Steven Sternbach, Holland Dell, Heath, MA*
One of our most memorable Thanksgiving dinners took place over a decade ago in New York’s Essex Hotel on Central Park South, where we were guests of our Manhattan relatives. But through the decades “Over the River and Through the Woods” has conditioned most of us to think of a country Thanksgiving as the ideal. That song, with words by abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, references the author’s early 19th century childhood in Medford, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb and home to Tufts University. The river in question is the Mystic, of book and movie fame. (The first line of the poem is actually "Over the river and through the wood"--no 's'--but most of us sang "woods.")
Just as the struggle for Civil Rights in the 1960’s ushered in a host of liberation movements, the ferment over slavery gave rise to wide-ranging liberal views among reformers, who embraced feminism, environmentalism, vegetarianism, as well as educational and religious reform. The first female American author to support herself by writing, Maria Child, as she preferred to be called, went beyond passionately advocating for the abolition of slavery, to calling for a just nation which respected Native American rights and condoned interracial marriage. Who knew?
Child’s original words to “Over the River,” have the children going to “Grandfather’s house,” whereas Steve and I are quite sure we learned it as “Grandmother’s house.” Why the shift? In the mid-20th century, it seems we referenced everything old-fashioned as belonging to “grandma.” The John Lennon wire-rimmed glasses, first popularized by the film Dr. Zhivago, were “granny glasses,” and the long, colorful skirts we wore as an alternative to the mini-skirt were “granny dresses.” Somewhere along the line, grandpa dropped out of consciousness, perhaps because at mid-century grandmas were in far greater abundance than grandpas. We were well into an era, unknown to Child, in which women lived considerably longer than men, and men had shorter lives than they do today. Neither Steve nor I, for example, knew any of our four grandfathers, whereas all of our grandmothers survived to see us born, and three of them lived long enough to have influenced our lives.
Since purchasing Mill Brook House, our every Thanksgiving is a country Thanksgiving, and, although we have no grandchildren to join us, we sometimes host members of Steve’s extended family. Once an 11-year-old third cousin complained, “This house is stuck in the 19…”--we waited for him to say “19th century,” but instead heard “1960’s!” We laughed, not because there were no microwaves, VCRs, DVDs, or even reliable color televisions in the 1960’s--all of which exist at Mill Brook House--but because it had never occurred to us that the 1960’s were something to be stuck in. But then Maria Child’s own progressive era was refashioned with the notion of quaintness, and her sentimental poem about Thanksgiving near the Mystic River became her best remembered legacy.
*Large format C-prints of this photograph are available from Steven Sternbach; please contact [email protected].