The Long Light of Those Days: Recollections of a Vermont Village at Mid-Century Paperback – January 29, 2017

Bruce Coffin's memoir, The Long Light of Those Days, is a wonderfully contemplative and incredibly detailed recreation of a time and place. As he writes in the first chapter of the book, "Memory and the Flight of Time," we reach an age when the future no longer spreads out before us like a never-ending summer day in childhood. In our forties and fifties we can look down the road that is not so long as it once was, and we can see the stop sign at the end. That's when we start glancing in the rear view mirror more and more, and our memories loom larger and larger in significance. As Mr. Coffin's book shows, this impulse can blossom into an act of creation, re-creation, and imagination. To reflect on all those experiences and people we once knew, to know where we really come from, helps us fine tune our understanding of ourselves. Mr. Coffin identifies the time and place--Mt. Tom by the big Christmas star--when he became most acutely aware of this, the time when he decided to explore the Woodstock, Vermont of his youth in a memoir. His ability to remember the details of old Woodstock down to the smallest brushstrokes is wonderful. If you let yourself linger over those details, you will go back there and see that village for yourself. You will also find prose moments like this that are catalysts, keys to open the doors of one's own memories: "...when the streets are quiet and Woodstock almost returns to itself, there is time to indulge in a kind of reverie. Going into stores, I sometimes pause for a moment with my hand on the same old door in a grip that feels like a handshake, and I close my eyes for a second to listen for the sound of the latch... and for one bewildering moment touch and hearing conspire to suspend me between a present which is simply there, and a past which is rich and real and strangely still open." You don't have to have lived in Woodstock, Vermont or have grown up in the 1940s and 50s to enjoy The Long Light of Those Days. If you understand that memory provides you with a narrative for your own life, if you understand that there is some alchemical magic in remembering, you will enjoy this book.

A good recollection of days gone by and how life used to be. For locals of the same age as the author I can imagine this would be a delightful stroll down memory lane.

Bruce Coffin provides a wonderful picture of the Woodstock, Vt. of his youth in the 40's and 50's. What's more, he allows us to share in his struggle to deal with the phenomenon of memory. There are two kinds of memory, he points out: voluntary and involuntary. He allows us to read into his mind as he explores the involuntary side of memory - those that are triggered by a long forgotten taste or smell, or a name which randomly pops into ones head, and the chain of memory and vision thus triggered. It is often said that one "can't go back". However, Coffin claims that "sometime around middle age we discover our past as a new and well-furnished addition to our lives". Coffin makes the point that we have brought it all along with us, and that is what we are today, and there can be joy in recollecting it. He has done much research and contacted many old friends and former neighbors to fill in the gaps in his voluntary memory of what once made up the small town of his youth. This gentle and thoughtful read aids us in finding those sweet spots of our own past. What an opportunity!

I had the pleasure of living near this lovely Vermont village for several years. I love this book and still enjoy reading it from time to time. If you yearn for the simpler days of growing up in the 40's and 50's, this is the book for you!

The Long Light of Those DaysReviewBruce Coffin has an eye for exalted moments and an ear for the language in which those moments live again. He has reclaimed much here, and further, he has done so with such generosity that we feel our own histories in his stories and descriptions of the people, bicycles, stores, ball games, homes, and mountains and woods of Woodstock, Vermont. This book, an act of unusual piety, brings a village to life in such a way as to reclaim something in us as well. Mr. Coffin's re-collections of Woodstock in the middle of the last century suggests our way home.

Mr. Coffin is an excellent visualist who shares his ideas and memories through a fluid notion of writing that can only be compared to his story telling at Christmas. I am trying to use my best grammar here, and truth is I have not yet read this book- but I know without a doubt that it will be great, because Mr. Coffin is the one who wrote it. With a mind like his, nothing but genius can result.

As a student of Bruce Coffins, i have gone throughout my highschool years listening him read us a christmas story each year, and listening to him teach about the things that he loves. he also has told us childhood memories which this story brings to life in a whole new way. i appreciate him as a teacher and an author.

If you like Wendell Berry's ability to transport you back in time, to simpler days, and to make you feel like you grew up in a place you've never even visited, read Bruce's book about a very special place and a very special time.