Notes from Maine - 2025/11/30

It’s spitting snow outside—at least it was when I was doing morning chores. The horses are out, but they have a stall open to huddle in if they get too chilled outside. These horses are well-fed and already shaggy. If precedent holds, they’ll coast through the winter with no real issues. With these giant, thick-bodied horses the barn stays above freezing inside for the most part. It’s a rare morning when I have to take the buckets outside to bang the ice from them.

Most other people around here will blanket their horses. I suppose many of them are just trying to keep the horse’s hair short and sleek? Spring shedding is a big event with my herd. Perhaps other people are hedging against that. 

I wish I had winter fur sometimes. Is that why we wear clothes? I’ve been chilly on and off this whole fall. The only time I’m not cold is when I’m outside doing chores. Moving around is the key, I guess. Maybe I should focus on putting more motion in my day. I could write for forty minutes and then get up and move. There’s always dusting, folding, sorting, or moving that should be done. I save that kind of stuff until it becomes a necessity. Sprinkling those chores throughout the day might solve my problem. 

Last Wednesday I didn’t have to worry about the cold. I decided to clean my top oven for the first time. Spills have been wiped up, and the glass has been cleaned, don’t get me wrong, but this was the first time I’ve used the Self Cleaning feature of this oven. The manual warned that the first time would be particularly smelly. It definitely was. I can only hope that the next time won’t be so bad. The top oven looks great though. We had frozen pizza and a movie last night, and I refused to cook it in the top oven. It’s too pretty for dirty-old, directly-on-the-rack frozen pizza. I’m going to save that top oven until I have something worthy of sullying its gleaming perfection. 

During the cleaning, the kitchen and living room were hot. If not for the burning smell, it would have been quite pleasant. The manual says, “The health of some birds is extremely sensitive to the fumes given off during the self-cleaning cycle of any range. Move birds to another well-ventilated room.” I thought about that as I cracked a window open and turned on the range hood. So, like, don’t keep your canary in the room while you’re cleaning your oven? Like a canary in a coal mine? Isn’t that a strong indicator that people shouldn’t be in the room also? I survived. For now.

Thursday night some friends came over and we sat in the kitchen and painted. I’m still trying to figure out which end of a paintbrush to use. It’s instructive to watch confident people use a brush. I get to a point where I’m sure that my next stroke will ruin everything I’ve done so far. It’s like building a house of cards. Failure becomes inevitable as I add paint. But I suppose practice is the way forward. I have a bunch of paper. 

Dad used to come down for Thanksgiving and football. As the games wore on, the commercials became more insistent that we “Gear up for Black Friday savings!” Back then, people would camp out and stores would open at midnight. I loved to talk strategy: “We’ll start in Brunswick. There will be fewer people there. Walmart for the big ticket items and then we’ll cross the river and hit up Target and Best Buy. Only then will we hit the highway down to Freeport.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” my father would demand. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m perfectly comfortable right here.”

“Fine, we’ll start with Target and then go straight to Portland. I’m not missing those doorbusters, though.”

By the time the last game was on, and we were both falling asleep in our chairs, I was forgetting to make the jokes and Dad was forgetting to be offended by the suggestion that we would go shopping. Before he went to bed, my father would leave his gin & tonic glass on the end table but he would cover it with a napkin. He was convinced that mice would come in the night, drawn in by juniper aromas to play in the bottom of his glass. At his house, he used to keep his remote controls in a metal box or else the mice would gnaw on the rubber buttons. Personally, I would have just moved my glass to the dishwasher, but I think that offended his stinginess. He wanted to use the same, unwashed glass on Friday. In his mind, the mice were just camped out, waiting at their little mouse doors for the chance to rush in for Black Friday gin & tonic leftovers. The joke would have been on them—there was never a drop of anything left in that glass before Dad went to bed.