GPSing My Roots

April 18. My front yard and the back forty are still all white – they had mostly turned brown-dead-grass color, and then we had weather again this week, and as far as my eye can see, I see white. The giant snow piles are lower, though. And it’s cold. Abu and I tried a stroll late this afternoon and half-way to neighbah Eddie Bear’s pond, he stopped, gave me a searching look, then turned around to high-tail it back to the house. Even dressed in full winter regalia: winter jacket, winter vest, sweater, shirt, scarf, polar-fleece gloves, and hat, the wind was stinging my face and I was pretty uncomfortable, so I didn’t argue with him. And when we got home, I cranked the heat up to 68. I’m sick of being cold, dammit, and the woodpile’s just about non-existent, at this point.

Today’s my 62^nd birthday, so I took it off from work, and tomorrow, too. The original thought was The Husband and I'd escape the country for a day, which would have been a very long day and I’d need tomorrow to sleep much later than usual, but the cold and continuing weather (please read all the cusswords that apply into that rendering of the word) convinced us that driving to Montreal and then walking the streets there would be no treat. So instead we headed toward the coast, to put me back in touch with my roots – well, some of my roots. Montreal is part of my roots, but I don’t know those, so well.

My mother’s parents, and my mother too, come from Dover, NH. Her father was a second-generation Irish-Scot, and her mother was a second-generation French-Canadian – the only one amongst her many siblings born in the States. Grampa Breen was a carpenter/contractor, and besides building the house my mother and aunt grew up in, built a lot of the fine buildings in Dover that went up in the 1940s-1960s. He would have built more, but died unexpectedly in the mid-1960s, when I was only 9 years old. 

The houses from that era were well-constructed, and had a certain style to them, and a certain smell, also. It’s hard to describe that smell, but it wafts through my memories of my grandparents’ house, and I’ve smelled it again in houses from the same era, including one down in CT where the crazy beloved friend who lives in Florida now used to live, and a couple in Maine and elsewhere in NH that I had passing acquaintance with.  The house, essentially a center-stair Cape with flourishes, had a breezeway – all the houses from that era had breezeways, which sometimes were used just as elaborate mud rooms or garden sheds, maybe holding the chest freezer and garden tools and outdoor toys, sometimes, like at my aunt's house, morphed into little snugs, complete with an old couch covered in many layers of old quilts, maybe a picnic table, and a second tv (rabbit ears!), along with the wet beach clothes and towels and the chest freezer and garden tools and muddy boots, and a ratty throw rug on the floor. And sand – lots of sand.

Those houses also had 2-car garages, which is interesting, because most folks then didn’t actually have two cars. My grandpa, being a contractor, had a car and a truck; the breezeway or the garage also held his golf clubs in season, and stuff to take to the beach, like coolers and lawn chairs and life vests. Their breezeway was a narrow one – more of a mudroom than anything else, but not a sandy breezeway, and not a messy breezeway.

On the opposite end of my grandparent’s house, there was a screened-in porch, with giant wall-sized screens that came down every fall and were stored in the garage until summer.

The house sat on a hill above Dover, and when I was a kid, you could see the lights of downtown Dover twinkling at night from the second-floor windows.  At the end of the road nearest my grandparents’ house was a farm, with cows, where my mother had played in the barn with her grade-school friend whose family farm it was; and at the other end of the road was a triangular piece of land covered with tall pines, which the neighborhood had turned into a park for children – it had a slide, and swings, and we were allowed to walk that far by ourselves when visiting.

The address is pretty much burned into my memory, from years of addressing cards and childish letters to my grandparents, and then my grandmother alone: 10 Fairview Ave. Could we find it? Would I recognize it if we did?

As it turns out, in spite of the weather we’ve been having, beginning about half-way from here to Concord there was no white stuff on the ground; and from Concord to the coast, it just got sunnier and warmer every 10 miles. By the time we hit Dover, we’d peeled off winter coats, scarves, gloves, hats, and turned on the air conditioning. Maybe we should consider moving to warmer climes in our retirement years, back to my roots.

Through the magic of GPS, we found Fairview Ave with only a few side-trip-ups. And the farm was still there – no cows that we could see, but the fields are clearly regularly hayed, and the barn was in fine shape. 10 Fairview Ave looks like it did back in the day, except that now it’s not white, but a grayish blue, and a big front tree has been cut down. And there was a truck in the driveway, appropriately. The breezeway was still there, and the screens were out of the porch. And – unexpected miracle – the little park at the other end of the road also was still there, with its slide and its swings!

We went around twice, and took pictures. Then we headed down hill, to downtown, hunting for lunch. We went into Harvey’s – flashback! Flashback! Boy, I’m sure I’ve been there before; and it’s been around long enough that I probably have been. The bakery part’s been there even longer – I’ve got to remember to ask Mom if that was the bakery that made her wedding cake. We chatted up a couple of the waitresses, one of whom was a local, and she told me the big Irish church is still there, but the French church was torn down a year ago. We had lunch with a big serving of nostalgia, and best of all – free desserts with lunch on Wednesdays!

More research and another trip to find church, cemetery, Great-grandma’s house, and the mills where Meme worked as a young woman are in order, but all in all, it wasn’t a bad way to spend a cold, nasty birth day. And I was warm until we got north of Concord again!

Soooo --- here’s my biggest question of the day: how does GOOGLE know it’s my birthday??

For the blog, April 18, 2018.

Postscript: I asked Mom about Harvey's. She doesn't remember if that bakery made her wedding cake, but she told me that when she was 16 years old, it was her first job, ever. She imagined she'd be out front wrapping up lovely goodies for ladies to take home, but instead she was put out back to wash the giant cooking pots and pans. Mom isn't that big now, and at 16 she would have been tiny; and she said the constant smell of sugary things baking would make her nauseous. So the owner of the shop fired her!

All photos of 10 Fairview Ave taken via phone from the car! Deb Marshall photos