Home Sweet Home

Back home from my whirlwind trip to New Hampshire. It was a good trip minus the plane part and the time change. The family all got along (thanks to separate hotel rooms) and it was a nice trip down memory lane. My favorite part of the trip was on the last day. We took my Grandfather's ashes to a little town called Piermont, NH where he wanted them to be buried alongside my grandmother and relatives from generations ago. (My great-great grandparents and older) It was a gorgeous day. The cemetery was very old, dating back to the Revolutionary War. The weather was warm, the leaves were turning their autumn colors and horses were galloping in a neighboring pasture.

After we buried my grandfather we headed up the road to Whitefield, NH located within the White Mountains. My maternal great-grandmother had a house there from the 1920's to the mid-1970's that we

wanted to go see. My grandmother, my mom, and myself all were at this house as children. The house was built in 1834. There is a date sign over the formal front door. When my mom visited the house as a child, they had to use chamber pots since there was no plumbing. My great-grandmother had plumbing installed in the later years. The home doesn't look like much now. It has been abandoned and actually we all were a bit on edge standing in front of it. It was located down a dirt road and was very overgrown and there was an odd echo when you spoke. There was furniture in the house though we don't think anyone lives there. My brother walked up to the door on the porch and the door was slightly ajar. He lost his nerve and quickly returned to the dirt road. We were waiting for a squatter to burst out the door with a firearm in hand (guns are legal to carry in NH). I do think the curtains in the upper windows date back to my great-grandmother's time. I would have killed to walk in the house. If there was no furniture in the house, I would have gotten up the nerve to walk through the door.

The house has been on my mind ever since we visited on Wednesday. I have always dreamed of fixing up an old house (this one is 175 years old) and how perfect this would be since it was our family's house. Logistically and financially- I don't see how I ever could but it fun to dream.

The irony of the day was that we had items that had been my grandmother's in our rental car since we didn't feel safe leaving at the hotel. The crazy thing is that many of these items in the trunk of the rental car were items right out of this house. Talk about a full-circle experience for them.

On the way back, we stopped in the neighboring town of Littleton, NH. I bought a fabulous apron (yes, I wear aprons. Something my grandmother got me started doing). The folks that own the cute little shop are from Larkspur, CA in Marin County (I went to high school in Larkspur) Very small world! Anyways, I felt that this apron was a delightful memento for our day of going down memory lane.