Maura Casey's Blog

I am being forced to join a paperless society. I don’t like it one bit. 

There. I’ve said it. Yes, I know it’s good to save trees from being mowed down. I agree that using less paper spares landfills mountains of trash. 

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But I miss reading newspapers on, well, paper, instead of squinting at my phone. 

And I would rather not rely on the internet alone to get my bills. I am beginning to long for the day that I could hold a bill in my hand. Write a check. Put a stamp on an envelope and mail it. 

I spent an hour of my life recently that I will NEVER get back fighting with my wireless phone service provider.  The bill is in my name. Despite this, when there is an issue, the wireless company, Verizon, texts my husband, who texts me.  Absurd. The few times I have tried to sign in to get information on the bill I get a message saying that I need the permission of the “administrator” – my husband. This is maddening. He has a long, melodious Italian name; I have a short, sprightly, Irish name. The bill is addressed to me, not him. I do not seek his permission on this or anything I can think of. 

A few days ago, Verizon texted my husband, who texted me, that we hadn’t paid our bill on time.

I then called the company. I told them I hadn’t gotten a bill that month. “Your bill is now online,”  the company representative said. I told her the company needed to take my husband off the bill as the “administrator” and by the way, I wanted to keep getting a paper bill. The woman on the phone clucked  sympathetically and said, in so many words, if I wanted to continue the quaint habit of getting a paper bill it would now cost me an extra $5 a month. 

Seriously? So I have to read my bill on the internet or pay for the privilege of getting it the old-fashioned way?

Photo by Tasha Kostyuk on Unsplash

I pointed out to the company rep that reading my bill online would require the permission of my husband, like this is some techno-version of the 1850s where married women didn’t even have the rights to the 20 pounds of clothes they were often compelled to wear. She tried to fix the problem, to no avail. Then another representative tried, too. How complicated could this be? Frustrated, I hung up, still wondering why I couldn’t still get a paper bill in the mail as I always had.

It turns out that this is a thing. There’s no law against companies charging to send paper bills. More and more businesses are turning to it as a way to cut costs and milk customers even more. Banks, credit card companies and other  wireless phone companies are in on the act. 

The movement to drop paper has even affected my husband’s transactions at the farmers market, now in full swing  as we approach the middle of summer. Our state used to distribute coupon books to the elderly at senior centers to give them more to spend at farmers markets. Each small booklet held five $3 coupons. Customers could use the coupons like cash to purchase fruit and veggies. They got fresh food; Pete deposited the coupons like checks in his farm account. 

A few years ago the state forced customers to use a mobile app to get the same benefits the paper coupons once provided.  Which, to me, begged the question. What if you can’t afford a smartphone? Or get confused about how to download yet another app? Eventually the state offered the option of getting a plastic card with the benefits loaded on. But it is clear that technology is herding us all in the same direction - more apps, more staring at computer screens, more passwords to remember and email spam to delete. 

More living life online. 

Last year, on an out-of-state business trip, I ordered breakfast at a diner which offered a variety of local and national newspapers for customers to read while waiting to be served.  It was a dimly remembered, but entirely relaxing few minutes to leaf through pages of a sports section or an editorial page rather than peering at my phone. It spared me the irritation of trying - again - to remember one or more obscure passwords for a website, or navigate the occasional, dreaded, two-factor sign-ins that make me want to pitch my phone out the nearest window, wondering whether I own it, or it owns me. 

It was a 1990s experience and no permission was needed. 

After hanging up on Verizon,  I wormed into the corners of the company website to figure out why my husband was affixed as the lord of a cell phone bill that has always been addressed to me. I finally found the problem. Turns out that it wasn’t an anti-feminist plot; someone checked the wrong permissions box when we signed up for our plan years ago. I unchecked the box. Now, rest assured, I can read the bill without Pete’s imprimatur.  The marriage is saved.

But I still can’t get a paper bill in the mail for free. 

I was in Paris last week. The city vibrated with heat. Temperatures for a few days rose to about 39 degrees Celsius/102 degrees Fahrenheit.

Yet, “no whining on the yacht,” as my friend Connie says. It was Paris, after all, and I was thrilled to be there. The temperatures took away some choices and offered others. No bicycle tour of the city for me. On the plus side, the lines to the Cathedral of Notre Dame were short or nonexistent so I was able to go to that beautiful landmark twice, once hearing Mass.

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I also wanted to wanted to take the World War II tour, which showcased settings of the city’s darkest hours, during Nazi occupation between 1940 and 1944. Alas, the tour required two hours of walking, so that, too, was off the table.

Instead, one thought-provoking sign of those difficult years found me.

