FOR MEMBERS AND SUPPORTERS OF THE TRUSTEES OF RESERVATIONS | WINTER 2007 VOLUME 15 NO. 4 | Seeing 'New Englandly' the trustees > of reservations home. It s about preserving the very real We are more than 100,000 people like you from every corner fabric that stretches from our past into our of Massachusetts. We love the outdoors. We love the distinctive charms future: the natural systems, the contours of New England. And we believe in celebrating of the land, the places where history and and protecting them - for ourselves, for our heritage mingle. Our recently released children, and for generations to come. With nearly one hundred special places across annual report details the first year of this the state, we invite you to find your place. effort and the variety of ways that we are recruiting many more people to the cause, Andy Kendall Jocelyn Forbush caring for and sharing the places we own and President Pioneer Valley Regional Director manage, and being bolder in approaching Kathy Abbott Vice President Chris Kennedy the future. The big idea is that we are all Field Operations Islands Regional Director in it together. Melanie Ingalls Vice President Steve McMahon This issue revisits the origins of our Education & Outreach Berkshires Regional Director conservation consciousness that began with Richard Ryan Vice President Wayne Mitton Emerson and Thoreau and lives on in the Finance & Northeast Administration, CFO Regional Director starkly beautiful words and images of con- Kate Saunders Dick O'Brien temporary New England writers and artists. Vice President Centra/ Advancement Regional Director Literary We hope it is an inspiration to get out Wes Ward Steve Sloan and explore with your family and friends. Vice President Southeast Land Conservation Regional Director Because it is our delightful responsibility Landscapes Valerie Burns to help our children, our grandchildren, President, Boston Michael O'Connor Natural Areas Network and their grandchildren see New Englandly Vice President Laurie O'Reilly The Trustees of Communications What is it to see deeply, to see "New so that they, too, will speak up for the places Reservations Director Englandly," as Emily Dickinson so that cannot speak for themselves. perceptively put it? Nicole Polillio In this issue of Special Places, Pulitzer Kate Wollensak Creative Director Prize-finalist Megan Marshall discovers that it's not simply about imagining Andy Kendall We invite your articles, photographs, letters, Hawthorne's Puritans or Thoreau's Walden PRESIDENT and suggestions. Please send them to: Pond. Rather, it is about profoundly under- Special Places Moose Hill Farm standing a place inside and out - its shape, 396 Moose Hill Street its creatures, its signs - and knowing that Sharon. MA 02067 it is your own. The skill of seeing deeply, tel 781.784.0567 earned through countless adventures and fax 781.784.4796 email [email protected] explorations, is what connects us to the land and urges us to defend its future. For information about becoming a member Today, as much as ever, we need to please contact us at 978.921.1944 xl858, email us at [email protected], or visit our website see New Englandly, need to hold onto at www.thetrustees.org. the land and the distinct character of our communities that make it worth living here. Special Places, Winter 2007. Volume 15. Issue Number 4. Special Places (ISSN 1 087-5026) As you know, The Trustees have launched is published quarterly and distributed to Report is available a new strategic plan, a concentrated effort The 2007 Annual now members and donors of The Trustees of online at www.thetrustees.org to be even effective at do: more what we Reservations. Copyright © 2007. All rights protecting the special places that make reserved. Printed on recycled paper ON THE COVER: The William Cullen Bryant Massachusetts the place we want to call Homestead, Cummington. © bill warren Please recycle this magazine by passing it 0$ to a friend or donating it to a school, library, business, or wherever it might be rW^H 4 SPECIAL PLACI WINTER 2007 VOL. 15 NO. 0 Am COVER STORY Seeing 'New Englandly' Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-finalist for The Peabody Sisters, recalls how 19th-century Massachusetts writers introduced her to New England - and to the fundamental link between people and land. SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN Books for Snowy Nights Let tonight's bedtime story become tomorrow's adventure with these choice children's books. Then check out the accompanying guide to Trustees properties perfect for winter explorations with youngsters. 12 HEEDING THE CALL Contemporary Voices From rugged uplands to wild coastscapes, our region continues to prove fertile ground for the literary seeds sewn by Thoreau. Who are his successors in word and image? PEOPLE AND PLACE 'A Happy Place' When he was relaxing at Long Hill, family came first for legendary Atlantic Monthly editor/publisher Ellery Sedgwick - even when Robert Frost was cooling his heels in the library. 