Left turns – or right – often are sudden, sharp shifts in policy.

Left turns are also, as much as possible, when driving, something I try to avoid. Left turns are very risky. You see no vehicles coming from the right and then – horrors – they’re coming from the left.

One of the riskiest around here is probably the left off Andover Road onto Route 2. But it pales in risk next to a left turn onto Route 2 from the bridge at Dixfield. My advice: take 108 to Rumford, a right into the mill yards, a right onto Route 2 and on to Dixfield – a big smile as you roll past the poor blokes lined up to turn left or right off that bridge.

On some trips, left turns cannot be minimized: whether I visit Dot Dunton before or after picking up the mail, I will have to make three lefts and two rights. I can cut one left out if I make Dot’s house at the Point the second stop and turn right out of her drive and head into Rumford Falls.

That would be extreme if I had no reason to go into town. But Ann Kimball, the only other person I know to be anti-left turns, confesses to having “done some pretty weird things” to avoid turning left. One ploy she admits to is going past the left turn she should make until she reaches a friendly traffic light with a left-turn arrow. Like me, Ann plans ahead: “If you need something at Wal-Mart and you need to go to the credit union, no contest – never take the left into Oxford FCU.

Left-handed is a backward compliment; doesn’t that make you wonder how “left” got a bad reputation? Left-handed is also how 13 percent of the world’s population is. It never gets old: You live with it. Try to sit at the left end of the table, pray for a chance at one of the two left-handed desks in the classroom, always looking at the wrong side of the Pyrex measuring cup. Stuff like that. No fair.

But there’s worse. Google “left-handedness” and discover that left-handers are more likely to be mentally imbalanced – to put it delicately – and delinquent, more likely to die young and to contract Crone’s disease. On the other hand (get it?), we lefties have much distinguished company: Ben Franklin, Crystal Gale, Bart Simpson, Queen Victoria (and her heirs), Kermit the Frog, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Jay Leno, Sarah Jessica Parker – countless others, especially countless other athletes (Bill Bradley, John McEnroe, Babe Ruth).

Left out is what happened to certain garden tools, lawn chairs, or tomato plants in frost. Left out is what all of us are from time to time. Last week I had a mysterious note, type-written, sent to the Sun Journal office on Congress Street. It read, in part (I’ll never know what it read altogether since the a big part of the page was torn off, and there was no signature), “we are very proud of him,” the citizen of the year. If the author of that note would write me once more with more information, I’d gladly give that citizen some attention.

Left behind is what you forget to put in the car before you go on vacation; this could be the ketchup, the portable crib, or even the child. It is also the history in video and audio tapes and slides that Peter McKenna left behind for the Rumford Historical Society to protect, preserve, and – it is hoped – put out for the community to learn from and enjoy. Pat Hopkins (a Lithuanian student, plus she is Lithuanian) tells me that the society needs volunteers to step forward to help Rose McKenna and the RHS regulars, Dru Breton, Myrtle McKenna, Bill Weston, among them, to manage the collection. Stop up to RHS offices on a Thursday, between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., and sign on.

Parallel project: Hope, formerly ARC, is in need of help to sort and assemble, write and edit, its history. Call Joe Sirois for details. The historical materials reach back to Margaret Beliveau and friends and forward to the present: Sounds like fun to me.

Left-leaning can be an insult or a compliment, depending on your politics. Left-leaning is also exactly how the two maples flanking the stairs and entrance to Rumford’s Municipal Building look if viewed from the apron of the fire station on Congress Street. Definitely leaning to the left, away from the building, from that vantage point.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that one of the trees – left or right, no matter – be cut down and the other left standing. Chery Gallant, an accomplished gardener, doesn’t like flowers or landscaping to be perfectly balanced, one on the left, one on the right, and neither do I.

Linda Farr Macgregor lives with her husband, Jim, in Rumford. She is a freelance writer and author of Rumford Stories. Contact her: ljm @gwi.net