Scheherazade – IV — The Westgate House

Old Maine farmhouses get their names from prior owners and prior generations, and the homes themselves are inextricably wound up in their previous owner’s identity.

My mother’s home stubbornly remained the Macomber Place in local hearts and minds even though she owned it for thirty years. We were constantly hearing about the destruction of the Macomber’s barn or the beauty parlor run out of the back room or this-that-and-the-other-thing regarding the Macomber family that once lived there.

There’s a delayed symmetry to these things, and it’s not out of the question that another generation from now the old farmhouse will become the Westgate Place, and the new owners will hear about my mother from elderly neighbors shuffling out of their houses in slippers carrying dog-eared folders of newspaper clippings and photos about our family. They’ll flip through the photographs of my mother standing way out on the scary, far-end ledge of the razed barn’s exposed rock foundation. She’ll be flashin…