I spent the first 20 years of my life in Springfield, Massachusetts, a once prosperous industrial city in the Connecticut River Valley that began its long economic decline during my childhood. Called Tobacco Valley, it is the most fertile on the East Coast, and a few long woodeb tobacco leaf drying sheds can still be found south of the city.
I went to the same Catholic primary school as my parents and brothers, but my generation of cousins scattered across the country. Although I half-heartedly played all the organized sports my dad coached, like my brothers, I felt most myself on my bicycle, depriving myself of the daily evening newspaper.
My maternal uncles built a cabin on a lake in the Berkshires, and I built a small backyard shed for myself with some of their left-over wood. It soon sported an adjacent kitchen garden. My uncle’s worked for the game company Milton Bradley, and my first summer architectural internship was assisting in the survey and drawings of the old downtown factory for the company after they moved production to the suburbs.
The interstate highway cleared most of the old river and rail side factories downtown, and erased my fathers childhood home in the North End. The city’s slow decline accelerated when I moved away, but I came to reappreciate my home town at the end of my parent’s life during my frequent visits back home.
But the side had reversed itself in my absence. Even though I returned to the same house I gre up in, instead of shopping, going to the doctor or seeing a movie downtown, my parents now drove to suburban strips and malls.i made a game of searching the area for old mill towns between the dam and canals of Holyoke and the canal and licks of Windsor, Connecticut.
When we sold the house I stayed at Motel 6 next to a strip mall, but found an old stream in the back, where the storm water from the parking lots drained. I followed the stream to an old carpet mill converted to housing where it emptied into the wide Connecticut.
My life has come full circle I. That I now live in a cabin in the Hudson Highlands and also have a home along a small river in the agricultural valley of China Mai, Thailand. There the streams have weirs and canals that feed rice paddies twice a year, as I traveled between parking lots and rice paddies.