From Connecticut, we ventured north about an hour just over the Massachusetts line and found a place to rent in the little town of East Brookfield: population 2,100. (We joked it was 2,010 plus a beagle while we lived there.) Off just about any beaten track, the little town had some appeal with its border weaving around Lake Lashaway. Highlighted on its welcome sign is the declaration that it is the birthplace of Connie Mack (born 1862). But unless you are a baseball fanatic you probably have no clue who that is. Neither did I, but now the fact that he played for and managed the Pittsburgh Pirates (1891 to 1896) means something to me. (Ironically, he was falsely accused of raising up good players and then selling them off to other teams in order to line his own pockets. It was a lie, but if you want to accuse the current manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates for doing the same today…well, it probably isn’t a lie.) Other than that, there’s nothing about East Brookfield that would bring it to anyone’s mind.
We lived right over the town line on the corner of Route 9 and a dead end street called Cove Street, right across from what was then Harry’s Pizza. Not a terrible location (with pizza across the street), especially for my brother who could walk right down the dead end street to fish off the bridge in a stocked river. He lived half his life down there the 21 months we lived there, and personally knew just about every neighbor between there and the bridge, plus at least one neighbor beyond.
The house itself was interesting. Portions of it, we were told, had been built in the 1700s and you could see the old wood rafters with wood nails in my dad’s office and the school room. Those two rooms were probably the most solid in the house. After that was a mish-mash of small rooms, all with short ceilings and uneven floors, in no particular order. The owner had tried to make a go of it as a B&B, so she had decorated the walls nicely, but the place as a whole left much to be desired. Unable to put up any bunk beds on account of the short ceilings, it would have been a bit more spacious if the bedrooms upstairs hadn’t been filled with beds. Katey and I had hoped for the one downstairs back bedroom (probably the latest addition of the many additions the house had likely seen), but since my parents’ mattress couldn’t go up the very narrow circular staircase…well, maybe it was for the best. My parents’ bedroom had the back/side door which was most frequently used – and which Grace broke through with her hands and cut one of them when trying to get outside after Daniel and Sally. That was an adventure.
The house had a back screened in porch that we treaded carefully when letting out our beagle onto his run or feeding the cats, lest we fall through its floor. The basement was not closed up well and only used to park our bikes. According to Jenny (then 3 or 4…I should say 2 or 4 as Jenny never knew she was 3), a “Stupie Clown” (interpretation: Stupid Clown) lived down there. She had to shout at it quite a bit. And it had the oddest patio area that was sunk into the ground as a walk out of the basement and mostly surrounded by cement walls. I think we all feared one of our parents would go a little too far with one of the cars and end up down in it. It was great when it snowed, though, because our neighbor who kindly plowed the small pad dumped all the snow into that area where we could then dig series of tunnels and forts. In 1996 the area set records with snowfall. It was great.
And while I spent most of my time in the small room I shared with Katey, it had a decent backyard for my younger siblings and an attic Katey more-or-less lived in. Terribly hot in the summer and frigidly cold in the winter, she sweated it out with a fan or bundled up in warm clothes and a blanket to create every craft imaginable from wreaths, to flower arrangements, to drawings, and more candles than the Yankee Candle Factory. Really.
So while the house itself left much to be desired in almost every way (like no mailbox so we had to trek to the post office which was a whole .7 miles away…and which I complained about endlessly), we made a lot of memories in our short time there. Grace even has the scars to prove it.
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