How to bake a blueberry cake like Gramma Wight’s

Start with the berries. Go down to the edge of the lake and pick two cups of berries from the clump of wild high-bush blueberries that has (without fuss or fertilizer, attention or interference) been producing berries for pancakes, muffins, and cakes for more than half a century. 

If you tie a cut-down plastic milk jug around your waist with a piece of clothesline rope, you’ll be able to use both hands to pick; this is good.

Go barefoot, and wear shorts, because to pick the ones on the lake side of the bush you have to stand in the water.  (Gramma Wight did not wear shorts. She wore skirts. I do not wear skirts at camp--or anywhere else, for that matter, if I can help it.)

The best time to go is early in the morning, because if you get there before the sun burns off the dew, there will be fairy dresses to admire, stretched between the branches of the bushes and spread out on the little patch of grass behind them.

Use Marjorie Standish’s Melt-In-Your-Mouth Blueberry Cake recipe, from her first cookbook, Cooking Down East. Marjorie says this is "undoubtedly the most popular recipe ever used in my column." There is good reason for that. I modify it with the addition of a crumb topping, because who doesn’t like a nice crumb topping?

You’ll need: two eggs, separated; a half-cup of shortening (next time I might experiment with using butter instead, but today I went with Marjorie’s recommendation and used Crisco); a cup of sugar; a teaspoon of real vanilla; a cup and a half of flour; a teaspoon of baking powder (I like Rumford brand because it’s aluminum-free—no weird aftertaste); a quarter of a teaspoon of salt; a third of a cup of milk; and two cups of blueberries. (I just realized that the recipe actually only calls for a cup and a half, but I used two because I had them, and it came out just fine, with a lovely amount of blueberry taste.)

Separate the eggs and beat the whites until stiff. It’s best to use your mom’s old Pyrex mixing bowl for this; the red one should be the right size. Add some of the sugar from the recipe to the beaten egg whites to keep them stiff, about a quarter of a cup.

Cream the shortening in a bigger bowl; the yellow Pyrex is perfect. Add the sugar, vanilla, and egg yolks and beat until nice and fluffy. 

Sift together your dry ingredients, but first, mix a little of the flour from the recipe with the berries so they won’t settle to the bottom of your cake; a couple of teaspoons should be enough. Add your dry ingredients alternately with the milk. Gently fold in the beaten egg whites and then, even more gently, the blueberries.

Spread the batter in a greased 8” x 8” pan. Marjorie says to sprinkle the top lightly with granulated sugar, but I do love a nice crumb topping. So mix half a stick of softened butter with a quarter cup of brown sugar, a half cup of flour, and a half teaspoon of cinnamon. Use a pastry blender—that ancient one with the crazily bent wires that was brought to camp fifty years ago because it wasn’t “good enough” for home.

Sprinkle the topping onto the batter and bake it at 350 degrees for 50-60 minutes, or until it springs back when you press the center.

Put it on a cooling rack on the table to cool. Add a note so everyone knows you didn’t make it for a bake sale or something. Don’t let the dog eat it—a friend tells me consuming blueberries has dire consequences for the canine intestinal tract.

 If you’re lucky, there will be a piece left for you when you get back from your meeting.

Governor LePage should be ashamed of himself

I started this as a letter to the editor after reading this morning's Lewiston Sun Journal, but (surprise!) it got way too long (250 word maximum? Really? At 250 words, I was just getting warmed up) so I'm posting it here instead. It won't be read by thousands, but just writing it made me feel a little better.

 

Governor Paul LePage is an embarrassment to the state of Maine.

Since running for election less than two years ago, he has thumbed his nose at President Obama (saying he’d tell him “to go to hell”), at the NAACP (“tell ‘em to kiss my butt”), at state workers (calling them “about as corrupt as can be”), and, repeatedly, at the people of Maine.

He dismissed concerns over the chemical additive BPA in consumer products, joking that “it gives off a chemical similar to estrogen. So the worst case is some women may have little beards.” 

He opposed the removal of the Great Works Dam on the Penobscot River, saying, “It’s irresponsible to be taking out hydro dams,” and refused to attend the ceremony marking its demolition. This, despite the fact that conservation, recreation, economic, and energy interests all hailed the agreement that brought about the dam’s historic removal while providing for power-generation upgrades to other existing dams. 

