![]() We all felt as if we couldn’t explain why we’d lost touch. We’d known each other so well, and then had been so far apart. She said, “I saw you on the street, and thought, yup, that looks like her.” It’s hard to express the feelings in all of our looks and hugs. We waited just a few minutes and saw her coming down the stairs, looking exactly like herself. ![]() I was shaking! Shannon said she’d reached Amy, who had said she’d be here. She said, “you walked right past Ham.” He was at the counter. I saw Shannon first at a table at the center of the same ancient-stylized floor painting of a bird’s head in a circular design. Four steps down to the counter, display of Bodum pots, tea things, and tee shirts on shelves on the left, a little round table to the right, and the milk-sugar station, the high counter straight ahead. Just across Elliot Street, down the beginning of the steep hill to Flat Street, was the slanted storefront of Mocha Joe’s coffee shop, where I had my second, and probably favorite, job. There was McNeill’s Brewery on the left, Maple Leaf Music on the right, where I had my first real job (lots of dusting and re-alphabetizing of sheet music). and saw that familiar block between Main Street and the Harmony Lot, where we’d always circled slowly a few times before finding a spot. Above those buildings to the left (east) I see the top of Wantastiquet, that huge hump of a mountain I’d walked up and down with these friends so many times, (and remember parking in its secluded parking lot at night), rising up abruptly from its foot in the Connecticut River. I parked on Main Street, across from The Shoe Tree-there for as long as I can remember. Over other storefronts, new signs : shiny, with spiffy, computer-designed lettering, but keeping in the spirit of the town–a store selling natural body products, another new-age bookstore. It was a true hippy spot: a cooperatively run restaurant, on the second floor, with creaky floorboards, a bottomless bowl of salad with great tahini dressing, and dense, buttery cornbread.) ![]() (The sign remains for the Common Ground, though the restaurant is no more. ![]() The same businesses with the same awnings, not updated in twenty years. I can’t believe how much has stayed the same over the decades. Past the library on the right, where I’d spent so many after-school afternoons. Driving from the Putney Road strip into the little downtown: they’ve redirected traffic, one way past the Common now, so where I expected the stop sign I’d failed to stop at during driver’s ed.-with the bulldog-owning bulldog of a teacher jamming on the breaks-there was none. It was one of the strongest experiences of sense-memory: watching the curve of the off-ramp come into view feeling the curve in the tilt of my car knowing when to slow down. The other day, I went back to visit friends from high school, whom I hadn’t seen in about fourteen years, in the town I haven’t visited much since then. ![]()
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