The first time I saw the place in Stowe, a summer
when I was eight years old, the gatehouse my grandfather had built was gone. His fence away, the farmhouse stood agape, hollow and doorless, eyes gouged.

My grandmother shook her now bowed head from side to side. A pity, it was once the place for her parties with lobsters by the crate and guests by the carload, summer city folk swimming in tiered pools carved by the falls.

The second time the house was gone. My mother’s memory now traced its shadow in the foundation stones. Once dragged from a nearby quarry, the fallen monoliths testified to time I’d only lived in their retellings.

Year later, with my own children, we waded through the slog. Recreated after years of thaws and freezes had burst my grandfather’s drainage pipes, it had reclaimed this wasteland of weeds. A beaver’s dome now staked out the new wilderness.

I could tell my children of photos, of stories I’d overheard, and debris I'd seen, but I could show them no relics of the legends until I found an iron-wrought staple set in stone. It had once riveted a wooden waterwheel to the chasm’s side.

This hand-hewn hardware held fast the history that no one there had lived. Only I could recall the timbre in the voices, the tones that told the stories with eyes laughing back to faraway times now all but lost to the wild.