Mooselook
Mooselookmeguntic, Maine
It’s just past lunch. I’m sitting on the wraparound porch of a cabin in the Maine woods where we always meet up with members of the Berger family this time of year. Twenty years ago, Dave’s brother Jon and his spouse Marilyn bought property on the shore of Lake Mooselookmeguntic and built a cabin spacious enough to fit us all under one roof for a week. Lots of laughter and love fill this place. Whether we hike, canoe, kayak, sail, or just sit and watch the lake from the dock, our time together here is special.
Before lunch yesterday, Dave and I took one of our usual walks to the causeway. Stepping aside for the occasional vehicle, we walked in the middle of Bemis and Upper Dam, one-lane dirt roads outlining the lakeshore. A couple days ago, we canoed to Indian Cove (one of our usual stops) and sat on the pebbled beach to watch the waves lap at the shoreline. We bring our books to the dock and read for a while, soaking up the sun.
Even in a place so beautifully serene as this, I have often struggled to relinquish myself into its quietude. Unable to loosen my grip on work or some lingering post-traumatic crankiness, I have been disappointed in myself when my angular, glaring sharp edginess has seeped out at exactly the wrong place or time here. That Dave’s kin have both tolerated my awkward ugliness and also loved me nevertheless attests to their tender graciousness.
I resist seeking out trees to hear their singing. I’m afraid to connect; for it all may end, and I’ll be out of this family too. Losing another beautiful place, to never hear their sounds again, hurts my heart and soul.
During some previous “Mooselook Weeks,” I have spent a great deal of time doing work instead of enjoying the beauty. One such week I spent poring over my German language studies, preparing for a doctoral qualifying exam. Another year, Dave and I carved out time during our week here to study for our graduate placement exams at West Virginia University. I spent one week ill-temperedly pounding away at revisions to one of my first published articles instead of floating on the lake. Then there was the first summer after my cancer treatment, when I felt driven to take on all hikes and strenuous activities to prove that my thin frame and fuzz-covered head bore no reflection of my ability to participate in life.
Even during vacation my hyper-vigilance for battling perceived enemies (physical and otherwise) can trap my fearful soul in perpetual mental combat. This year, I feel that habit loosening its grip. On a gray, rainy day that would ordinarily entice me toward restless crabbiness, I sense nothing to shadowbox.
Lee may have been right, with his two thumbs up in the courtroom. Since then, the burbling tumult of my familiar emotional underpinning has begun to ebb out of the age-old knot in my solar plexus. My back and limbs ached for several days after we left the courthouse, as though I’d run a marathon. The physical sensation of pain actually reassured me at the time, because I felt emotionally numb for over a week. Gradually then, a smile began to blossom throughout my entire being. My eyes would meet Dave’s and we would giggle together in relief. Soon after, it was time to go to Maine. I packed my bags for our annual trip with capricious disregard for the usual moody “what if’s” that poke at borrowed trouble about flights and rental cars.
On one of the sunnier days here at the lake, I lounged at length on a big turtle-shaped raft in the lake and indulged in some speculation about Tressie and Finch I smiled contentedly at my possession of a binder full of all the case evidence and discovery documents. This is my insurance policy against any further harm from either of them. They never had any credible evidence against me or Lee, only a bunch of (expensive) attorneys who scowled and threatened. Bullies hiring bullies, six of them to our one very skilled counsel. Mike’s decades of trial experience, combined with his own political expertise, leveraged powerfully the evidence as a catalyst for igniting public scandal had the trial proceeded.
Of course, the evidence had been available to public viewing all along to anyone who ventured into the records room at the courthouse. This is customary in probate matters. And until the records were sealed according to the settlement, any number of people interested in the case – reporter, political ally or foe, voting taxpayer, curious gossips – could browse the case pleadings and evidence. The records room has a copy machine available for public use, too; I know for certain of two copies were made of the entire file.
My phone vibrates along the porch boards, and I pick it up and read a text from Pam. Her greeting – “ County Fair!” – elicits a smile as I remember 4-H runways, smells of fried everything mixed with animal barn everything, and a bright boardwalk lined with rigged game booths. But Pam isn’t being nostalgic, as she continues with “Your oldest sis was conspicuously absent at all the political stuff.” Come summertime, fairs attract swarms of politicians eager to connect with their constituency. My sister, according to Pam, has been no exception to this ritual, but this year she was nowhere to be seen. Not even a re-election sign for her campaign appeared at the fair booth.
Who knows how many pages flew through the copy machine in the courthouse record room and into the hands of those eager to use the details of the lawsuit against my two sisters. For a moment, I indulge in imagining an opponent mudslinging her during a campaign oratory. Waving copies of the damaging letters from the evidence, they would shout, “If she undercut her own mother, then how can you trust her with your tax dollars?!” My sister already has plenty of enemies in my hometown; whether they use the lawsuit evidence to oust her from office (and whether it would be effective) remains to be seen. I’m not their leader, anyway. Yet I venture a guess that ripples from the lawsuit have eaten away at her haughty sense of entitlement. “Good luck; not my problem” I text back to Pam. She signs off with a winking smiley-face emoticon.
And what of my other sister, I muse while I sip my afternoon mug of coffee on the cabin’s porch. Whoever she was during our childhood seems forever lost to the angry brutal being now influencing her countenance. Her repeated betrayals will forever mark where I stumbled and fell at my most vulnerable moments. What she did to my mother at the end of her life suggests a core being so heartless and toxic that I shudder. For her to turn away from this path of wickedness, a mighty power of Divine healing must intervene. Had it not been for Kathi and Marilyn, I would have gone through life accepting the corrosive criticism of my two sisters heaped on my soul as “what siblings do.”
I peek through the cabin window and see Kathi and Marilyn deep in conversation. Ever grateful to the two women smiling back at me through the screen, our hearts connect as true sisters. They call out to their spouses, who are sauntering up from the dock. Dave joins them as they head to the kitchen to prepare supper, and soon I hear their brotherly camaraderie in the sound of laughter, knives chopping, shot glasses clinking. How I wish my brother Lee could experience this kind of sibling affection!
The long beams of sunlight on the porch remind me of my big brother’s shining integrity throughout the lawsuit. He could have gained far more money by accepting the bogus will that cut me out. It wasn’t about the money for him, either. In his strategy all along was the promise to split with me his financial gain from whatever outcome. His brotherly affection toward me throughout my family exile, and in setting things right through our partnership in this lawsuit won my heart. How I missed him for so many years, and how I grieved to learn the details of his own persecution by Tressie and Finch. I hope Lee and I can rebuild our relationship now that we have freed ourselves from them.
And Margaret. And Frances. And the Cincinnati cousins. One by one, they returned as loving kin. Out of the ashes I again pick myself up, reaching out to Dave, reaching out to music. Its glorious sounds grow stronger with each step away from the past
