David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Small Wonders, Big Stories: Miniature Buildings

A conical, silvery metal structure with a central vent stack and tiny vertical holes down the side, it sat close to the road among some battered barns and a worn house in tired farmland.  Looking for all the world like a punched tin colonial lantern, its diameter was such that two people grasping hands probably would be unable to fully stretch their free arms if they stood inside.  Not far from The Hickory Stick in Washington Depot, Connecticut, one of my favorite bookstores, it had piqued my curiosity for years.  Finally I stopped to take a look.  “It’s a corncrib,” a bearded young man called from the dim recesses of the house’s porch.  “Don’t use it for that, no more.  Just a little storage.”  I’d seen many corncribs in my home state, but never one like this.  Mystery solved.  But it led to a renewed interest in small buildings that has yet to be satiated.  Small in size, I’ve often found them big in stories.

Eyrie House Reverie (New England Trail Haibun)

Scores of women in long dresses, some grasping parasols, and men in derby hats and straw boaters, a few with lit cigars, stroll leisurely along the decks and promenades surrounding the boxy, three story, thirty room hotel.  Atop Mount Nonotuck they’re closer to heaven and fresh breezes escaping August’s heat.  Far below is a farm-patched valley where the lazy Connecticut winds and sparkles.  Across the river, the bright white Prospect House crowns Mount Holyoke, beyond which are the blue-hued ridgeline knobs known as the Seven Sisters.

Perhaps after a round of croquet the women will retire to the ladies parlor and the men try their skill at billiards or the shooting range.  Before dinner in the elegant dining room, couples might take in the proprietor’s menagerie of birds and reptiles, the bear in the basement.  But the lure of beef ribs, spring lamb, new potatoes, peas and beets might merit an early meal, a peek at Northampton by telescope, and a moonlit mosey to the pavilion.

A two minute detour from the trail, and I’m well over a century too late.  At the Eyrie House’s proud perch is a rusting tower caged by a chain link fence languishing among weedy trees.  It’s an uneven, lumpy area of basalt outcrops sloping in every direction.  Lost in the woods is a faded puzzle of fieldstone foundations and retaining wall remnants, and broad leveled paths that go nowhere.  I’m told that a few contorted lilac bushes still grow among the oaks, and that a boot heel divot might reveal broken oyster shells from long ago feasts.

fading stone remnants
elegance among the clouds
ghosts still promenade

(Haibun is a marriage of prose and haiku.  It was first practiced by seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho who perfected the form in a journal he kept on a trip to the remote regions of northern Japan. Gary Snyder, James Merrill, and Jack Kerouac are among American interpreters of the genre.  Haibun best expresses the spirit of the New England Trail because it combines clear-eyed prose descriptions of people, objects and places along with poetry that awakens the imagination.)

The New England National Scenic Trail, a unit of the National Park Service, runs 215 miles from Guilford, Connecticut to the Massachusetts/ New Hampshire border.  The trail is maintained by volunteers of the Connecticut Forest & Park Association in Connecticut and the Appalachian Mountain Club in Massachusetts.  For more go to https://newenglandtrail.org/

SmallPox Cemetery (New England Trail Haibun)

With only a tumbled down stone wall, rusted barbed wire, and a few low rock mounds hidden in leaf litter, the old smallpox cemetery was all but invisible just above Hatchett Hill Road.  Near the power lines, and at the cliff edge of a traprock quarry, hikers walked past while the land kept its secrets.  Deep in woods that were once pasture, the iron fence was melted down to fight the First World War, the headstones taken in the Depression to pave a basement wall.

At least two blistered, fever wracked bodies and three others were buried here, all before Washington bid the people farewell.  Did Deacon Holcomb and four children not more than two years old miss their tombstones?  Perhaps no more than the long dead were missed by us.  The past too easily disappears, goes missing.

With loving enthusiasm and a deep, soothing voice, Tom Howard took me to this almost vanished place and spilled the story so it would not die.  A burly man with a gray beard and silver hair beneath a ballcap, he labored long against civic amnesia, and later replaced the stolen stones with sturdy granite so this place would live when he died.

trees grew, kept secrets
stood guard over the outcasts
stone holds memories

(Haibun is a marriage of prose and haiku.  It was first practiced by seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho who perfected the form in a journal he kept on a trip to the remote regions of northern Japan. Gary Snyder, James Merrill, and Jack Kerouac are among American interpreters of the genre.  Haibun best expresses the spirit of the New England Trail because it combines clear-eyed prose descriptions of people, objects and places along with poetry that awakens the imagination.)

The New England National Scenic Trail, a unit of the National Park Service, runs 215 miles from Guilford, Connecticut to the Massachusetts/ New Hampshire border.  The trail is maintained by volunteers of the Connecticut Forest & Park Association in Connecticut and the Appalachian Mountain Club in Massachusetts.  For more go to https://newenglandtrail.org/