Good for the Elders

A week on the New Jersey shore makes you remember that life is worth living. The water is warm. The waves are adventurous.  And the folks are just that too. We spent our mornings in the salt and sand and every afternoon we made our way to our grandfather's house.  We wandered through the rooms and ran our hands over all the old familiar things. It is the closest thing to a homestead that we have.  Of course I am thankful for our Cambridge apartment, but it doesn't compare to the Lamson farm.  The familiar creaks in the floor boards are like music, and the delicious smell of cedar like perfume.  The pictures of my mother and her sisters still hang at the top of the stairwell. We cousins have gazed at them for as long as we have been alive and the comfort the sight of them brings never wanes.  It makes it easy to pretend that time can stand still. I imagine days when the difficult truths ahead were still unknown and impossible.  And it is hard not to look for our grandmother around the corner.  It seems that I can hear her footsteps somewhere in the next room.
And the stacks of books.  The titles and the stories and the pictures tie me so closely to this place.  There is so much poetry.  The poems of Robert Service always haunted us as children.  Still do.  And so I returned to our home refreshed, exhausted and craving good poetry. I think this is what we will read aloud until school begins.  Robert Frost in his dedication of the book below writes of Belle Moodie Frost:

-Who Knew As A Teacher

That No Poetry Was Good For 

Children That Wasn't Equally 

Good for Their Elders-