Cousins and Littlejohn Islands, Maine

Back when I used to work in the Yarmouth area, I discovered these two islands during a lunch hour. Just five minutes away from Route 1, they somehow seemed a world away from the business of my daily life, happily nestled in another time and space. Many afternoons I would take a small picnic lunch out there, to dine to the sounds of eiders, seagulls, and calmly lapping waters. It is so peaceful that you can almost forget your troubles in the lovely sights and sounds, something I really needed during that period of time.

Cousins Island is relatively easy to find, as there are ample signs to point you in the right direction. Littlejohn Island, however, takes a bit more work. It is well-hidden and if you want to find it, you are going to have to do it yourself. No, I'm not going to tell you how to find it - I had to work for it, and so should you. Besides, that's all part of the fun of exploring - and if you are an adventurer at heart, you know this fact as well as I do.

I always seem to stop on the bridge between the two islands, as this area brings a beautiful array of birds. You will almost always find some great blue herons, snowy egrets, and other birds peacefully feeding along the two grassy shorelines.

One thing you will find once you get over there is that the roads are quite treacherous, featuring rollercoaster hills with barely only room for one car, plus a steep dropoff into the sea. You kind of have to cross your fingers and hope no one is coming the other way. On the other hand, if you like excitement, you will certainly find it here!

There's not much to do on these two islands - I have been unable to find restaurants and the like there. But if you want some peace an quiet and some quality time with Mother Nature, this is a great place to go!

Beautiful Elizabeth

One of the best parts about being a traveler is the people that you meet along the way. So instead of talking about a place in this post, I will be talking about a person.

Beautiful Elizabeth.

It was cold tonight, so cold. I had been working diligently, trying to make an editing deadline among personal traumas, financial crises, vehicular malfunctions, and illness. Life, it seemed, was just not fair. I managed to push it all out of my mind, somehow, and kept trudging on.

In the middle of Page 105, my stomach began to rumble vehemently. For some reason, out of the blue, I had a vicious craving for a supreme pizza from Pizza Hut.

"Why do you want that," I complained to my stomach, "you know we are trying to lose weight."

But, the body has just as much wisdom as the mind, if you know how to listen. So, grumbling, I grabbed my things and headed off to the restaurant.

"May I help you?" a bright, cheery voice sang from behind the counter.

As I started to give my order, I changed my mind, then changed it back again. But unlike many clerks behind a counter in the same situation, this one was different. She didn't give me the stare. She didn't shuffle around impatiently. Instead, she simply smiled.

Then as I sat wearily in the booth waiting for my little brown box, she asked if I would like my soda now or later. She cheerily brought it over, her smile beaming from ear to ear, then brought a gentleman his glass of merlot. I was beginning to feel like I had entered some kind of strange restaurant wormhole and was no longer in a Pizza Hut, but a fancy dining establishment disguised as one.

"Where do you get all your positive energy?" I asked, after watching her deal with customer after customer with the same flawless treatment. I expected her to say from Jesus, or maybe drugs.

"We buried nine people in less than three months," she replied, looking me in the eye. "After that, I realized that today is all you really have."

I gulped, trying to picture the sheer magnitude of grieving over not just one, not just two, but nine people that you love in the course of three months.

She had five kids and was working two jobs, because her husband was injured and cannot work. Her car gave up the ghost the very same day as her furnace. She found out one of her best friends died in a car wreck through the grapevine. Things that would make me curl tightly into a ball and never want to get up again, didn't seem to phase her. She still stood strong - with grace, with beauty, and with a great big smile on her face.

"I keep a gratitude journal," she continued. "Every day is a blessing. Every day there are so many things to be thankful for. Yes, I have five kids and that can be stressful, but all of them are healthy. Yes, I have to work two jobs, but I have feet to stand on so that I can do it. Everything can always be so much worse.

"You are amazing," I told her from the bottom of my heart.

She smiled warmly in reply and handed me my pizza. "Have a great day," she said with a twinkle in her eye.

Unlike most times I hear the phrase, I knew that she actually meant the words.

