A pensive post for Mother's Day

“She will always be my teacher. Our time here is short, even when we are fortunate to live long. I cherish every moment. A mother’s heart is as big as the world. There is still so much to learn.” -- poet and writer E. Ethelbert Miller, on visiting his 90-year-old mother in a nursing home, from NPR’s Weekend Edition, May 10, 2009.

It’s Mother’s Day. This morning on my walk I thought first about my own mother, of course, and some of the things she did and said that I will always remember, and some of the ways in which she taught me and scolded me and loved me. Then I thought about my children and some of my own mothering moments, and I wondered if the things that seem significant to me are the things they’ll remember best…and I decided they’re probably not. I doubt if my own mother ever knew, for instance, that, to me, one of the defining moments of her motherhood occurred early on a summer morning when I was six, after she had stayed up all night long installing a flush toilet in the camp all by herself (because my brother Steve was marrying a “city girl”). When I got up the next morning and started to head for the outhouse, she opened the bathroom door with a flourish and said those magic words… “You can flush!”

That moment taught me so many things: You can do anything you make up your mind to do. You don’t need a man around to take care of the “manly” projects. Finish what you start, even if it means you have to stay up all night. (OK, I’m still working on the “finish what you start” part, but I have been told that when I’m involved in a project I’m like “a dog with a piece of meat,” and I know just where that tenacity comes from). It’s a good thing to welcome your children’s friends and partners and spouses into the family…sometimes you do it with a pie or a cake, but sometimes nothing says “we’re happy to have you here with us” like indoor plumbing.

I’ve been thinking all day about mothers, motherhood, and mothering, and about some of my favorite mothers. I’ve been mothered by countless women throughout my life, whether or not they realized it, and in the five years since I’ve been, technically, motherless, I’ve been fortunate to find mothering when and where I need it. Sometimes it’s as obvious as a hug, or something written in a card that makes me feel especially loved, but often it’s much more subtle…maybe it’s a friend’s reaction to my bragging about the kids that seems as proud as if she were their grandmother, or that slightly bossy note in an older woman’s voice that I didn’t even know I’d been missing, that tone that says, “I’m a mother and I’m used to people doing what I tell them.”

In Meredith Hall’s heartbreakingly beautiful memoir, Without a Map, she writes:

I have a friend who donates blood every time the Red Cross holds a drive. When I tell her that I admire her for her generosity, she says, “I only go because I need the mothering so much. It feels good to be touched. The nurses are kind and make me feel loved.”

If we are lucky, we get the mothering we need, wherever we can find it.

Happy Mother’s Day to all of my favorite “other mothers”:

To Peggy, the matriarch of our family since my mother died. We call her the BBSE – the Best Big Sister Ever – but she has mothered me in so many ways ever since Steve had the good sense to start dating her when I was two or three years old. (Which was it – 1961 or 1962?) I don’t remember a time when she wasn’t part of the family. (And she would have happily continued to use the outhouse at camp, but we’re all grateful that she was Mither’s excuse for putting in a flush.)

To Leslie, who was the Baby Princess for nearly ten years, but never complained, at least to me, about losing that status when I was born. Maybe she was lucky in a way – she got a real live baby to practice her mothering skills on when her friends had to make do with dolls. Or maybe her kids were the lucky ones. I wonder if she ever dug her fingernails into their wrists hard enough to draw blood?

To Winnie, who passed away this spring, almost five years to the day after my mother. “Besides your mommy and the doctor and nurse, I was the first person who got to see you when you were born,” she used to tell me, and I always knew that she had loved me unconditionally from that moment on. Unconditional love, the almost exclusive province of mothers, is not something to be taken lightly; most of us are fortunate to have it from one mother, let alone two.

To Aunt Leota, who worked in a bank and wore perfume and makeup and had the softest skin. I thought she was the most beautiful, best-smelling mother in the world, and she sometimes let my uncle and my cousins keep the Red Sox game on even during dinner.

To Auntie Bet, my mother’s dearest friend for more than 60 years, who modeled strength, independence, and intellect, and who helped to teach me the value of women’s friendships.

To Mrs. Abercrombie, Mrs. Walkama, Mrs. Mendelson, Mrs. Hower, and Miss Diggs. I was so lucky that my first five teachers were all such nurturing, motherly women, who understood that at five, or seven, or nine, I was really still just a baby.

