Todd Nelson, The Grindle House and me
We knew it as The Nelson house.
From January 1988, when my parents bought the house between the Abbott School and the Unitarian Universalist church from Gunilla Foster Kettis, until June of 2008, when we sold it to the Historical Society, it was where we spent summers; where my father and then both parents lived briefly in the early 1990s; where Lesley and I and our three kids moved to start our Maine lives in 1998, the year after my father died; where my mother lived from 2000 until 2008. Our former bedrooms are now administrative offices, but the feel of the old house persists, and memories swirl.
No longer our possession, the house lives on for me between the lines in many of my essays—the feelings of living in it year-round, of the village life that surrounds it, of the subsequent Nelson experiences inaugurated in a particular time and place and dwelling. It was the house we could land in that made a move from Chicago even possible, if adventurous; that gave us a sense of belonging. The Grindle house brought us here.
It had creaky, uneven, paint-spattered floors, a damp, fieldstone basement with a well in it, a fireplace in each room, a leaning barn, tin ceilings, and a room for every family member. The most solid thing about it was the staircase and second floor landing. I remember my father saying that he fell in love with the house when he entered the front door and looked up those stairs for the first time. I can still imagine the afternoon light streaming through those front windows, and the way the sun transited the façade, filtered by the big elm out front.
When my parents, Rob and Darren Nelson, came to Castine for a weekend visit in 1987, they called me up to say they had seen a house for sale, thinking it would be a potential summer place for the family. I told them it was way too far to drive from our home in Watertown and that we’d probably never go there. I was being so practical, being the father of two little kids, with another on the way, and about to move from one handyman special to another. And now Castine is the place we’ve lived the longest. Though my Maine ancestors, the Colbys, Holdens, and Churchills of Moose River, are uplanders, I’m fond of seeing our life here as an arc returning us to the family headwaters: Maine. We had been away for four generations. Now we were back. Close enough to the precise terroire. The Grindle house became an emotional and experiential epicenter of our family. It is where my kids feel from. Memories persist, triggered by a certain slant of light or flooring, or sound, or mood, and the Grindle house was the soul.
And many, many people in town also have memories of living there. Joey Macomber set fire to the wreath over the mantle in the el one Christmas. The charred pine wall boards persist. Susie Reed, whose family once owned it, mentioned her father setting a candle on a stool just below the one thermostat to control the furnace. It was costly to heat. The Paul Fallow family rented it from us when they came to Castine. Caroline Livermore too. Jackie and Gerry Bryan rented it one winter when they were building their house in Brooksville. I imagine it was a boarding house as well, given the various locks on doors. There have been “modernizations” and additions that the Grindles would not have imagined. I wish we still had the long, deep bathtub from the second floor. Every owner references a unique floorplan.
My brother, Derek, and his wife, Emma, spent the first Nelson summer there, 1988. It was their honeymoon and Derek painted the house; Emma worked at The Water Witch on Main Street. By the next summer, we started coming. Ariel was a year old; Spencer and Hilary, were 6 and 4, respectively. For them, the summer consisted of lapping the Civil War statue, taking walks to the dock three times a day, beachcombing for sea glass and china on the yacht club beach, picking blueberries. The kids loved traipsing into Witherle Library for their summer reading, to be greeted by Liddy Fitz-Gerald and Pat Fowler. I can see the old curved counter and screen door and the cool stone floor on bare feet.
When we first owned the house, there was a leaning yellow barn with a gambrel roof and it was beguiling. The floor boards were hoof-worn; there was a hay loft, and a lower level for manure carting. It had been a livery stable at one point in the past, when School street had a different route past the house, and it still had an old safe in it—a tempting project one summer. We had high hopes of stashed treasure. The combination was lost to the ages. Alas, after many hours drilling and prying and hammering the door yielded and we found it full of….nothing. Antique air.
My father had the barn demolished, before it collapsed, then built a simpler garage. There’s a great photo of five local men standing around the demolition scene, peering into the debris as the excavator crushed and buried it. Dad also gave up on keeping paint on the exterior and opted for vinyl siding, later photographed as an example of what not to do in the Castine historic preservation manual.
Living adjacent to the Town Common, one of the chambers of the town heartbeat, was a treat. Our Castine summers turned into essays: beachcombing, blueberry picking, fishing for mackerel on the dock, selling quartz pebbles rather than the proverbial lemonade stands. The kids loved the July 4th parade. I once played my bagpipes to lead it down Court Street, and back. We were not golfers, nor sailors—unlikely typical summer folk. We were gleaners, beachcombers, walkers, and watchers. One summer, we followed the rebuilding of the steeple on the Unitarian Church, hoisted to the ground and then returned into place with a crane. Years later, when I was principal of The Adams School, we watched the same thing happen to the cupola on the Abbott School. On Sundays, we listened to the church service next door. Larry Redman trapped skunks under the parish hall. Ariel and Hilary walked over to school. Band concerts and festivities were our front yard. I took it upon myself to install bird and owl houses in the forest “island” in the golf course. Kenny Eaton dropped by one evening with his metal detector to scan the yard. Elms expired, sadly; the laughter of the playground permeated lunch time; our big dog, Gus, stole kick balls and we replaced them. There is a tidal ebb and flow to life on the common.
We hung our hammock between the house and the massive elm on the southeast corner of the house, easily one of the oldest trees in Castine. A raccoon family lived in its cleft trunk. It was like having an Ent looking in the second story windows and shading the front porch. When it had to be cut down due to Dutch Elm disease, I saved a “cookie” from its trunk. You can see it bolted to the back wall of the timber frame cabin classroom behind the Adams School. It’s there for posterity.
—Todd R. Nelson