Last year I got bored with my blog and deleted it.
I’ve decided to revive parts of it—under a new name. Some of it will have to do with life in the 1940's and 50's--ancient history, but I'll post some new stuff occasionally.
This one is for practice—to see if I remember how to do it.
Archaeology
Fall 1947. Connecticut Route 63, ran
north from Litchfield past Grandma’s farm toward Massachusetts. She called it
‘The Turnpike Road’, although there had not been a toll collector in living
memory. Parallel to it, a quarter mile to the west, lay ‘The Post Road’.
The Post Road had long been
abandoned as a public way but was still used by the local farmers for access to
their fields and woodlots. That fall my grandmother and I often walked along
it, looking for asters or collecting the gaudiest of the fallen leaves.
We sometimes went as far as the gate
which Mr. Brooks had placed across the road, not from any need to stop through
traffic (there was none) but simply to affirm his absolute legal right to do
so. It was Mr. Brooks’ grandfather who, in 1858, had written a memoir of his
boyhood in which he recalled his neighbors:
‘Mr. John Wadhams, Sen., [Grandma’s
great-grandfather] was possessed of an uncommonly firm and robust constitution,
and up to the time of my first acquaintance with him in ‘South End’ [1798] had
always been a hardworking, laborious man. Mr. Wadhams and his sons were for
many years among the largest, most enterprising and prosperous Farmers in the
town. The rocks they removed, the acres they subdued, and the sheaves they
garnered, bore ample witness to their energy and industry.
All those sons had owned farms along
the Post Road.
By the fall of 1947, the forest had
reclaimed the acres they had so laboriously subdued. The only evidence of their
hard work was the road itself and the rocks they had removed to make
walls—inexplicable boundaries in the dark wilderness of mountain laurel, maples
and hemlock.
Here and there we found pleasant
openings in the forest. Our favorite objective was ‘Aunt Angeline’s’.
She had been the surviving wife of
one of grandma’s great uncles, still alive when Grandma was a child in the
1870’s. By 1947 her ‘house’ was only a few foundation stones and a shallow
cellar filled with sixty years of fallen leaves.
Nearby, was a deep well, lined with
freestone masonry. In Aunt Angeline’s day, I was told; there had been a sweep,
by which Grandma and her brothers dipped water for the old woman.
Two massive blocks of granite,
dragged from the foundation, capped the well. There was a small space between
the blocks. While Grandma rested on the stone steps of the house (perhaps
explaining, once again, her exact relationship to Aunt Angeline) I dropped
pebbles into the well. I would release one… and wait... and wait...
and wait... until it splashed
with a remote, invisible ‘paloop!’
Cold air seeped up through the
crack. When I spoke into the well, there were spooky echoes, perhaps the voices
of three Wadhams brothers and their cousin, killed on the same day at the
Battle of Cold Harbor.
