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Home is my oasis in a snow desert
where swirling flakes reveal fickle winds,
the weave of uneven ground smooths white,
ponds cure overnight to concrete.
I see the cold in lace-frosted windows,
clouds of breath,
bodies hidden by layered clothing,
all exposing a season of found and lost.
To step in, is to step back. A haunted atmosphere permeates Old Cove Cemetery in East Haddam, Connecticut, not because it’s a graveyard populated with ghosts of those buried, but because time seems to have frozen centuries ago.
Located a couple tenths of a mile down a narrow dirt byway lacking a street sign or name on a map, you don’t find Old Cove by happenstance. You have to know it’s there, to seek it out. A few driveways branch off the tree-and-brush-edged road where a couple structures are barely visible during leaf-out. Suddenly an opening appears, insular and quiet, dotted with gravestones and surrounded by a palisade of forest. Established in the 1690s, “this is as close as the twentieth century can come to showing what a colonial burying ground actually looked like,” wrote scholar James A. Slater in the 1996 revision to his epic book on colonial cemeteries of eastern Connecticut. Two decades into the twenty-first century, his words are even more profound.
In May 2021, I was asked to read the "Music Everywhere" chapter from The Last Undiscovered Place, my book about Collinsville, Connecticut, my hometown. The reading is part of the Collinsville Music Community History channel that focuses on the vibrant music scene in this small mill village during the 1990s and beyond. The brainchild of William Ihne, who videoed a lot of Collinsville art projects in the last decade of the twentieth century, his work vividly brings to life a time of high creativity that might otherwise be forgotten, or remained sequestered in the memories of those who were there. This recording was made at Tapeworks in Hartford and produced by Tommy Skarupa.
To listen to my reading click: HERE
