My dogs Indigo and Ranger on a January morning.

You don’t survive in Maine very long if you don’t make peace with winter.   I love warm days and sunny skies as well as the next gal,  but I have to say I have come to love the heart of January in my home state.  After summer it may be my favorite time of year.

This is the real deal:  week after week of temperatures near zero, snow up to your waist, rivers filled with jagged schooners of ice.  This is an honest, Fuck You winter, the kind of weather that, as Garrison Keillor once said, “is natures way of reminding you that the world is not all about you.”

Part of what I like about January in Maine is the result of my own weird work schedule– Colby College, my employer, has a “short term” in January, and usually I am off for the whole month, the result of my less-than-full-time contract with the school.  And so I take January to write, to build fires in the wood stoves, and to read.  Right now I’m in our summer place, finishing up three weeks of writing and revising two new books that will come out next year– one, the updated version of SHE’S NOT THERE (the 10th anniversary edition) and the other, a new memoir about parenthood, STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU.

The summer place in winter has a naughty moon-base feeling to it.  The bird feeders and the summer furniture are stacked up around the living room; the front porch is deep in snow.  Through the window I can see the sun reflecting off of the frozen lake.  After I finish writing this, I’m going to build a fire in the wood stove and finish up some reading I need to do for the coming semester.

Since almost no one knows I’m here, the phone doesn’t ring.  It is the quietest place on earth.  It’s just me and the dogs, the warm glow of the fires, and all the words I can find to set to paper.

Still, winter in Maine is not entirely silent.  Here are twelve sounds I hear:

Jenny B watches the young people on sleds.

One is the woomph of a frozen pond.  The water moves beneath the ice and the whole lake goes werrrp, a deep, warping groan, like something from outer space.

The dogs stand at the edge of the ice, snow on their black ears, and growl at it.

Two is the plow guy, doing the driveway in the middle of the night.  The heavy blade scrapes against the asphalt, the tires spinning around as our man revs his engine high enough to push the snow.  I think about our plow guy—whose name is Jared–when the snow is deep, how he spends hour after hour in that truck, driving around from house to house when everyone’s asleep. I feel bad when there are two storms right in a row, and Jared has to get right back out on the road and do the job all over again.  There are some winters when I think he never sleeps at all.

Three is the sound of a frozen stream, the clear merry sound of cold water rushing against ice,  like some strange music,  full of motion and hope.  A strange contrast to the ice-bound world.

Four is the shush of skis against new snow as the cross country skiers glide through woods, across fields, down hills.  Their heaving breath comes out in clouds.

Five is a car stuck in a snowbank, the tires spinning around and around. Car doors open, and close.  There’s cursing.

Six is the sound of Storm Center on television, early in the morning, from a room downstairs.  There’s a sudden cheer, followed by the patter of young feet on the stairs.  The kids run into the bedroom and announce, “No School!” Then the parents sit up in bed and groan as they imagine every last thing they had planned for that day instantly disappearing.

Seven is a maul chunking against the top of the log as the wood splits into two nice even pieces.  I usually split wood in the basement, so sometimes the tip of the maul ticks against the cement floor in the follow through.  Then I split the two pieces I just made into four, and sometimes the four into eight.  The smaller the piece of wood is, the higher the pitch as it falls to the floor. Clunk.

Eight is the birds, the few of them that remain.  I hear them in the morning as I go down the dark driveway to get the newspaper: black-capped chickadees, northern cardinals, ruby crowned kinglets, Bohemian waxwings.  They sound cold.

Nine is a car left car outside.  Return to the car to find a crust of ice on the windshield.  So out comes the scraper.  Sometimes—on a good day– the crud slides right off.  Other times you have to get serious, prying off that ice like you’re scraping burnt chocolate off a frying pan with a spatula.  How big does the hole you chop have to be in order for you to drive the car?  Sometimes I see drivers peeking through tiny portholes, like they’re driving a tank.

