Pam Post

If you’re Pam Post, home is a house with two Labrador retrievers and gardens that are magical. It’s having the quiet space for quilting and crafting. It’s Medomak Exchange and Good Things Thrift and Craft, and helping all the people coming in and out. It’s giving yoga classes. It’s gardening. It’s the people she meets every day in town. Pam grew up outside of Boston, studied organizational behavior and psychology, and then went on to study sleep disorders at Stanford. She found a job in Florida, and a few years later, she opened her own very successful sleep clinic there. As for Maine, you could say her parents -- her mother and stepfather, who moved to South Bristol, and her father, who moved to Hallowell -- brought her here from Florida; or the cool weather; or the end of a marriage; or the dissolution of her business. All are true. But you also could say that what brought her to Waldoboro was her discovery of a house surrounded by a series of overgrown, structured gardens.

I’m probably not the easiest person to live with.  I have a condition that now is recognized as ‘AuHD,’ a combination of autism and ADHD.  I’m really sensitive to transitions in terms of noise, place and people.  I can be hyper-focused and miss cues.  I can be dreamy and not pay attention.  Being on time is particularly hard because I believe time is elastic.  The mail pile is brutal.

But I met a man and we married.  We’d met through a friend.  He was a very powerful man, a property developer, and ten years my senior.  We bonded over gardening.  We were together for over ten years.

But it was a difficult marriage.  My husband always had the television on, and he was always playing music.  For me, those layers of noise got so I could barely think, even with earplugs.  And we married at a time when I’d just started my business.  A sleep-clinic runs 24-7, literally, and I was managing a staff for both day and night shifts.

My husband also had a lot of anger.  Sometimes he would lock me out of the house.  One Christmas morning I was flying to Maine to be with my sick father on Christmas day, and my husband had a total meltdown.  I had to ask someone else to take me to the airport.  He called me later to say he’d dropped off all my gifts on a street corner in a poor section of town.

But we lived in this gorgeous, historic home.  He could be very charming.  He was always inviting people over, and he’d be gregarious to everyone at the table but not speak to me.  When we were alone, he was always pointing out how I could lose weight or dress better or get up earlier so I could get more work done.

In the beginning, we bonded over gardening.  But his idea of gardening was giving me instructions of exactly what to do and where to plant.  I stopped gardening.

I didn’t have children, but he had three, and one of his daughters had two little girls that I adored.  One day we planned to go to the animal sanctuary with the girls.  They all got in the car and left, without me.  So, I got in my car and followed them.  At the sanctuary he was patient and charming with the girls, pointing out this and that, as if everything was normal.

Afterward, the girls wanted to go in my car to the restaurant.  As we took off, the little one piped up, “Grandma Pam, we learned about bullying in school and how it’s not right.  Grandpa is bullying you.  And that’s not right.”

I remember saying, “Oh, he doesn’t mean that.”  I gaslit her.  But I recognized what this six-year-old girl was saying to me.  How he was treating me was not right.  But when you’re in a marriage like that, you tell yourself about the good things just to keep going.

There was never any violence, yet it always felt possible.  One morning while making the bed, I felt such a rage toward me that I had to physically move myself away from him, put some distance between us.  I was afraid almost all the time.  I didn’t know what he would do if I left him.

Then he started going out with a woman we both knew.  They even gardened together.  One day, he was ranting and raving in the kitchen, and a switch inside of me just flipped, and I was done.

I moved into a cottage we had on the property.  Then I settled in town where I had community.  I loved going to the grocery store and post office and seeing the people I knew.  What I didn’t realize, though, was how much people wanted the gossip, the dirt, the news.  Only one person called to ask me how I was.  Nobody else said, “I’m sorry.  How are you?”

I got to know this part of Maine because my mother and stepfather had moved to South Bristol and I’d visit.  When it got really hot in Florida, when I was working in sweltering heat, I’d think, “I could be in Maine.”  So, I started coming to Maine from May to September because while my job was time-consuming, I didn’t need to be on-site.

Once I decided to sell the business, I started looking for a home in Maine.  I looked all the way from Rangely to Lincoln County.

Then, I saw this house.  Even from the outside, I could see that the bones of the gardens were beautiful.  Later I learned that it had been Bob Gorman’s house, and that  he’d designed these gardens, and in fact, he’d worked on a lot of gardens in town.  He was like the Miss Rumphius of Waldoboro.

Soon after moving, I saw an ad on Facebook for a gardener.  It was Olivia Westcott who used to be was Olivia Boucher.  And we got dirty together, and we brought the gardens back.

But other than Olivia, I didn’t know anybody at all.  One day my mom left me a message on my phone, which I still have: “Hi, Pam, I just heard from my friend Peggy Davis.  She lives near you, and I think you two would hit it off.”

So, I went over to Peggy’s, and she took me to Medomak House, showed me the Clothing Closet and the Food Pantry, and she explained the ideas for Medomak House that she and Ron had.  I was so excited that I couldn’t sleep that night.  The energy in this town is amazing.  Shortly after, I went to a meeting about starting the thrift store. I’ve been there ever since.  It was a foundation for me, meeting so many great people while helping them find just the right thing they’re looking for.

Waldoboro has been a very welcoming town to a person like me, who wasn’t born here.  In the other places where I’ve lived, I’ve always been surrounded by people who were just like me, in age, interests, and education.  Here, people are curious about you, and where you’ve come from.  I am meeting people who aren’t my age, who don’t vote the way I do, and who do different things.  people with talk will you here.  It could be at the grocery store, the vet or the dentist.  Or at the library, or at wherever.  Waldoboro is very diverse, and people are open to each other’s stories.

After my marriage ended, it was a big adjustment not to have a person behind me.  I was alone.  I was on my own.

But in Waldoboro, I’ve realized this isn’t so.  I have friends and community.  And I have two dogs that I love, one who came from Oklahoma and the other from a program run by VetDogs America that was run at the Maine State Prison for Labrador puppies.  My puppy, though, had “a career change,” as they say.  She’d passed everything but the barking.  I felt so lucky when they offered her back to me.

And I remember the first time I met her, when she first came to me as a puppy for weekend socializing outside the prison.  She’d left the prison kennel all by herself, and now she was sitting in a car with a lady she didn’t know, and she kind of grumbled to herself.  She was very brave.  She is pure love, wagging her tail and giving kisses to everyone she meets.