about the pine meadow pond journal

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door … You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”  ~ Bilbo Baggins¹

Hello there.

I’m Beth Lowe, and you’ve reached my blog, The Pine Meadow Pond Journal.

Welcome.

I don’t know about you, but I’m always a little disappointed when the About page on someone’s blog doesn’t provide me with much information about the author. I usually like to know a little something about that person when I read his or her writing.

So here goes.

I’ve been writing since I was very young. My first book, written when I was about ten, was entitled The Adventures of Buzzy Bee. I wrote and illustrated it, and it quickly became a bestseller among a very small and select group of readers: my family. Unfortunately, it just as quickly went out of print. Several decades have passed since then, and copies are extremely difficult to find. No reprints are planned, and I’d be extremely grateful if you did not contact my mother. You might find a copy on eBay, however. I wish you luck if you’re interested.

Until my mid-twenties, I kept a journal faithfully. I wrote scads of poetry. Reading and writing poetry afforded me countless hours of pleasure and, indeed, solace. It’s not a stretch to say that I wrote my way out of numerous episodes of what, for many years, I called “the blues,” through journal writing and poetry.

And, then, I stopped writing. For a very long time.

I told myself that writing wasn’t that important. That my marriage, my job, my career were more important. After a time, the blues were back, and I wasn’t writing about them, never mind through them.

You can imagine how well that worked.

Many hours of therapy, a different kind of job, a spot in a grad school program, and a regrettable, but necessary, divorce later, I was writing again. At first, it was poetry. Then, I found I was writing prose, since poetry didn’t seem to be an acceptable way to write most of my papers in grad school. I discovered, though, that my prose was informed by years of writing poetry. It was prose I liked, written in a voice I felt was genuine, and I was happy with it.

I stuck with prose alone for a long time; it seemed then, and still seems now, to be the most effective medium for me, but, recently, I started writing poetry again.

I’ve had the good fortune to discover some truly talented poets and writers on the web. These are the folks who inspire and educate me, day after day. You can find many of them in my blogroll. I hope you’ll check them out.

I have severe migraine disease, and I’ve had it for many years. The result? I struggle mightily with frequent and debilitating headaches, which I often have every day, sometimes for weeks, and even months. In order to preserve my creativity, my productivity, and my engagement with the world, I wage daily battle against being sidelined by this disease.

I have a project about my experiences in the works: I’m writing a book about living with migraine disease. My focus is on the difficulties, and eventual rewards, I’ve experienced, and still continue to experience, in accommodating my migraines while trying to maintain my capacity as an active, engaged writer, partner, family member, friend, and actor in and observer of the world.

For now, suffice it to say that migraine disease is a neurological disease.  Migraines themselves are not simply bad headaches.  There is no cure. This invisible disease affects sufferers and their families and friends deeply. I’ll post more information and some links soon.

But that is not the main purpose of this blog.

I spent the first half of my life growing up and living in the still beautiful, still more-rural-than-not northwest corner of New Jersey, USA, in Sussex County. If you were to ask me that silly, clichéd question about what highway exit you would take to get to my hometown, I would have to reply that there are no exits to get to my hometown or almost anywhere else in that part of the state. For the most part, there are only state and county two lane roads, where you still may get stuck behind a farm tractor for a few miles.

For the next twenty-odd years of my time in New Jersey, however, I lived in the congested central part of the state, just outside of New Brunswick, in a place near where most of the major highways in New Jersey converge. The town where I lived was accessible from several different exits. That should be description enough for anyone.

Several years ago, I met my partner, Michael, often referred to previously in these pages as “M,” and moved to north central Massachusetts – apple-picking and small farm country – where I now live and write this blog. Living here is, not so surprisingly, reminiscent of where I grew up, yet with a decidedly Yankee twist.

Michael is the one who keeps me going in all things. He is also the brains behind the serious techie stuff behind this blog, and, let me tell you, there IS some of that back there. Much of it, the “code,” is a foreign language to me, though I now know (ahem) a thing or two myself. Together, Michael and I recently started up a consulting business called TintypesDigital. We provide other creative people, educators, and small enterprises with the tools, strategies, and training they need to make sense of technology in a sensible, affordable, and sustainable way.

Michael and I live in a small house on a small piece of property with a huge backyard. Huge, that is, if you count the pond. Pine Meadow Pond. The pond that launched this blog. The pond that, to me, looks like it should be called a lake. There are Reasons that it is considered a pond and not a lake, and, dear reader, those Reasons shall be revealed to you along the way.

It’s not every writer who gets to have a perpetual source of inspiration in her backyard. Or who can look out of almost every window of her house and see water (there’s another large pond across the road).

Based on a topographical map of the area from the 1930s, we’ve surmised that the pond began its life as a swampy meadow. We believe, then, that it became a pond through the combined efforts, unbeknownst to them, of beavers and humans. In some kind of order, our road was built, and the beavers dammed up the area southward of the spring which now feeds what became Pine Meadow Pond. Pine Meadow Pond, in turn, feeds the pond across the road, which is at a lower elevation. Thanks to the industriousness of certain buck-toothed critters, Pine Meadow Pond is just one in a series of cascading beaver ponds.

The pond has its own presence as a living, breathing organism in our lives, and we are passionate about its welfare. Except for part of the street on which we live, the shores and much of the surrounding area of Pine Meadow Pond have been designated as conservation land.

At this point, the pond is reasonably healthy, no thanks to the RV trail riders and too many fishermen, some of whom have a habit of leaving their trash and fishing detritus behind. I’ve written about them before here. The pond is part of an extensive wildlife habitat, about which we are always learning more.

As you might expect, the pond is home to many creatures, some of whom you’ll get to know in these pages: beaver; muskrat; all kinds of birds, including Great Blue herons, Red-tailed hawks, Ospreys, and many songbirds; and coyotes, just to name a few.

Right now outside my window, as I write this page in late summer, there is a squirrel eating a nut, a chickadee is again checking the birdfeeder to see if its empty status has changed in the last two hours, and I hear a chipmunk sounding the alarm. A few weeks ago, a painted turtle made several looooong trips past the same window, scuffling through the leaves so loudly that it sounded like something much larger was walking past.

Commonplace events, perhaps. Less common, though, because someone has taken the time to observe and note them. Many of us don’t see what’s outside our windows very often anymore. There’s a whole world out there. We just have to pay attention and look. I believe we’d all be healthier if we focused less on ourselves and paid more attention to what’s going on around us, especially as it pertains to the natural world.

My views are feminist and progressive. I’m an environmentalist, and my family and I try to keep these principles always in mind when we make decisions about the products we choose, what we eat and drive, and how we live. We’re human, so we don’t always succeed, but we try.

I’m a “citizen naturalist,” which simply means I study the natural world, but I don’t have any formal training in that study. However, I’ve been out in the woods, fields, and bogs since I was a small child. I was lucky enough to grow up with a grandfather who valued the outdoors as much or more than anything else, and the rest of my immediate family perpetuated those ideals.

At times, my view will be narrowly fixed on the pond itself; it is my touch point. At other times, my focus will widen, and I will write about the world beyond the pond. It is always there, though, in the background, reminding me that I am home.

In Thoreau’s essay, Walking (1862), he wrote, most plainly, “Front yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.” Words to live by, don’t you think?

¹From The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1954.