A Jaunt to Royalston

Royalston, Massachusetts is not exactly on the beaten track and I believe the residents like it that way. I've been to many New England towns, villages, cities and crossroads and there are few places more intriguing than Royalston. My friend Linda, who has lived in New Hampshire for over thirty years, had never been so I thought it would be fun to take her there.


This house was purchased by the Landmark Trust USA in recent years.

Located just below Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire and east of Warwick (another town that time forgot), Royalston is defined by rocky hills and chasms. Their main village is a series of mostly white buildings with green shutters, many of which are propped up in the old-fashioned style for the summer. South Royalston, four miles to the east, is where the general store is located, a bar and an old school.

There is an unselfconscious shabby chic quality to the village. Road signs are old and rusted, and likely from the middle of the 20th century, as are the street light fixtures and the utility poles. Their historic district commission–and they do have one–is clearly committed to keeping things real without making it too precious. Many homes might benefit from a coat of paint but I find this unaffected, and yet preserved, village core a refreshing pause in an often hyper-restored New England world. [For an interesting article on Royalston that appeared in the Magazine Antiques, click here.]



Many of the roads to Royalston are even more odd. It's as if the Massachusetts road crews have not been near them for a half century. For example, as soon as you cross Route 32 from Richmond into Massachusetts it is a "dodge the potholes and raised patches" proposition. Again, I sense the locals want it that way. Royalston Falls is owned by the The Trustees of Reservations and is a 200+ tract of preserved land with a 45 foot waterfall that drops into a basin (and often a swimming hole in summer). The roads in the region are thickly wooded and there is a sense that you are driving into the past and far away from the world as you know it. It is both an exhilarating and disconcerting feeling.



Before we got to Royalston we went to Sunflower's Café in Jaffrey, New Hampshire for a delicious brunch. Sunflower's has taken the old space that Aylmer's Grille used to occupy before they bought the Woodbound Inn in Rindge. It's still a great bistro-type atmosphere and it's always good to see downtown Jaffrey doing well and revitalized. After brunch we popped into Mindfull Books & Ephemera, a used bookstore on Main Street, and I always find something there that I've never seen before in book world and of course think I need. [This time a special find was an out-of-print cookbook by the incomparable Ivy Vann who, in addition to trying to develop a New Urbanist concept neighborhood on her proposed Larrabee Street in nearby Peterborough, is an amazing cook, knitter, teacher, community and church organizer, and all-around domestic goddess.]

In Richmond, we stopped at Pickering Farm, a quilt shop that had all sorts of yummy fabrics and other goodies and assorted antiques and reproductions. I enjoy fabrics but am not a sewer or quilter. I did, however, buy a transfer pattern of chickens that I can put onto linen toweling and attempt to embroider. This will keep my busy while I watch my Mennonite friends quilt on winter afternoons. And, I like vintage chickens. Linda found a square tin angel food cake pan and I was glad she beat me to it! (Sort of...)

The shop is in an old farmhouse and even the bathroom is well-appointed with charming primitives and other items. The friendly owner, Diana Gallagher, told me that she is hoping to restore her old pantry space that has been a laundry room for decades. I told her about The Pantry and she was happy to purchase it (I happened to have some in the trunk of my car and felt a bit like a peddlar man–a pantry peddler).


Mount Monadnock from Ingalls Road in Rindge, New Hampshire

After we went to Royalston and back, enjoying another country road back to Fitzwilliam again, we took Ingalls Road back to Jaffrey from Franklin Pierce University. This road is a class six road that has been discontinued for most of the way which means it isn't plowed in winter or maintained. It was once a main route to Rindge from Jaffrey. At the other end, in Jaffrey near Gilmore Pond, is the Victorian farmhouse that I used to rent long ago in another time and place when my daughter was a young girl.

