No Crash

In just a couple of days, it will be one year since we were in that minor traffic accident, which turned into a major headache. Yesterday, we were out running errands and went for an early dinner at Ixtapa. Then we drove right past the spot where our reliable Subaru was hit. It was sort of like deja vu, only in reverse, and thankfully, without the crash!

We’ve driven past the fateful spot many times in the intervening months. But yesterday, I couldn’t help but hold my breath just a little bit, as we were driving along the same stretch of road where that young gal ran into us. Looking back, I’m still grateful for all the good things that flowed out of that instant of metal crunching metal. But I could feel equally grateful if that afternoon one year ago, had been just as uneventful as yesterday!

84 Days & A Question

I hesitate to type this, but I believe I wrote the very last check for the car accident today. Our Subaru was hit on November 30, 2006. It took us 40 days to get the car repaired and us back behind its wheel. Add to that, the additional paperwork that needed to be sorted out, final reimbursements from two insurance companies and the whole thing took 84 days! I remain grateful no one was hurt, and that our car is back on the road getting us safely from place to place. I do wonder if I had known on November 30th what I know now, if I would have been as mellow and easy going with the driver who hit us that day! I want to think so, but I’m afraid I would have felt a lot more frosted as she was able to drive away while we were left waiting for the tow truck! So does being clueless lead to increased kindness? Hmmmm...

40 Days

Anyone out there old enough to remember the butterfly poster from the sixties?

If you love something
set it free.
If it comes back to you
it’s yours.
If it doesn’t
it never was...

It’s ours! Our Subaru is back! And we are irrationally excited about it! After forty long days we are relieved that the car is repaired and roadworthy once again. We still have paperwork, phone calls, faxes and money to iron out, but all that is for the coming days. For now, it is all happy dances in the driveway!

Hope

Dear Lovely, Loyal Readers,

Thanks for continuing to stop by through my silence. I remain under the weather. It appears at this point to be turning into just a cold. No fever since last night (fingers crossed!), but I still feel tired and sound truly dreadful. Fortunately this is not an Audio-Blog!

I had hoped to be able to report that we have the Subaru back, but no such luck. We did see it last week and it looks beautiful! But at the last minute there were some snafus which need to be resolved. Perhaps tomorrow?

These three photos were taken up at Seal Harbor, on Mount Desert Island in Maine. Seal Harbor is just outside Acadia and is a lovely spot to walk, picnic, sketch, write or just soak it all in. I believe all of these were taken by Chuck, most likely while I was poking around looking for sea glass and other tiny treasures. They make me think of the Emily Dickinson poem that starts:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—

Wishing you hope, and all good things coming to fruition.

Under The Weather

It was a gray, dismal day. Oh, and the weather was that way too. We thought we were getting the car back yesterday. Then we thought we were getting it back today. Long, frustrating story cut short, we are now hoping for Monday.

Also, last night I started to feel under the weather. Now I am officially sick. I know this because I am verging on something between whining and pitiful. Plus, I also have a fever.

An attitude of gratitude. An attitude of gratitude. An attitude of...

O.K.

- Nobody was hurt in our car accident, five plus weeks ago.
- My husband is wonderful. As evidenced by the fact that I am not sleeping in our barn, even if I whine and sound pitiful.
- We both got our flu shots in November.

I wish you could see the germ coming at you - like the POWs, BAMs, ZAPs in a superhero comic book. Then you’d know when to bob and weave, when to douse yourself in alcohol gel.

I’ll shut up now and buck up.

Be well. :-)

How Did I Get Here?

It was around the first of November of 2006. I was looking to replace the bumper sticker on our Subaru. After five years of New England weather it was getting tattered. We had originally purchased it at a shop called Eden Rising on Cottage Street in Bar Harbor, Maine. When we were up there in October we had looked in vain. So I decided to try searching on line. I Googled the phrase: “Love Is Our Soul Purpose” plus bumper sticker. I didn’t get much, but one was at an address called PoetMama at blogspot June 2006. I clicked the link and found myself in what I later learned was a Blog. Up until that moment I thought blogs were all just political rants from both sides of the aisle. But here was a young mom who wrote poetry and had made note of a bumper sticker she had seen and liked. I felt as if I had fallen down the rabbit hole! I read a little on her page, then clicked on some links to other blogs and kept finding all kinds of interesting people. I continued following this trail of breadcrumbs and found lots of women, and a few men, from all over the world, who, like me, were interested in art, poetry, writing, family, photography, food, books... These were blogs? Hmmm. I set up a new bookmark folder and started adding bookmarks in order to retrace my steps later. Over the next couple of weeks I read lots of blogs, learned lots of new things and became increasingly excited at the idea of creating my own blog.

