Swap shed success

The swap shed at the Carlisle Transfer Station is like its own little box of legends. People who take its "drop-something-off, pick-something-up" credo to heart make claims of astounding finds: showroom-quality furniture, electronics in their original packaging, children’s toys that appear to have never seen the imprint of a child’s finger.

Maybe, but sometimes I think the legends exceed the reality. When I stop in the swap shed to drop off outgrown toys, what I usually see are tattered computer manuals, mismatched Tupperware, and the occasional action figure with a couple of limbs missing.

It’s a nice idea that you can drop things off and someone else might want them. And it’s fun for small children to browse among the discarded toys. But in reality, it’s something of an open secret these days that many of the people sorting through the items on the swap shed shelves are more likely to resell their finds on eBay than to display them on a shelf in their china hutch.

Yesterday, though, I made one of my rare stops at the swap shed as I unloaded trash and recycling at the other stations in the dump. We had recently bought a new vacuum cleaner, and I had been doing battle with my conscience about what to do with the old one. The swap shed isn’t supposed to be a repository for broken stuff that no one could possibly find a use for; that’s what the trash bins are for. But the vacuum cleaner wasn’t broken; it just wasn’t the greatest vacuum cleaner. It might work fine, I tried to convince myself, in a different setting, one with less floor space, fewer rugs, or no shedding dogs in residence.

I was the first person to visit the transfer station yesterday, so the swap shed was empty. Or so it initially appeared. But as I lugged in my vacuum cleaner, I spotted one singular item on the shelf: a glass pedestal cake plate.

“I could use a cake plate,” I thought to myself. I love making desserts, and I like the way pedestaled cake plates look on a buffet table amidst a number of other desserts. It’s even the right time of year to add this to my collection: we host an annual appetizers-and-desserts party in mid-November, followed by Thanksgiving two weeks later, and then a pre-holiday party in early December.

There was something so pleasing about the symmetry as I dropped off my vacuum cleaner – genuinely hoping there was someone who could use it and that I wasn’t just leaving trash – and helped myself to the cake plate. I didn’t need to sort through piles of items to find it. It was the only thing there. I dropped one thing off; I picked one thing up. It was the essence of simplicity.

The swap shed attracts its share of controversy. The idea of neighbors trading treasures from one household to another in a small town has a certain charm that the boxes of dusty National Geographics piled in the shed’s corners sometimes belie. And there are those who resent the reality of the eBay dealers and other forms of resale trade that goes on there, believing it dilutes the altruistic intent of the facility.

I don’t particularly agree with this argument. I think reselling on eBay is as honorable a job as any, and if there are people willing to spend their time going through junk at the transfer station to make a living this way, they’re welcome to do so. But for those of us who have dropped off boxes of dishware or other household items only to have them snatched out of our hands and shoved into someone’s car, sight unseen, to take home and resell, it does sometimes make the overall experience of stopping by the swap shed less appealing.

Yesterday’s experience felt like the swap shed returning to its roots. One item left; one item taken. I’ve already washed the cake stand and put it in my kitchen; this weekend Holly and I are going to make a cheesecake that we can serve from it when guests come for dinner on Sunday. I’m happy I found it and happy I took it home. I just hope someone can make equally good use of my mediocre-but-functional vacuum cleaner.

Love your (revolting small brown eight-legged) enemies

I have resolved to try harder to follow the words of Matthew in the New Testament: Love your enemies.

And by my enemies, I of course mean ticks.

Wood ticks: The large brown disgusting ones. Deer ticks: The ineffably tiny ones, so often compared in size to “the period at the end of this sentence,” so much less revolting to look at, in my opinion, and yet even more dangerous as carriers of Lyme disease.

New England in general and Carlisle in particular are replete with ticks. I absolutely despise them, and yet I know it’s a repulsion I need to try to overcome. I can’t be a responsible mother, dog owner, or citizen of the countryside if I can’t get over my natural impulse whenever I see one, which is to yell for Rick.

This has become particularly clear to me over the past week. Despite Carlisle’s reputation, at least within its own geographical boundaries, of being the Lyme disease capital of the world, there are years when I’ve gone the entire warm-weather season without seeing a single tick.

