Weird Happenings in New Hampshire

The other day I was in Portsmouth doing some shopping at the local health food store before meeting back up with my family at the restaurant where my niece works. It was my mother's birthday and we'd just taken her out for brunch at the quirky Friendly Toast and were then going to stop briefly to see my niece. The others had gone ahead so that I could do my health store shopping sans children. Finishing quickly, I hurried on to meet them. I was walking down the sidewalk, minding my own business, jauntily carrying my paper bag full of healthy products,

When it happened...

"Excuse me!" a voice cried out from behind me. "Excuse me!" Thinking someone was in a rush and needed space on the slippery, snowy sidewalk, I moved over toward the building to get out of their way. Seemingly from out of nowhere, a female face appeared in the tiny space between me and the wall and a five dollar bill was shoved into my hand with the words, "Here! There's more of that where that came from!" Then she was gone. Totally gobsmacked, I stood for a moment staring at the bill in my hand before swinging around to see what the heck had just happened. Lots of people were out that Saturday morning, filling the sidewalks, and it was hard to see where the woman had gone. I thought maybe she had joined a group and was hurrying away, but I couldn't tell for sure. I hadn't gotten a good look at her because she'd come and gone so quickly, but if asked, I'd say she was your average looking (meaning, no unusual tattoos, hair color, or piercings), American woman in her forties.

I was so stunned by her action that I didn't even say thank you. Of course, I was also suspicious. Immediately I opened my purse, not to put the bill away, but to check my wallet. It was still there. So, this hadn't been a trick to distract me, then steal my wallet. I began to walk again, tentatively holding the bill in my hand as though it might contain a bomb. After a minute, I decided to look it over. I examined it thoroughly and found no messages or phone numbers or websites scrawled on it. No blood. No bomb. It looked all right.

But I didn't want it.

Right away I started searching for someone who would. A man waiting for the bus looked a little down and out, but he also looked grumpy. I figured that if I tried to give him money he'd yell at me, "Do I look poor to you?" and I would be forced to reply, "Well, yes, you do, sir. I thought you could use some money." And Bam! that would be the end of me.

I wanted to live so I kept walking, hoping at the very least that I'd find a street musician working the crowd. Strangely, on a cold January morning, there was no such creature. Still dazed, my mind started going through all the possibilities of what this might mean. Was it a strange, grassroots version of Obama's new stimulus plan? A reality television show taping what people do with the money a stranger gives them? If that were the case, I was determined not to look entirely idiotic with my paper bag and a five-dollar bill held out before me between two gloved fingers. I straightened my shoulders and walked faster.

The worst case scenario? Maybe, just maybe, I looked like I needed the money. Maybe that paper bag in my arm resembled a six-pack from the liquor store. Was that why she'd given me money? She thought I looked down and out? The Norwegian in me was horrified, and my husband didn't help matters any. When I met up with my family and told everyone my story, he said that maybe my jacket had made her think I was a homeless person. I was wearing a navy blue peacoat. I thought it made me look distinguished. Apparently, I thought wrong.

Okay, so I'm pretty sure, despite my husband's opinion, that I didn't look homeless or needy. As much as I would like to be politically correct and say there is nothing wrong with looking homeless and needy, I won't be hypocritical The only people who really want to look homeless and needy are the ones who are trying to scam you. I don't think those who are truly homeless and needy want to look that way. Not being either, I certainly didn't. The thing was, the woman ran me down to give me the money. She literally chased after me yelling, "Excuse me!" to get me to stop. What was it about me that prompted such unusual behavior?

My husband said he would have chased after her and demanded to know where the rest of it was since she had, after all, said, "there's more of that where that came from." I wouldn't have done that. What if this had been a ruse to get me to follow her down a dark alley so that she and her gang could kidnap me and sell me on the white slave market? I don't want to be a slave.

