “five more minutes” and you wish for five hundred more years.

When a gay teenager in Mississippi, a middle aged man in Chicago or a lonely housewife in Kansas wonders if they will ever be loved and decides that life is not worth living, then I am the lesser for it.  Because your worth is my worth and not so very long ago, I decided that I was worth the whole tomato.  And so are you.

Linking up with Yeah Write
 

Read more...

Taken!

When he doesn’t respond to my text message I know something is wrong, can feel it in my bones.  I call his cell phone; four rings and it transfers to voice mail.  It sounds too chipper, as if the message should somehow change to reflect the situation.  When the recording of his voice answers, I expect to hear sirens blaring and a half coherent message with long pauses as he gasps for air:  “I can’t talk right now…I’ve been in a horrible and disfiguring accident… Leave a message and if I’m not dead I’ll call you." Because if that is not what has happened to him, then by God he’ll wish it had.

If there is one thing that Paul and I do well, it is communicate.  The day after our first date, he sent a text message to me:  “Good conversation, good looking, good start, it’s all good!”  From that point forward we were as good as married. Couldn’t let a day go by that we didn’t know where the other one was.  Because when you finally find your split-apart there is a fear that you will lose track of him again.

When I leave work at ten pm, much later than I told Paul I would leave, I call his phone again but there is no answer.  This is so uncharacteristic that my mind creates a variety of scenarios to fill in the missing details.  It’s good like that.  My brain will take a little snippet of a past experience mix it with the present and embellish it with a flourish to make it interesting but believable. Behold the string of blog posts before this one. 

My mind goes back to Halloween night at a local night club. The men are all in costumes; sailors, policemen, soldiers.  But they all seem to be missing their shirts or wearing pants a few sizes too small. I don’t think there is such a thing as a costume that is not preceded by the term sexy anymore. Except for clown costumes, they seem to have cornered the market on creepy.  I see a man lean in and whisper into Paul’s ear. When I ask Paul what the man said to him he says “He told me that I should win the contest for most handsome.” 

I wouldn’t disagree with that and it is a validation of what I already know, although I wonder why I wasn’t included in the most handsome category too.  But tonight my mind uses that experience to create a scenario for Paul’s absence. I cross the street and walk into the Tapas bar where Paul was waiting for me.  I tell the hostess that I am incredibly late and should have called to let my party know and ask if I can search the bar.  She looks genuinely concerned. I assume this is because I am in Washington, DC and not Boston.  

He is nowhere to be found. 

That’s it.  Paul struck up a conversation with a stranger.  The stranger masquerading as a sexy sailor was infatuated with Paul’s good looks and dropped some drugs into his vodka tonic.  Paul is now unconscious at the bottom of a well in the sexy sailor’s basement, who is in fact not a sailor but a creepy clown.  There is no other reasonable explanation.   

I am inconsolable as I walk to the hotel eating an extra-large order of French fries.  I make a mental note to be angry at Paul, if he is alive, for making me eat crisis food.  When I get to our room, my key card does not work.  I bang my fist on the door. There is no answer!

When I present my key card to the hotel desk clerk he eyes me suspiciously.  Who can blame him?  My eyes are red, my heart is racing and I am making love to French fries.  I hand him my driver’s license and he slowly hands me the repaired key card.

When I open the door, I expect carnage, a lifeless body.  What I find is Paul snoring on the bed and an infomercial playing on the TV.  Spitting out my French fries I angrily shove Paul’s arm.  He wakes up with a start and says “You scared me!”

“I scared you?”  I ask angrily.  With ketchup on my lips, piercing red rimmed eyes and the harsh light of the hall behind me, I am aware that I would win the creepy clown costume contest.

You should know that it took a full day for me to forgive him.  But I knew that Paul would be travelling for work this week to someplace, I can’t remember where.  Graciously I decided that it was important to talk about this before his trip and put this event in the past.  In the end, it all comes down to communication.  And if there is one thing that we do well, it is communicate.

 

Join me on Facebook and see pictures and stories you won't see here

Read more...

Stardust

The stars floating above our heads on this Cool Maine evening look the same to me as they did when I was a thirteen year old boy surviving North Carolina. Every Sunday night I would flick on the garage light, throw open the back screen door and noisily drag the wheel-less trash cans down the gravel driveway. After placing the metal cans on the curb there would be a sudden piercing silence. Looking up at the starry sky I would imagine what life on a planet circling one of those distant points of light might be like; wondering if there was some lonely alien boy looking back at me.

