A child's memories of small town Connecticut

When I was young I lived in a small red clapboard house along a branch of the Farmington River. I never really thought about it much, that rivulet, except twice a day when I walked over a narrow bridge to get to and from my bus stop. I’d stop for just a moment to watch some white water rush beneath me, to let its mild roar block out everything else. Then I’d move on.

Two nights ago I dreamt about that little bridge, though it wasn’t so little any more. It looked more like a dam, tall and wide, made of shiny steel, with a series of ladders, also steel. In the dream the rivulet had become pounding rapids after the dam. My younger brother and I were climbing the tower, soaked by mist floating up from below. It was frightening but exhilarating, both.

I haven’t spoken to my brother in nearly 4 years, since our Mom passed away after an aggressive battle with bone cancer. What had been awkward between my brother and me for years became unbearable, as the best of him died along with her.

But that’s a story for another day.

Today, for some reason, I need to revisit our modest town of just 1000 souls, to retrace the path of that school bus, to recall my place of origin. Perhaps it’s the precipitous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, leaving the Taliban in control, again. Perhaps it’s ethnic cleansing being perpetrated by one group against another in northern Ethiopia. Maybe it's the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Or my family contracting Covid-19 over the summer. Maybe it's that a friend’s stage four pancreatic cancer is forcing me to acknowledge how fragile life has always been. It could be the works. In any case, I'm forced to return.

In my mind’s eye I’m usually pretty young when I'm back in Colebrook walking from home to the bus stop—10 maybe, wearing high water pants or a flouncy skirt with ankle socks, scuffed shoes, and an itchy long sleeve blouse. Sometimes I’m walking with my little brother, or my Mom, sometimes on my own. Either way, I’m nervous, sometimes downright scared.

The bus stop is just a spot by the side of a Y in an old country road, next to a meadow where brown horses sometimes grazed. The neighborhood kids gather there from several directions, all older, some not so nice, one pretty darned mean. Every morning I make myself as small and quiet as possible, hoping they would just ignore me. Usually they do.

But once I climb the tall stairs onto that old yellow school bus, I feel safer, almost happy. For the next 45 minutes I sit by a smudged window and watch my own little world go by, and a pretty little world it is. Our bus driver would listen to old Eagles songs on a cassette player—Hotel California, Peaceful Easy Feeling, Lyin’ Eyes. I can still recite them word for word. Is she still alive?

First we drive by what passed for a mansion in rural Connecticut, sitting across from the bus stop, tall, white washed, with imposing white front pillars. Then, within a minute, we drive by a run-down mobile home sitting in a mud covered yard with disassembled car and truck parts strewn about. This is where the mean kid, and his several brothers and sisters, live. I often feel a mix of sadness and fear when we drive by that house that is poorer than ours. But not for long, because next comes one of the best parts of the ride, an insanely steep drop to a rusty old bridge that allows us to cross the Farmington. Once down, we climb right back up the other side of that steep ravine. How our driver could safely maneuver that long bus up and down that rickety bridge never ceased to amaze me. She does it in rain and she does it in snow. (It was decades later before the town replaced that old thing with a new one that brought the road flat across the chasm from one side to the other, shining in the sun. When I first saw it as an adult I couldn’t believe how simple was the solution to that long-standing danger.)

We turn left through a tunnel of green, mostly evergreen, that follows the river toward what my young son now calls ‘civilization.’ At least there are more houses in closer proximity to one another, among a continual sprinkling of farms. The kind with farm houses, barns, pastures, orchards and very tall grass. I like this area too, because it's where my best girlfriend lives, in a house about the same size as ours. The main difference between us is her family was ‘exotic,’ and independent—her mother from Vietnam, her father owns a small dry cleaning business one town over. They rent the upstairs to real live hippies, in bell bottoms, head bands and tie-dyed t-shirts!

My friend hops on the bus and together we continue on our way. If the bus continued straight it would have run into a glorious reservoir where people swim, boat and fish. It was built before I was born, after a devastating flood washed away much of northwestern Connecticut. But to us it is just beautiful clear blue water.

