12/ THE HOUSE IN WELLS RIVER

I didn’t know any of my grandparents well, but their homes were large, long-established family houses. My father’s home was in Fairmont, Minnesota, on the edge of a small lake in town, set amid dark-soiled, southern Minnesota prairie farmland. My mother grew up in Wells River, Vermont, a tiny village along the Connecticut River (current population 325), right on the border between Vermont and New Hampshire. Both houses were sources of fascination for me as a child, redolent of previous generations. This past summer, I was able to visit my mother’s and grandmother’s home in Wells River with all three of my daughters, Anna, Kate, and Lucy, along with my mother, Maggie, now 87, and oldest sister, Katie. Maggie’s cousin, Deli, 73, still lives there and graciously showed us all around. I’ve visited twice before in recent years, in 2001 alone, and in 2002 with Michael. Before 2001, I hadn’t been back to Wells River since 1972, when I was still a college student.

You can see King Hill rising up behind the farthest end of the house.

My first visit to Gram’s house in Vermont was when I was five years old. I was the fourth of five girls then (the sixth girl was born the next summer), so a trip alone with my mother from Minnesota in winter was, by itself, an amazement. Then add a first airplane ride and first view of “mountains.” I had known only the world of the Great Plains up to that time. But my older sisters said I would see mountains in Vermont. I remember asking them how big a mountain was: “Is it bigger than an elephant?” (I had seen circus elephants tethered in the field below our house, near the county fairgrounds.) “Bigger than a ship?” (I had never seen a ship but had heard of their size.) “Bigger than Old Smokey (our local ski hill)?” “No, bigger,” they said, to each question.

I suspect my mother took me along because I wasn’t in regular school yet but was old enough to manage some basic self-care. She often tells the story about how I entertained a group of business people at the back of the slow, propeller plane from Minneapolis to New York, describing the exploits of my large family of sisters. I don’t remember that part at all. I do remember coveting a tall, beautifully dressed doll for sale in the La Guardia airport and the winding drive north from Boston into central Vermont. And I remember experiencing my first awareness of public embarrassment during the trip: at a large extended-family gathering in Gram’s tiny living room, my mother complained about having to pluck out a few gray hairs from among her short, dark hair, at age 35. “If Gram plucked out all her gray hairs,” I commented, “she wouldn’t have any hair left.” This elicited explosions of laughter and days of comments from my adult relatives. I was confused; I thought I had said something logical, obvious, and straightforward. So, what was this strange, hot, uncomfortable feeling?

An upstairs pantry window; this is one of two angled windows upstairs, on the back side of the house, placed this way in order to allow the shed roof to attach just below them.

Lucy showing the size of one of two tiny doors into the downstairs bathroom; the bathroom itself is also tiny.

Gram’s house went on forever, sheds following upon sheds, closets, tiny doors, secret stairwells, pantries, and funny angled windows. The kitchen smelled like generations of meals. The cotton sheets on the beds were thick and stiff, heavy with a quality I didn’t recognize—they were ironed, I was told later. And then there were Skiz and Liz, or Skizzie and Lizzie, Gram’s old-maid schoolteacher cousins (we really called them “old-maid schoolteachers” in those days), who lived in the downstairs of the house with her and spoke like aristocrats. And there was Great-aunt Aggie from Canada, who lived upstairs, with a closetful of size 5 high-heeled shoes in all colors imaginable. My life had become more interesting.

Looking out from inside one of the carriage sheds.

On the next trip, with my whole family, I remember Skiz and Liz showing us the closet under the stairs where they kept games, toys, and puzzles for kids, along with odds and ends from their travels in Europe—strange hats and toys. Their real names were Isabelle and Lizzabelle, and they were each cousins to each other and to my widowed grandmother. Gram had been a widow since my mother’s fourth birthday, when her young husband died of a bleeding ulcer. He was working as an assistant Attorney General to President Calvin Coolidge (a Vermonter) in Washington, DC.

You can just about see the closet door under the front stairs in this picture. If you double-click on the photo, you can also see a series of handmade braided rugs on the floor.

Maggie has copies of the poignant letters Gram wrote to her husband’s parents from the capitol during his illness. The letters progress from sounding cheerful and hopeful at first, then gradually more cautious, then carefully uneasy, then clearly preparing them for the worst, and, finally, announcing his death. She took the train home alone to five children under the age of six, and soon after contracted polio and lost the ability to walk without crutches. Gram and her young family moved back into her parents' home, the house in Wells River, where Gram was born and where, in 1945, my parents were married. Great-aunt Aggie was Gram’s sister-in-law and also a widow. Her husband died young, too, from a ruptured appendix. Both men might well have survived if antibiotics had been available.

A corner of the small living room, with a transom window opening into Gram's old bedroom.

Maggie told us her grandfather used to sleep in the unheated attic, after he was widowed, up this steep, narrow stairway.

So the house in Wells River, as I knew it, was a houseful of old and widowed or never-married women. We walked every day to the post office a block and a half away to pick up the mail—there was no mail delivery in such a small town. Everyone we met seemed to already know who we were—“Oh, you’re Maggie Goodell’s girls!” And we would walk to the bridge over the Connecticut River to run back and forth, announcing, “Now, I’m in New Hampshire,” then “Now, I’m in Vermont.”

Maggie telling stories about the old electrical shop.

In one of the back sheds, Maggie's uncle ran an electrical business years ago, and there are still old store shelves and drawers with labels on them: "solder," "lugs." We explored the dark, brick-walled basement for the first time, and looked up into the now closed-off second stairwell running up from the kitchen—it's now a steep closet.

This space used to be a very tiny bedroom in Great-aunt Aggie's apartment upstairs. I remember sleeping in the single bed tucked right under this roof dormer angle—a very snug sleeping spot!

The best thing about the house in those days was the water. It was set up against the foot of King Hill and, behind the furthest shed, there was a spring. The house was already plumbed with town water, but there was still an old gravity-flow system to carry spring water into the kitchen through an open faucet into a deep, metal sink in the corner. There was a tall pipe stuck into the drain at the bottom, which allowed the sink to fill with 55° water to the top of the open pipe and then drain out through the circular opening. Bottles of milk were set down into the deep sink to keep them cool. Day and night the water flowed into that sink and overflowed into the tall pipe, with the sound of a gurgling creek right inside the house. I loved the sweet, cold taste of that gurgling water. I remember creeping out into the kitchen in the dark—did it really run all night?—to hear it and taste it.

Deli, Lucy, Maggie, and Katie (left to right) looking at Deli's old photos.

Back in Minnesota, we had a children’s record of Gene Kelly reading out loud a story about a house that had a personality and feelings, as if it were a live being. I used to listen to the record over and over. I loved Gene Kelly’s warm voice—a dancer’s voice—and I wonder if my love of old houses comes from that association of warm feeling with houses as personalities. I felt that way about the house in Wells River, that it was alive in surprising ways, with unfamiliar characters living there and a spring flowing through the kitchen.

Jane, Maggie, Deli, Lucy, Anna, Katie (left to right) in the side yard.

These photos were taken by Kate—thanks, Kate—on our visit in August 2008. To see Anna's pages of photos from the same trip, visit her Flickr site: http://flickr.com/photos/ungratefulninja

And, I wonder if anyone else would like to add stories or photos? If so, click on "COMMENTS" below or e-mail them to me.

—Jane