Eleanore Godfrey Thorpe

Here I am again, sheepishly returning to this blog that I've left abandoned since October for no reason other than my lazy surrender to these eyes that are so tired of computer screens.

However, I daily berate myself for missing the opportunities to pen stories of Bhaktapur's temples in Nepal, of village treks in Bangladesh's hill tracts, scuba diving on Thai islands, or even of the rare luxury of a decadent sushi feast in Dhaka.

Four minutes from midnight, now is not the time to impart those tales. Instead, I've come to share a couple past writings about a woman I have been remembering often this month. My grandmother, Eleanore Thorpe, would have turned ninety-one on the 3rd of Februray this year -- the same day as my brother David's birthday.

The kitchen walls of our Christmas Cove house, painted by Eleanore Thorpe

As a Valentine's Day assignment with my students last week, I asked them to narrate their grandparents' or parents' courtship in a paragraph. The vignettes that poured in from Afghanistan, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh were sweet and sappy in all the best ways. Even Eleanore (Bammie as we called her) – who used to call Valentine's and Mother's Day "ploys of the card companies" – even she would have loved the justice my students did to this Hallmark-monopolized holiday.

I, too, responded to the assignment I'd given my students, and the following story of my grandparents' early encounters was the result:

Gardner Public Library

In brown leather heels and a blue cardigan, my youthful grandmother Eleanore Godfrey sat shuffling through Dewey Decimal cards when she first saw him. The sharp man with a distinctive nose was a regular book borrower, but his weekly visits fell outside of Ellie’s normal working hours. So the sly young librarian switched shifts with another in hopes of wooing this man. At a party, they were introduced. When asked whether they’d met before, my grandmother stood tall on her classy leather pumps, smiling, beaming, waiting to hear this John Thorpe speak her thoughts, Why yes, we know each other from the––“No, I don’t believe we've met,” my grandfather’s voice interrupted Ellie’s narration. Hopes crushed. Memories dissolved. All those times she’d stamped his books much too slowly; or how she’d been sure to catch his eyes upon her refrain, “Due in two weeks, unless you renew.” Nevertheless, not long after he learned her name, she’d won his affections. The next year, she stood at his side, with a triumphant smile, in new white heels.

John & Eleanore on the porch of the Christmas Cove house

Eleanore is not pictured in this drawing my my brother, Benjamin, but the tall fellow in the back is our grandfather John Thorpe, Sr. – back in his theatre days.

The Gardner library incident was one of two favourite stories I've cherished of Bammie since childhood. The other was about the time she spent a full day removing seaweed from her beach only to have it wash up again the next day. A few years ago, I included this story in a composition for a creative non-fiction course, when my professor posed the simple, yet infinitely broad question,


What would you change?

...I would recover the house over-looking Sand Cove.

My grandmother Eleanore Godfrey Thorpe used to make “friendship doughnuts” and sell them for eighty cents per dozen to fishermen and local families in Christmas Cove. A nickel of those eighty cents went to my dad, the delivery boy. Hardly school-aged, he could maneuver the dingy through the crowded summer harbor, avoiding precariously hidden ledges marked carefully on every seaman’s chart of John’s Bay. After a few summers of deliveries to loyal customers, my Bammie, called Ellie by all who knew her, had saved enough money to buy a cottage over-looking the small beach that had been given to her as a gift. 

Some years later, Eleanore sold the cottage she had bought with doughnut money. It was the same way with most of my ancestors’ land in Christmas Cove—properties were bought and sold through the years, until finally, the extended Thorpe family today shares just one house. I love the solid, white, unassuming frame of the Thorpe house. It is old enough to tell stories from long before the Civil war, and to contain the secret of my grandfather’s birth, and of how he lived upstairs in the room with a tiny door. It is our family’s house. The doughnut cottage had been Ellie’s. 

If I could go back a couple decades and change Bammie’s mind—tell her that her cottage was worth keeping, I would not hesitate to state my opinion. Ellie, I’m told, never hesitated to withhold hers on any matter, especially politics. I like to think that during my more stubborn moments, I am a living piece of my grandmother. She stomped her small brown high-heeled shoe down when folks put forth unsubstantiated assumptions. Like when they denied the beauty of her beach.

I skip stones at the beach in every season. It’s still in the family, and we will always call it Bammie’s Beach, even though everyone else has been calling it “Smelly Beach” as long as my father can remember. An all-too-natural stench often pervades, as mounds of seaweed wash onto the sand and rocks at high tide, baking in the sun, and refusing to recede with the bowing waves. 

Dad told us how once, Bammie spent the whole day packing the dry, pungent seaweed into garbage bags and loading it onto Pappy’s truck to be taken away from her gem-habitat. The next morning the beach was covered again, as if over the night, arms had reached out from the small cove to recover from the ocean the brown and green shreds of clothing. The rags been stripped off by a small woman who wanted to prove that underneath it all, her beach was beautiful and pure. 

Bammie was probably content to sell the cottage because her real treasures were always the sand, rocks, and water outside of walled houses. As much as she might have enjoyed the rainy day task of bathing the cottage with the sugary warmth of dozens of friendship doughnuts, she was more herself when removing truck-loads of salty seaweed from a misty beach at dawn. 

Still, I wish she had kept the cottage. It would not have changed my life, I suppose, and there are much greater and more urgent things to be addressed, overthrown, reformed in the world. Yet as I walk along Bammie’s beach now, I look up to the east at the cottage and imagine that if I could only escape behind its small windows, make some doughnuts perhaps, or watch for the little boy in the dingy—that maybe it would be a place where I could think quietly about those bigger changes to make, territories to explore, fears to conquer. Other things I could leave the way they are meant to be—like the seaweed on the beach, and the memory of Bammie before the Alzheimer’s. Of my grandmother when she was Ellie.

Skipping stones at Bammie's beach