Going Back

This is the time of the year when people start thinking about “home” — whatever that may mean to them. Going home for the holidays, it’s a common archetypal thought that may or may not have a measure of happiness attached to it. It’s been a few years since I’ve been “home” — back to St. Marys, Pennsylvania the town where I grew up — and I won’t be going back this year either. For a lot of reasons not the least of which is that the long Thanksgiving weekend, Thursday through Sunday, is going to be spent in a writer’s retreat, cloistered away from everyone so I can make some progress on the book I want to have ready by the end of the year.

But there is a certain sentimental quality about going back to places we have lived at one time or another. I had a little taste of it on Saturday. I had to drive down to Marblehead, where I lived for seven years, and do some business. I don’t go to Marblehead much. It’s a pretty town and I liked it when I lived there but I just don’t seem to find any reason to be there now. Most of the friends I had then have moved away. Trudi lives in Ilwaco, Washington. Lynn lives in Coco Beach, Florida. I don’t know where Mary is now.

Marblehead is pretty. Like Gloucester, it is close to being an island, on a little “thumb” of land that sticks out into the ocean. The streets are narrow and the houses tucked close together. There is one house in the oldest part of town that has a chunk cut out of it. The story is that General Lafayette came to Marblehead in a carriage that was so wide that it could not fit through the streets and a hunk had to be cut out of that house so his carriage could fit through. There are also a couple of “castles” which are not as grand in scale as the two castles built by the Hammond family here in Gloucester but are interesting. One, called Carcassone after the town in France, sits on the edge of the island called Marblehead Neck overlooking the water and a huge rock with a thunder hole. The other is the creation of a wealthy eccentric who decided to build a reproduction of a castle belonging to the Viking Eric the Red. This area has a good bit of strange color thanks to the whims of wealthy eccentrics.

As I drove through Marblehead the memories came back as they always do — especially in places that don’t change much. Here is where so-and-so lived. There is where we did this or that. For a few years I had a love affair with a man who lived in an apartment that overlooked the harbor. He was a nice, quiet man from England who was here taking some classes at Harvard. At the time I was living out on Peaches Point and working in Peabody. I would get up early and go to a French bakery to buy fresh, hot brioce and coffee and take it to his house before going to work. Those were wonderful mornings with him watching the sunrise out over the ocean. Sometimes we had breakfast on the deck even though it was winter just to sit wrapped in a quilt, sip hot coffee, and watch the sun come up.

I don’t have a lot of nostalgia about most of my life — it happened and then things changed and I moved on. But there are moments when I remember little pockets of sweetness and that is something to be grateful for.

So Saturday I finished my business and spent a little time downtown and then decided to head back to Gloucester. On the way out of town I wanted to go to Trader Joe’s like I always did and got lost on my way there. I couldn’t remember which street to turn onto. That was humbling. I found it eventually, stocked up on Trader Joe goodies — spiced coffee, mesquite honey, black currant and pomegranate preserves, Thai spice and lime peanuts for Mark. Then I headed back up the coast.

As always, it was good to get back to Gloucester.

Thanks for reading.