Boxford

Just off of I-95 near the New Hampshire border, a medium-sized sign reads, “Boxford Village.“ Follow the road, and you will quickly come to the center of town – a Protestant church, the post office, a library, and the general store. Except for Benson’s ice cream stand, which is open between Memorial Day and the end of summer, this is the only store in town. On the other side of a grassy patch by the library, a large yellow saltbox from before the Revolution serves as the headquarters for the Boxford Historical Society. What they preserve there I can only guess at.

I wish I knew. I have lived in Boxford my whole life, and I’m still trying to figure out what that should mean for me. Apart from my family, I don’t know anyone in the town – prep school swept me away from whatever friendships I had made there as a kid, and I have never made much of an effort to get to know it. When I am home, I tend to spend most of my time visiting my friends in their town, Andover, where we went to school together, or farther south, in Boston. When I am not eating or sleeping, I am usually on my way out the door.

This leaves me free, I think, to wonder. Boxford: the name is somehow agrarian. It has a certain primness to it, the unapologetic pride of Jeffersonian democracy. Boxford. Take away the “b”, and you’ve got the famous university. Leave it in, and then what? The x makes you stop in the middle, think for a second. Boxford. If there is a ford somewhere in the town – and I am not sure that there is – what makes it boxy? What does it mean to be from a place and not to know it?

(Start with a place name)