Post by Grubb
I don’t know if Robert Frost and Shirley Jackson ever sat down together and knocked back a few glasses of cider, but the places they resided into do their writing weren’t far from each other in the Bennington area of Vermont. So on our way to Providence on Sunday we stopped to see where the folksy poet and the queen of the dark summoned the muses. Frost’s Stonehouse has been preserved as an historic monument.
When we pulled into the parking lot it was empty. The Stonehouse wasn’t open to the public until ten and it was nine-thirty. Then a woman drove up in another car and invited us to look around. She pointed to a small red building near the barn and said she was setting up for a class in basketry.
She then opened the door to the Stonehouse and let us do our own self-tour. Inside, it wasn’t much larger than the Ethan Allen homestead. Like Ethan’s pad, prominence was given to the fireplace. Ah, the world before mini-splits!
With Frost’s Stonehouse behind us, we located the different houses that Jackson had lived in. She had been married to a professor at the college, so her homes were in town. I always relished the story, apocryphal or not, that she thought of story to “The Lottery” while pushing her child down the street in a pram after doing some shopping.
The house where she wrote “The Lottery.”
Where she may have written “The Haunting of Hill House.”
It’s a quiet New England neighborhood, but thanks to Shirley, it seemed spooky to me.