On the several mile stretch, and one of the most isolated roads in the region, I literally almost ran into an old high school friend. I recognized the license plate on his SUV, we chatted for a few minutes and on we went. It was a surreal out-of-time experience. Further along, parents of an old friend were outside in their yard so we stopped and visited with them for a little while, too. What began as a drive into the past only ended in an odd drive down Memory Lane. It's been that kind of week.

Glimpses of Monadnock

Mount Monadnock behind a field of lupines, near Jaffrey, New Hampshire

The Monadnock region of New Hampshire, where I have spent much of most every year of my life, and time each summer as a child (and for a brief time now), is defined by the Grand Monadnock. A monadnock is a geological term for an isolated hill or ridge that "rises above a peneplain." In other words, millions of years ago a massive glacier came down from what is now Canada and formed this great and singular mass of rock.


Mount Monadnock from the Sawyer Farm, Jaffrey, New Hampshire

Located in the southwestern part of the state, it has the classic mountain profile and is visible for miles. It is also the most climbed peak in North America and is protected by New Hampshire state park and protective easements. You can hardly drive around the region without seeing it. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it attracted writers to its foothills and summit including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Thornton Wilder and Willa Cather and artists such as George deForest Brush, Abbott Thayer and many others. There is a palpable energy around the mountain and this is likely what has drawn so many to the area in the past and continues to do so.


Mount Monadnock from Ingalls Road, Rindge, New Hampshire

Edith Lewis recalled her companion and Pulitzer prize-winning writer Willa Cather's love for Jaffrey and the mountain environs:

Of all the places Willa Cather knew and enjoyed during her life–and places, different kinds of country, were rather a dominant note in her scale of enjoyment–Jaffrey became the one she found best to work in. The fresh, pine-scented woods and pastures, with their multidudinous wild flowers, the gentle skies, the little enclosed fields, had in them nothing of the disturbing, exalting, impelling memories and associations of the past–her own past. Each day there was like an empty canvas, a clean sheet of paper to be filled. She lived with a simple sense of physical well-being, of weather, and of country solitude.

[from Willa Cather Living, by Edith Lewis (Knopf: 1953) as quoted in New Hampshire Profiles, December 1955, pp. 17-19, by Elizabeth Yates McGreal]

Before her death, Cather requested that she be buried in the Old Burying Ground behind the Jaffrey Meetinghouse, in the shadow of the mountain and near where she had come for successive summers to write and to rest.


Monadnock, visible to the east in the far distance from a ridge in south central Vermont, and very near where our daughter now lives. I'm glad she can still see it.

While Monadnock looms above Jaffrey, my hometown, it isn't claimed by any town. It sits on land belonging to Marlborough, Troy, Jaffrey and Dublin and is a central fixture to a lovely, special part of the world. It is always good to see it and to know that it, unlike so many other things, never changes. [At right, purple mountain majesty at Sawyer Farm, Jaffrey, behind a granite stone wall.]


Mount Monadnock (in winter and from Harrisville) by William Preston Phelps (1848-1923) c. 1900, The Currier Museum of Art

Landmarks in Maine

We didn't often go to the New England seashore when we lived here but always made an annual pilgrimage each August to Maine for a day of beach-walking and lobster–and extended family visits–when we came out each summer from Ohio. In my first summer after college, when I was 21, I lived in Brunswick, Maine for several months and held my first museum job. It was invigorating being so close to the ocean and to be able to visit it so readily.


Long Beach, York, Maine • June 11, 2009

As my daughter, my mother and I all love the ocean it seemed the right place to go to celebrate Addie's forthcoming 21st birthday and my mother's belated 70th. I'm entering midlife and we'll just leave it at that. Fitting passages all. Late last July, my daughter stayed behind in New England after we moved. She announced that she would be doing so–that she'd lined up a job until fall and had another beyond that–only days before our final time altogether in our home. It was a bittersweet summer, our last in our old house, but we were together again after a winter apart and those two months of summer were a great send off for all of us.

