With thanks to my local library’s interlibrary loan program, I’ve just picked up a book that will keep me occupied during Advent and probably well into January: A Testament to Freedom: the Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (ed. Kelly and Nelson, Harper San Francisco, 1995). Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor who was part of the German resistance to Hitler – a commitment for which he paid with his life. I’ve encountered his sermons and other writings in bits and pieces over the years, and it’s time I read his work in context even if not quite in full. He deserves more than the occasional quote in a meme.
I’ll alternate chapters of Bonhoeffer with chapters of a much shorter work that’s an old favorite of mine. Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim (Harper & Row, 1988) is by Malcolm Muggeridge. He was a distinguished journalist who came to the Catholic faith fairly late in life, and Confessions is his account of how he got there. Meeting Mother Teresa in the course of his work was an important factor, but conversion of heart and soul was a years-long process. The book is pithy and brief, as befits a journalist who’s accustomed to getting a point across quickly. Muggeridge’s own style and humor make this conversion story compelling.
Who knew that hikers had book clubs? I do now, having discovered an organized group of hiking bookworms in my area. I just attended my first meeting with them via Zoom, where we discussed The Salt Path by Raynor Winn (Penguin Books, 2019). I was intrigued by what I’d heard about the book, which is on one level an account of a trek along England’s Coastal Path by the author and her husband. Reading the book was a revelation: the long trek was the backdrop, not the feature. The Salt Path is a moving memoir about a devoted couple dealing with a pair of personal disasters that turned their lives upside-down and left them homeless. Winn’s story isn’t about fun or romance or adventure, but rather about tenacity and mature love. It’s also an extended meditation on how people treated her and her husband as homeless people. Her evocative descriptions of the harsh and beautiful coast never overshadow her personal story.
I won’t wish readers a Merry Christmas just yet. Let’s not rush through Advent. May this time of preparation be one of prayer, peace, and good reading for you and yours.
Open Book is a blog roundup hosted by Carolyn Astfalk at My Scribbler’s Heart and by CatholicMom.com.
I’ve seen this attributed to G.K. Chesterton, and I’m sorry I don’t know in which of his many works it appears. But no matter: here’s a Chesterton thought for Thanksgiving, with my best wishes to my readers.
“You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”
Indeed!
…and here’s a wild turkey visiting my backyard, making me think of turkey dinners even though he’s perfectly safe here.
My autumn began with a trip upstate as the leaves began turning. As October ends, I’m near the Massachusetts border, where red and orange foliage has yielded to gold and bronze. The sunlight through the leaves these days creates a glowing aura around everything.
First stop: North Country
Three days on the Ammonoosuc and Presidential trails in early fall added up to 30 miles of walking for me, punctuated with unexpected meetings. Amazing, the encounters I’ve had walking through New Hampshire.
The Ammonoosuc trail follows – you guessed it – the Ammonoosuc River. While checking out the three newest miles of the trail east of Littleton, I met a couple I know from the NH Rail Trail Coalition. We were pleased to see that the new section, between Cottage Street and Oxbow Drive, has a great surface that will be especially helpful to anyone biking the Cross New Hampshire Adventure Trail. The following day, I met up with yet another NHRTC colleague while on a gravelly Ammonoosuc stretch between Lisbon and Bath. That surface is in the process of being upgraded from gravel to a smoother crushed stone. Can’t happen soon enough, as far as I’m concerned. My feet took a bit of a beating that day. I gave them a rest as I ate my lunch under the picturesque Bath covered bridge.
Ammonoosuc River in Littleton NH. All photos by Ellen Kolb.Bath NH: lunch spot along the Ammonoosuc River, under the covered bridge.
I was in the Pondicherry Wildlife Refuge a few months ago, when Joe-Pye weed and Queen Anne’s lace were blooming all along the Presidential rail trail. When I returned in early fall, nearly all the blossoms were gone, except for a couple of hardy little asters holding out against the equinox. Milkweed pods had burst and left their seeds floating across Moorhen Marsh. Frost had nipped the north country and its mosquitoes, making the walk to Cherry Pond even more pleasant than usual. My last view of the pond had been when it was covered with water lilies. This time, the pond was a mirror for Mt. Starr King and the Pliny Range.
If I were to search this blog’s many years of posts, I’d probably find a dozen photos of the views from the Cherry Pond observation deck. Even when I know I’m standing in the same place and pointing the camera in the same direction as I did on an earlier walk, I’ll get a unique image: different light, different season, different shades of earth and sky.
Cherry Pond, Jefferson NH: looking north toward Mt. Starr King
Mud Pond Trail, Jefferson NH
I decided to re-visit Mud Pond trail, also in the wildlife refuge but north of Cherry Pond, with its trailhead off of NH Route 116. I was there some years ago when it was brand-new and awaiting finishing touches. Now, it’s a small gem. Bonus: it’s designed to be accessible to anyone in a wheelchair, with switchbacks and boardwalks and easy grades along its half-mile length. It ends at Mud Pond, which really deserves a better name even though it looks unremarkable. It’s pretty and peaceful, and the observation deck must be a birdwatcher’s dream.
Walking for a cause
Mid-October, I walked 13 miles on the Rockingham Recreation Trail in Auburn, Candia, and Raymond with a group raising funds for the Light of Life shelter in Manchester. We couldn’t have picked a better October day. From a foggy sunrise over Lake Massabesic all the way to full midday sunshine in Raymond, I enjoyed good company.
I hadn’t passed by the old Raymond Depot in awhile, and it was fun to see it again. The littlest rail car – I call it a putt-putt, though it probably has a more dignified name – always looks a little lost on the siding, dwarfed by the more conventional rail cars nearby. They’re all part of the old rail line’s history, so they all belong there.
Raymond NH rail depot, now a museumThe golden time: autumn on Rockingham Recreational Trail, Auburn NH
One piece at a time
Just a few days ago, I attended a ribbon-cutting for a trail in Salem, New Hampshire. A trail segment, to be more precise. A 300-foot segment, if you must know.
Okay, let the eye-rolls commence. But I drove the better part of an hour to be there, because getting that segment finished took years, and I wanted to thank the people who had made it happen. This is the Salem (NH) Bike-Ped Corridor at the Massachusetts state line. Its significance: it’s the south end of what will someday be the Granite State Rail Trail extending from Salem all the way to Lebanon, just this side of Vermont.
A piece of the Salem trail is already in use further north of the newly-christened segment, extending into Windham and Derry. This is the same old rail line that includes what’s now the Londonderry rail trail, which will someday connect with the South Manchester trail, which will someday connect with yet-to-be-built trails in Hooksett and Bow and Concord, finally connecting with the Northern Rail Trail that’s already complete from Boscawen to Lebanon.
This is how long trails are built, whether they’re remote or urban, flat or mountainous: one piece at a time, even if some of those pieces are only be 300 feet long. Over time, those pieces add up.
Garden along Salem (NH) Bike-Ped Trail
I seldom get to Salem, so I spent time after the ribbon-cutting ceremony walking south along the Bike-Ped corridor into Methuen, Massachusetts. It was easy to ignore the traffic noise from nearby heavily-developed Route 28. Instead, I concentrated on the sights, sounds, and fresh clean smells of the wetlands and pocket parks along the way.
“Past peak,” say the foliage reports. Don’t you believe it.
October in New Hampshire: this trailside vine wasn’t ready to give up its fall color.
Ellen Kolb 