Dear Reader,
Cynthia Reeves, today's guest, is the author of three books of fiction: her new novel The Last Whaler the novel in stories Falling Through the NewWorld and the novella Badlands.
Her lifelong interest in the Arctic began in childhood reading tales of doomed Arctic explorers. But it was her participation in the 2017 Arctic Circle Summer Solstice Expedition, which sailed Svalbard's western shores, as well as two subsequent residencies in Longyearbyen, that have inspired her writing since then. In August 2024, she will circumnavigate Svalbard aboard an icebreaker carrying a hundred artists, scientists, and crew.
Cynthia shares more about herself at: cynthiareeveswriter.com.
Five signed hardcovers means five lucky readers will win a copy of The Last Whaler...an elegiac meditation on the will to survive under extreme conditions. To enter the drawing, go to: https://www.cynthiareeveswriter.com/contact Please put DEAR READER on the subject line.
Why Maine?
Hand in hand, my father and I walked past the sold sign and his childhood home, the old cape where he grew up an only child on this remote farm in South Hope, Maine. We paused in front of the barn, now a skeleton of timbers. The door, silent on its hinges, stood open as if to welcome us one final time. Within, emptiness yawned in the very place his father tended to the last of thirty years of four o'clock, winter-dark mornings, milking his brindled heifers while outside, moonfall gilded the distant blueberry ridges copper-gold.
Did my father imagine, as I did, his father perched on a stool, pulling udders in rhythm as milk filled a tin pail? Did he see my grandfather's grip falter, hands calloused by years of back-breaking labor, how quietly he lay down to still his restless heart as a thin column of milk rivered the hay? Did he hear the lowing of the cow whose udders yet ached, a whole vocabulary of loss in that sorrowful sound?
As a child, I'd summered on my grandparents' farm at the end of their gravel road, surrounded by dense poplars and hemlocks, framed by hills bearing the blueberry bushes we bent to harvest each August with scoop-like rakes. Breakfast was always piping hot blueberry pie with vanilla ice cream, afternoons spent swimming in the frigid waters of nearby Hobbs Pond, and evenings passed in rooms heated by roaring fires, even in summer. Nostalgia rooted in me the hope that the farm would pass down, generation to generation.
It wasn't to be.
But.
After a lifetime in the Philadelphia suburbs, I moved with my husband to Camden, Maine, to an old sea captain's house eight miles from my father's
childhood home and across from the harbor where my grandfather laid the granite walls that hold back the rushing waters of the Megunticook River as it spills into the Penobscot Bay. People wonder why we retired to one of the coldest of the United States. I wonder, too, when I'm shoveling out from the umpteenth snowstorm or leaning into a fierce maritime wind. The consolations are many, however: Driving past the old farm now reached by paved roads. Sharing meals with my father's friends--one just turned 92--as they tell stories of growing up in the 1930s and 40s with Dad, now gone five years. And most often, walking the carved and mortared stones beside the falls where my grandfather once knelt, icy water sluicing over his numbed hands, on the living side of the Megunticook.
-- Cynthia Reeves
cynthiareeveswriter.com.
Five signed hardcovers means five lucky readers will win a copy of The Last Whaler...an elegiac meditation on the will to survive under extreme conditions. To enter the drawing, go to: https://www.cynthiareeveswriter.com/contact Please put DEAR READER on the subject line.
* I hope you enjoyed reading today's guest column. If you're one of the winners, or your entry is an Honorable Mention in this year's Write a DearReader contest, it will be featured as a guest column. Cash prizes, rules and deadlines, along with last year's winning entries, read all about them at: https://www.dearreader.com/contest2024/index.html
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
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