18 CALENDAR OF EVENTS 24 FIND YOUR PLACE Tantiusques, Sturbridge COVER STORY Seein CALIFORNIA, A I GREW UP IN SOUTHERN landscape and culture about as distant from New England's as any you can find in the continental college, I'd United States. Until I came east for never seen snow fall or a maple leaf turn red. Yet the house my family lived in had been designed, sometime in the 1920s, by two spinster sisters from New England. They'd moved to Pasadena believing the warm dry air would improve their health, and built a house that I always imagined mimicked their own back east: center-entrance colonial, white clapboards, green shutters, oak tree out front. The Old Manse, Concord The Robin s my Criterion for Tune Because I grow - where Robins do - But, were I Cuckoo born - I'd swear by him - The ode familiar - rules the Noon - The Buttercup's, my Whim for Bloom Because, we're Orchard sprung - But, were I Britain born, I'd Daisies spurn None but the Nut - October fit - Because, through dropping it, The Seasons flit - I'm taught - Without the Snow's Tableau Winter, were lie - to me - Because I see - New Englandly - The Queen, discerns like me - Provincially - - EMILY DICKINSON COVER STORY The Pasadena tree, broad and towering when I knew it, bore die small, spiny leaves of a California live oak, and they never fell to the ground in a carpet of orange and yellow. Otherwise, the McLellan sisters must have felt very much at home when they moved into their new house as aging invalids. When the sisters died in the 1950s, they had no heirs, and my parents - moving up from a one-story tract home - bought the house fully furnished. Suddenly my little sister and I had ntain, Great Barrington twin maple four-posters and, better still, several shelves of children's books published in Boston in the 1880s. I grew up reading the McLellan sisters' Thoreau's fancy along with his "brute traffic lights, mini-skirted pedestrians, editions of Little Women, The Five Little neighbors," the woodchuck, the loon, and honking taxicabs from my field of Peppers, and What Katy Did. Hard the mud turtle; and Dickinson's iris, vision and replace them with the image snowy winters, rivers that froze solid aster, and anemone, bartsia, crocus, of Louisa May Alcott striding across for skating, and the tree-lined country and rhodora, "so thick upon the plain" the Common in long skirts and scuffed lanes of Concord, Massachusetts in her beloved Pioneer Valley. On a boots to deliver a manuscript at the (where two of the three authors lived summer visit to Boston for college Old Corner Bookstore at School and when they wrote their books), became interviews, I insisted on a side trip to Washington Streets. as vivid to me as Nancy Drew's River Concord to see Walden Pond. Like Or when, climbing Monument Heights was to most girls my age. many pilgrims before and since, I felt Mountain in the Berkshires, I visualized I was lucky, because Concord - and the uncanny draw of Henry David a "champagne-brightened" Herman Massachusetts - turned out to be a real Thoreau's cabin site and made my way Melville showing off for his new friend place, populated in the 19th century there without needing to follow any Nathaniel Hawthorne at their famous with a score of gifted authors who fixed signs. I had never been to Walden picnic of August 1850 by clambering that landscape indelibly in words for before, and yet I had. up "a peaked rock which ran out like a future readers. When I entered high In one of Emily Dickinson's poems bowsprit" and hauling imaginary ropes. school, I could read the works of that I read as a high school student, Or when I was married on the lawn Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, and she writes, "I see - New Englandly." at Long Hill in Beverly and couldn't Dickinson, which seemed distant at When I arrived in the Boston area help but think that the summer retreat times to some of my classmates but for college, then settled here to raise of Ellery Sedgwick, famed editor and never to me, and fill out the New a family, and later worked for two publisher of the Atlantic Monthly, must England of my imagination with a decades on a biography of three New have seen many far more significant wealth of historical, topographical, England sisters who were part of the gatherings than mine. Because and horticultural detail. I came to know Concord circle, I often recalled that Massachusetts existed first in my the troubled Puritans and persecuted phrase. I believed I was seeing New imagination, it was easy to go back Quakers of Hawthorne's tales; the Englandly when I walked the streets there, with so many landmarks and sandy-bottomed ponds that captured of Boston and managed to subtract touchstones still in place.