Here at Eagle Pond

by Hall, Donald

• ISBN13: 9780395611548
• ISBN10: 0395611547
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1992-01-01
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

HERE AT EAGLE POND is Donald Hall's remarkable collection of essays about the permanent and transparent memory of place and of his coming home to Eagle Pond, New Hampshire, where he grew up and returned to live with his wife Jane Kenyon at the age of 45, where he began writing poems at the age of twelve, and where his ancestors made their livings by free-lancing as farmers. In these tender essays, Hall tells of the joys and quiddities of life in the ancestral New Hampshire place formerly worked as a dairy farm by his grandparents; of the comforts and discomforts of a world in which the year has four seasons -- maple sugar, blackfly, Red Sox, and winter. These essays are also Donald Hall's letters to friends, answers to such life-altering questions as: "What would our lives be like, living here at Eagle Pond, in solitude among relics and memories, in a countryside of birches and GMC pickups?" And they are ghost stories as well: vivid descriptions of Hall's intimate connection with the land and with his family past. Most importantly, HERE AT EAGLE POND is Donald Hall's coming home to language.

Table of Contents

Introduction: the Letter Farm	p. ix
Why We Live Here	p. 1
Keeping Things	p. 8
Perennials	p. 20
The Fire that Never Went Out	p. 26
The Embrace of Old Age	p. 30
To Walk a Dog	p. 34
The One Thousand Seasons	p. 36
Good Use for Bad Weather	p. 42
October's Omens	p. 45
A Good Foot of Snow	p. 49
Heman Chase's Corners	p. 52
Reasons for Hating Vermont	p. 61
The Radio Red Sox	p. 66
Living Room Politics	p. 70
Rusticus	p. 77
I Love My Dish	p. 103
The Rooster and the Silo	p. 109
Centuries of Cousins	p. 112
Country Matters	p. 115
My New England	p. 118
Fifty People Talking	p. 131
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