Blog Tour for Simple Pleasures: Haiku from the Place Just Right by Elizabeth Gauffreau

The simple pleasures of our favorite places in nature are gifts of the spirit to be shared with others. In this collection of 53 haiku, each paired with a photograph, poet Liz Gauffreau invites readers to come with her to some of her favorite places in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. Some places are long-time favorites going back years; others have become favorites by virtue of inspiring poetry.

For this blog tour stop, Liz provides some backstory for one of the places that appears in the book: Beaver Brook Falls in Colebrook, New Hampshire. (This backstory originally appeared on her family history blog in 2018.)

Beaver Brook Falls

Beaver Brook Falls

A couple of weeks ago, I dragged my husband into an antique shop to see if I could find any antique or vintage postcards of places in New England associated with our families. I was
looking in particular for the hand-tinted ones because the colors aren’t quite natural, which gives the scene a proper feeling of otherworldliness.

The otherworldly scene I found was Beaver Brook Falls, which, for my brother George and me in the mid-1960s, was the real world of pounding water, slippery rock, and the smell of pine so intense we could reach out and grab it. As far as George and I were concerned, Beaver Brook Falls was one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World.

Location of Beaver Brook Falls

Then one day we spied a couple of men standing in the water at the top of the falls. We were
transfixed. How had they gotten there? Had they entered the waterfall and climbed up some
natural stairway under the rushing water? No, our parents explained, there must be a path
alongside the falls, and the men had climbed up that way. From that day forward, every time
our parents took us for a picnic at Beaver Brook Falls, George and I begged to be allowed to
climb to the top of the falls. Our begging was to no avail.

Beaver Brook Falls postcard

George and I grew up. Career and family took us out of New England. By the time I returned to New Hampshire after living many years in the South, over thirty years had passed. Nothing would do but I must return to Beaver Brook Falls and climb to the top. My husband didn’t think it was a particularly good idea, and it became less of a good idea when he saw how eroded the path was, but he went along. I later wrote the following poem about the experience (in a poetry slam workshop, of all places).

Fifteen more years went by, and I found the postcard of Beaver Brook Falls in the little antique shop in Concord. Back I went to the North Country to climb to the top of Beaver Brook Falls once again, this time with the admonitions of my husband dogging my footsteps and ringing in my ears, which I absolutely refused to heed. The haiku in Simple Pleasures captures the day’s folly.

Made it!

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free
‘Tis the gift to come down where I ought to be . . . .
~ Shaker song attributed to Joseph Brackett

Author Biography

Elizabeth Gauffreau writes fiction and poetry with a strong connection to family and place. Her work has been widely published in literary magazines, as well as several themed anthologies. Her short story “Henrietta’s Saving Grace” was awarded the 2022 Ben Nyberg  prize for fiction by Choeofpleirn Press.

She has published a novel, Telling Sonny, and a collection of photopoetry, Grief Songs: Poems of Love & Remembrance. She is currently working on a novel, The Weight of Snow and Regret, based on the closing of the last poor farm in Vermont in 1968.

Liz’s professional background is in nontraditional higher education, including academic advising, classroom and online teaching, curriculum development, and program administration. She received the Granite State College Distinguished Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2018. Liz lives in Nottingham, New Hampshire with her husband. Find her online at https://lizgauffreau.com.

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