Sweet Caroline

Happy National Poetry Month!

The House that Ethel Built

Whenever we visited Grandma's house when we were kids, one of the things we loved the most was "snooping." Mom would take us upstairs (which was a thrill in and of itself inasmuch as we didn't have an upstairs in our house). The bedroom Mom had shared with her sisters when they were growing up was empty except for an old wooden bureau. The real treat was getting to open the drawers and play with what was inside, stuff Harriet, Letha, Doris and Helen had left behind when they left home: tortoiseshell hair combs, bobby pins, hankies embroidered with violets and roses, a half bottle of Evening in Paris perfume, and a book with a sky blue cover called Penelope Ellen.

Mom let me bring the book downstairs and read it in the living room while the adults sat on the prickly red sofa and talked quietly with Grandma who sat like a lump in her gold brocade chair. We kids had to be very quiet, too, because Grandma had some kind of nervous condition and couldn't stand the noises children made. I read of the Mercator sailing off from the Newburyport wharf with Penny's parents on board and of her waving goodbye to them from the top of something called a hogshead. Her friend Thudy climbed up, too, using Cressy's back as a step and leaving an indelible molasses stain on the shoulder of her pelisse.

After one particular visit, Mom let me bring the book home so I could finish it. I did. My sister read it, too. We read it a few more times as kids and then as adults when we understood what hogsheads and pelisses were. It became one of our most beloved books because of the compelling and idiosyncratic characters and the stuff we learned about New England history. But we never knew anything about the author since there was no biography of her or Internet yet from which we could piece together even a rudimentary story of who Ethel Parton was.

When I moved East, I was delighted that Newburyport was a quick train ride to the north, and when my sister and her husband visited last year, we all read Penelope Ellen before they came and made a list of sites from the book to visit. We did. Based on the description of the main house in the book, we identified the real house that the fictional characters lived in.

And this is it.