He banned the state fire marshal’s office from testifying at the hearing on lifting the ban on the sale and use of fireworks in Maine. Apparently he didn’t feel that the concerns of State Fire Marshal John Dean, who opposed the bill to legalize fireworks on safety grounds, were relevant to the hearing. 

He initiated cuts to child-care subsidies under both TANF and Head Start, as well as cuts to the home-visiting program under the Fund for a Healthy Maine. These programs specifically target low-income parents who are working or attending school in an effort to attain self-sufficiency for their families (i.e., get off of assistance programs), and families at high risk of child abuse, neglect, and substance abuse.

Now, in a blow that undermines the incredibly hard work of Maine people, LePage has frozen funding for the $400,000 matching grant awarded to the town of Norway under the Communities for Maine’s Future program. This funding (approved by Maine voters in 2010 as part of a $25 million bond initiative) was earmarked for the renovation of six storefronts in Norway’s historic Opera House, a $1.1 million project that was slated to go out to bid in the next couple of weeks.

Is Governor LePage aware that a group of committed citizens in the Norway area have been working for five years to bring about this renovation project? 

Is he aware that the purchase and stabilization of the Opera House—an 1894 structure that is part of the Norway Historic District, and was, until recently, in imminent danger of collapsing onto Main Street—was made possible by a $200,000 private donation from residents Bill and Bea Damon? 

Is he aware of the tireless fundraising and countless volunteer hours that have gone into helping to get this project off the ground—and that in service to the endeavor, those volunteers employed such diverse talents as scrubbing, scouring, trash removal, staple-pulling, jewelry design, and musical composition?   

Is he aware that delaying the CMF grant funding—which, under state law, he will eventually have to release—could jeopardize the matching federal and state tax credits, which are essential to the project and are due to expire next year? 

Is he aware that this project is aimed at providing jobs, encouraging new business, and revitalizing a historic downtown area? Exactly what does the governor think it means to be “open for business,” anyway?

Governor LePage’s inappropriate behavior and off-the-cuff remarks may be merely an embarrassment to our state, but his ignorance, obstinacy, and arbitrary heavy-handedness are a danger to our future. As a friend commented, “One could say that he is a joke, but this is much more serious than that.”

WWW@100: A Dad’s Legacy

Today is June 22, 2012, and it’s a momentous occasion. Who knows why? If you guessed because it’s the 76^th birthday of Kris Kristofferson (the man I consider absolutely the best American songwriter ever and, yes, the man on whom I’ve had a serious crush for forty years), you’d be only partly right. Today is also the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of my dad, William Walton Wight.

Dad was an amazing man. He was talented, smart, and capable. He could build anything, fix anything, figure anything out. He loved poetry and liked to quote it, especially Robert Frost, Robert Service, and Holman Day. He was born in Oquossoc and raised in Bethel and he was the quintessential Mainer—practical, resourceful, and outdoorsy—until the day he died, even though he spent the last half of his life living in exile in Connecticut.

He liked people, and they liked him. “Everyone loved your father,” my mother once told me, a touch of bemusement in her voice. (No doubt she felt a bit mystified, a little wistful—the sentiments with which we introverts regard those Others: the ones who light up a room, whose personalities draw people to them and effortlessly hold them enthralled.)

My dad worked hard at his job—he had majored in metallurgical engineering and worked at Pratt & Whitney Small Tool in West Hartford—and, with a partner, he started his own small metals heat-treating business on the side which, remarkably, still exists today, more than 60 years later. (While he was involved with the company, it was very much a shoestring operation—he used to bring metal rods home and get my mother to temper them in her oven.)

But as busy as he was, there was never any question that his first priority was family. He took my four older siblings hiking, camping, and rockhounding. He helped lead my brothers’ Boy Scout troop. They all built a wooden boat together from a kit—it, too, still exists today. They played Scrabble, did jigsaw puzzles, went

to church, got a family dog.

 

 And he and my mother brought the kids to Maine as often as possible. They learned the names of all the trees in the Maine woods and all the Maine minerals they found. In the mid-1950s they bought a lot on North Pond in Woodstock and then, together, they built our camp.

