Whose Rooster is That?

Working Inside The Rural Zone

Painting courtesy Dot Carpenter

The other day, I noticed a random post on the community page of the town where my library calls home. And while this particular post stood out for me, it was by no means overly unusual.

The post was a photo of a rooster out on someone’s patio, just on the other side of the patio’s glass doors. Inside the house, looking out at the rooster, were two cats. The three appeared to be engaged in a conference of some sort.

The post read, “If you’ve been looking for your rooster, he’s been having daily basement meetings with our cats.”

The post was updated to read that the rooster’s family has been notified and that he’d be going home soon. A couple points here - first, that roosters and other such animals simply just wander around our town. Second, that the poster knew whose rooster it was, presumably just by looking at it.

Through its history, Auburn has been separated from the largest city in Northern New England by a large lake, providing the town over time with some - for lack of a better word - protection, from ever encroaching modernity. That and the fact that a huge percentage of land in town is owned and kept rural by Manchester Water Works.

We have a few gas stations and pizza joints here, yes, but no true strip, no box stores.

This has given the town a feeling of ruralness despite being a bedroom community. And in the last few years, as developers, and highways, and 55+ housing, begin to knock on the town’s door (we just got our first Burger King not long ago) residents seem to hold tighter to the notion of a rural farm community. In other words, roosters at the basement door.

The farms here sell raw milk, and there’s a lady who posts about her sourdough bagels. The senior group meets in the basement of a church, and in the winter, when the lake freezes, there’s an ice skating club that does laps out to the bob-houses.

At the library, we used to hold a Egg Friday because several of our staff raised chickens and needed a place to give away or sell their eggs to the community. (And then the raccoons came, but that’s a different story.) Across the street, on the old, closed bridge by the waterfall, fisherman gather every season and we have to ask them to remove their boots or waders before coming to use our bathroom. A bobcat lives in the park behind the library.

We hold tight to the notion of preserving our original building and its tin ceiling, a gift from our founder all the way back in 1893. Regardless of how the library expands, that frontage - an old rural library facing the waterfall - will remain. Inside the library, however, we strive to be as modern as possible.

The shadow we cast dates from an older, rural time. The service we provide is today, is forward looking.

Change is happening, it always happens, but slowly here, slower it seems than other places, but perhaps those other places all think the same thing.

And we’ll abide and accept the skunks that live under the children’s room, and the traffic that backs up thanks to the flocks of wild turkeys crossing the road, and the bees nest that blows out our HVAC.

We’ve yet to have a rooster visit us though. I hope one does soon because he’d be welcome and I think he’d enjoy our patio. We want every creature to feel welcome here after all.