Ten is a snowmobile, heading across Great Pond.  Sometimes there’s a whole group of them, making a sound like a swarm of angry bees.  Other times it’s just one guy.  Late in the day I see them all parked outside the Sunset Grill in Belgrade, a basketball game on the TV, glasses of Irish coffee lined up on the bar.

Eleven is an icicle falling off the rain gutter and shattering on the driveway in a thousand pieces.  Once, one fell on my head, and I looked upwards, angrily, and cursed the sky.

Twelve:  In the middle of the night the power goes out and I’m suddenly woken by the shocking sound of nothing at all.  I’m warm beneath the covers, though, and the family is safe beneath our roof, the two grownups, the two boys, even the wicked oscars swimming in the fish tank.  While we were sleeping, the dogs have jumped up in the bed again.  All warm and soft, the creatures bark at some imaginary cat, in their dog dreams.

I lie there for a while in my dark house,  in a sleepy kind of wonder, and listen.

I finally have fallen in with a group of musicians so marginal that there is literally nowhere further to fall.  We have a ball together, the five of us. We’ve played out a handful of times, and will probably continue to do so in the years to come.  It’s a jam band, which means that, on the one hand, we only have like five songs, but on the other, since each one is an hour and a half long, we don’t really need more than five songs.  Plus, we never remember how they go, so each time is different.

The instrumentation is pretty wild too– it’s a classic rock and roll rhythm section of drums, bass, and guitar, with two wild cards– me on keyboards, and Luke on the electric fiddle.  Dave LaGrange– who was part of the “Blue Stranger” circle– plays rhythm and sings and when he feels like it, which is a lot of the time, he whips out a lead as well.

In truth, the band is pretty freakin’ great–a few originals, but mostly things like Neil Young, Grateful Dead, the Band,  a few bar classics.  Lots of improvisation.  A good time.  I love playing with these guys– a nice slot for a keyboard player to fill.  I get to fill in the holes as I feel them, and then step up and do big piano or organ solos now and again too.

Anyway, I asked my friends on Facebook if anybody wanted to make a logo for the band, and just like that, four or more logos were drawn up by people I hardly even know, for free.  Amazing thing, the internet.  I said I thought the band emblem should be, “a three toed sloth hanging from a tree,” epitomizing our driving sense of ambition.  So here, for your consideration, are some of those logos. What do you think?

“On stage the band has got problems; they’re a bag of nerves on first nights.” –Rolling Stones, “Torn and Frayed.”

P.S.  and if YOU are a design nerd, or are just the kind of person who wants to hang around the house messing with images of three-toed sloths, draw up one of these your own self and send it to me.  Thanks. And STRAGGLE ON!

The Boylan house, about 1920.

This coming weekend,  my spouse Deedie (“Grace”) and I will go down to Devon, Pennsylvania, to say goodbye to the house that my family has lived in for the last 39 years.  Since my mom’s death this July,  the family has been going about the necessary steps to sell the old house, and if all goes well, we will close next Wednesday, the 21st of December.

The last month or so– since we first accepted the offer on the beautiful old place–has been hard emotionally.  I guess I felt as if we’d said a proper farewell to my mom this summer– but turning our keys in the lock for the last time presents us with a new kind of loss, and this one’s not so much about saying goodbye to my mom (again); it’s about saying goodbye to our own history.

We moved into that place in the summer of 1972.  I had just turned 14.  For the next four decades, it was the “mother ship,” the place we could always return to, the place where we know our hearts dwelled.  Both of my parents died beneath its roof;  one of my children was conceived there.  It was the place where I lay on my back at age 15, dreaming of a future that I believed to be impossible.  It was the place where I proposed to Deedie, and she said Yes.  It was the place whose doors opened to me after I spent months and years traveling the world.

And so we say goodbye not only to a place, but to a connection to the people we have been.

I’ve been wondering about a proper ritual for taking my leave, and have asked a few friends about good ways to make this break.  One friend suggested “smudging”– walking around with a bundle of smoking sage leaves. Another said to touch every wall and say, “Thank you.”  A third proposed a three stage ritual, one for each floor– on the top floor, eat something sweet, and be glad for life’s joy; on the middle floor, eat something bitter and acknowledge life’s pain and loss; on the first floor eat something salty, and acknowledge life’s flavor and continuation.

