BRACED FOR NEW ENGLAND WINTER
Tag: New England
ICY LANTERN
LADY PEPPERELL’S CORNER
This “dower house,” a Georgian gem built in 1760 by the newly-widowed Lady Mary Hirst Pepperell, sits at a sharp turn in the road a mile from Pepperell Cove in Kittery, Maine. Through her Bostonian roots and marriage, she was one of the richest, most powerful women in New England.
The mansion faces a Congregational church built in 1732, the oldest house of worship still in use in Maine.
OLD PEPPERELL AND BRAY
With its shelter on the tidal Piscataqua River and proximity to the Atlantic, Pepperell Cove in Kittery, Maine, is a scenic marina these days, for both working fishermen and leisure-time sailors. It was originally a hive of shipbuilding as well.
The docks are reached by the lane beside Sir William Pepperell’s 1733 gambrel mansion.
It’s adjacent to 1662 John Bray house, considered the oldest surviving residence in Maine.
CALICO AS COCHECO
Calico – cheap cotton cloth printed in a figure pattern of bright colors, as the dictionary says – was a renowned product of the Cocheco Millworks in Dover, New Hampshire.
The city was not alone. Throughout New England, red-brick mills clustered around rivers seemingly anywhere a dam could be constructed – sometimes leading to factory compounds more than a mile long, like those at Lawrence, Lowell, and Manchester (itself famed for its denim, which gave rise to San Francisco-based Levi Strauss).
Sometimes, the operation would be much smaller, supporting little more than a village.
Upstream, existing ponds were enlarged to guarantee sufficient water flow through the year. Altogether, their commerce left its imprint on the landscape and its character while financing the legacy of the Boston Brahmins.
Likewise, the rain and snowfall flow through many of my poems. It’s not just water over the dam on the Cocheco River, after all, that’s noticed.
INSIDE THE MILLWORKS
OVERLAPPING TIME AND SPACE IN NEW ENGLAND
When my private-time writing returned to poetry shortly after relocating to New England three decades ago, my attention turned to this unfamiliar place where I was now living. Quite simply, it felt much different than any of my previous locales, and the spirit of specific locations has always been a central concern in my literary ventures.
My personal writing has often been a way for me to assemble thoughts and impressions. In many ways, it’s the way I work through a problem or gain focus on an issue. So when it came to the exercise of looking at my new environment, I soon envisioned a set of poems along the line of a monthly almanac or even a calendar of words rather than color photographs.
I’ve long had a fondness for those large monthly calendars anyway, and by the time I got serious in pushing the almanac, I had a good selection of images to draw from as additional inspiration. Just what images does the region conjure up, anyway?
That’s when New England’s famed Winged Death headstone engravings came into play, and each month began to compress the overlapping centuries this corner of the United States embodies – more so than other parts of the nation, at least.
New England also has a strong tradition of authority and dissent. The Puritans, after all, came to these shores in their dissent from the Church of England, and Samuel Gorton, Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and their followers in and around Salem, just north of Boston, were soon challenging the Puritan hegemony before being banished, in waves, to Rhode Island. Early Quaker firebrands were soon adding to that upheaval, and that’s included in my spiritual legacy.
What emerged from all this is a craggy, even Baroque, collage that reflects the evolution of the Yankee character in its landscape of harbors and mountains. It’s now available as a free PDF as my latest Thistle/Flinch edition. To read more, click here.
A CLUTCH OF MAPS
One of my favorite passages in all of poetry comes from Howard McCord’s “Longjaunes His Periplus”:
A chest of maps
is a greater legacy
than a case of whisky.
Followed by:
My father left me both.
Like my younger one, I’ve always been fond of maps. My bedroom wall was lined with tacked-up National Geographic charts, which tended to sag in our humid summers.
I was reminded of this the other morning when I was looking for a Boston street map, just in case I lost my bearings. Yes, I could have gone to the maps at Yahoo or Google. Even looked for the satellite views and all of the scary ability to snoop that goes with it. I couldn’t, though, use a GPS, neo-Luddite that I partly remain.
So I opened the drawer and here’s what I found (I won’t give you the years, though many are from the early ’80s):
- Connecticut.
- Pennsylvania (Exxon).
- Seacoast (New Hampshire).
- Idaho.
- New Jersey.
- Sierra Club USA.
- Pennsylvania (official).
- AAA USA.
- Long Island/New York City.
- Saugus Iron Works.
- Maine.
- Historic Bath.
- Delaware.
- Audubon Flyways.
- Walking Tours of Bath.
- Strafford County.
- Dover (0ne of a half-dozen varieties).
- Maudslay State Park in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Has a great stand of mountain laurel overlooking the Merrimack River.
- University of New Hampshire campus.
- Museums of Boston.
- Gonic Trails.
- Doctors Without Borders global view (two copies).
- Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
- Paul Revere House in Boston.
- Manchester, New Hampshire.
- Vermont.
- New Hampshire (one of several varieties).
- National Geographic the Making of New England and another of Canada.
- North Cascades.
- Mount Rainier, including trails.
- New York City subways (two versions, three maps).
- Brunswick and neighboring Maine.
- National Geographic Endangered Earth.
- Virginia.
- White Mountains trail guides.
- Mount Agamenticus.
- Lamprey River.
- Pawtuckaway State Park.
- Trumbull County, Ohio.
- Baltimore (two versions).
- Britain and Ireland.
- Mohegan Island.
- Historic New England properties.
- Maryland.
- Lake Champlain Ferries.
- Maine State Ferry Service.
- Ipswich, Massachusetts.
- Portsmouth-Exeter-Hampton etc.
- York (Maine) Water District trails.
- Minute Man National Monument, a series of sites in Massachusetts …
And that’s before we get to the drawer of topographical maps, especially those from my Cascades years. Or the books and atlases. Or the genealogical maps, Guilford County, especially in those files.
Oh, the memories! And you want to tell me they’re obsolete? Fat chance!
REMINGTON AND THE BIG DIG
Can’t drive through the Big Dig – the tunnels that take Interstate 93 under Boston’s downtown – without thinking of the story of Remington the Rabbit.
Seems his first owner, a teen, named him after her favorite TV show at the time, Remington Steele, in honor of its star. The one she had a crush on.
And then, when she and her mother moved to England, Remington became a feature in another household, at least until they, too, had to move, this time into an apartment that didn’t allow pets.
So Remington, in his long life, spent his final days surrounded by three children who, from all accounts, treated him well and found their delight returned.
And then, when Remington’s days ended, their father provided the crowning touch. Seems Daddy was an engineer working on the Big Dig in Boston. And that’s where Remington was clandestinely buried.
Somehow seems fitting, amid all that steel, knowing there’s a rabbit in the works, somewhere over my head.
WAKING TO THE FIRST SNOW
It’s pretty but also heavy, wet, dense — you much prefer the lighter, fluffy stuff when it comes to shoveling. Still, you can’t help but admire it as the sunlight starts strumming through the branches.
We’ve had several rounds of flurries before this, when some of the neighboring towns found their ground covered. Real snow, in my book, means digging out the driveway.