One afternoon I noticed flowers sticking out of the wall of a building. Upon closer inspection, I saw that the small bouquet was very deliberately fastened below a plaque attached to the stone wall. I remembered just enough college French to be able to translate:

In memory of the children, students of this school deported from 1942 to 1944 because they were born Jews, innocent victims of Nazi barbarism, with the active complicity of the Vichy government. They were exterminated in the death camps. Let us never forget them.

The Vichy government began after the Nazi takeover and collaborated with German rule. They did the Nazis’ work for them. Vichy France targeted Jews in increasingly harsh ways, stealing their property, arresting and imprisoning them. In 1942, roundups began, and of the 76,000 Jews sent to concentration camps during the following two years (mostly Auschwitz-Birkenau), only about 2,500 survived.

The memorial plaque on the outside wall of an elementary school is one of a number of similar such markers in Paris, I discovered later. But in the present, gazing at the words, I had three reactions:

Good for the French to mark the terrible occurrences that took place here.

Yet how easy it is to mourn injustice that took place more than 60 years in the past.

Who are the Vichy-type collaborators in America?

Of course we have them, I realized instantly as I stared up at the marker. Our very own Vichy branch of government can be found in the conservative majority of our Supreme Court, which has imposed one loathsome decision after another.

There wouldn’t even be a six-to-three conservative majority on the court without Republicans smashing through legislative procedures in unprecedented ways. The Senate confirmed President Trump’s pick, Justice Neil Gorsuch, in 2017 only after Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked President Barack Obama’s nominee for 10 months, arguing the vote should not take place in a presidential election year. Then, when another vacancy opened six weeks before the 2020 presidential election, in a move of staggering hypocrisy, McConnell rammed through hearings and a vote on Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whisking her onto the court a mere week before the election of Democrat Joe Biden.

There is enough in the conservative majority’s latest opinions to rail against - lifting virtually any regulations on gun use, and opening the floodgates even more to big money in political campaigns.

But I’ll mention just one Supreme Court decision that is eerily similar to the manner in which Jews were smeared in early 1930s Germany. In Mullin v. Doe last month, the six-member majority said that President Trump could end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians brought into America.

Congress passed the TPS program in 1990. It is a temporary status of immigration extended to specific countries that are unsafe to live in due to armed conflict or extraordinary circumstances. The U.S. State Department has maintained its highest level-four warning against travel to Haiti and travel to Syria because of “rampant, violent crime,” widespread kidnapping, terrorism and armed conflict. The warnings are extraordinarily blunt. Before traveling to Syria, for example, travelers are advised to update their wills.

To end TPS, the Department of Homeland Security secretary is compelled to consult with other departments of the federal government, which Secretary Kristi Noem did not do. The law mandates that the decision to terminate could not be made out of discriminatory intent. Both conditions should have been enough to continue the program.

Donald Trump has been repeatedly vitriolic and crude in his characterization of the 330,000 Haitians in the United States under the program, railing against them during his presidential campaign and spreading the lie on national television that they eat their neighbors’ pets. Yet Justice Samuel Alito airily stated in his majority opinion that Trump’s statements were not “overtly racial.”

So Justice Elana Kagan stated, in an extraordinary dissent, just what Trump said: Haitians “probably have AIDS.” Haiti is a “shithole country,” which is “filthy, dirty, disgusting.” Haitian immigration is “like a death wish for our country.” Haitians are “poisoning the blood” of the nation. “The references — of filth, disease and primitiveness — are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes,” she wrote.

Kagan is right. Moreover, the things Trump said about Haitians sound exactly like what the Nazis said about Jews. And the actions of the Supreme Court sound like the Vichy government to me.

I don’t mean to make a false equivalence here. Nobody is marching Haitians off to extermination camps. But forcing more than 300,000 of them to go back to their country is a death sentence for many, if not most. It is the equivalent of emptying the population of Orlando, Florida, or Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s four times more than the number of Jews the Vichy government of France deported during World War II.

And if Alito sees no overt racism in Trump’s statements, what would he consider evidence of bigotry? Would he see a gathering of the Ku Klux Klan as the equivalent of a Rotary meeting?

The marker in France felt like a warning. Are we doomed to have markers placed decades from now mourning this cruel and inexplicable decision because of the likely, devastating result if thousands are sent away?

Some meetings are so long overdue that we feel extraordinarily lucky when they finally occur. That was the case with my reunion with Dr. Mary Hawking last week at her home north of London.

Mary was my sister Ellen’s brilliant, young physician when Ellen was critically ill with kidney disease. (She ended up having a kidney transplant in 1970.) Unlike American physicians at that time, who were invariably male and often had a distant professional demeanor, Mary stuck out, and not just because she was female and from Great Britain. She was always kind and willing to get to know her patients and their families She came to our family cottage on an island on Lake Ontario. She hired me to walk her dog, Bran. When I was 12, she took me to my first opera.