I even got as far as imagining my “items.”  The sweet would be handmade chocolate; the salty would be a Philadelphia soft pretzel, preferably purchased at a WaWa; the bitter would be some Angostora bitters, possibly shaken into a nice Manhattan.

But I suspect all of this is too histrionic for me.  Instead I bet we will just drink a little Irish whiskey, sing a few songs, shed a few tears, laugh at a few stories.  A ritual only makes sense if you believe in its power;  and the power of Irish whiskey and song is what I suspect I will trust most at this hard juncture.

The thing is, I really do want to leave the house–this last, final time– with a sense of hope, a sense of completion, a sense of a cycle complete.  There’s no point to going all the way down to Pennsylvania just to make myself sad again.  I want to bid all of this bon voyage, with love, and sadness, and hope.

My agent Kris Dahl says that the Devon house has appeared in virtually every single thing I’ve ever written.  It appears in various guises in the stories in Remind Me to Murder You Later; it’s the model for the abandoned high school in The Planets.  It’s the castle in the Falcon Quinn series, and of course it stars as itself in my memoir.

The places we live in make us who we are.  I grew up in this rambling, elegant, slightly eccentric house, a place full of books and creaking stairs, empty rooms that no one knew what to do with; a living room with a warm fireplace.  There’s a windowsill on the landing between the first and second floors where I made out with the girl from London I wrote about in She’s Not There; there’s a walk around the block I’ve taken with my father and mother, with Deedie, and with my own children.

And yet, I’m not the first person to take my leave of this house in the last 100 years. The Hunt family– from whom we bought the house in 1972, and who moved in in 1949–had to pack up their things when their father died. Al Hunt, who of course went on to be a well-regarded journalist, wrote me when I told him the house was sold– “Just hope you all are as fortunate as we’ve been: turn that treasure of a house over to people who care, appreciate and will infuse it with the same joy it has enjoyed for past 62 years. I think about it most every day, wonderful memories: xmas eve parties, dinner table discussions/arguments, swimming parties, painfully small kitchen, monkey in the third floor bathroom, an exuberant feeling when I walked throough tbe door after any absence. I have a picture of that house in our bedroom.”

Yes, that’s right, he said monkey in the bathroom.  And yet Jesus the Monkey (so called because, well, what did people yell when they opened the bathroom door and saw a monkey swinging around the shower rod?  ”Jesus!”) was not the strangest thing ever to dwell beneath that roof.

Here’s what we know:  soon a new family will live there.  The family in question is a lovely young family, with three small children, who– if the fates smile– will spend their lives beneath that warm, crazy roof, blessed by its many lovely rooms, and, above all, by each other.

I was blessed to have this house in my life.  And now it moves on.

There’s a scene in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” after Humphrey Bogart and his fellow prospectors are taking leave of the mountain where they discovered all the gold.  As they walk away for the last time, Bogart looks up at the Sierra Madre one last time, and says,  ”Thanks mountain.”

For this strange, blessed, heartbroken, hilarious, joyful, tragic life,  so much of it lived beneath the generous eaves of my family home, I am grateful.

Thanks mountain.

‘Nobody knows where Slim Gaillard is’

‘… one night we suddenly went mad together again; we went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisco nightclub. Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with big sad eyes who’s always saying ‘Right-orooni’ and ‘How ’bout a little bourbon-arooni.’ In Frisco great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the piano, guitar and bongo drums. When he gets warmed up he takes off his undershirt and really goes. He does and says anything that comes into his head. He’ll sing ‘Cement Mixer, Put-ti Put-ti’ and suddenly slow down the beat and brood over his bongos with fingertips barely tapping the skin as everybody leans forward breathlessly to hear; you think he’ll do this for a minute or so, but he goes right on, for as long as an hour, making an imperceptible little noise with the tips of his fingernails, smaller and smaller all the time till you can’t hear it any more and sounds of traffic come in the open door. Then he slowly gets up and takes the mike and says, very slowly, ‘Great-orooni … fine-ovauti … hello-orooni … bourbon-orooni … all-orooni … how are the boys in the front row making out with their girls-orooni … orooni … vauti … oroonirooni …” He keeps this up for fifteen minutes, his voice getting softer and softer till you can’t hear. His great sad eyes scan the audience.

