While I should be excited to spend a week at the Edwin Way Teale home, in
Hampton, Connecticut, as part of this year’s Writer-in-Residence, sitting at his desk, it
feels a tad eerie and unsettling, mostly because it’s been left exactly the same way, since the day he passed in 1980.
Edwin was a pioneering naturalist and writer whose lifework spanned fifty years and
earned him a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, 1966. His most notable works include, A Naturalist Buys a Farm and A Walk Through a Year, making him one of the first authors to chronicle the seasons in book form. When he died, he left 168 acres to the Connecticut Audubon Society. In 1993, when his wife, Nellie, passed, the house was added to the trust—but it came with the stipulation that Edwin’s office remain “as is.”
Teale’s office is a real time-capsule: his briefcase sits beside the desk; a box of negatives sits untouched on the desk blotter. The closet is still stocked with unused office supplies, like ink, pencils, and typewriting paper. The fireplace is decorated for a naturalist with seashells and a Henry David Thoreau bust. The Exxon calendar is turned to October 1980. His to-do list hangs on the bulletin board by the door. Things like, “Complete Pantry Brook, Chapter VII” or “update nature notes,” remains unfinished.
In the file cabinet of curiosities I find pieces of paper with Edwin’s scratchy handwriting, where he left notes for future projects. Everywhere I look I see research and cataloging, photos and outlines—all meticulously organized—to one day make up the ingredients that would normally get turned into a readable book. Just not for him anymore.
Surrounding me are decades of books—from Tenants of an Old Farm by Henry C. McCook, 1886, to A Place in the Woods by Helen Hoover, 1969—there is every kind of book for the nature enthusiast. Two family Bibles are tucked away in the desk drawer, along with the Mayflower Quarterly, and a collection of Tennyson. Tucked inside the latter is a piece of paper that reads: total receipts for New Year dinner, $71.00; one poem is marked, perhaps something he read aloud to celebrate the newyear:
Ring out, wild bells,
to the wild sky, the flying cloud,
the frosty light, the year is dying,
in the night, ring out,
wild bells, and let him die.
On the bookshelf I find a marked up copy of Work and Habits by Albert J. Beveridge, 1905, which offers a glimpse into the way Teale lived his life.
The first thing you’ve got to do in this life is to support yourself; the second is to
support your family; and the third is to help other people; when you’ve done these
things, you’ve succeeded.
Teale worked three decades for magazines, including Popular Science, and then as a freelance author. It was in the latter years that he and Nellie noticed the drastic change of the landscape due to developments and subdivisions. Small towns, he observed, lost their individuality. “One by one the roots that held us were cut.” Their new home became “a sanctuary for wildlife and for us,” and now it’s here for everyone.
The acreage surrounding the home, like the study, is well-preserved, and was like revisiting my childhood and getting to see all the wildlife and insects that have seemed long extinct: rare bluebirds; swarms of hummingbirds; two playful spotted fawns; a beaver; a pterodactyl-like crane; an osprey; monarchs and tiger swallows.
But inside the house, and particularly his unchanged office, there are different kinds of treasure: keepsakes that ordinarily would be kept from public view. In one file cabinet drawer, I discover Nellie’s Valentine’s Day card to Edwin, dated 2/14/1977. She wrote, “Here it is, our 30th anniversary of our first trip north in 1947—to be followed by so many others ... I’m yours with all my love.” They were married for fifty-seven years.
In the closet I find letters stored from Edwin’s hospital stay in January, ten months before his passing. The cancer had returned. The top letter, from Nellie, written during Edwin’s surgery, recounts, “We do a lot of waiting these days.” Her relief, when she learns of his recovery, is apparent, as is the hope of moving forward. “Now for getting well again, dear Edwin.”
It becomes clear the more I encounter Nellie’s influence in the room—her photos, her letters, her handwritten notes for her biography, another unfinished project—that the real
reason the room was left “as is” was for Nellie’s sake, not necessarily to safeguard it for future naturalists.
Nellie lived another thirteen years after Edwin, and in that time, she could’ve gone through things, tossed them out, or given them away. I think she didn’t want to relive or reopen the memories, or have to decide what to keep. To preserve the room like it was, she could feel like I do, that he might still be in there.
Edwin did a good thing when he bought this land and made it a home for the natural world. His wife did a good thing too; she died without ever having to clean out her husband’s office.