Walpole, Massachusetts

I lived a small life in the white stuccoes cinderblock house my parents built on a rutted dirt road in Ivyland, Pennsylvania until I went to college in the middle of Amish country in Lancaster County. It still smelled like home: cow manure and good black soil, that is until the developers paved and reconfigured the fields into over-priced houses and filled in the potholes that delighted me as a child to jump in after rain.

When I graduated from college, I moved back to my childhood home, now squatting next to a paved road, and taught in a nearby town. A few years later I called "home" the third floor of a friend's home that I helped wallpaper and renovate.

Marriage pushed me twenty minutes away from the stucco house on Pulinski Rd. My world was expanding by concentric circles gradually. It took a catapult overseas for eight years as we shuffled with boxes and a new baby each time back and forth to Morocco where we lived in a modern apartment and, for two years, in a cement three room house a mile up the side of the Atlas Mountains amidst fields of barley, walnut and apple trees, stone and adobe dwellings hunched along winding narrow paths up the stony face of the Imlil Valley.

We made a ceremony nightly of lighting the kerosene lantern against the dark, boiled and strained water for seen and unseen aquatic residents, scrubbed wash by the river with the women and reconciled ourselves to the fact that we were the hottest sitcom to tune into...it was either us or the local soap opera gossip that was on its umpteenth cycle of reruns through the village grapevine. We were infinitely more interesting.."did you see how she fell trying to climb up the mountain side..." Endless hours of speculation and entertainment all free to them but at great expense of my pride to me.

PhD in hand, we ended up in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts in a little house in Waltham for nine years. Then we moved to Walpole, Massachusetts that prides itself on having friendly people. Fields are not far away. People who have lived for generations here know the names of all the other townies. I have a neighbor who is a fount of town gossip and information.

Every town in every country and state is a bit of me.....welcome to my world.

Linda D

Submitted: Sunday 25th January 2004, 10:02 PM

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