To the Editor:

This year marked 100 years since the Armistice, and 96 years since my Great Aunt Margaret Kirk married fellow Altamontian Luther Warner. They wed at St. John’s Church on Maple Avenue with their reception in the parlor of the place my husband, Eric, and I have called home for a dozen years now.

At the start of the Great War, Margaret and Luther were nothing more than classmates at Altamont High School. They quickly graduated to dependable pen pals while Luther served his country as an ambulance driver in France.

Margaret kept Luther abreast of the goings on of the village — anecdotes and gossip that no doubt brought Luther a sense of normalcy and comfort in a time of great upheaval and distress that had become the life of all who lived at the front. Their relationship blossomed to one of genuine concern, longing, and romantic interest.

They married on the anniversary of the day that finally brought them back together — though it would be at least a year after the Armistice that Luther would finally return home to Altamont with the Croix de Guerre.

They spent the rest of their years living in this house at the corner of Maple and Western avenues. Tending the land, planting lilac bushes and pear trees, dotting their property with deciduous trees that reflected the name of the street. Luther cleared the abutting creek meticulously, building limestone walls along its banks. They tended their grape vines, made jams and juices, canned their produce, filled their larders.

This land was worked hard when they were here, and it is because of them and of the work of Margaret’s parents, my great-great grandparents, James E. and Rena Kirk, that we were inspired to return it to something resembling that agrarian state. Though the rains this season proved a complication (weather has a way of doing that) growing ferocious weeds that threatened to take over the gardens and preventing the regular maintenance of the field — the earth was still abundant.

We were rewarded with quart-sized potatoes and enough kale, garlic and onions, tomatoes, beans and mushrooms, roots and berries and herbs and winter squash to last us through the snow melt. And when the snows come (again) we will forget that the grass grew a little higher this summer. The weight of the white will erase all that.

And between the tracks of the deer, and the red fox, and the turkeys, we look forward to seeing your tracks in the snow. For it wouldn’t be winter, and it wouldn't be Altamont, and it wouldn’t be tradition, without an invitation to sled on Kirk Hill.

Jen O’Connor

and Eric Krans

Altamont