This year apparently will not be one of them. I found one on Holly’s bed as she was waking up earlier this week, and another one making its way across the dog’s snout. Then this morning as Holly was drying off after her shower, I found one of the tiny ones embedded in her hip.

But the find that leaves me with the worst feelings was yesterday afternoon. I had just checked in at the doctor’s office for some routine lab work when I felt something brushing across my bare arm. I looked and saw a large brown tick. I was so startled that without thinking I brushed it off of me – and then couldn’t find it. Not on the floor, not on the chair where I’d been sitting. Somehow I’d released a tick into the doctor’s waiting room. The guilt I felt about my part in so nonchalantly foisting off a tick onto the next unfortunate person to stand in the wrong place in that waiting room was overwhelming; I felt like a character in a Dostoyevsky novel. I wanted to find it and dispose of it properly, but I couldn’t. And yet I knew it would make its way some other poor unsuspecting patient.

When I’m by myself and see ticks, I can usually force myself to deal with it as needed: using tweezers, or my bare fingers, whatever works. But if Rick is around, I still can’t resist the impulse to call for reinforcements – an instinct so embarrassing to me that I pretend to him that there’s some other reason I called him, as if I just wanted advice and not someone else to do the dirty work. “It’s so tiny; I just wanted a second opinion on whether it’s really a tick and not a scab before I start tweezing at her skin,” I told him when I found the tick after Holly’s shower. Of course, he then found the tweezers and got to work on it, just as I knew he would.

Research tells me it was either Machiavelli or The Godfather who said “Keep your friends close, your enemies even closer.” At first blush, this phrase seems inapplicable when it comes to ticks. Keeping them as far away as possible seems like better advice. But no, I remind myself, the point is that ticks are going to show up whether you want them to or not, and “keeping them even closer” means not only being able to bear them but being really comfortable with them. Grab those tweezers; get your hands dirty; be fearless.

I try to imagine a form of hypnosis that might make it easier for me to approach a tick without hyperventilating. Notice how small they are instead of how gross they are, I tell myself. One thousandth your size at the most. You are the dominant creature here. You are in charge.

Maybe. But it doesn’t feel that way when I’m looking at one, whether it’s on my child’s pale flesh, in the dog’s fur or scurrying across my arm. Absolutely disgusting. And yet absolutely necessary for me to be able to confront comfortably. I’m working on it. And eventually I’ll get there.

Morning party

I am lucky that most people who throw large annual parties don’t bother to cull their guest lists from year to year or I probably wouldn’t have been invited to yesterday’s midmorning brunch given by my friends Liz and Peg. It was the third or fourth time they’d invited me, but it was the first time I’d actually managed to be there.

Yes, I have plenty of work to do this week, and plenty of assignments to wrap up as well as a few to start, and truth be told, I was a little embarrassed to be going to a party in the middle of the workday. It just sounded so very decadent. I could be meeting deadlines; why was I chatting and sipping coffee? That’s not something working people do.

On the other hand, why bother to be self-employed if it doesn’t mean a couple of times a year you can do something you never used to do in the corporate world: just wander across town on an ordinary Wednesday morning for a party?

Peg’s house was brimming over with other party-goers: forty or fifty in all, probably. Several years ago, if I happened to drive past an event like this, I would have wondered about the attendees. Really, I would have thought to myself, in this day and age, how can fifty Carlisle women be free in the middle of a weekday morning to stand around talking?

But I knew most of the women there, and now it doesn’t seem so unusual to me, although I certainly concede we are an exceptionally fortunate group. Some of the women who were there don’t currently have paid jobs, but many do. Some, like me, are self-employed and set their own hours and see something like this party as a special indulgence, a reason to leave the home office for an hour or two. Others work part-time. And some are business owners or senior managers who, quite frankly, can come and go from their offices without feeling obligated to offer explanations to anyone.

It was the kind of event I could have very easily persuaded myself to skip. I enjoy my solitary work day. I like the focus and intensity of being by myself all day concentrating on my writing projects. Going out to socialize takes effort.

