"To Walk on a Rainy Day at Essex Meadows"

 While rain has abated, at least for the moment, Spring here in southeastern Connecticut has been abnormally wet, or at least it seems that way. This essay was inspired by one of those rainy mornings.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“To Walk on a Rainy Day at Essex Meadows”

May 17, 2025

 

“Be still, sad heart! And cease repining;

Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;

Thy fate is the common fate of all,

Into each life some rain must fall,

Some days must be dark and dreary.”

                                                                                                                The Rainy Day, 1841

                                                                                                                Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

 

In her 1956 essay, “Help Your Child to Wonder,” Rachel Carson wrote: “A rainy day is the perfect time for a walk in the woods.” Walking through a rain-drenched woods when one is ten may be okay, but now in my mid-80s I prefer to keep my feet dry.

 

Poets have long celebrated the beauty of a rainy day. Langston Hughes in “April Rain Song:” “Let the rain kiss you/Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops;” and Emily Dickinson in “Summer Shower:” “A drop fell on the apple tree/Another on the roof;/A half dozen kissed the eaves/And made the gables laugh.” And who can forget Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain: “What a glorious feeling; I’m happy again;/I’m laughing at clouds so dark above./The sun’s in my heart and I’m ready for love.”

 

I get tempted, but with feet housed in rubbers and a slicker over my shirt I hesitate at the door. I recall walking with my wife – then my girlfriend – in Boston in Spring of ‘62, skipping along Commonwealth Avenue. Nurtured by rain, we were filled with love. 

 

But now I dither. Not all walks in the rain are as glorious as the poets would have us believe. In August 1973, I took my oldest son – then age six – on his first hike in the White Mountains. We left Pinkham Notch in a summer storm. Our goal was Madison Spring Hut. We walked along the Great Gulf Trail to the Madison Gulf Trail. By the time we arrived at the Hut, 6.5 miles later, we were soaked, but happy. The next day, as we hiked the Gulfside Trail to Mt. Washington, the clouds parted and the sun appeared. As we sat looking down into Great Gulf, I remember saying: “Son, someday this will all be yours!” And it has been, in the sense that he and his wife have taken their children on hikes along those same trails.

 

Essex Meadows sits on a hundred acres of lawns, fields, woods and a swamp – the Mud River Swamp, where primordial and avian life abound. As well, the property abuts The Preserve, a thousand acres of conservation land. Trails meander through the fields and woods. They wander across fields and through woods, allowing one to stay healthy while communing with nature. On a sunny day, there are fewer places more beautiful. But when it rains? The final lines of Shel Silverstein’s poem “Rain” come to mind: “So, pardon the crazy thing I just said - /I’m just not the same since there’s rain in my head.”

 

At Essex Meadows we have an alternative. The building, which holds 180 apartments, includes about a mile of hallways on three floors. The hallways, connected with five elevators and nine staircases, are lined with residents’ art collections. When it rains we have the pleasure of viewing paintings and photos, and the joy of meeting friends and neighbors, similarly occupied. So, we walk on and worry not about puddles.

"Reflections on Turning Eighty"Baltasar

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Essays from Essex

“Reflections on Turning Eighty”

January 31. 2021

 

“At twenty, a man is a peacock; at thirty a lion; at forty a camel;

at fifty a serpent; at sixty a dog; at seventy an ape; at eighty, a nothing at all.”

                                                                                                                Attributed to Baltasar Gracián (1601-1658)

                                                                                                                Spanish Jesuit, writer and philosopher

 

On this date eighty years ago, my mother delivered a baby boy, with the assistance of Dr. Robert Salinger, at Grace New Haven Hospital. It was 3:00PM; the baby was named for his father.

 

All babies, it was once said, looked like Winston Churchill. Whether that was complimentary to Churchill or the baby, I never knew. But what was true for many was apparently also true for me. Two days before the commencement of Operation Dragoon on August 15, 1944 (the invasion of Southern France), my mother’s youngest brother, my Uncle Joe Hotchkiss, was in command of LST 601. Churchill was there to wish the men Godspeed. He stood aboard a barge that came down the column where Uncle Joe’s ship was anchored. My uncle wrote to his parents of Churchill: “Smiling and waving, he passed within fifty feet. He was in his blue playsuit looking just as much like little Sydney Williams as he could.” 

