Once more to the Pondhouse
Rob Price

Every once in a while, you meet someone who when they pass away leaves a gap in your life, an empty space that lasts a long time, until it finally recedes far enough into the distant past that it's no longer a emptiness but a space of memories.

Such a person was Carol Burdick, who died last week in her home outside the Village of Alfred. The home - a cottage of sorts - was situated on a pond in the woods. Inside there were bookcases filled with goods books, a compact kitchen with wine bottles often sitting on a countertop, comfortable furniture, a table usually occupied with the pieces of an unfinished jigsaw puzzle and an upright piano.

CB - everyone called her that - named the cottage The Pondhouse and wrote about it in a series of personal columns she did for The Alfred Sun. I would say she tried to immortalize The Pondhouse in those Alfred columns, but she probably would have disagreed. If anything was going to be immortalized, she'd have said, it would be herself.

CB was 79 when she died, and her death stopped lots of people in their tracks, although her friends and acquaintances had known for a while she didn't have long to live. The normal news grind in the offices of the Hornell Tribune shifted gear, and Andy Thompson, the editor, pretty much cleared the top of the front page of The Sunday Spectator to say goodbye to CB. That's how much she was involved in the lives of others. It would have taken a hell of a piece of news to have knocked her off page one.

In her actual work, CB was an English instructor for Alfred University. Outside the classroom, she was a writer and an avid reader. Also, when desperate times called for desperate measures, she was a political activist. But lots of people can be these things and their deaths don't necessarily cause a great stir. CB was another matter.

Her friends and admirers spanned the generations. She had friends who were close to her in age; then you can drop down about 15 years, and she had a whole other generation of friends. And then you can drop down another 10 years or so, and you have me and my wife and some of our friends, who moved to the area in the early 1990s and got to know her.

And so it went: In Alfred's own English Department, where a new professor is christened every three years or so, every new hiree was likely to be invited into CB's orbit (She enjoyed conducting her own informal interviews during the longer interview processes). Not only that, new professors sometimes would arrive with children, or eventually acquire them, and CB always made The Pondhouse a welcome place for the young.

For years, many of these children - Emily, Sophie, Nathan, Amy and Lora - have been joining their parents and friends of their parents for an evening of Christmas caroling at CB's, usually a week or so before Christmas. CB would play her upright piano and the group would sing eight to 10 carols - pretty carols: "Lo, How a Rose E're Blooming"; "The Holly and the Ivy;" "Silent Night." Last year, one of the children, Emily, brought along a violin and accompanied the piano and the singing. The violin added a pleasant richness to the music, and I remember thinking at the time: "This is getting to sound pretty good; if only it would last."

CB knew as well as anyone life is all about change. She had her doubts about anything becoming immortal, and her columns about The Pondhouse never pretended anything is permanent. I suspect in retrospect she conceived of The Pondhouse as a kind of metaphor for herself, or perhaps for her heart. It was roomy and generous of space, although sensibly constructed, without any waste. It was full of good things: books, wine and a piano for playing music. It was a sturdy shelter against the changing seasons of the north: warm and cozy in the winter, bright and breezy in the summer. But it also made it itself open to those seasons, with windows that welcomed the changing light and colors of the woods.