My husband taught middle school his whole career. His educational theory, one of his many educational theories, was that to really learn something you have to hear it 10 times. It’s a theory he still puts in practice; his sons, his daughters-in-law, his grandchildren — and certainly his wife — can attest to that.

Thanks to all the carefully archived stories, snippets of stories, and embellished stories (oh yes, he does that, too) driving into Augusta for the Women’s March on Saturday was a trip down the bumpy road of my husband’s memory. We were sharing the one pink pussy hat I’d concocted out of random yarns and, after weeks of illness and inactivity, we were both ready for an adventure. The internet and cable news pretty well covered every detail of the rally and marches, both in Maine and around the world, so I’ll just skip to his hometown.

I’ve been going to Augusta for nearly 50 years, starting with Mother’s Day in 1968 when we delivered a present and card to his mother on Weston Street. I didn’t meet her that day, instead staying in the car while he knocked on her door and handed in his gift. For reasons of her own and which her son never could figure out, his mother was never satisfied for long. Every couple of years, it seems, they were moving.

But in the years since, his whole childhood, as it was lived out on those streets, has become like my own. I know where Smith School was, Farrington School where his brother was principal and a stepfather was crossing guard, Buker School, and of course, Cony High School where he graduated in 1957.

I know that the U-Haul place on Western Avenue was once an A & P where my husband worked all through high school. I know that the walking path between Augusta and Gardiner is the rail bed for the train that he took, at age 17, to join the Air Force. When he returned home four years later the train was gone.

The drive from home took us past Togus (drumroll under our breath in honor of the little cottage at the entrance where his life began) and over the Kennebec Bridge (did he really clamber, at age 12, over the girders of the half-completed bridge on a dare?), thronged with sign-carrying marchers intent on the Capitol. Past a modern building (a bank? offices?) that is built on the bones of the old Augusta House, the hotel that catered to legislators in town for the session, droves of middle aged men from Maine’s small towns cut loose in the big city. If those walls could have talked before they were demolished. Next it took us past the Blaine House where Gov. Edmund Muskie casually chatted over the fence with the neighborhood children.

One of the things that infirmity brings on a couple can be a switch in drivers. In our case he always drove everywhere. Now I’m at the wheel, and we’re both enjoying it. I get to decide the route, and he gets to look out the window. As I took us around the streets he grew up on last Saturday, thanks to that educational theory of his — “tell it 10 times” — we were practically in unison telling each other the stories. Leaving the rally we skirted Capitol Park and on past the Augusta Police Station, once home to the Naval Reserve unit he joined at age 16. For some reason he always has to recite his service number (come on, I could bring up my high school locker combination if this was a competition). The road turns here and heads upriver, passing close by the Charles Street intersection where on a long-ago cold winter morning two children sledding down their street were hit by an oil truck and killed. Wally, skating on Haynes Pond, heard the ambulance’s wail.

Now the road is called Gage Street, and where it dips a bit — known as Bedbug Hollow back in the day — a vacant lot on the left marks Aunt Annie and Uncle Elmo’s homestead, a two-flat where we brought our little boys to visit their great aunt and uncle. Across the road a long-gone shoe shop once stood. Elmo, a carpenter by trade, was a fisherman by inclination and kept a homemade boat in every pond for miles around. It was also Uncle Elmo who thought the devil was visiting him one night when his bearded young nephew, fresh out of college, knocked on his door; perhaps it was the drink. I must admit, Wally did look a bit devilish with that beard.

We take a left where Gage joins the road across the bridge and there’s Penny Memorial Baptist; my mother-in-law changed religions nearly as often as she moved, but this old Baptist church was a steadfast anchor for her son through his young teen years. And next door to it is one of the many places in this general neighborhood where he lived out his boyhood.

We continue ambling along the streets, me at the wheel, deciding where to go next. Bridge Street is a favorite, and we call out the places almost in unison, almost as if I grew up there too. For instance, a rackety vacant building on the corner of State and Bridge was the old fire station before it became Pomerleau’s Furniture on its way to abandonment. And right next door was the house, now gone, where Wally’s purported father lived; he’d moved in with his sisters, his Irish sisters, after divorcing his wife and brought along two or three of their children, Wally’s siblings. Though the house is gone, I feel as if I too had visited the closet that held the toilet with the pull chain and the single bare light bulb overhead. Bridge Street had a tough reputation where local men would pay boys to fight in the street for their amusement. One of our sons and his wife-to-be had a brief panicky moment when they realized that her grandfather had a connection to Bridge Street and even spoke of what a ‘looker’ Wally’s oldest sister was. Would they turn out to be related?

Wally and his mother lived at the top of Bridge Street for a time, and it’s always a must stop on the tour, as we recount for each other the day he found a hidden door in the closet in his room that led to his sister’s room. “Part of the Underground Railroad,” he surmises today, for yes, the, mmmm, twentieth time. Nearby, steep North Street led up to the Poor Farm, he reminds me. I didn’t need reminding though, about how the children tied their sleds to the runners of the Poor Farm sleigh so it could pull them to the top and thence to slide back down.

Finally, we’ve killed enough time between our stop at the rally and our lunch date with his sister, so we head out Western Avenue to KFC for the chicken we’d promised to bring. Naturally, that takes us by Haynes Pond, home to horned pout and frogs until it was drained, filled in, and done away with to become the site of the “new” post office.  Wally’s never stopped mourning it.

