On a high summer’s day, I visited the Robert Frost Stone House Museum in Shaftsbury, Vermont.
This historic homestead is where Frost lived — and wrote — from 1920 to 1929. His poems penned here include “Nothing Gold Can Stay” and “Fire and Ice” and, in 1923, his first of four Pulitzer Prize-winning volumes, “New Hampshire.”
Serendipity smiled at me, and widely, when I mentioned to the docent, a friendly college-aged woman, that I had long ago been inspired to become a writer in no small measure by a university class focused fully on Mr. Frost. After I finished perusing the modest home-turned-museum, the docent presented me a surprise: a small treasure trove of artifacts, not kept on public display, she had retrieved from locked safekeeping.
With her blessing I had the uncommon privilege of handling, carefully and with breath-held awe, a rare volume of “The Cow’s In The Corn: A One-Act Irish Play In Rhyme.” Thin as a thick pamphlet, with pages weathered at the edges, its age-worn hardcover features a geometric print of orange, yellow, and black squares and circles, sans any printed text of title or author.
As commonly advised, do not judge a book its cover. Inside, it is hand-numbered “66” out of only “ninety-one copies” and bears the poet’s signature, crisp and legible and flowing in dark pencil that remains unfaded.
Frost possessed a typewriter, naturally, but rarely used it other than to teach his children to type. He preferred to write by hand, in pencil, and so a one-page manuscript draft at the Stone House was magical to behold — in my mind’s eye I could see him writing and revising, crossing out and inserting, thinking anew and polishing.
Enchanting as this was, equally so was simply gazing out the dining room window and imagining my poet hero composing one of his best-known works, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Surprisingly, Frost wrote this gem not on a vapor-breath snowy evening, but rather here on his dining table in the gleaming morning, chronicled as being a warm day in June 1922 — quite similar, very likely, to the sunny pre-noon hour of my wife Lisa’s and my August visit.
Something gold that will also stay in my memories happened as we were leaving. A quarter mile down the driveway, past a barn dating back to Frost’s time, near the homestead’s connection to Vermont Route 7A, a rural two-lane road, I spotted a simple black-and-white sign bolted to a weathered wooden post: Welcome To The Robert Frost Trail.
The signage was easy to miss; indeed, we had not seen it when driving in; and its location echoed Frost’s most famous poem, “A Road Not Taken.” Instead of two roads diverging, the gravel driveway and a freshly mowed trail — “Because it was grassy and wanted wear” one stanza states — parted.
Despite having gone for a long run at daybreak, I decided to give this grassy path some wear and went for a short impromptu jiggy-jog before we got back on the road driving.
The Robert Frost Trail passes through remnants of his old apple orchards and stands of red pines. As I traveled it, another line from “The Road Not Taken” resonated poignantly with me and still does today: “I doubted if I should ever come back.”
Though I doubt I will ever make it back to the Robert Frost Stone House, I remain grateful to have visited — and run where its namesake enjoyed taking long walks.
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.
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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.