Day One: Memorial Day, 2010

My grandfather I am told, my Pepere Pineau, always wanted to live on a farm. I thought how fitting then it would be to start my new undertaking — this blog, on Memorial Day. Let me be clear, my grandfather did not die in any battle. He died of a stroke, from what I understand, in the outhouse of our family camp at the tip of Moosehead Lake in Maine. Not a glorified way to die, but a fitting way for him. No, not so much the dying in the outhouse, (a fact which I think about every time I am sitting on the cold wooden seat) more the fact that he died up country at the camp he built with his sons — a place he spent many a year fishing, hunting, playing cribbage, and drinking coffee.

That is not to say that Pepere could not have died in battle. According to my aunt, my grandfather fought in the Battle of Anzio in WWII. A  battle almost as bloody at the battle on the beaches of Normandy. Pepere’s picture can be found on a plaque in downtown Portland, Maine on the Heroes Wall along with three of his sons who are all Vietnam Vets and who (thankfully) are all still alive. The war, however, still lives with them both emotionally and physically — epitomized through my Uncle Ray, who a few years before his own stroke found a chunk of shrapnel in his leg. He joked that he would never be able to go through a metal detector again. These stories, however, and are not the real reason that I decided to write this blog.

This past October I, along with my husband, moved to a small farm in Central Maine. In November I gave birth to my first child and have now begun to awaken from the fog of new parenthood. With my new awakening I decided to chronicle one full year on our farm. The farm life is nothing new to my husband, he grew up on a farm…actually, he grew up on this farm — it has been in his family since, I believe, the early 1920’s. I, in contrast, am not a farm girl, have never been a farm girl, and now find it astonishing that I plan to spend the rest of my days on this farm. 

Stick with me, though, it should be quite a trip.