BOG MAROON

BY DON DOUCETTE

Thoughts of cranberry bogs have taken me back in time to memories of a small homestead cranberry bog here in Attleboro, Massachusetts.

Several times this past week my travels have taken me to Sandwich, Massachusetts – and during this travel time, I have noticed cranberry bogs along the way in their early spring seasonal transition, from dormancy toward sap flow, the reawakening of cranberry bogs seems as magic as the bogs take on a beautiful earthy hue which I inwardly refer to as “bog maroon.” I am emotionally moved by the color.

And so my boyhood cranberry bog memories of Attleboro just south of the confluence of two Ten Mile River Watershed brooks situated between the Twin Villages of Dodgeville and Hebronville – just south of where my Twin Village Brook and my Thurber Farm Brook meet behind the former Atwell Family residence. That house location along with the gravel hill it sat upon is gone now and replaced with modern housing facing South Main Street just south of the gas transmission line.

Our Dad maintained a garden toward the rear of the Thurber Farm; my grandparents owned the ninety acre farm and I lived and played there without regret as some of my fondest memories remain there.

Our play time took us several times from my fathers garden plot westward with brother, Paul, and neighbor chums carefully westward through a wetland to a small concrete dam structure with an opening and with the combined brooks flowing through the vacant dam opening. If memory serves correctly, upstream grew some vagabond wild cranberries in a small clustered patch not by chance and a personal thought then, the remnant of a local agricultural cottage industry. Perhaps the modest bog was cultivated by predecessors occupying the nearby Atwell family property.

I remember approaching the dam structure only several times and recall play time as we jumped across the dam’s opening above the softly flowing water; a tiny rite of passage during our tender young lives.

And so my childhood memories recently come to fore, spurred on by the emotional tug of “bog maroon.”

Don Doucette

“Ten Mile River Rambles”

Friends of the Ten Mile and Bucklin Brook

Citizen of the Narragansett Basin