To Donna’s mom, who once scrubbed dog poop out of my clothes with Lestoil when I tripped on the way to her house and fell in it, instead of sending me home to my own mother…who is “Italian by marriage” and still sends me home with food when I visit…who wrote on my graduation card two years ago, “We love you and brag about you as if you were our own daughter.”

To Maria’s mom, who let us monopolize her TV room and fed me about five nights a week for a while in high school when Maria and I went on an extended Star Trek binge, who worked seven days a week with her parents on their farm, and who epitomized the phrase “the salt of the earth.”

To Ev Nickerson, who allowed me underfoot in the kitchen of the Sunday River Inn, and taught me to make yeast breads.

To Diddy, who shared my love of baseball and gave freely of her time, recipes, baked goods, and advice – both solicited and unsolicited – when I was a clueless 20-year-old newlywed.

To Mabel and Ida...if you believe the sitcoms, stand-up acts, and popular culture in general, two wonderful mothers-in-law in a lifetime are a statistical improbability, but that's what I was fortunate enough to have.

To Cynthia, long-time camp road neighbor and friend, who gave me cookies and peanut butter sandwiches when I showed up at her door as a three-year-old, and whose family shared so much of my family’s early camp history from the 1950s and ‘60s.

To Joan, my camp road walking partner, who is just enough older to seem motherly at times, but who shares my memories of growing up on the lake as a summer kid.

To all the others who have mothered me, and to all mothers everywhere – Happy Mother’s Day.

What I saw on my walk

It was over 80 degrees here yesterday, and kind of muggy...the kind of weather you start expecting about two months from now, in late June, but not in late April. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. That shot of summer-like temperatures and sunshine went a long way toward melting those last piles of dirty snow left in the woods. (For those of you who do not live in Maine: yes, we do still have a bit of snow here and there, and yes, we do sometimes question the sanity of living in a place where there's apt to be snow on the ground a full six months of the year. Some lifelong Mainers go south for the winter, or part of it; they tend to get springtime amnesia, and arrive back, all tan and relaxed, around the first of April, acting stunned by the presence of dirty snowbanks and ice on the ponds, as if a lifetime of living here hasn't taught them anything.)

I'm pretty sure that last year at this time, the ice hadn't even gone out of North Pond yet (this year it went out on the 14th, a full week earlier than usual, and, if I remember right, two weeks earlier than last year).

Anyway, the camp road, where Remy and I have been walking almost every morning since the mud dried up enough to not suck my shoes off when I step in the soft spots, is suddenly positively bursting with signs of spring. There are buds on the moose maples (a.k.a. striped maples, which Wikipedia calls "an understory tree of cool, moist forests"--they grow everywhere down near the lake, and make great marshmallow-roasting sticks, fishing poles, and replacement tent poles, depending on their size), and pretty soon the buds will turn into wide, hand-shaped leaves that will completely change the way the camp road looks, from airy and open to cool, green, and tunnel-like.

Little green things were poking out of the ground all along the road, and in a couple of especially sunny spots, yellow violets were already in bloom. (I forgot to take a picture of them, but they looked just like these, so I "borrowed" this photo.)

When we got to camp, we found just one last patch of snow in the shady spot between the camp and the banking behind it. I remembered one year--I must have been about eight years old or so--when we came up to camp on Memorial Day weekend and found a patch of snow still hanging on, in the same place.

Remy had already been in swimming a few times since the ice went out, but yesterday was the first time it was hot enough for him to race right down to the lake and plunge in as soon as we got there. He found a ball on the porch and I threw it for him at least a dozen times.














His favorite thing to do after swimming is to get as dirty as possible again by rolling in dirt, hemlock needles, or anything else he can find that will stick to his wet fur. Silly old dog.
I was excited to see buds on the high-bush blueberry bush that grows right beside the lake (you can't really tell, but that's what I was trying to take a picture of here). That bush is at least as old as I am, and possibly a whole lot older, and as far as I know, it has never been tended, pruned, or fertilized. Every year we get enough blueberries to make muffins and pancakes quite a few times, and in a good year there will be enough for a pie or two. When I was very little, the first thing in the morning, my mother would give me a plastic mug with a handle and send me out, still in my pajamas, with the instructions, "If you'll pick me a cup of blueberries, I'll make some pancakes."

I saw two loons on the lake in front of the camp, but they dove before I could get my camera.