It's 6:50 and I still have a deadline. I still have all the same old problems that I did before. But somehow, my life feels just a little better, just a little brighter after meeting Beautiful Elizabeth.

A Journey Into Christmas Past

As Christmas looms just a week away, my mind drifts to a tradition that our family has grown to adore over the years - nighttime sleighrides at Nestlenook Farm in Jackson, NH.

If you are picturing yourself simply piling into a rickety sleigh and riding around in a circle a few times, you are sorely mistaken. A sleigh ride at Nestlenook Farm is pure perfection - and can take even the most cynical and jaded soul back into a world filled with childhood dreams.

To get into one of these sleighs is akin to taking a magical ride through the world of Christmases past - the kind of Christmases that you always dreamed of, filled with twinkling lights in the deep woods, skaters twirling happily under a beautiful white bridge, and tiny fallow deer that appear from behind the trees - creatures that are too adorable for even a six-year-old child's mind to dream up.

Huddled around multiple outdoor bonfires are adults, excited as children, warming themselves, and honeymooners kissing romantically in the firelight or under one of the impossibly huge trees, every branch aglow with twinkling lights. Children run back and forth to get more hot chocolate, throwing snowballs and shrieking with excitement.

The first time I saw one of the sleighs, I was awestruck by the sheer size of the horses, who snorted and paced, the heat from their well-worked bodies rising in a steam in the winter night. They were powerful creatures - yet they gently bowed their heads to let a three-year-old girl pat their immense noses with a tiny pink mitten.

My parents, brother, niece and nephews smiled in anticipation as they piled into the sleigh, pulling heavy woolen blankets over their legs for warmth. The air was thick with the scent of horse sweat, leather, and wool, as well as smoke from the woodfires burning nearby. As the sleigh first pulled away with a lurch, my niece's sky-blue eyes widened, in an expression of childlike excitement and, perhaps, a bit of fear.

Deep in the woods, the quiet sound of the horse hoofs and sleigh bells seemed to make everyone stop their conversations and just listen. The twinkling lights on the evergreens cast beautiful shadows all around, making even the homeliest faces glow with beauty. And I swore that behind a few trees, I could see a tiny elf or two, peeking at us.

So many dreams I dreamed over the years, looking out at those magical woods. So many tears I quietly shed in the refuge of those shadows, when it seemed that Mother Earth herself was listening. And so many peals of laughter still echoed among the beautiful evergreens.

The sleigh suddenly stopped and the passengers perked up and looked around. Tiny deer walked out shyly toward the sleigh, waiting to be fed tiny pellets of food. I jumped out to feed them, as always, along with all the other little kids. As always, their beautiful faces never ceased to amaze me. And, as always, my mother had to call me back to the sleigh when it was time to leave. I guess some things will never change.

Skaters twirled on a pond illuminated with white lights and raced under an arched bridge into a Christmas card scene. As the sleigh paused on the bridge, I felt that I had truly gone back into time, a hundred years or more.

As I think back on it now, my eyes well a bit with tears, for all those who will never come back to spend Christmas with us - for the passage of time always brings change. People move away, relationships end, and small children grow up. But such are the most precious moments that linger in your mind and heart - and some of mine will always echo with the sound of horse hoofs and tiny sleigh bells.

May you all have a blessed Christmas, wherever you are.

Winter's Tapes

As the first snow of the season buffets down, I take a drive along my favorite town road between Brunswick and Cook's Corner, watching everything spring, summer and fall become cloaked in a grey stillness. There is a peace in this, a perfection of design, as if all the stresses, mistakes and sorrows of the past are now covered in a sparkling, new purity. Nature seems to be repainting my life's canvas, gifting me with a Christmas present of one giant do-over.

I rustle through my glove compartment, looking for the tiny tapes, the little treasures I made almost ten years ago on a solo cross-country trip to the coast of Oregon and Washington.

Ten years ago.

Those words hit my stomach like a sucker punch.