Dean stands in the back, saying, ‘God! Yes!’ — and clasping his hands in prayer and sweating. ‘Sal, Slim knows time, he knows time.’ Slim sits down at the piano and hits two notes, two C’s, then two more, then one, then two, and suddenly the big burly bass-player wakes up from a reverie and realizes Slim is playing ‘C-Jam Blues’ and he slugs in his big forefinger on the string and the big booming beat begins and everybody starts rocking and Slim looks just as sad as ever, and they blow jazz for half an hour, and then Slim goes mad and grabs the bongos and plays tremendous rapid Cubana beats and yells crazy things in Spanish, in Arabic, in Peruvian dialect, in Egyptian, in every language he knows, and he knows innumerable languages. Finally the set is over; each set takes two hours. Slim Gaillard goes and stands against a post, looking sadly over everybody’s head as people come to talk to him. A bourbon is slipped into his hand. ‘Bourbon-orooni — thank-you-ovauti …’ Nobody knows where Slim Gaillard is. Dean once had a dream that he was having a baby and his belly was all bloated up blue as he lay on the grass of a California hospital. Under a tree, with a group of colored men, sat Slim Gaillard. Dean turned despairing eyes of a mother to him. Slim said, ‘There you go-orooni.’ Now Dean approached him, he approached his God; he thought Slim was God; he shuffled and bowed in front of him and asked him to join us. ‘Right-orooni,’ says Slim; he’ll join anybody but won’t guarantee to be there with you in spirit. Dean got a table, bought drinks, and sat stiffly in front of Slim. Slim dreamed over his head. Every time Slim said, ‘Orooni,’ Dean said ‘Yes!’ I sat there with these two madmen. Nothing happened. To Slim Gaillard the whole world was just one big orooni.’

“Children have an innate capacity for both astounding kindness and intense cruelty”

Jennifer Finney Boylan talks to Myla Goldberg about memoir, narrative, and Goldberg’s  new novel, The False Friend. Goldberg is the author of several books, the best known of which may be the novel, Bee Season.

Jenny Boylan: The False Friend brings us a woman who’s still trying to make sense of her own childhood, and trying to connect the person she’s become with the child she was.  Usually the search for identity is presented as joyful and uplifting in contemporary fiction– but here, as in Bee Season–that quest turns out to be harrowing. Do you think that, for your characters, self-knowledge is a dangerous thing?  Might they be better off with some of their questions unanswered?

Myla Goldberg:  Anything worth having is dangerous, to varying degrees, but I’d like to think that the long-term benefits of self-knowledge outweigh the risk.  Everyone needs to be harrowed at some point in their lives.  In both Bee Season and The False Friend, we are with characters at incredibly stressful and difficult turning points, but it’s possible to imagine happier and more fulfilled futures for them as a direct result of the decisions they end up making. Life loses its meaning when you stop trying to move forward, which in Celia’s case means looking backward for a while.

JB:   Your book is many things– an inquiry into character, an examination of how thechoices made by children continue to shape the lives of the adults they become– but in some ways it’s also a mystery story.  Were there books that guided you as you wrote?

MG: Rather than specific books, there were three specific writers whose work obsessed me during the five years I was writing The False Friend: Graham Greene, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ian McEwan.

Graham Greene’s characters inhabit moral grey zones.  Their desire to do right is hampered by their personal limitations, and an action that genuinely helps one person invariably hurts another.

I covet the way Ishiguro can use a lone, idiosyncratic character to illuminate broad swaths of human nature, getting at the universal nature of regret, love, desire, and ambition all through a single pair of eyes.

