Christmas At Eagle Pond by Donald Hall

Author:Donald Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

It was late in the darkening afternoon by the time everything was prepared for dinner, everything that could be done the day before. We still had an hour before supper. Caroline drove me to Henry’s store, also the West Andover post office, half a mile down the road toward Gale. Henry Powers was everything: postmaster as well as storekeeper, with a hand-operated gasoline pump in front of the store to complete his facilities. The grocery lacked refrigeration but carried coffee, salt, and the toilet paper that replaced the Sears catalogue when the bathroom replaced the outhouse. There were cans of Spam, there were candy bars. Caroline and I brought Henry a dozen eggs, which we traded for two rolls of Scott tissue. Henry entered the cubicle that was the post office, and we picked up postcards addressed to Kate and Wesley Wells. In summers I hiked to Henry’s place every morning for the mail and to pick up any groceries we needed, sauntering idly along the gutter of Route 4, passing the farms each with a few cows, one old farmer, and a big garden, passing the boulder that Riley shied at. Most of the year my grandfather walked down every day with three postcards, in 1940 still a penny, with Ben Franklin’s face where a stamp would be. Every day Gram wrote a postcard to each of her daughters, and every day she had three postcards back. Her eldest daughter was in a Connecticut hospital, but that did not keep her from writing a bulletin to her mother: She felt better. Donnie must be there now. There were snow flurries in Connecticut. Maybe there’d be a white Christmas? From Boston Nan wrote that she’d picked up Donnie at South Station. The bookstore was busy. Dick would be on leave Christmas Day. Caroline wrote that she was on her way.

Just past Henry’s store was the house where he and Nettie lived, and across the street their daughter Nina and her husband Charlie. My mother remembered West Andover in her childhood as a crowded village, which now had mostly vanished. A cellar hole beyond Henry’s had been the Daniel Webster Inn (Daniel Webster drank whiskey there), where drummers used to stay overnight, and across the road another cellar hole had belonged to a grocery store five times bigger than Henry’s. My mother’s West Andover also comprised a butcher, a fishmonger, and a livery stable, where drummers rented horses to sell their wares in the hills and hamlets. In a world transformed by the automobile, my mother’s village had become only its depot and Henry Powers’s place.

Our return took Gram away from opening Ball jars, up from the cellar, for tomorrow’s vegetables. She sat by the set tub in a rocking chair under Christopher the canary and read the postcards from her girls. She wrote three of her own, although they wouldn’t get to the P.O. until the day after Christmas, including one to Caroline, who stood beside her. (When Caroline drove home she would need to find a postcard waiting.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.