Postcard From Hardwick: Coming, Going, Coming
Midwinter mornings, a crescent moon hangs above our house, a jewel in the sky. Stretching out my hand, I imagine cupping this cream-colored curve in my hand. The moon is one of my earliest memories as a small child — a steady, unfailing presence, no matter where our family moved, as my parents toted their cardboard boxes of kitchen stuff, hand-me-down kids’ clothes, and books from New Mexico to Boulder to New England.
From our hillside house in the pre-dawn dark, few lights illuminate Hardwick — so small a village it might even, by some estimates, not be much of a village at all. A handful of streets, a few neighborhoods, some businesses, gas stations at the entry and exit points. A Dollar General. Routes 14 and 15 wind through, syncing briefly before they separate again. The highways parallel the Black and Lamoille rivers.
What more is a Vermont town but a conflagration of highway, river, mountain, and people? Nomadic hunters and gatherers lived here first, more summer than winter residents. Much later, colonists snowshoed in, seeking land and wilderness. The Revolutionary War brought more settlers, with the construction of the Bayley-Hazen Road, intended as a jugular to ferry troops and provisions into Canada. The military road was never finished. Our friends live on a piece of that dirt road now, often a spectacularly muddy stretch in April.
After the Civil War, Hardwick swelled with the granite industry. Quarrying was, and is, hard and dangerous work. The men came anyway. The bars came, too. By the Depression, quarrying trickled to a near standstill. In World War II, the railroads were torn up for scrap metal, and converted to war use. Then and now, dairy family farms milk, although far fewer of these remain. Young folks move in, seeking cheaper property than they can find elsewhere, although there’s less land and fewer deals now than there once was. Some youngsters simply remain, in love or not in love.
The thread through all this movement is always hunger, hunger, for bread or meat, land or love.
Around ten years ago, I walked into the house where I now live. I knew the owners and their carpenters renovating the house, originally constructed as granite worker housing. Late morning, the kitchen was flooded with sunlight over sawdust scattered on the floor. Even then, I saw the two windows some fool had removed and I’ll have put back in someday. I told my mother, who was visiting, that in another life, I would live in this house.
So long past my starry-eyed twenties and thirties, my young womanhood, when I believed through sheer will I might determine my fate, now I know the strength of our landscape, how rivers on their way to the salty sea shape the terrain, how seeds lodge in silt-choked cracks in granite — and thrive — how frost heaves up hidden rocks in a family garden, every single year. I now know hunger is collective, not territory unique to any woman or any man, not to time or place, but the driving force of life.
Abandoning one house and seeking another, I tracked down the owners of that house I walked through, so many years ago and once imagined as my own. In this life, we live here now, in a house built in the horse-and-buggy time in Hardwick, by carpenters whose names are unknown.
