Joy, joy, happy, happy! The books have arrived, just in time for the Winthrop Craft Fair tomorrow—December 3—-at the grade school in town. Hours: 9:00 to 2:00. Stop by and see us if you are out and about in Winthrop.

All right. My YA fantasy novel, Maya and the Book of Everything, is available directly from Amazon. And if you are an Amazon Prime member, then shipping is free. That’s what we Mainers call a wicked good deal.

Here is the link: https://www.amazon.com/Maya-Book-Everything-Great-Library/dp/0997845309

Because of the name of my book, when you do a search for it on Amazon, it is right next to Isabel Allende’s Maya’s Notebook. Now, how cool is that to be next to one of the giants of literature?

Very cool, indeed!

Today is my birthday, and I am fifty-nine years old. The sky is blue, the sun is shining, and it is warm, but not too warm. A lovely, lovely day.

Tonight, we’ll be meeting our eldest daughter and a friend for dinner in Brunswick.  On Saturday,  our youngest daughter will be coming for a week-long visit. And in a couple of months, my YA fantasy, Maya and the Book of Everything, will be published.

What a great way to start my fifty-ninth year sixtieth year!. (Thanks, Lyn LaRochelle, for the correction.)

Because my youngest daughter will be here for a visit, I’ll be taking a break from blogging. (And from editing. Praise be!)

A very happy September to all. I’ll be back at the end of the  month.

Summer, with its hot days, has finally come to Maine. Since we live in the woods, warm weather isn’t much of a problem for us. We don’t even need air conditioning. A ceiling fan in the hall cools the whole house.

We do have to plan on when to go for bike rides, though—the heat of the afternoon can be a bit much. Yesterday, Clif and I went late morning, and with the temperature in the mid-80s, we both decided we should have gone earlier. Still, one of the things about bike riding is that there is always air moving around you as you pedal, which is great in hot weather but not so good in cold weather. (Oh, I have had some cold rides.)

Clif and I have made good progress with our biking, going to the end of Memorial Drive, about an eight-mile round trip. Our next accomplishment will be to head up Beaver Dam Road, with its long, long incline that could be dubbed Misery Hill. In past seasons, we have found that going up Misery Hill on a regular basis makes us strong enough to go up most any hill in the area. This is a good thing as central Maine is not exactly flat and has plenty of challenges for bike riders.

“When do you think we’ll be ready to go up Misery Hill?” I asked Clif.

“Sometime in July,” he replied.

As the saying goes, time will tell, but I, too, am optimistic that we’ll be strong enough to tackle Misery Hill sometime in July. Then, it will be on to Route 17, giving us about a fifteen-mile round trip ride.

When we got back to our car at Norcross Point, there were lots of people enjoying the water and the shade on this hot day, and I snapped a few photos.  It seems to me that the pictures I took could have come from any time—now, when I was young, and even further back.

Somehow, during these jittery times, this gives me comfort.

Yesterday was a sunny day with a clear blue sky.  Before going to a meeting at the library, I stopped to take pictures at the lovely old sliver of a cemetery in the middle of Winthrop.

As to be expected, there were tree spirits in the cemetery, and I caught a picture of one.

Then I turned my attention to four very old gravestones.

I decided to focus on one of the smaller ones, which I expected would mark a child’s grave. In part, I was right, but the stone, in fact, marked the graves of two children, both with the name Susannah.

The first Susannah died in 1771—when we were still a part of Britain—and she was five years old. The second Susannah died in 1784—we were then the United States of America—and she was twelve years old. If my math is correct, the second Susannah was born a year after the first Susannah died.

To modern parents, it is a very strange notion to use the name of a dead child for the next sibling of the same sex. Somehow, it seems morbid if not downright creepy. However, it is my understanding that this was fairly common practice in America in the 1700s when the child mortality rate was appallingly high.  Names, often ones that had been in the family, were reused if a child died.

Different sensibilities for different times, and that little gravestone marks the story of one family’s grief in losing not one but two Susannahs.  I understand that parents  in the 1700s were not unaccustomed to losing young children. Nevertheless, it is my belief that these parents grieved, too, even if a child’s death was all too common. To mourn is human, whatever the century.

Indeed, in the mid-1800s, a time when children still died at an alarming rate, Louis Pasteur would write in a letter that another one of his dear children had died of typhus. Three of Pasteur’s five children would die from this illness, which influenced his decision to study infectious diseases.

With all these morbid remembrances of lives ended too soon, you would think the Winthrop cemetery would be a grim place. But somehow, it isn’t. Like so many New England cemeteries, it is peaceful and serene, a place of beauty, even.

I especially love how snippets of stories, the human story, are told through the gravestones and remind us of how things were both different and the same back through the centuries.

Yesterday was our thirty-ninth wedding anniversary, and the bright, beautiful day was filled with simple pleasures.

First, we went to Railroad Square Cinema for Cinema Explorations, a winter film series.  As Cinema Explorations begins at 10 a.m., delicious bagels, provided by Bagel Mainea, are available. Clif and I can never resist.

We always get to Railroad Square early so that there is time to chat. Clif is on the left, and our friend Joel is on the right.

The movie Dukhtar, which means daughter in English, was showing, and it is the last of the film series.  This excellent Pakistani film is about a mother and her young daughter who flee from the latter’s arranged marriage. Dukhtar is by turns tender, harrowing, sad, and triumphant, a movie very much worth seeing.

(Eye in the Sky, a movie with Helen Mirren and the late, great Alan Rickman, will be coming soon, and Clif and I are looking forward to seeing it.)

What to do after the the movie? Why, go across the parking lot to Grand Central Cafe for pizza with friends and a discussion about Dukhtar.

