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HollyRobinson

Writer & Red Dirt Rambler

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Are Men in Trouble?

Posted on 02.27.23 | Holly Robinson | 7 Comments

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Not long ago, I visited my son and his wife at their new place in Brooklyn, New York. We walked from their building to a restaurant where I tried and failed not to be shocked by the prices, then stopped at a bar.

The bar was hosting an open mic for stand-up comics in a back room, so we made our way there and sat in the kinds of metal folding chairs usually found only in high school auditoriums. We arrived late and ended up in one of the front rows. (Everyone avoids those, terrified of being called out by the comics.)

I was the only person between the age of 35 and 70, but this was a treat, since I used to do stand-up comedy. The room was Covid-cold, so I kept my orange scarf wound around my neck as the performers began filing up to the mic for their five minutes of fame.

As a former stand-up, I wasn’t surprised that the ratio was two women to twenty guys. Nor did it surprise me that most of the performers were in their twenties and thirties. This being Brooklyn, the epicenter of Hip Culture, most of the guys wore flannel shirts and knit caps, like they’d just finished milking cows instead of pounding the pavement or pouring pretty lattes.

No, the first surprise was how nearly every guy who stepped onto the stage was so unprepared to deliver his lines. Most brought their phones to use as prompts. Often, they’d glance up at me and completely fall apart.

“They must feel like they’re telling jokes in front of their mother,” I whispered to my son.

“Either that, or they think you’re a talent scout, with that orange scarf and those glasses,” he said.

But the bigger surprise was yet to come: well over half of the male comics worked an “I’m so dumb” riff into their material, like, “I’m so dumb I keep trying to read books, but the pictures don’t move.” It was excruciating to watch, and reminded me of that too-recent time when female comics seemed to deliver nothing but fat jokes.

What’s going on? I wondered. Do men in their twenties and thirties—a time when they’re supposed to be charging forth into the world, making strides in their careers and building relationships–really feel that stupid? Or was this just a special quality shared by a certain type of young man in Brooklyn who wants to poke fun at his vulnerabilities in front of people?

I dug around online when I got home to see if I could find any answers. Here’s what I discovered:

According to the Pew Research Center, women are now more likely than men to graduate from college. Among adults ages 25 to 34, the gap is even wider, with 46 percent of women holding a bachelor’s degree, compared to only 37 percent of men.

And, in an edition of Up for Debate, Conor Friedersdorf asks why men and boys are struggling, and cites various troubling figures from Brookings scholar Richard Reeves, author of the book Of Boys and Men, who sums things up this way: “men at the top are still flourishing, but men in general are not.”

Reeves offers a variety of statistics to support this, including:

“In the U.S … the 2020 decline in college enrollment was seven times greater for male than for female students.”

“Among men with only a high-school education, one in three is out of the labor force.”

“Mortality from drug overdoses, suicides, and alcohol-related illnesses … are almost three times higher among men than women.”

As someone who grew up in an age where feminists were striving to shatter glass ceilings in everything from sports to the job market, it’s tough for me to believe that men—especially the mostly well-spoken, probably college-educated young men I saw on that stage in Brooklyn—have any cause to think of themselves as “dumb.” And I know from watching women friends struggle to balance motherhood and careers that we’re still bearing the brunt of the load when it comes to childcare and housework, often at our own economic peril because we can’t pursue our careers at the same pace our male colleagues do.

On the other hand, having raised three sons, I witnessed how inclined the teachers were to punish my boys for being too active, too loud, or asking too many questions. Our public schools, with their emphasis on collaboration over competition and budget cuts that have made things like recess, sports and music a luxury rather than a given in the curriculum, aren’t always places where boys thrive. Unhappily, our educational system may even be leading to boys being over-medicated for attention disorders; the Centers for Disease Control reports that about 9.4 percent of boys are put on medication for ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), while only 5.6 percent of girls are treated in the same way.

So what’s the solution? How can we support men and boys in ways that ensure they feel confident enough to thrive, without taking away the cultural shifts that have led to greater gender parity? Is it, as Reeves suggests, simply a matter of holding boys back in school by a year to allow them more time to develop and mature? Is that were the trouble really begins?

This seems simplistic to me, but we need a solution, and fast—look at how many men are expressing their despair and fury through mass shootings or hatred toward women, especially the “incels,” the growing group of men that believes women dominate men sexually and want to exact revenge for that. You can read about that part of the “manosphere” in a recent issue of MIT’s Technology Review and other places.

Any thoughts?

They Said I Shouldn’t Marry Him. I Did It Anyway.

Posted on 02.13.23 | Holly Robinson | Leave a Comment

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When I brought my boyfriend to Florida along with our four young children to visit my mom, things went sideways pretty fast. Dan and I made the mistake of traveling to Florida by train, foolishly imagining that our kids—two boys and two girls, then ages 5, 6, 7 and 8—would entertain themselves by watching the scenery rush by.

Instead, the girls just wanted to play Polly Pockets and the boys wanted to play with their Matchbox cars. Dan and I took turns entertaining them until the kids finally passed out around midnight, at which point Dan looked over at me and said, “Ah, the romance of train travel.”

