For most of our time in New England, the weather was chilly, gray, and damp.  It set an appropriately foreboding mood for listening to books like Moby Dick, The House of Seven Gables, and The Witch of Blackbird Pond, as we drove through Massachusetts. However, the clouds parted for a gloriously picturesque day on Nantucket Island. I’ve wanted to visit Nantucket ever since I read Joan Aiken’s Nightbirds on Nantucket, a delightfully cockeyed adventure tale, full of winks and nods to Mr. Melville’s big fish story.  The book’s plucky British heroine, Dido Twite, is rescued by an off-course Nantucket whaling ship skippered by a Quaker captain, who is obsessively chasing a pink whale.  While stranded on Nantucket, Dido uncovers a Hanoverian plot to blow up St James’s Palace by firing an enormous cannon across the Atlantic, the side-effect of which would push Nantucket Island into New York harbor.

Nightbirds was the first real chapter book I read on my own.  It was also the first book given to me by another woman—in this case a young schoolteacher—with the urgent instructions: “You have to read this; you’ll love it.” It set me on a search for my own elusive quarry, more Joan Aiken stories.  I scoured the card catalogs of every elementary, middle school, junior high and city library of the small South Georgia towns in which we lived in the 1980s, here and there finding a new volume in the loose series of Dido books. I learned that Aiken’s father was Conrad Aiken, a Georgia poet laureate, and my feelings of kinship grew.  When I exhausted all of my library resources, I wrote an admiring letter to the author asking for a list of her other titles.  I addressed it:  Joan Aiken, Sussex, England.  She answered my letter and included a long list of book titles.  I was in my thirties, when, with the help of the internet, I found the last unread title, but I’ve never given up the ritual of searching Aiken, J FIC, as soon as I visit a new library. Aiken died in 2006, but her daughter recorded an introduction to a recent audiobook version of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Aiken’s best known children’s story.  She says her mother did not attempt fiction writing until her forties, after a career in journalism, followed by child-rearing and the unexpected death of her husband.  She worked on Wolves for ten years before it was published.

At the Nantucket Whaling Museum, we were horrified by tales of the doomed whale ship Essex; the tragedy supposedly inspired Moby Dick.
Visitors arriving by ferry for the annual Daffodil Festival.

Outside Boston, we ate supper with a UGA friend, Mary Frances Giles.  Mary Frances is a worker at one of the L’Abri study centers, and she gave us a tour of the Southborough campus.  L’Abri, which means shelter, was established by Francis and Edith Shaeffer as a retreat for visitors wishing to study and consider their religious and philosophical beliefs. We loved wandering the beautiful old house and hearing about Mary Frances’s role there as a counselor, speaker, and hostess.  Here’s a link to a Friday night lecture she recently presented:

Living with Longing

 I didn’t know that visitors are not required to stay for a whole semester.  As long as there is room in the house, anyone may study for as short a time period as a weekend.  I was also surprised to learn that L’Abri study centers—9 worldwide–are still completely funded by unsolicited donations.

In route to MA, we stopped in Newport, RI to enjoy ocean and mansion views from the Cliff Walk.

At the Wampanoag village in Plymouth, we learned about companion planting.   Corn, bean, and squash seeds are planted in the same mound.  The corn provides support for the bean vine and shade for the squash.  The squash controls weeds, and the beans replenish soil nutrients.

Plimoth Plantation was one of our favorite stops.  It was fun to talk religion, politics, and farming with William Bradford and Miles Standish!

This house inspired the setting for The House of Seven Gables. (We only counted five, though.)

Here’s the custom house where Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote an angry diatribe against Salem in his introduction to The Scarlet Letter.  He didn’t enjoy all the government bureaucracy, despite having won the job because his friend, James Polk, was elected president.

This is the narrow, winding stairway to our rooms in the former home of a scandalous sea captain, whose wife (a daughter of America’s first millionaire) paraded prostitutes into court to support her divorce case circa 1813.

Orchard House in Concord. The Alcotts encouraged daughter May (Amy in Little Women) to practice drawing on the walls of her bedroom. Her “doodles” are still on the walls, doors, and window trim.

Visitors leave pens and pencils at Louisa Mae Alcott’s grave on Authors’ Ridge in Sleepy Hollow cemetery.

We argued politics with a Redcoat at the (new) Old North Bridge.

 ‘Tween decks in a tall ship, we tried out tools for measuring distance and location at sea. Sextons are still required on Navy vessels in case some sort of cyber terrorism disables the high tech equipment!

My favorite line from Moby Dick is not the opening sentence, but the closing one. After the deadly climax of the story, the reader catches a last glimpse of Melville’s narrator, riding his coffin-turned-lifeboat in a calm sea: “On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.” Oh, the delicious melodrama! But what a meandering journey to get that last, plaintive note.  I know we’re supposed to read deep  to get the most out of good literature, but frankly, I was worried all those words would exhaust, rather than inspire my kids. (We opted for a nicely abridged version!)