She did the right thing for herself and we are proud beyond measure that she made the independent choices that she has done this year. But that doesn't lessen the pain or distance or the loss of her. So, while mourning our old house and life this winter, while embracing the new, I've also been mourning the "empty nest" I have experienced with our daughter. Last summer the robins returned to their nest on our west porch and had several hatchings. Mrs. Robin feathered her nest as our daughter was leaving ours and we packed up a house of memory, several generations and history.


A bee in a beach rose–abundant and lovely and fragrant by the sea.

The past few days have been about celebration and looking forward. Of course the weather was overcast and the sun only came out as we headed towards the Maine bridge from outlet land this morning (isn't that always the way?). This didn't really matter–we still had a full day of cliff walks and beach treks and lobster rolls and naps and even a waiter who was born and raised in the town my daughter was and the town that was home to me and my mother for so many years. Small world, isn't it? It rained hard last night and that helped us all to sleep soundly.


Our beach visits were more November-ish than June but still lovely.

Barbara Kingsolver wrote in her essay, Letter to a Daughter at Thirteen:

...the minute you were born I looked at your hungry, squinched little face and I got it: We do this thing one minute at a time.

She continues a few pages later:

People say it's because parents love their kids so much that they want to tell them how to live. But I'm afraid that's only half love, and the other half selfishness. Kids who turn out like their parents kind of validate their world. That was my first real lesson as a mother–realizing that you could be different from me, and it wouldn't make me less of a person.

I'm still learning that lesson.


Who is this middle-aged woman and what does she want? Is she mother, daughter, wife, friend, writer–what else?


Last night as my daughter slumbered down one hall of the rambling old York Harbor Inn (in the "Yorkshire" room, something out of Alice in Wonderland) and my mother down another, I dreamt of our past life in a farmhouse that was once home to all of us. I remembered her delighted response to her first taste of ice cream that she had on my mother's 50th birthday, her first bicycle, her first day of school, her first time away at camp, when she first held her brothers and her puppy, Lucy, and somehow the rest just seems a blur. It all goes so quickly: "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it– every, every minute?" [Emily in Our Town].


After Addie was born my doula and family friend said, "Now begins the process of letting go...from here it's a series of goodbyes. When children are born into the world they are no longer really ours." It's still a process for me but a necessary one. I told my daughter she is doing what I dared not do and didn't really do until I was 45: completely leave home and never look back (well, almost).


Mom and me • York Beach, Maine • June 12, 2009

I am a week into my solo New England journey and as I embraced my daughter and my mother, I ached for my boys. I will return to them next week, just before Father's Day, and hug the daylights out of them and I hereby promise to savor every single day of their next 10 and 12 years before they, too, are 21.


Addie and Mom • June 11, 2009

So, a happiest of birthdays to my dear daughter – happy day, happy year, happy life. I wish you one filled with joy, necessary sorrow and everything in between–I am a thought or a call or an email and letter away. And to my mother, at the start of her eighth decade, here's to more of the same in your life, too. And thank you both, immeasurably, for being in mine. I love you.





POSTSCRIPT–Just now as I was finishing this blog I heard a rustle outside and looked out the large windows of the old schoolroom in the house where I am staying, sensing something watching me. It was the doe that had walked out in front of my car a few hours ago, just up from the driveway of the house by an abandoned stone church. I quietly went out on the back porch and we watched each other for a few minutes, mere feet apart, before she heard another car on the road, snorted and turned into the woods. My mother and I have always said that deer came to the farm during times of great change or to honor an event. Throughout this birthday-even while I have been writing, the doe has returned several times to graze, right out the windows, only to leave again.

Thomas Wolfe Was Correct

Our former home, depicted in a Colonial Revival era color-tinted photograph by Wallace Nutting: "A New Hampshire Brick Ender"

Thomas Wolfe was right and so was Thornton Wilder. When it comes to going home, we can't quite repeat an experience again, we can't even relive it, but we can attempt to revisit and see things in a new way. You can't exactly repeat any one day of your life, like Emily tried to do in revisiting her 14th birthday after her death in Our Town, but that would be the point.

