Photo by Bill Stokes
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, notes that the keeper’s recent wallowing in the environs of the Westfield cabin he owned for the last 40-plus years of the previous century may have put such a memory overload on him as to make him unfit for mixed company. That will be for Phyllis to decide.
A brief visit to the cabin, which is now an AirB&B, with its memories of countless campfires and joyous family gatherings, walking and driving to old haunts like John Lawton’s “Haunted house,” stopping briefly at the Newton Cemetery where the keeper once spent the night after inviting UFO crew members to meet him there, doing bridge checks of the many trout streams with their own sets of memories, noting that the Westfield Firemen’s Chicken Barbeque is coming up, and remembering those with family and Black friend Bob Shephard, stopping to see the expansive wild rice growing near Harrisville, pausing to photograph The School House Tavern with its own outrageous history, and passing by the neighboring farms and houses where old friends have been replaced by strangers.
Finally, then, the keeper asks Phyllis for a little time to reenter the present world: reviewing those 40-plus Westfield cabin years has time-contaminated him with a glorious past that he needs to work through.