Yesterday was an eventful day for me. I followed through on some life altering decisions which I will blog about in the next few days, met neighbors we’ve had for more than a decade, and lost our electrical power for more than 16 hours …

At about supper time, a storm blew in from the northwest, and raised some serious havoc over a rather wide radius. Trees came down all over, people died in lightning strikes, some homes caught fire when they were hit, some streets in Portsmouth accumulated water so fast that cars had to be abandoned. What an evening! We lost our power at the height of the storm, which was at about 6 PM last night, and it came back on at about 10 AM.

We were lucky. We didn’t lose anything, and although the plants in the garden were turned upside down, they all look as if they will survive.

Once the storm was over, Dougie and I took a walk down the road to where a pine tree had come down across the power lines. We took some photos, which I’ve included below. On the way home, some of our neighbors were just coming out onto the street to see what was going on. Herbie and Rita have been neighbors as long as I’ve been here, and he is Doug’s cousin. He’s been through a really terrible time medically for the last 2 years, including a trach, 14 mos on TNP, etc. I’m not clear on how it started exactly, but it initially had something to do with the absolute upper part of his spine. I tried hard to get some names from them … but no one apparently remembered any.

I hadn’t seen Herbie and Rita since before he became ill 2 years ago, and we enjoyed visiting each other. As we were talking, another couple came toward us from down the road … wanting to see what had happened. They introduced themselves as my closest neighbors. None of us had met them before. They’ve been in the house across the street since 1997. The conversation picked up steam, and became even more engaging with the extra input.

While we were all still talking, another couple approached from the same general direction. They are people who live only a few houses away. They bought the land from my Father-in-law, and built in one of the nicest spots available quite a number of years ago. They were very nice, and I was absolutely delighted to meet them.

Eventually, the sun began to set, and the mosquitoes drove each of us back in our separate directions … a little poorer from having had to break things up, but a lot richer from finally all meeting one another.

Here in the Maine countryside … and not just here, really, but in much of New England, people generally keep to themselves, because they don’t want to intrude and be seen as “busy bodies.” Also because we all treasure our privacy. However, if something goes wrong and one of us should need some help that others become aware of, everyone would pull together.

But still, even as I write this, I’m a little horrified on the inside as I realize that I never met the lovely couple who live right across the street from us until they’d been there for 11 years!

It took a power outage and a bit of excitement down the road to draw us all from our computers and televisions … out into the street … to meet the people we’ve been rubbing elbows with for better than a decade.

Is globalized communication shrinking our face-to-face world, causing us to become enclosed in the prisons of our homes? We can make friends with people clear across the country, develop warm relationships with friends in India and Malaysia … but more and more, we don’t even know the people who live right next door.

Friends, we need some balance, no?

Take time to greet someone near you this week - someone you see all the time, but have never spoken to. Even just a smile will do, if you’re bashful. If you can communicate with me across the country, or across the world, then you can also communicate with the people whose faces have become familiar to you, but whom you don’t know.

Oooookies … *gets off the soap box* … now here are some shots from last night …

A bit of extra reading on the storm:

Somehow, that seems to be the theme, right now. Online communities like ours are waking up to the realization that we’re more than just faceless, often nameless, origins for the words which flow across the medical blogosphere’s monitors. We’ve become 3 dimensional, living, breathing, bleeding … warm friends. There are no ages, no sexes, no races, no cultures … we are all friends who happen to be in different places, but who are coming to know each other as well, if not better, than those we rub elbows with on a daily basis.

In Rob’s post yesterday, he alluded to the diversity of his online friends: “I have friends who are from all over the country - even all around the world. I have Hindu, Jewish, Atheist, and Agnostic friends, where I would have never had such an opportunity to get close to people across so many faiths […]” Rob is right. Not only have we found diversity in our friendships, those friendships have developed real depth. Here, in our little corner of the blogosphere, we’ve done what the world needs to do if it wants to survive: we’ve built deep friendships irrespective of culture, race, or religion. Our differences have only been a source of wonder and enlightenment … and have expanded us beyond who we were before we stretched ourselves enough to become one thing only: good friends.

Now, I would like to think that we’re exceptional … in fact, in many ways, I do think so … but it appears as if this is a real movement which is picking up momentum as begins to span the world …

This morning, my son sent me a link to an article on SlashDot … “Over-50s Invade the Social Networking Scene“. I laughed when I read it, and quickly chased down and read the full article: “Face it - oldies want chums, too“. It made think … there’s more to all of this than meets the eye …

It’s not just an unprecedented amount of older people making a rush into Facebook … it’s people of all ages making a rush into friendship. Getting to know people … where nothing matters but who you are - not your looks, not your sex, not your age … simply who you are, and how you give yourself to your friends.

