BOOKPATHS

Trail Wood Sanctuary, Hampton, Connecticut, U.S.

A Walk Through the Year, by Edwin Way Teale (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1978; out of print, but available)

Inspired by Thoreau’s idea of “a book of the seasons, each page of which should be written in its own season and out-of-doors,” Edwin Way Teale selected entries from his journals and combined them into A Walk Through the Year, “a year of days at Trail Wood,” his Connecticut farm.  Reflecting his daily walks, readers share Teale’s descriptions of the seasons, wildlife, and love of the natural world.

June 4.  I fall in the pond before breakfast!  Along Azalea Shore, a broken limb blocks the way.  I tug at one of the dead branches, trying to drag the obstruction aside.  It snaps without warning.  Frightening the fishes and sending two mallards quacking and skittering down the pond, I pitch backward with a great splash into the shallows.  Now it is my turn to come squelching and dripping up the slope to change my clothes – with a new mishap to explain to Nellie.
     After breakfast, I clear away the fallen limb without further misadventure.  Then, on my way to a morning’s work in my writing cabin, I pause along the way to watch the polliwogs.  Black swarms of little tadpoles sweep outward along the muddy bottom of the shallows at my approach.  Some have hatched from green frog eggs, some from toad eggs.  Ballooned out into far larger size, the second-year tadpoles of the bullfrogs rush away propelled by the whipping of their slender tails.  At Driftwood Cove, I come upon a score or more of the smaller swimmers resting, like black notes on a sheet of music, on two parallel twigs submerged among decaying leaves.  Every floating mass of algae or decomposing vegetation provides a haven for the alarmed tadpoles.
     It is among one such mass, entangled in a dense growth of waterweeds, that action shifts my attention from the polliwogs.  A large bullfrog rips into sight swimming for its life.  It attains the shore and I see one side of its body appears raw and covered with a kind of whitish slime.  Then I notice the blunt head of a large snapping turtle thrusting this way and that among the swaying vegetation.  Like a dog that has lost the scent, it is hunting for the frog, a frog that has made a miraculous escape and has attained the safety of the land.  -- from A Walk Through the Year, by Edwin Way Teale

Websites

Related “Bookpath”

Trail Wood Sanctuary, Connecticut

Trail Wood Sanctuary, Hampton, Connecticut, U.S.

A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm, by Edwin Way Teale (Bibliopola Press, 1998; first published in 1974)

Edwin Way Teale writes about the farm, “on a quiet country road two miles north of the village of Hampton,” where he and his wife, Nellie, lived, including their “day-by-day (and also night-by-night) outdoor adventures with bluebirds, woodchucks, daisies, tadpoles, hills, brooks and swamps, butterflies and hickories, sunshine and shadow, rain and snow.”   A valuable book for our time, Teale’s observations and insights offer readers gentle guidance in “living well and lightly on the land.”

Now owned by the Connecticut Audubon Society, Trail Wood Sanctuary is open daily, dawn to dust year-round.  “The Teale Study and Writing Cabin are open to the public by appointment during the spring and summer months."

When I stepped out under the rising sun of this June daybreak, the air was honey-scented, the grass all glittering with dew, the world glowing and green and alive.  Fifteen times, while we have been here, June has returned to Trail Wood.  Although small natural changes in our surroundings have been innumerable, the general scene remains the same.  The fields and woods and brooks are as we first saw them.

During this decade and a half, while we have become increasingly familiar with our trails, our swamps, the fern banks, the brooks, and the far corners of our land, we have experienced surprisingly little feeling of possession, of ownership.  The deed is ours.  But in our minds the trees own the land almost as much as we do.  We are one with the robin among the wild cherries in the sunshine.  We own Trail Wood together, we and every other wild creature that shares with us these country days. – from A Naturalist Buys and Old Farm, by Edwin Way Teale

Publisher’s Website

Monte Cristo Cottage, 325 Pequot Avenue, New London, Connecticut, U.S.

Owned and operated by the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Monte Cristo Cottage, “the only permanent home of Eugene O’Neill from his birth in 1888 until 1917,” is open for guided tours between Memorial Day and Labor Day.  The cottage was the setting for two of his plays, Ah, Wilderness!, and Long Day’s Journey Into Night.  You’ll find visitor information on the Monte Cristo Cottage website.