Things did not improve at my mother’s. Dan’s son caught a stomach bug and spent the day vomiting. My son and Dan both came down with strep throat. Dan’s ex-wife called to say she’d forgotten to tell us that their kids had lice. After a mere 24 hours, my mother found me weeping on the front steps after putting everyone to bed.

“You can’t marry this man,” she said. “He only wants you to look after his children, you know.”

My mom wasn’t the first person to try and discourage me from marrying Dan. Most of my friends couldn’t fathom why I’d rush into another marriage. Even my therapist was puzzled. She was also quick to unblinker my eyes with divorce statistics: while nearly 50 percent of first marriages end in divorce, the divorce rate for second marriages is even more dismal—about 67 percent.

With two kids each, Dan and I would be creating a new family and literally bringing baggage from our old families that included bikes, stuffed animals, and Game Boys, not to mention ex-spouses. To complicate matters, we needed a bigger house because neither of us lived in a place large enough to accommodate us.

“You could just keep dating,” said a friend. “Once you’re living together, all of that romantic stuff will fall by the wayside. And right now you’ve at least got some weekends to yourself,” she added wistfully.

True. With my ex-husband taking the kids every other weekend, I had more freedom to write, or even to just nap. Having Dan and his kids on weekends when I didn’t have my own children meant I was playing happy families with people whose rules and rhythms were different from my own.

Yet, I loved Dan, and I loved his children, too. I married him anyway, on the day after his divorce was final, in a backyard wedding where half of our 96 guests were children. There were so many knee-high guests that we hired a pair of clowns to entertain them. The DJ quickly learned that the Chicken Dance was the most popular song he could play to avoid chaos.

Two years into our marriage, Dan and I decided to have a baby together because it was just too weird having children with other people but not with one another. This set our clocks back by ten years, but it was a happy decision for all. We’ve moved households twice in our life together—once, because our house was too small, and another time because our house was too large as the kids started going away to college. We’ve had jobs and layoffs, kid crises and family dramas galore. We’ve celebrated three weddings in three years—our children all seem to be optimists—and the birth of our first grandchild.

And now comes the strangest phase of all: Dan took a job on the west coast, so we’re conducting another experiment in love through a bi-coastal marriage, taking turns flying across the country for long weekends because we want to keep our house but he loves this particular work. It’s a new puzzle and we don’t know if we’ve found all of the pieces yet.

But isn’t that true of every love affair, and of every marriage? You think you’re sailing along, and then there’s a hailstorm or the wind changes or, hell, Moby Dick rears up out of the water and smashes your damn boat. All you can do is keep swimming for your life and hope you make it to shore.

With Dan, I’m happy to say I always know where the shore is, whether it’s on the east coast or the west, or anywhere else in the world.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone.

Rat Patrol

Posted on 01.20.23 | Holly Robinson | 4 Comments

rat in dining room

Since my husband’s departure for a job on the opposite coast, I’ve mostly embraced our bi-coastal lifestyle even though it means having to do chores previously designated as “his,” like putting out the trash, clearing the driveway of snow, identifying tripped circuit breakers, and moving heavy furniture. (Slide it onto a towel, and you can move anything.)

The only area of his expertise that I can’t wholly embrace is the removal of unwanted critters. Take stink bugs, for instance. Why do they always buzz around at night? And why do they insist on clinging to curtain rods far above my head?

Then there are the ticks. Why are there still ticks in winter? And why, even with those special tick tweezers, is it such a God awful job to get the head out, too?

Also, why do the coyotes lurking in the woods behind our house insist on howling just as I’m trying to fall asleep?

Still, I was feeling proud of my Pioneer Woman self-sufficiency until two weeks ago, when I was peacefully finishing my dinner and the dogs rushed into the dining room, barking their fool heads off as they gave chase to not just one, but two furry critters.

The invaders were small, so I decided they must be mice, or maybe shrews—we’ve had those sneak into our house to eat the dog kibble—as I grabbed the dogs in time to let the poor creatures escape. I managed to snap a photo of the slower one before it disappeared.

I sent the picture to our exterminator, Ryan, a surprisingly jovial guy whose sole job is to kill pests, or at least remove them from your house. I’d last communicated with him over flying squirrels in our attic. (This blog post makes it sound like I must live in the back of beyond, but I have neighbors on either side and a grocery store less than two miles away.)

“What is this?” I texted Ryan with the photo. “And can you come over and set some traps?”

His answer made my heart sink to my slippered feet: “Looks like a baby rat, unfortunately.”

Yikes! If I’d seen two, there must be a nest of babies. And that meant they had parents, who were probably now intent on taking revenge on my dogs and me.

I slept badly that night, picturing thousands of rats streaming up our staircase to the second floor and attacking me the way they did Willard during that horror movie. This was silly, I reminded myself: Why was I afraid of rodents? I grew up with 9,000 of them! (If you’re curious, you can read about it in my memoir, The Gerbil Farmer’s Daughter.)

Still, I was horrified to come downstairs and discover that the dogs had killed one of the rats and left it for me under the dining room table as a sweet little gift. Nobody wants rats in their house for health reasons. We’ve all read about the Black Death.

