To our Dear Family, Friends, & Random People Following this Blog,

I send my profound apologies for not blogging our annual holiday newsletter in 2021, but you simply won’t believe what happened to us! As you remember, we moved back to Maine in 2020, and due to a lottery windfall we were able to purchase an island featuring a workIng sardine factory.

Believe me, you cannot imagine our excitement to finally begin all over again in the marvelous state where, much like Patrick Dempsey, I’d spent such an idyllic childhood. The hubster would be a fisherman, and I’d handle the canning operation solo for a few months … you know … just until we were turning a profit and could hire more employees. 

That is not what happened at all! You would have thought, (and you would have been wrong) the realtor might have mentioned that the last sardine cannery in Maine closed in 2010, as well as those pesky little Atlantic herring fishing regulations. (No wonder why we got such a deal on the island)!

Anyway, we were minding our own business struggling to make a go of the sardine factory when one day, in an effort to stave off the aging process, the hubster took a hike around the island. He met “three nice men” who for a tidy sum wanted him to ferry them and their things to the mainland now and again. “Great,” I thought. “Finally some money.” Sure, it was a little suspicious when these excursions had to occur in the dead of night, but let’s face it. People be weird, right? (Who thinks drug smuggling right off the bat)?

Well, once the DEA seized the island and arrested us, we knew we had a problem. Of course, the hubster cut a deal with the prosecution, and we were put into witness protection until the trial could begin. And just let me say for the record, witness protection IS NOT the way it is glamorized in the movies. Nope. Not. At. All.

The government stashed us in a teeny-weeny one room cabin in the Maine Allagash with no running water and an outhouse! Lord have mercy! It was like living in the eighteen hundreds. We might as well have been living in a cave. No electricity, no phone, no wifi, no television, no radio, no washing machine, and no dryer. (Not to mention the candles and woodsmoke wreaked havoc on my asthma). However, the government did give us an axe and some seeds to grow our own food. Oh, and some chickens which had to live indoors with us, as the chicken coop just wasn’t secure from the large night prowling animals there.

No siree! The Allagash in Maine is no place for the faint of heart. Snow up the wazoo (think higher than the normal wazoo) in the winter, and in the spring and summer the mosquitoes alone are big enough to carry you away, never mind the bear! It was torture, but on the upside (you know me, people, always finding the silver lining)! I became an expert with a slingshot and was the bane of the squirrel population’s existence around the cabin. 

Fortunately for us, the drug smugglers were not a bigtime operation, nor were they the brightest crayons in the box. Mo, Larry, and Curly, as we liked to call them) blew themselves up in a tragic accident in the prison laundry. According to the U.S. Marshalls, Mo, Larry, and Curly had no living relatives, and no drug smuggling connections who’d even begin to care about the hubster or me, so we could return to our civilian life. Except not to the island. The island is still in the hands of the government. I’m pretty sure we don’t own it anymore either.

Again, on the bright side, we didn’t die. We were gone so long though, two of our children thought we’d been abducted by aliens, (See Goodbye 2019. You Were a Stinker Holiday Newsletter) and the youngest thought we’d run off to South America again for another Kaca Daca tribe adventure. (See Holiday Newsletter 2020). You can’t imagine how excited they were to learn we were back! They’ve even promised to try and go back to their yearly telephone calls to tell us about their lives!!

I won’t bore you with the details of just exactly what it took just to survive up there in the Allagash, but rest assured I’m back to writing the third book in the Rafe Ryder series, Rafe Ryder and the Mystery of the Moonstone. If you’d like to help the hubster and me get back on our feet again, consider buying Rafe Ryder and the Well of Wisdom, and Rafe Ryder and the Brushstroke of Time. Anything is appreciated when you’re practically destitute, especially those Amazon and Goodreads reviews!

So … we made it through 2021 and 2022, and I feel sure our lives are finally back on track now. (Hey, I have water, sewer, and food I don’t have to kill, skin, or grow. I’m a happy girl)! Now that you know we still exist, do drop us a line.

Much love to you all, and Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Diwali, Happy Kwanzaa, or whatever else you celebrate!

Sincerely,

L. L.