Here in New England | The DNA of Strangers

This was a long time ago, on a warm spring day in 1956 when I was 9. As it always did, my walk home from school took me beside a nursing home where every Christmas we came to sing carols. A cardboard box lay on the sidewalk; looking inside, I found books. They must have belonged to one of the nursing home occupants who had passed on, and now there was nobody who cared about them.

I took out the book on top. The cover was brown. Inside, the publication date said 1835. The paper was thin and delicate, and a map spooled out that showed a wild country west of the Ohio River, a country filled with the names of rivers and forts, and swaths of space marked “Unorganized Missouri Territory” and “Unorganized Arkansas Territory.” This was when Walt Disney had 9-year-old boys singing about “the king of the wild frontier,” and here on a sidewalk my hands held that wild frontier.

I brought the book home, telling nobody. At night I turned its delicate pages, and I dreamed of wild rivers and forts. Then one day my mother found it on my bed, a book that held who knows what viruses, and took it away. But what I held on to, and maybe why someone in the nursing home had also held on all those years ago, is the sense of how our lives always carry the DNA of stories of those we never knew.

I have a friend in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire whose wife goes to flea markets looking for antique tintype portraits. Something stirs in her to see those unknown faces caught in the flash of a photographer’s camera. When I stayed at their home a few months ago and saw the framed tintypes hanging on the walls, I had thought they were generations of her family gathered in a time-capsule gallery that flowed from room to room.

When she told me they were photos that she just wanted to make a home for, I remembered being at Arlington National Cemetery just before Christmas, as volunteers placed thousands of balsam wreaths beside the graves. I stood beside a woman who murmured every time she placed a wreath, “How long has it been since someone said your name?”

My wife, Annie, once bought an early-1800s New Hampshire farmhouse. When she tore out a wall to put in a window, she found a woman’s shoe with a flower design; according to early New England belief, old shoes in a new wall protected a home and the people inside. She also found a diary, about 3 inches by 2 inches, with a green leather cover stamped “1883.” Inside, handwritten lines told the daily life of a farmer’s wife. The entries were brief and matter-of-fact: “The pig was sick.” “The sleigh broke.” “I’ve been knitting mittens.” Now and then, the writer mentioned her six children. One day Annie went to the nearby cemetery and found the graves of four of them.

Annie transcribed the diary. “I was sharing the same space with a woman who raised her family here,” she explained. “The daily weather, the events of her life.” One entry caught her eye and she never forgot it, the only time the farmer’s wife let herself reveal an emotion: “Feeling kind of blue today.”

In a life whose days were filled with keeping the house warm, and the family fed and clothed—all the things that fell to a farmer’s wife to do—why did she feel blue that day? This woman who once looked out her window and saw the same fields that Annie did a century later. It’s the kind of question I hope I also always want to ask.

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