Failure Is an Option--Part Three

The Feel of Home

I grew up in New Jersey but felt an all-encompassing sense of home when, at the age of six, I first visited my grandparents in Western Massachusetts. Their house rested only five feet from the edge of a steep bank. A brook, carved away over time from the land above, rushed below past water-smoothed stones. A bitterly cold wind swirling with snow raged outside, and my grandmother served homemade cocoa as we sat cozily before a wood burning stove, its door left open. The first such fire I’d ever seen, the coals blazed or glowed, shifting from orange to red to brilliant yellow.  

To keep his house safely on its foundation, my grandfather transformed the brook’s bank into a five-tiered retaining wall of varicolored and striated rocks that ranged in size from softballs to boulders three feet across. He quarried them mostly by himself with nothing more than grit, determination, an old heavy truck, and a homemade winch. The truck had fat, deep blue fenders and plank benches my grandfather built against the sides of the bed. Rides down the main street of town to the dump or a quarry, thrilled us grandchildren. Laws were different then. 

The calendar-worthy town where my grandparents lived was the place I wanted to call home. I fell in love with the forested mountains and picturesque boulder-strewn streams and rivers. After college, I moved to Western Massachusetts without a job offer or the means for an apartment. My grandparents graciously opened their door. Ours evolved into a beneficial relationship. They were in their eighties, and I gladly took on the tasks becoming burdensome to them. I never felt a stranger to the town and met some kindred spirits I still treasure some thirty years later.

More the next time.