Notes from Maine - 2025/12/14
Last night was our annual Yankee Swap. I’ve talked about this party before—we call it a Yankee Swap although technically it’s more of a White Elephant. Each participant can pick a present to unwrap from under the tree or they can steal an item that someone else has already unwrapped. Gifts can only change hands once per “round,” and a round ends when a gift is newly unwrapped.
I brought a small microwave popcorn popper and a big supply of popcorn kernels. I walked away with a tin of shortbread cookies and a variety box of tea. I haven’t bothered to taste the cookies yet. Don’t get me wrong—I’ve eaten a ton of them. I just stuff them in my face so fast that I haven’t bothered to taste them. The tea will be a nice hot beverage for the evening. I like drinking something warm before bed, but coffee is dangerous. Sometimes I fall right asleep after a cup of hot coffee and other times it keeps me up. I don’t know how to predict which eventuality will come to pass.
The party was small this year. I was hoping for some of the friends who I only see once or twice a year so I could try out some of my new small talk ideas.
“Do you know that musical instrument that sounds like a spring? You put the metal part on your teeth and…”
“A mouth harp?”
“Yeah? Is that what it’s called?”
“I think so.”
“Have you ever managed to play one without banging that metal spring thing fully into your teeth? I never have.”
That was going to be my opening salvo. I’m hoping to eventually meet someone who has successfully played one of those things. My guess is that it operates in place of the bass when a small group gets together to play music. A different substitute would be a jug, right?
Another opener might be, “If a bluegrass band plays a waltz, does the mandolin player chunk out staccato chords on the two AND three?” This would be if I was talking to someone musically inclined, of course.
I’m becoming more and more interested in the division of labor in bluegrass quartets. Let’s say it’s bass, fiddle, violin, and mandolin. The bass player and mandolin are the rhythm section until they get to a mandolin solo. Then, suddenly, nobody is covering the second and fourth beat unless the guitar player steps up. With a quintet (the minimum required to get that “high lonesome” sound, I’ve heard), there’s often a banjo to fill the gap. When I was growing up, my father listened to a lot of bluegrass. On Sundays, the radio had “Stained Glass Bluegrass.” I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. It was just background. My father grew up all over, but mostly in New England, so his bluegrass affinity was slightly mystifying. He even took violin lessons in his 40s, although his “tin ear” held him back. My curiosity about how bluegrass quintets and quartets work is strictly intellectual. Billy Strings was on Tiny Desk Concert last week. Dad would have loved that—at least the old-timey stuff. They also strayed into Bela Fleck-style bluegrass/jazz fusion and Dad was not a fan of that.
These are the kinds of topics I would prefer to discuss at a party. It’s not that I don’t care about how your family is doing, or what colleges your teen is considering, but those are subjects that are so well covered that they don’t hold any interest for the speaker or the listener. Once in a while it’s nice to discuss whether or not you think it would be a good idea to put trousers on trees. That way we wouldn’t need mailboxes—the mail carrier could simply fill the pants pockets with the incoming mail. I suppose since they mostly have a single trunk, the trousers would look more like skirts. That’s fine too. There’s no reason skirts can’t have pockets.
Absurd, but fun—that’s my intention. In a lot of conversations you’re working through the mundane to get to something interesting. I think you get there a lot quicker if you start at absurd. I just glanced back at my essay from last year’s party. I was concerned with the number of sick people in attendance and whether or not I would be infected. The next essay I talked about how sick I was. Turns out that I did pick up germs somewhere and the illness lasted right through Christmas. I’m hoping to not repeat that this year.
It’s snowing again right now. We’ve already had too much winter weather for December and it’s not even half over. When I put the horses out this morning I left the barn door wide open so they can run back in. It’s one of those days where I can already tell that they’re going to be clamoring to be inside. At least that will keep them away from the trees. They have easy access to the young maples next to the barn right now. One tree looks like it has been gnawed on by a family of ravenous beavers. This is yet another reason why we need clothing for trees. Maybe a nice denim tree kilt would keep the horses from destroying their future shade. The sweet filly (little Lilly) spends less and less time hanging out with her parents. She wanders off to try to find trouble. I’ll open the laundry room door for Albert to go out and she’ll be standing there waiting to see if any carrots appear. I keep one on the counter next to the door in case she’s there. You might be tempted to think that I trained her to come to that door because I always have a carrot ready. The opposite is true. She trained me to keep carrots there because she kept surprising me. Albert is not a fan of this game. He just wants to go outside and it’s difficult to do that when Lilly is blocking the stairs.
