Bruce Coffin’s beautifully written account of growing up in Woodstock, Vermont, in the 1940-50s has become a New England classic. The details of life in a typical Vermont village — the work places and stores, the sports and pastimes, the landscape, and, most of all the people — are affectionately recalled in a feat of memory and imagination. In these unexpected details the essence of a complex, microcosmic world is recaptured and brought back to life.
"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, Bruce reveals the people, sights, sounds, and atmosphere of Woodstock, whose natural and man made 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."
This book brings a village to life in such a way that we feel our own histories in his stories and descriptions of the people, bicycles, stores, ball games, homes, and mountains and woods of Woodstock.
Bruce has an eye for exalted moments and an ear for the language in which those moments live again. He's created a splendid remembrance of his boyhood days in Woodstock, growing up in a simpler and sweeter time.
