As we round the corner into August, I begin to feel a push to squeeze all of the things we dream about in February into this month.
When you live in Vermont you recognize that summer time is limited. In June we are still finishing recitals, auditions and lessons. That week Paul and I ran a quartet camp and the Friday after our spring recital our son and his daughter arrived for three weeks. It isn’t that I don’t count that time as vacation but I deliberately pack it full with mostly kid-friendly activities.
We head to the lake with everyone for the week of the July fourth. Every nook and cranny of the camp happily filled with family. We canoe, swim, play charades, dig treasures out of my “camp bag” and, of course, find the best ice cream in the land.
Everybody left on Saturday. We got home and spent Saturday and Sunday unpacking and re-acclimating dogs, sheep and chickens. We suited up and treated honeybees for mites and pulled Brobdingnagian-size weeds out of the garden.
On Monday the floods came.
Currently we have have no bank, no operating post office and no ice cream shop. There is no meeting friends in flip-flops for iced coffee or grabbing a puzzle from the toy store. Our beloved town is empty and it makes me feel empty. So Paul and I are making an effort to find adventures that take us away from the challenges, at least for a little while.
Yesterday we decided to head to Plymouth Notch, birthplace of Calvin Coolidge. We’ve been before, worn the blue sticker on our shirts, taken the tours and bought cheese from Coolidge’s dad’s cheese factory. But there is that something that draws us back each summer and often fall. The tiny village, set deep in the notch of the Greens is so perfectly preserved that you feel as if you might just bump into Cal as you wander through his childhood home.
It was a beautiful, sunny day when we parked and stood in the afternoon sunshine. This weekend happened to be one hundredth anniversary of his inauguration which took place in his home, the oath-of office given by his father. People were dressed in clothing of the day. Rocking outside his homestead was “his housekeeper”, who lived beyond Calvin’s death, in this same home, for forty more years. Taking money in the general store that Coolidge senior owned and ran until Calvin was four, was Calvin’s sister Abbie, who died when she was fifteen of appendicitis. Above the general store is the summer White House where Coolidge ran the country from, when he came home to his beloved state.
At 2:47 that afternoon, “Calvin” gave his inauguration address on his front lawn: this being a repeat having been given at the actual time of 2:47AM the night before when one hundred and fifty people showed up.
We took a stroll down the dirt road toward his grandparents farm. Walking out of the village we passed the childhood home of his mother, who was raised just across the street from where she raised him until she died when he was twelve. The connections of the people here were a delicate spider web strung between spaces. We walked past the farm pond, evident in all of the black and white photos. I stood, looked across acres of field, the only break in green being the massive maples planted hundreds of years ago to shade livestock as they grazed: the only sound coming from the tractor traversing back and forth cutting hay. The flowers around the pond were in full summer glory, Black Eyed Susans with their black center brilliant against the orange petals. Tall purple stalks were reflected in the pond and dragon flies made aerial loops with their delicate, lacy wings. Cicadas began rubbing legs together, their buzz building to its loud climax while crickets rhythmically hummed in another pitch. As I stood there I understood why Coolidge kept coming home. Why he drew on his life as a farmer when balancing the country’s budget every single year of his office. What he learned here, remains.
The home he lived in until he left for college, New England architecture at its best, white with forest green shutters, a wide porch for shelling peas and reading stories, is simple, like Calvin. There is a barn attached to the house giving easy access for his dad. A wood room where he spent hours cutting and splitting wood to keep the family warm, and the small parlor with its well-worn, wide pine floors painted gray, where he took the oath of office after kneeling to pray for guidance. The housekeeper, in similar Coolidge fashion, kept all of the family belongings stored in the basement so that when we visit we are actually seeing their possessions rather than a close facsimile. Calvin and Grace slept in a double bed covered with a quilt that he made when he was fourteen. Two pairs of his shoes still sit beside that bed.
What he learned here and subsequently carried through his life as president and beyond, was how to want what you have; to know gratitude and know when you have enough. Every bit of this place reminds me of this lesson and, I believe, is why I am drawn here. Even the simplest of chores had purpose.
As we wandered through the summer White house, with the wooden stage and velvet curtains hung for local performances, the long table with one hard-wired phone set up on it, I was struck by what they were able to do from that small town.
As we climbed into our car for the long drive home, I knew that I was leaving something spiritually important: something that most of all caused me to question our embrace of what we call progress.