Because the day was so fine and the dog had been left alone for a fair amount of time, we decided that after pizza, a walk in the woods was in order.

I was taken by the juxtaposition of pussy willows next to frayed cattails.

In the woods, the snow is completely gone.

The horned tree stands guard over the trail.

Two of my favorite guys.

Clif and I ended the day with Trader Joe’s Mandarin Orange Chicken, egg rolls from our local Chinese restaurant, and white rice we cooked ourselves. We both had a rum and coke to go with this meal.

Happy anniversary to us!

At the little house in the big woods, whatever the season, the backyard is aflutter with birds, and it gives me great joy to watch them as they flit from the trees to the bird feeder. Finches, woodpeckers, chickadees, nuthatches, and many other birds come to eat. Our friends Beth and John are just as crazy about birds as we are, and last year on a warm spring day, we spent a happy afternoon on the patio, watching the birds.

In the winter, of course, I watch from inside, often as I am doing dishes. Winter is a hungry time for birds, and there are always a lot clustered at the feeders.

The other day, as I was watching the birds in the backyard, I remembered the time I freed the birds at Woolworth’s in Waterville. I was three or four years old, and in those far-gone, innocent times, I was allowed to look at the toys and the pet section by myself while my mother did her shopping. I was a quiet child. not prone to running around and screaming and breaking things. My mother felt as though she could trust me, but you know what they say about the quiet ones.

On the day I set the birds free, I watched the bright fish swim in their tanks and listened to the bubbling sound that came from the water. I admired the silky hamsters, curled in a ball, their little noses twitching from time to time. Then I came to the birds, tweeting and jumping in their cages. I remember feeling sorry for them, trapped in such a small space.

Without hesitation, I undid the latch of one the cages and opened the door. With a swoosh, the birds flew from the cage, and their quick motion startled me, making me realize that what I had done was probably not a good thing, at least from the store’s point of view.

I found my mother, but I didn’t tell her about the birds until we were at the lunch counter, and two parakeets went by.

“Look at those parakeets,” my mother said. “I wonder who let them out.”

I confessed right away. “I let the birds out.”

“Shush,” she said, and I could see that she was trying not to smile.

Our food came, and as we ate, birds flew over our heads, and I could hear them twittering. No doubt they were eventually caught and returned to their cages. But for a short time, anyway, they had escaped their confinement and did what birds are born to do—fly.

When we got home, my mother scolded me, just a little, telling me I was never to let the birds out again, and I didn’t. But to this day, I  see my younger self and my quick little fingers, unlatching the cage door and letting the birds fly free.

And it still makes me smile to think of it.

Well, here it is. The post you’ve all been waiting for—an update on the workings of the oven in my new electric stove. I wish I had good news to report, but I do not.

A week or so ago, two men from Dave’s Appliance came to test the oven. As far as their readings were concerned, nothing was amiss, but they turned down the oven’s electronic setting by ten degrees. In talking with them, we also learned several facts.

First, our complaint is not uncommon, and they have had to go many homes with new electric stoves. One irate customer even produced a burnt loaf of banana bread as proof of her oven’s erratic temperature. Second, new ovens don’t heat the way they once did. In the old days, say the 1990s, the temperature was controlled by a mercury thermostat. We all know that mercury is toxic, but it sure did a good job of regulating an oven’s temperature. Nowadays, ovens use an electronic-based thermostat, and at least in low to mid-priced stoves, these thermostats have huge swings where they overshoot the temperature by a lot and then cool back down. (Hence burnt banana bread and cookies.) To make matters even worse, the oven announces it is up to temperature when in fact it isn’t. The men from Dave’s recommend preheating the oven for twenty minutes.

The final cherry on the sundae is that the men from Dave’s told us that we could spend three times what we spent on our stove and still have the same problem. After they left, Clif did some research online, and the information he found confirmed what we had been told.

Clif turned our oven’s setting down another twenty degrees, and I made a batch of biscuits to test the new settings. Now, I am rather proud of my biscuit-making abilities. Usually, they are light and fluffy through and through. However, with the new oven, even with the lower settings, the bottoms were not burnt, but they were hard and crunchy, not what I want for biscuits.

Yesterday, I spoke with the folks at Dave’s and told them about my oven woes. I was assured that I could return the stove and just pay the difference if we bought a more expensive one. However, because of what we have learned about modern ovens, I am reluctant to do this. We could spend more and still have the same problem.

So here is what we are considering—a large convection toaster oven, one big enough for pies and pizza and even a 9 x 11 pan. My daughter has a toaster oven she swears by, and she sent me a link to Bon Appétit’s glowing review of a Hamilton Beach Easy Reach Convection Oven (model #31126). According to Bon Appetit, the Hamilton Beach is not only very affordable—$70—but bakes like a champ. And at the little house in the big woods, we do a lot of baking.

In retrospect, I’m not sure what we would have done if we had known ahead of time about the foibles of low-to-mid-range priced modern electric ovens.  Waited until we had enough money for a much more expensive one? Installed a gas stove, which has a more responsive heat?  (Unfortunately, we would have to pay a significant fee to have it hooked up, and we have a budget as big as a minute.)  Held on to the old one, keeping our fingers crossed that the door didn’t just give out entirely in the middle of a batch of cookies?

Here is a lesson we have definitely learned: The next time we buy an appliance, we will be sure to research the hell out of what we are buying.  We will not assume that the new model will be as good as the old model, even though it is from the same manufacturer. (Our old stove was a Whirlpool, our new stove is a Whirlpool, and Clif feels as though we’ve been sucked down a whirlpool.)

Onward and upward!