I saw a woodpecker, not a pileated, but just a little one (downy? hairy?), and heard several more tapping on trees in the woods.

I saw a kayak, a canoe, and a motorboat out on the lake, the first ones I've seen this year.

I saw neighbors at three other camps on our road, checking on things and starting the process of opening their camps for the season.

I saw a few mouse poops in our kitchen cupboards, but I didn't clean them out because it was 80 degrees outside the camp and 53 degrees inside. I swept the deck and played ball with Remy instead.

And when I got home, I found that the sun and warm temperatures had turned yesterday's buds into these:

Easter among the heathens

It's Easter, a holiday that slips by without a lot of hoopla in our house, since the three of us who live here are all, to varying degrees, heathens. One definition of "heathen," according to my rather outdated American Heritage Dictionary (it was a high school graduation present from my mother, and it contains no modern words like "megabyte," "laptop," or "locavore," but I like it because it's worn and familiar, and because I take a certain perverse pleasure in using a dictionary whose entries skip directly from "internee" to "internist") is "One who is regarded as irreligious, uncivilized, or unenlightened." (That's the definition I'd apply to Tony and Will.)

As for me, I'll take the description offered by Wikipedia (now, there's an entry not found in my dictionary, either). When you enter "heathen" in a search of Wikipedia, it takes you directly to the page for "paganism." The word "pagan" comes from the Latin word "paganus," which means "rural," "rustic," or "of the country," which sounds quite pleasant and not at all pejorative, although I suppose the term, like "heathen," has always had rather negative connotations among Christians.

Anyway, paganism, or at least neo-paganism, from the little I've read about it, sounds like a very loose, free sort of religion, and one that doesn't ask a lot of its adherents...a little like Unitarian Universalism, only more so. So if I'm out for a walk on Sunday mornings, counting the hooded mergansers in the open water of Round Pond or playing Stick with Remy, instead of sitting through a church service, I'm just being a good pagan.

It was about ten years ago that Caitlin decided that Easter Sunday would be a good time to announce to my mother that I had become a pagan. My mother was a very good church-goer all her life, and very active in her church as long as I can remember, and she never quite came to terms with the fact that I pretty much stopped going to church once I had kids and jobs and more things to take care of than would fit into just Saturdays.

I remember the exact moment that Caitlin made her announcement, because it was a very painful moment for me, although not in the way you might be thinking. I was standing at the stove, making Easter dinner, and my mother had just arrived at our house from church. Just as I reached over a tall pot of something simmering on a front burner to stir something on a back burner, Cait piped up with, "Mom, have you told Gramma you've decided to be a pagan?" My mother said, "What?" just as I dropped the spoon into the pot on the back burner. I reached into the pot to get it, and as I did, I nudged aside the lid of the pot on the front burner. My sweater had ridden up as I stretched to reach the back of the stove, and steam from the pot scalded an inch-wide stripe across my stomach.

Fortunately, my ensuing yelping prevented me from having to discuss paganism with my mother, and she never brought the subject up again.

Anyway, Easter in our house has always been mostly about egg hunts, chocolate bunnies, and ham. (That, and trying to keep the cats from eating that nasty green cellophane Easter grass, which always makes them throw up.)

This year, with our finances rather strained and postage going up all the time (and chocolate and jelly beans being awfully heavy to mail) I seriously considered not sending Easter packages to the girls, but tradition won out, and I packaged up bunnies and jelly beans and Tony lugged them to the post office for me (and was shocked that postage for three little packages could, as they say around here, "ruin the looks of a $20 bill").

I even hid a few eggs around inside the house for Will (yes, I know he's 18, but when you're the youngest child and the last one left at home, you have to put up with some small indignities while your mother clings to the vestiges of your childhood), but with the wind blowing hard and the temperature hovering in the high 20s this morning, I was very glad I didn't have to take part in the annual outdoor hunt that was always a tradition when all the girls were home. (The photo above is probably from about 10 or 11 years ago, and it looks like Easter was warmer that year, but I remember some pretty torturous egg-hunts that took place in the freezing cold at barely dawn [thanks to Caitlin, who could always be counted on to get us all up early on holidays if candy or presents were involved] around piles of dirty snow and patches of frozen mud.)

