David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Eight Parlor Stoves and the Future of Museum Collections

A Wealth of Objects
Why do museum collections often include objects that visitors never see? Although I’m a devotee of museums from nationally known art institutions to small town historical societies, from assemblages of farm tools to medical curiosities, the question didn’t dawn on me until by happenstance I saw eight nineteenth century parlor stoves in the attic of the Connecticut Historical Society (CHS). Bequeathed to the organization in 1945, I was told by the chief curator that they had never been on display and would likely never be exhibited. I was intrigued.

Like the venerable CHS, many museums have attics, basements, and closets stuffed with materials in racks, on shelves, occupying floor space, or even hanging from the ceiling. Some have such abundance as to require offsite storage. No doubt many museums have more objects stowed away than on display.

Of course, public gallery space is precious and of limited capacity, and a surplus of artifacts allows for changing exhibits. Permanently stored materials may also include items that are damaged, can’t be authenticated, or were acquired so long ago their provenance remains a mystery to current staff, volunteers, and trustees. There may also be mission relevant items worthy of safekeeping even if they don’t rise to level of public display. The presence of such stranded or orphaned objects only amps my curiosity. What is hidden away?

Connecting with Tree Roots

But when you think of all the roots they drop,
As much on bottom as there is on top.
A double tree, widespread in earth and air,
Like a reflection in the water there.
--Charlotte Perkins Gilman

What are trees hiding? That’s what I want to know. Like most people, when I see a grand old tree my eyes soar upward along the trunk and into a network of branches reaching skyward. But while I’m looking up, my imagination probes belowground in wonder at unseen tangles of roots. I may marvel at a spire of spruce or an ancient oak with muscular, gnarly limbs defying gravity, but I’m intrigued by what I don’t see.

Trees give definition and beauty to the landscape. Their greenery provides an array of solar collectors and air purifiers. They are habitat to wild neighbors from squirrels to bears. My home is built of their very substance. Among the largest, oldest, and most useful of living things, they’re not possible without the roots most of us don’t notice until tripping over one that’s tilted a sidewalk, or gawking at an occasional specimen snaking along a rock.

Nathan Hale and the Face of Heroism

        Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual’s character.
                    Ralph Waldo Emerson

Discovering Nathan Hale
He’s the face of heroism, yet no one knows what he really looked like. His home is a shrine, but he never lived there. Most every school child knows his inspiring last words, though it’s not clear he uttered them. Nevertheless, Nathan Hale is designated by statute as Connecticut’s official hero, an honor that no other state appears to have bestowed on a native son.

Hale died at age 21. Probably no one so young has had so many monuments dedicated to them. There are statues in in New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, St. Paul and elsewhere. College buildings bear his name as do public schools from New Jersey to Washington State, Ohio to Oklahoma. But nowhere is he so well memorialized as in Connecticut where a trip along the “Hale Trail” exposes travelers to natural beauty, history, architecture, sculpture, and an invitation to encounter a legend.

New England's Real Fall Season

It’s like awakening with a hangover from a monthlong party celebrated with tons of colored confetti. When leaves have dropped and leaf peeping tourists are gone, that’s autumn in New   England for many of us living here. Time for leaf cleanup.

We’re world famous for October color. It might as well be a sunset caught for weeks like a kite in the trees. It’s a regional icon essential to our identity and economy. New Englanders delight in flaming sugar maples, lemony birches, and late blushing coppery oaks. The vibrancy of the year’s colors is a subject for discussion on street corners, in supermarkets, and around dinner tables. The effects of rain or drought, the previous year’s snowfall, hours of sunlight, and an early or late frost are among variables providing almost as much partisan passion as politics.

Bright autumnal tints elevate the spirit, put us in touch with natural cycles, and are kaleidoscopically beautiful. But as much as we delight in color, for many of us it’s not the main event as measured in time and energy—at least if you have a lawn and garden. As the season’s more evocative name suggests, it’s the fall of leaves and their cleanup that provides the most immediate connection between people and nature.

Signs of Surprise

Pollution on a stick. What else to call the thickets of needless and repetitive signs that line our roadsides and penetrate parks and other public places. Some come in words, others in universal  symbols. They may direct, forbid, inform or advertise. New ones pop up all the time like some weedy invasive plant.

In these days of justifiable concern over distracted driving caused by cell phones, eating, and other diversions, it’s remarkable that eye-caching road signs are not seen as culprits. Often there are more messages blaring at drivers beyond the windshield than can be absorbed at the posted speed limit.

To be sure, I value discrete street and directional signs, the more reflective for night viewing the better. But do we really need two or three signs telling us we’ve crossed a town line, that a service club meets on the first Monday of the month, markers indicating mileage every few minutes, or billboards bombarding us with ads for everything from cars to toenail clippers?

Historical Whiplash: Tales of Two Buildings

Reimagining the Past
Historical whiplash! You might just be a victim stepping over the threshold at 144 Albany Turnpike in Canton, Connecticut, my hometown. The structure is a clapboard, center chimney classic built when Thomas Jefferson was president. It sits close to a four-lane blacktop, a commercial strip of twenty-first century clamoring signs and chaos. Step inside to the 1950s, a world of Life magazine, Elvis, and big cars with tail fins. Welcome to Dish’n Dat, a restaurant with an Eisenhower era diner feel, and the mouth-watering comfort food to go with it.

But the way things look is only the beginning. Like any historic structure, it is chockful of stories. A private residence for generations, it began life as a public place when it opened as an in-home tea room in the 1920s. By 1950, in was a full-service bar and restaurant. Soon after, a dead body was discovered nearby. A few decades passed, and the was subject to a lawsuit by an international rock star. By the end of the twentieth century, it would host a series of restaurants offering Mexican, Asian and other exotic fare that would have astounded the original homeowners who cooked over the old fireplace. Who knows what else the walls could tell us?

Small Wonders, Big Stories: Little Free Libraries

Serendipitous portals to far places and new ideas, Little Free Libraries are popping up like mushrooms in late summer. I never know where I’ll find one or where it will take me.  
These book exchanges have been planted on street corners, in front yards and public parks, near the entrance to stores and restaurants, at shopping centers, beaches, schools, playgrounds, rail and bus stations, along bike and walking trails, and wherever people might be tempted by stories or learning something new. A field guide to butterflies, a collection of poems by Robert Burns, and Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code novel have been among my finds.

The concept is simple: small kiosks where you can find books to read, and leave some to share with others. Beyond providing a 24-7 source of reading material, Little Free Libraries are said to promote literacy, neighborly conversation, creativity and community revitalization. The number, design, and location of these book-containers makes a statement about a town, and I look for them wherever I go. Little Free Libraries suggest that people in the area care for more than facades. Finding them an irresistible attraction, I decided to establish one in my hometown.

Learning from Old Schoolhouses

A Lot to Teach
Old one- and two-room schoolhouses still have a lot to teach. Their original educational mission may have come to an end by the middle of the twentieth century, but they continue to instruct us in architectural simplicity, elegance and adaptability. They abound in lessons about the past and the rapidity and breadth of change. Although attended by now elderly people still living among us, when compared to today’s institutions of elementary education it seems like millennia since the buildings were last regularly filled with students.

Built a century or two ago, these school buildings have proved remarkably adaptable though they are small and were constructed with a specific, limited purpose in mind. They survive in the guise of homes, community centers, offices, church parish halls, art galleries, restaurants, storage sheds, senior centers, and a host of other uses. Some remain empty awaiting their next act. Others have had several lives. Farmington’s North District Schoolhouse, an educational institution for about a century, became a tenement around 1900. Later it was a liquor store and now serves as a dentist’s office.