Ipswich
My daughter lives in Ipswich, MA with her boyfriend. Her birthday was Thursday so my wife and I drove out here for a visit.
Most of the time I’ve driven the round trip in a day, to pick her up or drop her off. It’s 350 miles each way so those are long days. A couple of times I’ve stayed locally overnight. Decent hotels aren’t close, at least not affordable ones that I knew about. For this stay my wife found a B&B and we were even able to bring the dog.
When I’ve been here before I’ve been around my daughter’s area which is commercial and coming in and out of town, most routes of which are commercial. The residences I’d seen are near those areas and there’s nothing interesting about them.
But the B&B, though in walking distance from my daughter’s, is in an historic area. An unusual one, I think. There are a lot of old houses here. The B&B I think dates from the late 1800’s though the addition we stayed in is newer. I don’t think it’s got one of those Ipswich Historical Commission plaques on it with the date the house was built, but a lot of the other houses in the neighborhood do. There are of course a lot of houses built in the 1800’s here but it’s not the numbers that start with 18 that freak me out a bit, it’s the numbers that start with 16. I’ve seen several.
One is the image for this piece. I took that shot when walking the dog last night [when this was written – published a day later]. It might be the oldest building in the neighborhood but not necessarily. Its plaque says Built Before 1659. The oldest confirmed date I’ve seen is Built 1652.
The plaques I assume are partially for the tourists but these are lived in houses. This isn’t Colonial Williamsburg, it’s a neighborhood. I saw one from the 1600’s which has a For Sale sign on it, Appointment Only. I have no idea if any of these houses are still owned by the families that built them. In some cases I doubt it, as the house in the picture was an inn, not a residence.
Sometimes age startles me. I’m looking at buildings in the US that were around for at least a quarter of a century before Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi were born. The Mayflower landed in 1620. The guys who built or inhabited these buildings probably knew people who were at the first Thanksgiving. For all I know some of them were themselves. I suppose the information is there if I want to delve into it.
It’s not like I have that much to write about it, just a reaction to really old age. The two houses across the street from the Inn date from around 1730. For here that’s kind of normal.
05/09/2022 @ 1:23 pm
It’s a good thing you found lodging.
You’re too old to safely drive 700 miles in a day.
05/09/2022 @ 1:45 pm
You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Maybe because I’m using supportive cushions and stuff, I can drive distance better than I used to. Last year I did something stark raving nuts:
I was driving my family to Disney (the day after a 700 mile round trip to get my daughter, or maybe the day after that). Waze went wonky on my at exactly the wrong time so I used the IPhone map program at a critical juncture and the damned thing routed me through the DC area, so I spent a few extra hours on 95 South between DC and Richmond, resulting in my arriving in South Carolina/Georgia too late to find a hotel room – I hadn’t made a reservation – so, with about a 15 minute nap at a Florida rest stop, I did Apalachin, NY to Lake Buena Vista, FL, in one shot.
I do not recommend that.
05/10/2022 @ 6:28 am
Since that building was built, Pluto has made about one and a half orbits around the Sun.
05/10/2022 @ 8:45 am
A good way of measuring time. Or by estimating that we’re close to fifteen generations past that construction. Or we can look at it geologically and say that no significant time has passed at all.
05/10/2022 @ 4:51 pm
I still try to grasp the notion that time as we see it is the odd perspective, if you will. Without the human perspective, everything is happening all at once. The universe is a tiny spec, and the massive piece of real estate that we perceive. And somewhere in the middle of that single moment of time is the construction of that building.
Nothing about that makes sense to me, and yet, that is supposedly how it has happened.
05/10/2022 @ 5:17 pm
What doesn’t make sense? The simultaneousness of it all? That’s scalable. What’s going on in your body simultaneously is ridiculously complex and true of every guy working on that building in 1652.
05/10/2022 @ 7:18 pm
I do get that, but I don’t. I mean, I can tell you that a million is 1000 times one thousand, but I can’t really sense it. I know that the recent telescope launched into space is seeing light from soon after the beginning of the universe. I can even accept that every event from the Big Bang to an apple I ate 30 minutes ago, might as well have occurred within a flash of time like a flash bulb from a photographer’s camera in the 1960s, and the building in Ipswich is somewhere in between… other than knowing it, I can’t grasp it like I could grasp the apple, literally or figuratively.
05/10/2022 @ 11:01 pm
That’s why I do that time comparison when I talk about wealth disparities. The numbers are too abstract. The multiplication is there but the scale isn’t. Ten to another exponent doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t grasp, it just gets closer to grasping. I can’t grasp a period of time that’s over five times my lifetime. It’s beyond my point of comparison. It’s abstract.
05/11/2022 @ 5:23 am
And then…
Where is the line between an abstraction and a deeper type of knowing? I can feel the loss of a family member in a way that will occupy my thoughts for decades, but what of a war where thousands die a thousand miles away? Is there a narrow line, or a broad border? How is the transition made between that which we feel, and that we can only know as an abstraction?
When we can’t sense it, it seems that we have a responsibility to know. Walking around in my grandparent’s house, I can see the room where my father used to knock over my aunt’s dollhouse. I can picture how the events played out, and still see the participants as the story was told, many decades after the fact. I can see shadows on the street at night in that photo of the buildings in Ipswich. The shadows were made by electric light. What were they when my dad was tormenting my aunt? Were they from electric light, gaslight, or merely moonlight? How long did that moonlight take to get to Ipswich? 1.3 seconds? How long did that light take to get from the surface of the sun to the moon? 8 minutes? How long did it take for that photon to go from the center of the sun to the surface of the sun? 1 million years? All of that, and the creation of a Celestion speaker are created simultaneously, in rhythm with the first James Brown performance with the emphasis on the first beat in 4/4 time…all in the flash of a light bulb at a birthday party in 1966, a candle in 1866, a torch in 1766, a lightning strike in 1666. Synchronous.
05/12/2022 @ 12:45 am
Wow!
No doubt Johannes Gutenberg just smiled!
06/05/2022 @ 10:02 am
I used to live in Ipswitch, around 30 years ago, after Gloucester and before Rockport. In Gloucester, I lived next door to The Two Sisters, a breakfast joint that I hope is still there. I would roll out of bed, stumble across the alley and collapse into any available seat. In Rockport, I lived in a converted Ox Barn with the bed in the kitchen, rather like the Colonials used to live (because the kitchen was often the only room with a fireplace and therefore the warmest room in the house.) There was an enormous hole right behind the building, a played-out quarry that was filled with rainwater, right across the street from the Atlantic Ocean right where the Granite Pier juts out into the sea. I don’t think about those times much. In fact, I was startled to remember that I had ever lived in Ipswitch at all…and I don’t even like fried clams.
06/06/2022 @ 12:47 am
There’s a two month old review on Yelp for Two Sisters