 

In a way, it’s remarkable that I know this much about my dad, when you consider that he died in 1958, more than eight months before I was born. But it’s a testament to his legacy, to the far-reaching influence he has had on my siblings and, indirectly but inarguably, on their children and grandchildren as well.

And on me. I remember asking my mother once, when I was quite young, “How old was I when Daddy died?” She looked confused, and explained gently that he had died before I was ever born. Then it was my turn to be confused. “But I remember him,” I insisted. And it seemed to me that I did. His legacy was to remain a vital part of the family he left behind, during my childhood and beyond—even now, more than five decades after his death.

His legacy is in the wooden boat and the family camp—with his musty suede camp jacket and plaid wool shirts still hanging in the closets. It’s in the fact that by the time we went to kindergarten we could all identify feldspar, mica, quartz, beryl, tourmaline, and—our favorite because we loved the way it rolled off our tongues—lavender lepidolite. It’s in the way, over the years, we’ve all been drawn to the state of Maine—three of us to stay—and the way, I think, we all consider Maine our true spiritual home. It’s in the way we all love the woods, the water, our kids. It’s in every part of our lives.

70 Years Ago Today...

Seventy years ago today, my parents got married. It was a Monday, at 2:30 in the afternoon. (Why they chose to get married on a Monday is a mystery to me; maybe it wasn't that uncommon back then, or maybe the church was tied up every weekend with all the couples who were rushing to get married before the husbands were sent overseas to fight.)

My father was nearly 30, and my mother had just turned 22. Both had graduated from the University of Maine, but they were several years apart and hadn't met there. In fact, although they were both Maine natives, they met, in the summer of 1941, in Connecticut, where my father was working as a metallurgical engineer and my mother was working for the Aetna Life Insurance Company (and living at the "Y" with several other girls from Maine).

From all accounts, it was a whirlwind romance; my mother told me once that my father produced an engagement ring on a Labor Day weekend trip home to Maine, barely two months after they had met. "I said, 'Oh, no, Bill, it's too soon,'" she told me, "and I made him keep the ring until Christmas."

They were married just a little more than three months later, in Bangor, where my mother had grown up, and where her father still lived. For their honeymoon, they traveled to Littleton, New Hampshire, in the White Mountains (yes, in early April!), where they stayed at the historic Thayer's Inn, built nearly a century before.







They snowshoed up the trail to the Flume gorge and took pictures (none of which I am able to find at the moment, but here's a photo of the same place, 70 years later, at approximately the same time of the year, taken recently by my friend Ryan).



On their way back from New Hampshire, they stopped in Bethel to see my father's mother and grandmother, who ran a small restaurant (Farwell & Wight's) together. They strapped on their snowshoes again and hiked up a mountain, to the old Farwell homestead (which the women had abandoned nearly two decades earlier, after both lost their husbands the same year, to move to town and go into business together). There, they liberated an old spool bed, already an antique, which was first theirs, then eventually became my sister's, then my niece's, and is now in the guest room at camp.

They moved into a tiny, boxlike house in Newington, Connecticut, then, after the kids started coming--four of them in the next seven years--a bigger house with a bigger yard (and a sidewalk running all around it--a racetrack for my brothers' bikes). Eventually they moved to Westfield, New Jersey for my father's job.

From my mother's accounts of those years, I think she loved being a young wife, raising her family in a place filled with other young families, baking up a storm ("a pie, a cake, or a batch of cookies, every day"), coffee-klatsching with the other neighborhood wives ("we'd all get together and call in our grocery order, and they'd deliver it to wherever we were having coffee that morning"), taking camping trips in a leaky tent with all the kids and the family's cocker spaniel.

Then in the mid-1950s, itching to get back to Maine for at least part of the year, they bought a lot on North Pond in Woodstock and started to build a camp, and that quickly became a major focus of their lives. My parents always knew that one day they would retire together "to a house on a hill in Bethel," and spending their summers on nearby North Pond was a step in the right direction.

