Being An Autobiography:
A Chronicle of My Years in the Southern Maine Town of Kittery; which I grew to like and enjoy very much; A Retrospective Complete
Written by and a Chronicle of: Douglas E. Cate
Today's date: Thursday, May 13, 2010
Chronicling the Years 1985-1998;
Introduction/Preface:
I may live in the rural, tree-studded, hilly community of Eliot now, and I may have been born in Portsmouth-a veritable city; and lived my first two or three years there, but I grew up in and lived in and went to school in Kittery. Kittery-whose boundless wonder still holds an especial place in my heart and thrills me even today. Even though, it has been twelve years since I was last an inhabitant of that glorious, quaint little town. It was and is a town that is like something out of Dickens, King, Twain-Hawthorne even. It has hills and undulant countryside like Eliot does, and it has builtup, sturdy, urban sections like Portsmouth does, so that in a way, it seems to be a convergence of the two communities nearest it; but it is so much more than that-so much better than that. To me, and I hope to all of it's residents, Kittery, in it's generally quaint convergence of rural and urban environments, of city and town, park and parking lot, sidewalk and path, forest and superhighway, ghetto and paradise, Kittery is some sort of apex of the inborn grandness and grandiosity of not only Maine, but America as a whole. It is a crossection, a microcosm of the essential American experience and lifestyle-both good and bad. Melancholy is present there, yes, and trauma and tragedy and stark drama; but there is something better than that and more than that, that exists there; and in my opinion, more good happens there than bad. I was but three or four when I came to live in Kittery. In a neighborhood that was quaint, vibrant, sweet and somehow both crowded and devoid of all life-that, that is where I grew up. In a thin environment, a tiny, raised valley between trees, hills and rising, thalassic waters. It was like an oasis in the midst of a harsh and inhospitable terrain, perched where it was thirty or forty feet above sea level, and our apartment building itself perched higher than that even, as it was at least twenty or thirty feet above streetlevel. Now, in Eliot, my car nestles beneath the gathering leafy canopy of several roadside trees, but in Kittery, any automobiles owned by my family, stood at least forty feet above street level (which again was at least twenty feet above the level of the Piscataqua River, which wound sinuously past our neighborhood and was so close that even from my street-facing bedroom I could have thrown a rock into it-and distinctly heard the plunk!-still, though, those automobiles that sat in the parking space nearest our apartment were unprotected from the sun. Only the shade of the building thrown over them at odd times on sunny days would ever stall the progress of paint fading and interior convection. Not to say that unlike Eliot, there weren't trees, for that would be a gross falsehood-no, there were myriads of different-sized trees in our neighborhood in Kittery, which you might say could be classified as two neighborhoods, perhaps even three or four in one. I mean, there was our apartment building and the area on that side of Bridge Street that was nearest to it, that most immediately confronted it; but there were other little (and big) neighborhoods spread throughout even our entire, larger neighborhood. The environ entire was composed in part of at least five smaller residential zones, but all of those zones had to compete with the forests and the urban areas for space and control. It truly was a quaint meeting of the rural and the urban, jostling, fighting for space; but neither ever giving up even one inch of ground. In a way, that metaphorical battle between them was little more than a constant stalemate-an issue never to be resolved, for neither except perhaps through the guise of natural erosion, would ever dominate more space than the other; unless of course man stepped in, but the war between nature and man was for most of the time that I resided there, a stalemate.
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