The tree was not there when Mr. Hubbard lived there. But it is still the tree in Harry Hubbard’s dooryard. I am nearly convinced it is lighted every Christmas just for me.
The Hubbard’s yard and my yard are a pair of large trapezoids stacked against each other to make a bigger rectangle, more or less. The yards share a long diagonal property line marked off with some old marble scavenged from the nearby college by its caretaker. The caretaker had moved my house to its present spot in nineteen hundred and two. My house had been closer to the college, on Maine Street. It has been in its current location so long now that the marble boundary line has nearly been reclaimed by the earth.
The Hubbard house is long and thin and set right up against the road, probably to provide the most open space on the ample property for a good sized truck garden. My house is long and thin and set right against the Hubbard line, more or less perpendicular to the Hubbard House, probably to provide the most open space in the big yard for a good sized truck garden.
When I rise from my chair in the front room by the street—the study, as it was once known—and look out over my porch I alone can see into the Hubbard yard. Protected from the road by the Hubbard house on one side, and my house on the other side, and a hedge of hemlocks brought from the wood and set out long ago, the yard is a secret garden. And these last six years it has been home to a lighted tree. As I walk the length of my house from the front room past the ancient rippled sidelights in the front hall and back to the barn I catch that tree winking to me in each successive window.
Harry Hubbard and his wife lived there when I was born so the house will forever be the Hubbard’s house, at least so long as I live here which, so far, is pretty much all of my life. There are a handful of houses like that in this neighborhood, forever to be identified by the names of some previous owner.
Harry Hubbard is long gone now. Before he passed he and his wife moved out of the big house and around the corner to a small house on Thompson Street, one of the original tiny boxes of the Douglas Park neighborhood. That house too butts up against my yard on the rear side.
My house in 1952 or thereabouts. It’s long and thin. The property line is on the far side of the house and runs as near as a few feet from the wall in a couple of places. The side yard, about a half acre or so, had been dedicated to an ample vegetable garden maintained by tenants when my parents bought the place.
The lore is Mr. Hubbard was born there in the long house by the road. I learned this, from the keeper of neighborhood lore, when I was a very small child. She’s gone now too, though much more recently.
I once told her how I had seen Mr. Hubbard standing in front of his old house on the sidewalk, dressed up in fine clothes, his shoulders a bit round, and his hair white, using a cane. This was after he’d moved into the tiny box around the corner. He looked more the part of the retired professor than the man I used to watch working in his barn in a white undershirt, or opening the point well in his garden. He just stood in front of that house and gazed at it. “Well you know,” the lore-keeper told me, “he was born in that house. It’s not just a place he lived in for a while.”
I believe it. I learned that before the house belonged to Harry and his wife, it belonged to Harry’s parents, Oramandel and Abbie (I also learned that one of Oramandel’s nine siblings was named Confucious so Harry had an Uncle Confucious)
The Hubbards sold that house when I was a child to a youngish professor with a pair of kids. In short order the Professor became President of the College and moved with his kids to a big important house on Federal Street. Ever since then, fifty years or so, there had been a string of single people, or old people living in the Hubbard house. But a few years ago new people bought the house. The people that live there now have four kids; they do a lot in the Hubbard’s yard, including lighting a fir tree at Christmas.
It looks especially nice during the January thaw when there’s been rain enough for puddles to build up on the snow. The reflections off the puddles or, once it gets cold again, the undulating ruffles of crusted snow, mix well with the rippled glass in my antique windows to cast glimpses of color here and there as I idle along from window to window. I get home from work late, long after the neighbor’s kids and most everyone in the neighborhood is abed. As I wander from the kitchen to the study and back I wonder, who is this lit for other than me?
Harrison Hubbard in 1919. Word is he was born in this house. He’d have been about thirty years old in this photo. Among other things he worked at the Post Office for 42 years, wrapping that job up with a stint at the post office on the Navy base. This photo came from the Maine Memory Network which reports its source as the Pejepscot Historical Society.