After five years in the United States, Mary moved back to her native United Kingdom. We exchanged a few letters, but contact diminished and then dropped off. And that was that.

That is, until I decided to write a memoir about my sister’s illness and how it shaped my childhood and our family. As I began to write “Saving Ellen: A Memoir of Hope and Recovery” during the COVID-19 pandemic six years ago, I knew I needed to try to find Ellen’s doctor. As Mary is the sister of the late physicist Stephen Hawking, it took me about five minutes to find his foundation and send an email to Mary through the organization. She replied within hours.

So began a period of multiple interviews over the time it took me to write my book.

When we began the interviews in June 2020, there were questions about my sister Ellen, who, God rest her kind heart, has been dead for nearly 35 years. And of course about my mother, with whom Mary had extensive discussions over the risk of donating a kidney to Ellen. (Mom won that argument, though it shortened her life.)

But one of Mary’s first questions was about Bran, her gigantic German shepherd, who looked fierce, even terrifying, but who had the sweetness of a Krispy Kreme doughnut.

“What happened to my dog?” Mary asked.

Before Mary came to the United States from the United Kingdom, she weighed the high crime rate and decided she had to either buy a gun or get a dog. She decided that the safer choice was a dog and picked Bran, who even as a puppy promised to grow to be one very large German shepherd. When either Mary or I walked him, oncoming pedestrians would often cross the street to avoid us.

But as Mary prepared to move back to the United Kingdom, she knew she had to leave Bran behind. British law then mandated that pets like Bran had to be quarantined for six months. It was a deal breaker.

My mother reassured her. She knew of a good family, a couple, Joe and Barbara, who had two teenaged boys. They would be glad to have Bran.

After Mary asked about Bran, I contacted Barbara’s sister, Judy, as Barbara had passed away. “Bran?” Judy said. “The family adored him. My sister had land with room for him to roam. He had a great life.”

Dr. Mary Hawking, right, and me last week. Sorry I don’t have a picture of Bran!

This past week, when Mary and I were in the same room for the first time in 50-plus years, we talked about many things, but lingered on our memories of Bran and the day that he had the last bark.

Before she returned to the United Kingdom, Mary visited us at our island cottage one more time. The island was separated from the mainland by a harbor and narrow channel less than 200 yards wide.

That day, Joe and Barbara had business at a marina directly across the channel from our cottage. They brought Bran along for the ride.

Bran jumped out of their truck and his ears perked up. He stared at our cottage across the channel. With his acute hearing, he detected the voice of his beloved former owner, Mary.

He barked once, and immediately bolted to the end of a dock and made a flying dive. Looking like a canine sea monster with his big head and broad paws cutting a swath through the water, Bran swam across the channel, scrambled up on solid ground and bounded up 27 steps to see Mary.

I was a teenager and I watched, open-mouthed, along with others, at the big dog’s determination. Bran was happy with his new home, with land to explore and boys to roughhouse with. But he was delighted to see Mary again.

Decades later, at her home in Dunstable last week, of all the many things we talked about, Mary and I both marveled at that shared memory.

The big German shepherd never saw Mary again, or me, for that matter. But he did, indeed, have a great life. Everybody loved him. And blessedly, he died of old age.

We have a strawberry field that looks like rubies are scattered everywhere. There are so many strawberries it is hard to avoid stepping on some.

The field is near a small forested area on our property. Early in the day it is in complete shade - a blessing since the weather is hot by noon. So I was out there the last few mornings. The air was sweet and cool. I listened to the birds, the flute-like call of a wood thrush and a particularly loud Carolina wren, and felt like I was in Eden.

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But harvesting is labor intensive, one reason why Pete made the field a “Pick your own” operation. People can buy the strawberries at a reduced rate, as long as they do the bending and picking on their own.

That’s when I realized that for some, strawberry picking isn’t a mere tradition.

It’s a cult. But a really, really nice one.

Whole families sometimes arrive armed with sun hats and baskets. With laser focus and military precision, they work their way through the rows and finish, content, having guaranteed dessert for days.

This morning’s view

And still the fruit proliferates. Which is a good thing. Since Pete doesn’t spray any chemicals on them, we share the fruit with critters once in awhile.

Last year Pete got elaborate towers of pots so we could grow strawberries not just in our fields, but our back deck. The idea was that in the morning we could pick strawberries for our cereal or pancakes, instead of walking through grass and dew 200 feet from the house to grab a few berries.

Ha.

We may have harvested a handful before a chipmunk set up shop nearby.

He got so fat on strawberries I thought he was going to need insulin shots or Chipmunk Weight Watchers. It’s a wonder he could waddle up the stairs to grasp the objects of his desire.

The strawberries are growing in towers again this year. I haven’t seen him, so maybe we’ll have a better chance of grabbing the fruit for our cereal after all.