Ian McEwan would be the closest I get to a mystery writer, per se.  He’s masterful at pacing a story in a way that makes you feel as if...(click here for the full interview)

Sept. 29, 2011, Boston.

Stop all the Tivos, sit on your hands.
Don’t order a beer to drink there in the stands,
Silence the fans and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let the Blimp circle moaning overhead
Scribbling in the sky the message They are Dead,
Take off the Dropkick Murphys, put on your sweater,
Let the gates of Fenway be shuttered forever.

They were my Spring Training, my All-Star break,
Seventh inning stretch, a juicy steak,
My hot dogs, Cracker Jacks, my beer in a cup;
I thought the season would last forever. But I fucked up..

The Yankees are not wanted now; we need not their pose,
Pack up the Rays. Dismantle the O’s.
Turn off NESN and stack up winter’s wood;
For nothing in baseball is now any good.

Franz Liszt

August 21, 2011

Belgrade Lakes, Me.

Maybe something in me is trying to make up for lost time.  I was not much of a weeper in the first half of my life, but since 2000 the tears just run like little streams.  I remember being reduced to tears at my all boys prep school, in 7th grade– can’t remember what I’d done, but one of the teachers did something that just humiliated me in front of the other boys.  I waited until class was over, then I went into the basement of the school where no one would see me, and I wept.  Later, after it was clear I’d been crying, a second humiliation lay in store, as those wee young men taunted and teased me for those tears.

I don’t recall crying much in the years since then, at least not until I was in my mid-late twenties, and my father died.  Still, it took the death of a parent to move me to tears then.  I think I was out of practice, or still bearing some sort of internalized lesson about the things that men don’t do, and crying was one of them.  Since the second half of my life began in 2000, though, it really doesn’t take much to set me off.  For the most part, the tears I’ve cried have been tears of joy (I’m fortunate to say this, I know), but then, on the other hand, sometimes I get the other kid too.  Like today.

This afternoon I went to a concert near my house here in rural Maine, and heard one Lloyd Arriola perform the works of Franz Liszt.  It’s the bicentennial of this birth, and Arriola is preparing to debut an all-Lizst program at Carnegie Hall this fall.  The concert I heard was ostensibly a dress rehearsal for that one.  He did the Grand Solo de Concert, SW 175; the Fantasie und Fugue uber dem Choral “Ad now, ad salutarem undam,” SW 624/414-4; the Eroica from Twelve Transcendental Etudes, SW 151; “En reve” (my favorite), SW 208; and the Magyar Thapszodiak No. 12 in E minor.

The concert was in every way extraordinary, and if you’re in New York this fall, I heartily recommend the Carnegie Hall gig.  I don’t know much about Liszt, somehow.  These pieces, except for the “En reve”, were like a series of thunderstorms rolling through–so much sound rumbling over me, I felt like my ears and my heart would burst.  Then there were these strangely soft, lyrical moments, like the storm blowing away and a soft rain pattering on the lake– you’d catch your breath and then, wam, the clouds burst again.  Kind of amazing.  I know that I have to listen to this music many more times before I will really understand what I’ve heard.

LLoyd Arriola

(You can hear Lloyd Arriola perform the “Fantasie und Fugue uber den Choral “Ad now, ad salutarem undam,” at his web page here; a player on that page’s far right hand side provides six of his performances, and the “Fantasie” is the last one in the column.)

But then, after the last piece, Arriola returned to the stage and said that for an encore he’d like to do a piece of Gershwin’s he’d transcribed in the style of Liszt.  Well, okay, thought we in the audience, that sounds cool.  And so he returned to the piano bench, and the storms broke again.

Only– through the rumbles broke the soft melody of “Someone to Watch Over Me.”  As the piece went on, it became more and more lyrical, more plaintive, more vulnerable.  And that, my friends, was when the tears began to roll down my cheeks.

Kennebec Highlands, near my home in Maine, in a photo I took out the window of John Gawler's airplane last summer.

