A Blog of Personal Thoughts

When My Parents Moved

August 2026

I was 10 when my parents decided to move again, the seventh time in my 10 years. This time it was back to New York City from a small town in Maine. I thought that was a terrible idea and told them so. I told them I could live with Mary Jo and her family. Their answer was no. I told them I could live with Aunt Mary and Uncle Henry on their farm in Pennsylvania. Their answer was no. I was going to move with them.

I liked the idea of staying in Orono, Maine, a town on 2,000 with plenty of fields, the river running between the university and the town. I liked sledding down the hill opposite Mary Jo’s house. I liked walking up to the university pond to ice skate. I liked the idea of living on a farm in Downingtown, PA with Uncle Henry and Aunt Mary Downing.Yes, the town was named after one of Uncle Henry’s ancestors. I could learn to milk cows, hang out in the barn with the calves, walk the quarter-mile lane to the road to catch the school bus. I could wander in the Brandywine Creek on autumn and spring days. Anything but the constant drone of New York City with sirens, garbage trucks, honking horns, and people. I didn’t like the City and I knew it.

I went with them. Once there, I longed for the silence of our home in Framingham Centre, Massachusetts. This was the house we always had, the house that was home no matter how many times we moved. I longed for the tops of the trees, bicycle rides, walks down the hill to the railroad tracks or to the shops in the Centre. I longed for the pond in Orono or the creek that ran through Uncle Henry’s farm. One of my ancestors, John Steele, was wounded at the Battle of the Brandywine, Pennsylvania, and lost the use of an arm. He was a colonel and an aide de camp for Gen. Washington. Washington also invited Steele to his presidential inauguration. My mother’s first colonial ancestor, Marie Ferrée arrived in Lancaster County in 1640. I’ll save al that for another blog.

We lived in Greenwich Village for seven years. I never learned to like it. On one of my first days there, I walked across the street to Washington Square Park to climb a tree. A policemen came along and told me to get out of the tree. I told him I was an excellent tree climber and would not damage the tree. Tree climbing was against the law and he insisted I get down. This city was no fun. I developed good friendships with many at Grace Church School and then Friends Seminary. Most of them lived in the Village and it was easy to get together. These many decades later, we are still friends calling, texting, getting together in various parts of the country in pairs or groups.

On weekends I went to museums, most often the Metropolitan or the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Those became my fields. People didn’t go to museums much in the 1950s. I could spend a day at the Metropolitan and see perhaps a dozen people, usually just the guards. I could stand an inch from a painting to look at the brush strokes that made the ice. I could feel the cold as I stood an inch away from this enormous painting.

Washington Crossing the Delaware. One of my ancestors watched the crossing from the riverbank.

Coming around a particular corner, I saw Christ with his crown of thorns, a small painting, 16 by 12 inches. Every weekend for about 20 minutes I stared at the ecstasy and tragedy in his eyes.

At MoMA, my favorites were the Monet water lily paintings. The center panel of the triptych was about 20 feet long and 9 feet tall. The two slightly less long side triptychs were at a gentle angle to the center painting. When I was a junior at Friends Seminary, there was a fire in the museum. Firefighters had to hack through the large center panel, destroying it, to save more paintings in the museum. That morning I’d gotten up before my friends arrived on the way to school. I share the poem I wrote about my life in New York museums.

The Met & MoMA

Sad, she says, you have no fields where imagination flows across
blades of wheat or reeds no fields of grass insects or flowers
only walls of Manhattan’s Met or MoMA—Rembrandt Picasso Da Vinci 

Odd, I think, seeing Jesus with his crown of thorns that pricked his forehead, ears, 
dug through his hair. Why such cruelty? Why such joy in his face?

Sandwich for lunch in pocket, galleries empty but for guards and teenage girl 
studying her way through Sergeant’s portrait of Madame X, the Phelps Stokes, 
lady in a white dress, or the massive Washington Crossing the Delaware

I see brush strokes feel breath on canvas, back away to
see the whole painting, feel the cold against skin course down the wool coat, eye icy bits,  

hear chop of water as numbed hands pull hard on oar. Feel country’s beginnings
ancestor who eyed men cross the Delaware that Christmas night.
Wander saints’ galleries, Virgin Marys, archangels, and Lucifer descending 

Stare at bare branches, spring buds, then green leaves that surround this sacred place.
Smell water lily in the blur of brush stroke lifts to afternoon silence of garden’s pond.

I touch friendship in a bronze sine wave of sculpted people holding hands,
peace offering to Korea, McCarthy, Sputnik, Cold War, Khrushchev, Kennedy, Castro 
beneath flowering trees in a garden along 54th Street where a

triptych of water lilies surrounds me till Wednesday’s Times said MoMA burned and firefighters hacked through a twenty-foot panel of peace that wrapped my life.

I wept.