A Return Home Shaped by Avalonia

Story by Amy Storrow
 
 
How Do You Know You Know a Place?
 

I expected changes, both big and small, when I moved back to Southeastern Connecticut after more than forty years away. The grocery stores, drugstore, lumber store, and laundromat in Stonington Borough are all long gone, yet of course, Cannon Square and DuBois Beach remain. 

Thanks to new technology and to the people of Avalonia, I’m learning new paths. Siri has taught me, for example, that Barnes Road connects to Farmholme Road, and Farmholme Road connects to Route 1 right near Stonington High. Who knew? Likely, almost everybody who lives nearby. For me, these routes are like new synapses written on the land.  
 

Through Avalonia’s Groton Town Committee (GTC), I see the landscape in new ways as I participate in boundary walks to monitor its preserves.  I revel in names like “Winged Euonymus” (aka Burning Bush), which I thought was “Win Your Honor-Mus.” And I’ve learned “Winged Euonymus” = very invasive, very bad. Thanks to Charlie Boos and Bonnie Castellani, as I work on my own yard, I am now committed to using native plants.

Janet Andersen from the GTC graciously took me on a hike to see stone walls, perhaps crafted by Native Americans long before Europeans arrived here. Some scholars say they are “serpent walls” with boulder heads and meandering stone-wall bodies that roam the landscape throughout the region. These beautiful, undulating sculptures may be another kind of synapse written on the land, perhaps thousands of years old.  

I thought I knew the Stonington-Mystic-Groton area well, and by many measures I do. I am thrilled to live here again. Thank you to Avalonia for deepening my connection to my new-old home.