My hometown

 

"You know you're from Reading" is a Facebook group. I grew up in that New England town with its typical white church at the head of the common (I married there) and left in 1971.

Within the past decade I visited twice. Walking the familiar streets it was like being in a time machine, but I wasn't sure if I'd been transported into the future from the past. If I just looked harder, I would see Winslows, Torre's Ice Cream, Charles, Greg's Dry Cleaners where I worked when I was at uni, the Atlantic where my grandmother, mother and I had all shopped for food. All of those stores were gone.

 

The dummy in the middle of the town was gone. Sidewalks had writing engraved in the cement. They were fun to read. 

 

The front of the post office was still there but was shadowed by a strange building offering condos. When my husband-to-be was in the army, I would go in the back and ask Bunny Clarkson if by any chance was there a letter from him. Bunny would see me coming and if there was a letter, he'd hand it to me before I asked.

All in all, it had been a good childhood. We lived in a large house on 14 acres of land. There were two huge rocks left by a glacier too tired to carry them further. They were the site for all kinds of imaginative play from Greek temples to western badlands. We held tea parties and picnics on their smooth surface.

We spent summers at the golf club and winters skating at Birch Meadow or even in the next town on Lake Quannapowitt.

I had more good teachers than bad, and a few great ones whose lessons continue to guide me decades later.

Still -- I wanted out. Out. Out.

I knew there was a world out there. I caught a glimpse when my first husband was assigned to an Army band in Stuttgart, Germany. Another language, other foods, a delivery man who came by in a horse-driven wagon and a new and old castle in the middle of the city.

Too soon, I was back. I bless my ex that he didn't insist we buy my family's house, which he loved and I considered the inner most cell of the Reading prison. Had I still owned it today, its sale and the land would make me a very wealthy woman. But I would have led a totally different life.

It was just as well we didn't buy it, because the divorce meant I could move to Boston.

The city provided museums, theaters, gas lamp posts and ethnic neighborhoods, never mind that almost every street whispered of the history not just of the city, but the country. The 46 universities gave a youthful buzz to the city.

And there was shopping for food in Haymarket Square on Saturday or buying spaghetti still drying on strings in the Italian North End.

I loved it.

 

I still wanted to live in Europe and some 800+ or -, resumes looking for a job in France or Germany, I found a job in Switzerland, where I'd been told it was impossible to get working permission. I'd answered an ad in the International Herald Tribune bought at the Out of Town News that had the magic words, "we'll get working papers."

Since the move abroad in 1990, I've never tired of living in Europe. I embraced the culture far beyond fondue or morning tea in bowls or or or or... I was able to visit historic sites I'd only dreamed of seeing. I relished the differences such as the two-cheek kiss in France and three in Switzerland as just a few examples.

Moving from Boston, I ended up in a Môtiers, a village with 600 people and 6,000 cows. It also had a museum dedicated to the writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a waterfall, parades of cows going and coming for pasture, a cave that made champagne in an old abbey.

 

Môtiers and the Val de Travers, was where absinthe was invented. Although outlawed in the early 1900s, they made it illegally from then on. It has since been made legal. 

My landlord invited me for dinner and showed me how to cover the glass with the beautiful slotted spoon, place a sugar cube on the spoon and pour water on the green liquid turning it almost milky. I imagined myself in a Paris café at the turn of the century. My manners and a desire not to offend stopped me from spitting the first swallow out. No one had warned me it was licorice flavor.Licorice is on the very few things I dislike.

 

There were two regular festivals. One had each cluster of homes decorate the fountain closest to them. Another scattered sculptures on the mountain paths.

Changing jobs, I moved to Geneva. I also spent/spend time in my Nest, the studio I bought in Southern France. Geneva is 43% international and I found myself meeting people from all over the world. The floor of my flat had English, Italian, Indian, Syrian, Russian. Almost every gathering at work or socially was a babel of languages with French and English the common ones. I reveled in it.

I felt as if I'd escaped my childhood prison. Yet, I took my childhood with me. I would bake beans in my grandmother's bean pot, knead oatmeal bread from her recipe, miss the bright red autumn leaves even if the local yellow ones were beautiful. I carved pumpkins with the little Indian girl down the hall as brownies were baked in the oven.

A high school friend visited me almost annually. On his last visit, he brought a book about the history of Reading. It reinforced all the good things from my childhood especially the stability and the opportunity to have a good life.

I remarried and my new husband and I decided to show each other our childhoods. His was upstate New York. As I showed him Reading. It amazed me I no longer had any feeling of being trapped in a small world. It was just one of those experiences that has enriched my life. It gave me a solid base on which I could add all my other experiences.