I did cook ham for dinner, and even got some asparagus, because it seemed springlike, and ours won't be up and ready to pick for another month. I felt a little bad about not making my traditional bunny-shaped yeast rolls, or a special dessert, but I'm on a healthy-eating kick, which I'm trying to turn into a permanent healthy-eating lifestyle, and I didn't want to jeopardize it. (I didn't make any hot cross buns this year, either, even though I love them, and even though they have true pagan origins, with the cross symbolizing the four quarters of the moon.) So I made purple and green Jello instead, and cut it into little cubes and mixed the colors together, and except for the fact that Tony doesn't really like Jello in general, and the fact that grape Jello in particular (despite its wonderful color) is a nasty, nasty thing, it made a fairly festive Easter dessert.

In past years I've made Easter cakes, starting with this one, which I made when I was about 14, when we came to Maine from Connecticut to spend Easter with Steve and Peggy at the Inn. On the back of this photo, my mother wrote, "Easter at Sunday River--before Isaac ate the cake!" (Isaac was my brother Andy's yellow Lab, and I think that's about all I need to say about the fate of that particular Easter cake.)

But I never attempted an Easter cake as impressive as this one that my mother made the year I was two:I have a feeling she probably also made this Easter coat and whatever dress I had on under it, probably something painstakingly hand-smocked. And years later she made these smocked Easter dresses for Annie and Cait:














Hmm...Annie's dress seems a bit on the short side...perhaps it was made for the previous Easter?

When I went for my walk this morning, in the cold, cold wind, I saw that, even as cold as it is, the ice is starting to go out of North Pond already, and I thought about how my mother would have liked to see that, and to think that in just a couple of months, she could get down to camp and wage war on the mice and spiders who have had the place to themselves all winter.

Five years ago on Easter, my mother died, and I have to admit that, for me, Easter is now more about remembering her than anything else. But that's OK. When you're a pagan, Easter can be anything you want it to be.

When you're a Dork Mom

I have never been The Cool Mom, even though for years it was something I aspired to.

I always thought Cool Mom status was something you could attain through hard work--things like baking cookies and attending sporting events and loaning out your car. (Or taking an entire day off from work to create an extravaganza of a cake featuring Teddy Grahams in frosting bathing trunks and bikinis cavorting on a cookie-crumb sand beach and floating around in Gummi-Saver innertubes in a lake of blue Jello.)

But no matter how many cookies I baked, or how many soccer or field hockey or softball games I shivered through, or how often I got in my car and didn't complain about the gas gauge perpetually pointing to "E," I never quite made it onto the Cool Mom pedestal.

Maybe it was my total disregard for fashion, or my dislike of shopping. Certainly my years of carrying around one or more volumes of The Tightwad Gazette, and announcing at random moments, often when my kids' friends were present, "Did you know you can save $17.81 a year by washing out baggies?" didn't help my cause.

Maybe it was my fondness for country music, especially country oldies and stuff that even nearly-normal people who liked country music had never heard of. "My mom only listens to old guys and dead guys," one of the kids lamented, describing my CD collection, which runs heavily to Willie, Waylon, Kris, and Johnny.

Or maybe it was that time in a department store lingerie department when I waved a handful of brightly-colored bras in the air and hollered across the sales floor to Caitlin, "These look fun! Why don't you try these on?"

Whatever the reasons (and I'm sure there were many) that kept me from being the Cool Mom, I resigned myself years ago to Dork Mom status. I had plenty of company with the other Dork Moms, the ones who didn't know enough not to use pet names for their kids in public, who couldn't stop themselves from reaching out to straighten a collar, the ones who forgot to blend invisibly into the background in public places. (I have a friend who once--and I am not making this up--committed the trifecta of Dork Mom offenses when she called out to her high school senior son across a crowded dining hall at lunchtime, "Come here, Kane-O, and let Mummy fix your tie!")

When you're a Dork Mom, you come to accept your complete and utter lack of coolness. After a while you stop trying. You make peace with the fact that you'll never read the right books, listen to the right music, wear the right clothes, or eat the right foods. You stop caring that you'll never learn to behave properly in public, and that you're an embarrassment to your children. Eventually you even develop a defiant little attitude about it--a "this is who I am, so take it or leave it" kind of thing.

But then, it turns out, something peculiar happens. Your kids grow up and leave home and once in a while they call you and ask for your blueberry muffin recipe, or they want to know how to wash a sweater, or whether you can still eat leftover chicken after five days in the refrigerator. You're still a dork, but now you're also a valuable source of information.

