Living in the Past

I worked at the Fitch House at Old Sturbridge Village for a year or so as a part-time job in summers and on weekends.  This was at the same time I started teaching 10 years ago. If you don't know about Sturbridge Village, it's a replica of a village from the 1840s, and all the houses, stores, the church, and even the covered bridge came from old New England towns. The village is about 20 miles from Worcester, and we used to go there on class trips from Northboro during elementary school.  The Bake Shop is my favorite and only memory from those times--it was full of the smell of ginger and molasses, and butter and sugar browning in the oven.

  Lots of people make fun of you when you choose jobs like being an interpreter in a place like that. They say you want to live in the past.  There's a certain truth to that.  I was part of a group of women who cooked over the fireplace all morning, baking cakes and pies, and  even roasting coffee beans which we ground up for coffee break.  The museum visitors traipsed through, watching us sweat over the fire to finally unearth a cake from the tin baker that we placed  in the fireplace. Little kids, and even some adults, thought we slept and lived there year-round.  We dressed in 1840s style, in woolen cloaks and flannel dresses in the winter and light cotton dresses in the summer.  The dresses were a real handicap when it came to the fireplace cooking.  You had to be careful that you didn't catch on fire and create a real treat for the museum patrons.  Sometimes the minister would come to dinner on Sunday, and we had to cook our asses off all morning, roasting lamb or beef.  The interpreters with acting ability would stage the meal in the dining room, Mr. and Mrs. Fitch playing host while the minister droned on, the men all twitching their mustaches and fondling their beards while the women hustled the food to the table.

But it was sort of romantic to work there. I loved it on late November days when the near freezing rain would pour down, no visitors would come, and we'd just build a big fire in the fireplace, as usual, and sit and gab while baking something delicious for ourselves. The men would come in, looking for food after a morning of splitting wood or herding the oxen around.  It was a slowed down kind of job in general.  Even on the busiest days in the summer, when the visitors constantly passed through, we'd sit in the family room at the front of the house and sew.  I was trying to learn to do buttonholes by hand and several stitches that were necessary if I wanted to become an official "mender" for the costume department.  After having spent nearly 10 years at IBM, working my way up the ladder, this was now my only goal.  What a relief.

More than anything, it was the clothes that slowed me down and made me a little more dreamy.  Wearing a little white cap under my bonnet, carrying a hand-woven basket, and hearing my feet ripple my hem as I walked across the common made me more present.