Someone You Know: Susy

Someone You Know, written by Amber Kapiloff, is a new column spotlighting the good people of Franklin County.

There aren’t too many people in Phillips.

The mountains are beautiful and the Sandy runs prolifically, but glance at your failing GPS signal and you’ll miss downtown. Unless, of course, you happen to come through during the annual Old Home Days celebration. Then you will see rainbow bunting flags fluttering above the streets and kids running around in packs like coyotes- a few teetering about on unicycles. You might see the pitched tents harboring antique tools for sale or the ladies of the quilt group spilling out of the church and onto the front lawn.

If you are lucky enough, a sprawling white house will catch your eye. Or rather, the giant, elaborately-painted pirate ship on the barn doors might. This is the home of Susy Sanders and her husband, David.

Built in 1832, the house has a significant presence on Main Street of Phillips- especially on Old Home Days. Every year on this weekend Sanders’ home goes through a somewhat magical transformation- turning into a place of fairies, pirates, queens and dragons- “Wonderland” as Sanders has named it.

“We had over 300 people this year and that was with the pouring rain,” Sanders says.

We are sitting in her office in the building next door to her home, a building which is now attached to its neighbor thanks to Sanders and her husband. The two homes, both ancient, both with solid bones, are filled to the brim with whimsical and mysterious artifacts- a collection of vintage scissors, stacks of books on faeries and dragons, broken cuckoo clocks and Sanders’ dream-like paintings.

As Sanders brings me through the two homes, winding our way up narrow staircases and into tiny back rooms, I get the feeling that these houses, or maybe the people who occupy them, contain magic year round. Not just on Old Home Days.

Sanders grew up in Washington state but her husband is from Rangeley. They finally moved back east after 10 years of summer visits to Maine.

“I looked for houses in this area for over a year. I had lots of criteria- it had to be on water, had to have a barn, and had to be big. This house kept coming up in my search so we finally bought it. We hadn’t even seen it yet.” Sanders explains to me.

Sanders’ story, just like her collections of curious treasures, is unique and colorful.

“I live big,” she exclaims, grinning ear to ear. She is referring to her preference in houses, but the statement seems to align with the rest of her story as well.

Sanders grew up at a mental institute. This was back in the ’50s, back when doctors and their families all lived in cottages on the grounds. She explains it as a sort of “wonderland” itself- a self-sufficient establishment with gardens, cows, pigs and wild goats.

“We had the run of the place. We had daffodil fields and beaver dams and acres of rolling hills to explore. But the whole time we were surrounded by mental patients. Back then everyone was diagnosed as schizophrenic and given this drug that made them drool all the time,” Sanders remembers.

She likens it to a sort of nursery rhyme- the women in bonnets picking daffodils out of the fields right alongside the more mysterious and somewhat dark characters of the patients.

“I was never scared of them. It was my goal to make them smile and I always did. That was where my imagination started. I remember one day a white rabbit even came dashing out into the flower fields. Thinking back it was straight out of Mother Goose.”

From there Sanders went on to lead equally bizarre and fantastical adventures. She lived on a Taoist commune in the bush of Alaska for five years, ran a greenhouse with a live snapping turtle roaming the grounds and a parrot flying through the air, taught herself to spin yarn and weave fabric from which she created collections of avant-garde clothing … the list goes on.

She raised her son, Andrew, single-handedly while living off-grid in the woods of Washington for the first four years of his life.

“Around that time I was teaching women how to spin and weave and how to start their own cottage industries. I realized I wanted to be an art teacher for a living so I decided to go back to school. I had no child support, was raising my son by myself and putting myself through school all at the same time.”

Sanders not only put herself through school, she went on to get two graduate degrees and eventually her doctorate in psychology. She tells me the story of how she ended up switching majors from art to psychology.

“I wanted a microwave. We were so poor and I was offered this amazing financial aid package for a private college but it had very specific requirements, one being that I do work study. I found a job as a probation officer, but the guy interviewing me said I had to be a psychology major. So I just changed it. All for a microwave!” Sanders has lots of stories like this, small blips in her timeline that ended up sending out large ripples of change throughout her whole life.

Like Wonderland.

“When I first came to Phillips I didn’t think that anyone lived here. I never saw people. Every now and then I would see a light on in some back room at night and wonder who was living there,” she says.

But everything changed that summer when Sanders woke up to her first Old Home Days celebration.

“I was like, what?! Where did all these people come from?” She laughs at the memory. “Walking around I realized how little there was for the kids. The following year I started ‘Wonderland.’”

Sanders’ life has many themes. Always unique, always colorful, always imaginative … throughout our conversation she talks multiple times about the idea of “drawing people out” of their shells. This is what Sanders does best, whether it’s through her psychology practice or her Jung-style, emerging image paintings or crowning the local kids ever year at Old Home Days.

“I help people. I draw them out and show them that they are capable of blossoming. I started doing it as a little girl with the patients at the mental institute and I haven’t stopped. I find people who are dead in the eyes and I make them smile.”

This seems to be Sanders’ strongest current throughout life- making people feel comfortable enough to see the magic that is all around them; even if it is just an old farmhouse in a small town in Maine.