June 22, 2022
I have had an extremely difficult time lately. The term for it is Major Depression, along with dealing with certain physical health issues. The best medicine for all of that is hiking, which is great, but I am having a hard time doing even that lately. My schedule for editing the book I recently finished is difficult to keep because I can’t concentrate on much of anything for more than thirty seconds at a time. My daughters are gone, and everywhere I go and drive in the White Mountains I see them and their entire childhood. I feel stuck, and it’s hard to breathe. Sorry not sorry to be so brutally honest. I’ve written before this is a journal of sorts as well as a record-keeping vehicle. My photos on Instagram don’t mention the personal stuff usually, so it’s possible no one but me will read this anyway. I don’t make an effort to publicize this blog. It’s for me, and there is and will be so much on it that someone would really have to be motivated to read all the entries anyway.
It’s harder and harder to do anything, but I forced myself to get up and take the drive down to Saugus this morning. I knew there wasn’t a bunch of trails to walk there and this trip would not require much energy, so I wouldn’t feel pressured to put in any miles or do anything that strenuous. I could just relax and take my time and look at everything.
This is a small site, and the buildings are reconstructions. The museum has some actual artifacts and part of a water wheel, and there’s a film explaining the history. In the early-to-mid 1600s, the Puritans wanted to manufacture iron. Iron was worth more than gold at that point, and this site ended up being one of the few iron works in the Western world. The British sent over an engineer along with a bunch of horribly treated Scottish indentured servants, and the site thrived for a while. Of course, the Native Americans who used this area were driven away, and the museum does have some information posters about that aspect. I do like how each NP site I’ve visited thus far always includes the history of the Native Americans, as well as relevant stories of women and African-Americans.
The nature trail is short and sweet and runs along the river.
Here are a few photos from inside the small museum. More artifacts than I show here are displayed at the site; for some reason, I didn’t take pictures of them.
I plan on visiting a National Wildlife Refuge on the 29th. I’m scheduled to give a talk about hiking with my daughters that evening, and the site is nearby. It will be my last talk about my girls, at least for a long while, and I will be glad when it’s over because it is difficult to move on when I am still here and immersed in everything. This quest was planned and started to prepare me for them leaving, but nothing really prepares you for that after you’ve spent 20 years living for your children.
I am packing up our home – I need to move forward! – and finding all kinds of things that remind myself of the person I was before my ex-husband, then a visiting professor in my Harvard Medical School anatomy class, invited me to go climbing with him at the MIT gym. That was on Halloween 2001, less than two months after I moved to Cambridge and started my graduate program at Harvard. That date permanently altered the course of my life – but I did end up having two children because of it, and those two children are the sun and the moon and the stars to me. And now they have grown, as children are supposed to do, and it is time for me to live without them.
Hopefully my next entry will be more positive. Empty Nest Syndrome is real, but I know I will get through it. Onward.