A History Garden (Slight Return)

I knew it'd been some time since I had last posted anything here, but if you asked how long exactly I couldn't have guessed. I knew It Must Have Been Years, and I was only slightly surprised that it was well over FOUR. It really could have been more than that years, or less than that years. You can really lose track of time as time goes by. At any rate I deliberately took a years-long break from some activities to focus on other ones, so as not to lose the time going by while I had it. Writing and researching history is very time consuming, so I made a concious choice to put my time, effort, and energy into areas of my life that had a finite time-span and only return to this blog once I had time to do it again.

Priority One was to reformat my life after my last significant relationship ended. First and foremost I decided to spend as much time as possible with my daughter before she hit her teen years (she had just turned 6 when the split happened -- see image right). I can say that was the best decision I made; my daughter is now 14 (see image below) and she is fully engaged with devloping non dad-related teenage autonomy. But those years of us being thick-as-thieves established the bedrock that our current relationship firmly rests on. And I will never regret not having spent more time with her because I was busy blogging...

See that path in the blog header with the planters and paving stones and black and red mulch? It was the garden path leading to the front door of my house, which I still co-owned with my ex after we split up. The mortgage had been upside-down since '08 and it was unsellable when things ended, unless I wanted to foreclose and go bankrupt. The bank had made clear a short sale was not in the cards. It took years, but between the housing market slowly coming back from the subprime mortgage crash and budgeting my finances to pay down the mortgage, I was eventually able to sell the house and break even. Quick plug for my realtor Debbie Chennisi. If not for her relentless hard work, I never could have sold that hot mess without a foreclosure that would have bankrupted me.

From a distance it didn't look like a hot mess though. It is in a great location, a quiet cul-de-sac only 5 minutes from RT 95 one way and the Centre of New England shopping center the other. It's got Lake Tiogue in the back, a garden, chickens and a chicken coop and this nicely-mulched stone pathway leading to the front door... But because my priority had entirely been to pay down the mortgage the place had a LOT of deferred maintenance. It needed a new roof. New gutters. Trees that needed to be taken down before they fell on someone's house. And there were several other issues that structural engineers had signed off on. For instance, in 1965 the entire nieghborhood was built on a miles-wide sand deposit left by the last ice age. So that crack in the foundation? Most of the houses on my street had the same cracked foundation our house had, and it had stoppped settling long before we moved in in 2005. All the stuff wrong with the place was in the disclosure and home inspection. Still, I never thought it was going to sell at the break-even price. But the housing market went ballistic once the pandemic hit, so even with all these problems and going under contract with three different buyers, eventually it sold as-is for the price I was asking!

There was an immense sense of freedom and relief when I drove away from there for the last time...

Meanwhile as all this was happening I was also still teaching full-time, coordinating Model Legislature statewide, and was handed the keys to the RI Social Studies Association (which I took only with great reluctance -- more on that in a future post). Around the same time retired archivist Peter Bennett joined WRICHS, so I gladly handed the responsibility for the WRICHS Archive to him and took over the vacant position of WRICHS Historian. There was an opportunity there to kill two birds with one stone, and I began wrting articles for The Hinterlander about mill villages in the south-western corner of RI that I am also using as core drafts for chapters in my "Lost Mill Towns of South County" book project. In the winter of 2019 I also put together a related mill-preservation presentaion for HistoryCamp Boston for March 2020. Then as luck would have it, HistoryCamp 2020 was scheduled to take place the same weekend that the pandemic shut down the entire country. So much pandemic hiatus stuff... But now that things are opening back up, I'll be giving that postponed presentation for HistoryCamp 2022 this August.

So skip to the end, I have kept a small number of public history and service projects going while I mostly spent quality time with my daughter, paid down the mortgage and sold my house. Other irons in the fire, I either quit entirely or set them on hiatus. But now I have the time, so I am picking up my pen and keyboard and starting to blog again.

Shortly after I first started A History Garden I asked an online friend of mine, who has a very awesome blog to take a look at it for some feedback. This is what she said:

"I can unreservedly say that I love your blog. I love the Rhode Islandiness of it, the strong individual voice and sense of humor, your original photographs and the mixture of longer essay form with shorter entries and reviews. The only thing you have to do, as far as I'm concerned, is post more" [emphasis mine].

I have thought much about these words of advice and encouragement fron Liv since she wrote them to me so many years ago. The number of views some of my articles have gotten, on a blog that has been for all intents and purposes moribund for years, surpasses the number of students I've had in over thirty years of teaching. This is really such an amazing medium as a public historian for reaching an audience. Therefore my goal, if I am really restarting my blog, is to post something every day. Even if all it is is very short or a quote from so-and-so, or something I wrote for some other purpose. My goal is to share ideas and history with whoever is interested. The pathway in the header is no longer my front yard, but my path forward here is clear nonetheless.

Gonna post more, Liv.

And in case all this wasn't enough for your slight return pleasure, here's another...