One of the advantages of living alone, I have discovered, is that I can change my plans on a dime and it affects no one. Plan A for today was to clean a bit, and shovel the debris of the past few weeks of packing my daughter to school and working late (thus not cleaning up at the end of the day) had left scattered about.

But as I was writing poetry Friday night, I decided instead to to the Robert Frost House in nearby Shaftsbury, VT. Why, as a poet, and particularly as one who first came to love poetry because of Frost, e.e. cummings and Ogden Nash, I had not been there yet when it was so close, I cannot tell you. “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” was one of the poems where I first “got” the power of rhythm to create mood, so truly Frost and his home should have been one of the first places I went when I moved up here five years or so ago. It should have been a pilgrimage for me.

 

Houses of people who have made a difference to me, who have made an impact on me, have always been emotional touchstones. Seeing Montecello or Poplar Forest, Thomas Jefferson’s homes, is still an emotional high. When I had the chance to visit Shakespeare’s home, I felt an energy that was almost religious in it’s fevor. And there have been other places that resonated with me. I have a stone from “Merlin’s Cave” in Tintagle, England, legendary birthplace of King Arthur that I treasure and touch almost like a talesman from time to time. And there is a brick from the family homestead in eastern Virginia, now long fallen and gone, that I display in my house, more for me than for guests, who likely wonder why a brick has a place of honor on my bookshelves.

I expected to feel that same energy when I went to the Frost House. But I did not. It’s cute. A 1920’s bungalow. with stone walls and wood eves and dormers. But the inside is truly a museum. And while there are a couple pieces of furniture that belonged to Frost there, this place truly is a museum, with scads of history displays, copies of letters, photographs of people in his life, smatterings of poems, notes from critics and fans.

I enjoyed it. I learned a few things. I was definitely reminded of the genius of his art, and how beautifully he caught mood with his language and command of meter. But you got no sense of him having actually have lived there, or how he lived, or what might have surrounded him. There was no FEELING of him, just facts. There was no energy.

Out back, there are paths. Paths into a field. Paths into the woods. Paths that run along stone walls. And it is walking along these paths that you get a sense of Frost, even though here too, there is nothing of “his” to see.

What you see instead, and what you are reminded of, is his love of land, of how trees and stone walls figure into his poems so often. Of the images of New England that he wrote about so beautifully that even today, a generation after his death, they are still how so many of us define New England in our minds. He created it for us and his words, spare and so often perfect, made it more real than reality.

 

The museum recommends an hour to go through the museum. Unless you are a slow reader, you can do it in half that. They barely mentioned the grounds. But it was while walking that I felt Frost. It was here in this place of fields and stone walls that I could sense

his presence far more than in the stone house at the front of the property.

 

Somewhere as I walked, my mind took another tack. I began to think about my own writing own Journey. As an adult, Frost began trying to farm in New Hampshire, and failing as a poet and a farmer, he took a risk and moved to England, where he began to get a name as a poet, and then he moved back to New England, to Vermont. His was a journey of faith, or at least persistence. And we are richer for it.

My journey is different, and I am looking at it a lot right now as I try to pull together a book or two, to sort out what to put in it, and what themes to focus on. I have also been looking at it as I sort through all the poems my mother saved, going back to when I was in high school. I can trace my life in these poems more than I realized.

Often I tell people that my poems are not about what is going on in the moment, and that is true. Often they are remembered memories, or revisited ones. And at times they are here and now and raw. In recent months, they have become more immediate, but even now, some of them look back. Some look forward in hope.

But there is still a journey in them and somehow this morning, as I wandered the land behind Frost’s house, that’s where my mind went. Not to this great, oh so great poet and his life, but to my own, and to my own frailty and persistence, my strength and vulnerabilities, and the poetry that has documented all of it for nearly 40 years.

I probably don’t look back enough. Oh, I look back at moments and mistakes, and I capture and revisit things I have done and felt along the way. But I rarely look at the broad sweep of my life, and there lessons in doing just that. Lessons worth looking at.

And somehow, while coming here to feel Frost, I ended up instead looking at the pilgrimage of my life. I saw myself anew. I am under no illusion that I found a great truth. In fact, it was only a beginning, but once again in life, I have a new lens to see myself and my world through, and that’s always powerful.

 

When Frost first moved to Vermont, he and his father planted a thousand red pine trees. Not long ago they harvested two of them. Some of the wood is going to be cut into board to recreate a table like one that Frost owned when he lived here.

The remainder of the wood has been crafted into small things. Handles for letter openers. Wine bottle toppers. And bookmarks. I bought a bookmark, because I read more than I drink or read letters. And this will become one of my touchstones, for the gift visiting Frost gave me, long, long after he was gone.

Oh, and the housecleaning? Maybe tomorrow. Maybe.

Be well. Travel Wisely,

Tom