A while later, you start to realize that your kids are asking to borrow the books you're reading. Or they go with you to a Kris Kristofferson concert and decide he's really pretty incredible. They solicit your advice about things even more important than potentially hazardous leftovers, and sometimes they even follow it.

Eventually you might notice that your book list on GoodReads.com overlaps your kid's by 37.34%, and that your ratings for the 59 titles you have in common are 78% similar.

All of this has happened to me, but I still never dared to hope that I might have started to attain Cool Mom status...until I got a phone call the other night from Cait, who said something like this:

"Hey, Mom, I was just reading your blog and laughing my ass off, and I was thinking, you know, I read your blog, and my friend Ashley reads it, and my friend Brian who you've never even met reads it, and some of my other friends read it, and Katie and Annie and Annie's boyfriend read it...so I was just thinking...you know how Debbie was always the Cool Mom because she talked to the girls about sex and let them drink beer in the house? [Aha! So that's what it takes! No wonder I never had a prayer of becoming the Cool Mom!] And you know how you always wished you were the Cool Mom? Well, I was just thinking about it, and I realized...well, now you're kind of the Cool Mom."

You hear that? I'm the Cool Mom! Well, at least until they read this post...

Addendum: Caitlin has just read this post, and called to inform me that, although the bra-waving incident was bad, it pales by comparison to the time Donna and I met her bus in Portsmouth, a bus filled with her high school freshman peers who were all returning from a two-week trip to Hungary, waving fluorescent pink and orange posters that said, "Welcome home, Caitlin!" in both English and Hungarian. Although I think, actually, I can blame that one on Donna. (It was also Donna's idea for both of us to wear "Hartwick Mom" buttons when we visited Cait at college for Parents' Weekend, and to introduce ourselves to her friends as "Caitlin's two moms.")

C.H.A.O.S.

My house suffers from C.H.A.O.S.—Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome. It’s not that I don’t want to live in a tidy house—really!—it’s just that I can’t figure out how to get—and stay—there.

There are a number of very good reasons for this.

First, we have a dirt driveway, which means that, especially at this time of the year, we have a mud driveway. Keeping up with the mud that comes in on our shoes is hopeless. So I don’t even try. I know people who have instituted a no-shoes-in-the-house rule and claim that it has made a remarkable difference. However, in order to institute a no-shoes-in-the-house rule, you have to a) live alone or b) live with cooperative people, neither of which is my situation.

Second, we have a big black Lab who goes to work in the woods with Tony. Remy spends his days, depending on the season, splashing in brooks, playing in mud, and rolling in everything from snow to dust to unidentifiable dead things. He spends every evening shedding at least a pound of fur, along with whatever dust, burrs, pine needles, pitch, and things-too-terrible-to-contemplate he has picked up during the day, evenly distributing this detritus through the house. (By the way, I usually think of the word detritus as “accumulated matter or debris,” as in “I’ve lost the phone bill again and am sifting through the detritus on the kitchen table to try to find it,” but I note that, according to Wikipedia, “In biology, detritus is non-living particulate organic material…It typically includes the bodies or fragments of dead organisms as well as fecal material.” Yeah, that’s it.)

Third, we have four cats. Whenever I am asked how many cats I have (and you might be surprised at how often I get asked this question. For instance, in the past week alone, I’ve been asked it twice. Once was by the cashier at the grocery story, when I was buying the supersize bag of cat crunchies, the supersize box of scoopable cat litter, and ten cans of canned cat food. Then just yesterday, when my friend Cathy came over to go for a walk with me, and it was so warm and spring-like that I had the back door open and was letting the cats think about coming out into the dog pen to roll around on the doorstep, Cathy saw all their little faces peering out the door and asked, “How many cats do you have, anyway?”)…anyway, as I was saying, whenever I get asked how many cats I have, I say something like this: “Well, I have two cats myself. But I let Caitlin adopt Manny when she was a senior in high school, and of course he still lives with us and obviously always will. Then a year later, Annie got Max, and when she moved into a no-pets apartment, he came to stay with us, and now that she has a boyfriend who’s allergic to cats, it doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere, either.” I feel it’s important to explain that I’m not one of those crazy cat people, really, I’m not, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. (When I come downstairs in the morning, and they’re all in the kitchen to greet me, yowling and weaving around my legs, a sea of furry, writhing bodies, I think of Harrison Withers from Harriet the Spy and I have to tell myself over and over, like a mantra, “I am not a crazy cat person, I am not a crazy cat person…”) Well, four cats shed a lot. They create clumps of cat fur, dust bunnies of cat fur, rolling tumbleweeds of cat fur that can very quickly get out of hand.