I ended up giving the money to my niece and she put it in her tip jar. She didn't want it at first, but I told her she could pay it forward some time. She promptly took it. The youth are so much less suspicious than I am.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure the gesture was meant to be in good spirit - a simple, generous act. Too bad I didn't take it that way, which says something about me, I guess. Too many times I've taken people at face value only to end up being ridiculed by them. This time, I was going to be careful. Of course, this time was probably the one example of someone truly being kind and not using me for a morning's entertainment...Boy, I wish we could hear what that woman's thinking right now! You probably just blew her mind, Beth!

For the moment, the event remains a mystery to me. If anyone has any ideas about what might have happened, please pass the information along. In the meantime, beware the five-dollar biller. You might just get free money out of the deal.

New Hampshire Loses Power; New Hampshire Writer Loses Mind

It’s been four days since an ice storm hit New Hampshire and what a crazy ride it’s been. President Bush even declared a state of emergency here in the Granite State. Trees and power lines are down, roads are blocked and electricity has been cut off. Many people still don’t have power. PSNH, our electric company, says that this storm has created the worst damage they’ve ever had to deal with in the history of the company.

Oh, lovely.

Day One: It’s Thursday. My husband and I left home at 2:00 in the afternoon for his appointment to receive laser eye surgery to control bleeding in his eye (he’s had diabetes since he was 14). We were blissfully unaware (at least I was) that a storm was approaching. On our way home, the roads seemed fine to me, probably because I drive like a turtle…until we reached the last road to our house, that is. It’s pretty much uphill all the way and every time I accelerated, the car slid on the pretty sheet of ice coating the black surface of our road. Even though I’m from Minnesota, I’m not a good winter driver (I never got to use the car much). When I was in graduate school, after an ice storm, I stepped on the brakes for a stop sign and ended up turning the car completely around (hmmm…maybe that’s why I didn’t get to use the car much). Fortunately, my husband knew what to do, calmly telling me shift into a lower gear before we died a horrible death. That helped a lot.

Happily, gratefully, we made it home in one piece. We discovered that school had let out early and that my middle child’s holiday concert had been canceled. No sarcastic comment from me about being glad about the cancellation - I was really looking forward to it. Really! But then, I have no life. Having nowhere to go, we settled in for a warm, safe evening.

It’s now midnight and the sound of my 4-year-old son crashing through the baby gate (lodged firmly in our bedroom doorway to keep our puppy from destroying the rest of our house) wakes us. My husband, dragged from his usual coma-like sleep, leaped out of bed and immediately went into commando mode, fists up, feet a-shifting back and forth, ready to take someone out. Luckily I had figured out what had happened and hissed at him to knock it off before he hurt himself. He eventually settled down and we soon determined, from the lack of a clock light, that the electricity had gone out. The absence of sound had awakened our little one, sending him hurtling down the stairs in the dark. Smart. I calmly explained to him what had happened and told him to go back to bed, so he climbed into ours. That’s not what I had in mind, but I tried to make the best of it (we only have a double bed). After about a half hour of getting squished he decided he’d had enough. I carried him back to his bed and he went right to sleep.

Morning dawned. It was dark and still sleeting out. Everything was coated in a silvery layer of ice. Our deck, the grass, the trees. Branches were drooping as though drained of life. Limbs were breaking. We climbed out of bed to a frigid bedroom. We quickly dressed like nobody’s business and fired up the wood stove. We closed off as much of the house as we could to keep at least one area warm. When that was done, my hubby and I headed outside to start cleaning up the slush/ice. It took a while because the ice is pretty thick and hard, plus it was still sleeting/raining out. We knew it was going to get cold later, however, and we can’t afford to let the driveway freeze. It’s on a hill and my minivan would never make it - not going out, which is downhill, nor coming back in, which is uphill with a drop-off on the other side. If you accelerate and then don’t slow down in time, you’ll shoot off the other side like the Dukes of Hazard. Daisy, I am not.

As we worked, the ominous sounds of snapping limbs and jarring crashes caught at our attention, reminding us of the power of ice and to stay out of the woods. Once in a while, a car drove by, some speeding as though the driver was needed in surgery, others crawled along, knuckles white. Otherwise, it was quiet. Later, when we did a tour of the yard, we found huge broken limbs scattered about, several landing on our woodpile, of course, and one big tree down, ripping out the roots as it toppled. No major damage, though, and we were thankful.

