A Child's Visit to Boston and other memories

Cleaning out drawers today in preparation for getting furniture ready to move for the new carpeting job. (Carpet will be "Native Colors" a soft brown in Karastan's "Divisadero" line, with little flecks of red and blue-gray in the brown, to help hide stains.)

Found a little collection of my daughter's souvenirs of her trip to Boston, Massachusetts, when she was about 6 or 7, when my sister was working at the M.I.T. library, and my mother made her a visit. It seemed a perfect opportunity to give our daughter the experience of an important historical American city to which she has some very old family ties, especially with her grandmother there to retrace some of the ancestral footsteps.

My mother first went to Boston with her mother just before World War II. My grandfather decided his wife needed a break, but he couldn't go with her.

It was the year that her only nephew, Carl Beyer, had died in a car crash, and she had spent months "being strong" for her widowed sister, Carl's mother, and Kay, Carl's young wife, who had two small children.

It was also the year that my mother, approaching 30 and still childless after nearly 10 years of marriage, had suffered yet another miscarriage.

It seemed the perfect time to send these two women away, to give them time to make an extended car trip "back East" to visit friends and family. I believe they set out in June or July and returned at the end of November. They were able to put four new tires on the car just two weeks before Pearl Harbor day, and the onset of rubber rationing.

During that trip East, my grandmother had been able to visit the small Wadsworth family cemetery in New York state where her father's mother was buried, and take away with her, at the cemetery keeper's suggestion, the wedding picture of her maternal grandmother (a small metal daguerrotype) that was loosely set in the tombstone above her grave. (This grandmother, Sarah Elmina Wadsworth Butler, had died young, leaving her baby son, Marsden Butler, to be raised by a pair of childless aunts.)

With this Wadsworth connection, of course my little daughter came home with a book of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poems for children, but she also had a full tour of the House of Seven Gables, climbed the steps of Bunker Hill, made a little wooly sheep at Old Sturbridge Village, visited Old North Church (and heard about Paul Revere's ride), and "helped" her grandmother piece a quilt. Quite a series of adventures for a young child! And today I found the little paper bag of all her souvenirs. Of course I will put it away until her next visit, when she can choose for herself what is most precious to her.

And I also tucked inside the bag her very first report card from kindergarten, showing that she was learning well, but was a little shy. Probably just the way she is today.

I wish her well on all her adventures in her new marriage and her new home in Germany. Visiting Boston was only the first step in a life of travel, it seems!