We pick up kids at the home of my Girl Scout leader, where I sew and crochet and fill my uniform with badges. Then our driver expertly turns that big bus around in the middle of what passes for a highway (Route 8), then right by the most amazing home. It is set on a hill, stained mahogany, with enormous picture windows. Most wonderful of all is the cleared green fenced-in field with shimmering mahogany horses. And the only Husky I have ever seen.

Interesting is that I only entered that house once that I could recall. It was as impressive on the inside as out—furnished with antiques (including candles in sconces along the walls), with shining hardwood floors, and oh so clean. The reason this is interesting is that I am actually related to two of its inhabitants. They're cousins, the daughters of my mother’s youngest brother. He and his wife divorced (the first divorce I knew) and she had remarried the man with the big house, the pedigreed dog and the horses.

And on we drive, my friend and I, jostling on the cracked plastic seats that smell of rancid left over lunches and exhaust fumes, chatting about English or math, lunch or recess, animals or stories. Next comes the driveway of another girl in our class who didn’t hang out with us much. Her family is privileged; her mother worked as a travel agent so they vacationed all over the world. (She would prove this by pealing off her sunburn from her freckled back during class in the winters.) They have an enviable house, atop a Hill surrounded by trees, looking down on Shady Brook, which flows into the Farmington, just a narrow creek at this point.

The old bus takes the curves of the road that follows the water as we eventually climb up out of the town’s valley onto a grassy plateau. The little back road meets a real one, with proper paving and an actual center yellow line, right at the corner where the old one room school house still stands. It’s a museum now, that small square log cabin, but it hardly seems historic given the general remoteness of our town.

We turn left, driving past the homes of families with relatively greater means, newly painted and pointed, with pricy cars in the drives. (We don't know them.) We drive past the town center, the home of our church choir director (the first gay man I come to know), the old country store, the historical society, the tall white congregational church, where my Dad serves as Deacon and I play clarinet accompanied by the choir director on the organ. We drive past the partially paved back road that leads down another hill to the town pond. It was there that I worked as a child care provider some summers, and there that I swam out to a floating dock or lay toasting on beach towels with my friends.

We’re almost at the school. With its 6 grades plus kindergarten,100 or so students, library nook filled with Nancy Drew mysteries, gym/auditorium/cafeteria with stage and squeaky floor. The school yard holds a playground on one side, a playing field on the other, and a garden (often flooded) in the back yard. The blacktop is periodically chalked with a large outline of the United States that the 5th graders would fill in with states, or huge blue outlines of humpback, blue and killer whales, showing their size.

What do I remember about school there? Being embarrassed when I caught a stomach virus in kindergarten and had to be driven home. Our gymnastics coach who helped me to learn the balance beam. Being sent to the psychologist in 1st grade because I couldn’t see the blackboard. Then being diagnosed as nearsighted and given my first pair of rectangular (very dorky then, now retro) glasses. Subsequently racing ahead in English, math, social studies and science from that point on, demonstrating just how dorky I really could be.

I remember a friend falling off the swings and breaking her arm. I remember a recurring dream in which the school caught fire and tipped over with all of us screaming inside. And another dream in which dinosaurs attacked us all there. And I remember that same classmate who lived in that enviable house being the first to introduce us as 6th graders to the joys of doodled sex cartoons. (I fretted about those inane drawings for years.) Another classmate had a congenital respiratory disease, which ultimately took her life during my first year of college. But back then that disease gave her a sense of freedom to do what she wanted. Suffice it to say, she had fun, and she got into trouble, a lot.

I remember the long-overdue retirement of a teacher I had who couldn’t teach any longer, my father’s stint as a liberal democrat on the school board of a town in which democrats were not liberal. I remember watching the Watergate hearings on a fuzzy old TV.

And I remember that long yellow school bus, and the Eagles, bringing me back to the bus stop from which I walked over a small branch of the Farmington River, past the foundation where an old creamery used to be, back to my own little home.