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Ellie

John Pedrick

Eleanor Nudd and I (she was then Eleanor Wells) passed like ships at college. She was a senior, and running or helping run everything of importance - the newspaper, the literary magazine, the English club that imported noted poets; I was that noisy freshman running the stairwells singing Cab Calloway. But we really met later, out in the world, when one of our English professors got us together for lunch at the Lincolnshire in Boston. There a conversation started that was ongoing until her death in 1995.



She became quintessential farm wife, but at the time of that lunch was just as quintessentially the slim, chic young Manhattanite with literary aspirations, living on the edge of the Village, working for a magazine, and taking in the arts by copious gulped drafts. I was something more or less likewise, living in Boston and working for a publisher. We visited in both cities. When her parents neared retirement and bought an old house in New Hampshire, she left New York and went to supervise the renovations, which made sojourning back and forth all the easier and more frequent. Throughout marriages and childrearing years, they came down to the Circus or the Ballet of the Science Museum; we went up for venison broiled in the fireplace at New Year's and to ride a pung through the woods and stoke the fires under the maple sap in early spring. And when the children were grown and on their own, she began to come to Skimmilk Farm every summer for three or four weeks of nonstop reading writing, talking, as well as to commute on as many Mondays as she could manage for the workshop. She brought much - outsize casseroles, the law straight from a wrathful Zeus on syntax, and her beautiful and realized work.



Twice we travelled to England together, and you just haven't traveled unless you're standing in the mist and your companion grabs your arm and says, "Look, they're swarming up that hillside!" and then dumps on you're a couple of bucketsful of quotation from the English poets and you are THERE. Once we went to Canterbury, and believe me I have died and bled with Becket.

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