Mira Kandlikar-Bloch - An Elegy for Winter Street

In 2012, my grandparents still lived at 6 Winter Street. That white, weathered, colonial-era  farmhouse was built in 1829. But the pool must have been built in the 70s. 

I was baptized in their backyard, along with the bugs, beetles, and blueberry bushes. 

A faulty filtration system gurgled my name, wet concrete spelled it out. A brittle plastic  waterslide and white Cabot yogurt tub told me anything was possible. 

So I shared my secrets with the daddy-longlegs in the shed, because I couldn’t smell them yet. 

I hid in the stacks of my grandpa’s office and ate blueberry pancakes with Vermont maple syrup.  I whistled too loud, asked too many questions, pretended to live in the ditches along the side of  the garage. 

I picked at the peeling paint. 

The dragonflies and bullfrogs told me their secrets, too. They told me about the frog pond in  Hubbard Park, up the hill on Winter Street. As a kid, I sometimes thought I had dreamed it. Or  stumbled upon it by accident, like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. 

But I saw it this summer, conspicuous as ever, cattails and lilypads and grey-green water. 

I walked up Winter Street to the top of the hill, sweating, and smoked a joint at the old gazebo.  Carved my name into a picnic table, pretended to use my grandpa’s swiss army knife. 

Choked on the humidity. 

Kicked at the charcoal in the firepit, fought with the mosquitoes, prayed to the trees, the haze,  and the damp dirt road. 

Mount Hunger— 

My grandfather’s ashes are long gone from that trailway, just like my summers on Winter Street.