They arrived in December. The first, early in the month. The other, after Christmas. She’d forgotten to wrap them but it’s not as if I didn’t know what they were; my mother had mailed me one every year for the thirty years I’d lived out west. The annual “Around the Harbor” calendar in all its glossy technicolor glory. Glamour shots of Boothbay Harbor, outlying islands, sailboats and lighthouses, photographed by the region’s resident shutterbug.
My mother dated the photographer the year after my father left. She’d survived the harshest winter in most locals’ recent memories, carrying in armload upon armload of wood, feeding the fires, feeding eleven-year-old me, barely feeding herself, just the two of us sleeping through the frigid darkness of those long winter nights. In spring she emerged, tentative as the daffodils peeping through the snowbanks in our backyard. Fifteen pounds lighter from a season of self-doubt. Frye boots still reeking of new leather, popularized by the only other divorcée on the island.
“You’re a walkin’ skeleton,” the postmistress remarked when we picked up the mail. “Men like their women with a little meat on their bones.”
Those days, there were three post offices on the island, each run by its own postmistress—a term almost as antiquated as the concept of mail itself. Those days, culture was not cancelled; stamps were.
Eventually, my mother regained enough weight and confidence to place a personal ad in the weekly local newspaper in the form of a clever limerick.
Responses poured in, along with the regular stack of fan mail and recipes from the readers of the monthly newsletter she wrote and illustrated for nearly forty years. She narrowed the candidates to the two she found most witty and dated them simultaneously: a judge from a town up the peninsula, and the photographer who lived a mile down the road. Both candidates were a decade younger than my mother and both were fun while they lasted, but neither was marriage material.
Mr. Right, it turned out, had been right there all along: the vice president at another newspaper where her newsletter was printed. No limericks were needed for this union; they tied the knot two years later.
She and the photographer remained neighborly—how could you not on an island? He shot my senior class photo, the backdrop our cove’s jagged coastline and spruce trees. And after I left Maine for the West Coast in my early twenties, my mother sent his “Around the Harbor” calendar every Christmas.
The year she sent it twice, that final year of her newsletter when she wrote teasingly of eating ice cream for breakfast and making August last as long as possible, neither of us could have imagined that the following summer, she’d have a meltdown in that very kitchen where she savored each spoonful from the bowl of black raspberry ice cream.
“I’m having trouble understanding August,” she told me, eyes downcast. One the once-white Frigidaire, now dingy and yellowed with years, the calendar glared at us and in that moment I understood. I understood that her concept of time was slipping away. I understood that my mother was slipping away. And I understood that those lighter-than-air Augusts we’d shared—those breezy summer days of counting fireflies and collecting sea glass—would eventually slip away, too.
The photographer still sells his calendars. The island’s only remaining post office is run by a new postmistress. The judge has faded from view, along with my mother’s recollection of the limerick that started it all.
And as her days slowly slipped away like the fluttering pages of a calendar, we measured our time together in the quiet serenity of moments, not months.