End of the Road

….a rag rugs long journey

The Sleepy Hollow Rag Rugs hang tag reads in part: “This is a real rag rug, woven of the clothing, curtains, aprons, sheets, blankets, and sewing scraps of our neighbors, friends, and family. If your rug could talk it would tell many stories of life in Waldo County. . . . A rag rug finally wears out, but don’t throw it away. Use it for a dog rug, or wrap the water pipes, or stick it under the wheels the day you’re stuck in the snow.”

Those words came to mind the day I finally confronted the rag rug that’s been slowly deteriorating on our back deck all winter. It’s big, 6’ x 9’, one of the rugs Tom Flagg wove sometime in the 1990s. Tom became a weaver of rag rugs for me after fishing for most of his life, working on an old loom he installed in the shop where he once built lobster traps.

It was one of those life changes we’re all becoming familiar with, when what you were doing with certainty and competence goes away. In Tom’s case the strain on shoulders and joints was becoming too much. For Wally, 33 years in middle school classrooms were enough. After he retired, my husband transitioned to a weaver of rag rugs as well. I think by then Tom had been at it for several years.

Tom and I had a system. I supplied the materials, he did the weaving. Once a year we hauled out the boxes of rag balls in my shop, which were carefully sorted by color, and put them into the back of his truck. We took them to his workshop where he’d have assembled several plywood tables on sawhorses. We dumped out all the boxes – the citrus boxes I’d collected from Hillside Market over the years ­– on the tables and began putting together future rugs.

It took half a large, black garbage bag full of the rag balls to make a big rug, and seeing all that color in front of us was inspiring. “A blue rug,” we’d decide, “light blue”, say, and we’d start filling a bag. “How about some red highlights?” So some of that. “And a little green?” Sure. Back and forth we went, grabbing balls off the tables until we had enough. We both got into it.

Tom the fisherman had developed a good eye for what went with what, for what sold, for what he wanted to weave.

Wally the teacher, took to color just as quickly. One night, not long after he’d started weaving, he woke me up to ask if I thought he ought to add some yellow to the rug he was doing. It was like watching someone’s brain change direction before your eyes.

Because Tom’s loom was so big he could make those six-foot wide rugs, twice as wide as my old barn loom can manage. He made dozens of them over some five or six years, weaving mainly in the winter, and getting out in the woods and on the water in the better weather. Many of those rugs probably went into summer homes or, as I like to imagine, to pristine homes where people take their shoes off inside, where the driveways are paved (no gravel tracked in), and the children who live there wipe their feet before coming in.

So to the rug that wintered on our deck rail. It was a quiet rug, all shades of gray with a few sedate red highlights, a rug I imagine Tom enjoyed weaving. I’d have to talk him into the pink ones or the riotous shades of turquoise and orange. Wally had the same trouble with certain colors until the day a black rug with stripes of shocking pink walked out the door with the first customer of the day. “It’ll never go,” he’d insisted. After that he knew no color boundaries.

Having a rag rug shop has made gift-giving easy. Wedding couples and graduates get a gift certificate to pick out a rug next time they’re in the neighborhood. Our own offspring got their choice for that new apartment or dorm room. The gray and red rug went to our middle son, when he finally came back to the Midcoast after some years as a Boston bartender and a stint teaching English in Taiwan.

The general gist of a conversation between him and his father at the time was “Get a real job.” Evidently his bartending experience was seen as good training for social work, and so Ed settled in Rockland, working for DHHS. He moved into a quirky apartment over the old Good Tern co-op on South Main. Remember when it was there? A little staircase led up from the second floor living room to a tiny bedroom and bath under the eaves.

We said, “come get a rug for your new place,” and he took Tom’s gray and red one. There would be another Rockland apartment, this one on Thomaston Street, and then a move to Damariscotta to the brick apartments next to King Eiders, this time with his wife-to-be. As members in good standing of the boomerang generation, they ended up back with us for a summer the year he got a Masters and became a LCSW (Licensed Clinical Social Worker). The rug would have spent that season rolled up in our barn loft.