My mother was married for just over 16 years, and was a widow for nearly 46. (I never knew my father, who died a week shy of his 46th birthday, and more than eight months before I was born.) She wore her rings until the day she died, and I believe she always considered herself still my father's wife. The day after my mother retired, in June of 1982, she left Connecticut for Maine, there to stay for the rest of her life (except for her trips to Alaska and Colorado and England and Scotland and France and Germany and Australia...). She started a journal that day with these words: "June 22, 1982--Your 70th birthday, Bill, and a very good day to close out my Milford life and get ready to carry out our dream of retirement on a hill in Bethel!"

Robert Frost's birthday

Today is the anniversary of the birth of Robert Frost. When I was very young, probably no more than three or four, my mother began reading to me from Complete Poems of Robert Frost, a well-worn volume with the poet’s signature embossed in gold on its green cover. Not every night—she read me picture books and fairy tales and, later, Charlotte’s Web and The Secret Garden and Beezus and Ramona. But every now and then, she’d take out the old green book of Robert Frost’s poetry and say, “Let’s read poems tonight.”

My mother liked the peaceful, pastoral poems—“The Pasture”—and the searching, reflective ones—“The Road Not Taken.” “Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening” was her favorite, the one her grandchildren would read in unison at her funeral, forty years later.

I liked those poems, too. I memorized them, and when I told my fourth-grade teacher that I knew them by heart, she had me stand up in front of the class and recite them, all three. Then she sent me across the hall to the other fourth grade class to recite them there, too.

But my own favorites--too long to memorize, but wonderful to hear read aloud--were the ones that told stories. They were stories of simple rural people, but the stories themselves, far from being simple, were infused with dark undercurrents and complicated emotions. “Home Burial.” “The Housekeeper.” “The Mountain.”

By the time I was nine or ten, I was asking her to read and reread “The Death of the Hired Man,” shivering with pleasure and dread through my favorite lines… “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.”… “ ‘I’ll sit and see if that small sailing cloud / Will hit or miss the moon.’ / It hit the moon.”… until she reached the poem’s inevitable conclusion: “ ’Dead,’ was all he answered.”

My mother was always taking college courses, working toward her master’s degree in library science, and in one class, Robert Frost’s daughter, Lesley Frost Ballantine was her classmate. (At least, I think that’s how the story goes—she met her somewhere, anyway.) Lesley had just published a children’s book called Really Not Really, and my mother brought me home a signed copy, inscribed “For Amy—Really!” There was a black and white photo in the back of Lesley with her father and her two daughters—this photo, as a matter of fact:

I knew Robert Frost had died just a couple of years earlier, and I couldn’t believe I was that close to my mother’s literary hero.

I think the old green Complete Poems is at camp. And I still have that copy of Really Not Really, as well as a 1939 edition of Collected Poems of Robert Frost with my parents’ surprisingly silly bookplate in the front:

They must have bought this volume early in their marriage, and I like to think of them reading Robert Frost’s poems aloud to each other and dreaming of their future together.

Camp in March

Mid-March, and it feels more like late April. Remy and I walk in to camp and find only a few patches of snow left on the road. The ice on the pond has receded from the edges enough to let him wade in for a drink.

The outside thermometer says it’s in the mid-50s (the sun won’t hit the front of our west-facing camp for several more hours), and the one inside, 38 degrees. I’m hot from trudging a mile on the muddy road, and for once the coolness of the stale, unmoving air inside the camp is welcome.

I flop down on my mom’s old couch, the same one that she bought for our living room in Connecticut when I was about five. (It’s a Castro Convertible—the original convertible sleeper-sofa—which may explain why it’s still in such good shape, well into its fifth decade, while I’ve already been through several couches in my adult life. It weighs about two tons. They really don’t make ‘em like they used to, I guess.)

The battery-operated clock on the wall says 11:35. I wonder what time it really is; I take out my phone, and am surprised to see that it says…11:35. It seems impossible that time hasn’t come to a standstill here since we moved home from camp, almost six months ago.

I remember arriving in June, usually the day after school was out, when I was little, and waiting impatiently for my mother to unlock the door, pushing past her to be the first to inhale the odd, unmistakable scent—part pine boards, part mothballs, part decaying mouse—that meant we were home for the summer. In those days, the camp had usually been closed up tight for nearly ten months, the electric clock on the wall recording the exact moment when my mother had opened the fuse box, halting the current, the last thing she did before walking out the door and back into our other life.

