A reader replies via Substack Notes to my question about where you all live, and why:
My wife and I live along the Connecticut coast at the juncture of the Connecticut River and Long Island Sound. We overlook a sprawling estuary of salt marshes, tidal rivers and creeks and forested hummocks, the remnants of hilltops now drowned by 15,000 years of sea level rise
Our house, which we built over 40 years ago, sits among hayfields and small copses of hardwood and pine. My family has occupied the land since the Mid-1600s. Prior to that it was the home and hunting grounds of the Nehantic Tribe. Approximately 8,000 years of history lies beneath our feet. This is our home and we love it and are grateful every day to be the stewards of this place.
Your home turf almost became mine. I graduated from Yale in 1964, at the end of a senior year that coincided with the deaths of Jack Kennedy, John XXIII, and A. Whitney Griswold. My class was shocked into a liberalism that remains virtually unrivaled (or so I'm told}. I immediately applied to the fledgling Peace Corps and spent the next two years in Cameroun. My mother, according to family legend, spent those years in states of periodic anxiety. To welcome me back with an anchoring gift, she made a down payment on a decaying house on the banks of the Connecticut, immediately north of, and adjacent to, the eastern landing for a small auto-ferry. I visited my soon-to-be house only once, for some obscure financial misadventure forced my mother to renege on the contract and reclaim her down payment. Nevertheless, I spent enough time crisscrossing your home turf -- my mother and her multi-talented second husband had made a delightsome habitat out of an abandoned barn during my absence -- to fall in love it, to the extent that all of the proper place names mentioned in your piece are quite familiar to me, even after almost six decades. Many thanks for re-awakening so many wonderful memories. DL.
I wonder if that was next to the Chester Ferry, which still operates between Chester and Lyme. By the way, one critical change that turned the Connecticut River from an open sewer back then into the beautiful place we know today was the Clean Water Act of 1972. Environmental protection works.
Superb writing, as usual. You share these special places with my son, Dr. Scott Williams, also a rower -- capt. of the Conn. College team. This would have been a perfect piece for Estuary magazine. Do you know it?
Thank you, Ted. Let me know next time you come down to visit him. We can meet up somewhere for lunch and reminisce about Les Line, Gary Soucie, and other great editors of yore.
Now that I've blathered on about where I live, please let me know about your home turf, why you like it, what you'd keep or what you'd change. And thank you for commenting. Richard Conniff
A reader replies via Substack Notes to my question about where you all live, and why:
My wife and I live along the Connecticut coast at the juncture of the Connecticut River and Long Island Sound. We overlook a sprawling estuary of salt marshes, tidal rivers and creeks and forested hummocks, the remnants of hilltops now drowned by 15,000 years of sea level rise
Our house, which we built over 40 years ago, sits among hayfields and small copses of hardwood and pine. My family has occupied the land since the Mid-1600s. Prior to that it was the home and hunting grounds of the Nehantic Tribe. Approximately 8,000 years of history lies beneath our feet. This is our home and we love it and are grateful every day to be the stewards of this place.
A gently, yet acutely observed piece. Thank you.
I was particularly taken by your neighbor’s needlework. "Do not mistake tolerance for hospitality."
Speaking with irony rather than judgement…in large swaths of the world - from Albania to Afghanistan - this notion is reversed:
“Do not mistake hospitality for tolerance.”
Your home turf almost became mine. I graduated from Yale in 1964, at the end of a senior year that coincided with the deaths of Jack Kennedy, John XXIII, and A. Whitney Griswold. My class was shocked into a liberalism that remains virtually unrivaled (or so I'm told}. I immediately applied to the fledgling Peace Corps and spent the next two years in Cameroun. My mother, according to family legend, spent those years in states of periodic anxiety. To welcome me back with an anchoring gift, she made a down payment on a decaying house on the banks of the Connecticut, immediately north of, and adjacent to, the eastern landing for a small auto-ferry. I visited my soon-to-be house only once, for some obscure financial misadventure forced my mother to renege on the contract and reclaim her down payment. Nevertheless, I spent enough time crisscrossing your home turf -- my mother and her multi-talented second husband had made a delightsome habitat out of an abandoned barn during my absence -- to fall in love it, to the extent that all of the proper place names mentioned in your piece are quite familiar to me, even after almost six decades. Many thanks for re-awakening so many wonderful memories. DL.
I wonder if that was next to the Chester Ferry, which still operates between Chester and Lyme. By the way, one critical change that turned the Connecticut River from an open sewer back then into the beautiful place we know today was the Clean Water Act of 1972. Environmental protection works.
Wonderful! What a gorgeous, historic, and cultural place we live in :-)
It is, and for readers who want to know more, check out Patrick's great 2024 book, "A Field Guide to the Connecticut River" (Yale University Press).
Superb writing, as usual. You share these special places with my son, Dr. Scott Williams, also a rower -- capt. of the Conn. College team. This would have been a perfect piece for Estuary magazine. Do you know it?
Thank you, Ted. Let me know next time you come down to visit him. We can meet up somewhere for lunch and reminisce about Les Line, Gary Soucie, and other great editors of yore.
Now that I've blathered on about where I live, please let me know about your home turf, why you like it, what you'd keep or what you'd change. And thank you for commenting. Richard Conniff