Meantime, I am content to make my great-grandmother’s strawberry shortcake recipe for dessert, even though if I keep this up I will be as fat as our chipmunk friend.

Towers of strawberries. Not quite ripe yet.

My great-grandmother, known to all as Nana, was what I think of as a take-no-prisoners woman. Stories about her abound. Although she died in 1952, she is still a legend in our family.

She and her daughter, my grandmother, survived the Titusville (Penn,) Flood of 1892, a terrifying disaster in which hundreds died. She raised her daughter on her own after her husband sought his fortune working on the Panama Canal and soon died there, presumably from disease. Nana was small, blunt, and forthright. And she had a recipe for strawberry shortcake that she stole when a neighbor refused to share it with her, Nana waited until her neighbor left her house, then walked in, helped herself to her recipe box, found the recipe and copied it. Lucky for her that few locked their doors in those days.

Lucky for us, too. All of her descendants have baked it for decades. I published this recipe three years ago, but it’s worth reprinting. Enjoy this product of Nana’s life of crime!

Nana’s Stolen Shortcake  

Grease a square pan, or a muffin tin, and preheat the oven to 375 degrees fahrenheit/190 degrees celsius

Combine in a large bowl: 

2 cups flour 

2 teaspoons baking powder 

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup of butter cut in pieces (1/2 stick) 

(either room temp which makes this easy or cut in cold butter with two knives). 

Mix. 

Beat in: 

One egg, slightly beaten 

1/3 cup sugar 

1/2 cup milk

(I often throw in some cinnamon)

One teaspoon vanilla 

Bake, 30-35 minutes. 

The top should be golden brown.

Serve warm, with melted butter. Drench with strawberries, cut up, mashed, with some sugar added. Enjoy!

Every year in late spring, my mother would walk into the house from our backyard and say with satisfaction, “The bride is in bloom.”

The bride was not a person, but a bush heavy with white flowers that would appear as the weather warmed in our tiny, urban backyard. Also called the pearl bush, the flowers cluster on branches which bend downward, looking like a bridal veil.

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My mother was a skilled gardener, but the location of our house on the west side of Buffalo fought her at every turn. When she and my father bought the Victorian-era structure the yard ended at the red brick wall of a movie theater behind our house. Yet the wall lent the plot of land an intimate feel, like a hidden courtyard. It muffled the constant traffic noise of nearby Elmwood avenue, with its wheezing buses and shrieking ambulances.

Alas, in less than two years the Elmwood Theater was torn down to make way for a bank parking lot. The brick wall was replaced by a chain link fence. The view was unremittingly ugly. In summer the asphalt radiated heat. In winter it was covered in drifts of snow that eventually became black with dirt, salt and sand.

Stars of Bethlehem, running amok in our yard

Still my mother tried to wrest some beauty from the yard. She had my two brothers and our father get flagstones from a dilapidated mansion a few blocks away that itself was slated for the wrecking ball. They did, but the flagstones mostly sat in piles at the end of the driveway. None of us made it a priority to help her complete her vision for the yard. But she persisted in her efforts. She planted tulips, lilies of the valley and hyacinth. Together she and I went into the backyards of once-grand homes, now abandoned and falling apart, and dug up bulbs of Stars of Bethlehem, replanting them in the yard. Mom planted two Kwanzan cherry trees. In spring, their branches were covered in double pink blossoms, reaching up like they were glad to see us.

The Elmwood Theater before it was torn down.

Yet we kids never used the yard much. It was too small for games. The view was grim.

The years passed. So did my mother, then my dad. My sister Ellen insisted on buying the house when Dad died. It was a money pit. Dad never maintained it. That neglect showed. I always thought Ellen bought the place because she wasn’t ready say goodbye to our parents. But in four years she would see them again. When Ellen’s estate sold the house it was slated to be torn down for yes, another parking lot, this time for a nearby bar. I visited the house once again to dig up some bulbs before the entire lot was paved over.

That’s when I could see it, in the spring sunshine, from an upstairs window: The outline of a Japanese rock garden. Mom must have planned it all along and there it was: The Japanese cherry trees, a riot of pink; the bride in full bloom, blossoms cascading and nearby, the stacked-up piles of flagstone. Why hadn’t we made it a priority to take an afternoon, buy some sand, do some digging and imbed the flat stones in the garden? Mom asked nothing for herself and it would have given her so much joy. The thoughts haunted me as I dug up the Stars of Bethlehem. The flowers could not quell regret, but they had become a form of remembrance.

I planted the Stars of Bethlehem around our rural home, but to my disappointment, they never bloomed. A few months later I suffered a miscarriage. It was spring. I bought the biggest bleeding heart bush I could find and planted it to comfort my own bleeding heart. The bush grew bigger every year.

