The Danvers Herald has published a piece I wrote about my recent visit to Danvers. En route to a reunion, I detoured to the old neighborhood where I had grown up. I looked for traces of what remained of the once-so-familiar landscape along the northern end of Nichols Street (now called Conifer Hill Drive).
The published version had this title:
"Remembering Danvers: Visiting the old neighborhood"
Below is the plain text that I submitted to the paper:
Revisiting Danvers
By Sandy Nichols Ward
On Friday September 16, driving up Route 1 toward the
Breakaway for a reunion party with my Holten High School classmates, I looked
for old landmarks and reflected on changes that have occurred over the
years. I paused in the Breakaway parking
lot, surveying from that high point the once familiar landscape ahead to the
north, where I and generations of my family before me had lived and worked and
played. I thought of my first-grade
school; the family home called “Pine Knoll” where I used to visit the cousins
and great-aunts; the hayfields (replaced long ago by the shopping center) by
Granddaddy’s house (replaced by an office park); the old state hospital now
transformed into condos; and of course Putnam Pantry Candies. At least Putnam
Pantry is still there, still in business.
I was early, so had time to drive north to the little street
now called Conifer Hill Drive. A CVS store occupies the corner where the Danvers
Liquor Store once stood, marking the entrance to “my” street, called Nichols
Street back then. I wanted to explore what, if anything, remained of the land
where I had played as a child. Not much is recognizable. No surprise there. The
Locust Lawn ski hill and barns had been destroyed in the early 1970’s to make
way for construction of I-95. In 2013 another drastic excavation occurred,
re-shaping the south side of the remaining hill into terraces for large
buildings of a new housing development. Now, in 2016, I was curious to see the
finished Conifer Hill Commons. I parked and walked around. I gazed at the
boulders on the massive retaining walls, and the tall trees high above on the
narrow ridge, a fragment of the old hill.
Do children ever climb up there to play among the trees? I wondered as I watched young children in a
city-style playground at one corner of the parking lot. That new playground,
with plastic climbing equipment, seemed so small and artificial compared to the
trees, hills, meadows, and streams available to us as children in the 1950’s.
I did recognize, with a smile, many plants reminiscent of my
era: golden rod, thistles, sumac, long vines of bittersweet, a shagbark hickory
tree. Oh, I hadn’t thought about a
hickory tree in a long time. A huge one used to stand by the stone wall near
our home at 120 Nichols St. Squirrels
feasted on the hickory nuts, and we, too, would crack them open and pick out
the nutmeat. As I looked down, I was delighted to see a half-shell lying on the
stone wall, just exactly as I remembered.
The ground around my feet was littered with evidence of hickory nut
feasting. A young vine crawling up the
wall nearby had shiny green leaves, in groups of three, so characteristic of poison
ivy, another well-known plant in my childhood. I saw some poisonous pokeweed, too, with its bright
red stems and beautiful black-purple berries gleaming in the sun. I remember
mashing pokeberries into a juice to serve at a “pretend” party with dolls, while
my mother cautioned anxiously that we NOT drink that juice. Somehow I survived
childhood in spite of the dangers of poisonous plants and long periods of
unsupervised play in the woods and fields of Danvers, where I learned to love
wild weeds as well as cultivated gardens. Those gardens are long gone, but I
was happy to see such colorful bouquets of wild weeds thriving along the margins
of the new development.
I returned to the Breakaway and enjoyed the evening with old
Danvers friends, sharing stories from our school days and catching up with more
recent news. I’m glad I made this trip back to Danvers.
