A Walk into Reflections

As much as we love Scotland, the wife and I are no admirers of what they call a Scotch mist. But that's what shrouded our last Sunday's walk around Rockport. Like it or no, we ventured with our four-footed female "menace." From our School Street manse we strolled up Broadway to mail the weekly note to our daughter of the Berkshires, then into Cleaves Street where delighting us was the sight of the cute coral painted door set in stone for the children's entrance to the Carnegie Public Library over which the good wife watches as one of the three trustees.

We commented on the fetching white blinds that stand out on the front side of the Charlie Spiewak home. Blinds are rare these days making them unique. We know they'll come back into fashion as soon as the cycle spins around. People are like that. Up Hale Street we slogged through the sultry damp afternoon, climbing into the olden part of the town above the sea. One house again attracted our attention as we saw one half more drab than ever while t'other half loomed up clean pure white. Will never the twain meet color-wise?

A delight to the eyes is the property of Arnold Knauth and his fellow artist-wife, Jerri Ricci. These two eager beavers have resurrected an old building into a red colored studio set back from a white picket fence. Once it was a barn. Now from it emerge beautiful paintings from the brushes of these two personages. And Hale Street is the richer for it.

Punkins on porch stoops, their fronts transformed into human visages dot this winding hillside. Our regrets are expressed to the fact that there should be vandals who destroyed stoop punkins through town last week especially that of Alice Burbank's on High Street after she even had it rigged with a mike to talk to the kiddoes come Halloween. How mean can some youths get!

We liked the corn husk draping teacher Marion Bruce's house on this street as a sort of medallion of the season. And nearby number 24, we believe, was a display of late 'mums, and also a heap of chopped cord wood all ready for the fireplace on winter evenings. It brought the wife and I back to our northern Vermont retreat where such furnace length wood is a "musty" when the thermometer falls below a frigid 30 under.

Then down past the red brick funereal telephone dial structure facing Main Street with its netted windows and its cold sign, "Private Property, No Trespassing." We had to admit though that the shrubbery was well kept up and showy.

Across Main Street into Mill Lane we sailed with our snouting boxer Molly as the front echelon, ever prowling for cats of either sex much to our dismay. In a corner cellar window of the first house she really growled at the likenesses of faces carved out of coconuts, real Halloween scarers. Down the crushed stone road that did the town justice we ambled to note mighty attractive back yard gardens still flush with Fall beauty and bird baths whose patrons again gave Molly the jitters. She has yet to get her wings.

One particular fetching garden fronted by a winsome white picket fence was that of the John Patiences. Down past the dismal cemetery of ancient stones brightened only by the neighboring functional modernity of the Peg Leg motel. And then into a secluded graveyard section bordered by wrought iron gates and a 17th century stone wall wherein the weather beaten marble slabs spelled out the names of Gotts amid which were just plain nameless stones where they must have buried folks whose modesty forbade identity.

For Molly, the infidel, graves meant nothing except a place to ramble and snout at her pleasure. She was at her height as she came into the Mill Pond area where we arrived at the land of exciting reflections, perfect to a fault. All the attractive homes along the bank were seen again in the pond in complete proportion, a mirage that held us to the spot for many minutes.

It was a grand though short walk around our town, one that you, neighbor, should leave your car to repeat and feel the alluring breath that is of Rockport.
J.P.C., Jr.