It's Good to Walk Even on Easter

What does anyone do on an Easter afternoon? Walk, of course, even if you have to wear cast-offs. It's traditional in New England at least, and respectable folks leave their gas wagons home for a while. Obedient to our august selectmen's wishes, again we leashed our brown bomber, the quadruped Molly, as we idled fom our home base on School Street into a litter-less Main Street (Gloucester, take notice!).

In the window of the store once owned by Mrs. Jennie Savage we admired an Easter egg tree, gaily colored. So did we like a gnarled old scrub tree in the yard of Betty Bruni on Jewett Street, where colored eggs were implemented by a hen, a duck and a life-like Easter bunny.

Easter finery perched atop Rockport ladies' heads, resembling eye-fetching pancakes, floated past. Style, they call it in some circles. Into Broadway we sailed, our haughty four-footer still prancing on the leash, scoffing at neighborhood hoodlums yapping at her withers. Even our Rockport constabulary noted how well we were keeping the leash edict. At Five Corners we took a left up the hill past Eddie Doyle's future golden garden. Eddie was once a minion of the law in Clamtown (Essex).

Into Poole's Lane we headed for the railroad yard. The wife and I knew this lane well, when it was hardly more than a footpath. Those were the days when our young fry were gaining their feet, the days when there was a piggery owned by the grocers Ketchopoulos, a fount of exploration at that age when every grunt was a challenge; the day when a planked footbridge crossed a rushing gurgling brook another half hour pause of childish diversion. That lane had many lessons for our boy and then our girl that no textbook could ever give. Too bad modern educators couldn't abandon their textbooks and slide rules and take their young charges into the fields and show them the force of nature.

Off the leash, Molly raced down the lane, probing yards on both sides, having a ball. Down past Jim Ketchopoulos' yard, we saw where a horse barn stood and a granite trough still stands, covered with lobster pots. By this time, we were plumb up against the town's first Housing for the Elderly Project, 50 units that to us look crowded, with double-deckers. After 60, who wants to climb stairs?

Into youth's domain we passed Evans Field, where little children were frisking away at bat-the-ball, home-plate-or-bust, and fly the homespun kite down the rugged hill. As we ambled up the cinder path we dropped in for a moment on railroader Spencer Perkins to enjoy the warmth of his Busted and Maine potbellied stove, glowing red.

Onward and upward, we trudged, Railroad Avenue down Broadway and past a third spectuacular Easter egg-colored scrub tree in the well groomed front yard of former Postmaster Ralph Wilson on Broadway. Thence into School Street and our domicle where Molly grunted her way into slumberland, dreaming of the felines she had failed to conquer.

J.P.C., Jr.