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From the Editor
That Homely Spirit
“Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.”
-Robert Frost, “Directive”
Thrilled to the soul is how you would have to describe with any accuracy my feelings the day we moved from the projects in Queens to Fairfield. I was nine years old and in one day, February 1, 1959, I went from not being able to walk on the grass to looking out over hundreds of acres of unfenced woods and fields. In my first hour after moving with my parents and two younger brothers into the upper half of an 1820 mansion, I met a boy two years older than I who lived in a downstairs apartment. He told me that he earned his spending money trapping muskrats along the creek that ran behind the house. He took me to the garage and showed me two skins stretched out on boards.
At McKinley Elementary School next door,I was in Miss Beecher’s third grade class, where I made friends with Ed Friedman, whose father owned the store called “World of Cheese” on Main Street in Westport. My family and I had visited the store together on our first weekend in Connecticut. We had all enjoyed the place, sampling tart cheeses from places we had never heard of, much less been to.
Ed Friedman’s father was a totally independent Connecticut merchant operating from his home in Fairfield and his shop in Westport. He was not part of a big company but instead followed in the great Connecticut Yankee trading tradition. Put this together with the rural feel that was dying quietly when I showed up and you end up with a yearning, never-satisfied taste for a lifestyle that holds you forever after.
Max H. Peters
Publisher and Editor
Header photo by Skip Broom, HP Broom Housewright, Inc.