The cold front arrived that afternoon. Temperatures plummeted. We got a phone call - we happen to have a phone that works without electricity (having learned our lesson when I was pregnant and our electricity went out and it was a blizzard and I wasn’t all that far from my due date, and we had no phone). It was the guy who’s fixing our car door (Thursday morning my husband backed out of our garage while the car door was still open - our 6-year-old neglected to close it, after which it would neither open nor close). He had fixed it - lovely man - so that we could now open and close the door, but probably shouldn’t. More importantly, we could now open the front door, too (that’s the door I use - I am not crawling through the window. Remember? Not a Duke?). We decided to leave it as is - a much cheaper way to go, plus it didn’t look too bad. My husband calls the remaining dents his Persian Flaw. We just bought the car in August, of course, brand new and shiny, a rarity for us. So much for having one thing that our children haven’t ruined.

Anyway, as I was driving to go pick up the car, I encountered a downed power line and a snapped pole. The tracks of previous cars showed that they just blithely drove under the sagging line, though barely, so I thought I could, too. I made it, just barely, but farther down the road I spotted an orange diamond-shaped sign that said Road Closed. I read it in the rear view mirror as we continued merrily on our way. Hmmm…how interesting, I think. Now how are we going to get back home? The electric company had been starting work on the pole as we were passing it, so it looked like we would have to find an alternative way home. That was quite an adventure in itself, finding a way that wasn’t blocked by wires or trees, and in a new neighborhood. But we found a way, only because the weekend before I took my oldest to a birthday party. Strangely, at the time he wasn’t up to going and I didn’t particularly want to take him, but we had committed to it, so he had no choice. Our family keeps our commitments. He ended up having a really good time, I learned about some new back roads, and our conscientiousness later paid off. Good karma is a lovely thing.

We have a gas range so I made dinner quite easily that night. The ice cream was starting to melt, though, so I put it on the porch, resisting the temptation to eat it all right then (I was going into survival mode). It was 3 degrees outside. My hubby and I later dragged our mattress into the living room to sleep. It was very warm in there and, you’re going to want to kill me here, actually got too warm. Thankfully, we survived the heat and awoke to the dog dragging our quilt off the bed because she was trying to kill it. The fire was out and it was only 60 degrees in the room. Day Two had begun.

The ice on the trees was so beautiful, the smell of wood smoke in the air tantalizing, the lack of power freeing us up to do other things. This was all well and good, but my hair does not handle not being washed on a daily basis. It looked greasy and lank and strange ratty bunches were starting to form at the nape of my neck. My 4-year-old kept insisting that we’d lost our electricity because we’d been wasting it (I told him that was something that might happen in the future, but not today). My back hurt from shoveling ice and hauling wood, I wanted water in a bad way, and I missed my writing. Being a modern woman, I do my work on a computer. Jane Austen, I am not.

Still, we managed to enjoy the morning…until my husband went out for water and returned with the news that the earliest we’d get power was Wednesday (it wasSaturday). I **apped my pants. Okay, I didn’t, but it was disappointing news to hear, to say the least. I was starting to understand Jack Torrance in The Shining. Despite my growing demented state, I settled in for the long haul. I’m nothing, if not a survivor. I also sharpened my ax.

At supper we roasted hotdogs over the fire, followed by marshmallows. Later, while washing the dishes in an inch of water that I’d boiled on the wood stove, I noticed the flashing orange lights of an electric truck on the road. I’d seen a couple trucks stop at that same spot before and nothing had come of it, but this time I kept my eyes on that truck. I sensed electricity in the air. Time passed, nothing happened. I spotted the dark outline of our neighbor going down to talk to them - maybe to threaten them. Then a miracle occurred. The electricity came back on! We had lights, heat, and a return to civilization! We zipped out onto the deck and hooted and hollered and shouted, "thank you!" I hope they didn’t think they’d electrocuted us.