Bleeding hearts in front of our house

When we sold our house and moved midwinter, I dug up the bush and the soil around it, and replanted it at our new home on a quiet country lane.

As the weather thawed, the bleeding heart branched out and bloomed, content in its new environment. And, somehow, the Stars of Bethlehem appeared, too, as if my mother wanted to send comfort.

Every spring, scattered in the grass, Stars of Bethlehem now bloom in unexpected places. I think of them as my mother waving to me. “Hi, Mom!” I say, as I admire them.

And the bleeding heart? I have split and replanted the original many times now, dividing it in fall and giving some away to friends. This month, all the bushes in front of the house and in our backyard bloomed once again. There are six of them now, 34 years after I brought the mother plant home.

When I see them, I smile, touch the delicate flowers and I whisper, “Hello, love. I haven’t forgotten you.”

We just finished Memorial Day in America, the day when we honor those who died on battlefields defending our country. Parades, speeches and trumpets playing Taps abounded.

My social media feed was replete with pictures of soldiers and everyone’s memories of them, whether or not they died in the middle of a war or warm in their beds decades later. Such attention and gratitude is absolutely right and honorable.

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Even I got into the act, posting a picture on Facebook of my mother’s grave with its proud “WWII” etched at the top, indicating that she was a veteran, and its ever-present little American flag in the grass before her tombstone.

But we have gone from pride in the selfless military service of those who agreed to walk through hell for America to canonizing for sainthood absolutely anything to do with the military.

And even my mother, Cpl. Jane Irene Murray, would have said that the government and the country have gone overboard.

This is my Mom when she served in the Army as a corporal., and the medals she earned. The medal second from the right has the head of the helmeted Athena, goddess of war, the symbol of the Woman’s Army Corps. Women were fully integrated into the Army in the 1970s and the Women’s Army Corps disbanded.

Right now, the Trump Administration has proposed a $1.5 trillion budget for the military, an incredible 44 percent increase over an equally jaw-dropping $895 billion that is the current budget, the largest in history. (With supplemental money passed for the Pentagon the true figure is about $965 billion.) The current American budget is more than the combined totals of the next 10 countries which spend the most on the military. The proposed budget would cut programs that help the poor to buy more bombs.

This is utter insanity. It makes the U.S. and the world less safe and vulnerable to presidents with itchy trigger fingers - like the current one. Why negotiate when you can drop a bomb? Why discuss when you can send aircraft carriers to do the talking?

Our military budget is the nation’s biggest jobs program, with projects in virtually every congressional district. So it grows ever-larger and makes it harder to cut.

But the other reason is that we elevate people in the military.

Until Vietnam, it’s safe to say that veterans, most of whom were drafted, were thought simply to have done their duty. Perhaps in retrospect our admiration grew, particularly for those who joined the armed forces during World War II to fight the Nazi menace. No wonder we call them the Greatest Generation. They - my mother among them - helped to save the world.

But Vietnam was so unpopular that vets were shamefully subject to unrelenting insults and vitriol. They were called baby killers, murderers and worse. This, despite the fact that so many who were sent overseas were bewildered boys who were drafted and dropped into a nightmare from which many never emerged. They came home to find peace, and instead were reviled.

That was a disgrace.

But now, Americans have overcompensated. We are told, over and over again, that we owe our freedom to those who serve in the military. That we would not have any rights at all unless people donned a uniform and marched off to battle.

That is a too-narrow viewpoint at best, propaganda at worst, and political opportunism on the part of the government.

I see many people who fought for our rights who have gone unrecognized.

There is little public applause for the aging Freedom Riders who risked their lives to register Black voters in the South in the 1960s, for students vilified for integrating public schools, protesters who marched so that gays not be jailed, injured or fired for their sexual preference, for people attacked for questioning the status quo, for playwrights, journalists and others who shone a light on injustice or lawyers who went to court defending the innocent.

In my view, those people fought for the rights of everyone.

I see zero correlation between fighting for freedom and the Korean War, the Vietnam War (based on a lie), the war in Iraq (based on a lie), the present war in Iran (based on an impulse) and all the military acts that our current commander-in-chief has indulged in: dropping bombs on Venezuela, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria and Somalia, among others.

Any see-no-evil attitude towards the military makes a bloated military budget inevitable, and it becomes a vicious circle. The size of our military budget is a clear and present danger.

It’s time for a reset.

I’ve learned a lot in the last year.

In spring of 2025, my book, “Saving Ellen: A Memoir of Hope and Recovery,” was published. Lucky me to be a debut author - not, God knows, to be confused with a debutante - at the youthful age of 67. I planned for post-publication like a military invasion. The days when an author has a fairy godmother to arrange publicity is mostly in the past, if it ever really existed. Marketing would mostly be on me.

