I wanted to visit New England while it was still summer. I’ve always thought September was the best, albeit final, month of summer. So that’s when I went home to Connecticut, visited friends in Massachusetts, and spent a fabulous weekend in Maine with a college friend and his husband.
I enjoyed breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with friends and relatives. I visited my favorite field in Franklin, Connecticut—the place I first went with my favorite buddy to be alone, our connection and conversation helping to sustain me through extremely difficult times.
The field is where I went to wail when my oldest friend in the world killed himself in 2014, and where in the woods around it, not long afterward, I buried little Phineas, my well-loved feline friend of more than 18 years. It’s where I went to wail once again when Mom died five years ago.
As I always do while I’m back home where I grew up, I decorated the graves of my dearly departed—“my people,” including my dad, my grandparents, and great-grandparents. Whether I place real or faux flowers on their graves, they serve to represent my continuing effort to honor their memories by always remembering that I am their legacy.
I call “my” field, the graves of loved ones, and places familiar to me since my boyhood “the ground that grounds me.” These places connect me to specific pieces of land and root me among the people who have lived there. They evoke a deep sense of gratitude in me simply for having had the opportunity to grow up and live in such a beautiful place.
“My theme is reverberating,” I wrote in my journal while I was in Connecticut, “through the land, through my mind, through my heart. These are the places that I miss and long for, that remind me of my family, my history, who I am, how I came to be who I am, how I came to value and believe what I do, why I continue to believe and do what I do.”
Antique farm tractors on display at the 163rd annual Woodstock (Connecticut) Fair on September 1, 2024.
Source: John-ManuelAndriote/photo
Attending the 163rd annual Woodstock Fair with friends, in Woodstock, Connecticut, the first time I have been there since I was a boy, my first thought was that I was stepping back in time. But I thought again, and realized it was more accurate to say I’d stepped out of time, into timelessness—where we can marvel at antique farm tractors and “old ways” of doing things after driving to the fair in an EV and using a magnetic-strip credit card to pay for my bowl of clam chowder. The fair feels so authentic, so unpretentious and happy–a celebration of simply being alive on such a lovely late summer day.
The grounds that ground me. These are the places that evoke childhood memories while offering opportunities to make new memories now in my seventh decade of life. The places I go for a measure of how far I have come in my life since I was first, and most recently, there. The places that have contributed powerfully to my resilience. The unchanging central points that help center me.