Besides, what kind of housekeeper are you, if you get rats in your house? It was only when I started telling my friends about this that a number of them stepped forward, heads hanging, to whisper their own rat confessions. “It’s not like you want anyone to know, is it?” pleaded one friend.

After Ryan was finished setting the traps, he came inside to lay blame on the neighbor’s new chicken coop next door. “If you keep chickens or bird feeders near your house, that’s essentially a red carpet for rats,” he said. “I figure you probably have 17 rats in your basement.”

I had to laugh. “Seventeen? That’s a pretty specific number. Not, like, about fifteen?”

He frowned. “Well, okay. Seventeen to twenty-four, I’d say.”

“You’re not making me feel better, Ryan.” Two dozen rats working together could definitely carry me out of my bed.

Nor did it make me feel better to know that a group of rats is called “a mischief.” One thing I do not want in my house is a mischief of rats.

Luckily, as the days pass without any more rat sightings, I’ve started to calm down. Rats and humans have always lived together. In New York City alone, Jonathan Auerbach once estimated there were probably two million of them. This seems plausible. Whenever I visit New York City, I regularly see rats frolicking like squirrels on the piles of trash by the curb or between the subway tracks.

Rats are like us, searching for food to sustain themselves and their families. They are nocturnal creatures and skilled at staying out of sight. As long as they leave me alone, I’ll stop texting Ryan.

Suddenly Home Alone, After 30 Years

Posted on 01.07.23 | Holly Robinson | 26 Comments

hellcat swamp boardwalk at sunset

The first thing I did before my husband left for California was go down to the basement and bring up the white wine from the downstairs fridge.

“Why are you doing that?” he asked when I returned.

Sheepishly, I stuck the bottles in the fridge upstairs. “It’s for when you’re away, so I don’t fall down the basement stairs getting wine and hit my head when nobody’s here.”

“Jesus,” he said. “That’s not going to happen!”

Probably not. Still, better to be prepared.

My husband took a job on the opposite coast right after Thanksgiving. I supported his decision—it’s exciting work, and I’ve never seen him this happy—and we agreed that we’d keep our house in Massachusetts and I’d mostly live here, since it’s unclear how long he’ll have to be on site.

For the first couple of months, things felt normal-ish. I went out to help Dan find a place to live, and he came home for the holidays a week later, along with our five children and their spouses.

Then the children left. Dan and I spent a day taking down the tree and decorations before he departed, too. Now, for the first time in nearly 30 years of marriage, I’m living alone.

For the first time, nobody needs me. Our children are busy adults. Most are happily partnered. My mother, who lived with us, died last January, so I have no caretaking duties.

Who am I, if nobody needs me? I’m not sure yet.

Right now, I’m busy conquering my fears. I’m not fond of the dark or noises that go bump in the night. I don’t like to set mousetraps, and I like to empty them of tiny corpses even less. It’s winter, so I worry about the snow being too heavy for me to shovel. And what if my husband and I spend two years apart and one of us dies before we get to live together again?

“Promise to call me every night,” I told Dan at the airport. “We have to check in with each other and make sure we’re still breathing.”

He laughed. “Maybe I should get you one of those buttons to press so you can say, ‘Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.’”

“Not funny,” I said.

When I asked various friends for advice about going solo, some of their answers surprised me. One friend chastised me for “letting” my husband live alone. “What if he likes it too much?” she said. “What if he meets someone else?”

I pictured a woman in a bikini. On a surfboard. Yeah, that didn’t help my adjustment any.

“The main thing,” said a divorced friend, “is to avoid eating dinner in front of the TV. There’s something really sad about that.”

Another warned me against the “sweatpants-are-actual-clothing” trap. “I know you have Vuoris in every color,” she said, “but you honestly shouldn’t go outside in them.”

“Not even to the post office?” I asked in shock.

“Not even,” she said. “You have to get dressed every day in actual clothes. Otherwise it’ll seem like you’ve stopped caring.” She tipped her head at me. “A little makeup wouldn’t hurt, either.”

Despite the weirdness of my new singledom, there is liberation, too. The kitchen counters are always clear of clutter. I own the TV! My friends all want to come and have slumber parties, and if I want crackers and cheese for dinner, there’s nobody to disagree. Dan and I have long phone conversations, just as we did when we were dating.

Best of all, the mornings are silent, except for the dogs snuffling around my feet and the birdcalls outside. With no voices to interrupt my thoughts, I was able to go back to a novel I struggled to write for three years and put in a drawer out of frustration. There is creative space in my head again.

Marriage is wonderful. Family life is complex and fascinating. I’m blessed to have so many people to love in my life. But, slowly, I am remembering the rewards of solitude.

Mr. Curve Ball: When a Partner Makes an Unexpected Life Choice, Then What?

Posted on 12.10.22 | Holly Robinson | 19 Comments

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When my son came home a couple of weekends ago, he brought champagne to celebrate my husband’s new job. “Here’s to Mr. Curve Ball!” he said as we toasted Dan’s success. “What comes next?”

We have no idea.

Here’s the thing: we’ve lived in the same tiny Massachusetts town for almost two decades, but Dan’s new job is in southern California. So, at a time when most of our empty-nester friends are settling into retirement, garden projects, grandchildren, and early dinners, we’re blowing up our lives and going bi-coastal. Dan will live in California while I hold down the fort here.