Then came the wedding, and a cottage on Levensellar Pond where the big gray rug filled the living room. With a baby on the way and home-ownership on their minds, they moved into the house on Slab City where they’d be for the next ten years. Two more babies, little boys, were born to join their older sister. (The parents would there endure the life-threatening brain cancer of their middle child who thankfully survived. The support of this community raised their spirits every day.)

But the rug had already started down a hard path. The basement, a quiet refuge with a chair and a lamp for reading, had one drawback: the cold cement floor. The big gray rug was just right for keeping feet warm, for someone having a quiet read on a cold winter afternoon, perhaps escaping the chaos of family life.

Then the basement flooded. Or the sewer backed up. Or maybe both. The rug, naturally, was soaked, probably dried outdoors, back on the basement floor. The rags a rug is made of can withstand a lot, but the cotton thread that makes the warp and holds the whole thing together, aren’t so hardy.

Still, the rug made it to 217 Beach Road two years ago, when the second-floor renovation was complete. Ed and his family were moving into the top half of his boyhood home. In the upset of moving one of their cats pooped on the rug or threw up, or maybe both. Spreading it out on the deck railing to clean it off seemed like a good plan.

Yet it wasn’t forgotten. All winter long, I knew it was there. Tracee knew it was there. Everyone knew it was there. It froze and thawed and froze again, and still we left it. The children even used it in front of their tent one night this spring when they had a “Grammy sleep-over” on the deck.

That would be Date Night for their parents, a nice take-out dinner and a Netflix movie.

Then the other day when I attempted to spread out the rug to check its condition, it began to fall apart in my hands. I managed to get it out to the truck for its final trip to the dump. It’s been around, that rug.

What are we supposed to do now?

So for the past two and a half months, like it or not, we’ve been sequestered from each other and from most commerce. Many people haven’t set foot inside a store, have hardly seen another soul outside of their own immediate household. For people who live alone that means they’ve been incredibly isolated.

And now we’re “opening up”. Stores are open, restaurants are starting to open, and most importantly for those of us who’ve just endured a Maine spring, the temperature is above 50 every day and it’s not raining.

This means we can actually see each other outside. The Beach parking lot is full, the Bald Rock Trail lot is full, the lot at Barretts Cove is full, all of which means the trails and shore are getting crowded. And we’re seeing more and more out of state plates.

Maine’s infection rate is still fairly low, especially so outside of the southern counties. This must be appealing to folks coming from hotspots in southern New England and New York; it must feel safe to be here and not there. They come here and reportedly say they like our quarantine rules, but then don’t seem to abide by them.

We’re safe here in part because so many of us have been staying home. Such a dilemma; we need our local economy to operate, but at the same time it needs to be safely done. The other day Tracee and I had lunch on the deck at the Waterfront, then did a little shopping on Main Street. Both the restaurant and the shops were doing things the right way, limiting customers, requiring masks and in one case, gloves.

Yet another friend was in a Belfast store where she was the only one wearing a mask, and the other customers were actually laughing at her. She didn’t say if the staff was masked. What to do? Turn around and walk out? Confront the others with their careless behavior?

I guess we’re on our own. We know the rules and we know the risk. We know we can inadvertently pass this virus on to others. We know how to prevent that. Wear a mask. Stay home if you’re sick or have symptoms.

However, if you see someone violating the Governor’s order, you can call the Sheriff where the practice is first to use education. If you feel there is a violation you can report it via the dispatch center at 338-2040, and a deputy will be assigned.

Sympathy

Condolences to the family of Gail Woodworth, a longtime resident of Atlantic Highway. She passed away recently.

And I’m remembering Becky Bullock Crowther, an old friend who lived in this house of mine, who grew up at the Beach. When I heard her son’s voice on my answering machine the other day, I dreaded calling him back. There was only one reason he’d be calling: his mother had died. I’ll miss her.