Returning to Our Childhood Home (Where Time Almost Stops)
A Guest Post by Cheryl A. Ossola
If you left your childhood home and returned years later to find it changed, you will relate to this month’s guest essay by Cheryl A. Ossola. Perhaps “home” was a magical place where you spent your summers, as I did on my godmother’s farm, or just the neighborhood or town where you grew up and went to school. Places change, that’s inevitable. But the places of our childhood are enshrined in treasured memories that bring us back to a happier time, when life was easy, before we became adults. These places are holy in a sense, sacred to our personal stories. They define us in a myriad of ways. When these places change, it can be disorienting, it hurts. It can even be, as Cheryl writes, soul-crushing. And yet, to return and spend some time can also be soul-soothing.
Have you returned to your childhood home and found it changed somehow, different from what you remember?
I’m grateful to Cheryl for allowing me to share her essay published just this week on Italicus. Cheryl is an author and expat living and writing in Italy.
Where Time Almost Stops
Happy memories and sad discoveries in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom
by Cheryl A. Ossola
I’m on my way home after nine days at my childhood summer paradise—Lake Willoughby, in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom (NEK). My visit, after a seven-year absence, was everything I thought it would be: joyful and depressing, relaxing and anxiety-inducing. There’s always risk in returning to a place or state of perceived perfection because the new reality often intrudes on our treasured (sometimes accurate, often embellished) memories. Knowing that, and because I hadn’t flown or left Italy’s confines in nearly four years, I was half dreading the trip, even though I’d be rendezvousing with my sons. Of course it was worth it, as I knew, deep down, it would be. And though my return to the lake didn’t rewrite the past for me, it did show me how present-day Vermont has changed—and in some ways not for the better.
The beach and cottage compound of my childhood summers (now used only by the owners) hasn’t changed too much. I got over the shock, long ago, of seeing the wooden dock replaced with a more practical and durable one made of metal and polymer. (I didn’t like it, but who can blame the owners when the thing has to be broken down and hauled out of the water every autumn before the lake freezes over, then reinstalled each spring.) And the cottage my family stayed in most of those summers, with its roomy screened porch (the setting for dramatic Monopoly games and hours of reading), creaky wooden floors, and fireplace made of river rocks, is also long gone. (Trees have filled in the site now, making it easier to bear, though my brain still screams “Wrong, wrong, wrong!” whenever I return.) The bridge over the brook sports a sturdy banister now instead of a single rickety handrail, and the platform is solid too, without the thrilling/terrifying bounce it used to have. The lodgepole fence we once dared each other to walk atop from end to end has lost its coat of white paint, but the design is pretty much the same. The horseshoe pits where my friends and I painted ourselves with mud after every rainstorm—those are gone, and so are the crudely carved words, “The Ossolas,” on one of the birches, done more than half a century ago by my dad. Those trees still stand tall, but lichen coats their trunks now, erasing all written proof that the Ossolas were there. But we were, and Willoughby is an indelible part of our family’s history, the magical place that produced the vast majority of my treasured childhood memories.
Most important, the lake is as cold and clear and beautiful as ever, its ring of mostly gentle mountains unchanged. It’s temperamental, which I suppose most lakes are—but Willoughby, long and narrow, cut by a glacier, is as flighty as an unbroken colt. A morning might bring calm, the lake’s shining surface enticing ducks to shore and swimmers into the gasping cold, but by noon a determined wind might kick up in Willoughby Gap—the mountain pass between Pisgah and Hor—and morph that glass into choppy waves, the current underneath racing north. Thunderstorms descend and depart with the abruptness of New York pedestrians, and at times such marvels called microbursts dump rain on parts of the lake, leaving others untouched.
So there are changes to my little pocket of Vermont, sure, but they’re nothing compared to the distressing decline of the surrounding towns and farmlands. That devolution was visible the last time I was here, in 2015, five years pre-Covid, but now it’s shocking. Ramshackle farmhouses have always dotted Vermont’s slopes and valleys, but now farm after farm is decaying. And some are gone. The huge dairy farm on the hill above Westmore, whose owner used to deliver produce by the truckload to us cottage-dwellers, is one of those, and so is the farm where I learned to ride a horse. And in the towns, many of the lovely clapboard houses with steep roofs and columned front porches that line the streets are not so lovely anymore. Some have flaking paint and rotting woodwork; others, worse off, sagging roofs and few signs of habitation. Businesses have gone under, rusting cars and trucks populate driveways, and a once-excellent grocery has gotten depressingly squalid despite prices that rival New York’s.