I have a sweet friend that I met in the spring of 2006. I’m sure a lot of you remember him: Dr. Hans Engel. He has the In a Doc’s Mind blog. We were in the process of developing a warm, wonderful friendship, when he had a catastrophic stroke just over a year ago. It damaged his reading and writing abilities, and since that’s how we were communicating, I was afraid that we would lose each other. But we haven’t. Our friendship continued to grow, and now we talk several times a week. We’re improbable friends … but oh, how we enjoy our little chats, and each other!

That’s an example of what these friendships are. They don’t end at the keyboard - although some of us haven’t explored them beyond that point, yet.

We’re living in an age when we no longer know our next door neighbors … we have no clue of who lives down the road … or a half dozen doors away. We’re all pressed together like canned sardines on elevators, in restaurants, checkout lines, church and temple benches … but we no longer know one another. The more tightly pressed down we are with the teeming masses in our daily walk, the lonelier we seem to become. The internet, the blogosphere, has provided a way for us to rebel against the aloneness … and here, we find that our hearts are not as solitary, and some of our deepest thoughts, loves, fears … can be shared in this little haven of ours.

Here, it’s not our bodies doing the talking … it’s our souls.

FaceBook Question #1:

Do you think that as years pass and technology advances, that we’re heading inexorably toward a homogenized electronic social experience which blends reality with fantasy?

Enrico Cantu:

Peggikaye Eagler:

Rob Lamberts:

Pattie Iannitti:

Clay Jones:

Arunn Narasimhan:

Vijay Sadasivam:

My thoughts:

Your turn … :o)

When I was a little girl, I remember that there were certain things that I just couldn’t resist, like climbing up on big rocks, stepping in a puddle to see how deep it was, trying to catch any and every toad I found hiding in the garden, squeezing myself into the kitchen cupboard to hide from my brothers … climbing a tree that had temptingly low branches …

It didn’t matter if I knew I was going to get into trouble … the urge was simply more than I could resist. I can’t count the times I was told to be careful and not get my clothes dirty that I would come home with a tear, or a stain, or skinned knees. It was a forgone conclusion that I’d be far too dirty to be seen in polite company! My poor mother simply thought that I was just another one of her boys … she’d missed having a girl completely!

When I turned into an adolescent, some of those urges faded along with being small enough to hide in the kitchen cupboard … I wasn’t quite as keen on catching toads anymore, and puddles were just - messy. But oooh those trees! I still couldn’t resist climbing those trees … or clambering up onto a large, beautiful rock promontory.

By the time I had my own children, big rocks that are good to climb and trees with delightfully low branches still had appeal. I couldn’t walk past one but that I was drawn to explore its mysteries, and my limits. I was sure that I would be the only grandma who climbed trees with the grandbabies!

But somewhere along the way, that wonderful urge became weaker and weaker … until it was so faint that it was hardly a memory. As my son and I wandered through down a wooded path yesterday, and he had to help me over a fallen tree, I wondered how I had gotten from where I was - to where I am: an adult who can’t keep her feet on the ground, to an old lady who needs help to just get myself past an obstacle that’s not much higher than my knees. I don’t remember the urges and desires fading … it simply seems that I awoke one morning, and realized that they were just - gone. There was a sense of loss … as I wondered how I could have missed their passing.

Little did I know how much had yet to pass me by unnoticed …

The seasons turned, and I watched my own children jump into puddles, climb trees, hide in impossibly small places, detour to every large climbing rock we’d happen by, and collect whatever hapless little toads their little hands were fast enough to nab. It seemed as if no time at all had passed, and I found myself smiling and shaking my head as my adolescents climbed trees and hung precariously from branches. A little time again, and I laughed as I watched my adult children play with their children, as lost in their games as were the babies. I remember feeling shocked one day as I looked out of the camp’s kitchen window to see my 25 year old son perched on top of a 5 foot stump - looking like a statue on a very tall base. And I remembered my own romps …

Several years have passed, and I watch that same son bend intently over a sedentary task, and I feel my heart clench as I notice how many gray hairs he has. When did that happen? When did my little son stop climbing trees? When did he begin to gray? Has he already passed into that time when trees have lost their appeal?

Now, I no longer wonder when I stopped climbing trees and catching frogs - I find myself wondering … when did my children get old enough to no longer want to climb trees, or catch frogs? When did their hair begin to turn gray?

Time leaves its stamp upon all who set foot on the road of life. Master Chronos faithfully updates his seals on each of us, sparing no one, claiming us as his own with an increasingly heavier hand. And we know it - we expect it for ourselves. But our hearts tell us that he should relinquish his grasp on our children - the tiny babes we nursed and dandled on our knees. To mar their delicate skin with wrinkles, and frost their manes with white …

… is a cruelty worse than knowing that we will continue to forget and lose even those those things that we still enjoy. Our loss will progress, until for us, memory is no more; and it will be our children who are gazing, in their turn, upon their babes, and wondering how it could be that their golden curls of childhood are turning into ever widening strands of silver.