 

…………………………………………………………

 

Regarding the rubric quoted above, it hurts that a man who never made it to sixty should refer to one who has turned eighty as a “nothing at all.” Of course, when the average person meets 10,000 people in a lifetime it means I may have met approximately 0.00014% of the world’s population. Those I do know or have known may have something to say about me. The rest could care less whether I am a peacock, a camel or an ape. So perhaps Gracián was right, to most of the world I don’t exist.

 

Nevertheless, I do, and I feel good. I am healthy and blessed in my family and friends. Yesterday morning I did my regular (five days a week) series of exercises, which includes fifty crunches and twenty-five push-ups. Yet, my grandchildren look at me, knowing I am a relic of yesteryear. I can hear them reworking those lines from Lewis Carroll: “You are old Pop Pop Williams, my grandchild said, and your hair has become very white. And yet you incessantly stand on your head. Do you think at your age it is right?” Well, my hair has been white for fifty years, and I do not stand on my head. Staying upright is my focus! Nevertheless, I look forward, with chin out, to whatever the future offers. Bring it on, I say! 

 

Of course, there are things given up as one ages. For example, I gave up skiing in my seventies. One advantage of giving up something like skiing is that time and memory exaggerate past reality. I never danced down the deep powder on Vail’s Bolshoi Ballroom with the grace I see in my mind. But so what? It’s my memory. We all have a little Walter Mitty in us. And age has other advantages. It excuses one from the complexities of high tech. When I had trouble logging onto the portal my accountant wanted me to set up for my “organizer,” my complaint brought forth the following e-mail response: “Bonny, please send Sydney a paper organizer.”

 

However, eighty doesn’t seem that old, when I look back at the speed with which the years have passed. Like a roll of paper towels, time unfolds at ever-increasing rates. Was it really seventy-seven years ago that I saw my father board a train in New Haven that took him to Texas and thence to Italy with the 10^th Mountain Division? Can it be that Seventy-five years have passed since I enrolled at Miss Lindeman’s school in Peterborough, New Hampshire, or that sixty-five years have gone by since I met John Harper, my roommate at Williston Academy? Has it really been fifty-seven years since the Reverend Dr. J. Burton Thomas, pronounced Caroline and me man and wife at the Church of Our Heavenly Rest in New York?  Can our youngest child be turning fifty this year?  Our grandchildren were born yesterday, so why are five of them in college? Where has time gone? Photographs remind us of what once was, just as in our memories the people we once knew live on. In his 1958 book Things Fall Apart, the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe wrote: “A man’s life from birth to death was a series of transition rites, which brought him nearer and near to his ancestors.” There is truth in that. At night, before nodding off, my mind wanders back to earlier days.

 

When I turned 30, my wife threw a birthday party. There was a sense of youth left behind for the more serious job of being a parent: recklessness, out; responsibility, in. Indicative of the age, a fight broke out in the dining room over something, the importance of which has evaporated. At 40, Caroline threw another party – less rambunctious. Our children were getting older. There is a photo of me in a cowboy hat, with a silly, bourbon-induced, grin, contemplating the onset of middle age. There were no fisticuffs, just a bunch of men and women having fun. There have been three other parties celebrating the passage of the decades, with the time between each, while numerically the same, getting shorter.

 

When we’re living through it, time passes quickly. On the other hand, the eighty years before I was born seems long ago. Consider what those years brought and how far away they seem: The Civil War and the assassination of Lincoln. Custer’s Last stand in June 1876. The assassination of two more U.S. Presidents: James Garfield in Long Branch, NJ in 1881 and William McKinley in Buffalo in 1901. Teddy Roosevelt’s ride up San Juan Hill, in 1898. Kitty Hawk, NC in 1903, with the Wright Brothers first flight. Doughboys sent to France, in 1917, to “make the world safe for democracy;” not realizing the war would give rise to Mussolini and Hitler. The “Roaring 20s” and the Great Depression. Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and the start of World War II.  

 

In a letter to Edward Dimmitt, in July 1901, Mark Twain wrote: “Life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages.” I have been one to repeat the oft-quoted line that youth is wasted on the young, but I fear Twain is wrong for one fundamental reason – not knowing our fate helps keep us going.

 

Time is sobering, as it exhibits both the alpha and omega of life. In those eighty years before I was born, all but one of my great-great grandparents died, as did all but one of my great-grandparents. And my parents and grandparents were born. Since my birth, all have died, along with two sisters and one brother. In Hannah Rothschild’s book House of Trelawney, Tony Scott, an aging, bachelor art dealer, reminisces: “One of the worst things about aging is that if you stop, there’s a danger you might never get going again; muscles seize up and then every movement is uncomfortable.” We cannot let that happen. Walking with my wife in the woods around Essex Meadows is a life-saving antidote.

