Ruskin dismissed part of the Midland Railway with “You enterprised a railroad through the valley.... The valley is gone, and the gods with it; and now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange—you Fools everywhere.” Yet people were outraged when a century later the powers that be proposed to raze the line's Headstone Viaduct. What had started as an abomination came to equilibrium, pearl-like, with its surroundings. As humans we derive comfort and strength from anything which has lasted longer than a human lifetime; it becomes for all practical human purposes eternal, like nature itself. If Attleboro station disappeared, its physical traces erased, nature would soon enough fill in the vacuum, leaving only memories and old photographs. While the station is still here I've taken care to create and share memories of it with my grandchildren. And so, this Minor Place where my grandfather began and ended his Army career on Armistice Day, 1918, where my father saw feral steam locomotives roaming the rails in the '40s, will give yet another generation a framework on which to develop their own curiosity and sense of place.
SARA KASSEL DUET Jack and Caroline sat half buried in the cat’s litter box. Building sand castles and digging moats they wasted away their lazy childhood days with plastic trowels and maple tree helicopters. Jack pushed Caroline, so she