Remember the Time: Essays & Reflections - Tapa blanda

Sinopsis

I’ve always made my way down to the three rivers. Even now as I sit on my back porch, I hear the rush of the Assabet a half mile to the north, already filled with an early and surprising winter melt. Any leaf of me could fall and be carried back to the fork of the Sudbury and Concord rivers. My whole life has been a continual returning to these three rivers and my common ground—the water, fields, woods and village of Concord and now, just to the west, the small mill town of Maynard.

More and more I remember less and less, but there are still a few granite walls destined to stand for another thousand years and still a few hills to defy development. There are still a few farm-stands with the same trucks and tractors parked by weathered sheds, and still a few cantankerous old souls hiding their smiles behind eighty or more New England winters. I wonder if they remember the kid who worked for them so long ago? I wonder what they remember? I wonder what they wish they kept?

This collection of essays is my way of keeping what I remember—or at least what I need to remember. Musketaquid is the native Nipmuc name for the Concord River. Someone once told me it meant “slow moving river,” which seemed like a fine and apt name to me, so much so it didn’t bother me to discover the actual translation is “grass grown river.” That, too, makes sense. The grassy fields are now wooded over—a bramble of hawthorne and swamp maple hiding almost every view, but it is still a slow moving river—and always will be. Even the Nipmucks would agree with that.

These words are dirges, songs, celebrations, memories and ramblings. They are what I have to add to the rivers—small streams of experience becoming a smaller part of the Musketaquid, which, hopefully, somewhere past the Merrimack, flows into some greater sea of understanding and insight. They are the good, the bad, and the ugly drafts of my life scattered here and there with the randomness of the winds and tides driving me and ferrying me to so many shores.

Words carry me away and words take me home.

I wrote these essays and scratchings over a long run of time, usually close to home, but often in far-off places, and sometimes simply as conversations with my students, friends, or family, but always within dream and earshot of the beautiful, beautiful rivers rambling through my home.

These words are just a part of my Thanksgiving.

The rest is just my life.

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