49 Sycamore Street

OK—one more sidewalk shot; then we’ll go inside. You can’t really tell, bundled up like this, but Rick’s laughing here, not crying.

So here we are, in the East-Coast version of the real grad-student world, and for the first time in our two-year partnership, we have to get furniture for our living quarters. Stanford and the Sieve and Crockery Jar had taught us a lot about making do with very little. My esteemed Harvard faculty adviser, Fletcher Watson, kindly made sure we knew the whereabouts of the Cambridge Sears, Roebuck (Mass Ave, between Central and Harvard Squares), but we quickly learned that our new student-intensive community could do better for us.

I do truly regret that we took no pictures of the Dover Country Store. Can’t remedy the error, inasmuch as (we’ve been told) it no longer stands. Then and now, though, Dover’s a classy, ancient, southwestern suburb of Boston, with a very strong and carefully-cherished rural flavor. Our new neighbors the Kanes told us that if we showed up at 10 a.m. on Saturday, in time to greet the truck, we’d have a chance to claim serviceable estate furniture at prices even we could afford. Don’t recall what we paid for the green sofa,1 but it can’t have been a whole lot. It went with us to Burlington in 1970, and Valerie says she loved it and recovered it more than once. Nearly half a century later, we and our scattered children still use tables, bureaus, bookcases, and a big armoire that friends helped us truck the fifteen miles or so from Dover. 1Nor, for that matter, have we any idea who owned it before. Probably dead, in any case.

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