Because we are living in a tsunami of books due to the self-publishing revolution, a book is published every seven seconds. Last year, in the United States, 4.6 million books were published, according to Publisher’s Weekly, 15 times the number of books published 20 years before. Publisher’s Weekly is paywalled, so those statistics can be found in this web post from Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

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I knew that getting any attention for the book would be a daunting task. All that said, it’s been tougher in some ways and more rewarding in welcome, surprising ways.

Among other occasions, in 13 months, I spoke at or attended:

Ten libraries

Four bookstores

One college

Three conferences or meetings

Had a table at two book fairs

Spoke on eight podcasts

Signed books and taught writing at the Okoboji Writers’ and Songwriters’ Retreat in Iowa.

Attended five book clubs (one in person and the others via zoom) where members read the book and were eager to discuss it.

The book was also the subject of four articles in newspapers, three magazines, and three (blessedly favorable) book reviews.

None of this, you may be unsurprised to hear, resulted in an invitation to a second book deal, a movie, an interview on The Today Show or an appearance on the NY Times bestseller list.

Seeing my book displayed in a bookstore will never get old.

There have been speaking engagements at bookstores and libraries where hardly anyone showed up and one memorable occasion when nobody at all showed. (It was a frigid evening in February; I didn’t take it personally). And there was another occasion, at a local college, where 40 arrived and nearly every seat was filled, proving that you just never know how these things will go.

The book opens up with my childhood habit of stealing from my father while he slept so I could give the money to my mother. Many people remarked on that scene, and it has become a common occurrence for women to whisper to me while handing me a book to sign, “I stole from my father too.” Proving, once again, that none of us outgrows childhood without some pain.

Early on, The Buffalo News did a generous and lengthy article on my roots in the city and the book. But what is, perhaps, a commentary on the decline of newspapers, more people from my past contacted me after an events and arts magazine, Buffalo Spree, published an article in January. Mary, a former roommate, got in touch; so did Carol, a friend from my teenage karate lessons, as did Jim and Kevin, both of whom were ushers at my wedding and an unending source of laughs when I was in college. What gifts, to have these precious people in my life again. Former classmates from graduate school were incredibly kind during an appearance in Washington, D.C. One even wrote about the book in his own Substack (Here’s looking at you, Jim Buie!)

In the year since publication, I’ve been assured sales would increase once I publish another book. Untold numbers of people have asked, what am I working on now and when will it be ready? It’s enough to give me a panic attack. I have only begun to formulate an answer to those questions.

I am in awe of authors and friends such as Luanne Rice, J. Courtney Sullivan, Jeff Benedict and Nicole Baart in this regard. They seem to pop out books every two years or so like they are baking muffins. They make it look easy. I know. Appearances can be deceiving.

Yet I’m a turtle, not a hare.

On August 4th, I’ll be in Wilson, NY at the invitation of the town’s library. My book’s settings are divided between Buffalo, N.Y., the town of Wilson, and nearby Lake Ontario, on which we had a summer cottage. I renamed Wilson in my memoir, but, to my delight, that didn’t fool anyone in town. I am honored by the invitation and the occasion will be a homecoming. Wilson’s library provided endless books all the summers of my childhood. Like all libraries, it is holy ground.

By then, I hope I will be better prepared to answer the question of, “When will you write the next book?” In the meantime, I am beyond grateful I wrote even one.

About 10 days ago I saw a blanket of yellow flowers in the field across the street, blooming in the morning dew. They had appeared overnight.

That’s when I knew it was time.

When my husband began his farm on our land 15 years ago, there was one crop for which I lobbied hard. Despite my white hair, I said, “I’m an Irish girl at heart. Make me happy and plant potatoes.”

So he did. Every year, he waits for dandelions to bloom. Then he plants potatoes.

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If it was an old wives’ tale that potatoes are best planted when the weeds bloom, it is one that is many centuries old. The timing of planting, in fact, is now supported by the science known as phenology. Dandelions, that curse of gardeners everywhere, have maddeningly long roots that burrow deep into the soil. Warmth, soil temperature and the length of day all influence their growth and when they flower, the soil temperature for potatoes is just right when the sunny blooms appear.

The view across the street from our house, with its bumper crop of dandelions.

Nobody approved of Pete starting his farm more than my cousin Sara Murray, who lived on the family farm outside of Westport, County Mayo. The first topic of our transatlantic phone calls during the warm weather always involved the potato crop. During one summer when we had a particularly robust yield, I said to Sara, half-joking, that I should send her some of our potatoes. There was a silence, and then she said, her voice lilting with hilarity, “A Yank sending an Irishman potatoes? Now THAT would be a news story!”

Indeed.

So with the dandelions in their first bloom, we examined all the seed potatoes we were to plant — five different kinds.

