A Hike Back in Time: Memorial Day 2019

Our tiny town has one of the more charming Memorial Day services. Picture small children singing “My Country 'Tis of Thee,” a member of the historical society reading The Gettysburg Address, and the whole assembly joining in a walking parade between the three town Veterans’ memorials where a former marine plays Taps on his harmonica.

Last year we missed the service, so we decided to go on a Memorial Day adventure instead. Jim, a member of the local historical society, invited folks to join him on a hike to lay flags on the graves of two Revolutionary War veterans. The hike started right at the top of our hill, a half-mile from our house, so it seemed like an opportunity we couldn’t pass up.

We met Jim and Clare, another member of the historical society, and headed down the trail. As we walked, we noticed that the trail was often bordered by old stone walls. This had been a great mystery to me when we first moved here and discovered a stone wall in the woods at the back of our property. Why would someone build a stone wall in the forest? Then it dawned on me that this had not been forest when they built the wall. This whole area had been cleared and used to graze animals. In a couple of hundred years, the forest had reclaimed the fields.

As we followed Jim off the trail, he pointed out cellar holes and the foundations of old barns. A little farther in and we stumbled upon the small graveyard, surrounded by its own little wall. The gravestones were hunks of granite hand-carved with the names of Enoch Kilton and his wife Ethear. Jim had carried in clippers and a rake and we set to work clearing the space of old leaves and placed a small flag in a special holder labeled Revolutionary War Veteran.

 

Claire told us that at the time of the revolution this whole area had been cleared. The farmer/ militiamen here in western Massachusetts had felt the vibrations of the battles in Lexington, picked up their muskets and started marching toward it. She also told us the story of Enoch’s wife who came into this country with her husband and 10 children. She was severely disabled, so they had to build a special basket for her to ride in on a horse. Once here, she was bedridden for nearly 50 years. Yet she lived well into her eighties.

In 1936, Charles Morse, author of several histories of our town, hiked back into this area to talk to the last occupant of Kelton Hill, a hermit named Amos Alexander. Alexander told him what he knew about the Keltons: “During the revolution, both Enoch and his son James served with their neighbors in campaigns against the British. One night the first Kelton home burned to the ground. Mrs. Kelton was hastily carried out from her bed and given temporary shelter. The neighbors went to work immediately gathering materials, and before the ashes cooled, a new house began to rise on the same site.” The area grew into a thriving community for a brief time, dying out when the last Kelton died in 1910. Alexander had, himself, found the cemetery, replaced the stones which had been broken by falling trees and cut in the names with a hammer and a chisel.

We had originally planned to stop our walk at the first cemetery, which would had made for a 2-mile hike, but we decided to stick with Jim and try to find the second cemetery, a few miles farther into the woods. We had only packed a single water bottle, but Jim didn’t have a water bottle at all. He was wearing crocs and carrying clippers and a rake. Surely, we could keep up with him. 

So we walked back to the rocky trail which headed steeply downhill, then just as steeply uphill. We forded some streams, swatted some bugs, and encouraged young walkers not to give up. As we trudged uphill, deep into the forest now, the air was suddenly filled with the loveliest scent. Lily of the valley grew along the path. As we stopped to smell the flowers, we realized these were not wildflowers. Someone had planted this lily of the valley many years before. Right behind the flowers, there was a cellar hole, the outline of a homeplace that someone had built.

We had to leave the trail completely to find the second cemetery, and after a few wrong turns, we finally found the larger cemetery with slate stones for several pioneer families.  We planted the flags and Jim cut back some of the saplings trying to invade the cemetery. 

On the way back, Jim asked if we wanted to go off the beaten path a bit and see a mysterious stone chamber. Apparently, a British man had come to town asking about this particular chamber, which was built into a hillside. It was invisible from one angle, ferns growing over the top, but as we came around, we saw an opening to a narrow stone room that cut deeply into the hillside, high enough for a person to stand, but only a few feet wide. It could have been a root cellar, but it was not situated anywhere near the foundation of the homestead.

 

After some research when I got home, I found that quite a few people are interested in these old stone structures in New England. They theorize that they were built by a group of Druids who came to America from Spain before Columbus and that the chambers were built at a certain angle with the sun to line up perfectly with the summer solstice. Mysterious, indeed.  In Charles Morse’s history of the town, he visited the same spot and was told that it was one of the oldest underground vegetable storage shelters in New England. Not our own personal Stonehenge, but still pretty cool.

After many hours, we stumbled out of the forest, exhausted, bug-bitten, and thirsty, but in awe of the history and mysteries hidden half-buried beneath the trees, right in our own backyard. Perhaps we have lived up in some small way to historian Charles Morse's hopes in exploring this same deserted village. 

"Perhaps once more the voices of children will ring out as they explore the fields and the woods. Surely they will find the stone walls and think of the people who built them.”

Planting Butterfly Gardens: Guest Post at From the Ravens

 
 

"I thought we would be learning about the life cycles of butterflies, when the lessons we needed were in patience in uncertainty, dealing with disappointment, and never giving up hope (lessons I have never needed more than I do right now)."
  
