Found a stone

The Rodeo's are selling their house. They have been angels - Marta was there with Nick and the boys before the Fire Department arrived, and has been kind to us ever since. The tree Nick hit is there - one of the ironies of this whole thing is that to look at the tree you would never have known its tragic moment.

Mrs. Monti will do a stone marker - it was her idea that we find a stone. Tess and I found one over two years ago, just off a path in the woods. It's taken me two years to get the stone down off the hill. Now I need to drive it to Quincy.
I think it will just say:

Nicholas
+22 Nov 2007

It's a field stone, and it will go down flat. I want to get it set in place before they sell the house.

Estabrook

We walked the dogs across the school yard yesterday, heading for the conservation land on the other side. Abby puffing up the hill, Tess running back and forth, trying to get me to throw her tennis ball. It was a beautiful evening - tall thunderclouds with their tops lit by the setting sun, a bit humid still, but cooler than after the thunderstorms earlier in the day.

Estabrook is like a path of memories. Mrs. Hopkins' kindergarten classroom on the corner, the one Nicholas used to be terrified to go into. We used to go in the side door, and get as far as the coat rack, then Nick's courage would give out and we would sit on the boot bench outside the classroom. Sometimes as we got close to class time, Mrs. Hopkins would look out and say hello to Nick, cheerfully (or terrifyingly, I suppose). Other times we would work our way into the room, maybe get as far as the reading circle or the play house.

From a long perspective, I know now that Nick was completely used to having Alex with him. Alex, it seemed (to him), always knew what to do, was never frightened, was bigger, would always protect Nick. Going places with Alex was not scary. Nick worried - nameless terrors that seemed to have started at Eliot-Pearson, with the equally sweet (and inexplicably terrifying) Carol Henrichs. Maybe it wasn't so much that school was scary, but I guess the idea of spending the day there, by oneself, was a bit much.

There were so many happy days. Bringing Abby to school for show and tell when she was about 9 weeks old (?), charting "a puppy's progress" for science fair, helping to build the play structure and later the outdoor amphitheater (with Len Morse-Fortier), Ms. Donahue (who also had Alex), art classes with Mrs. Shurtleff, Nick's introduction to music - recorder, then 'cello (bass would come later, at Diamond), Mr. Horton (Nick never did get himself sent to his office), Mr. Banks' gym classes. The wild fringe of the playground, home to many warrior camps, forts, and so on, and the playing fields - Nick's flirtation with soccer, mostly - baseball was mostly at Fiske and in town. Bad days too - breaking his foot running across the breezeway in Cub Scouts, roofing important balls and rockets. But on the whole, in my memory of it, Estabrook for NIck was love.

to be continued...

What are we doing here?

I thought a long time about posting this photograph.
Where do we come from? Where are we going? What is this all about?
I don't have the answers. I don't know why we go from fullness of life to non response - I know how this can happen but not how it could happen.
In a sense, this post is about being afraid that memory will fade. That Nicholas will fade.
This photograph puts me there. I can look at it and not fall apart now, but I can't look at it and not feel that moment. As tough it was yesterday.

Squam Rock

The Fourth of July came and went. Nick's last (and only) load of fireworks from Seabrook is still sitting above the cabinets in the kitchen. We let half of them off in the Estabrook parking lot in 2006. Andrew was pestering his parents to let him buy some, and I thought of Nick.

For many years, the Fourth of July was defined by Erma's. There's a photo of us in her garden, Nick, Alex, Elizabeth and me, taken by Esther. Nick is about eight. The holiday followed a familiar pattern, one I had known since my own freshman year in college. A family gathering at Erma's, me as the adoptive cousin, Elizabeth and the boys adopted too. Seeing the family - Erma, Phil, Marcie, Mike and Candace, many more. Usually some neighbor's dog in the middle, and the cats - Pinklepurr, maybe Dandy, who knows. The beach, of course, and on the way to the beach, the climb to the top of the hill, through the trees, and then the bare top and Squam Rock.

Squam was always a challenge. There is really only one easy way up, as I discovered sometime in 1974. And getting up is the easier part. I don't remember how old Alex was when he first climbed it, only that Nicholas had to climb it too. Right away. I think he climbed it pushing off my hands, the first time, to get up over the first part. Then it gets easier as you get to the top. From the top there's the view - not quite this one, but close - the little channels of melt water, the mysterious nubs of iron where someone, probably a hundred years ago, built some sort of ladder or railing, now gone, probably for gentleman adventurers to climb up. And the vertical sides, it seems on three sides. The descent is harder - the choice between an undignified crab walk / slide on the seat of your pants, or the what-the-heck run.

Then there was the year that Nick climbed it on his own - no helping hands, no seat of the pants, just a wild scramble up and a wilder one down. I think he ran all the way back to Erma's to tell us. They weren't supposed to be climbing it without one of us there, of course. We (or at least he) climbed it every visit - probably for the last time in the summer of 2004, after Dad died. Erma was like a great aunt to Nick and Alex, died in April 2005. What a wonderful person.