Mountainous conception

Part of Avon Mountain, in Connecticut. It’s known for its microclimate.

“The night you were conceived
your father drove up Avon Mountain {near Hartford}
and into the roadside rest
that looked over the little city,
its handful of scattered sparks.’’

— From “Breaking Silence — For My Son,’’ by Patricia Fargnoli (1937-2021), an American poet and psychotherapist. She grew up in Connecticut and later moved to Walpole, N.H. (best known as the home of TV history-documentary maker Ken Burn’s Florentine Films) and on the Connecticut River. She was the New Hampshire Poet Laureate from December 2006 to March 2009.

Walpole’s public library in 1906. The famous and highly literary and reformist Alcott family, connected to the Concord, Mass.-based Transcendentalists, lived there for a time in the 1850s, as have other writers and painters, drawn by the region’s great natural beauty. The abundant lilacs in the town inspired Louisa May Alcott (who wrote Little Women) to write the 1878 book Under the Lilacs.