 

In his 2016 book of essays, Senior Moments, Willard Spiegelman wrote, darkly in my opinion: “We come into the world alone, with a cry. We exit alone, to confront the eternal silence. The fun, all the pleasure and adventure, lies in between.” More succinctly and less poetically, a friend used to make the same point: “It is not the destination in life that is important, but the trip.” But who knows? Perhaps the future is more exciting? John Kendrick Bangs suggested the party continues. In his 1896 book, Houseboat on the River Styx, he wrote of Charon, whose job was to transport ‘shades’ across the River Styx, from the land of the living to Hades. He takes command of the houseboat, which is filled with well-known personages, from myriad cultures and multiple centuries, who socialize together. The house committee includes Sir Walter Raleigh, Cassius, Demosthenes, Blackstone, Doctor Johnson and Confucius. Who wouldn’t want to mingle with that group? Bangs was having fun of course, but the dead do live on in the memories of those who knew them. After my Grandfather Hotchkiss died in 1947, my grandmother told me to remember him and to do so often. “For,” she said, “when you do, he will come alive, in your memory.” She was right. He does.

 

In “Morituri Salutamus,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow spoke to his 50^th reunion class at Bowdoin

 

“For age is opportunity no less

Than youth itself, though in another dress.

And as the evening twilight fades away

The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.”

 

………………………………………………………

 

And on that note, with a future lit by stars, these reflections on completing eighty years come to a close. But I go on.

"Cross of Snow," Nicholas Basbanes

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Burrowing into Books

“Cross of Snow,” Nicholas Basbanes

August 1, 2020

 

“But to me, a dreamer of dreams.

To whom what is said and what seems

Are often one and the same, – “

                                                                                    “The Bells of San Blas,” March 12, 1882

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as Nicholas Basbanes writes in the introduction, has gone out of favor – “widely revered in one century, methodically excommunicated from the ranks of the worthy in the next.” A poet of gentility, tradition and respectability is incongruous when lyrics to popular songs and the language of late-night TV hosts would make blush a Vietnam War combat veteran or a Salomon Brothers trader. Yet, this is a man worth knowing – a brilliant linguist, a popular professor and the most renowned poet of his time. When first picking up the book, I wrote a note to myself: “I am embarking on an adventure to know a remarkable man, his life and times.” And that is what Mr. Basbanes has done in this very personal biography of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

 

The “Cross of Snow” in the title comes from a poem Longfellow wrote in 1879 as a tribute to his late wife Fanny who had died eighteen years earlier. The poem was inspired by the landscape artist Thomas Moran’s painting “Mountain of the Holy Cross,” a peak in the northern Sawatch Range of the Colorado Rockies

 

“There is a mountain in the distant West

That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines

Displays a cross of snow upon its side.

Such is the cross I wear upon my breast

These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes

And seasons, changeless since the day she died.”

 

Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine in 1807. After graduation from Bowdoin College in 1825 (in a class with Franklin Pierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne), he spent three years in Europe to better his knowledge of modern languages, which he would teach at Bowdoin. “Your tour is one for improvement rather than pleasure,” his brother Stephen wrote. He became fluent in German, Swedish, French, Italian and Spanish. When he died, his library contained over 11,000 books, in fifteen languages, all of which he could read. Returning to Bowdoin, he took up teaching duties. Six years later, he married Mary Potter. Four years later, he was offered the Smith Professorship of Modern Languages at Harvard. He was again asked to travel to Europe to brush up on languages and to purchase books for the college. Mary went with him, only to die of complications from a miscarriage on November 29, 1835 in Rotterdam. She was twenty-three. Her last words: “Henry, don’t forget me.” He was deeply saddened. In his diary he wrote. “…at night I cry myself to sleep like a child.” He later admitted that bringing her was the biggest mistake he had made. He did not forget her. Four years later, he completed Footsteps of an Angel, which includes this stanza:

 

“And she sits and gazes at me

With those deep and tender eyes,

Like the stars, so still and saint-like,

Looking downward from the skies.”

