"Once More to Peterborough"

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Essay from Essex

“Once More to Peterborough”

August 3, 2021

 

“It is strange how much you can remember about places like that

once you allow your mind to return to grooves which lead back.”

                                                                                                                         E. B. White (1899-1985)

                                                                                                                        “Once More to the Lake”, August 1941

                                                                                                                         One Man’s Meat, 1942

 

Thomas Wolfe’s posthumously published novel You Can’t Go Home Again tells the story of George Webber, a fledging author, who frequently references his hometown in a book he is writing, to the annoyance of the town’s residents. I spent three days last week in my hometown, with my wife and a grandson. And we did so without annoying anyone…at least as far as I know. 

 

In his essay “Once More to the Lake,” E.B. White tells the story of taking his 10-year-old son to the lake in Maine to which his father had brought him when he was a small boy. He writes evocatively of mortality – how each new generation replaces the former. In the last sentence he wrote of his son pulling on a cold, wet bathing suit, a habit he remembered from his childhood: “As he buckled the swollen belt suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.”

 

Our Town is Thornton Wilder 1938 play about living in Grover’s Corners, a small New Hampshire village, around the turn of the previous century. Through the “Stage Manager,” he tells of the Gibbs and Webb families – their births, loves and deaths. Wilder began to write the play at Peterborough’s MacDowell Colony, which makes it special to those of us from that part of New Hampshire. It was first performed at the Peterborough Players in 1940. On this trip we ran into Beth Brown whose grandmother, Edith Bond Stearns, started the Peterborough Players in 1933. I remember Mrs. Stearns and her daughter Sally Stearns Brown, a friend to my parents. (Beth was the age of my younger siblings and used to take riding lessons from my mother.)  With Beth was Gordon Clapp, the New Hampshire-born, Emmy-winning actor who will play the Stage Manager in a revival of the play to be staged outdoors in Peterborough, in about two weeks. (Unfortunately for us, the performance coincides with our annual time at the Jersey shore.)

 

On this latest return to Peterborough, Caroline, grandson Alex Williams and I had an “Our Town-like” experience. Act III of the play opens at the Grover’s Corners cemetery, on “a hilltop – a windy hilltop – lots of sky, lots of clouds…”  We drove to Pine Hill Cemetery, which is on a hillside. Looking south from the graves of my family there was little wind but lots of sky. Wilder’s cemetery held mountain laurel and lilacs. In this, nestled under White Pines, rest my paternal grandparents, my parents, a brother, sister and an uncle and aunt. American Flags decorate my father’s and uncle’s graves, commemorating their service in World War II. We stop and spend a few minutes in quiet reflection. Driving out, we pass tombstones with familiar names – Bishop, Nichols, Pettengill, Snow, Wilson and Shattuck – each conjuring a memory of an individual from my past. 

 

The purpose of this Peterborough trip was to meet with publisher Sarah Bauhan and her art editor Henry James about a book to be published next year, Essays from Essex. It is to be illustrated by my grandson, who brought some of his artwork, including a drawing for the cover.

 

We stayed at the Cranberry Meadow Farm Inn, a bed and breakfast now owned by Carolyn and Charlie Hough. It was built in 1797 as the Wilson Tavern but was converted to a private home in 1834. Again an inn, it is located about two miles from the village, on the corner of Old Street Road and Route 101. It sits on 80 acres, with wonderful walking trails. When I was a child, we would pass the house driving home from skiing at Temple Mountain; my father mentioning that legend claimed it was a stop on the Underground Railway.

 

Following our meeting with Sarah, we drove past the house where I grew up on Middle Hancock Road, four miles from town and now looking sad, with weeds in the driveway and in need of paint. Gone were the cries of children happily playing, the bustling business of my parents’ Red Shed Rubber Animals, the music from the radio that kept my father company in his studio, the barking of dogs, the neighing of horses, the bleating of goats and the rattling of the male Peacock’s outstretched tail, as he flirted with his peahen. Through the woods and over the hill, on Windy Row, we drove by my grandparent’s summer home, now owned by a cousin, Nathanael “Sandy” Greene. While there is a new garage, the house and grounds are well maintained and look as welcoming as they did sixty years ago.

 

We visited the Unitarian Church (now the Unitarian Universalist Church), which dominates the town’s center. The large, historic brick building is located on the corner of Main and Summer Streets. In 1956, twenty-eight-year-old David Parke was ordained at the Church and served as minister for five years. He was a favorite of my father’s. He returned seven years after leaving to officiate at my father’s funeral in December 1968. My five youngest siblings were Christened there and three of my sisters were married before its altar. Besides my father, funeral services were held in the church for my mother, a sister and brother. At all three, I gave eulogies.

 

Street layouts in the town remain much as they had been, but old stores are gone, replaced by restaurants and small specialty, food, art and clothing stores. Derby’s, once the town’s department store, is now an art gallery. Clukay’s Pharmacy, where we bought nickel ice cream cones, is a clothing store, and the land on which sat the Village Pharmacy, owned by Myer and Florence Goldman, now sits a bank. The hardware store on Grove Street is a restaurant. The Nichols Ford Dealership, bought in the 1950s by Milt Fontaine, has moved out of the village. The American Guernsey Cattle Club building, built in 1950 and the town’s largest building, now houses a variety of businesses, including Bauhan Publishing. The railroad no longer comes to town and Depot Square, where we used to meet my grandmother when she arrived on the train from Connecticut, now houses the Toadstool, my brother Willard’s bookstore, the largest retail outlet in the village. Shopping centers have sprung up outside of town, on land which was once fields and woods.

 

Thomas Wolfe was correct: You can never re-live the life you once knew. But we can recall past times. In returning to Peterborough, I am reminded of scenes from long ago – stopping at a diner in Brattleboro after a day’s skiing at Hogback; picking blackberries on Cobb’s Hill, galloping along dirt roads, swimming in Norway Pond; arguing with my father at the dining room table; listening to my mother as she read aloud a Jane Austen novel; taking a long walk with David Parke, when he recommended Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen, a history of the 1920s. In turn, I recommended the book to my author daughter-in-law, Beatriz Williams, who tells me it was important to her understanding of that decade.

 

As we age, there is in us a bid for immortality, a desire to recapture our youth – to go home again. But that is an impossible dream. But it is possible and healthy to revisit venues of our past, and to recall people and places that shaped who we have become. And when we are gone, we hope our children and grandchildren will do the same, so that our bid for immortality comes true, at least in their memories.