I was happy to find that the book hasn’t lost all appeal to a modern audience, though. One night, we pulled into a Cape Cod campground after closing hours.  We were in dire need of clean clothes for the next day’s activities. The night manager drove me over to the laundry facility, so I wouldn’t have to stumble around in the dark.  He looked and sounded like a baby-faced Affleck brother from Good Will Hunting. After asking about our impressions of the area and adding some commentary of his own, he said, “I heard you playing Moby Dick in your the RV when we were loading up your stuff.”  He reached over, popped open the glove compartment, and pulled out his own worn copy. “I can’t get enough of that book,” he confessed reverently. “I like a book you have to think about for a long time.”

Our quest to visit all corners of the continental U.S. is pressed for time. We wedged a trimmed-down trip to New England between prom and graduation, but to pull it off, Brandon dropped us off in Nashville and flew back to Texas for a work conference. That gave us a few days to visit our old home on Peachtree Street, where we lived in the early 2000’s, and to do RV repairs. Again.

When Thomas Wolfe said ‘You can’t go home again,’ I suppose he had something metaphysical in mind. When we visit Nashville, we get to stay in the actual house we lived in, on a street populated by many of the same neighbors we enjoyed fifteen years ago. Our friends, Connie and Tom Michael, bought the house when we moved, and though the home is distinctly theirs now, every corner of it is full of our happy memories, too. On this trip, the Michaels were finishing up their school year, so we tagged along and found ourselves retracing the familiar routine of our old Nashville life.

The Michaels participate in the same national homeschool group, Classical Conversations, which we attend, so we were excited to watch Paul’s CC mock trial competition. His team won!

The Frist Center is a gem. Though it has no permanent collection, great traveling exhibits rotate through this museum, which is located downtown in a beautifully renovated Art Deco building. Each Spring, we used to attend special seminars about the newest Frist exhibit at our local library branch, and the final program included a visit to the museum. This year, we arrived just in time to visit the Frist with our former librarian, Lana White, who marveled at how tall her little art students had grown.

“Miz” Lana and the kids at Thompson Lane library just before we moved in 2005.

We’ve worn-out most of the tried-and-true Nashville field trip options over the years, so we drove down to Maury County to see the James K. Polk Museum.

Visiting the (Nashville) Parthenon together circa 2003

Reunited with Brandon and operating a fully-functioning (fingers crossed) vehicle, we sped on to Columbus, Ohio, where we spent the night with Nicole and Jonathan Kelly, old friends from our early days in Lubbock. They were newlyweds when we met them, and they credit then-toddler Jane with inspiring them to have babies. Now they have three cute girls, and the youngest is called Jane! We had a fun time catching up with them and exploring  Columbus.

Jack Hanna’s Columbus Zoo

Next, we visited Gettysburg. We listened to Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, on the way. In the introduction, Shaara’s son, Jeff, tells about a family visit to Gettysburg that inspired the novel. Though the book won a Pulitzer prize in 1975, it was not commercially successful during the lifetime of the author. His son says that Shaara felt like the project was a failure. While our tour guide was careful to point out some inaccuracies in the book, the haunting voices of the novel powerfully colored our impressions of the battlegrounds.

One phrase, “All those young hearts, beating in the dark,” kept sounding in my mind as we plodded along on horseback through the fighting of July 1st, 2nd, and 3rd 1863, tallying the terrible expense of the war. I’ve never understood the enthusiasm of Civil War buffs; perhaps because I’m a Southerner, I feel a sense of shame and discomfort at places like Gettysburg. But I do think it’s important to visit these monuments sometimes. Underneath whatever other political and economic reasons given are given for the  war, there persists a bitter truth; we built our country using slave labor and repeatedly hardened our hearts against the correction of that injustice. I had to reminded myself that I can love my country and its unique graces, while simultaneously acknowledging its brokenness.

Later, we watched a documentary called The Address, about students with various learning disabilities, who memorize and perform the Gettysburg Address. Georgia immediately started working on it, too, and she spent the rest of the trip four-score-and-seven-year-ing us.

One might think a tour of New England should involve the major cities of the area, but since we visited Boston, Philadelphia, and New York a few years ago, we decided to focus on parks and smaller cities this time. We couldn’t miss the chance to stop briefly in Philadelpia to see some old friends, though.

We ate lunch with Stacy Bartholemew, an Athens friend who encouraged and nurtured me when I was a college student. I’ve enjoyed following the Bartholomew family adventures over the years, and their enthusiasm for big cities has infected me. I remember marveling at how well their children navigated New York City after spending their early lives in smaller towns and suburbs. They moved to Philadelphia several years ago to plant a church in Center City, and their affection for this adopted home makes me view it with friendly eyes.

Just across the Delaware River in Collingswood, New Jersey, live our friends, Jim and Emily Angehr. They are church-planters, too. We loved touring their neighborhood and watching our children play together for the first time since the Angehrs moved from Lubbock four years ago.

(Emily took these pictures. See more of her work at junedayphoto.com)

Last, we dropped in on Rocky. Our children like to believe he’s an actual person, and their wish was fortified when they learned (spoiler alert) there’s a gravestone for Adrian Balboa in the local cemetery.