We were very lucky to get our power back so soon and still hope to share our good fortune. I’ve offered friends the use of our shower and hope they don’t have to take us up on the offer because that means they got their power back, too. Though I’ll be glad to help them if they need it. Our freezer is open, too, if anybody has food that requires it. Problem is, it’s hard to call anybody and check on them. We can call out on our phone, but those in need can’t get the call unless their cell phones have service (which doesn’t always happen when you’re at home in this wooded area of NH). Of course, we lost power again today, so that didn’t help matters, but we got it back again a little over an hour later. I think they were fixing other lines. I hope that’s all it was. It’s very windy today and wind does not bode well for power lines.

So, I admit that I didn’t actually lose my mind. Our family survived quite well. I discovered that I can make do without the amenities of hot water, computers, TV, and maybe even flourish. I discovered that I’m addicted to writing, but could make do with taking notes for new book ideas. I discovered that the old kerosene lamp I bought at a yard sale works really well. I discovered that the little stream running near the house provides good water for flushing the toilets. I discovered why people in the old days went to bed so dang early.

Power has been restored to our home and my mind has been restored to its former lucidity. But you know what? I wouldn’t mind losing it again, just not for a while. I have some writing to catch up on, and a hotel to run…

New Hampshire's Going For The Record!

This winter season we got a lot of snow here in New Hampshire. In fact, we’ve had the most snow in a season since 1875. On March 28th, we got about eight more inches. Unfortunately, they measure snowfall in Concord and they only got about 2.8 inches. That just doesn’t seem right to me. We get dumped on and most of it doesn’t count. Anyway, right now the record is 122 inches, set in the winter of 1873-74. We are currently at 115.2 inches. That puts us into second place. You may not believe this - I don’t believe it myself - but I’m actually kinda wishing for more snow. I want to break that record. Why, you ask?

Because I want bragging rights.

Wouldn’t you? I can just picture myself, eighty years old and sitting by the fire, telling my grandchildren in a gravelly voice, "I remember the winter of ‘07/’08 when we broke the record for the most snow in a season. It was a nightmare, I’m telling you. Your grandad had a broken wrist, leaving me to sno-blow the driveway, which was a couple hundred yards long, shovel the steps, porch and deck, and try to rake the roof with an implement that was longer than a tree. Then, just when his wrist healed, he went and injured his thumb!" At this point, I’d give a good guffaw and slap my knee. Then I’d grow serious again. "That was the year of the bad back, little ones. Most of us New Hampshirites weren’t able to fully straighten up again until August." Big sigh here. "I remember one time we had to clean up from a snowstorm…in the pouring rain!" Of course, the grandkids would ask next, "But why didn’t you just let the rain melt the snow, Grandma?" And I’d smugly reply, "Because, smart aleks, the next day was going to be frigid cold, worse than being in Minnesota, if I remember correctly. That rain wouldn’t have been able to melt all the snow in time and we would have ended up with 8 inches of ice on the driveway. Our little ice rink wouldn’t have melted until July."

Just when the grandkids thought the story was over, there’d be more. I’d lean closer. "You whippersnappers don’t know what it was like. Just leaving the driveway was an adventure. All that built-up snow and ice had created a ramp at the end of the drive, plus the snow banks were so high, you couldn’t see down the road you were trying to turn onto. You just punched the gas and hoped for the best, sailing through the air, wrenching the steering wheel to make the turn, praying there weren’t any cars coming. We were Dukes of Hazarding it that winter."

I’d probably embellish the story a bit, too. It’s one of the privileges of getting old, and of having lived through harsh times. Perhaps I had double pneumonia that year and the kids had the plague, too. I had to sno-blow uphill, both ways. We lost electricity twenty times and our pipes froze. Our roof nearly caved in from all the snow. We could go sledding off the roof. We almost lost our youngest in a snow bank. Actually, we did lose several of our sleds after one particular snowstorm.

Ahhh…Good times.

So why do I want more snow? Like I said earlier, I want bragging rights. Plus, it gives me something to aim for. Everyone needs goals in life. I’m hoping you’ll root for us. Do whatever you need to do to send us snow. Prayers. Snow dances. Whatever it takes. It’s only seven inches. But if you could, could you just have it all sent to Concord? I’m sure they wouldn’t mind, not in the least.