When you return to a place where you have lived and loved, it is never the same. When you are gone for a prolonged period, that odd, uneven homecoming is laced with a bittersweet taste, especially if you are not returning to the house where you have recently lived or the one in which you may have grown up. Both of those family homes are no longer in our family (and their undoing by our choices has not been lost on me and yet I know that those were the right ones). So for the first time in my life I am revisiting this beloved place where I can not just go and open a door and walk inside and find immediate comfort and the old familiarity that is a home (however, renting one that belongs to a cousin to whom we gave a favorite soft and chintzy couch, is somehow reassuring). I knew of this reality before my departure–and also years before that with some subtle and then pronounced changes, and the eventual sale, of our family farm–but knew that it needed to be confronted. I had a perfect two-week window in June, quite possibly my favorite month in New Hampshire. I knew if I didn't seize this time to be here that another year could go by and that I needed to relearn, sooner than that, how to negotiate being in a place of memory while no longer living in it. And what better window than your eldest child's forthcoming 21st birthday?

The first day I drove to Syracuse, New York via Akron, Ohio, where I stopped briefly to drop some copies of The Pantry at a beloved historic museum home that was once in our family (for a book signing at an annual meeting on my way back to Kentucky). When I was a child, every summer we drove to New Hampshire from Akron the same way, along the New York Thruway, usually at night. This homecoming was my first since moving and selling our house 10 months ago, the longest stretch I've been away from New Hampshire since my Akron childhood. So it was fitting that I chose the northerly route to avoid rains in the Appalachians, which we generally follow up from the rolling knobs where we live, along the spine of the mountains and hills and on into the northeast.

Except for a brief detour in Akron, I was on the interstate the entire way until I pulled off of I-91 on route 10 in Northfield, Massachusetts, the same way we approached at the end of a long night of sleeping in the station wagon as it carried us, bum pity, bump, across the cement interstate of New York. I was secure with my father at the helm and my mother at his side pouring him coffee, while we slept stretched on mattresses in the back end. Around dawn we would hear them announce, "We're in New Hampshire!" as we crossed the state line into Winchester. "Yea!" we'd answer in our bleary-eyed state. From there it seemed the next forty-five minutes were the longest stretch of the journey: the evergreen canopy over the road enclosed our way until our first glimpse of Mount Monadnock that teased us between breaks in the trees all the way to my grandparents' farm in Jaffrey.

In Northfield, a town with a long Main Street and every represented style of New England architecture, I couldn't get enough of the buildings. My mother went to boarding school at Northfield School for Girls (for many years part of Northfield Mount Hermon) and we enjoyed seeing her old haunts as we passed along. On this trip I even took some photographs (always one to stop for a building, I realized I'm now a kind of tourist in my own land). Strawberry signs began to pop up and I stopped to buy some (savoring the strawberry segue from Kentucky's almost end of season to the start of New Hampshire's upon arrival here).


Pine trees and old cemeteries and stone walls are everywhere in New Hampshire.

With a pause in Winchester at the Evergreen Cemetery, something I'd never stopped to notice (and probably shocked to not see plastic flowers on all of the grave stones, a common site in the South), I inhaled the scent of pine. Past Fitzwilliam on the way to Rindge, a moose crossed in front of me, safely enough away that I would not hit him. In all of my 33 years as a New Hampshire resident, and a lifetime of visits, that has never happened to me once. In fact, it was only the third moose I've ever seen. I took it as a good and welcome omen.