For him, this means enjoying the California sunshine while figuring out which strip mall restaurant has the best burger, how to drive on ten-lane highways, and maybe even testing whether his knees can get him up on a surfboard.

Meanwhile, I won’t have to keep anybody’s schedule but my own. Every day will be a writing retreat. The downside is that I’ll be responsible for everything from walking the dogs to shoveling the driveway alone.

When I shared our new living arrangement with a friend, she didn’t ask whether Dan and I will miss each other. She merely screamed, “Oh my God! What are you going to eat?”

She has a point. Dan is the cook in our family.

“I guess it’ll be grilled cheese and soup, with a few carrots thrown in for roughage,” I said.

“You’re awfully good to let him do this,” said another friend.

Let him?

No: even if we have to live apart, I want Dan to take this job. My husband has played by the rules for the past 40 years, going to work steadily every day even when the work was less than thrilling. His regular paycheck and health insurance have given me the chance to be a freelance writer, doing work I love and being able to spend time with our five children.

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Most Americans spend one-third of our lives at work—that’s about 90,000 hours overall. That’s a lot of time, especially when you consider one study showing that Americans spend less than 40 minutes a day enjoying quality time with their families, and another report estimating that we only spend about 117 days total (or 168,480 mere minutes) making love during our entire lifetimes.

What’s more, a recent Gallop poll has demonstrated that most Americans (about two-thirds) feel “little to no” engagement in their jobs. They’re just like kids at school waiting for the bell to ring and set them free.

Given all of that, how could Dan and I not try this social experiment, if it gives him the chance to work at a job he loves?

Even if it means tuna melts and grilled cheese are my go-to foods, it’s totally worth it.

How a Sunday Drive Led Me to an Island Home (Part IV): The Terror of Existence

Posted on 10.31.22 | Holly Robinson | 4 Comments

Recently I was listening to a Fresh Air interview with actress Rachel Bloom, best known as the co-creator of the TV series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. When asked what kind of future she most hopes for her daughter, Bloom said, “I want her to feel as fulfilled as anyone can in the terror that is existence.”

sculpted head from nh

That sentence stopped me in my tracks (literally, since I was running while listening to the podcast). Like most of us, I’ve been thinking a lot about terror. Maybe you have, too.

After all, there are plenty of reasons to be afraid lately. Take your pick:

Russian missile strikes in Ukraine

257 school shootings in the U.S. so far this year

The worst drought in Europe in at least 500 years

A stampede in South Korea kills more than 150 people

A suspension bridge collapse in India kills over 140 people

Terrorist explosions in Somalia

I could go on, but the point is clear: the world can be a scary place.

Clearly I need an island fix to restore my sanity. My Wi-Fi connection on Prince Edward Island is spotty if the wind is blowing and I don’t get newspapers delivered there. Sitting out on my deck, there’s little noise but the tractors forging their steady rows in the potato fields across the street and the wind blowing through the old chestnut tree. Within a few days, my shoulders relax. I might even forget to edit the manuscript on my lap because I’m just watching the clouds.

flowering potato field

This October, we were on our way to PEI when Hurricane Fiona swept up there ahead of us, tearing up trees, collapsing barns, flooding roads, and leaving most of the island without power for over a week. We stayed put in Massachusetts, anxiously communicating with friends and neighbors on the island who kept us informed about the damage. Our house, luckily, was mostly spared, other than a broken window. A lot of trees were torn up by the roots but fell away from the house.

Even luckier is that we have found an island community where neighbors are always reaching out. One man, who has done a lot of carpentry and roofing work for us, hurried to put up a new metal roof before the hurricane hit. Another drove by and, noticing that a pile of roofing shingles was blowing all over the yard, called me and offered to pick them up and take them to the dump.

Then, a few days ago, a woman I met only recently emailed me to say, “I noticed that the corner of your barn has shingles and wood missing creating an entranceway. I’m not sure if hurricane Fiona created it but I had my drill and screws with me, so my partner and I grabbed a couple of pieces of plywood that were inside and we boarded it up. I hope you don’t mind.”

When Rachel Bloom was imagining her daughter’s future, she said she wanted her to be happy. To work hard and be fulfilled, “as fulfilled as anyone can in the terror that is existence.”

As someone who makes a living as a writer, I’d be the first to agree that working hard at projects that feed your soul is part of what it takes to be happy and fulfilled. But, to truly keep the terror of existence at bay, we need to know our neighbors, to reach out helping hands when we can and accept help when we can’t.

It’s easier to be part of a community on an island, of course, where there are so few people, and where the same families have grown up near their “home places” for generations. Most islanders make time to stop and chat. But it’s not impossible to do the same thing in the U.S. if we’re only willing to try.

Next time you see someone in your building or on the street, don’t just walk by. Stop and say hello. Every friendship begins with a conversation, and every conversation is the first step toward building a community that might just save your life one day, or will at least lessen the terror of existence.

