Cat at the Aldrich House, Strawberry Banke, Portsmouth NH

My wife, Carol, and I celebrated our 32nd wedding anniversary yesterday with, among other things, a visit to Strawberry Banke Museum in Portsmouth NH. Strawberry Bank is a living history museum founded in 1958 to preserve the original settlement/neighborhood that became the city of Portsmouth. It contains several colonial homes, now renovated and furnished to look as they did in the settlement period, a Revolutionary War Tavern, a fully stocked World War 2 corner store, and examples of homes from eras right up through the 50s. Costumed Roleplayers are stationed in some of the homes, and uniformed interpreters in others…and there are daily demonstrations of household tasks and crafts. The grounds are lovely, mostly because of the preserved and restored lawn gardens…both ornamental and practical.

One of the homes there was actually already a museum when Strawberry Banke was founded. The Aldrich Home was the home of Thomas Baily Aldrich for a few years in his late teens, when he was sent to live with his grandfather. Thomas Baily Aldrich was a respected poet, novelist, and travel writer of the late 1800s, and editor of the Atlantic Monthly for 9 years. A contemporary and friend of Mark Twain and other respected writers of the time, after his death his wife (who Twain considered an “empty headed clothes horse”), bought his grandfather’s house and had it renovated to look like she envisioned it from Aldrich’s most famous book, The Story of a Bad Boy, which was set in and round that house. She got it mostly wrong…but she tried. The book itself, while not well known today, is often cited as a precursor to and an influence on Twain’s Huck Fin. To bring this long story to a close, among Mrs. Aldrich’s efforts is a formal memorial garden for her husband on the grounds…and this cat is a current resident of the garden. I could not resist trying the HDR Painting Picture Effect on the Sony HX90V on the cat, the lilies, and the fence. It is somehow very suitable for the house, the people, and the time. 🙂

Camera as above. Processed in Lightroom.