“I ordered too many,” Pete sighed, and I had to agree. We had bags and bags of organic seed potatoes, freshly arrived from the Maine Potato Lady. (That’s a company, not a person.) I wondered where he would put them all. “I’ll plow a new field,” he said. Still, we had plenty of room in the land he had already prepared. So he cut the potatoes up, leaving three eyes in each piece, applied a treatment to the tubers and after a day, we brought them out to the fields to plant. Pete dug the trenches, and I placed the potatoes, eyes up, one after another with room to grow.

Customers at farmers markets go wild for fingerlings, the long, small, slim potatoes.

Their names sound like the nicknames of illegal drugs: Magic Mollies, Blue Ecstasy.

Others are old friends. Pinto Gold is a lovely combination of golden and red potatoes. The purple potatoes have such a vibrant color they look like jewels when they come out of the earth. But that won’t be for another few months.

Pete does nearly all of the farm work himself, but he knows I’m always willing to get my hands in the dirt to plant potatoes. Maybe it’s swirling in my DNA, with ancestral memory of the Irish famine.

In a tragic missed opportunity, in 1845, the first difficult year of the blight that destroyed most of Ireland’s potato crop, there was a letter published that offered a tantalizing clue to a solution. It was a chemical that would have fended off the disease that caused the hunger and deaths of hundreds of thousands and years of suffering. The London-based Gardeners’ Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette published a letter by one Matthew Moggridge, who lived near a smelting factory. The nearer a potato field was to the factory chimney, which belched out copper smoke, the more free of disease were the potatoes. The fields within 200 feet of the chimney were completely untouched, he wrote.

Decades would pass before spreading copper sulfate on leaves was found to prevent the blight that altered Irish history. Such a simple solution, but one that was then unknown.

My satisfaction in planting tubers might have its roots in the echoes of that complicated history, but I think it’s far simpler than that.

The work of writing, unlike my husband’s work of farming, is not physical at all. It mostly resides between my ears. There is a real satisfaction in engaging in activities that get me out of my own head. I plant, something grows, I can feed it to my family. I can measure it. There’s nothing for me to intellectualize, thank goodness.

I’m not ready to give up my pen for a shovel anytime soon, but let the potatoes grow. And dandelions? They have served their one positive purpose, so from here on out, I wish them only limited success.

Two things happened this week that gave me rare hope about the future of the United States.

One involved the king of Great Britain, Charles III.

The other came from my beloved hometown of Buffalo.

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Both combined to show that there is a glimpse of a kinder, stronger, even wiser United States than anything the Trump administration has shown to the world in 15 months.

First: Who’d have thought years ago that it would take a king, addressing (transcript) a joint session of Congress, to remind America what democracy is all about? (video link)

To help the 535 members of Congress that they are more, should be greater, than the bullied, servile lapdogs too many have become since Donald Trump took office? That the America that has stood up for NATO, that came to the defense of Ukraine, is worthy of rising again?

Buffalo Sabres fans belting out the Canadian national anthem (video imbedded)

The king is far too polite to say, “Exactly what have you people been THINKING since January of last year?” But he got his message across nonetheless, with tact, clarity and wry humor.

He reminded Congress of how they are supposed to act, and of our shared roots. “The U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society has calculated that Magna Carta is cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.” (Emphasis mine)

He also said, “…it is here in these very halls that this spirit of liberty and the promise of America’s founders is present in every session and every vote cast. Not by the will of one, but by the deliberation of many.” (Emphasis mine) Congress loudly applauded.

He reminded Congress that Great Britain has stood with America in conflicts for the last 100 years and NATO came to the aid of America after 9/11, the only time that Article Five of the organization’s mutual aid agreement was ever invoked.

And he added, “Today, Mr. Speaker, that same, unyielding resolve is needed for the defense of Ukraine and her most courageous people.”

Congress roared its approval. Members leaped to their feet.

What King Charles staged was less a speech and more an intervention. He reminded members of Congress of their higher calling; that they are capable of much more than they have shown lately.

Of course, the only true intervention can come from American voters, whose biggest mistake is sitting in the Oval Office right now, wreaking havoc. And interventions are powerful, but are, by nature, temporary. Still, the messenger and the message made a welcome impact.

The second sign of hope came from my hometown of Buffalo.

The city has had a tradition for decades: When the Buffalo Sabres hockey team plays at home, both the Canadian and American anthems are sung. It doesn’t matter if the Sabres are playing another American team; the words of “O, Canada” echo to the rafters.

The only other American city that follows this tradition is Detroit which, like Buffalo, is a city on the Canadian border. Everyone in Buffalo grows up knowing the words to the Canadian anthem; as a vestige of our childhoods, I do and my husband does, too, even though we haven’t lived in Buffalo for 40-plus years.

