Dear Hadley: A Love Letter

Dear Hadley,

My sister can't understand my attachment to you. She rolled her eyes when I added a “Welcome to Hadley” sticker to a recent online order. I don't entirely understand it myself. You are, like many small towns, a bit insular, a bit incestuous, and, like so many small New England towns in particular, anachronistic and resistant to change. You were not always a happy place for me- our family never quite fit, I know. I could write this letter to the whole of my darling Valley, and it would not be any less true, and perhaps filled with an even greater love. But for so many years, you were home base. Love comes when there is time and space for roots to grow, and that is what you gave me.

There you sit, sandwiched between two college towns, refusing, even now, to entirely give up your small farm town identity. The sprawling development, the proliferation of chain restaurants, the explosion of shops and big box stores has been, mercifully, confined to one long strip. Locals refer to it as "Route 9" or, less often, "Russell Street." It's the Hadley most people know; it's the one they drive through on their way to the bustling centers of Amherst or Northampton. It's the Hadley of autumnal throngs of students eager to outfit their dorm rooms, the Hadley of Target and Whole Foods and McDonalds. But that's not the real you- and we both know it. You exist, not on Route 9, but along winding roads that court the river or skirt the last of the tobacco fields. The real you is out where the land opens up, and there's a clear view of the hills that make the Valley what it is.

Between the expansive liberalism and intellectualism of your neighbors, you remain a safe haven to hicks and bad hobbits, to families that settled here long generations ago. You are the Hadley of patchwork farms, of fertile land, and of little farm stands that spring up along the side of the road in the summer. You know the ones- where a jar of money sits untended and patrons are expected to leave what they must and make their own change without cheating. This is you. This is the real Hadley. The one that has a little cemetery with names on stones going back to the 1600s- names that still populate the town today. Anachronistic and resistant to change, and I love you for it. You are the Hadley of my mother, my grandmother, and her father and her grandmother, that still exists- both in substance and shadow- regardless of, in defiance of, the forward march of time.

Perhaps I love you more for the leaving of you. I had to, you know. I loved you, but it was time to to go. And so I left, and all these years later, I have never lost the feeling of existing in two places- here, where I am, and also with you, always. Perhaps I love you more for the absence of the things that were in my life for so long, but which the city I live in now can't offer me. The absence of the heavy scent of magnolia blossoms in spring, and wet earth, and the feel of my bare feet sinking into freshly plowed fields. The absence of sleeping with the windows open all summer long, and the sharpness of an August night, as summer fades. And oh, the absence of wild and glorious falls-- that defiant blaze along the hills, unrestrained and generous-- a gift before the long, dark hush of winter.

Perhaps I love you so for the glistening sweep of the river I hold in my mind's eye, the one that comes to me unbidden, or for the sweetness of the wildflowers that grow along the dike. Perhaps I love you for showing me the complacency of cows, content in their grazing, underneath a sky that's vast and grand, and seems beyond their notice.

I love you, I know, for the bounty of your harvests. For giving me the joy of cherry tomatoes, straight off the vine, warm from the sun, with a sheen of good earth on them. I love you for being famous for your asparagus, your strawberries, your tomatoes, and your sweet corn. I love you for being a source of vexation to drivers caught behind lumbering farm vehicles out on Route 47.

And I love you, of course, because of home. It is cliché to call it a rambling farmhouse, but rambling it is, with little shadowy pockets we seldom visit- in the attic, in the back kitchen, in the barns. Crotchety, old, and faithful, it has housed my family for four generations. It's complicated, and I cannot explain to you the tangled ache and angst, the fear and love, that jumble in my heart. I cannot explain it to you, or even to myself, but there it is- a sloppy layer cake of thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams, what-ifs, and if-onlys.

I love you for the shadows of my younger selves-- the ones that I encounter around every corner when I visit home. I dread them and I love them, those pesky ghosts, with their disappointed idealism of a younger time. “We didn't think it would work out this way,” they tell me, and what can I do but shrug and say, “I know. I remember. Growing up sucks.”

In my memories, it always summer, or maybe a perfect September day. Reality disappoints, but it doesn't matter. I still think of you like this-- dressed up with a blue sky and the green, green exuberance of summer. I still long for the luxury of time to just be with you and my dear Valley; it's time I never seem to have on visits home. It doesn't matter that when I'm there, when I'm with you, I seem to be caught in an eternal adolescence- simultaneously aching for the space and freedom of my city life, and wishing that I didn't have to leave again. Discontent when I am present, and discontent when I am gone, but content, somehow, in the bittersweet between.

So yes, dear Hadley, I love you. You are just a little New England town, unremarkable to most, but how can I not find you special? When so many of my memories and so many experiences that shaped me- beautiful, ugly, good, painful- are all wrapped up in you? How can I not love you when every warm, familial memory starts and ends with you? How can I not love you, when you were the place where I learned to love beauty and find wonder in the little things? How can I not?

Yours always,

Lily