I guess I was thinking of my mother, who died last month at the age of 94– both of my parents really.  On the one hand, I was thinking about how I don’t have her to watch over me anymore, not like she used to, when she’d call me on the phone and ask me to help her do the “Jumble.”  On the other hand,  I know there is a place where her soul indeed is watching over me.  I feel that.

After the piece was over, we all applauded.  My friend Barbara Alfond, who was sitting next to me, noted my tears and understood where they came from.  ”When your mother is pregnant with you, she carries you all around,” she said. “And after you lose your mother, it’s like you carry her.”

I cried harder and harder. What’s funny is that there is a way I really like tears. There’s something so good about getting all of that out of your system– it’s such a physical experience; there’s nothing else like it.  I wish that I had had the ease of tears, as I now have, back when I was a boy; it would have made a lot of hard passages easier to bear.

But my problem was that after a while, I couldn’t stop the tears.  People were getting up to leave the concert hall, and I was still stuck in my seat.  I couldn’t talk.  My friend John Gawler, who was in the row behind me, patted me on the back.  ”Are you all right, Jenny?” he asked (John Gawler, of Gawler Family Band fame, has got to be one of the most compassionate, upbeat, loving people I know.)  I nodded, yeah, I’m all right, but I still couldn’t talk.  And at that point, I started feeling embarrassed.  I had crossed the line from publicly feeling some very strong emotions (good) to being kind of out of control (bad).

But what can you do, but let the tears flow?

Later, John and I walked outside.  I asked him about his little airplane, which he and I used to fly in while his wife Ellen gave my son Zach fiddle lessons.  ”Well, we won’t be flying anytime soon,” he said.  ”We had a storm back in June that flipped the plane over and tore off its wings.”

I dried my eyes, told him about my mom.  And also shared that I was feeling more than a little sheepish about all the leaking.  But then I quoted Gandalf to him.  ”Not all tears are an evil.”  He nodded.

I headed out the door, thinking about Liszt, thinking about my parents.  I remembered flying in that plane with John Gawler last summer, looking down on the lakes and the mountains of Maine.  We crossed a field where a woman was tending her garden, and she looked up at us and waved.  How small she seemed, how vulnerable, how full of hope!

The third in my series of summer 2011 op/ed columns for the New York Times appeared on August 18.  This time, I was subbing for either Gail Collins or Paul Krugman.  Or both.  It’s a valedictory piece about ghosts, transness, my open-minded “conservative” parents, and forgiveness.  A kind of amazing thing is that in the 100+ comments on the Times site, only one thought that my being trans was particularly remarkable.  I had long hoped for this: a piece in which transness is part of the exposition, but NOT the whole story.  Nice.

All My Old Haunts

Jennifer Finney Boylan

Belgrade Lakes, Me.

For someone who does not believe in ghosts, I’ve encountered more than my fair share of them over the years in my parents’ house in the Philadelphia suburbs. The first day I set foot in the place, I saw, or imagined I saw, an unseemly blue mist drift through the dark basement.

Just a few months ago, one of my mother’s neighbors, who had come over to check on her, saw it, too; the mist came down the hall, paused to consider him, and then curled into the room where my mother lay dreaming.

He told me about it after she died last month. “It didn’t seem malicious exactly.  More like it was just checking up on her.”

My mother, an evangelical Lutheran and a private, dignified lady, thought that talk of specters was ridiculous. “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” she told me. “There’s the Holy Ghost, of course, but that’s different. We call that the Holy Spirit.”

As a transgender teenager in the 1970s — a boy in body, a girl in spirit — I remember lying in my bedroom, up on the third floor, thinking that I heard footsteps creaking in the attic. I would whisper, “You’re not real. I don’t believe in you.” To which I always imagined the ghosts replying: “That’s all right. We don’t believe in you, either.”

What I’ve learned over the years is that you can be haunted by lots of things; actual ghosts can be the least of them.

