Story Of Place

 

Through  the 46 years I've made my home in this place, spirits of those who walked these fields, those who picked up and moved rocks from these garden spaces, those who hid daffodil and crocus and tulip bulbs deep in the cooling autumn earth, those who stood on my front porch and watched the sun make a fiery ascent on a cool spring morning - those spirits walk with me - perhaps just a little closer in this spring of great change.

From author Louise Penny in her most recent Gamache novel, "World of Curiosities"

"It was the home Pierre Stone himself built. It had been in the family for generations.
Billy's parents had sold the place when it got beyond them.
Times change. You had to roll with it.
But it was impossible to roll without getting bruised."

The Secret of NIMH

Remember those days when you went to visit Smitty at his video store in the Damascus Plaza to select videos that might appeal to the whole family?  Our kids were of the age that I could sometimes still select old favorites like Disney's Swiss Family Robinson and peruse new titles in the family-friendly section. And thus the animated re-telling ("The Secret of NIMH") of the Newberry Award winning book "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" captured my imagination on a cold winter evening.

The movie version is described this way: "Mrs. Brisby, a widowed mouse, lives in a cinderblock with her children on a farm. She is preparing to move her family out of the field they live in as plowing time approaches but her son Timothy has fallen ill and moving him could prove fatal."

The rumble of the tractor grows closer and closer to the cinderblock, the earth quakes and the blade cuts its way through the soil. Terrified children huddle together as bits of earth rain down on their heads. And, just at the last possible second before they're tossed into oblivion, the giant earth moving equipment sputters and stops as a resourceful rodent chews through a hose.

In these early spring days, I hear the rumble of heavy equipment here and wish there might be a group of resourceful rodents at work to stop it as trees fall and the ground is ripped apart.