A Hallmark Movie Featuring Slightly Old Folks 

A Hallmark Movie Featuring Slightly Old Folks 

By Teresa Pelham Michaud

As soon as I turned 16, I got myself a driver’s license and a job at Sophia’s Pizzeria. I wasn’t trained at all for my $3.37 an hour job in the kitchen. On day two, I was given a ticket to prepare a pizza “with everything.” I’d already successfully made several orders and didn’t give much thought to sprinkling the same amount of each topping onto this pizza as I had when I’d made a pepperoni and mushroom. The result was the pie was sent back because it was uncooked in the middle.

The next day, I got a call from Geissler’s Supermarket, the other place to which I’d applied a few weeks earlier. All the cool kids worked there, so I jumped at the chance to leave the hot pizza kitchen for the air-conditioned meat department. I learned how to identify all the cuts of meat and how to wrap packages in cellophane like a pro. The two butchers I worked with were harmless but said all sorts of inappropriate things in my presence. But it was 1984, so everyone just thought they were funny, not creepy.

A guy named Danny worked as a bagger at Geissler’s. He tried in vain to straighten his curly brown hair by wearing a baseball cap backwards over his wet hair. He was two years older than me and lived in the next town; these were two qualities that made him irresistible to me.

Conrad and Jimmy, the ridiculous butchers, teased me incessantly about my crush on Danny. They’d let me know if he was about to walk past our window and would send me out with some random chore just so I’d have a chance to talk to him. As a lifelong professional flirt, I quickly got a date with this mysterious older guy. 

Danny picked me up in a red Ford EXP. Although I have no recollection of where we went, I do remember that I spent the earlier part of the day at the beach with my friends and had a horrible sunburn. (Shockingly, I’ve now had more spots cut or frozen off my body than I can count.) I’m not sure what I would have done if he’d touched my bright pink shoulders.

I don’t remember much beyond these details. Did we go out just once? Ten times? No clue. We dated again a few years later for over a year, but it was evidently not meant to be. We went our separate ways, got married to other people and had three kids each.

Navigating my way through life after the end of a 23-year marriage and the sale of a house, I messaged Danny on Facebook with questions about interest rates and home inspections. He’s a mortgage guy and I needed a house. He was supportive and helpful. I was certainly not planning to have a relationship with him.

But sometimes love happens when you’re not looking for it. We’ve been together for 11 years now and married for two. It’s got the makings of a Hallmark movie (except he’s not a rugged rancher and I’m not a fashionable city girl with an important job): high school sweethearts reconnect after decades apart. 

Having both lived in Connecticut for over 50 years, we embarked on an adventure last year and moved from Farmington to a town in rural Maine with no stoplight. It is home to a fraction of the population of the town we had just moved from. Our new one-story home is very different from the 125-year-old Farmington house. It was charmingly situated on busy Main Street at a stoplight that seemed to encourage drivers to express their feelings directly outside my bedroom window.

It now feels perfect, but this move was a tough decision. I had lived in a dozen places throughout my life, but never more than 45 minutes away from friends and family. This would be a big change for me, a social butterfly. It would be a piece of cake for Danny, who would be happier planting corn and digging up potatoes than he would be watching football with the guys. I’m the only friend he needs, he says. He definitely had some convincing to do before I agreed to relocate.

We had technically started our move north back in 2018. Perhaps looking for a way to prove to me that he was serious about building a life together, Danny proposed that we buy a small getaway property which we could rent out a few weekends a month to cover its expenses. I had to admit it was a pretty good idea.

Housing prices and mortgage rates were reasonable in 2018, so we had lots of options and not much competition. A tiny cabin in Parsonsfield in Maine popped up on Zillow. The price was good, it was on a river, and it was under four hours away from our home in Farmington. By lunchtime, we had made an offer.

As we began spending time each month in this rural farming town, we started to appreciate its beauty and slower pace. Rivers and lakes and mountains are everywhere. Most people have chickens, so we can get eggs so fresh they’re still warm. I can go to the post office in my pajamas and nobody cares.

New Englanders across the board are not known for their friendliness but we make friends while sitting on our front porch and out at bars and restaurants. If your car gets stuck in the snow, there’s no sense in calling a tow truck since pretty much everyone here is willing to stop and help. That, plus the most stunning night skies I’d ever seen, led us to consider living here full time. But would I actually move out of the only state I’ve ever called home?

When a piece of land on a former apple orchard by a lake in the same town as our cabin went on the market, we quickly bought it and hired a builder. Neither of us had any idea what we were doing, but it was an adventure we wanted to tackle together. Just a few months later, ground was broken, as was my right arm from embracing our new climate by ice skating. And then, with my arm in a cast, I was hit with a diagnosis of a fast-growing type of breast cancer that required surgeries, chemotherapy and radiation. Didn’t see that one coming, did you?

And that’s where the rubber meets the road. During a year with more lows than highs, Danny showed up for me in a way I didn’t think was possible. Not exactly Hallmark movie material, but that’s real life. He made me laugh, made me go to all of my appointments and made me eat. I’m quite possibly the only person who gained weight while doing chemo.

We had made plans to go to the cabin one chilly Friday, but obstacle after obstacle kept popping up. I’d go to a procedure and then would immediately be sent to another one. Everyone really seemed to want to poke me. That pretty much sums up cancer treatment: getting poked. Exhausted but unwilling to give in, I insisted we still drive north. Around midnight, we took a detour and showed up at the construction site to find that our walls were up! In total darkness and silence, we stood in what would be our kitchen, staring at the stars above—more stars than I’d ever seen. The building project became a welcome distraction from the “nonsense” invading my body.

And now here we are, living in a town where we are outsiders trying to blend in. Posing as locals. My flannel collection has multiplied. I can carry on a conversation about loons and lupine with the best of them. Sometimes I can drive to a destination without GPS, which is a challenge since many Maine roads look identical and have few landmarks. The quirks of this town make it both quaint and difficult. On the one hand, there’s no Target or CVS in sight. On the other hand, there’s no Target or CVS in sight. 

Because everything is an hour away, a doctor’s appointment also means a Costco run, getting my nails done or oil changed, and discovering a new brewery. Maine is second only to Vermont in the number of breweries per capita (plus second in number of lighthouses and first in wild blueberries and lobster), so there’s always something new to discover. We’ve found that life is better when you can look at a task as less of a chore and more of an adventure. My inflatable paddleboard lives in my trunk during the warmer months, replaced by snowshoes during the winter.

I memorized my wedding vows while paddleboarding around those little islands near L.L. Bean in Freeport and then recited them the next day when we eloped in Boothbay Harbor. I vowed not to get upset when Danny wakes me up to see the family of deer in our yard. He vowed to be cool with me needing to go somewhere warm when spring refuses to begin.

A slower, simpler life might not be for everyone, and sometimes I do crave life beyond our orchard. But there’s something sweet about hearing the horses and goats across the road as they begin to stir each morning while we sip our coffee and decide where the day will take us.

It feels like our love story just restarted now that we’re living in a place that’s novel to both of us. Every time we find something new, we discover it together. Now there’s some serious Hallmark movie material.