I’m haunted, for instance, by memories of my smart and loving parents in that beautiful old house, by the dining room, with its long Winterthur table, where my father held forth from the southern end, an L&M King filter elegantly positioned between his second and third fingers.

My father, Dick Boylan, was a charming combination of medieval history professor and trust banker. While he helped mastermind the merger between Philadelphia’s Provident Bank and Pittsburgh National to create PNC, his true passion was for the Middle Ages, with a secondary interest in debate, or as he liked to call it, “forensics.”

My parents were Republicans of a variety that we will not see again. They adored Gerald Ford (“The Healer,” as my mother, Hildegarde, mistily called him). On plenty of social issues, she was a liberal, not that she’d have used that word. But she only voted for a Democrat once — in 1936, when she supported F.D.R. and jilted Alf Landon.

In those days, before we surrounded ourselves only with those who already agreed with us, my parents delighted in assembling people of divergent opinions over our dining-room table to argue about the Equal Rights Amendment or the Gary Hart campaign. At a certain point, my father would ding his fork against the side of his glass and command everyone present to begin arguing “the reverse of their earlier position.”

He would get me to play our piano with my left and right hands in different keys. “It’s good for you,” he would say, gently.  “It makes you open-minded.”

This kind of thinking seems almost quaint in the current political landscape, where it’s commonplace to call people with whom you disagree “traitors” or “un-American.”

In the wake of the recent debate over the debt ceiling, I imagined my father’s solution. If the goal were to cut $4 billion from the deficit, he’d have suggested that the Republicans be put in charge of coming up with $2 billion of tax increases and the Democrats with finding $2 billion of cuts in services and entitlements. “Only when you try to argue your opponents’ point of view,” he’d have said, “does your own begin to make sense.”

There was plenty of that in my mother’s view of the world, too. When I finally came out to her as transgender, just after I turned 40, my conservative, religious mother put her arms around me, and said, without hesitation, “Love will prevail.”

My father died in that house on Easter Sunday 1986; my mother passed away this summer on the day after the Fourth of July. I went through the old place at dawn after the funeral, turning out lights and preparing to take my leave.

I paused for a moment in the dining-room doorway, filled at that hour with long shadows. There at the head of the table was my father, his L&M King in hand; my mother at the other end looking at us all adoringly; and in between them my sister and me, teenagers still, all the tragedies and wonders of our lives unrevealed. I thought of a line from Thornton Wilder: “Oh earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”

For a moment they flickered like ghosts, that family, the voices echoing in the empty house. And then they were gone.

Jennifer Finney Boylan, a professor of English at Colby College and the author of “I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted,” is a guest columnist.

OP-ED COLUMNIST

This Astronomical Recession

By JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN

Published: August 4, 2011

Belgrade Lakes, ME

If the decrepitude of Neptune caused me to briefly lose my faith in America, it was the ingenious rings of Saturn that restored it for good.

Two weeks ago, on the day of the very last shuttle landing on Earth, I drove along Route 1, taking a good look at the Maine Solar System Model. This would be a scale mock-up of our cosmic neighborhood unveiled in 2003 and devised by Kevin McCartney, a geology professor at the University of Maine at Presque Isle, who built the thing because it “seemed like a good idea” at the time.

Driving the 40 miles from the Sun (at the university’s science museum), to Pluto (in nearby Houlton), also struck me as a good way, as the government likely prepares to cut the nation’s safety nets, to gauge the impact of the recession on Aroostook County, the state’s northernmost county and one of its poorest.

I saw plenty of signs of economic ruin — boarded up businesses, burned-out houses. But there were signs of life as well, like the tough-looking farms surrounded by fields of yellow-white potato blossoms and, on a mountain range between Saturn and Uranus, the swiftly rotating sails of a brand-new wind farm.

“We built it ourselves,” said Professor McCartney, meaning the universe. “Around here we sort of take care of ourselves.”

Hardship is nothing new for “The County” (as everyone in Maine calls it). “This area was never rich in the first place,” explained the professor’s wife, Kate, who runs a bed and breakfast. The county took its hit in the ’90s when Loring Air Force Base closed. “It’s not as if things are so much harder than they were. They’ve never been easy in the first place.”

