The Crow and The Historian

Door to Interesting Places; Charley Freiberg photo

“A  naybah fella who was working in his garden one day found a crow nestling on the ground. The crow had fallen out of his nest, so the fella picked it up, tucked it into his shirt to keep it safe while he was working, and at lunch time took it home to show his mother. Mother discovered she could feed the bird with a medicine dropper, so they adopted it and fed it milk until it was old enough to eat solids.

“The crow adopted the fella as if he were its mom. The bird lived in the house with the family, never soiled indoors, and would ride on the fella’s shoulder when he went out to work in the garden. While the naybah fella worked, the crow eventually taught himself to fly about, but always returned for a ride into the house, or just to sit on a tall cornstalk and watch the fella work.

“One day the fella heard his mother calling him home for lunch, but when he got to the house, found he was too early. His mother hadn’t called and they were bemused by this, but once back out in the garden, the fella discovered the crow had somehow learned to mimic the mother’s voice when he was immediately called for lunch again. 

“From that time on, the crow learned all sorts of things to say, and used to tease the neighbor’s cat terribly. The crow would imitate another cat meowing, and when the fella’s cat ran outside to see who was invading his territory, the crow would fly down and grab the cat’s tail. 

“The crow was also quite a lady’s man. He disappeared for several days, and the fella and his mom figured he’d returned to the wild. But soon he reappeared with another crow, which he tried to get to join him eating food the fella left out for the crow in a pan. The lady crow wouldn’t come that close to the house, so the crow took bits up to his friend and fed her. Eventually the lady bird returned to the wild without the tame crow.

Crow; Clare McCarthy photo

 

“The story has a sad ending: a neighbor, who didn’t know the crow was a pet, and thinking he was doing the fella a favor, shot the crow one day when the fella was away and the neighbor saw the crow in the corn. The bereft  fella and his mother buried the poor thing’s body where he had first found it, and erected a little wooden headstone to mark the spot.”

That story was told to me by an older gent in town who’s lived an interesting life, as many people have. The Historian, however, is interested in the curiousities we all encounter, that many people may note briefly but soon forget or otherwise ignore. The Historian stores up these encounters, and sometimes documents them: on the walls of his house are many old photos and curious stuff from days long gone; and in his mind are stories, stories about people and the things they did, who they did it with, and what they said when they did it.

I’ve had an interesting correspondence with The Historian over the past year. The correspondence in itself is a fair curiousity in this day and age - he hand-writes me a letter, and hand-delivers it to my kitchen door, a polite New Hampshire gent who quietly comes and goes and never intrudes. In turn, I type a response on my computer and print it out, because most people claim that my handwriting is completely illegible. Then I put it into an envelope and even though the Historian lives only about a mile away, I send it via the actual mail and let the rural route delivery guy put it into the Historian’s hands. If we were having a contest about who is more a true New Englander, The Historian would win, because a true New Englander never spends money he doesn’t have to. It gives me an excuse, however, to buy and use a stamp, and I will admit that I’m fascinated by some of the stamps the Post Office has for sale, wastrel that I am.

The Historian has lived and worked in the same places I grew up in, then returned to as a young adult after living away for a decade or so. So he and I know a lot of the same people – his wife and my Nana were nurses together, and he knew, as an adult, a lot of the folks I knew, as a kid, who lived in and around the village where I grew up. These are very different perspectives – as I read his stories, I go through a fascinating mental maze: now wait, who’s that he’s telling about? That name sounds familiar – oh! I remember! Wait – they did what? Really? Holy mackerel, I never heard that story when I was a kid! Someone musta clapped their hands hard over my ears when that story was brand new! 

There’s something special about living most of one’s life in the same place, especially when the people around you have also lived there for long and long. When the Husband and I lived in Maine, back in the dark ages, I met a husband and wife who lived on the farm his family had lived on for generations – the farmhouse was filled from cellar to attic with trunks and chests and baskets full of things that belonged to the generations that had preceded them, and family – and town – history and the answers to events that had since slipped into historical mystery was just a finger’s length away, if you knew where to look. I also knew there an old man who lived in the house he’d been born in, and to him, the house – still without electricity or running water; and the barn and land - though he no longer farmed except to keep the fields hayed and the ancient kitchen gardens working - were like a holy temple that had entered his being and become the material expression of his spiritual connection to the world and his own past and future. 

Old Bottle; Charley Freiberg photo

When you live where you’ve long lived, bonds form that our more mobile neighbors don’t experience. When a town elder dies, that loss tolls like a clarion through the spirits of all those who knew him or her, whether you were good friends or not. When an ancient tree is felled, or a piece of woods unsettled, we feel it in our bones, because it alters us as well as the landscape. 

The Historian’s stories reintroduce me to my place, in this, my home place. My memories now include some of his memories. And they remind me – what an interesting place small towns can be, and how interesting the people who have lived there and keep the stories!

For the blog, 22 May 2017