Pam writes: We are in the process of selling our home in Bridgewater and moving into our retirement home on Massachusetts' South Coast. While we are no longer Bridgewater residents, we will continue to search out all things Bridgewater and visit any place we find with the name.
Before we left our Bridgewater home, though, we read together a book that had been recommended to us by a number of people throughout our 27 years there. Innocence Under the Elms is a memoir that tells of growing up in Bridgewater during the turn of the twentieth century. Rich's writing is captivating and provides a true sense of place and time. Her descriptions of buildings and places we are familiar with but that she knew differently than we do transported us to another time - a time before farms were razed to make room for suburbs (only one farm remains in Bridgewater now), when Bridgewater State University was the State Normal School, and when winters were still cold enough that Carver pond froze enough for ice skating and hockey.
Dickinson's father was editor of the local newspaper The Bridgewater Independent. A free weekly that we could still pick up in paper format when we first came to town, it is now available only online. Louise, her parents, and her sister (Alice) moved several times within town. Each place she described as home was a place we could situate as within a two to twelve minute walk from our home in town. For us, all are part of the same neighborhood, but to Louise and Alice they were worlds away from each other. One house (which she described as out-of-town) was less than a ten-minute walk from the first place she lived ( and just around the corner from our house) but Dickinson credits it with instilling in her a love for nature.
Louise and Alice loved to read, and made excellent use of the town library, to which Pam wrote an entirely separate post on the "Library" Books blog.
James adds: We read this book in the midst of delving into Thornton Wilder's Our Town. We had read the novel Tom Lake by Ann Pachett about a community performance of the play. As we were in the midst of reading Innocence Under the Elms, we saw the marvelous Broadway production of Our Town with Jim Parsons, Katie Holmes, and Richard Thomas. At some point, I realized that the first page of Rich's book describes our town as if it were Our Town. The way she builds a mental map for the reader matches Wilder in cadence, scale and tone.
We highly recommend this work.
