New construction from 100 years ago. That's Mrs. Clapp on the left, probably with her father.
Triangle when we knew it
View from the screened-in porch at The Big House
Kit and my mom having a sail in the inlet
My sister, brother and I doing time on the raft
On a drive back from Falmouth recently, I detoured for a coffee mini-eclair from French Memories Bakery, but really to check in, as Duxbury has been one of my life’s constants. We first met when my siblings and I were little kids, living in Bronxville, NY. Our neighbors were descendants of Mayflower people, and they and their extended family owned land with summer houses on Abrams Hill. The sister we knew, we called her Mrs. Clapp because she was old and wrinkly and smelled like licorice, had added a house in the 1920s, right on the water, which, from a bird’s eye view, formed a Triangle with the other two, thus its name.
Purchased from a Sears catalog as a kit with assembly instructions; the cabin was guaranteed to last for 20 years and had two bedrooms, a living/dining room with a fireplace and mantle, kitchen and bath with running water, operational windows. I’m not sure there were holes in the walls when we started going as kids, but certainly as we got into our thirties, it had become a welcoming place for bugs and critters. As adults, we had a family member who one could say was on the cleaner side, who didn’t react well after the oven she'd preheated gave off the pungent smell of rodent urine.
But Triangle was good to us and within our family’s three generations, we have a much treasured shared history. As my brother said the other day, “We squeezed a whole lot outa that little old shack!” A significant part of my memories involve Kit, Mrs. Clapp’s spinster daughter, who ruled the roost at the top of the hill into her early nineties. A condition of staying at Triangle as adults was the spring/fall ritual of putting up and taking down the screens at The Big House, where Kit lived. She’d had them made to fit into her porch in the summer in order to enjoy the view of the marshes and long stretch of beach, bug free. Kit was great with her hands and would get frustrated by our lack of coordination and pride in our work. She’d stand over us, not shy about letting us know when we weren’t using the finesse needed to place the screen with 20 years of paint into a space that also had 20 years of paint. But I loved her stories of being a WAVE in WW2, or a professional working for the Carnegie Foundation, and delighted when she'd meet me for lunch at the MFA. So, like a body that loses a soul when the person dies, Triangle died for me when she did, and I never returned to stay, as my siblings did.
Kit’s niece inherited both houses, selling them soon after, and with some regularity, because by then my mom was at a retirement home nearby, I’d stop by to see if anything had changed. It was not surprising to first see all the wild pink climbing roses, snowdrops and daffodils, all manner of flowering bushes gone, then later, the rickety old cabin itself, causing a mourning of all those physical things that tied childhood to adolescence to adulthood - the medicine ball (a pillow filled with horsehair that weighed 10 pounds), the teapot with pastel flowers on it, the potato chip chair, the apple cookie jar, the green glass depression era plates, the longhorns over the fireplace. Because of the cabin’s situation, it was only a matter of time before a monster house went up, as had already happened all over that hill. So it was with relief that the other day I saw something modest replacing it, respectful of the land surrounding it, and ready to begin creating a new trunk of memories for some lucky people. If it weren’t for global warming, I might be trolling zillow for it now.
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