The title sequence of a popular 1980s television show featured an aerial shot of the place, meant to convey to the viewer an image of classic, picturesque New England. But as a child who spent my summers there in the 1960s I sensed the lateness of the cultural hour. The fields were filling with brush, the tractors rusting, the men who used them dying or moving away. We feel the keenest nostalgia for a past we've never lived, and that's what I felt, at eight or ten years old, each time I went into our barn, with its smell of hay dust and rope, motor oil and tar. I, a kid from the suburbs, would ever know.
Nothing cures nostalgia like growing up.
I was reminded of this recently, during our annual country fair, when I rolled my wheelchair down the street after the parade of horses and oxen had gone by. Whatever its rustic pleasures may have been, our lost agrarian paradise produced a lot of manure. Still, at our historical society museum, at the fair, or at our Old Home Week celebration, it's easy to start feeling that the present is but a cheap copy of a more authentic past. I sit along the parade route, watching flatbed trailers roll by loaded with hay bales, corn stalks, pumpkins, and hastily costumed children being reminded to wave and smile. A bonneted and aproned girl, barely five years old and bored, drags a turkey down the street on a leash.