Today has been a day of extremes. I began the day in Durham, NH where it was sunny and hot, and I was glad to spend an hour in the air-conditioned yoga studio where we contemplated our spiritual connection to a higher power. I am ending the day in a torrential thunderstorm in Craftsbury Common, VT, where we just heard a talk in which we were invited to contemplate our spiritual connection to our rural heritage, or to our “place” in the world.
As I drove toward Concord, NH, the temperature on the car thermometer registered 99, which has to have been a record for this date. I was confident that as I drove north, the temperature would drop. Not the case, or at least not by much. It fell to 94 in Littleton, but then, as I crossed the Connecticut River into Vermont, the temperature plummeted to 68, and the Vermont radio station informed me that there was a tornado watch in effect for the entire state. The sky was black and the winds kicked up (the radio said 45 mph gusts) and I wished I did not have the unfamiliar part of the trip ahead of me. With my eye on the sky for funnel clouds, I made my way north on 91, and by a circuitous route to Sterling College in Craftsbury Common, a tiny, picturesque white village hidden in the northeast kingdom of Vermont. If I were Robert Frost, I would no doubt craft a poem about NH and it’s cold relative to the west, and become famous…..
My connection to this place is both rooted and spiritual, and brings me to my next random thought, that these past few days have been filled with connections to several men who are either literally or figuratively dead to me. Today’s connection is to my oldest brother, who died 20 years ago. Even as I write that sentence, I can’t believe that his death was that long ago, as I can still hear his laugh, see his face, and imagine him sitting at the dinner table jiggling his knee, or drumming his fingers on the table, playing a fugue which only he could hear. In any case, here, in Craftsbury, VT, he began his teaching career after his graduation from Dartmouth, and we drove him and his stuff to what seemed to me to be the end of the world, and deposited him, and aforesaid stuff in what looked mostly like a poor excuse for a summer camp. I think he lasted one or maybe 1 ¾ of a year here, being fired for trying to close the school down after he discovered that the headmaster was falsifying the students’ transcripts. Though he was sent packing, the school stayed open only a short time after, though I don’t know if it closed because of Rob’s crusade. I think it was here that he ran into a deer and totaled his VW bug, and then “had” to buy a Porsche, in which he and younger brother Dick drove across the country to spend the summer in California.
Our speaker tonight cautioned against nostalgia, as a romanticization of the past and a substitute for remembering the truth of the past, and I find that it is easy for me to slip into nostalgia as I think about Rob and that time in our lives and in his life. After he left here, he moved to a school in Connecticut, near where I soon landed as a freshman in college, and spent some bizarre weekends with him, perhaps the subject of another blog.
I sat with a woman at dinner who taught for 8 years at White Mt. School, and that precipitated true nostalgia, and thoughts of ex-husband, Bob Whitten and the years we lived at White Mountain. They were, in many ways, the happiest years of our married life, but if I am honest, they were also, for me, some of the unhappiest. For him, I believe they were the happiest, and represented the place he had lived the longest in his entire life and felt the most rooted. He died 8 years ago, and as I prepare to spend 4 days on the WMS campus, actually living in the dorm where we were dorm parents for 2 years, I feel his presence. I wonder how it will affect me while I am there, and I hope, if anything, that it will be a comfortable experience and that it will bring back the happier memories. Will that be nostalgia or truth?
Finally, last night Todd sent me his itinerary for China, and I realized that he would be spending a day or two on the Yangtze River, docking at Yichang. That, I have to admit, made me think of my other ex-husband, whose great uncle spent 3 or 4 winters living in a temple in a small village up the River from what he called I-Chang. I transcribed his wife’s diary, written both from the small village and from the larger town of I-Chang, and always hoped to see and travel the river before the 3 Gorges Dam was built. For 10 years I lived and breathed Walter and Anna Granger, and I can’t say that I would want to re-live that time period, but if anything, I’d like to write to my ex and say “guess what, you turkey, Todd is going to see the very places that Walter and Anna write about in their diaries!” Part of me is smug that a member of my family will be there first.
And so, here I am in the Northeast Kingdom, not far from the birthplace of my grandmother and my mother, and I am thinking about the men who are now lost to me. The thunder, lightning and rain have started again, and tomorrow will bring clearer air, and a brain cleared of these cobwebs from the past, now that I have committed them to paper. (Paper?)