In my poetry notebook I started jotting down ideas and questions. I kept finding answers and adding ideas. Then I needed to come up with a name for my future blog. I created a long list of possibilities. Most of them were lines from my poems. But one related to a proud moment from a few years ago when I had triumphed during a terrible summer thunderstorm and subsequent power outage. Thankfully Chuck Googled the particular phrase I had in mind. What he learned left us both shocked, laughing and me disappointed. The only way I can put this delicately is to say the phrase was centuries old slang for something sexual. It had also been revived in contemporary urban slang, with the same meaning. YIKES! Back to the notebook! The next phrase was from one my poems: “50 Yellow Daffodils”. This time I Googled it and was reminded that yellow daffodils are closely associated with fund raising to fight cancer. An absolutely worthwhile cause, but not at all what I planned to focus on in my blog. Back again to the notebook. Finally I settled on the phrase “Pink Granite”. Believe you me I Googled and Wiki’d the daylights out of it. This time nothing but geology and kitchen countertop entries! Hooray!

So on the day after Thanksgiving I registered with Google, then Blogger and I became the proud owner of my very own blog! I finally managed to post my first entry just before 3:00 a.m. Saturday morning! Just over a month and 36 posts later I am delighted with this journey. I wanted my blog to be an outlet for my writing, as well as a way to stay in touch with family and friends. It has done all that and so much more! By the way, I still haven’t found that replacement bumper sticker and we are still waiting to get our Subaru back from the auto body shop! All things in time. Thanks PoetMama and thanks to all of you reading this, my 37th post!

The Beat Goes On and On...

We are weary. When Chuck brought up today’s mail from the box, we found several items concerning the accident. It happened three weeks ago today, and we still don’t have the Subaru back. What followed were lots of phone calls and faxes - our insurance company, the other driver’s insurance company, the dealership, the auto body shop - and then some more back-ing and forth-ing in various combinations. Bless their hearts, our winning streak continues, in that everyone was easy and pleasant to deal with! When all was said and faxed, we learned that our car makes the trip to the body shop first thing tomorrow to begin getting all smooth and shiny once again. Sitting on the curb in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot on November 30th, we never guessed it would take this long. I do know that in the big scheme of things this is small potatoes. Really I do. Patience. Patience is a virtue. Apparently patience is the lesson to be learned this month. Luckily I still have ten days left to get some!

Maybe the music of my favorite animated cartoon from childhood: The Vince Guaraldi Trio’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas” will lift my spirits. That’s the ticket! W.W.C.B.D.? What Would Charlie Brown Do? :-)

The Beat Goes On

We are continuing to deal with the paperwork, phone calls and financial facts of our November 30th crash. The best news remains that no one was hurt. The next best is that it looks as if everything that was supposed to collapse or crumple on impact did just that. We returned the Subaru Forester after the overnight rental from the dealership. We test drove one five years ago before we bought the Outback. The Forester’s ride and creature comforts have definitely improved in the intervening years. We now have a longer term, agency rental under us: a Chevy Malibu. As you can see from the photo, it’s very nice, but we still miss our Subaru. Thanks to everyone for your concern and good wishes. Remember, “Buckle Up For Safety”!
It’s pretty nippy around here again today. In the 20s outside and I won’t tell you how low we keep the heat set indoors. Let’s just say that we have reached the point in the season where layers are de rigueur! So in order to get a bit of a jump start this morning the iPod has Sugarland’s “Twice The Speed of Life” coursing through it’s digital self. I tend to enjoy country music seasonally - usually in summer. However, Sugarland’s freshman album is terrific anytime. I haven’t bought their new CD yet, but I am hoping that by going from a trio down to a duo, they haven’t lost anything vital from their sound or their lyrics. Fingers crossed.