That about takes care of the actual dirt problem. But even if I didn’t have a mud driveway, a big dirty dog, and four cats, I would still have a big clutter problem. There is clothing clutter, gadget clutter, and decorative clutter. There is office supply clutter, cooking-related clutter, and sewing clutter. But a lot of the clutter, the majority of it, in fact, seems to consist of paper—books, magazines, newspapers, important mail, junk mail, probably-junk-but-I’m-not-sure-yet mail, cards, notes, and lists.


I haven’t seen the dining room table since we ate Christmas Eve dinner on it. Shortly after that, I started working on the year-end tax stuff there, and half of the table is still buried under files and receipts and so forth. It also comes in handy for folding laundry (when I can uncover enough of the surface) and as a landing pad for things that are on their way to some other part of the house…like the bottle of shampoo that has been trying to make its way upstairs to the bathroom for about three weeks, while I continue to wash my hair with the watered-down dregs of the last bottle.


But that’s OK, because we can always eat at the kitchen table:

It’s very easy to blame all of this clutter on the fact that more stuff comes in the mail every day than any normal person could possibly keep up with, or the fact that, if any housework ever does get done around here, I’m the only one who ever does it, or the fact that houses built in the late 1800s are notoriously short on storage space.

But here’s the real problem: my priorities.

One night last week I came home from work, and here are seven things I did not do:

1) I did not wash, fold, and put away laundry.
2) I did not sweep the kitchen floor.
3) I did not finish my bookkeeping and put away the files and piles of papers on the dining room table.
4) I did not put away the dishes in the dish drainer.
5) I did not sort the recycling.
6) I did not get out the vacuum cleaner and drag it from room to room, trying to keep up with the flying fur.
7) I did not clean any toilets, sinks, or tubs.

Here are seven things I did do that night after work:

1) I talked to Donna on the phone. We have many things to talk about, and they are all very, very important.
2) I made dinner. From scratch. I don’t remember what it was, but I’m sure it was pretty good.
3) I made two lovely loaves of oatmeal bread, fresh and fragrant and yeasty.
4) I made two kinds of cupcakes—yellow and chocolate—for my coworker’s birthday, and decorated them with sunflowers.
5) I watched “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” with Will and Tony. (The ones that were on the night before; I don’t stay up late enough to watch them the first time around.)
6) I finished knitting a baby sweater.
7) I went to bed and read The Mighty Queens of Freeville for an hour before I fell asleep.

Tonight I can think of at least ten things I should probably be doing instead of posting to my blog...but I have my priorities.

My naked ears, or "Don't worry--you can't cut it too short!"

For years now, when I go to get my hair cut, I've been saying things like, "Go ahead and cut it short," and "Don't worry, you can't cut it too short for me!" Most of the time that's true. I've had lots of haircuts where the hairdresser thought she was done, only to have me ask her to take a little more off.

It wasn't always this way.

As a kid, I had a lengthy series of severely traumatizing haircuts from a large, well-muscled Italian man with a flat-top--Frank the Barber--in downtown Milford. At first, I was too young to realize that most little girls didn't get their hair cut at barbershops, where they had to wait their turn sandwiched rather snugly between Pasquale from the pizza place, still in his sauce-covered apron, and a prematurely balding young salesman with a comb-over. Even after I figured it out, when my mother told me that Frank's haircuts were much cheaper than those from the salons where my friends went, I didn't complain too much about it, although it was embarrassing to realize I was having my hair cut at the same place as some of the boys in my class. Finally, though, after a particularly bad outcome--Frank, struggling to even up my bangs, took a little off one side, then a little off the other, then a little more in the middle, and ended up cutting them so short that Kevin Roman, the meanest boy in the third-grade church choir, said, "You look just like a baby!" when he saw me--I put my foot down.