I am honored to have a guest post up at my friend Amy Marquis's lovely blog: From the Ravens. If you'd like to hear about our family's nine-month misadventure in trying to raise a butterfly and what we learned, please click on the link below to read more:
  
As Patient as Metamorphosis: the Art of Waiting as Taught by the Butterfly

 

"This earthly life is a battle:" Wisdom from Ma Ingalls

Illustration by Helen Sewell *

Last year, our family read through the entire Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I had a moment while reading Little House on the Prairie when the Ingalls family's wagon is coming up on the prairie in Kansas for the first time, that I had to catch my breath. I felt so grateful to Laura Ingalls Wilder for giving us this glimpse into her life with all its imperfections and setbacks, to be able to experience this moment in history for ourselves. In her biography by William Norris, “Laura explained that her desire to write came from her feeling that what she had experienced on the prairies were ‘stories that had to be told.’ She said that her memories of pioneer days “were altogether too good to be lost.”

I agree with Laura that these stories are too good to be lost. Lately, as we go through these hard times, I have been even more grateful to know these stories. But I also realized as we journeyed with the Ingalls that Laura had to be brave to write this story as well, because it wasn’t altogether a happy story. Brent joked that the series should have been called, “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” and it really was: prairie fires, injuries, malaria, blindness, financial difficulties, and millions of grasshoppers. That is all before the endless blizzards and near starvation of The Long Winter. Just reading those books made Brent and I huddle around the woodstove afterward because the feelings of coldness and hunger were so visceral. I have often thought to myself during this quarantine, "At least I'm not twisting haysticks."

Illustration by Helen Sewell, original illustrator of Little House on the Prairie

In the summer right after we moved, I was checking on our little tomato garden one morning. A kind of white fuzzy caterpillar had been landing on our plants. After researching a bit, I found out that it was the Hickory Tussock caterpillar, which not only could deleaf a tree, but its black spikes were venomous and would sting you if you touched it. (Brent learned that the hard way.) That’s when I heard the strangest noise, a kind of munching noise coming from the trees above me. I looked up for the source, and saw a caterpillar lower itself on a strand down to the ground. As I scanned the distance, I realized that the sound was the sound of hundreds of hickory tussock caterpillars propelling down from the tree on our lawn. I ran inside and grabbed a broom and began knocking them out of the tree and squishing them with my flip-flop. I called Ella to help, and together we killed probably a thousand caterpillars that year. Our trees and garden were saved, but it gave me a special empathy with the Ingalls family when the grasshoppers landed in their fields. What could be more horrifying than the thought of millions of grasshoppers landing in your hair, under foot, crawling over your house?

I wondered how did these pioneers do it, how did they keep on going through the disappointments, the crop losses, the famine, the diseases?

While I found myself often frustrated with Pa’s wanderlust and inability to settle down for the sake of his family, I have to admit that I, too, often get caught up in my own idealist visions of the future. For ten years, we were stuck with a house in the city, when we longed for a rural life. If we could just move to the country and raise chickens, we would be happy, we told ourselves. Yet when we finally achieved our dream, nothing turned out as we thought it would. That began a series of frustrations and disappointments that has lasted over two years and included natural disasters and a pandemic. Yet none of it compared to what the Ingalls went through. 

Illustration by Helen Sewell, original illustrator of Little Town on the Prairie

After surviving the grasshoppers, Mary’s blindness, and the Long Winter, they finally move into their claim shanty and plant their corn. Then the crows arrive to eat their crops, and it’s really too much for Laura.
“The prairie looks so beautiful and gentle,” she said. “But I wonder what it will do next. Seems like we have to fight it all the time.”
“This earthly life is a battle,” said Ma. “If it isn’t one thing to contend with it’s another. It always has been so, and it always will be. The sooner you make up your mind to that, the better you are and the more thankful for your pleasures.”

My commonplace book art inspired by an illustration by Helen Sewell in Little House on the Prairie

Ma’s words helped me with my own frustrations. I realized that I had been a victim of my own idealism, that I had written a story in my head of how God would work in my life that had nothing to do with my reality. Like Pa, choices that I had made to make that dream a reality may have even hurt my family. The disappointment of losing that dream had so clouded my vision that I felt like I had no story to tell. My words were literally stuck in my head. I wanted the story with the happy ending I had written in my head. I wanted God to tie up everything in a neat bow.

 I don’t like to think of life as a battle. Yet in the current state of the world, life seems to feel more and more like a battle every day.

Pa always seemed to think that happiness was just a little bit farther west, but Ma was more practical. Early on, she accepted that life is a series of things to contend with, and it’s acceptance of this reality, that allowed her to appreciate the small pleasures in life and be thankful. I wondered if maybe, she was right.

Earlier this year before the pandemic, Brent and I had sat down to discuss life and mission. These sessions have often resulted in a big vision for our life and crazy adventures, but this time, we came up with a simpler motto for our year. "One foot in front of the other." We can’t see far ahead, but we can take the next step, face the next thing we need to contend with, and hopefully be thankful for our pleasures along the way. I think Ma would approve.

*Our tiny small-town library has some really old treasures in its stacks including some original copies of the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder with illustrations by Helen Sewell. While we love our editions with illustrations by Garth Williams, I loved this older style too, and thought I would share.