Notes from Maine - 2026/05/17

Albert (dog) lost one of his frisbees this week. He has two black rubber frisbees that he enjoys chasing. I put away all the hard plastic ones when the new fence was installed last year. The occasional throw gets away from me and I’m not going to find out if a plastic frisbee will damage the new fence. I also don’t intend to find out if a horse can damage the new fence. 

Albert and I have been installing an electrified rope along the inside to keep the horses away. That’s what we were doing when he lost his frisbee. One minute it was in his mouth—he’s careful with his things. The next minute he was looking up at me expectantly.

“Where’s your frisbee?”

He never answers, although he often runs off to find the object of inquisition. This time, he didn’t move. Lilly (little filly) was there. Albert kept looking to her as if she might have taken his frisbee. There’s a tiny chance that Lilly was able to eat the frisbee so quickly that I didn’t see her chewing on it. As remote as that possibility is, it’s the only answer I can come up with. Everyone was there one second, frisbee included. The next second, Albert had an empty mouth and the frisbee was nowhere to be found.

For days, we’ve been looking for it. 

I have a hard time walking away from a lost object quest. My mother is the same way. She’ll tear apart the house if she misplaces something. For me, it’s usually a tool that I’m looking for. I bought a whole set of Allen wrenches years ago and dropped one climbing the steps from the cellar. It took me a couple of hours of searching, sweeping, and cleaning before I finally found that thing. I can only use one hammer at a time, but I’ll sometimes search and search if I don’t have all four hung up in the correct places. It would save a lot of time if I just gave away my extra hammers. Then I’d only have to keep track of one. But sometimes, on bigger projects, you need “guest hammers.” 

I inherited one of my father’s toolboxes after he passed away. One drawer was just for tire pressure gauges. I have about a dozen. I’m afraid to count them. If I know how many I’m supposed to have, I’ll have to track them. My brother keeps at least four tire pressure gauges in his garage. He has one near each car, one near the door, and one near his tool bench. Both of his cars can tell you the pressure in each tire on the dashboard, but that’s not good enough. I believe that his air compressor will also tell him the current pressure of the thing it’s inflating, but who would trust that? I offered my brother the collection I inherited, but he wasn’t interested. I don’t think that my father’s gauges reach the level of excellence that my brother demands. 

I would offer them to my sister, but last I checked she was driving around with two in her car already. In fact, she gave me one a few years ago that I still have. I’m beginning to recognize that my family might have a very specific obsession with tire pressure. I still have a gauge in the barn even though the barn cart has airless tires now. I got sick of the blackberry thorns out back puncturing the tires. By never counting how many gauges I have, I’ve avoided the need to keep track of them. I should do that with other things, I guess. I don’t know how many socks I have, so all I care about is that they’re in pairs. 

That reminds me—it’s about time to replace my socks. I’m not encountering a lot of holes yet, but I do have a couple of stretched cuffs. That word doesn’t sound right (cuff). I think of the cuff as the bottom of an object, like the bottom of a sleeve or a leg. But, looking it up I guess that cuff is a proper term for the top of a sock. The other word I found is “welt,” which I’ve exclusively known (until now) as a term for an injury. Aside from a few stretched welts, the reason I’m thinking about new socks is that my socks are uniformly dingy. I was considering “stripping” them—soaking them in the tub with some borax and washing soda. I’ve never tried that before. It seems like a fun thing to do. The water here is pretty hard, and I’ve been told (by the washing machine) that I sometimes use excess detergent. 

Glancing back over the things I’m concerned with in this essay, it occurs to me that nothing of real interest is happening right now. For May, that’s a good portent. I’m not rushing into summer projects, frantically trying to line things up so I can get them done before the cold weather. These past few years have had too many big projects and I’m ready for a slower schedule for once. Maybe I can spend the rest of May worried about nothing more than counting tire pressure gauges and trying to make my socks whiter. Oh, and of course we have to track down Albert’s missing frisbee. That’s probably at the top of the priority list.