But I was certain that any civilization existing on a distant planet would be far too advanced to be touched by divorce, discrimination or Sunday night football.  This was the year that my kind- hearted eighth grade teacher, Sister Mary Claire asked us to write a letter to our grown up selves; a message in a bottle to be delivered sometime in the distant future. 

I remember feeling self-conscious about what to write. As a thirteen year old gay boy in the south, I didn’t talk about my feelings, I suppressed them and goodness knows I didn’t eat them,  I was far too skinny.  So, I wrote a generic letter:

            Dear Bill,

            Wow, I can’t believe you are an adult now, congratulations!

I hope that life is good for you now and that you are happy.  I am sure that a lot has changed.  Are you still best friends with Willy?  I bet you are.

Do you still live in Greensboro?

Well, I better go now.

Sincerely,

You (Ha, ha!)

I don’t recall ever receiving the physical letter.  Perhaps Sister Mary Claire threw them all away in a rage after catching most of the eighth grade class in the field at recess smoking marijuana.  Or maybe she lost them when she was transferred to a convent in a crime riddled neighborhood of Baltimore.  Many years later I heard that she left the Catholic Church.  Perhaps the yellowed letters written with a number two pencil sit in a shoebox under a disenchanted aging woman’s bed who stares out at the expanding galaxy of her own past.  But it was less the actual delivery of the letter and more the act of writing it that spoke to me.  That there would be a future Bill in a distant world was enough of a message.

It did not occur to me then that Sister Mary Claire might have written a letter to herself. But we are all made of stardust.  I think we both searched the heavens looking for answers while the world around us spun out of control.

When Paul and I bought our cottage in Maine I bought two solar “sun jars”.  We place them under the full sun during the day and sit by their soft yellow light under the stars at night.  Tonight, I look up at the stars, and see their history; see the light that left on its journey through space years ago.  Looking across the table at Paul’s face I see the answer to that thirteen year old boy’s question and more importantly, the delivery of his message. 

     Join me on Facebook and see pictures and stories you won't see here

http://yeahwrite.me/82-open

Read more...

The Story in The Story

It is six thirty in the morning and I am sitting at our dining room table with a cup of coffee on one side of me and the window half open on the other.  I opened the window hoping that inspiration would be carried on the back of the cool morning breeze. The half-light of the sun barely illuminates the living room, which makes the dark grouping of objects seem more like a suggestion of furniture instead of concrete reality. If I were to stretch my arm through the window I could almost touch the brick corner of our neighbor’s building.  But it remains just out of reach: as does any inspiration for a story.

As a writer a great deal of my time is spent trying to bridge the world around me with the world inside of me. Often times, Paul will catch me staring blankly into space.  I worry that he feels like he is living with a person who is experiencing the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease; someone who is not always present in the world.

He will snap his fingers in front of my face and say “Hello? Can you repeat what I just told you?”   When I flatly recount his story verbatim he’ll look at me and say “Wow, my story sounds even more boring when you tell it.”  To which I respond
“Not really.”

But that is the crux of the matter.  Any story can be told, but it is the way in which it is told that matters. If I write about my grandfather’s table, I can describe the way it looks.  It is round with dark grained wood, curved legs and has multiple leaves to make it bigger. All of these things are true.  It is an object in this world.  But if I speak of its journey from the mountains of North Carolina to its spot in our dining room with our blended family sitting around it for the first time together on the evening before our marriage, it becomes something else. It becomes the bridge between this world and my world; a story in a story.

“I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need.” Rodin said.

I suppose that is what I do with a block of words.  Whittling them down until the story hiding inside of the story is revealed.  It runs in my family.  My grandfather did this with his drawings.  We would sit at his dining room table and he would begin to draw as if the picture already existed on the paper and his pencil merely highlighted it.    And so must his mother, who was a musical prodigy, have done the same with him; at the very same table singing in French as she played the Mandolin. The love of art and the art of love played out over and over again upon this table.

Paul walks into the living room humming and arranges the pillows on the now clearly defined sofa.  The clock above me plays its tune and strikes eight.  I sit up, stretch my arms, look out through the window and catch a glimpse of my neighbor sitting at his kitchen table.  I wonder if he has been there the whole time.

“Did you find any perspiration?” Paul asks playfully, knowingly misusing the word as he kisses me.

“Yep” I say, ready to join the real world again.  “It was there in front of me the whole time.”

  http://yeahwrite.me/81-open

Read more...