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The Power of Settings

When I sit down to write, the characters are moving back and forth in an imaginary world where the road forks and either leads to the heroes or leads to the villains. The places in my stories are rarely pure fiction. They are places that I have seen somewhere in my life, and each has a special memory. Whether it was the person, or the place doesn’t matter. They all hold enough significance that I have carried them for all these years.

The house on Rowell Mountain circa early 1900's
The house on Rowell Mountain circa early 1900's

The house I refer to as The Mountain in my books is really the McCarthy (aka McGinn) farm that sat on Rowell Mountain in Solon, Maine. The house itself remained in the family with descendants living there until the 2010’s. The house burned down in 2015, but the history there was remarkable, one couple with seventeen children from the turn of the century through World War two.

When I was in high school, my mother watched one too many Little House on the Prairie episodes and lost her mind (Not literally). So, we were forced to move from in-town Madison (aka Monroe) to a nearby town called Cornville. The house we bought was not dissimilar to the one pictured here.

My mother had spent a lot of time with her grandparents and great grandparents and cherished the simple farm life she saw as a youth and wanted to recreate that in the 1980’s.

To me, the most amazing things about a house of that size were the massive dining area. In my books, they are like the house in Cornville where the kitchen and the dining room were one large room with a long table. Growing up we could and often did sit nearly a dozen kids at the table when you included friends and cousins.

The other feature of note was the incredibly high ceilings. While a high ceiling might look impressive, it makes heating the room much more difficult. In our first winter there we had cut, split and stacked ten cords of wood. That is a stack of wood, 4’x4’x8’ times ten. By the end of January, we had burned through all of that in the wood stoves (the only source of heat) and were forced to go cut green wood that didn’t burn nearly as efficiently, making for some long winters back when Maine actually had winter. We cut a lot of Alder for the kitchen stove because it could be easily handled. Perhaps that is where the name of the oldest child in the McGinn series came from, because I cannot think of a person that I have ever met, that’s named after a tree.

One of the stories that is in The Mothers McGinn and happens to the villain Wilbur Hawkes, is based on an actual event that happened to me. My father had bought my sister a beautiful Appaloosa horse named Danny Boy. He was an impressive specimen with one exception. He was blind in his left eye. Since he couldn’t safely be ridden, we needed to be exercise him to let him burn off some energy. Once while exercising him on a lead, I started talking with a friend and not paying attention to the horse. When Danny Boy decided he had exercised enough he stopped abruptly and kicked back with both hooves, and one caught me in the chest. I weighted no more than 130 pounds and the force of the kick sent me flying through the air.

I don’t remember which cousin it was that was visiting, but in my mind, it was Felicia, who might have been ten at the time, ran to the house calling out to my father, “Uncle John! Uncle John! Danny Boy just killed Jonathan!”

My father came to inspect my condition. Seeing that I was fine and being a hard North Woods man himself. He chided me for not paying attention and told me to get up. There is no better lesson about being alert around animals than being knocked on your ass.

Clearly, I lived, but that is one of the more vivid memories that I have from my time in Cornville, Maine and it still makes me laugh to think about it.

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