In Rindge I passed the Cathedral of the Pines on the way to my mother's to say hello. I saw the gaping hole left beyond the bell tower where the pines fell and were cleared after the devastating December ice storm. Beyond that has always been a magnificent view of Mount Monadnock [as Nathaniel Hawthorne noted in 1838, "like a sapphire cloud against the sky"] to the west, within a windy bower of pines, now all gone. [Ironically, the impulse for the cathedral was created out of the devastation--and clearing out--of the Hurricane of 1938.] Everywhere has been evidence of the woodland carnage: trees still arching over, piles of wood debris on the sides of the roads. I visited with my mother (also the longest I have been away from her) and she followed me up to help me settle into my lovely rented home in the northern part of the region (thanks to a dear cousin). The day was clear and warm, with brilliant blue skies and white puffy clouds. I couldn't have asked for a better homecoming.

Later on I drove over to another town to see some friends and realized the fastest route was to come through my old town. And yes, to pass down the Main Street of memory, right past our old house, the house I can not dream about when I sleep but that can sometimes haunt my day dreams, creating such longing that I truly know what homesick means. But then, as soon as I dwell in it for a while, I can leave it again only to return to each remembered room as I can with every family home in my memory. I have recently found renewed comfort in this Biblical passage: "In my Father's house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you. I go and prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also." John 14:2-3


A cache of flag irises, in abundant bloom now.

There is a scene in a particularly violent David Lynch movie, Blue Velvet, if memory serves, where the beginning of the movie is in slow motion and the protagonist drives through the summer afternoon serenity of his Southern town and people are waving, watering their lawns, living their lives (or maybe that was at the end of the movie Pleasantville?). I experienced this same dream-like trance when I arrived here again, where things seemed somehow new again but yet strange in their luster. As if I had returned from a long sleep myself. The canopies of trees, after two long days on American interstates where open rolling lands and wide cleared alleys drive us onwards, were suddenly strange to me. Had living in open knob country where wide vistas are common somehow changed me?


Shirley ("Shirl) and Lucy Davison

On Sunday I visited with some farmer friends of ours and stopped at my favorite used bookshop, Old Number Six Book Depot, located in Henniker. I chatted with the employee about the state of books today (a topic for another blog) as well as the recent burial of the power lines in our former town, where he also lives (also a topic for another blog). I can spend hours in this bookshop and nearly did on this trip. I ended with a pour through a few boxes of old New Hampshire Profiles magazines. My grandmother, Louise T. Grummon, occasionally contributed articles to this magazine and it defines, like the earlier years of Yankee Magazine, the New England of my childhood, of my mother's childhood. Almost immediately I found an image that seemed somehow familiar. It was of a New Hampshire village street scene in 1959 and I could tell by the road signage and the glimpse of the brick historical society. Another issue had an ad featuring an image of our former home, the same year it was purchased by my husband's family in 1961. Was the universe speaking to me again, reminding me of my former place in the world and showing me new images of it, while playfully enjoying my return? Of course it was.

This town where I lived for more than a decade has always been a poster child for a Norman Rockwell Hollywood movie set of a perfect New England village. But it, too, has changed. Many of the older families have gone or can not afford to live there any more. In 1997, our oldest son was the first child born on Main Street in over fifty years; now there are many children in the village and that is a good thing (and each of our children benefited from that bounty). Many of our old friends have passed away now and taken a great bit of the town with them. We lived our lives in such a way that we did not interact much with the town. I realize that is not how a villager should live but that we were probably not suited to being villagers (which is probably why we live on several hundred acres in Kentucky now). [IMAGE, above, shows our former home, Whitcomb House, as it appeared in an ad at the back of a New Hampshire Profiles magazine in 1961, the same year my husband's grandparents purchased it.]


I found this image of my former village in a 1959 edition of New Hampshire Profiles magazine in a favorite used bookstore. Majestic elms once lined Main Street. We planted six "Liberty" elms from the Elm Research Institute in front of our house ten years ago and five are still living. [Click to enlarge image for detail.]


The same view in June 2009, fifty years later, the elms long gone.

