Quaratine: October 2020

We kicked off the Autumn season with a visit to our local outdoor farmers market at The Wayside Inn. Who else gets to say they pick pumpkins at the oldest continually operating inn in the country, where revolutionary minutemen lived, George Washington wined, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow dined?

Fall foliage is hitting perfect notes this week. Time to get your leaf peeping on.

The leaves are changing colors, and so are the lemons on Beyonce, our Meyer Lemon tree. Her little green fruits are slowly ripening to golden yellow. I count a full thirteen lemons, the biggest harvest we’ve ever had.

The lemons spend months growing from delicate white blossoms to tiny green peas and now slowly expanding to full-sized fruit. And I can’t tell you how many people have inquired about my “lime tree” and are surprised to learn they’re actually lemons. Without fail they always remark, “Oh, but they look like limes, they’re green!” To which I always reply, “Well, when they ripen they turn yellow, like you know, lemons.”

Also, we voted. Hopefully, with any luck, we will begin to course correct our way out of this nightmare.

Back to the historical side of things, let’s get witchy. Since the weather is perfect for a long hike, we decided to take a hiking trip through Ashland Town Forest in search of the Salem Witch Caves.

The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 are a dark scar (one of many) on this country’s history. Over two hundred men and women were falsely accused of witchcraft. Thirty were found “guilty” by a corrupt court and of those, twenty were publicly executed. But what of those accused who survived?

The Towne family immigrated from England to Massachusetts in the 1600’s and three of Towne sisters lived in Salem at the time of the trials: Rebecca, Mary, and Sarah. All were eventually accused of witchcraft during the hysteria. Oldest sister Rebecca Nurse was convicted first, drug through town on a cart to the edge of the city, fitted with a noose, and hung from a tree until dead. Two months later, Mary Easty followed her sister to the same fate. Sarah Cloyes, the youngest sister, awaited execution in prison.

But Sarah had something her two sisters did not have, a fantastic husband. Peter Cloyes was not about to let a crooked judge hang his wife. Under cover of darkness, he broke Sarah out of prison and together they fled to freedom. They traveled forty miles South in the dead of winter along a sort of underground railroad system that smuggled accused women out of Salem. Their final destination was the Danforth Plantation, a safe haven created by Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth in what is now Framingham. There, they spent the winter hiding in a system of caves (pictured below) on the back of the property waiting for the hysteria to die down. Those caves have mostly collapsed in over the last 300 years, but a few remain in what is now Ashland Town Forest and this is what they look like now:

Today, the “witch” caves where they once hid are a peaceful place, in a serene spot along a well-worn hiking trail populated by hikers and bikers and dogs. You could have a lovely picnic here. A stark contrast from what I imagine they were in the 1600’s. No paths, no trail maps, no friendly faces. Just a terrifying, bleak place to hunker down and survive an unforgiving New England winter.

Epilogue: Once the trials were over, Sarah and her husband emerged from the caves and built a home to permanently settle in the area. Danforth, who had provided protection to them during their ordeal, continued to provide asylum to more than a dozen more Salem Witch Trial refugees and eventually distributed 800 acres of his property to their families so they could build their lives back. The new settlement the refugees created in Ashland and Framingham was aptly named Salem End Road.

And now we interrupt an autumnal stroll in the woods to report…a snowfall.

Yep, that’s our pumpkin. The one I was gonna carve for Halloween. We had to dig it out from the snow and it’s way too frozen to carve now. Can’t be too mad though, it’s beautiful out right now. Everything quietly snug under a blanket of snow.