How a Sunday Drive Led Me to an Island Home (Part III): A Hurricane, Cat Stink, and Super Sly Insects

Posted on 10.02.22 | Holly Robinson | 6 Comments

As I write this, Prince Edward Island is still in recovery mode after Hurricane Fiona washed out roads and bridges, collapsed barns and houses, uprooted thousands of trees, and left ninety percent of islanders without power. We were headed there at the same time Fiona was wending her way north and had to turn around. We’re thankful that our house made it through, and owe a huge debt of gratitude to our neighbors, who diligently replaced shingles on our roof and hauled the outdoor furniture inside before the storm, then checked the property afterward.

Surviving the Cat Stink

One reason I fell in love with PEI is that, wherever you go, you’ll likely have a vista of red cliffs and a beach, typically edged by farm fields of bright yellow canola or potato fields blossoming such a bright white, it’s like a million butterflies have landed on the green.

That beauty helped me survive our first season in the house.

Whenever there was rain or damp weather (pretty much every day here in the Maritimes, on the geographical edge of Canada), a cat stink mist rose to clog our noses and mouths.

“Where is it coming from?” my husband asked.

“I think everywhere,” I said.

We crawled around on hands and knees, sniffing. Kitchen floor? Yup. Rusty radiator in the living room? Uh huh. How about the sun porch? Check, check, and check: some previous owner’s felines definitely had one big cat party in here.

“Holy hell,” I said. “What are we going to do?”

We did it all: washing the floors and radiators, throwing bleach at the smell, and even pulling up boards and replacing them. We also sanded and repainted a lot of the walls. Mostly, the smell went away, but every now and then there would be a whiff and we’d fall to our knees again.

The Insects Rule

The other surprise obstacle: insects. I’d only ever been to Prince Edward Island in summer. Now, eager to try living in our house, I arrived in April to open things up.

The first insects to take up residence with us were black flies, clouds of critters with the supernatural ability to leave holes in your skin that would turn to welts. They were undeterred by any amount of insect repellent, even Deep Woods Off.

Next came the horse flies. Now, we have flies in Massachusetts. We even have greenhead flies, which send most tourists scurrying for the nearest airport. But I have never run from horse flies as big as the horseflies on Prince Edward Island. These were bat-size. I didn’t just sprint away. No, I did the kind of survival running those people do in movies about apex predators.

After that came the more ordinary house flies, which one of my neighbors called “shingle flies.”

“What are those?” I asked.

She gave me a look. “Flies that live in your house shingles.”

Right. Another dumb Come From Away question.

The flies were definitely living in the shingles of our house. They also seemed to be rising up from the farm below, where our neighbor raised cows and sheep. Whatever the official name of these flies might be, it should have included “Super Sly.” No matter how tight the screens were on the windows, or even if the windows were closed completely, they managed to sneak into the house. It became a nightly ritual to grab the flyswatter and smash five hundred flies with the bedroom door closed so we could sleep without buzzing. If we made the mistake of getting up at night to use the bathroom, we had to start all over.

Our fly-bashing skills proved handy for the next round of critters: the mosquitoes. We have mosquitoes in Massachusetts, too, but these were like the Cirque du Soleil of mosquitoes: risk-taking high fliers who could wriggle through even smaller holes than the shingle flies, out-fly the black flies, and leave welts on our skin the size of bread slices. One night I went outside to walk the dog and had to run for my life back into the house, driven by the deadly drone of a million mosquitoes.

Did we hate the island by then? Were we sorry we’d bought the old Homer Robertson house?

Stay tuned for a tale of ghost ships and the Mick Jagger of fiddlers…

How a Sunday Drive Led Me to an Island Home (Part II)

Posted on 09.09.22 | Holly Robinson | 4 Comments

Things move slowly on an island. By the time we actually stepped inside the house we’d bought sight unseen on Prince Edward Island (See Part I here), it was late October. The intervening weeks had given me time to hear lots of people tell me I was crazy.

“How could you buy a house you’ve never seen?” my mother demanded. “Besides, you don’t need another house. You barely take care of the one you’ve got.”

True. I am not a duster or a sweeper. I do not fold laundry or iron it. I subscribe to what my husband calls a Darwinian philosophy when it comes to clothing: if an item can’t survive being washed with different colors and dried at high heat with the towels, out it goes, usually in tatters. On the other hand, I have plenty of time to write, play with children and dogs, and hike and swim. And I desperately wanted a year-round house on Prince Edward Island.

“Why?” a friend asked. “Isn’t it cold up there in the winter?”

“It’s no worse than Massachusetts,” I said, despite having zero facts on this topic.

“It’s not even on the beach!” another friend said. “If you want potato fields, drive to Maine.”

Also true. Yet “The heart wants what the heart wants,” as Emily Dickinson wrote, and I wanted this old farmhouse on Prince Edward Island.

(North Lake Harbor)

Because we lived so far away, I had to rely on the realtor to give me the name of a home inspector. And, because the home inspector could only come in the morning, we’d have to spend the night somewhere close to the house. I found an inn online—Harbour Lights Inn, located just outside North Lake Harbor, famous for its lobster and tuna fishing village—and called.

To my astonishment, the woman who answered was actually American; she and her husband were in the process of applying for their Canadian citizenship after two decades of living on PEI.

“You’ll love it here,” Pat assured me.

