Why I Wrote a Book About Growing Up in New Hampshire
There are places my children will remember that will never appear on a map: the stretch of road where we slow down because deer cross at dusk, the muddy edge of the driveway every April, the dock where someone always leaves a wet towel, the hill behind the house that becomes a sledding hill as soon as there is enough snow. None of these places is remarkable, but I suspect they will be some of the places that last.
I have spent most of my life in New England, and I’m raising my three children in New Hampshire. As they’ve gotten older, I’ve started noticing how much of their childhood is tied to where we live. We tend to mark childhood by the big things—birthdays, first days of school, vacations, holidays—but when I think about my own childhood, much of what remains is smaller and more repetitive. The same trees changing outside the window. The first cold morning when nobody can find their gloves. Frogs returning in spring. Gravel under bicycle tires. Damp bathing suits over the porch railing. Cornfields in September. The porch light coming on earlier each night until suddenly it’s winter.
Those were the things I wanted to write down.
I’m a poet, so poems were the natural place to put them, but I didn’t want Home Is Here to be a collection of poems about childhood written for adults. I wanted children themselves to be able to enter it, and that led me to nursery rhymes. Children understand rhythm long before they know what a poem is. They understand repetition and anticipation, and they know the pleasure of recognizing a line and shouting the word that comes next. Nursery rhymes are meant to be said aloud and repeated until eventually nobody needs the book anymore.
I loved the idea of that happening with these poems. I wanted to write something a parent might read so many times at bedtime that a child starts finishing the lines, or that a teacher might pull out when the first snow falls. Maybe the book sits on a grandparent’s shelf and becomes familiar simply because it has always been there.
The book eventually arranged itself around the four seasons, which makes sense if you live here. Spring is silver buckets on maple trees and puddles deep enough to require an immediate change of socks, mud tracked across the floor, and the sudden return of frogs after months of winter. Summer is dock ropes and canoes, blueberry-stained fingers, ice cream melting faster than anyone can eat it, cicadas, campfires, and nights when it stays light long past dinner.
Then come sweaters, apples on the counter, corn mazes, school buses back on roads that were quiet all summer. The mountains change color while people drive hours to see what we can watch happen on the way to the grocery store. Winter brings missing mittens and snowplows before dawn, sleds dragged out of the garage, wet gloves drying by the heat, and that blue-gray light after a storm when even the road sounds different.
That’s the New Hampshire I wanted in the book—not the travel-brochure version, but the one children actually live in.
One of my favorite images in Home Is Here is also one of the simplest. A child is outside at dusk, the sky is getting darker, and the porch light comes on. I love that illustration because I know that moment. I know what it means to look toward a house when it’s getting dark and know somebody inside is expecting you. There are bigger New Hampshire images in the book—mountains, lakes, brilliant autumn trees—but that small pool of light outside a house feels just as much like home to me.
My children may not stay in New Hampshire. They may grow up and live somewhere without mud season or snowbanks, somewhere they never hear a loon at night, and that’s fine. I don’t need them to stay here. But I hope they remember what it felt like to grow up here: running outside on the first warm day without a coat even though it wasn’t really warm enough, the sound of the lake at night, October leaves stuck to wet pavement, snow piled at the end of the driveway, the first frogs in spring.
Most of all, I hope some of those things become so ordinary to them now that they don’t realize they’re keeping them.
That’s really where Home Is Here came from. I wanted to write down a New Hampshire childhood while I was still watching one happen.
Home Is Here: New Hampshire Nursery Rhymes, illustrated by Nicole Hogan and published by Kelsay Books, is available now.
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