Category / Maine

by Kelly Mattei

Poison Ivy

Poison Ivy.

A few weeks ago, I was in Miami with my husband. We sat outside on the lanai one evening, and before I realized it, the mosquitoes had feasted on my feet and legs. Mosquitoes love me. I’m one of those people.

The next day, my husband caught me singing a song as I walked around. He stopped me and asked, “What are you singing?!?” I said, “Poison Ivy by The Coasters.” He had never heard it, and if you’re under 65 (maybe 70), chances are, you haven’t ever heard it either. I explained to him that, when I was in college, I went to a fraternity cocktail party where they had an old band called The Coasters playing. They sang some songs you might know like Charlie Brown and Yakkity Yak, and they also sang Poison Ivy. But why was I singing Poison Ivy on that day in Miami? I was singing it, because of the mosquito bites on my feet and legs. There’s a line in the song that says, “It’s gonna take an ocean…of calamine lotion…” I was thinking of how I needed some calamine lotion for my mosquito bites, and that made the song pop into my head.

And that’s when my husband told me he had never heard the song. Being the good wife I am, I had to play it for him, so I found it in Apple Music on my phone, cranked up the volume, and danced around the condo while playing Poison Ivy for him. Much to my surprise, he loved it! I still cannot believe he had never heard it, but he says it’s true. We laughed and sang that song for the rest of the trip. Anytime he could catch me off guard and wanted to make me laugh, he would suddenly play that song on his phone.

To see The Coasters play Poison Ivy, click here.

Fast forward a few weeks to last Friday night. One of my dearest friends of all time lives in Florida. She has two grown children, one of whom is a young man who recently graduated from Florida State University. He and two friends were driving from Florida to Maine, where they will be working at a summer camp, and they stayed at our house Friday night. We all laughed and talked while enjoying cocktails, and at some point, my husband played Poison Ivy on his phone. He was trying to make me laugh, and he was successful. I then explained all the background on the story to our young friends, and we all listened to the song together. Yes, alcohol was involved, but that song sort of became the theme of the evening.

They left early the next morning on a six-day drive to Maine, with stops in New Jersey, New York, Boston, and more…quite an adventure! Several times during their travels, I have received texts from my friend’s son. One text, on Monday, was simply a photo of the radio screen in their car with a short message that said, “We’re still listening!” It showed they were listening to Poison Ivy by The Coasters. I replied, “OMG! Maybe y’all can perform some Coasters tunes at the camp talent show!” Wednesday (yesterday), I received a text in which he said, “We were with [the girl traveler’s] great aunt, and she was delighted to hear that we wanted to play Poison Ivy in the car.” I replied with laughing face emojis and said, “I’m dead!” And then, today, I texted to them, “My husband is playing Poison Ivy right now. When it tops the charts again, we are going to take all the credit!” His response? “We already made a pact for it to be one of our most played songs at camp. We’re gonna put everybody on it!”

It’s a catchy tune, my friends. Once you listen to it, it is forever embedded in your brain! Until recently, it conjured up fun memories from college, but now, it also conjures up great memories of Miami with my husband and a fun evening with our guests! I’m thinking it’s going to hit the Top 40 within a few months, simply because we revived it!

by Kelly Mattei

Messages from Heaven

Messages from Heaven.

I lost my dad in 2006. My mother passed in December 2017. And then, a dear friend left this world in 2018. I remember lots of conversations I had with each of them when they were alive, but I also get “messages” from them now.

Unfortunately, Facebook wasn’t a thing when my daddy was living. If Facebook existed then, I didn’t know it. Daddy would not have been into social media, anyway… but if he had been around for Facebook, he likely would have checked it sometimes, just to see pictures of my growing daughter, since we lived 600 miles away.

But my mother and my friend who passed in 2018…they were into Facebook.

Today, as always, I checked my Facebook “memories,” where I get to take a look at my posts from the same day in different years past. No big deal, right? I usually laugh or smile as I scroll through them, and today was no different.

As I scrolled through my “memories,” I came across a post from this day in 2012. In the post, I asked friends to pray for a friend who was having surgery on that day. I read through the comments, and there, at the bottom of the comments…a comment from my friend who was having surgery…the same friend who passed in 2018. It was just one simple sentence, “Oh, sweet Kelly…always thinking of me.” As I read it, I could hear her saying it, and I got a little emotional. You know how we we think we have moved beyond grief? You know how lots of people don’t understand grief continues for an undefined length of time? Well, this is an example of how grief lingers. Who knew such a simple comment would make me miss her so much 2 1/2 years after her passing?

Once, when that same friend and I were walking to the car after spending the afternoon at the beach in Maine many years ago, we looked up at the sky, and we both had the same reaction. We stopped and gasped. There was a big hole in the clouds…it looked as if God might reach down through that hole and touch the earth. (It’s the feature photo, but the photo doesn’t really do it justice.) We called the scene “the hand of God.” Every time I see a similar scene now, I think of my friend and “the hand of God.”

Occasionally, I see comments from my mother on Facebook, and I have an emotional reaction to those too. It’s different than finding a note or card…maybe because it’s a reactive message? She’s reacting to something I posted on Facebook? It just seems more conversational.

And then there are different kinds of messages…

A few days before Christmas, I got a different kind of message from my mother…in the grocery store, of all places. I was shopping for all the things I would need on Christmas Day when I remembered we would also need bread to make sandwiches after Christmas, so I dashed around to the bread aisle. And that’s when I saw her…my mother…standing in front of the bread…and I stopped in my tracks. I took a deep breath and moved closer. Don’t freak out. It wasn’t a ghost. She wasn’t looking at me. She was trying to pick a loaf of bread, and I stood behind her, waiting patiently…and watching.

No, it wasn’t really my mother. It wasn’t a ghost. It was just a woman who, from behind, looked like my mother. She was short…about my mother’s height. She had her hair brushed in the same way Mother brushed her hair. Her arms looked just like Mother’s. She stood like Mother. She was wearing something Mother would have worn. I never saw her face, but I ended up behind her a couple more times before I left the store…and found myself walking out the door behind her! In fact, I took a photo of her and sent it to my brother, my cousin, and my aunt, all of whom reacted exactly as I did. They were shocked, but they were happy. No, it wasn’t my mother, but I felt like seeing this woman was a message from my mother…just a little “hello” in the grocery store.

A few weeks before that, I was in Michael’s Arts and Crafts when I rounded a corner and gasped audibly. Standing in front of me was a woman who, from behind, looked just like my friend who passed away in 2018. I saw her two more times in the store that day…and then, as I was walking out, I passed a woman who, from behind, looked just like my mother. I have decided she was the same woman who was in the grocery store a few days before Christmas.

I get visits from my daddy too. I’ve seen him walking across a parking lot, and I have seen him in the background of other people’s photos on social media. But usually, he visits in my dreams…always laughing and happy. The first time he ever visited me, I was dreaming I was with my little family at Disney’s Magic Kingdom, watching the parade. Float after float went by, and then suddenly, there was Daddy…waving big and laughing from the float. It’s something Daddy never would have done, but it made me happy that in my dream, I was in “the happiest place on earth,” and he was laughing and waving, letting me know he is happy.

Are these really messages from Heaven? I have no idea, but I choose to believe they are, because they keep my loved ones on my mind…and they make me feel connected to them.