Because we were showing up in late October—well past the peak tourist season—she promised to give us dinner as well as breakfast.

“Oh, gosh, I don’t want to trouble you,” I said.

“Really, it’s fine,” she said. “Maybe I’ll come to the home inspection with you. I’ve always wanted to see inside that house.”

“You know which house we’re buying?”

She laughed. “Sure. That’s Homer Robertson’s old place.”

“That’s not the owner on the listing sheet,” I said, confused.

“Right, but that’s always going to be his house,” Pat said. “You’re come-from-away.”

Driving on Disappearing Roads

The drive to Prince Edward Island in late fall was markedly different from the one we’d taken in August. Traffic, sparse even in summer, once you get through the gauntlet of sun worshipers and fried dough eaters pouring into the beaches around Hampton and the shoppers zeroed in on outlet stores in Kittery and Freeport, trickled down to nothing. The views were different, too. Fall was still in full swing in Massachusetts, the trees putting on their typical fireworks finale in reds and golds, but by northern Maine the colors seeped away into bleak browns and blacks.

“Stephen King territory,” my husband mumbled as we turned onto Airline Drive, which goes through Washington County’s crumbling houses, hunting cabins, and tired looking churches.

The snow started falling in New Brunswick. At first it was pretty, powdering the wide vistas of rolling hills and the edges of the Bay of Fundy, but by the time we reached the Confederation Bridge, it felt like we were driving off the end of the world. I remembered the sign I’d seen that summer at East Point Lighthouse, claiming that nineteenth-century lighthouse stood at the end of the world, perched above the meeting of the tides between the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Northumberland Strait.

As we left the bridge and began driving east across the island, the wind started howling. At one point it felt like some giant hand had picked up my Honda and shaken it before dropping us back on the road.

“Uh oh,” Dan said.

On Prince Edward Island, I’d heard that the “roads disappear” in winter. I’d scoffed at that. Hey, I thought. I’m a New Englander. We know snow!

But we didn’t know island snow. One minute, Dan and I were following a ribbon of tarmac; the next, a giant white sheet was drawn over the road and the asphalt disappeared. With such an abundance of farm fields, there are few trees and bushes holding the snow at bay.

“Can you see where you’re going?” Dan asked, white-knuckled beside me.

“Sure,” I said. “I’m just driving between the houses.”

Not that there were many houses. In fact, some of the towns are named for how many houses they have, like Five Houses just past St. Peter’s Bay. There were few cars to hit, fortunately, and at last we arrived at our destination. Harbour Lights Inn was a gray two-story house that would have had a fine view of North Lake Harbor, a small collection of colorful fishing shacks and cottages on a red sand beach, if the windows hadn’t been veiled by snow.

Pat and her husband Bruce had decorated the inn with an Asian theme, since Pat had spent so much time in China, and as we ate and admired the artwork and furniture, they filled us in on the neighborhood.

Homer Robertson, we learned, grew up on Munns Road, in the house directly behind the one we were intent on buying. Most people on Munns Road had grown up on the same road or nearby. Like many remote, beautiful islands, making a living on PEI takes energy and ingenuity. Bruce, for instance, was an historian who taught at the university in Charlottetown. Homer had run a store out of our house and did some farming. The house behind Homer’s was occupied by a woman painter who also worked as a hospital technician. Her husband, a retired chemist, raised sheep and cattle. That woman’s brother was a carpenter who resided at the end of our road, and next to him was yet another of their brothers, a lobster fisherman who also raised cattle.

When morning rolled around, Pat announced she was coming to the home inspection with me.

“Thank you, but you really don’t have to do that,” I said.

She raised an eyebrow. “This is my chance to see inside that house. You think I’m going to pass that up?”

Then, when I tried to pay her for our night at the inn and the meals they’d given us, she waved me off.

“I don’t take money from friends,” she declared.

So off we went to see what I hoped would be our island retreat, accompanied by a friend.

Anne of Green Gables Could Have Lived Here

The house was built around 1900, and as the realtor wrestled the key into the lot, I held my breath. Many of the houses we’d looked at on the island had been “renovated” in ways that stripped away all of the original woodwork and character in favor of paneling, dropped ceilings, and linoleum.

Not this one. Stepping into this house was like stepping back in time. We entered through a tiny yellow sun porch furnished with a trio of ragged lawn chairs. The dining room had an enormous oil stove for both cooking and heating and was separated by a wall from a galley kitchen. There were no appliances, other than a tiny gas stove and refrigerator.

What there was, though, was the original woodwork around the door frames and windows, and the original pine floors. Some of the floors had been painted a pleasing green. The floor in the main living room wasn’t pine; it was oak, I guessed, laid in an elegant interlocking pattern. The windows were nearly as tall as I was, flooding the living room with light.

“Oh my God,” Pat exclaimed behind me.

“What?” I asked.

“The furniture,” she said, scarcely breathing. “It was handcrafted in Vermont.”

I examined it then—I’d been too busy looking at the house–and realized the chairs and couch were the sort of elegant, Mission-style furniture I’d only seen in the Sundance catalog.

“That makes sense,” said the realtor. “The current owner is from Vermont. He’s including the furniture in the sale,” she added. “Dishes and artwork, too. Everything.”

