Asking For Love

     Every summer when I was growing up we made the long drive from outside Philadelphia, where I was born, to te village of Devon, in western Massachusetts, where my father’s family had lived for a hundred and fifty years.
     The road to Devon turned off the river road, dropping suddenly down the riverbank, then leveling abruptly for the ancient covered bridge. Our car bumped sedately as it entered the bridge. This was dark inside, with huge crosscrossed beams. Going slowly and majestically through the nineteenth-century gloom, we could hear the hollow wooden echo of our passage.
     The ceremonial crossing of the river was the moment I waited for. When we came out of the dark tunnel of the bride I said contentedly, “Now we’re in Devon.”
     We drove up Devon’s one steep street, over the railroad tracks, and past the small, neat shops that my grandmother had used: Bates, the butcher, the dry-goods store, the grocery store.
    “Wallace’s is closed,” my mother said. The grocery store was always closed by the time we got to Devon.
     “We can stop at the farm for eggs,” said my father.
     The farm belonged to Cousin Thomas, who was the only Thatcher still farming. Four generations ago the family had split: Thomas’ great-grandfather had stayed in Devon, and my father’s great-grandfather had moved to Boston. Thomas’ line had stayed farmers, and the men in my father’s line all went to Harvard. They were Episcopalian ministers, like my father, and judges and teachers and lawyers. Now the Thatchers lived all over the Northeast, but they had kept the land. The cousins, more distant with each generation, still came to Devon in the summers.
     Cousin Thomas’ farm was at the foot of Devon Hill. There were two big, gloomy hemlocks along the road, and a pond below the house for the flock of bossy German geese. The white clapboard house was symmetrical in front, with square pillars and a deep and generous front porch. In back, the house meandered, with lopsided additions. It was built around 1800, and now, in 1970, the shutters sagged, the clapboards showed cracks, and it needed paint.