A Working Antique

I work in an antique building situated on our town common, at least until we move to a shiny, spanking new building a quarter of a mile away, which is slated to happen after the first of the year. 

Our current office used to be a house, and it’s got to be at least two hundred years old, complete with heat you can’t turn off, occasional mice infestations, and the staccato cadence of the apartment dwellers who live overhead.  But it sure is pretty. The common itself is a historic district.  If you live in one of the homes there, you can’t modify it without permission, you can only paint the exterior with certain colors.  Every day I park my car in front of Meeting House Pond, and on mornings when the wind is still, I catch reflections of First Parish Church (the old Meeting House), or the town hall rippling top of the water. 

I’m a little like Cinderella most mornings, the clock on the common is chiming the hour when I pull up, and I scamper across the street trying to get through the door before it stops.  But there are days the clock finishes before I cross the street, because I have to fish in my purse for my I-phone and take yet another a picture of a scene that’s been the same for hundreds of years. I know I've posted similar photos here before, so please bear with me.  No matter how many times I capture it, it hits me every time.

Stunning a view as it is, working in the historical district means there’s no cell tower near, which guarantees lousy phone service.  When we need to take or make personal calls with our cells, we have to walk outside, plug one ear against the traffic rumbling by and shout into the phone.  I was doing that one morning last week when I looked out to something unexpected.  Usually the pond is populated with ducks.  

A photo op for me, but bad news for the goldfish.  Gosh, I’m going to miss this when we move.

Fingers Crossed

We don’t often get days in mid-March when the earth stokes us with warm heat, but that’s what we got Sunday, and today too.  Yesterday, it was warm enough to sit outside without a jacket, without a fleece even, to gaze at the garden still littered with the remnants of last year’s leaves.  This morning, my daughter, an hour-and-a-half north, texted to let me know she was wearing flip-flops.  In March?  Unheard of.

Already there is evidence of spring—the wrinkled foxglove leaves where they’ve seeded themselves— green rags flopping between crevices in the rocks at the back of the garden.  

 

 In the side yard, blooming snowdrops mound in the grass.  Out front, purple crocuses help to hide the cement foundation under the brick porch.

We cracked the window before we went to bed last night, and woke in pre-dawn light to the soft swish of cars driving down the highway a half-mile away, and the wirt-wirt, peeb-beat of birds—sounds that come to us fresh and new each April, but this year have arrived weeks earlier.

In New England, the only thing we know to trust is the unexpected.  No matter how good things are, someone will caution us to anticipate the worst.  A snow storm in April doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.  Rarely, but in my lifetime, we’ve had snow in mid-May.  Earlier this year, I cautioned myself not to celebrate this string of warm weather too much, sure if I did, I’d jinx things.  

But as I parked the car in front of the town common today, and gazed at a woman dressed in a short sleeve shirt, sitting in front of the reflections mirrored in Meetinghouse Pond, I decided, on a day like this, it’s just too darn hard not to.