“Everything? Really?” I asked.

She shrugged. “He doesn’t want to bother moving it.”

Upstairs, the bedrooms and hallway were wallpapered in floral patterns. “I feel like Anne of Greene Gables,” I said.

“Or we could be in Little House on the Prairie,” Dan said, swatting away a cobweb.

The only anachronism was a bathroom jimmied into the original landing at the top of the stairs. There, a toilet was raised on a wooden step to allow for the plumbing below it. It was framed by one of those same tall windows.

“We’ll call this The Throne Room,” Dan said.

A Bolt Hole for The End of the World

The inspector continued crawling around in the usual places inspectors go: the basement, the attic space, etc., pointing out the plumbing fixtures, oil tank (ancient), and wiring (even older). The house was surrounded by a trio of barns, one small, one medium, one big enough to park a crane inside, and here we discovered more unexpected items: antique tools and boxes of literature about the end of the world.

Most of the literature seemed to be warning of the world ending in 1982 after a series of global disasters—earthquakes, tidal waves, and violent storms—brought about by all nine planets aligning. “Oh, yeah,” Dan said, skimming a pamphlet. “’The Jupiter Effect.’”

I had no idea what he was talking about. Apparently The Jupiter Effect was a bestseller by British astrophysicist and science writer John Gribbin and astronomer Stephen Plagemann, who predicted devastation for our planet because the gravitational pull of the sun on all planets lined up in a row would trigger sunspots, solar winds, and an increase in the Earth’s rotation, all of which would cause things like an earthquake along the San Andreas fault that could level Los Angeles.

“Wow,” I said. “So this guy from Vermont believed the end of the world was coming. That must be why he bought this place. It was his bolt hole.”

“Right,” Dan said. “And now it can be ours.”

We looked at each other. An island bolt hole, with all furniture included?

“We need to think about this,” Dan cautioned.

“Good bones, this house,” the inspector said when he shook our hands. “But you’ll have your work cut out for you. Pretty much everything needs updating, including the roof.”

“That’s a lot of money,” Dan moaned.

“We don’t have to do it all at once,” I said.

“I don’t know. Maybe there are other things we should do with that money,” Dan said.

Maybe he was right, I thought.

A Singing Beach Clinches Our Decision

We said goodbye to the realtor, Pat, and the inspector, and headed home. As we started to turn west toward Souris, I spotted a red dirt road across the street from the end of our road.

“Wait. Let’s see where that goes,” I said.

Dan grumbled, but down that dirt road we went, bumping through the ice-crusted ruts. The weather had turned clear and the sky was a hard metallic blue. The road was only about a quarter-mile long; at the end, I parked and we followed a path over a small dune.

On the other side of it was a stunning beach. This wasn’t like the red sand beaches of the North Shore, but pale pink, with the texture of table sugar. I scuffed through it in my boots and was rewarded by a tinkling whistle.

“It’s a singing beach!” I exclaimed.

Dan looked out across the Northumberland Strait. “What’s that?” He pointed to a hilly looking land mass.

“Cape Breton Island!” I was nearly cartwheeling with excitement. I might have done, except for my boots and my down jacket. And my age.

Though, at that moment, I could have been ten years old again, or twenty. This was our beach, at the end of a red dirt road, at the end of the world, and it was close enough to walk to from our house.

Yes, dear readers, we went through with the sale. In the next post, I’ll tell you all about the good, the bad, and the ugly of moving into a place my niece immediately dubbed “The Murder House” when she visited from England. Stay Tuned for Part III.

How a Sunday Drive Led Me to an Island Home (Part I)

Posted on 08.15.22 | Holly Robinson | 16 Comments

The beach at the end of our red dirt road

I never meant to buy a second home. I certainly never intended to buy one on an island a full 11-hour drive away from my house in Massachusetts.

By that time I’d been coming to Prince Edward Island, Canada, for a decade, ever since I was an impoverished single mom looking for a cheap place to bring my kids on vacation. I couldn’t afford Cape Cod, or even New Hampshire. Prince Edward Island was cheap because it was far, though it didn’t really sink in just how far it was until I actually made my first trip here.

To get to PEI from Massachusetts, you basically drive through so many miles of pine trees in Maine that the state motto should be “Maine: The Infinite State.” Then you drive even more miles through New Brunswick’s rolling hills and Bay of Fundy Views, until finally crossing the architectural feat that is the Confederation Bridge across the Northumberland Strait and landing on an island of red cliffs and lighthouses and lobster suppers. (The first time I came here, the bridge wasn’t built yet, so there was the added excitement of trying to make the ferry and missing it, then having to wait another hour with cranky kids in the car.)

That first trip to PEI was with my friend Emily and her children. We were both divorced and struggling, and we rented a rent-a-junk sort of van that garage bands use to move their equipment, only instead of equipment, we had four kids in the back under age 10. Having this brood basically required us to keep tossing juice boxes and crackers into the back of the rattling van during our odyssey, and stopping by the side of the road more times that we could count to let them pee, since apparently they couldn’t all pee at the same time at gas stations, as requested, which led to Emily and me to imagine one or more of them being gored by moose or eaten by bears. Fewer children would be easier, but still.

