I’m quiet here. From inside to out. Pittsburg is a place you feel in the deepest part of you. There’s a richness to the air here, a deeper breath, and a grateful exhale. I am surprised by the slowing of me. The softening of me. Internally, there’s an easing of some sort. I feel the taut places in me go slack. I stretch my arms wide and high overhead … I reach, breathe, gather, pray. Here, I am a verb of being.
Good morning from Pittsburg, New Hampshire.
Given its 291 square miles in area, Pittsburg tops the list of incorporated New England towns as the largest. The town’s also tucked in at just about the 45th parallel — the most northern town in New Hampshire — bordering not only Canada, but Maine to the east and Vermont to the west. The longest river in New England, the Connecticut River, begins its 410 mile journey toward the Long Island Sound at Fourth Connecticut Lake in Pittsburg, a literal stone’s throw from the province of Quebec, Canada.
If you’re in need of a little soul-searching, I’d start here.
Away from home and out of the regular life loop, Pittsburg transforms me. I am different here from there. I think it’s important to notice what a place offers in these moments of the experience, but also what it has to teach me. Who am I here and can I take her home with me?
In Pittsburg I find a rare kind of hope – wild, wide-open, and free. There’s hope in the tremolo of a loon and the unexpected flash of white across the broad chest of a deer. I measure time by the movement of clouds and the flow of water. Even the scolding of a red squirrel stills my soul somehow – or maybe it’s me, myself, still enough to hear it at all. Though we hardly ever meet, moose, bear, fox and I walk the same trails and it seems certain we’ll all find our way bettered from just venturing out in the first place.
Jessie Lincoln Beckwith Johnson Randolph loved her mother.
Maybe Jessie wanted her mother to have a garden as majestic as her new home. Maybe she wanted to remind her mother of the years she lived in Europe. Maybe Mary Harlan Lincoln, daughter-in-law of Abraham, was a woman who had everything … except for a formal, parterre garden.
Or maybe, just maybe, Jessie wanted to gift a garden that would bloom and bloom her love forever and ever.
A garden like this one doesn’t happen by accident and deserves an inspirational setting in which to take root. This mother-daughter garden grows at Hildene, ancestral home of Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln, in Manchester, VT.
It’s said Mary Harlan Lincoln could see the whole expanse of her garden blooming before her as she stood at her second floor, center bedroom window. Now known as the Hoyt formal garden, I prefer to think of it as Mrs. Lincoln’s garden. Stunning from any view, the garden is most beautiful, perhaps, from that second floor – planned as it was to resemble a cathedral stained glass window. 
Hildene, a beautiful 24 -room Georgian Revival style manion, is but one generation away from the single-room log cabin Abraham Lincoln was born in. Tucked into the beautiful Vermont green mountains, visitors can walk, self-guided, through most of the home with many of its original furnishings and features, including family artifacts and a historical timeline perspective of President Lincoln’s life and death.
It’s the garden, though, which captured my heart. I’d love to take tea with Mrs. Lincoln out on the porchswing in the early warmth of mid-June. We’d swing, and sip, and marvel at mountains and the never-ending beauty of Vermont.
And the sweet scent of a thousand peony blossoms would remind us both of the ever-blooming love between a mother and her child.
Nothing unfurrows my brow like a few days in Vermont.
We visit as often as we can.
Right about now the meadows fill to overflowing with daisies, black-eyed Susans, buttercups, and Indian paintbrush.
There’s a farm ’round every bend in the road and pastures full of horses, cows, and sheep.
Maybe there’s some sort of simplicity to be found here, a respite from other, more common complications and worries.
When I’m in Vermont I feel like my most true self. And something I can’t quite explain happens to me every single time I cross the border.
Vermont, I love you and I know you love me right back.
Peace. Love. Vermont.
one hopeful year 