It’s not only the farmers that are few in number. Finding a plumber or a builder is increasingly difficult as tradesmen leave for the cities. (It took a year to get someone to install new windows in my friends’ house; my brother tells me of nightmare remodeling scenarios.) Vermont’s young people want more opportunity; staying home to run the farm or logging business is, apparently, no longer the dream it once was. Though sugaring is still a big industry, Maple Grove Farms, one of the best-known producers of Vermont maple syrup, closed the doors on its maple sugar candy factory last year, after 160 years of production. For my sons and me, that was a huge blow. No trip to Vermont was complete without a visit there and the purchase of hard-to-find B-grade maple sugar candy. B grade (an archaic descriptor; the grades are now called Golden, Amber, Dark, and Very Dark) is harvested later in the season and thus has a stronger maple flavor than the delicate, sugary (former) A grade. We used to buy boxes of seconds—rejects only because they were broken or slightly misshapen—at about half price, and I’d hoped to bring some back to my friends in Italy. The loss of that place, with its sweet products and sweeter memories, is nothing less than soul-crushing.
But the people are still there, most of them. Willoughby Farm once was a working dairy farm, purchased in 1907 by the family whose descendants are my friends. Those dairy farmers’ children, the owners of Willoughby Farm when we started going there some 60-odd years ago, left us long ago. They were my parents’ dear friends; now, with the death a year ago of the last of that generation—a vibrant woman and brilliant music teacher, a seemingly immortal (to me) embodiment of Vermont—what’s left are their children (my childhood friends) and, promising continuity, their children and grandchildren. The small beach is crowded now with paddle boards and kayaks instead of the sluggish wooden rowboats I grew up with, proof that it’s still Kid Heaven. Thank god.
Sitting on the beach, I’m at peace, reminiscing with my sons, catching up with now-rarely-seen friends, or in silence, gazing at the lake. I’m grateful for the enduring nature of this place, the family’s commitment to it and determination to pass it down—six generations now, I think. The traditions continue, even if transformed, and new ones are born. During our visit this summer, there was no bonfire on the beach like the ones of my youth, with s’mores consumed to the point of nausea and traditional songs led by a music teacher on guitar (the same woman who led us up mountains and streams, took us blueberry and raspberry picking, and saved me when I bid on an enormous piece of farm equipment at an auction—and won). But there was a good-size blaze in a fire pit, a second-generation music teacher on ukulele, singing his own songs and Beatles standards, marshmallows roasted on freshly cut twigs, and a bald eagle winging toward the sunset. Time skips ahead or slows to a slog, and everything changes. But in some small soul-soothing ways, nothing changes at all.
Cheryl A. Ossola was a magazine editor and freelance writer/editor in the San Francisco Bay Area until she chucked it all to move to Italy with her dog. Her prose and poetry have appeared in Fourteen Hills, Switchback, Writers Digest, boats against the current, After the Pause, Dance Magazine, and the anthology Speak and Speak Again, among other publications. Her debut novel, The Wild Impossibility (Regal House Publishing), won a Nautilus Prize in Fiction; more books are in the works. For more info, visit cherylaossola.com, and for weekly doses of her writings on Italy, books, travel, art, and history, subscribe to “Italicus: a writer’s life in Italy.”
One last note from Jan: If you have any interest in living in Italy, or just love reading about life in Italy, I highly encourage you to read Cheryl’s substack: Italicus, which is a lovely glimpse into the joys and struggles of being an expat in a small Italian village. I discovered Cheryl through her article, How Not to Expat. Personally, I look forward to hearing more about her dog’s life in Italy…
Jan, thanks so much for inviting me to share your space. It's lovely to hang out with you.
I think there is something eminently relatable to the discomfort of the inevitable change of a childhood home and land, no matter where you're from. (I wrote about it in my newsletter, too, probably because these feelings never fully get resolved, only ebb and flow, and writing helps me try to make sense of it all)!
I read this immediately because I know Vermont well, having lived there for 11 years. While I didn't grow up there, for my job (and for fun) we drove all over the state, to the most rural pockets and seemingly unoccupied corners. Lake Willoughby is absolutely stunning; I did not realize how much I'd missed it until reading this!
From my time running a rural camp on 50 undeveloped acres in Northwestern Vermont, I know what it's like to have to haul out a rickety wooden dock at the end of every summer, what the crush of winter ice does to it if you don't, having to replace it because you think "maybe this year it will survive the winter" (you were wrong). Connection with the land is so deep there.
Even with all the changes (and Cheryl is so right, the poverty and dilapidation across rural Vermont is stunning and completely overlooked by those who imagine the state to be a fall color paradise), what I have to remember is that just over a century ago, almost the entire state was farmland; trees were mown down and have been climbing back ever since. It wasn't that long ago! The land survives (if we give and take responsibly...), even if the culture sadly fades away.
I wrote more than I planned. This obviously struck a chord. I'm so sorry about Maple Grove Farms. B grade forever!!