(I should note that this is the same Kevin Roman who was the only person in the whole choir mean enough to remind me--and he reminded me for years after it happened--about an unfortunate pants-wetting incident that occurred on the very first day of choir. We never went to the same school, and we didn't really even know each other, and third grade was the only year that the boys' and girls' choirs rehearsed together, but of course I saw him at church things, and every so often, maybe once a year or so, he would look right at me and say, "Hey, you're that girl who wet her pants at choir practice!" Now that I think about it, this might have only happened for a couple of years, since I don't remember ever coming face to face with him after sixth grade or so. It's even possible that Kevin Roman grew out of his dreadful 9-year-old self and became a perfectly decent person by high school, but I was not taking any chances. Any time I saw him from a distance, I managed to hide, and I'm afraid that even today, if I were walking around Milford and happened to run into him--of course, I still imagine him as a tough, stringy little boy with brown hair and freckles--I would hold my breath and try to avoid him, and I would still be expecting to hear, "Hey, aren't you that girl...?")

Anyway, after Kevin Roman told me I looked like a baby, I refused to go back to Frank's Barbershop anymore, and my mother started taking me to the place where she got her hair done, "Mr. Sam, Coiffures" on the Boston Post Road. Her own hairdresser was not Mr. Sam, but the chatty, somewhat abrasive Vi, who had ongoing problems with her teenage children and her love life, but whom my mother liked because she could trust her not to tease her hair too much after she took out the rollers.

I got my hair cut by whoever happened to be available at the salon, occasionally even Mr. Sam himself. The haircuts I got at Mr. Sam, Coiffures were not much different from Frank's, except that they probably cost three times as much, but at least I didn't have to worry about running into any boys I knew there. (For all I knew, maybe even Kevin Roman got his hair cut at Frank's, a possibility too terrible to contemplate.)

In middle school, when I finally decided to rebel, I just stopped getting my hair cut at all. Every girl I knew wore her hair long, straight, and parted in the middle, so that's how I wore mine for the next few years, too, much to my mother's dismay. For some reason, she really, really liked short hair, and she campaigned tirelessly for me to get mine cut. By high school graduation, I had caved and gotten it cut short again, but more because a few of my friends were wearing their hair short than because it pleased my mother.

I kept my hair short and sensible throughout the late 70s and 80s, mostly because I was too busy getting married, working, building a house, having kids, moving to a new house, getting divorced, getting married again, and that sort of thing to want to mess with long hair.

Then I grew it long again. I was in my thirties, and my mother continued to bring up frequently how much cuter my hair had looked when it was short, and to make veiled references to my advancing age, and the inappropriateness of long hair after one is out of one's teens. In fact, long after she had stopped sighing about my unfinished college degree and given up trying to get me to go to church, she still campaigned for short hair.

After she died, I cut my hair short again (I gave my long hair to Locks of Love, wondering if any young cancer patient really wanted graying middle-aged hair with split ends) and realized that, along with all the other things my mother was right about, short hair probably does look better on me.

Now that I'm back to short, I like it very short. I like my morning hair routine to consist of no more than a quick wash in the shower with a tiny dollop of cheap shampoo, and a quick run-through with a comb. (If it's short enough, I can skip the comb and use my fingers instead.) The shorter the better. You could say that I am not afraid of short hair.

(The only time I've ever felt anyone cut my hair too short for my liking was one summer when I was in college and Leslie came over to camp. "I saw the cutest haircut, and I think it would be perfect on you!" she said. [I think she was in cahoots with my mother.] "It was the same length all over, about half an inch long." I let her cut my hair, but a style that might have looked adorable on a tiny girl with a pixie face wasn't quite right for me; I just looked even more like a teenage boy [I already had the flat chest and pimples to complete the look].)

I got my hair cut yesterday, for the first time since November (another advantage of getting it cut really short is that I can make a haircut last a really long time, although it's usually at least a month past its expiration date by the time I get around to making an appointment) and, as usual (well, it was actually only the third time she had cut my hair, so I'm not sure "as usual" is the right choice of words, but you know what I mean), I told Kathy, "Don't worry--you can't cut it too short for me!"

I think where this haircut went wrong was in a simple miscommunication. She asked me if I wanted it "over my ears." I thought she meant, did I want "hair over my ears," as in, the top part of my ears would still be slightly obscured by hair, which is how I usually have it cut. She thought I meant, did I want it above my ears, as in, the hair on the sides of my head ends before it gets to the top of my ears.

I started to be suspicious when I heard her using a razor on the sides of my head. (I don't think I've heard the skri-i-itch of a razor next to my head since the days of Frank's Barber Shop.)

When she was done, I didn't say anything, because what was there to say? I had, after all, repeatedly assured her that the shorter it was, the better I liked it. So I said it looked fine.

