From Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography.(book)(Excerpt)

Life at Great Elm

In 1923, after years spent abroad in Mexico and in Europe, my father bought a house, called Great Elm, in Sharon, Connecticut, and moved his family there. I was born in 1925, the sixth child.

OUTDOORS it was very very still, and from our bedroom we could hear the crickets and see the fireflies. I opined to my sister Trish, age 12, that when the wind dies and silence ensues, fireflies acquire a voice, and it is then that they chirp out their joys for the benefit of the nightly company, visible and invisible. "Why do they care if it's quiet outside?"

I informed her solemnly that it was well known to adults that fireflies do not like the wind, as it interferes with their movements. Inasmuch as I was 13 and omniscient, my explanation was accepted.

"I just hope they bite all of them," she said. Her reference was to our five older siblings, whose shouts and yells we could hear through the chorus of crickets. They were still out there at the swimming pool playing games, one whole hour past bedtime for the four of us under 14. I consoled her. I reminded her that I had invited her, not one of them, to crew with me the next day. We would compete on my sailboat at 2 in the afternoon at Lake Wononscopomuc (also known as Lakeville Lake), a milesquare spring-fed crystal-clear lagoon lying five miles north of our home. We raced every Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday, seven hot-blooded contestants of whom I was by far the youngest, and my proclamation of whom I had tapped to crew with me the next racing day was eagerly awaited by qualified supplicants. It gave me great pain that only two of my seniors particularly cared whether they were invited or not. I handled that snub by telling Trish that they were, in fact, not truly qualified to serve.

Summers were seasons of unmitigated pleasure for us, in the late Thirties, in Sharon, a small village that would be designated by the Garden Club of America as the most beautiful town in Connecticut, after Litchfield. My Texan father had brought his brood to rest while he continued a peripatetic life in the years since he left Mexico.

One obsession governed almost all of us: horses and horse shows. There was one of these almost every week, somewhere within forty miles of us. Our groom was fiercely competitive. Whenever we failed to place in a contest, he surmised that skul-duggery was on the throne. Obviously if one of us captured the blue ribbon, it meant that the judges were both honest and acute. If we captured the red ribbon, it meant that they were either honest or acute.