About 100 folks attended the ribbon cutting ceremony yesterday morning on a gorgeous day (much like the day of her funeral) to celebrate the historically accurate grounds makeover for Amherst's deservedly most famous resident, Emily Dickinson.
The $275,000 project paid for by 17 private donors (one of them kicking in a "challenge grant" of $125,000) with a little town seed money to start the planning process ($15,000 in CPA funds which I supported in Town Meeting back in 2005) the entire project required less than a year.
Since Emily Dickinson confined herself to an upstairs room or beloved garden, the Homestead grounds comprised a significant part of her physical world--tended to by Irish servants who later honored Miss Emily's final written request that her white "coffin [was] not driven but carried through fields of buttercups" out the back to a final resting place in West Cemetery.
To all the cry babies who moaned about the cutting down of the trees and the building of the fence, doesn't she look grand!
ReplyDeleteHelluva terrific parade today... fire engines, police cars, Select Board, Shriners, marching bands, bagpipes, choruses, Hadley, Pelham, Worcester, Tantasqua, kids, and on and on on and on. Now that's a parade! Rain stopped in time for most of it. Go ahead. Make my day. Find something wrong with it.
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Yes"Dave" (AKA: cowardly, Anon, Nitwit) I uploaded an entire new post less than a half-hour after your Nitwit comment; my goal was to get it published by 5:00 PM (not that I"m worried about the crusty Gazette) but Blogger took forever to render the video of the Umass Marching Band (and yes, my wife yelled at me for kneeling in the middle of the road to get that video, but I knew nobody was going to arrest me) so it went up at 5:03 PM.
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