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returning to the Green I still call up their images, they were so much a part of those times. And the Great Elm -- what a tree was that! It grew halfway between our house and hers, one hundred feet high, the trunk almost forty feet in circumference, and must have been something short of two centuries old when it died of the Dutch blight. But while it lived, how grand it was. I think if anyone ever doubted God, one only had to look at that massive, lofty, natural creation to believe in Him again.
    As in your small town, or anyone's, there was nothing much to do in ours back then, no place to go or anyone to see. In one geographical sense we were fortunate, for we lived "next door" to Hartford, the capital of the state, where you could make the five-mile trolley ride "upstreet," as it was called, and ride the escalators in the department stores. But Pequot Landing was a place whose today was unimportant and whose Colonial yesteryear, if historically remarkable, seemed, at fifth remove, dull and bookish; the town was only in our childhood emerging from the Icebox Age into that of the General Electric Refrigerator.
    We lived on the less fashionable east side of the Green where the trolley tracks went by. For years our father, George Woodhouse, had worked at the old Jewett Belt Company out on Park Street in Hartford, saying that when he had saved enough money he would like to have a place in the country, just an old place he could fix up and where he could raise fruit trees and chickens in his back yard. And after moving our large family to Pequot Landing, the first thing he did was to plant the small but long-dreamed-of orchard behind the garage. He spaded out the holes, carried the trees himself, and one by one planted them -- four cherry, four pear, four quince, four plum -- and when he had tamped them down and watered them, he took a snapshot for posterity, came into the house, showered, and brought my mother to the bedroom, where he made love to her, suffered a heart attack, and died.
    The old place never got fixed up.
    Pa hadn't left much insurance, but Ma, a dauntless woman, found employment at the Sunbeam Laundry on the southern edge of the city, fifteen minutes away by car. Because she'd had to sell the family Auburn for funeral costs, she spent forty-five minutes each way on the trolley. Things were never easy for Ma. She was away from the house more often than she was there, and when she came home she was tired and sometimes cross, and she brought all her laundry problems with her. She seemed often bewildered by the brood our father's death had left her in charge of, but she tried hard to bring us up decently and intelligently. A simple woman, she never attained to the chic or "quality" of the country-club wives, nor did she have Lady's color and elegance, but she had her own style and humor. She hated being poor. I think it was her humor that most often saved her, for she never got over Pa's death, and until the day that she herself died his military brushes rested on the lace runner on the bureau.
    The house was ample and ramshackle and tired, with tan printed paper on most of the walls, a furnace that clanked heroically but never sent up much heat, a kitchen that was barely adequate, with an intransigent stove and a balky sink, and crayoned yardstick marks on the door jamb which recorded our heights at every stage. The other rooms were small and chopped-up and the large pieces of furniture were catty-cornered everywhere. It seemed you were always meeting yourself coming and going; if not yourself, then Nonnie or Lew or Harry or Aggie or Kerney, or Patsy, the dog.
    It became our mother's constant refrain that if she must live "in the country," she was just as glad it was Pequot Landing, which she thought was having the best of both worlds, urban and rural. Just south of us, where the elms stopped and the macadam became a dirt road, lay some of the richest agricultural land in the Connecticut Valley. Much of it Harleigh