Ayuh!

A little over thirty years ago, my wife and I resigned a successful career in the US Foreign Service, purchased some wooded acreage in rural Maine, and cleared enough of the land for a house and a vegetable garden. We did it all ourselves, including building the house from the ground up. We had never done anything like it before, and it was scary, very scary. Our fear, and certainly our inexperience, must have been evident, because we learned later that a group of the men in the small town into which we had moved, placed bets among themselves as to when we would give up. (They all lost.) I suppose that from time to time I will write more on this blog about our early experiences in Maine, but today I want to share an event that set the tone for the following three decades.

We began clearing the land in April, and started construction on the house about a month or so later; by mid-fall we were moved in. The project cost us a lot of the money we brought with us from what by then we had come to call “the world”, and so we were feeling a little pinched. We were okay, and we knew we were going to continue to be okay, but watching the checking account balance dwindle had its effect.

So, when our neighbor about a mile up the road telephoned one evening to ask if we would like to contribute money to a charity operated by the local church, we responded that we couldn’t do so, because, we said, “We’re broke”. Now, what we meant by that was not that we were poverty-stricken or destitute, not broke in the literal sense. Rather, we used the expression that evening in the same way we had used it hundreds of times in “the world”, to mean, “I haven’t got any cash on me, and I don’t feel like writing a check” or simply, “now’s not a good time”. But our neighbor heard it differently.

About an hour later, there was a gentle knock on our front door. It was our neighbor, standing in the dark, with a basket of food in her hands – some flour, a little sugar, several cans of soup and beans, a few pieces of fruit, and the like. “My husband and I have collected these from your neighbors up and down the road,” she said, handing the basket to us. “We want you to know that as long as you live in this town, you will never starve”.

We were stunned. And embarrassed.

My wife and I had visited and lived in foreign countries before moving to Maine, and we well knew that the same or similar expressions can mean different things in different cultures. But it had never occurred to us to apply that rule between Maine and Washington, DC. We apologized to our neighbor for that oversight. Since then, our friendship with her and her husband, and with our other neighbors up and down the road, and our love for the state of Maine, has grown and continues to grow in depth and scope, but that encounter that autumn evening was something truly special.