And though I grew up in a very different community — an old “planned” suburban village on the shores of Lake Michigan, one designed to be a commuter town — I have some history with Augusta prior to meeting my husband.

While I was a student at Colby in the 1960s, a friend suggested late one night that we go down from Waterville and see the mill where his father was a foreman on the night shift. The Bates mill sat on the bank of the Kennebec, between downtown Augusta and Sand Hill, the French Canadian quarter.

I remember a huge brick building that literally vibrated from top to bottom as dozens of power looms beat out the cloth that would be fulled and teased into cotton flannel. One figure stands out in my memory: a young, obviously pregnant girl stood by a spinning mule, a long machine with dozens? a hundred? spindles whirling at once, twisting cotton fiber into thread. In the middle of the night, a hot night I think, this girl was tiredly tending the spinning threads, moving heavily from one spindle to another to mend the ones that broke. The noise, to say nothing of the cotton dust, would be enough to drive me crazy, I thought, and then, how was it that I was a college student and this girl was standing all night in front of this infernal machine?

There were a couple of other excursions down to Augusta, to the home of my friend, Jerry. Memory is such an elusive thing; his house, with the Capitol dome looming nearby, was warm and welcoming, lots of sisters I think, and parents glad to see us.  On another visit they’d moved, out into the country and called their place Axis Mundi, Center of the World. Jerry’s father, a lineman for the electric company, repaired violins as a sideline. He showed me how after he removed the back of an instrument to work on it, he wrote his name and the date inside, as did every other person who’d every worked on that violin. Years later the family’s “new”country house was marooned atop the hill that overlooked the Denny’s diner restaurant, surrounded by the enormous retail development that engulfed the area. The house appeared empty, but the mailbox down on the road still read “Axis Mundi”.

Augusta is typical of so many towns: its main street, Water Street, has been abandoned for the glitz and glamor and parking spaces of the shopping centers. First came Western Avenue, even in my memory it ended in rural spaces. Then, starting in the 60s I’m guessing, fast food restaurants, strip malls and super markets sprang up, one after another ending with a big Sears out by the 95 highway. I imagine for every new store out on Western Avenue a Water Street shop closed. Next came the Marketplace out on Civic Center Drive – Axis Mundi’s front and back yard: clothing stores, sporting goods, jewelers, nail salons, stationers, shoe shores, party stores, Walmart, Home Depot. Cell phone stores, a candle store, tires, hair salons, and our personal favorite, Olive Garden.

Today Water Street is a wasteland. Store fronts are empty shells for the most part, often elegantly detailed buildings that once housed, for instance, the dress shop where 14-year-old Wally had a job sweeping and cleaning up. Or the bakery where my brother-in-law picked up his Saturday night beans and biscuits. My mother-in-law’s favorite jewelry store. I’ve never walked it, been depressed enough driving down it, imagining the shops and small businesses that once lined the street. Maybe it’s just the nostalgia that’s affecting me, nostalgia for the kind of intimacy a walk-able downtown encouraged. And I should know better.

Haven’t we just traded one kind of prosperity for another? Retail shopping appears to be booming in Augusta, just not on Water Street where you can get a tattoo, but not much else. Was it the mills, the missing mills President Trump was referring to as “carnage” in his inaugural address? Shoe shops, the big Bates cotton mill, the paper mill – they’re all gone. John O’Brien came home from WWI, missing part of a lung from the gas, and still could make a living for his family in the paper mill. Those mills were already dying the night I had my own brief glimpse of those times.

Needleworkers gather for their bi monthly meeting, Tuesday, Jan. 24, 4-6 p.m. Bring your project – all are welcome – and enjoy seeing what everyone is working on.

The book group has picked the next two books to read and discuss.The pick for the February 28 meeting is “Lab Girl,” a memoir by scientist Hope Jahren . 

 Then in March the group picked “A Man Called Ove”, a novel by Fredrik Backman . Both of these books have gotten great reviews and been recent New York Times bestsellers. All are welcome to join the book group to discuss them.

Card-making Classes

Too late for inclusion in last week’s column about animal sightings I remembered the day 90-plus-year-old Bessie Dean strode across the field by her house near Dead Man’s Curve to show me a dead coyote that had apparently been hit on the road. I could hardly keep up with her and realized she must have actually used the exercise bike she kept in her living room!

Edna Pendleton reported “a huge flock, 50-plu bohemian and cedar waxwings [were] hanging out in our big oak tree out back. Next thing we know they all flew to the crabapple tree on the front lawn and feasted on the berries!! What a sight! I’ve never seen so many at once.” Could have been the same flock Norm Walters caught with his camera a couple of weeks ago.

Gina Sawyer, living at Nortons Pond near Breezemere, reports four bluebirds hanging around her place.

And I came nearly beak to beak with a huge raven perched atop the 12-foot stub of an old dead maple at the corner of Tanglewood and Ducktrap roads. He was all hunched and fluffed up, maybe asleep, when I noticed him. Unfortunately he took on look at Fritz, our big white retriever, and took off, big, lazy wing beats sounding “whoosh whoosh” as he flew to a more protected perch.