Anyway, we landed on the island around midnight. This was back in the days before GPS, so we had to navigate using a map and a flashlight (because the interior van lights were busted) to our destination. The last part of the drive involved a bumpy dirt road which fired up my fantasy life again, only this time I envisioned a serial killer waiting for us in our rental cottage, but I was too tired to care at that point. We managed to make the key work in the lock and let ourselves inside, where we all fell into beds without even undressing.

In the morning, I woke to the sound of fiddle music. I sat up and pulled the curtains, and realized our serial killer’s cottage was actually on a sparkling blue bay lined with great blue herons and tall lupines in bright Disney colors. The fiddle music was coming from across the water, where I could see a church spire, tall and white but spiraled in red like a barber shop pole.

I was instantly besotted with the island, and have been coming for over 20 years now.

After I’d successfully introduced PEI to my second husband, Dan, the first house we bought on PEI was a tiny box, a summer cabin with a separate shower room created from an old ice cream stand. Some years later, Dan and I were staying at a friend’s house on the east end of the island when we happened to run out of milk. (We still had kids in tow, though only two at this point, and already teenagers.) We left them sleeping and drove a few miles to the only store in the area.

“Let’s take a different way back,” I suggested.

It was then, on one of those narrow roads that bisects the island south to north, that I saw it: a field of bright yellow mustard, planted between potato crops, and an empty house across the street.

Mustard fields in flower between potato crops across from our house

“That’s my house! Stop the car!” I yelled.

“The house was like the poor cousin of the famous home and museum of Lucy Maud Montgomery, the author of the beloved Anne of Green Gables books and a steady tourist magnet, especially for Japanese women who all seem to be compelled to buy those red pig-tailed wigs with sunhats so they can pretend to be Anne. It sat, square and simple, overlooking potato fields in front and sheep fields down behind it, with its own three crooked outbuildings. And it was for sale.“

“We have to call,” I said, pointing to the real estate sign.

My husband sighed.

In the U.S., if you call an agent about a house, you’ll have a meeting in ten minutes. But, because this was PEI on a Sunday, nobody was in a hurry. “I’ve got the family here and we’re about to go to the beach,” the agent explained, not at all apologetically.

The house was abandoned, clearly—some of the windows were boarded up. “How much is it? And how many bedrooms and bathrooms?” I asked, pressing my face to the windows. There were the ubiquitous lace curtains, unfortunately, and I couldn’t see a thing.

“Five bedrooms, one and a half baths.”

“I’ll buy it,” I said, ignoring the sound of my husband choking behind me.

“You’ll what?” the agent asked.

“I’ll buy it.” I made an offer. “See if the seller will accept that.”

“Don’t you want to see the house first?”

“I can’t. We have to drive back to the U.S. tomorrow. I’ll see it during the inspection,” I said, and gave him my phone number and address.

“It’s ours,” I said, turning back to my husband. “We found our house!”

“It could be a nightmare inside,” he warned. “Don’t get your hopes up.”

“It could be,” I agreed, but I was sure this was it…

(Stay Tuned for Part II: What We Find When We Step Inside, Including Literature about the End of the World.)

Why We Write: Desk Ecstasy

Posted on 05.12.22 | Holly Robinson | 2 Comments

I recently cleaned out the basket where I toss magazines I don’t have time to read. Naturally, in the process of valiantly trying to cull through old issues, I found several I couldn’t put down and spent more time reading than cleaning.

During this episode, I stumbled on a terrific profile by Alexandra Schwartz in the February 3, 2020 issue of The New Yorker. (Side note: Why didn’t I read this one? I mean, shouldn’t a pandemic be the best possible reason to read every magazine you’ve been hoarding?)

Schwartz’s profile is of literary critic and memoir author Vivian Gornick. One line in particular would have brought me to my knees if I hadn’t already been kneeling by the basket. In describing Gornick’s desire to become a writer, Schwartz says:

“She had known desk ecstasy, the feeling of the world disappearing as you till your mind for the page, and once you experience that it’s hard to do anything else with your life.”

Could there be any better description of why we write, even when we doubt our ability to put words on the page or convince other people to read them?

I first experienced desk ecstasy as a teenager. Convinced I could make good money writing romances, I submitted stories to a romance magazine despite the fact that I’d never even been kissed. I never sold a single story, but it didn’t matter. I wrote those stories while on lunch breaks at a furniture factory where my job was to staple plywood backs onto wooden dressers. (My apologies to anyone out there who bought one. I’m certain your neatly folded clothes went straight through the dresser when the back fell off.)

So what if the factory was hot and loud? I had created a magic portal I could escape through.

Still, I tried hard not to be a writer when I went to college a couple of years later. My obsessive reading led me to plow through nearly every book in our tiny town library by the time I was sixteen, but I majored in biology, determined to have a “real” career. Medicine, maybe.

However, during a single elective course in creative writing, I once again experienced desk ecstasy. This time I couldn’t give up writing. I have never once looked back at this decision with regret.

I have known publishing rejections—too many to count—and successes. Ultimately, though, that score sheet fades in the face of what matters most: the ability to make the world disappear by creating new worlds of my own.

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