Sh*t To Help You Show Up June 10, 2022
Listen generously
When I was a little girl, still in single digits, we went to Maine every summer. An elderly couple who were members of our Quaker meeting, Dorothy and Eggbert Walker, owned a three-room cabin in northern coastal Maine, called Sea Cairn. Eggbert had polio as a child and was palsied on one side, so he couldn’t drive; Dorothy was the family driver. But the long trek from D.C. to the northern coast of Maine was getting to be too much for her to do alone, so my parents struck a deal with them. They would go with us to Sea Cairn, acting as surrogate grandparents, and we would get to use the cabin for free.
There is not a single part of my childhood that was more filled with joy than those trips to Maine. I spent most days completely alone— wandering in the woods, noodling around in the tidepools, digging in the small spit of sand. I would take a small bucket down with me to the water’s edge and collect mussels, which I would then deliver to my mother to make fresh mussel chowder for lunch. The satisfaction over being a provider for my family was bigger than any grade I got in school, any trophy I ever won.