As I headed away from the three-story-tall cross-section sculpture of the Sun, the inner planets came swiftly. Each mile represents one astronomical unit, the distance between the Earth and the Sun; I passed the silver model of Mercury in 0.4 miles, followed by a red and white Venus outside the Budget Traveler Inn. There, Stephanie McIntosh, a desk clerk, said occupancy was down except during snowmobiling season and the Maine Potato Blossom Festival. The best part of the festival, she said, is the mashed potato wrestling contest.

A cloudless planet Earth, about the size of a navel orange, sat on the top of a pole outside of Percy’s Auto Sales. Brian Rackliffe, a salesman there, told me sales have improved since the dark days of 2008. “But they have a long, long way to go before we’re back to normal.”

I found Mars by the “Welcome to Presque Isle” sign on the way out of town. From there, it was a long way to Jupiter. I passed fields of potatoes, hay and broccoli, and in a ditch near a lot filled with construction equipment, a model of Ceres that represented the asteroid belt.

Jupiter was by a sign marked “Moose Crossing.” Five miles beyond was Saturn, which had its own parking lot. It was hard not to be impressed by the planet, with its beautiful rings, built by students at local schools. “Saturn weighs over a ton,” Professor McCartney told me.

Next was Uranus, at the Bridgewater rec center, where a sign read, “Congratulations Chloe Wheeler. 2011 Pre-Teen Miss Potato Blossom.” Then there was Neptune, a blue basketball-size sphere another 12 miles down the highway, in front of a large garden of what looked like squash or pumpkin vines. Potatoes are still Aroostook County’s No. 1 agricultural crop, but the industry has been in decline for years, the result of shifting consumer tastes and competition from other states, particularly cursed Idaho. As I looked up at Neptune, it was clear that the planet had been through a few rough years itself. Paint was flaking around its equator.

I’d been wondering how the people of Aroostook County would handle Pluto, since it had been downgraded from planet to dwarf planet in 2006. Professor McCartney admitted that the demotion had hit him hard. With a Mainer’s mix of cussedness and generosity, he reacted to Pluto’s degradation by putting up a second Pluto. He also added a model for Eris, another dwarf planet.

At the second Pluto, I met a woman who said she’d spent her whole life in Aroostook County. “My son’s the son of a potato farmer,” she said, “but he had to leave. Now he’s a sea captain. It’s always a problem, keeping the young people from going away.”

Earlier in the day, I had driven up to Limestone, Me., on the Canadian border, to the old Air Force base. Once it was a weapons storage area and home to the 42nd Bomb Wing. Now the whole area is called the “Loring Commerce Centre,” a name that I tried hard not to find ironic. As a storm came on, I drove past ruined, rusted hangars, fields of decommissioned military vehicles and a rotting structure with four towers resembling desolated, ruined minarets. After a couple of wrong turns, I accidentally wound up on the vast, wind-swept runway, as rain blew horizontally past my car and lightning struck the ground.

The skies cleared on my way to Eris. Driving, I saw the St. Croix River off to the east, and the green forests of Canada beyond, and a black Labrador retriever with a snake in its mouth.

When I finally found the dwarf planet, it was across the street from a shuttered general store and next to a veterans’ memorial with a flagpole and no flag. But there was a new store a few doors down, selling fishing lures and cheeseburgers. Loggers were pulling their trucks into the parking lot, their rigs full of newly hewn timber.

I cast a glance north, toward the distant model of the Sun, and remembered something Kate McCartney had told me. “People always think the end of the universe is coming,” she said, referring not only to deadly asteroids but to the American economy as well. “But we’re more resilient than that. You drive the Maine Solar System Model, the speed of light is seven miles per hour.” She smiled. “At that speed, you have to believe everything is going to be all right.”

Jennifer Finney Boylan, a professor of English at Colby College and the author, most recently, of “Falcon Quinn and the Crimson Vapor,” is a guest columnist.