Peter Coleman

Dad spent a brief portion of his early childhood at the old ‘Colman Estate’ at the foot of a hill on a seven-tenths-of-a-mile stretch in old Auburn, New Hampshire. I have only seen the old one-story clapboard ‘mansion’ twice. There had been and old gristmill somewhere out in the swamp behind the house, but no one seemed to remember the exact location. The day that Dad showed me the house, he simply, but proudly explained, in passing, that it had been there, in the same house, that he had lived as a boy. Maybe it was just a repressed memory; maybe it was the only simple, surviving memory had had to cherish. How could he have known that his parents’ rudimentary, but blissful relationship would end in divorce and another fractured chapter in the Colman odyssey? Did the eventual disappointment of infidelity irreparably damage his innocence, contaminating his capacity for enduring love? Or did the rude, unforeseeable turn of events affecting his young life just render him wiser and more conscious of his own frailty, his own vulnerability, and his own flawed morality? The answer cannot be known.

We continued on soberly to the Auburn Cemetery where most of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Colman-Moy clan have been laid to rest beneath a proud row of limestone and granite headstones on a prominent brow of the nearest hill. Dad seemed to possess a sense of pride as we perused the silent, stolid monuments, the only tangible vestiges of our humble Auburn history. ‘Inglorious Miltons’ perhaps?

I really don’t know whether those were happy days for my father. Folks worked pretty hard from dawn to dusk in those days, without many distractions. There were no trains nor trolleys servicing the Colman Hill, and it was a good half day’s buggy or wagon ride to the city. There was too much to do on the farm to waste time spending one’s hard-earned money on frivolous activities. Oh, once in a while there was a county dance at the Grange Hall. Nearly everybody who could walk would go to the dance, except a small group of local ‘Friends’ (Quakers), or other such straight-laced religious folk whose strict Protestant traditions against attending ‘worldly’ functions prevented them from enjoying such potentially corrupting intercourse (an old, but equally functional English word for conversation…).







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