But on this June morning, it was an effort I felt like making. Among the forty or fifty guests, I knew most of them, though there were some I hadn’t seen in over a year, and it was great to catch up. Ingrid had been living in Switzerland for the past couple of years, and I was interested to hear how that had worked out for her family; Lisa and I commiserated on our sons’ busy spring baseball schedule; Peg updated me on volunteer recruitment for next fall’s Spaghetti Supper; Liz and I fell into a conversation about what it’s like to visit your childhood home once your family no longer lives there. I met a couple of people for the first time as well, though I knew their names and they knew mine; that’s what small-town life is like.

And as decadent as the plan may sound, we did a little bit of good for the world as well, and for ourselves. Peg and Liz stated on the invitation that the party would include a canned food drive and put out boxes into which people could deposit food contributions that will later be brought to a distribution center, and guests were also encouraged to bring a second-hand book wrapped in brown paper (with a one-word description written on the paper) to trade.

It would have been easy to stay home, but I was so glad I went. It made my day feel richer for sharing it with a wider community than is the norm on a work day. My creativity and productivity improved when I got back to my desk, and it wasn’t even noon yet. It’s just good some days to get out and be with other people, and I was lucky yesterday to have the chance to do just that.

Sound effects

I didn’t think there was much more I could write about running. I’ve been running for 26 years now and writing about it nearly that long. Having just finished writing a memoir about running, I felt a little bit as if the well had run dry. I honestly thought I was done with the topic, from a literary perspective, at least temporarily.

Then yesterday while I was out running, I noticed the sounds. And I recognized right away that I’d never written about the sounds, because I’d never before given any thought to the sounds.

Midafternoon on a chilly mid-autumn day in Carlisle, as I ran four miles along the back roads, through the center, and home via the Bedford Road footpath, I heard all of this:

My feet thunking on the asphalt of the roadways
The scritch-scritch of a rake against pavement as I passed a neighbor raking her driveway
Gravel crunching under my shoes on the footpaths
Cars whooshing up behind me
The scuff-scuff of my feet against the packed dirt of our long driveway
The wind schussing through the dry brown leaves left on the trees
The tump-tump-tump of another pair of shoes as a runner passed me
Multiple geese honking in a high-pitched clamor from their pasture at Kimball Farm
The mid-pitched conversation between two bicyclists and their whirring tires as they sped by me
The church bell striking three o’clock

This was a quiet afternoon. Weekday mornings, when I usually run, are louder, with the roar of school buses, the steady thrum of continuous traffic, the heavy engine sounds of trucks; but the automotive sounds are so loud at that time that I miss out on everything else. Yesterday afternoon, the sounds were in balance: cars, wind, running shoes, geese. All the elements of a quiet Sunday afternoon worked in harmony to make up my soundtrack – and for what seemed to be the first time in 26 years, I noticed the sounds of my daily run.

Halloween retrospective

Halloween is a happy event in Carlisle. Last night was chillier than many years, but just as much fun. Although it’s always appealing to maintain regular traditions, Halloween varies a little bit each year, and that’s fine too – at this point, it’s to be expected.

This year Tim opted to stay home and watch the Patriots rather than trick-or-treat. He’s been ambivalent about putting on a costume for the past two years now, and it didn’t really surprise me that he greeted the idea of trick-or-treating less than warmly this year, but I had hoped he would walk along with us even if he didn’t go up to the doors. (He knew that Holly would share her take with him merely for being present.) He didn’t, though; he chose to stay home. But not too long after we left him, I received a text message from him saying he’d gone over to my parents’ house rather than stay home alone, so that made me feel better about how he was spending his evening. (Since we live so far off the road, we never expect nor get trick-or-treaters, so it’s fine to have no one home.)

Also different this year: though my friends Lisa and David hosted their annual pre-trick-or-treating party in their big yard just outside the town center, no one in my family but me wanted to leave the Patriots game broadcast for it. I wanted to be there enough that I went anyway, though, just for half an hour. It was enough time to chat with the other families who were there and eat a plateful of appetizers, as well as a bowl of the southwestern pumpkin soup that I had made and delivered to Lisa’s stovetop earlier in the day.

After Lisa and David’s party, I went home to pick up Rick and Holly, and we headed back to the Town Center, which hosts hundreds of trick-or-treaters every year, a tradition that evolved in response to the fact that so many Carlisle neighborhoods are just too sparsely populated to be ideal for trick-or-treating. For the kids, going to the Center an easy way to reach lots of houses without too much walking, but there’s still enough walking that it feels like the kids are getting a workout along with their chocolate and candy corns. For the adults, with such a crowd in a relatively small area, it feels like a giant floating cocktail party; everywhere you look, you see familiar faces (and while cocktails aren’t officially part of the festivities, no one looks too closely at all those thermal coffee cups being toted along).

