CELLAR HOLES

During many of my back-east wanderings through the woods, which filled many a happy day in my youth I would sometimes happen upon an old cellar hole. Often times the spot would be far removed from any road or other habitation, way back in the woods, and I would pause for a moment to pay homage to the spot, and wonder about what had happened there. Forgotten people and forgotten lives. Forgotten effort too. (Vanity, vanity, all is vanity under the sun.) Old cellar holes always felt like a memorial that refused to focus on a specific person. More of a memorial to forgotten times in general. Not the sort of memorial which informed or brought closure- just a mysterious, forgotten place- a hole in the woods. Old cellar holes have an undeniable air of mystery about them. They raise questions rather than answer them.

Anyway, I was reading to the kids last night at bed time from the children's classic, "Miss Hickory" by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, and happened upon this apt description of a cellar hole, and the thoughts that such a discovery always conjured in my own mind.

"The cellar hole that had once held a home had been abandoned for many years. None but a dweller of the forest could have found it, for its road was lost, its stones were overgrown with wild brier and sumac, and the old gray birches that had sprouted around it were now tall and arched by the winds into a roof. But the cellar hole could remember. There, on one side, a brick fireplace had once stood with the bean pot snuggly simmering in its oven, the andirons holding four-foot logs, and a mother rocking a cradle and knitting on the wide hearth. The cellar hole remembered spinning wheels and sleigh bells, sizzling doughnuts and molasses cookies, fishing tackle, guns, singing school and Bible readings, hardships and laughter, snow-drifts and white lilacs. Now it was nothing, but an ancient memory book of things past. The thicket of black alder, pine and hemlock that led to it kept its pages closed to all except those who love the country. And when doe had been searching for a safe home for her fallow deer, the cellar hole had seemed right. There was not even a footpath where the long-lost road had led to its smoking chimney. Granite rocks covered with lichen and moss were the only sign posts."