MY BERKSHIRE b y Eleanor F . Grose OLA-^cr^- (\"1S MY BERKSHIRE Childhood Recollections written for my children and grandchildren by Eleanor F. Grose POSTSCIPT AND PREFACE Instead of a preface to my story, I am writing a postscript to put at the beginning! In that way I fulfill a feeling that I have, that now that I have finished looking back on my life, I am begin' ning again with you! I want to tell you all what a good and satisfying time I have had writing this long letter to you about my childhood. If it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t have had the fun of thinking about and remembering and trying to make clear the personalities of my father and mother and making them integrated persons in some kind of perspective for myself as well as for you—and I have en­ joyed it all very much. I know that I will have had the most fun out of it, but I don’t begrudge you the little you will get! It has given me a very warm and happy feeling to hear from old friends and relatives who love Berkshire, and to add their pleasant memo­ ries to mine. But the really deep pleasure I have had is in linking my long- ago childhood, in a kind of a mystic way, in my mind, with you and your future. I feel as if I were going on with you. In spite of looking back so happily to old days, I find, as I think about it, that ever since I met Baba and then came to know, as grown-ups, my three dear splendid children and their children, I have been looking into the future just as happily, if not more so, as, this win­ ter, I have been looking into the past. I have been with young people a great deal through all of my grown-up life, and I love them and all their new and progressive ideas better than I do most of the ideas of most of my contemporaries! I love my past of “plain liv­ ing and high thinking,” but I love also your future, which I think will be glorious! As my father used to say, “Allons, allons, mes amis, en avant toujours!” Your loving Mother and Grandmother Amherst, Mass., 1956 Dear Children and Grandchildren: One night in November sixty'seven years ago, on a farm in Lanesboro in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts, a little girl was born. Her name was Eleanor Fisher, and I was that little girl. I shall try to tell you what it was like to grow up on that farm nearly seventy years ago. I think of my childhood as being a very good one, with every' thing in it that a child needs to be healthy and happy and normal. But, you’ll say, all old people think their childhood days were better than the present! I don’t think I think that. I love my life now with all the new things and new ways of living, and best of all my husband, my children, and my growing and promising grandchih dren. Each year I have been more and more satisfied and happy since I met Baba in 1915. So you see my life in Berkshire was not better than the rest of it has been, but a very happy beginning of it. Some of you, and I hope all of you will know it some day, know Berkshire as it is now. When I lived there, the countryside, hills and fields and views, were just about as they are now, but certain things were very different. The house I lived in isn’t there any more, and other buildings and people are gone. Many trees have grown big and many have died or been cut down. Let us think for a minute of what kind of home it was. First place, can you imagine living in a world with no air planes, no television, no radio, no movies, no atom'bombs, no tele' phone, no automobiles, no toilet in the house itself, no water to wash in except what you pumped with a hand pump and heated in a tank at the back of the kitchen stove? I don’t think you can imagine it, but my world in Berkshire was without all these things. W e did have running water piped in from a spring to the kitchen sink for drinking. Our house, I think, didn’t look like anything you have ever seen, inside at least, in the way of a house. It was wooden, painted and stained brown, and shingled, looking something like a Swiss chalet, with a piazza running almost all the way around it. That piazza really had a life of its own— it was used for so many things. Clematis grew up the piazza posts and along the roof on the west side and all along the south side grew a luxuriant woodbine which really shaded all that side of the piazza. Sometimes robins built their nests in it. In the summer Mother had her painting table on 3 the south piazza and there was an old cot bed covered and used as a couch and comfortable chairs to sit in. Sometimes I slept on the cot on hot summer nights. Hammocks hung at various times, at the north-west and south-west comers. All through the year Mother used the piazza for “constitutional” walks when she needed a breath of fresh air after painting a long time. On the north side of the house on the piazza was a weight pulling machine put up for the boys in my father’s school to toughen up their muscles. I used to enjoy pulling that up and down. Along the extreme end of the north part of the piazza against the wall of the woodshed was a tall glassed-in cabinet with shelves on which were many rocks and crystals and other geologic specimens. That extreme north and east end of the piazza was boarded up in the winter, with a door opening on to the rest of the piazza, making a rather large vestibule for the north door of the house. In that vestibule were kept, in the winter, the overshoes, skates, snowshoes, maybe sometimes a sled and the fur robes for winter driving. The cold, still, rather dank air in there had a peculiar musty, leathery, rub­ bery wet-fur-robe smell that was like nothing else. The south door had no storm door on it. The biggest fun that I had on the piazza, when I was fairly young, was riding round and round and round on it on my tricycle. That tricycle wasn’t like anything you have ever seen. It was a rather high seat something like a chair with low back and arms, the seat covered in red plush; there were pedals which you pushed back and forth with your feet, two rather big wheels holding up the seat and one small wheel in front from which came up a long pipe-like bar with cross-piece handle by which you steered. That machine could not be used on the rough ground (and there were no sidewalks!) but the piazza made a wonderfully smooth road on which to speed, and I certainly used it. The speed and the rumble of the wheels gave you a delightful sense of power. Beside the clematis on the west and the woodbine on the south side of the piazza, there was a hop vine which grew up on a pole beside the south piazza steps. That hop vine grew very fast and always reached the piazza roof by the first of June. W e used to put a pin into the pole to mark its growth and found, on its best growing day, it accomplished six inches in twenty-four hours! I have that hop vine, or a piece of it, growing up beside our back porch here in Amherst and it still reaches the porch roof by the 4 first of June. After I outgrew the tricycle I had a bicycle on which I took some long trips, but I used it mostly just riding round the houses, up the Lanesboro road and then coasting down into the driveway from the road round our house. But that has nothing to do with the piazza. The house was built originally for a summer house; the walls inside, too, were all wood, and by the time I knew it, quite dark' ened by time and lampblack. The floors were made of soft wood. Downstairs they were all covered; in the parlor with a carpet from wall to wall, big rugs in the dining-room and studio and small rugs in Papa’s study and the hall. The kitchen and passage-way from dining-room to kitchen were bare so they had to be painted very often, about once a year. That was fun, for after the painting was done, boards were laid down through the passage-way and from sink to stove to pantry to wood-shed, and you had to walk on these boards for a day or so till the paint was dry. That made getting around from one place to another rather a game—for me at any rate! Downstairs, except my father’s study and the kitchen, the four other rooms, parlor, hall, dining-room, studio, all opened into each other with no doors, only big square, wide openings.