There were differences in the life of a graduate student and that of a postdoctoral fellow who was not quite a faculty member. The differences were probably similar to those changes evident in other lifestyles with an evolution from communal living to an independent life. Undergraduates resided in dormitories and fraternity houses. Graduate students rented apartments near other students and spent mutual time in play and in inexpensive social gatherings. Postdoctoral fellows began having a home separated from their friends and acquaintances. This was the path we followed as we settled into our new duplex on Lyme Road on the outskirts of Hanover.
As with any livable structure built in the north, especially in New England, there was a basement, a place not only for storage but also for getting away from others, an opportunity for a few minutes of isolation. Some might have a playroom, family-room, or den. I had a study.
It was not a separate, paneled place for thoughts and scholarly work. Rather, it was constructed by a bamboo screen nailed to three edges of a flat door supported by bricks in order to make a desk. I had an intimate cave thanks to its bamboo walls surrounding me. The desk chair had wheels that kept getting trapped in the corduroy of the throw-rug meant to keep my feet separated from the concrete floor of our cellar. However, an electric floor-heater was still required during most of the year. It was a very comfortable place to read scientific journals in the evening, especially late at night when Karen and Deb were sound asleep in each of the two bedrooms making up our new, four-room apartment.
The grey living room couch was part of our rental furnishings offered by the College. Fortunately, so were the kitchen appliances. We were able to add a television set, one that was huge in its wooden furniture case and small in the size of its screen. We added a brown armchair to the red one we had transferred from Ithaca. A small duplex apartment for a newly funded fellow and his wife and small child does not need much furniture.
And then there was the bed in our own room. We no longer shared sleeping (and crying) quarters with our daughter, who had her own crib in her own room. As for the bed, it had its own long history.
We had spent many vacation hours that summer in Sandusky refinishing the still-usable bedroom furniture Karen’s parents were donating to us. We thought the gallons of turpentine we had used to strip off the old coating would be sufficient preparation for re-staining the wood of the bed’s headboard and footboard. It wasn’t. The result was a very bubbled surface that would not be covered by anything we tried. We finally left the shabby results with her folks for their finding a way to redo the efforts we had endured for the two weeks of our vacation between graduate school and our new life after student-hood.
Our most pleasant and unexpected event while living on Lyme Road was Hanover’s first snow fall. Coming from northeastern Ohio and the Finger Lake region of New York, we had experienced snow – the white stuff that quickly turned to gray sludge and frozen ice banks. Here, in New England, on the morning after a foot of snow had fallen on the hills around us, I drove toward the campus and was overcome by the beauty surrounding me.
The pine trees were blanketed with heavy mantles of white fur. I had never seen a winter’s day with such a magnificent beginning. Being certain that it would melt away as did all of the snow I had viewed over twenty years of my life, I forced myself to return on the neatly plowed road to our apartment where Karen and Deb bundled up to join me with camera in hand to record the true wonderland surrounding us. Karen and I knew it would disappear within a few days as it turned into the usual slush. We were wrong.
The white snow remained as low mountains on the trees and ground of New Hampshire for the next five months! It did not melt. It never turned to frozen, gray stuff but rather remained as fluff – which differs significantly from “stuff.” At last, I had found the true impact of a New England winter shown on every Christmas card based on a Currier and Ives print, but now one in three dimensions extending from white grounds to a clear, blue sky.
There are times, now in Houston, when I long to renew my acquaintance with that stuff. I miss the reds, golds, and yellows of the autumnal hills even more. The sound of leaves crunching under foot and the incense of once-allowed burning leaves may be found only in semi-forgotten memories.