NOVEMBER 29, 2021 – Yesterday our son and daughter-in-law took us on an excursion between their hometown of Chester and down river to Essex, Connecticut. We took side routes and backroads for a closer look at this old part of New England.
Our trip included breakfast at The Whistle Stop café, a cozy, local establishment in nearby Deep River, operated by the fourth generation of descendants of the founders. Over the decades reaching back to my early youth, I’ve eaten at many family-run eateries in small, New England towns, and the intimacy and ambience of The Whistle Stop, along with a menu that was an inch thick, were quintessentially Norman Rockwellian.
As we traveled at observation speed, we saw one beautiful old postcard scene after another. If you told me that I could call any of these places home, I’d feel little compunction to see the rest of the world.
Upon returning to our son and daughter-in-law’s own gracious New England home, I embarked on a long hike down from the top of the town to Pattaconk Brook, then along a road overlooking the brook as it wound its way to the heart of Chester. Along my route, were closer views of fine, old New England homes—each sited well and surrounded by picturesque scenery.
This part of New England is like a collection of engraved postage stamps from an age when stamps were collectible, many as miniature works of art. Now and again the visitor encounters a small field bounded by ancient, stone fences, but sweeping vistas are just beyond sight of the sea and well south of the stunning Berkshires, Green Mountains, White Mountains, and ranges of Maine. Here is where the artist could paint a million scenes, each a little paradise of its own.
As a “miniature” revealed itself around every bend in yesterday’s road, I thought of the numberless paradises that make up this one grand paradise we all call home. I contemplated details: a weather-beaten shed with windows to keep old memories alive; the plaque on an old house bearing the name of a prosperous sea captain and the year he converted earnings into a monument to them; an ancient tree dressed in lichen, highlighted by a burst of sunshine on an otherwise cloudy day. Such “strokes of the brush” give this area an intimacy that’s absent in the grandeur of “big beauty.”
Late in the day we appeared at the hearth of friends in Lyme—our next-door neighbors on Hamburg Cove, Steve and Lin, the most gracious people we could choose for friends. As we relished an elegant repast, festooned with warm, amusing conversation, I imagined a painting within a painting—looking not through the windows from inside outward at the cove on which darkness was descending but from the outside looking in at the warm light of our friendship and the well-attended details of a delectable meal.
Paradise is where you look.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