Some years we’ve gone with groups of friends, but having it be just the three of us was special. We could go at our own pace and didn’t have a lot of different people to keep track of. At most houses, Rick and I stood at the curb while Holly made her way up to the door; sometimes I went with her if it was the home of someone I particularly wanted to say hello to. Through the windows of the well-lit parsonage, we glimpsed our minister dressed in a black cape and watching the football game in between trick-or-treaters.

Some traditionalists in Carlisle – one of whom accosted me at coffee hour at church yesterday morning – dislike the newer format of trick-or-treating in the Town Center. They liked it better when kids went out in their own neighborhoods, and in some parts of town where the neighborhoods are laid out more traditionally, kids still do trick-or-treat. But I really like the Town Center idea. Over the past few years, when it’s not Halloween, the conversation arises periodically as to whether Carlisle is a lonely place, whether the emphasis on solitude and natural splendor results in too little socialization. Last night it didn’t feel like that at all. The whole town was out – though many were unrecognizable behind masks or make-up – and I was happy to be celebrating another Halloween with all of them.

Back in the social swing

The Carlisle social season is back in full swing.

In places like Miami Beach and the Hamptons, kicking off the social season looks a lot different from here, or at least that’s what I infer from photos and articles. Designer dresses, charity balls, black tie banquets.

Here in Carlisle, the social season – at least from my perspective – began this week with a school fundraiser at a pizza restaurant on Tuesday evening followed by the third grade meet-and-greet first thing Wednesday morning, which segues into the introductory Room Parent meeting and, later this month, the ski-barn barbeque.

Yes, these events are decidedly dress-down rather than dress-up, but they still serve to pull a very large group of friends and acquaintances – comprising essentially every parent of school-aged children in town who has any interest in being involved in any aspect of community life – together after a long summer during which we all went in different directions.

And I was dreading it. I really was. All throughout August, I experienced twinges of something that felt a little like agoraphobia, not exactly fear of crowded places but fear of resuming my usual social customs: greeting, connecting, schmoozing. Despite the fact that mingling with a large and extended version of my cohort makes up the bulk of my social life, I found myself retreating this summer to the point where I feared the time of year that we all start getting out again. I felt socially drained, as if I’d lost all interest in catching up with old friends and meeting people new to town.

But I’m relieved to say that the events are back under way and it turns out I’m not afraid of crowds after all. I guess I just needed a break. Last night, the kids and I went to a school fundraiser at a pizza restaurant – held in a neighboring town because Carlisle doesn’t have any restaurants – and though it was the kind of scene I’d feared all summer, after five minutes I was basking in the noise and commotion.

I asked a friend’s husband about how his running program was going and heard from another friend about how she selected a new puppy for her kids. I learned a few details about a local family’s six-month stay in South America, from which they’d just returned. I met a family who moved to town last month, having lived all over the U.S. and Europe, and asked about their impressions of Carlisle. I answered thoughtful inquiries about my family and our summer vacation. I talked about work with some people and about the middle school faculty with others.

A woman I was sitting with at the pizza dinner who moved to town over the summer commented on how friendly everyone had been to her ever since she arrived in Carlisle. “Almost Stepford-like,” she said, but I gave her my usual explanation of my theory about why people in Carlisle are so friendly. “Hanging out with each other is all we can do,” I said. “We don’t have theaters or restaurants or nightclubs or concert venues or even coffee shops. Our entire social life, at least within city limits, consists of socializing with each other. If we weren’t friendly, there would be absolutely nothing to do at all.”

Which doesn’t explain my retreat into mild agoraphobia over the summer, a time during which I didn’t want to do any socializing at all and feared the prospect of resuming the usual schedules in the fall. But I’m relieved that it’s passed, and I’m finding it wonderfully rewarding to be talking and catching up and sharing information with a wide and ever-growing circle of acquaintances once again.

