Personal History

This is how it began: Grace Quimby invited my mother and I to Cold River Camp for a week or so. We went, and there my mother met Shari Eniti, who was there as a babysitter*. Later Shari became one of our babysitters, for my sister and I, and later still when she moved to California she rented her house in East Montpelier to my mother. The house came with a deaf white cat (one eye blue and one brown) and a fat old mare, nominally a palomino. That horse was pastured during the summer down the road, on John and Polly Holden’s land.

And thus when I was 13 years old I met Polly Holden and, shortly after meeting her, became her garden helper. During the six or seven years I worked for her I did just about everything that needed doing: I weeded, I planted, I turned compost, I put in edging, and mulched the vegetable gardens with Austin Cleve’s old hay; I dead-headed the flowers every morning, and picked the lettuce first thing but the green beans only after the dew was dry; I pruned trees and bushes and mowed the lawn, cut down the iris after they had bloomed and braided the daffodils down in early summer; I made apple sauce and apple butter and put up quarts and quarts of vegetables for winter in the cellar freezer. I painted inside and outside the house, hung wallpaper, organized Smith alumni files according to Polly’s arcane system, wrapped presents for family and friends, cleaned the attic and the toy closet under the eaves, vacuumed and dusted, hung out clothes and brought them in, babysat for her grandchildren (this included going back to Cold River Camp with Polly’s daughter Bonnie and her children when I was 15 or so – and you see how it all goes around?), baked cookies with the grandchildren, and served dessert at her daughter Sally’s wedding in a black skirt and white apron. I started at a dollar an hour or less.

It was the best job I ever had. I loved it, the sheer joy of working outside in the summer among all the green and growing things. But far beyond that, it was that Polly and John gave me a haven from my life, at a time when I had sore need of it. I had a place where I knew what was expected of me, a place where everything was in its’ place and I knew where that place was. I knew their house, the flowerbeds, the gardens, the inside and out, I knew where to find the various baskets and tools, the system of the three bins for garbage in the kitchen (burnables, compost, and other) and I knew I would have lunch with them every day I that was there and I could tell you what that lunch would be. Soup, salad, toast, and a source of protein. Every day. Homemade soups more often than not, salads fresh from the garden – it was heaven.

Then John would have his after lunch nap, by all means, and Polly would usually lie down on her slant board in the upstairs hall near her office for a time, and I would return to the garden. It was stability. I had my napkin for the table, and a napkin ring of my own to mark it. There were jars of nuts and ‘Hollywood’ crackers in the kitchen; I was told to help myself and did so. If the day was exceptionally hot, Polly would bring me out a glass of cranberry juice or Schweppes bitter lemon in the afternoon, and make sure I took a break, that I wasn’t getting too sunburned. When I burned anyway – inevitable for me – she put lanolin on my back and neck, smoothing it over my angel wing shoulderblades. I was welcome there and loved. It meant more to me than I can say.

After two years in East Montpelier, my mother bought land and built a house in Fayston and we moved there, but during the summers I continued to work at the Holden’s, staying over a night or two every week, sleeping in the crooked window room. I ate breakfasts of granola and yogurt, or softboiled eggs, and lunches and dinners with John and Polly; I played Scrabble with John in the evenings or rehearsed the lines for whatever play he was in with him; went swimming with Polly in the neighbor’s pond; got up and was in the garden by 6:00 am, worked until 6:00 at night. I did this through the first two years at college, coming home to Vermont and the Holden’s garden, the green and growing things and Polly and John in my life. I knew all their children and grandchildren through Polly’s reports on them and from the artifacts they had left in the house and from meeting them throughout the years; I wore Spike’s old highschool coat throughout college and for years thereafter. I watched Princess Diana get married upstairs on the scratchy old TV in their house, Polly and I marveling at her incredible youth and at the gown’s train spread over the steps.

Then my mother rented her house, and I needed a summer job that included full time housing, and that was the end of the halcyon garden days. Polly and I stayed in touch and later, after I finished college, Polly took me to Egypt and Somalia with her, since John was unable to go (he was having his hip replaced at the time). Three weeks in Egypt and the Sinai, where I was the youngest and she the oldest on the tour, bracketing the rest of the group nicely, and a week in Somalia visiting her nephew and his family. I came back to Philadelphia horridly sick with some sort of flu and completely elated at having seen the sun rise over Cairo from atop Cheops pyramid, the Bedouin tents in the desert, St. Catherine’s monastery and the sun breaking across the desert from the top of Mt. Sinai, the beauty and the glory of it all. I had swum in the Nile (and it was very cold indeed), and eaten truly fresh bananas for the first time in my life. – I had been completely happy. It was like being six again, completely happy and completely free. We had a wonderful time, the two of us, the almost sixty years between our ages as nothing.

Life went on, as life is wont to do, and I visited them when I could, at their home in Vermont or in Hot Springs where they were wintering then. I moved – first to Mount Desert Island, and then to New Mexico, and then to Texas, and to Vermont again. Polly and John moved into Wake Robin; I moved back to Texas to care for a dying friend and came back again to Vermont once that was over. I visited them in Wake Robin now and we all grew older; they moved gradually into assisted living and then to the nursing units at Wake Robin. Polly no longer knew quite who I was when I visited, though her social manners were as graceful as ever, and John was in a wheelchair and seemed to nap much of the time. Polly told me tales about her childhood, her as a small girl riding perched on her father’s bicycle handles into town, and asked me again where she knew me from. The last time I saw them was just before I left for Armenia – I knew Polly wouldn’t know me, but it seemed important to see them anyway, to say my goodbyes while I could to these people who had given me so much throughout the years.

John died while I was in Armenia; Polly this past week. My mother saw the notice in the paper and told me; I wasn’t going to go. I had said my goodbyes four years ago, when I knew I was unlikely to see them both alive again and when Polly no longer had any idea of who I might have been in her life. I knew their family, but they were unlikely to know me – I was a bit player at best in their lives, after all.

I ended up going, and not just to one but two services. It stuns me, how much it did mean, to see the family again and to have the chance to honor Polly and John and their presence in my life. Amazingly enough, I was known- Cat (Polly’s granddaughter) picked me out first - and I knew them all, Polly and John’s children and grandchildren. Like their parents, they are good and gracious people; they made me welcome in their midst, they extended invitations to their homes. I, for one, am glad to know that Polly and John live on not just in my memories and the memories of others but also in the kindness of their children and grandchildren; these the things that do not die.

meg

*She may have actually been babysitting for the Holden's grandchildren, which would make it that much more of a circular reality - but, then again, she may not.