The dog suddenly freezes. There are two squirrels scrambling wildly around an oak tree a few feet ahead. They have the dog’s complete attention, and we are now at a standstill. Not the workout I’d envisioned when we left the house 20 minutes earlier for a lunchtime walk.
I use the break to organize many thoughts competing for space inside my head. Pushing aside concerns about the half completed outline of my next article and a missing library book, I start planning how I’m going to get three kids to three different ball fields after school while wondering about the the current …show more content…
The dog is mesmerized and looking like he wants to get in on the action. We’re going to be here a while.
I look around and realize that the tree the squirrels are climbing and descending at dizzying speeds is sitting in the front yard of the former house of Margaret Sanger, the nurse and activist who lived here for a few years in the first decade of the 1900s.
Sanger’s time in Hastings was brief and, at least initially, traumatic. Her young family’s newly built house went on fire the night they moved in. She, her husband, and young son escaped safely, and the house was rebuilt, but Sanger grew to dislike life in our leafy ‘burb. She ultimately moved her family, which by then included three children, back to the city, so they could participate in the “. . .great ‘Pageant of Living,’” as she described it in her 1931 book, My Fight for Birth Control.
Many of us happen to think we “live” quite well while residing in Hastings. This statement has always rankled a bit. As I looked over the house, I also find it tough to believe someone would want to leave this stately home and address.
But we’re lucky Sanger chose to