What did I do in those ten years? I struggle to think. There was love, to be sure, along with plenty of heartbreak. There was prosperity and good times, and there were lean times filled with loneliness and poverty. There were times of uncertainty and times of beautiful blossoming. Times of creative intensity. Times filled with mysteries that still, to this day, completely boggle my mind.

The tapes noisily play on, filled with tales of birds dancing slow circles in the sky, of lonely truck stops out in the middle of the country, the only place to get something hot to eat, for miles and miles around. Standing inside of the skeleton of a dead tree that was stories tall and as big around as a small cabin. Coastlines that plummeted to the sea, filled with bright yellow flowers.

I could go on and on about the experiences I had, and may do so in another entry. But one thing about the trip is staying with me today.

The passage of time.

How similar my ten-year-younger voice sounds on the tape, and yet, how different. I was the same self back then - but it was like being in a very different play. My goals were different. My living situation was different. My lifestyle was different. And every player, with a few exceptions, has now been replaced by someone else. And I realize, upon listening, that this crazy trip that I had taken years ago had marked a new beginning. I did not know what compelled me to go - but only that I must go. And in those crazy thirty days, I learned more about Life and myself than I had ever dreamed possible.

When I returned home from my journey, I thought things would just go back to the way they had been before.

But I was wrong.

The mysteries, the spiritual experiences, the great, vast spaces of the West were somehow now in my heart, and a part of me forever. It was like trying to fit a galaxy into a tiny box, and as much as I tried, pushed, pulled and shoved - there was just no going back.

And I remember thinking something that every experienced wanderer knows.

Sometimes you just can't go home again.

My Afternoon at Big Sam's Lobster

One summer morning, I looked at the calendar.

It was August.

A familiar, sinking feeling overtook my stomach. I knew that the snowplows would soon be here.

The season was almost over, and I hadn't even begun to start enjoying it. It was high time for another adventure, one last hurrah to end the summer with a bang. But where? Like many of you, Year 2010 had not exactly been a lucrative one, so I forewent Tuscany and opted instead for a local, inexpensive outing.

When I venture away from my Topsham home to the wilds of the Maine open waters, I tend to visit my favorite beach of all, Popham Beach. But this time, I wanted to see something I had never seen before. Passing my familiar exit, I headed across the Bath Bridge to the Georgetown exit on the other side, making sure to ignore the very magnetic Dairy Queen looming on the corner. I wasn't sure what I was looking for exactly. I almost never am.

After turning down one road after another, enjoying the pretty houses and gardens, I finally came across a wooden yellow sign, nailed to a tree.

"Big Sam's," it announced, in big, red letters.

My curiosity was picqued. I followed the strange, red-lettered signs until finally I was taken to a private road - one that looked none too friendly, complete with a scolding "No Trespassing" sign. The dirt road didn't look too welcoming either.

But warnings like these never did turn my inner Lewis & Clark around.

Oh no.

They only make me want to find out what's down the road even more.

So down the bumpy, dusty road I went, to find out what lay at the end of the trail. The road twisted and turned, went up and down. It went on far longer than I was comfortable. But still, I was undaunted.

When I reached the very unique "lobstermobile," a spray-painted red car complete with metal claws, I was already very happy I came.

There lay a picture-perfect Maine hideaway, one that looked like it was out of a postcard. Tucked away from the world, this harbor was literally timeless. I soon forgot what time it was, even what day it was - and became lost in the sights that lay before me - quiet, shady inlets dotted with huge granite rocks, green, fragrant pines and charming fishing boats.

As I approached the counter, I was almost afraid to look at the menu, figuring that lounging at such a lovely location would surely come with a hefty price tag.

But I was wrong.

To my surprise, I found that I could have a lobster dinner for around fifteen bucks, or a Maine shrimp dinner for about nine. There were a variety of side dishes to choose from, and I had a hard time picking one.

As I ate my sumptuous Maine shrimp, enjoying the sound of waves lapping the docks, I felt someone watching me.

Franklin, the pet Franklin gull, was gazing at me intently from his usual spot on the flag post, hoping for a bite.

But I wasn't giving him any.