Heidi Watts

Pops was the name I gave my father when I was in college, my second time around – but that’s another story. His real name was Richard Franklin Walter, but I must have have thought Daddy was too childish and Dad was too ordinary. In any event, the name stuck and long after he was dead, which was actually only a few years later, he was referred to as Pops.  Daddy, a.k.a. Pops was born in 1907; he was twenty-four when I was born and forty-nine when he died in an automobile accident. I have many warm memories but the warmest are of greetings. I remember that when he came home from work or when we went to meet him at the train he would squat down, hold out his arms and I would run into them. Then I would be vaulted up and bear-hugged breathless.Although I was too young to remember it I am told that when he came home from work I would run and hide – the age -old children’s game – and crow until he found me. – surprise! delight!    He called me his little “...

It was 1955. I had traveled from Boston, two nights and three days sitting up on the train, for my first teaching job at a select school for young ladies in Tacoma, Washington. Although I had had no courses in education or any other kind of teacher training – my degree was in English literature – I had been hired to teach the third grade. The Annie Wright Seminary served the daughters of the educated upper classes in Tacoma and up and down the West Coast.  Although there were the famous boy ’ s  boarding schools: Groton, Exeter, Choate, few were for girls and most were on the East Coast.  The school had originally been only for girls from elite families who boarded during the school year and just went home for holidays. However, Annie Wright had just opened an elementary day school for younger girls from the good families of Tacoma. That was why I was hired, a month after graduation from college, to be the third grade teacher. I was 22. A large ornate gate o...

Who knows what admirable virtue of fishes may be below the low-water-mark, bearing up against a hard destiny, not admired by that lone creature who can appreciate it! Who hears the fishes when they cry?    – Henry David Thoreau It was a fair morning in June, the sea a calm cerulean blue, sparkling in the reflected sunlight. A few terns plummeted head first in the water and came up with something small and silvery wiggling on the end of the beak, and in the woods behind the house a song sparrow cranked up for the trill. I was cranking up the wood stove for breakfast and the children were stirring in the back bedroom. Out the kitchen window I could see the fishing boats coming in, a working man’s regatta of white and brightly painted Cape Island and double-ended fishing boats. The seagulls swirled above them in patterns of calligraphy washed across the cloudless morning sky and added their cries to the sound of the motors, the swosh of the parting waters. Dimly, c...

I stood on the deck and raised my hand to shade my eyes from the glare of the sun, low in the sky now, but leaving it slowly these long June days. "Rebecca", I said, to the long-legged   eleven year   old beside me, "Who do you think that could be?" There was no reply. Rebecca was lying on   her belly,   her head hung over the edge of   the dock,   absorbed in the antics   of a rock crab, wavering in and out of the brown and yellow weed below the pilings. The bright   yellow,   double-ended   dory   came efficiently   through   the shimmery haze on the water,   the oars dipping cleanly   with   the   long pull of an experienced fisherman. It might be David Hirtle, but   the dark   back   was too   slight.... It   might   be... "Oh, it's Peter   Baker."   The boat   was   close enough now   to   reveal the silhouette   of ...