 

Several months later, on that same trip, in July 1836, Longfellow met nineteen-year-old Fanny Appleton in Switzerland. She was traveling in Europe for a year with her father and siblings, her mother having died the previous year. Fanny was an observant and intelligent young woman. On a trip to Pompeii, she wrote in her journal: “The awe of the Past never came so strongly upon me as here, frail matter doomed to revisit the glimpses of the moon…Matter can be embalmed but the free soul was not cased in, by even the bondage of a million years.” Longfellow was smitten, but it took seven years of courtship before they married. In the interim, he wrote Hyperion, an unflattering semi-autobiographical piece – his second worst decision according to Mr. Basbanes. Hyperion speaks to Longfellow’s long pursuit of Fanny. She wrote to her friend Emmeline Austin about the story: “There are really some exquisite things in this book, tho it is desultory, objectless, a thing of shreds and patches, like the author’s mind.” Nevertheless, teaching duties occupied him and he continued to write – in 1839 The Wreck of the Hesperus and The Village Blacksmith, and three years later Poems on Slavery, a mildly pro-abolitionist collection.

 

It was during their eighteen-year marriage Longfellow was most productive, especially after retiring from his teaching duties in 1854. During those years he published Evangeline (1847), The Song of Hiawatha (1855) and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858). He and Fanny hosted scores of America’s and England’s literati, as well as artists and musicians, at their home on Brattle Street in Cambridge, a house that had once been George Washington’s headquarters and is now called the Vassall-Cragie-Longfellow house. Among those entertained: Prince Edward (later Edward VII), Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Louis Agassiz, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Edwin Booth, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt and Jenny Lind. Fanny bore six children, five of whom survived into adulthood. Sadly, she died in a tragic accident at age forty-three on July 10, 1861.

 

Dante had been a favorite of Fanny’s; so, with her gone and with his eldest son in the Union Army, Longfellow translated Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. “In the months following Fanny’s death, Henry found comfort in Dante’s exploration of the heavenly spheres, with the idealized Beatrice at his side.” His effort, which took six years to complete, is still considered one of the best English translations. In 1868-69, he took a final trip to Europe, traveling with his three living daughters, his son Ernest and his wife, his brother Samuel and brother-in-law Tom Appleton. He dined with Charles Dickens and was received by Queen Victoria, who afterwards told Sir Theodore Martin, then working on a biography of her late husband, “I noticed an unusual interest among the attendants and servants…I am surprised and pleased to find that many of his poems are familiar to them.” His popularity in Britain was such, Basbanes writes, “that he was outselling Robert Browning and Alfred Lord Tennyson on their own turf.”

 

Longfellow is best remembered for sentimental poems like The Village Blacksmith, Paul Revere’s Ride and The Song of Hiawatha, whose lines we recall: “By the shores of Gitche Gumee/By the shining Big-Sea-Water.” It was poetry that people my age once memorized, but which does not fit today’s more cynical age. In this intimate biography, Nicholas Basbanes writes of his poetic achievements, his professorships at Bowdoin and Harvard and his translations. Longfellow condemned slavery, but not with the adamancy of some of his friends, perhaps because his father-in-law’s mills depended on southern cotton. However, people knew where he stood. One of his best friends was Senator Charles Sumner, a staunch abolitionist, once caned into unconsciousness on the Senate floor by South Carolina Democrat Preston Brooks in 1856.

 

 Longfellow continued to translate, write poetry and welcome guests at Craigie House, as he “…resumed his agreeable pace.” He did so until his death on March 24, 1882. His home on Brattle Street in Cambridge is now a museum. During his lifetime it was the most visited home in the United States, second only to Mount Vernon. In 1875, he attended his 50^th reunion at Bowdoin at which he read an ode written for the occasion, Morituri Salutamus, which includes these two lines:

 

“So many memories crowd upon my brain

So many ghosts are in the wooded plain,”

 

An evening in his company, Anthony Trollope reflected, was memorable: “…the stranger is apt to drop the poet in the gentleman, the distinguished man of letters to the uncommonly pleasant fellow whom he has encountered.” In her comments to Sir Theodore Martin, Queen Victoria added, “No other distinguished person has come here that has excited so peculiar an interest. Such poets wear a crown that is imperishable.” The writer William Winter (1836-1917), who regarded Longfellow as a mentor, is quoted: “…a perfect image of continence, wisdom, dignity, sweetness and grace.” Many years after his death, his son Ernest wrote of his father: “He was not a rushing river, boiling and tumbling over rocks, but the placid stream flowing through quiet meadows.”

 

This biography, by a sensitive and diligent author, is a delightful tribute to a poet whose soothing and bucolic voice deserves to be heard and to be read once more, especially in these turbulent times.