Calgon, Take Me Away

Friday was a long day. Lots of phone calls to insurance companies, rent-a-car agencies, auto repair... Throughout the day, sitting crosslegged on the bed, with papers and policies and Post It Notes stuck everywhere, moving the phone from ear to ear, while voice mail music played, I let myself think of this place. This photo was taken at the end of a very different kind of long day, one autumn in Acadia. Across the meadow is Jordan Pond, and The Bubbles. Chuck is sitting in one of the Adirondack chairs just outside Jordan Pond House. I can smell the wood smoke from their chimneys, feel the nip in the fall air. I wanted to magically teleport myself into the empty chair next to Chuck. I also wanted our sturdy, reliable Subaru to be waiting safely in the parking lot- with our License Plate list resting on the dashboard!
Happily, every single person I spoke with on the phone today was very nice! But I must admit, today I felt a little peeved with the gal who drove into our car, and was able to then drive away. I do remember having to call my parents (on more than one occasion!) after an accident when I was about her age. The worst was after Mom and Dad had the '68 baby blue Chevelle completely redone - bodywork plus new paint job - and I had to make one of those heart in my throat phone calls: "Hi Mom! Is Dad around? No everything's fine. I just want to talk to Dad!" Gulp! I can still see my Dad standing in a sea of flashing red and blue lights, in the middle of a group of exceptionally tall state troopers and local police officers from two different towns. Dad looked around, assessed the situation and quietly took charge by suggesting we all get out of the middle of four lanes of traffic. It's a miracle I'm still alive. No - not from the accident - that my parents let me live another day! But they did and hopefully the college student's parents from yesterday's adventure will let her live another day as well!
I’m weary, still grateful and after remembering back all those years, a little less peeved.

Crash! & The Kindness of Strangers

First things first - No One Was Hurt!
It had been a good day; lots of errands and “to dos” crossed off a long list. It had been unseasonably warm. Chuck and I were together (always good) and we had decided to get an early dinner at a great Mexican restaurant before heading home. Chuck was driving slowly in the right hand lane, about a block from where we were going to take a right at the light. Suddenly, a car crashed into the driver’s side door and front quarter of our car. A young college student’s car was perpendicular to us. I got out and was surprised to see how much damage we had sustained. Because while it felt like a big scary crash, there had also been a feeling of solidity in the way our Subaru wagon took the impact. We were able to limp the car a couple of car lengths into the Dunkin' Donuts parking lot, which turned out to be where the other driver had been heading when she hit us. None of us was injured. We had all been wearing our seatbelts. Her car would be drivable. Because of the wheel damage we sustained, ours would not be.

That was the crash. Now, onto the kindness of strangers.
- The young gal driving the other car was sweet and apologetic as we all made sure that everyone was alright and exchanged our information.
- The police dispatchers we called were swift and efficient.
- The two Fitchburg police officers who responded were polite, compassionate and reassuring.
- AAA was easy to deal with and got the ball rolling on a tow for our car. Later they called us back to give us an ETA on the flatbed.
- Our car dealership was close by, still open and could rent us a car to get home.
- The woman at our auto insurance company was kind, patient, asked all the right questions, walked us through exactly what we needed to do and in what order.
- The other driver offered to buy us coffee, before she got back on the road and headed off to class.
- While waiting in the Dunkin' Donuts parking lot for our tow truck, one of the employees came out on her dinner break to ask if we needed a ride or anything else.
- Our tow truck driver, John, had a sunny disposition, arrived right on time and got our car safely loaded in just a few minutes. Then we climbed into the cab with him and he drove us to the dealership.
- The folks at the dealership were ready for us and had us set up with a rental in no time.

We feel lucky. We feel fortunate. We are grateful. Grateful every single person we dealt with was well intentioned. Grateful for well engineered, safe vehicles, seat belts and cell phones. We know we have paperwork ahead of us and finances to sort out, and we wish we had never been in an accident tonight. But our spirits never fell and all that positive interaction with other folks left us reassured in the inherent goodness of people.
By the way, two and a half hours after we planned to have our early dinner, we had a delicious meal at Ixtapa. The service? Warm, friendly and courteous as always. After the events of today, how could it have been otherwise!