This affection we feel toward our northern neighbor has made it all more heartbreaking for us to watch as Trump has been vicious, belittling, and rude to Canada, outrageously saying it should become America’s 51st state and insulting beyond all reason.

So what happened in Buffalo? As usual, before the Sabres took to the ice against the Boston Bruins, a woman began to sing the Canadian national anthem. Unfortunately, the microphone malfunctioned. Her voice could not be heard after the first few words.

It didn’t matter.

After a moment’s hesitation, the crowd, dominated by people from Buffalo and at least some Canadians who drove across the Peace Bridge to attend, took up the words and began to sing those beautiful verses without a missing a beat, their voices getting clearer and stronger, together:

O, Canada, our home and native land

True patriot love, in all of us command,

With glowing hearts we see thee rise,

The true North strong and free.

From far and wide, O Canada,

We stand on guard for thee…

By the end, most of the 19,000, American-majority crowd were singing the Canadian national anthem, showing the traditional respect and affection we have always had for that wise and good country.

And together, the crowd roared their approval when they finished.

The moment has gone viral. I am profoundly moved whenever I see the video, not just because of the grace of the act, but because it symbolizes the promise of a return to decency. I also know, no matter what spews out of this administration, that given the chance, Americans would stand on guard for Canada. And despite everything, I believe Canada would stand on guard for us, too.

A year ago I set Google alerts with my name. Skyhorse Publishing was about to release my first book, and I wanted to be notified if articles or reviews about it came out. (One can always hope.) The settings worked; I did, indeed, get an email every time Maura Casey got ink somewhere.

But which one?

Google alerts have made me meet, virtually, my doppelgängers from all over the country.

“Doppelgänger “ is an imprecise term in this context. It implies that we look alike, and of course, we don’t. Our ages are all over the place. The name Maura Casey may not be Jane Doe, but it is remarkably common.

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Casey is the most ordinary Irish names, behind the likes of Murphy, Sullivan and Kelly. So this was not unexpected. But the combination of my first and last names occurs far more often than I once thought.

Photo by Tooth and Toad on Unsplash

There’s the Maura Casey who is a National Weather Service meteorologist. She keeps an eye on conditions out west. With my google alerts, I can tell you all about the snowpack in the mountains of Montana, the danger of wildfires, and high winds. Better yet, her title reveals that she is a “warning coordinator.” We all need a warning coordinator in our lives, and I’m delighted to hear that Maura Casey is vigilant.

There’s more, of course. One Maura Casey is a physical therapist in New York City. Another Maura Casey is a pharmacist in Pennsylvania. Maura Casey also competes in canoe races in Ireland - who knew?

Another Maura Casey is a sommelier - a wine expert. From her website: “About a decade ago I found myself in wine and spirits and haven’t looked back.” Yup, that happened to me, once. Speaking from the vantage of four decades of sobriety, I hope that her journey is smoother than my own. I was a whiskey woman, though. Maybe I would have had better luck sticking to wine.

There’s also a Maura Casey who is a realtor in Scottsdale, Ariz. I’ve known about her ever since I tried to buy the domain name of mauracasey.com and discovered she grabbed it first. She also got mauracasey@gmail.com. She used to be a marathon runner, too, putting my little 5K races to shame. Clearly, Maura Casey is quicker on her feet and on the uptake than I am, or at least more internet-savvy.

This array of people with whom I share my name isn’t entirely a surprise. When my husband and I lived in Somerville, Mass., and were in the process of buying our first house in the 1980s, my financial records got mixed up with a Maura Casey who either worked for or was on the Boston City Council. Then and now, Boston is the city with the highest percentage of people of Irish descent in America, so at the time I was more amused than startled. I was also grateful that she wasn’t a bank robber.

I get a kick out of knowing there are versions of me out there, and here’s hoping they are better humans than I am. Even knowing someone with my first name is rare enough that it amuses me. For example, the office manager of my dentist calls me for appointment reminders. She is a lovely woman, originally from Ireland, and when she calls me in her lilting voice, she always begins the same way: “Maura, hi, it’s Maura.” “Hi, Maura!” I respond. We both laugh. Perhaps we are easily amused.

I suppose we could all make things less confusing for each other if we used our middle initials. My middle initial is J, for Joanna, but I grew up with mixed feelings about my middle name. I was named for an aunt who was a virtual stranger to me. But later, I became friends with a Miami Herald editor whom I loved and admired, Joanna Wragg, who by her example helped me get sober. So for a time I used my middle initial more as a sign of gratitude for my friendship with her, rather than its familial ties.

Most of the time, though, I’ve been just plain Maura Casey, like the rest of the Caseys canoeing, sniffing and sipping wine, selling houses, measuring wind speed and serving in government. Who knows how many of us there are. Godspeed, everyone. Please don’t get arrested and pay your bills on time, for the sake of us all.