Thetford Center, VT — by Amanda Perry
Welcome to “Dear Daybreak”, a weekly Daybreak column. It features short vignettes about life in the Upper Valley: an encounter, a wry exchange, a poem or anecdote or reflection… Anything that happened in this region or relates to it and that might strike us all as interesting or funny or poignant.
Want to submit your own Dear Daybreak item? Just go here!
Dear Daybreak:
In the ‘70s our family was transferred, with only weeks to find a livable starter home, to the Upper Valley. Nothing affordable existed within 20 miles of Hanover/Lebanon. So for $35K, we bought a fixer-upper New Englander near a village green and late-18th-century church in Grafton, NH.
From there, consuming Upper Valley culture meant driving 50 minutes up Route 4 in a temperamental orange VW bus. Trips were limited to weekly ballet lessons in WRJ for the kids and shopping in West Leb for what wasn’t produced at home.
I joined other young Grafton mothers in community work and the Ladies Benevolent Society. Run by stalwart leading ladies, the Society held monthly potluck luncheons to discuss which area causes to support. Its members included more than a few compulsive gardener/cooks, so I’m not sure what was discussed more: the agenda or the food.
After lunch, we young mothers washed dishes in the meeting-hall kitchen. Comparing notes, we laughed until a particular leading lady poked her head in the door and snapped, “You girls be careful with my Pyrex!”
We glanced sidelong at one another. Why was she so worried about a hunk of glass? Everyone had Pyrex in the pantry. And knew how to clean it. She likely was unaware the Women’s Movement Second Wave was on. We weren’t “girls.” We were wonder-women, balancing households and budgets and volunteerism with self-improvement. Some of us were enrolling in college, where we weren’t called “ladies” either. Whatever. We kept our heads down, managed all of the above, and still got dinner on the table every night: a minor miracle.
You learn in college and in the garden. Such as how—without scraping—to remove old wallpaper in the kitchen of a fixer-upper New Englander: Just can a ton of home-grown tomatoes and, despite windows being open and fans blowing, wallpaper falls right off.
Or how to thwart a talkative visitor who, though lacking culinary skills, insists on helping to make a strawberry-apple pie: Just hand him a Northern Spy and sharp paring knife. Listen as you hull the berries, whose seedlings you planted during a freak May snowstorm. Slice/spice the remaining apples and prepare the pastry. Your visitor will stop to stare, open-mouthed, as you slip your pie into the oven. The apple he’s still trying to peel is turning quite brown.
In the ‘80s, our family was transferred from the Upper Valley. But whenever I see vintage Pyrex, I’m transported back to certain moments in Grafton. The first occurred when that particular leading lady—a daughter of the Great Depression—snapped at us to “be careful.” Was her Pyrex a reminder of when, instead of discarding empty cereal boxes, mothers like hers arranged them back in the cupboard, hoping for better days? Or of something more universal? The Hale Telescope, installed in the 1930s, used Pyrex (borosilicate glass) as its primary mirror. Its window on the cosmos made incredible news as she came of age.
The second occurred when a gracious neighbor (born in 1905) who lived across the green appeared at our back door one rainy evening. I’d fallen ill and she’d pulled on boots to wade through the grass hauling a basket. Containing her specialty: deep-dish chicken pie, wafting delicious, topped with mile-high biscuits. Baked in Pyrex, of course.
— Patricia Kangas Ktistes, Rockport, MA
Dear Daybreak:
Sally is my 15 year-old amber-eyed mixed breed from Atlanta. We take walks at night and sometimes I wear my headlamp.
One night we came across four deer as we turned the corner to walk the loop through the neighborhood. Two females and two young deer were standing watching us. We were standing watching them. I know what Sally was thinking. She was thinking, “I want to catch them.” I don’t know what the deer were thinking. I was thinking, “What an amazing time these five minutes are, watching the deer watching us watching everything and just living in the same space at the same time.” The deer wandered off into the woods and Sally and I continued our walk toward where the deer disappeared. I turned on my headlamp to look for them. I saw four sets of eyes looking back at me. Big eyes and little eyes blinking: The synchronous dance of deer eyes in the woods.
— Sue Lin, Hanover
Dear Daybreak:
He blew back in on the 10th, looking every hard mile between here and Georgia or Florida or whichever balmier state he’d overwintered. His patch is still dull, and it took me some time to notice him, soft clucking and pecking at the leavings of messy juncoes: spent sunflower shells on the ground beneath what will be, in coming months, a flowering crab.
I sang to him a welcome home song, as soon as I registered who he was. He ate and tested the bearings of the prominent boxelder down by the river, flitted back to the feeders, then back to the boxelder, in what I can only assume was a growing contentment that he had indeed “found the spot.”
The University of Michigan gives 2.5 years as the average lifespan of a Redwinged Blackbird, and I’m next to certain this is the fellow who nested here last year. They give the outlier age at 15, and I wonder how many he’ll wrap his black toes around the year’s leading growth on that boxelder. The tree grows fast and breaks often, and I’m curious if he pines for a perch he came to like last season, in the way that we miss Lalo’s and the swimming holes that shifted after Irene.
He seems a little unsure, and a cloud occults the sun and we move back inside. Our daughter isn’t yet a month old, and our son is more puddle than child after a day playing in the melt.
Dawn on the 11th rose resplendent in a thousand variations of light and the song of the traveler rose in orchestra properly for the first time this year. I hadn’t realized how my ears had ached for those notes. Reports had come to us of ice jams and rivers breaking out of winter slumber, and I thought to myself as I heard him belting away from his perch, “if anything will shift the Connecticut, it will be that trill.”
The world can’t help but stir to the sound! It is the blessing of the plow, the ode to sun, the speaking of archaic rites settlers here left in some dawn beyond the waters. In his singing the blackbird teaches us how to wake the land, and his wild notes wash over me and run through me and make my heart thrum the exalted and chthonic vibration of breaking seeds.
He sings full-throated, without a female of his species within 500 miles. He sings, the rising sun flashes its show and the whole valley rings differently. I jot that down on the calendar, the day after: “First Blackbird, a few Turkey Vultures above the White.”
— Mike Loots, Norwich
