The Spring at the Corner of Lowell and Hull

Marash Girl's childhood home faced once-quarried granite cliffs become bird sanctuary, and backed onto its own orchard of apple trees, pears and peaches, with white birch and granite rocks on its northern side.  Two blocks north of the house was a spring.  In good weather, Grandpa Moses would carry a gallon thermos past the then recently built brick houses, down the hill,  past the stretch  of woods, to the corner of Lowell Avenue and Hull Street where the freshest spring water one ever would taste flowed out of a rusty old pipe.  Upon filling his thermos, Grandpa would trudge back up the hill to share the clear brew with the family.  

When we grew older, we children, asked to make that same trip carrying containers somewhat smaller than the gallon thermos, would arrive at the spring, drink as much of the water as we could manage before we filled the containers, and trudge back on up the hill to share the sweet clear drink with the family.

But as with all fairy tales, the dream soon came to an end when a developer bought the wooded property and replaced the woods with eight unbelievably unimaginative houses, filling Lowell Avenue all the way to the corner of Hull Street, and covering the spring and its gift of sweet fresh water.  For a good while the cellar hole for the corner house was never built upon, as the spring insisted on continuing to offer its gifts . . . but soon the developer ignored the insistence of the spring, and built that corner house despite the spring, a corner house whose cellar, to this day, has water in its basement.