I look around at the cobwebbed windows—the ones that don’t open because they’re really just old wooden storm windows (meant, according to my mother, to have been temporary, until she and my father got around to replacing them with double-hung windows with screens)—and dreadful 1960s wood-grain paneling. I think about all of the improvements we will consider, plan, but almost certainly not execute this summer. This is partly because of a lack of funds, of course, but mostly it’s because once we move to camp for the summer, we will be too busy just enjoying it—and by “busy,” I mean “picking blueberries, reading on the deck, kayaking, and napping in the hammock”—to want to take on many projects.

The walls are covered with bits of memorabilia—pennants from the colleges my four siblings attended (I never spent long enough at any one school in my 31-year pursuit of a degree to add one of my own); old motorboat registrations; newspaper clippings; a random assortment of photos from the past 50 years, slipped under the edges of the door casings.

I briefly consider taking down some of the clutter, tossing it or packing it away, before I invite the members of my writing group, who have never been to camp before, to a day-long writing retreat there in June…but I know I won’t. Like the 1970s-era tubes of Prell shampoo in the bathroom or the 2004 Travelers Insurance calendar in the bedroom (the last of several dozen of these annual gifts my mother received from her friends Betty and Elmer before she died), everything here has a purpose. In its own way, every scrap of paper, every curled photo, every ancient comic strip contributes to making camp what it is: a repository for nearly 60 years of the very best memories. It’s a musty, dusty, ramshackle place, where babies get mosquito bites, toddlers eat dirt, teenagers chase each other in motorboats, and grown-ups who have forgotten how to relax suddenly find they remember after all.

My latest excuse

In Stephen King’s book On Writing, he describes his typical day, which is pretty simple. I can’t remember the specifics, but, at least at the time he was writing about, nearly every single day included a big chunk of time spent reading, a big chunk spent writing, and a big chunk spent walking. These three activities formed the backbone of his day, and regular meals provided the rest of the structure.

Reading, writing, walking, and eating—that’s exactly what I want to do every day—no more, no less. And I am convinced—utterly, completely convinced—that if only I didn’t have to have a “real” job (damn you, health insurance!) that’s exactly how I would spend my days. (I am also convinced that this would lead to my becoming healthy, fit, well-read, and a successful writer. Not to mention well-balanced and self-actualized.)

[A word about self-actualization: in a recent letter from a dear friend and college roommate, she referred to her husband as “the most self-actualized person I know.” I had heard the term, but since it wasn’t one I went around using myself, I looked it up to be sure I knew what she meant. It turns out that self-actualization is nothing more or less than what I’ve recently been calling “living my authentic life,” or what my mother liked to call “living up to your potential” (usually preceded by “If you don’t start…” and pronounced as she was looking at my high school report card or hearing about my plan to drop out of college and work in a hardware store).]

One of the worst things about having to go to a real job is that I always seem to get my best ideas when I’m rushing to get ready for work in the morning. Instead of having the leisure to go immediately to the computer and get down to the business of writing, I have to keep getting ready for work, and since I rarely have time to make even the most rudimentary notes, I usually lose the thought completely before I ever get around to writing about it.

Yesterday morning I was rushing around to get ready for work, as usual, when it occurred to me that I could write about what it’s like to be always rushing around to get ready for work. But of course I didn’t have time to write anything down before I left the house.

So as soon as I was in the car, I reached for my miniature voice recorder. Then I remembered that I don’t have a miniature voice recorder. Well, actually, I do have one, but as soon as I got it, I discovered that talking into it made me feel pathetic or insane or ridiculous, or all three, like a crazy person with no friends or a comically self-important person (this is because I once knew a comically self-important person who carried around a miniature voice recorder to capture all of his brilliant ideas). So I let the batteries run down, and now I don’t even know where it is.