So my visit hasn't been mournful so far but refreshed. There have been a few tears but they have mostly been because of joy and release, a kind of needed catharsis of closure and renewal. I am seeing the region with new eyes, seeing old friends, my mother, my daughter (who is visiting from her own new life in another nearby state), and immersing myself in a place that is dear to me but that is no longer home. And that is OK, too, because I know where that is. I already feel the pull back there but know it is well-tended, that my husband is taking the helm and that my boys are so happy in their new land that they really didn't want to pause this month to come back to their old one. This confirms what I already knew: that we made the right decision to move when we did.

Just before she turns 21 later this week, for two days my daughter, mother (who was 70 in February) and I will walk along the sea and we will rejoice in the beauty and wonder of all the things that matter, in all the places to love, in all the people to love. My mother was there for the birth of each of my children and I know that she carries us in her heart, even from the miles away that we are, just as I carry my own children--and my extended family--forever in mine. Our seaside visit will be both a beginning and an end, as every journey needs to have, as well as a destination.

By Father's Day I will have returned to my new Kentucky home, far away from the pinewoods and the stonewalls and the clear granite-bottomed lakes, and the familiar architecture, from family and old friends. But I will be refreshed as I carry the past into my future, as I embrace again my husband, my boys–my new land, my new home.

THE PANTRY Now Available Through My Website

A few months ago The Pantry–Its History and Modern Uses was going to be remaindered by my publisher, Gibbs Smith. Yes, this is the sad thing that happens to most books when sales get sluggish, they've ordered too many for a printing, or they start to molder in the warehouse. The irony of being a mere several hundred dollars away from earning my first royalty check (for those who think publishing a book guarantees instant financial reward, think again!)–as well as our current recession creating a resurgence in gardening, canning, more food storage and pantry-design–was not lost on me. [However, I continue to feel blessed that I was able to publish this book and that Gibbs Smith gave me the opportunity that they did. Publishing is taking a hard hit in this internet world and economic downturn. Books and magazines and newspapers–print media is in peril. So read a book today, open a newspaper or buy your favorite magazine. (I can count at least two favorites that have gone under in the past nine months.)]

My publisher very kindly gave me an opportunity to buy the books, all clean and unmarked and still in boxes, back at a special price. Horrified at the thought of being piled in a "remaindered" stack at a bookstore near you, I decided to take action. I donned my favorite apron, rolled up my sleeves, did some figuring and freight shipping information from Utah to Kentucky, added up the cost per book for me (including freight), and decided well, I AM THE REMAINDERER and I WILL REMAIN! I've been wanting to announce this for sometime but first had to get my website updated to accommodate ordering and also figure things out like PayPal accounts (thank you to the wonderful Ronald for both!). Now I am more than delighted to send you a copy of my book–from my pantry to yours.

So I am now the primary distributor for The Pantry (I still have to look into Amazon.com options and how to continue that). But based on the Amazon price (which is above $11), I have reduced the original retail cost of the book considerably to $11.95 (plus shipping) and that is still a bargain for a hardbound book (most paperbacks are more). It also includes a signed copy and inscription if desired–gift-wrapping is optional–and a souvenir bookmark. [I will also offer wholesale discounts to stores and non-profits in half-case (10) or case lots (20)]

When the books arrived from UPS in late April I was delighted that it was a clear sunny break during a very rainy month. My husband, who suggested and supported my "buy back" option, was there to help unload (not to mention helping with our children and other details during the writing, production and editing of the book!). I felt like my mother when she was Girl Scout Cookie Chairman for two years in Akron, Ohio and we received boxes and boxes of cookie orders for our troop that were piled in our living room.

Look for my ads and listings in the upcoming Arts & Crafts Homes (Summer 2009: available mid-June) and the updated Old-House Design Center Sourcebook (available mid-July 2009). In the meantime, I'm going on a two-week vacation back to New England and ending it with a book signing and radio show in Akron, Ohio (more about that later). I promise more blogs from the road!

NOTE: Media inquiries about The Pantry may also be directed to me at info@CatherinePond.com