It’s good to have friends. It’s good to be part of the crowd. But retreating can be a comfort too. So maybe what I was doing wasn’t so much hiding as hibernating. Summer hibernating, in my case. I needed to recharge my conviviality batteries and maybe just have some time when I wasn’t quite so focused on interacting with other people. It felt good to retreat for a couple of months, and even better now to want to be back in the thick of the conversations. Sometimes nothing informs us more effectively than listening to our own inner rhythms, whether they are telling us about our need for food, water, sleep, exercise, solitude….or yes, society.

Fisher cats and snakes: Another bucolic day in the country

The experience reminded me of being a 12-year-old at a slumber party. Back then we’d all gather around, happy to be together and excited to stay up late at night. Someone would tell a ghost story and we’d all shiver with a giddy thrill. Then someone else would tell a ghost story, and then there would be a third, and before you knew it we were all terrified, afraid of every bump in the night, and miserable over the state of anxiety we’d worked ourselves into.

But this time it began not with pizza and a movie but with a drive down our long dirt driveway at 7:30 in the morning to bring my older child to school. I spotted an animal darting across the road in front of me. It was the size of a raccoon, the shape of an otter, but with a big bushy tail like a squirrel. And it was black. I saw it again an hour later in the same spot when I was driving my younger child to school.

Does anyone know what this is? I typed into our town’s online message board, certain that the many naturalists who live in Carlisle could answer it.

Sure enough, several did. “Sounds like a fisher cat,” wrote one. “And they are vicious creatures,” wrote another. “Suggest to your neighbors that they put the chickens in their coop,” added someone else familiar with the layout of our neighborhood. “Did it look like this?” contributed another, sending along a link that showed the very same animal I’d spotted only with its teeth bared in a terrifying grimace.

“On a different note,” wrote one of my fellow townspeople. “Last week I saw a brown snake with diamonds on its back, basking in the sunshine." Could it be a rattler? some wondered. Fortunately, no; it was subsequently identified as a juvenile Black Racer.

“Speaking of the sunshine,” wrote a neighbor, “It’s warming up now, and the ticks are out in full force, so be on the lookout whenever you get back from spending time outdoors.”

And just like that, I was like a 12-year-old at a slumber party. Suddenly all of us who normally tout the wildlife inherent to our thickly wooded town as one of its most beloved features were sitting at our computers afraid to leave the house.

Every now and then, it happens. The very aspects of our lives that we like best turn on us and become a source of fear. I love the thick woods and open fields surrounding our house and extending throughout our town…except when I start thinking about fisher cats, rattlesnakes, ticks, bears, and other frightening creatures. Not only that, but my daily running streak was at 988 days as we were typing out this online conversation. Another twelve days and I’d reach the thousand-day mark. I’d already run through thunderstorms, blizzards, heat waves, ice storms, stomach viruses and migraines….but fear of wildlife now threatened to keep me from my goal.

Perhaps my first thought upon hearing there might be vicious fisher cats and sunning rattlesnakes in my yard should have been for the well-being of my family members rather than for the integrity of my running streak, but streak runners intent on completing their daily mile-or-more without ever missing a day are not known for their well-balanced perspective and reasonable judgment. Nonetheless, I knew I couldn’t really miss Run Number 989 just because of the potential – and very remote – risk of wildlife. So I headed out anyway. Though my eyes were glued to the driveway in apprehension, I cleared the section of the driveway where I’d twice seen the fisher cat with no further sightings, and then I started to notice other things about the run. It was a cool and lovely spring day. The air smelled like lilac blossoms. Bright green leaves stood out on all the trees. And by the end of the day, a new calf had been born on our farm.

It all served to remind me that there’s always something to be afraid of, but it’s more important to look at the positive. Just as back in the slumber party days it was silly to sacrifice a happy evening with friends out of fear of ghosts and supernatural events, it doesn’t make sense now to ignore the many virtues of spring just because of snakes and ticks. There will always be something to fear. And there will always be something to look on with delight. And so I completed my run that day, and reminded myself to be braver next time, and perhaps not to be quite so quick to enter into discussion on the online town message board. As it so often does, a little knowledge proved itself to be a dangerous thing. But I was safe and sound and another day into my running streak. I’ll worry about wildlife another time; today is another beautiful spring day.