So instead I reached for a pad of paper and a pen and (even though I am death on texting and driving, and, actually, don’t even like to take my hands off the wheel to adjust the radio or the heat), scribbled down, while driving with my elbows (there was no traffic; I promise), a few key words that I thought would remind me of what I had been thinking about writing:

Fortunately, I did not get in an accident; the worst thing that happened was that I placed the pad on the steering wheel and ended up inadvertently honking the horn when I started to write, just as I was coming into the village of Bryant Pond, startling myself and, no doubt, a few sleepy residents.

Unfortunately, when I took out my notes today and tried to recreate the witty prose that was so insistently writing itself in my head as I was driving yesterday, I came up empty. In fact, I had to struggle to remember what I was even thinking when I made my notes. (Maybe it’s time to dig out that recorder again after all. There are probably worse things than appearing comically self-important.)

“Bathroom—PB toast—Ex-husband”? OK, I admit it, I did take my piece of peanut butter toast into the bathroom with me to finish it while brushing my hair and putting on moisturizer, and this is something that would have driven my ex-husband crazy (he had very definite never-the-twain-shall-meet ideas about bathrooms and food, which I can certainly understand, from a hygiene point of view, but sometimes you just have to compromise your ideals in favor of finishing breakfast). But somehow it doesn’t seem as amusing now. Rats.

“Tony—paper—Kate Braestrup”? Well, Tony was following me around with the newspaper (actually he was standing outside the bathroom door while I was inside eating peanut butter toast), trying to tell me that Kate Braestrup, a Maine writer I greatly admire, was having a book signing in Winthrop. Being followed around seemed particularly annoying to me at the time because a) I hate being talked to through the bathroom door (doesn’t everyone?), b) I had already made it clear that I was late for work and didn’t have a moment to spare, and c) Winthrop is 50 miles away and I’m not likely to be going there for a book signing. But it’s another thing that really doesn’t seem that amusing, or even particularly annoying, today, and I have to admit that he should probably get points for noticing and pointing out an article about a writer I like. (However, we do have to talk about that shouting-through-the-bathroom-door thing.)

“Cadbury Mini-eggs—Ice fishermen.” Oh, yes. I was feeling so frustrated about having to go to work instead of staying home to write all day (something that, in case you’re wondering, wouldn’t have happened anyway—it would have been more like staying home to do laundry and waste time on the computer and think of something unusual to cook, ending up saying to myself in the late afternoon, “Shit! I meant to write today!”) that I thought I would just take along six Cadbury Mini-eggs in a tiny lidded container, and then, after I worked all day, I could savor them in the car on the way home. Except that less than a mile from home I passed a pond where three ice fishermen were checking their traps, and I got so jealous that they got to do what they wanted all day instead of going to work that I ate my Cadbury Mini-eggs right then and there. (And yes, as a matter of fact, I have considered working on my inappropriate use of chocolate to soothe, reward, and brace myself. Maybe right after Cadbury Mini-egg season is over.)

“The Storm at the Door—Moxie—Baby food.” I’ve just started reading The Storm at the Door, by Stefan Merrill Block, and when I thought about what I really wanted to be doing (besides writing, of course), it was staying home and reading with my very old cat, Moxie, who is dying, purring on my lap. (I think he’s purring. It could just be that his lungs are filling with fluid, but he still seems happy, especially when he gets to be with me.) Thinking of Moxie reminded me that I wanted to go to the grocery store and get some baby food turkey to see if I could coax him to eat it, so I wrote that down, too, so I wouldn’t forget.

“GPS—8:10—School bus stops.” I have to be at work at 8:15. When I left the house, my GPS said I would get there at 8:10. I don’t actually need the GPS to find my way to work, but I do need it to tell me whether or not to exceed the speed limit on any given morning, and whether I have the extra two minutes it requires to take the slightly longer route with slightly fewer frost heaves.

My conclusion: rushing around to get to work on weekday mornings causes me to get stressed and annoyed at home, eat peanut butter toast in the bathroom, do dangerous things while driving, resent innocent ice fishermen, and eat too much chocolate. It does not provide much in the way of inspiration. On the other hand, having a real job, besides providing my family with health insurance, gives me a perfect excuse for not being a published writer.

And in case you’re wondering, I got stuck behind a school bus making frequent stops and arrived at work at 8:14, with myself and my bad attitude intact.