And it is fine, really, it is. It's just that I've never seen quite so much of my ears before, and I'm not used to them. And it was 15 degrees this morning, with the wind whipping, and I really needed earmuffs. (Or maybe a pair of these cool Spock ears that Katy found.)

My new column!

We're starting a new column at the weekly paper where I work, and I get to be in charge of it! Called "Penny-Pinching Times," it will be a combination of money-saving ideas I dig up from various websites and my personal copies of all three volumes of The Tightwad Gazette (Subtitle: Promoting Thrift as a Viable Alternative Lifestyle--when these books first came out in the early- to mid-90s, I used them to drive my children crazy), tips sent in by readers, and suggestions channeled directly from my mother, who occasionally reaches down, whacks me "upside the head," and says things like, "Do you really need all those lights on?" or "Don't throw away those perfectly good bones--make a soup!"

We're a little late to the party, since the Lewiston Sun-Journal (our "parent" paper) has been running a column called "Tough People, Smart Money" for a couple of months now (but I think we have a better title for ours, and the proof of that is that every time I go to mention the Sun-Journal's column, I have to look at the paper to remember what they call it).

Anyway, here's the first installment, which is mainly intended to introduce the column and, I hope, generate some interest:

Penny-Pinching Times

Introducing a new column with hints, tips, and creative ways to make ends meet in a challenging economy.

Born in 1920, my mother grew up during the Great Depression. She remembers her own mother taking in washing to make ends meet, as well as baking cakes for neighbors' special events. “Whenever she made a cake, she would always bake an extra cupcake, and divide it among my brothers and me,” my mother once told me. “She called it a 'try cake,' and it was our job to let her know if it was good. We thought it was such a treat!”

My mother was a new bride in the spring of 1942, when sugar became the first of many foods to be rationed during World War II. The rationing program was the government's attempt to make sure that every American got a fair share of commodities that were in short supply during the war. Rationing eventually extended to many other foods, including meat, butter, shortening, processed foods, and canned milk, as well as non-food items like gasoline and fuel oil, and even shoes and bicycles.

As their children began to arrive, my parents sat down, did some calculating, and figured out that if they both switched to drinking their coffee black, without sugar, they could save enough sugar to bake a batch of cookies once a week for the kids. By the time the rationing of sugar ended in 1947, nearly two years after the end of the war, they were the parents of three small boys, who surely appreciated their sacrifice.

The lessons she learned during the Depression and the war years served my mother well when she was a widow raising five children in the late 1950s and 1960s. My siblings and I grew up knowing how to pinch a penny, stretch a dollar, and never let anything go to waste.

I've always tried to follow my mother's example, both for environmental and financial reasons, but at times when I've had a little disposable income, it's been easy to forget the importance of conservation. In the challenging economic times with which we're faced today, I've found myself turning more and more to the tips and tricks she taught me, as well as coming up with a few of my own.

This column will offer suggestions for creative ways to stretch your resources. For those who survived the Great Depression, rationing during World War II, and other tough times in America's history, it will be a chance to share your hard-earned wisdom with the next generation. For younger penny-pinchers, it will offer a chance to tell us new ways you've discovered to make ends meet while attending school or raising a young family. With suggestions for saving money on food, clothing, utilities, and entertainment, it should help show all of us ways to be thrifty without feeling deprived.

My mother washed out baggies, composted food scraps, and re-used wrapping paper. She was not only a tightwad, but an environmentalist – although an accidental one – before we ever even heard of the word. (And she never went back to putting sugar in her coffee.)

Here's one of my mom's favorite inexpensive recipes. It goes without saying that she always bought store-brand beans!

Gramma Wight's Three-Bean Salad

1 can each of green beans, yellow wax beans, and kidney beans, drained

¼ cup each of celery, onion, and green pepper, finely diced

½ cup cider vinegar

½ cup sugar

1/3 cup vegetable oil

Mix together beans, celery, onion, and green pepper. Mix vinegar, sugar, and oil till sugar dissolves and pour over vegetables. Add salt and pepper to taste. Chill at least two hours for best flavor.

Please send your tips for saving money to achapman@rumfordfallstimes.com, mail them to The Rumford Falls Times, 69 Congress St., Rumford, ME 04276, or drop them off at the office. Be sure to include your name and the town where you live (we won't print your name if you'd prefer to be anonymous).