The Noah Webster House, 227 South Main Street, West Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.

The Noah Webster House will celebrate the anniversary of Webster’s birth on Saturday, October 18th.  Webster was born on October 16, 1758 in the two-story wood house built by his father.  Webster is most famous for authoring the first American dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1806.  Twenty-two years later he completed his two-volume An American Dictionary of the English Language. Both editions used American spellings instead of the English and added “American words that weren’t in English dictionaries.” The Noah Webster House honors the life and work of the author, while also bringing the history of West Hartford to life.  The museum is open year round from 1-4 p.m., Thursday through Monday.  For information, visit The Noah Webster House website.

Hartford, Connecticut. U.S.

Follow the Wallace Stevens Walking Tour in Hartford, Connecticut.  The 2-mile walk follows the poet’s daily route from his home at 118 Westerly Terrace to his office in the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Building at 690 Asylum Avenue.

Hartford, Connecticut, USA

Writers unite to keep Mark Twain’s house afloat.

“The latest element of the museum’s comeback plan adds a harmonic note to history’s echo. On Tuesday, Tom Perrotta, Tasha Alexander, Phillip Lopate and at least seven other nationally best-selling authors will gather in the auditorium to read Twain’s works — a sort of one-off version of the worldwide tour, and an event in which the current Twain staff has invested much hope.” – from “Writers Unite to Keep Twain House Afloat,” by Bob Tedeschi, The New York Times

Mark Twain House and Museum Website

Bookpath: Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, The Harriet Beecher Stowe House and Library, Hartford, Connecticut

In 1873, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) and her husband, Calvin Ellis, moved into their Nook Farm house in Hartford. In their 60s when the took up residence, they would spend the rest of their lives in the Gothic-cottage-style house, surrounded by neighbors connected with the arts, including Mark Twain. Today, the Visitor Center and museum shop, The Harriet Beecher Stowe House, Victorian gardens, and the Center’s historic collections, allow visitors to step back in time and imagine the years in which the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin lived and wrote.

General Information

Address
Harriet Beecher Stowe Center
77 Forest Street
Hartford, CT 06105

Phone
860-522-9258; Fax: 860-522-9259

Hours
Open Year round.
Tuesday through Saturday, 9:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Monday, Memorial Day through Columbus Day, 9:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Sunday, Noon – 4:30 p.m.
Closed: January 1, Easter Sunday, July 4, Thanksgiving, December 24-25

Admission
Visit The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center website for individual tour prices (House Tours, Garden Tours, Nook Farm Walking Tour, Combination Ticket, The Child’s Tour). The website also offers historical background and additional visitor information.

Connecticut

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Andrea L. Foster shares the “harrowing experience” of a Connecticut library group that “received a Patriot Act demand for patrons’ records.”

"'As librarians, I believe it is our duty and responsibility to uphold the intellectual freedom of our patrons,’ said Mr. Chase, who is also director of the Plainville Public Library. ‘And in this case, my own government was preventing me from carrying out that responsibility.’" – from "Library Group Tells the Story of a Gag Order by the FBI," by Andrea L. Foster, The Chronicle of Higher Education

Connecticut

Hal Borland's books are worth having nearby, to pull from as seasons change. His writing is a reminder to pay attention, get to know, and celebrate the places we call home.

Today, for instance, Hal Borland gives us this:

The Day's Dimensions, October 21 -- Even as Autumn days shorten, they increase in height and breadth. It is as though there were a constant ratio which keeps the days in balance; and if it seems strange to think of any day in such dimensions, look about you, now that the leaves are thinning out. The eye can reach. New vistas open. The horizon is there just beyond that row of maples from which the morning's breeze has shaken a shower of gold and scarlet. The sun slants in the window where, two weeks ago, the shadow of the elms lay deep.

The hills are no longer remote, and at night you can look up and see the constellations of Andromeda and Pegasus. Even in a land of trees, we no longer are canopied from the sky and walled in from the horizon. Our earth's distances invite the eye. And as the eyes reach, so must the mind stretch to meet these new horizons.... -- from Sundial of the Seasons : a Selection of Outdoor Editorials from The New York Times, by Hal Borland

Sundial of the Seasons, published by J. B. Lippincott Company in 1964, is out of print, but easily found.