A State of Maine - Some Reflections on Place

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Created on Sunday, 04 October 2009 01:00

Written by Gary E. Smith

When I was in the fourth grade, we moved from one side of Waterville to the other, from Roosevelt Avenue to the First Rangeway, from Brook Street School to Averill School.  We actually walked to school in those days, not five miles through a raging blizzard, but maybe a quarter of mile down a cement sidewalk.  The fact is, I can remember that very sidewalk, and this past week (no accident, Dr. Freud) I remembered the houses along the way, each of them.

Eliz will tell you that after we were married I liked to drive by that Roosevelt Avenue house, and by then, there were other places I wanted to see again, the dorm I stayed in at college, the chapel where we married, the place we worked after our honeymoon, and it goes on.  I have this fantasy that, in retirement, I’d like to retrace some of these steps of my childhood, adolescence and early adulthood, to remember and reconnect, not in a sappy and romantic way, but to touch some place within me and feel my spirit be strengthened by it.

That was the overture I made to my brother, no slouch of a writer, this invitation to consider this sense of place, this place of memory, and to find the connection to the spirit, human or divine.  This is a vintage William Wordsworth poetic theme, I have learned, here in this Transcendental town.  “What though the radiance which was once bright be now forever taken from my sight,” he writes in his “Ode on Intimations of Immortality,” “though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower; we will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind; in the primal sympathy which having been must ever be; in the soothing thoughts that spring out of human suffering; in the faith that looks through death, in years that bring the philosophic mind.”

Do you drive by places, too?  We lived in Bangor when our children were little, nine years of their lives there.  I’ve returned with them to our home, and they’ve returned on their own, this inherited sentimentality or more.  We lived at 60 Sixth Street (say that in second grade as you’re losing your front teeth), and Hannah told me at seventeen that the trees were not as big, the house was smaller.  Our family remembers the time, as we were setting out on a trip from that Sixth Street house, packing the car, an elderly couple kept driving back and forth out front.

I went down the driveway to ask if they were lost or needed help, but no, the driver said, “I am driving my brother one more time past the home we lived in when we were little.”  Would you like to come in, and, of course they did, coming up the steps on the side porch, their eyes a little wet; “where my mother rocked,” they said.  “Our stove was here in the kitchen.  That was my father’s favorite room.”  This could be me, I am thinking now.  I have seen the future.

Eliz and I were born in Maine, lived there through college, moved away for only a few years, returned for nine, left Maine in 1985, nearly twenty-five years ago.  By 1995, we were returning for at first two weeks in July, then three, now four or more.  We have found cottages on Monhegan, Ogunquit, and lakes in southern and western Maine: Sebago, Sand Pond, Raymond Pond, and for five years, on Crescent Lake in East Raymond.  What is the pull, I have wondered?  

I have memories of the same ponds and lakes in central Maine as Earl, wonderful early memories.  I can smell the shellac on the bedroom wall in the bedroom where I slept.  I can taste the food we ate there.  I remember going out in the boat and wondering if my two older brothers could touch the bottom of the lake, I thought they were so tall.  And, growing up in the Belgrade Lakes and swimming there, going to summer camp there, these lakes were a big part of my life.

And I wonder now why the days are so glorious when I find my own lakes just a bit south of there.  In his poem, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth writes, “Five years have past; five summers, with the length of five long winters! (make it here for me “fifty years have past”) and again I hear these waters, rolling from their mountain springs with a soft inland murmur.  Once again do I… connect the landscape with the quiet of the sky…”

“These beauteous forms, (and this is where Jenny began to read) through a long absence, have not been to me as is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: but oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din of towns and cities, I have owed to them, in hours of weariness, sensations sweet, felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; and passing even into my purer mind, with tranquil restoration: feelings too of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps as have no slight or trivial influence on that best portion of a good man’s life…”

Eliz and I drive the back roads of Maine on rainy days.  Some of my maternal ancestors are buried near there.  Forget the summer day two or three Julys ago, we found some of these cemeteries again, and I, with my camera, documented the place: this gate, third right, you know what I mean.  I found again my great-great-grandparents in a tiny cemetery in West Sumner, Richmond Tuttle and Nancy Bosworth Tuttle.  He was born in 1826 and died in 1907.  

The stone was dark, the light was poor, I knelt to take my picture, and, supporting myself on his gravestone to stand, I toppled it.  It slowly tipped and then laid flat, left undisturbed for one hundred years, his great-great-grandson comes from Massachusetts and wreaks havoc in this peaceful cemetery.  Eliz and I fled like guilty teenagers but called the town office later to confess and arrange for its repair.

I hope there’s something in this for all of you, a connection with some place or places, a place to which you return, if only by memory, when you need strength, some place that evokes the beauty and happiness you once knew, and by its recollection, know again.  

For me, it is enough to return to Maine each year, lately a tempo of Monhegan, Ogunquit and Crescent Lake, touching base, touching home, back roads, roots, memories, a cottage of grandchildren, the sparkling water, the trees, the rain, the screened porch, the books.  How blessed I am.  How truly blessed I am.

Reading

These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:--feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened:--that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,--
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

From “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”
William Wordsorth, July 13, 1798

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