Happy to stay close to home this weekend

I sometimes say that a good weekend is one in which I don’t leave Carlisle city limits. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek. Carlisle is a town of 6,000, so using “city” to modify anything about it, including its borders, is facetious. Nonetheless, I love weekends that are home- and community-based, and I can’t help feeling a particular sense of satisfaction on a Sunday evening when I realize I haven’t left town in 48 hours.

This was very close to being that kind of weekend – as close as I almost ever get, in fact. On Friday, Holly had a friend for a sleepover; the highlights of the evening were pasta alfredo and homemade meatballs for dinner, s’mores for dessert (we make s’mores in the oven, which I am unapologetic in my preference for; unlike the campfire version, the chocolate actually melts, and you can broil the marshmallows to perfection every time), and a screening of the DVD "Flicka." Actually, those are what I saw as the highlights; the girls would probably say the best part was getting to stay awake talking until 10 PM and then falling asleep at the same time in Holly’s double bed.

On Saturday, we had our townwide Trash Party. As co-chair with my friends Lisa and Mollie, I had the pleasurable job of sitting in the park in the Town Center handing out trash bags, serving up doughnuts and coffee, and making suggestions as to what street different families who dropped by for an assignment should tackle in terms of trash clean-up. A few minor altercations broke out among neighbors squabbling over the privilege of collecting crumpled newspapers, crushed Coke cans, beer bottles and fast food wrappers along the same stretch of road, but Lisa handled those; I just thanked people for their hard work and encouraged them to take another doughnut hole before they hit the roadways to start gathering litter.

At noon, Lisa, Mollie and I piled into our pickup truck and drove around town collecting full trash bags people had left by the side of the road for us. It felt a little like a warped Easter egg hunt. “There’s one!” we would call out when we saw the big black bags hulking by the side of the road. I’d pull over; the two of them would jump out, grab the bags, throw them in the back, and we’d be on our way again. As the three of us talked about kindergarten placement, houses for sale in our town and ways that one husband in the group had annoyed his wife that morning, it reminded me of the scene where the three girls drive around together in the movie “Mystic Pizza.” This was the middle-aged suburban version.

Later in the afternoon I went for a five-mile run along one of my favorite routes. When I returned home, Holly was sitting on the big rock in front of our house waiting for me. She ran down the driveway to meet me, bursting with news about what happened on her trip to the circus with her grandparents earlier in the day. Because she was breathless, it took three tries before I understood the cause of her great excitement: she’d eaten cotton candy!

We went to church the next morning. In a surge of magnanimity no doubt brought on by the tranquility of the weekend, I agreed to a request to chair a new committee. Easter lilies decorated the altar, and Holly made an origami dove, a symbol of peace, in Sunday school.

On Sunday afternoon, I brought Holly to play at her friend Samantha’s house. Since Samantha’s father was home, Samantha’s mother and I decided to go for a walk. We walked for about two and a half miles and talked about the odd and random things that friends talk about on a walk. (Old episodes of Will and Grace, for example, and how to avoid spending a lot of money during a summer vacation in a resort town.) We saw some astonishing flood damage from last month’s deluges, and we saw several other people out on walks.

Weekends like this, spent with family, friends and community, are so satisfying to me, especially when good weather makes it possible to spend a lot of time outside. Due to my daily running commitment, I don’t take time nearly often enough for a walk with a friend; I’m so glad I did yesterday. It was a lovely weekend from beginning to end.

Yet some part of me always wonders whether there’s something a little bit wrong with being so happy to stay within our tiny town of 6,000 for the weekend. Is it contentedness, I wonder, or is it provincialism? Am I content, or complacent? Mild agoraphobia, even? It’s just that there’s plenty I didn’t do this weekend as a result of staying so close to home. I didn’t climb any mountains or see any live theater. I didn’t really support the arts in any way, come to think of it, and I didn’t do much to support any local economy. I had fun with friends and I exercised a lot, but I didn’t expand my cultural horizons at all. Nor did I comfort any afflicted. I didn’t even cross paths with any afflicted.

So it’s important to remember that being content with staying close to home is good but going out of one’s immediate comfort zone is important as well. I felt so lucky this weekend to be so community-bound, but it wouldn’t be good for me to do that too often. It’s just too comfortable for me. I need to push myself to get out into the world, no matter how happy I may be staying as close as possible to home.