The Long Light of Those
Days:
Recollections of a Vermont Village at Mid-Century
by Bruce Coffin
(Elm Street Press - 233 pages)
Bruce Coffin has
created a splendid remembrance of his boyhood days in Woodstock,
growing up in a simpler and sweeter time.
"You can go home again, if only
in memory," Bruce assures us in this illuminating record
of growing up in a small Vermont village fifty years ago....
With the remarkable
clarity of Norman Rockwell paintings, the author reveals the
people, sights, sounds, and atmosphere of Woodstock, whose
natural and manmade beauty has made it a memorable landmark.
"I wanted,"
he writes, "to restore the Woodstock I had first known,
where houses were largely homes and not real estate investments,
and where the commercial buildings were places for stores
serving the basic needs of the community and its outlying
farming districts rather than so many feet of retail space
for profiting from the consumer demands of transients and
tourists. I wanted to put it back just the way it had been
before I grew up and went away, before it all changed."
Anyone who has spent
time here will recognize the places and names in the book,
but everyone will appreciate his recreation of the delight
and wonder with which youth view the world and the kind of
memories we all cherish.
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