September 15, 2004
It was one of the few airy, fresh days of this summer. We were due at my sister's for a family party, but I was anxious to get out and spend some time near the water and make some art. I drove over to the next town, a small suburban village with a median income of oh, say, a zillion dollars, and took a ride through "The Manor", an enclave of broad streets flanked by large, Victorian homes on generous plots trimmed with perennials and bright groupings of cheery impatiens and spanking white fences. The house are not mansion, but overly generous in space, with rambling porches, wings that wrap around courtyards and picturesque sheds, and laws studded with hundred years old trees that shade the avenues. Bordering the southern end of the enclave is the Long Island Sound, blue and green and sparkling with sailboats. Eternal summer, eternal youth, visible to all out most windows, and to the lucky few, from a birds-eye view from front porches decorated with wicker and Adirondack chairs.
My husband and I have trolled these streets since we were in college. We envisioned ourselves with a brood of kids, a pack of dogs, a boat, and a house in The Manor. Since our college days, the large, Anglo-Irish families that settled the area had slowly turned with the tides of generations to Wall Street money. Once grand houses had started to look a little seedy; shingles were missing of northern exposures, roofs needed shedding, and shrubs and trees were overgrown in front of the homes of widows who couldn't keep up the pretenses after forty years of manorial living. The area was never in danger of needing gentrifying, but yuppies were the lifeline for the next forty years. It's not the type of community that would ever be in danger of tears downs, the rage even in my own city. No, it's the sort of community where you need a permit to take a wedding photograph in the town park. The houses are being restored to their luster of their sixties and seventies, the thirties and forties, the turn-of-the-century American romanticism of cobble stone driveways, and paths lined with hydrangeas and roses, and new Gothic brackets for the upstairs porches.
My husband and I have always lusted after houses, wanting the wide plank floors, capacious kitchens, and most of all, being close enough to the water to smell the salt air on a winter's day and a summer's night. Almost at the half-century mark, I still think there's time, that something, someone will enable me to live the life of baskets of boots by the backdoor, a fireplace in the kitchen, and a front porch filled with planters of geraniums that look as bright as bees against the backdrop of a long expanse of water. Our heads always turned by the Sound, we'd never went more inland, never made a simple left in this community, past the Sound, into the heart of the enclave. It was a few years ago that we stumbled upon the heart of the center, a large square studded with a fountain, banked on he left by an Episcopal church, and on the other flanks with smaller, charming cottages.
I've returned to the square again and again since then. I've walked the perimeter, admiring the neat little houses with exuberant gardens, the feeling of neighborliness as they all face each other, ideal for a chat on an autumn's eve when the first wood smoke curls out of the chimneys. That Sunday I headed to the square to sketch the fountain. No one was about; church was over and the houses were quiet and dark. I felt a little like an intruder as I walked across the perfectly groomed grass on sat on a bench. I quietly took out my journal, water pens, and gouache. I soon fell into the reverie of the place, listening to the water, the drone of bees intoxicated by the sparkling sprays, and I felt the unseen eyes of the place relax a little, like the square let go a held in breath. In the bright noon day sun, I felt a rippling under the surface of the patina, a gentle but persistent perception that there were well-kept secrets behind the red-painted doors and geranium-stuffed window boxes.
Right now it's just a shadow across my mind. But there are lanes that lead from the square to a marsh, lanes almost hidden with privet hedges as high as second stories. There's a house set out alone on a bend in the cove, a monastery set deep into the marshland, and a lighthouse that can be seen from the top of a bridge. Something connects it all, I'm not sure what. I'm just sure that graveyard tucked behind the rather gloomy stones of the church, holds more than just bones.