My Ashfield

 

It feels odd writing about Ashfield when I've only been living here for three years - but it's also true that I used to come here during the summers for just about every year of my childhood from the earliest period of my life - and I spent two entire summers here as a teen-ager taking care of my aunt. So I have strong feelings of love and admiration for Ashfield, but they are also idiosyncratic, colored by the experiences of my childhood. I call this "My Ashfield," not wanting to try to speak for anyone else.

 

When we used to come to Journey's End for a summertime visit in the nineteen twenties, all six of us plus my parents, squeezed into a Buick "touring car," what we looked for above all was snake rock - right on Steady Lane shortly before it took a sharp turn to the right and emerged onto Cape Street, from which it was just a skip and a jump to the opening in the stone wall that told us we were there! How we did shriek when we saw it! There was always a contest to be the first to spot it, and we would hang out of the car to look ahead as we drove up the hill. It's still there, and seeing it still gives me a thrill of pleasure!

 

Snake rock

 

In those days, there was no dock at the swimming beach at Ashfield Lake, where we all swam, but the Lake House was already there. There was a tethered float out in the water nearby to which even kids our age could swim. We used to rent a rowboat and row as close to the distant end as we could, to see the pond lilies - and then back again. There were rumors that monsters lived in the depths of the lake, like Loch Ness. That made swimming both exciting and scary!

Ashfield Lake

 

But my first memories are of the woods and the night. My aunt taught us to love the woods as a second home, as she did herself. She let each of us pick out a tree to "own," and she never forgot whose tree each one was, would walk down the well-trodden path to the second brook pointing out the trees that other people had claimed. There was a place where the path turned to the left and leveled off. She would always point out the place where a group of big rocks formed a kind of natural theater, reminding us that a scene from Midsummer Night's Dream had actually been performed there way back before ww1 when the farm was being run as a summer camp for working girls from the mills of Boston by my aunt and my mother, both fresh out of college.

 

Then we would come to the second brook - a deep cleft in the earth where the water flowed downward amid great tumbled rocks which had once been a mill dam. I remember one summer that was particularly hot sitting under a flow of icy cold water that poured over the stone above me! The trees leaning over this stream were almost entirely great pines, which gave the place an air of mystery and romance, enhanced even more by a rock formation further down the brook which she called "The Witch's Cave," where two great glacial slabs leaned together high above the water, creating a dark triangular space beneath in which dried deer droppings testified to the use of the space during cold weather. We sometimes sat dangling our bare feet, fishing in the pool beneath for little brown brook trout - which we then threw back on those rare occasions when we actually caught one!

 

Ah, but the night. It was so very dark! The stars used to look like diamonds in the blackness outside. Because there was no electricity in the house, we carried candles to bed. I remember always being scared of the dim and wavering image of William Shakespeare that hung above the great fireplace in the darkened living room my aunt called Hathaway Hall. The eyes seemed to follow me around as I walked through, especially after I had read Wilkie Collins' spooky story, "A Strange Bed"!

 

The six of us children slept on canvas army cots out on the screened porch, and it was often quite cold at night, and often buggy in spite of the screens. But in the morning, there was always a fire burning in the big kitchen fireplace to warm up by, and my aunt was always ready to help us make "devils on horseback," as she called the wonderful concoction we made by wrapping bacon around a hunk of cheddar cheese, toasting it over the red hot coals and folding it, dripping, into a slice of fire-toasted bread.

 

I have a vivid memory of my daily summertime chores. In the winter Leon and Charlie Sears used to drive their team and sledge out on the lake and cut blocks of ice, which they would then bring to our icehouse, to store in sawdust for summer use. My job was to climb the home-made ladder up to the top level of that little ice house, sweep off the damp sawdust that kept the blocks from melting and pick out a big block of ice with the red-handled ice tongs, then carry it up to the house to fill the ice compartment in the ice chest. It worked just fine! Another one was walking barefoot down dusty, unpaved Cape Street dangling two grey enamel milk jugs on my way to Leon Sears' dairy farm down the road about half a mile to collect the fresh milk, still warm, bringing it back home and plunging the cans in the ever-flowing "tile" in the kitchen, fed by the spring high up on the mountain, that cooled it down.

 

Ashfield has become, for me as an adult, a real home! It's so easy to enjoy a whole series of casual connections that you gradually begin to realize are becoming actual friendships. Already I have begun to feel as though I really belong here. I guess what it means is that I am naturally a small town person. I'd been living in the city for far too many years. Living in Ashfield for me is coming home!

 

Click here to read a poem I wrote that is mostly about Ashfield roads.