When it was decided we would move from tiny Lewisburg, Tennessee up to New Hampshire, a woman at our church (who may have never left the borders of Tennessee but had certainly never been north of the Mason Dixon) asked us what we were going to eat up there. You might laugh, but she wasn’t too far off the mark.
I was two months shy of the age of nine and in the middle of third grade when we left my “whole life” and moved to the foreign country of New England. At that point of my life, my geography was a little sketchy (although I could name all eight states that touch Tennessee – can you?) so I really had no concept of where New Hampshire even was. I knew it was north. I knew it was cold. I knew we would get to ice skate and sled. (All things I’m thinking my parents told us to make the move sound less worse than it really was.) What I did not know was they did not have the same stores or the same products. (No corn meal in sight – my dad would buy it on business trips to Texas and bring it back in his suitcase.) Third grade in New Hampshire merely resembled third grade in Tennessee. (A topic that deserves a whole blog post in and of itself.) And they did not speak the same language. (I don’t pahk cahsor have idears, and my name is NOT Melissar.) Truly, we had moved to a foreign country.
But at least it had interesting houses. As a blossoming student of history, I found the fact that our house had been built in 1833 to be amazing.Even more fascinating was that it had been a part of the underground railroad. It even had a secret room. You couldn’t get to it, but you could see the staircase rising above the basement staircase and it looked as if the door (now sealed) was behind our stove. I found it wondrous and spooky all at the same time.
As a kid, the house just off the Derry “suicide circle” (rotary) on South Main seemed huge! There were real (but no longer working) fireplaces in almost every room. My bedroom had a crystal chandelier and real wood floors that I had to take a hammer to every few months to knock in nails that could potentially cause an accident that would lead to a tetanus shot. Katey’s room/the school room had so many layers of wallpaper we figured it was its own form of insulation. (The reality is in old New England homes, it can be virtually impossible to get old wallpaper off so you either paper or paint over it.) My parent’s bedroom had a “closet” that was basically another room complete with a window. The garage was three stalls with heavy old doors we had to push and pull ourselves (great fun!) and a complete attic above (that could have been a fun place to play but although it was “finished”, I don’t recall if it was heated). And there was a kitchen upstairs off the room that was my dad’s office. We didn’t use it, except my dad would heat water for his tea, but the previous owners had been two sisters (Lillie and Millie who were married to Frank…and Frank) and one couple had lived upstairs while the other lived downstairs. They loved the old house so much, they’d stop by to visit! And after the gravel driveway in Tennessee, a decent paved one was great for bikes, skates, and just about everything else. The yard was virtually a grassy area around the house with enough room for the swing set and the home of lot of snakes. (I hated when my mom made me go to the backside of the house to get the laundry from the line…I don’t care if they weren’t poisonous.) But the property backed up to a golf course and there was a good sized plot of land the course owned between our house and the neighbor’s that we played tag, kickball, and lots of other things. Plus, we could sled into the sand pit and it was just a jaunt over the green to a pond to ice skate.
To be bluntly honest, the house was one of the few things I liked about New Hampshire the first time we lived there. In a lot of ways, it was a culture shock. It didn’t help that I was still in a public school when we moved, so I finished third grade at the school up the street. The next year, my parents placed me in a Christian school. And the next year I transitioned to being homeschooled. My mom says I took it all in stride, but under that “stride” I was a little confused about where I stood in my little world which didn’t help me like the place where I had so many strange first experiences. By the time we moved two and a half years later back “south” to Connecticut, I was beginning to understand New England. And I would love Connecticut.
Our first New Hampshire home from 1989 to 1991
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