Edie Clark

1948 - 2024

Edie Clark

Jaffrey NH - "It might have been the beauty of this land and its dramatic sky that brought me here, but the house, its history, its voices, the thought of the many feet that have touched its floors, this is what is so meaningful to me now. I'm only here to make it better, to make it last."

Edie Clark, whose essays about her life in rural New Hampshire inspired thousands of readers across the country to feel she was a close friend, even a member of their family, died peacefully at Cheshire Medical Center in Keene on July 17 after a brief struggle with Covid. She was 75.

Obituaries not only honor the person, but also are intended to give a brief summary of a life. But Edie's life was always there on the page. Her hundreds of columns and features in Yankee¸ many of which were compiled into anthologies, and her memoir, The Place He Made, brought her everyday world into the homes of strangers with heart-touching intimacy. Her seemingly casual yet exquisitely crafted essays, often only a page or two, made readers see what she saw, feel what she felt.

She showed how deeply and expansively one can live alone. From a knoll on her beloved Mary's Farm (named for the previous owner) in Harrisville, New Hampshire, she spent years looking out to a sweeping meadow and Mount Monadnock, collecting the stories of people she knew, the changing weather, the wild animals who visited, and the misadventures of Dune, Mayday, and finally Harriett, the dogs who were her constant companions. She once wrote, "I find that writing the next essay is my best day." Each time she sat down to write, it affirmed that her farm was her "sanctuary from a world that sometimes changes too fast for me."

Edie was born December 10, 1948, in Summit, New Jersey. She lived with her parents, Luther S. Clark Jr. and Dorothy H. Clark, and her sister, Christina H. (Chris) Clark, in Morristown, New Jersey, where Edie grew to love the adventures she found in the outdoors. She was a stellar athlete;tennis, skiing, and field hockey were among her favorites. In 1969, the summer before she graduated from Beaver College (now Arcadia University) in Pennsylvania, Edie worked on a sheep farm in Iceland. She did not speak Icelandic, and there were no English speakers for miles. She found that writing in her journal let her transform loneliness into a vivid picture of a time she would never forget. One of her fondest memories was of returning to the village 40 years later, and being welcomed back warmly by local residents.

After graduating from college, she worked at a publishing house in Philadelphia, where she met her future husband, Michael Haman. In the early 1970s, inspired by the back-to-land movement and especially the writings of Scott and Helen Nearing, they first moved to Vermont and then southern New Hampshire, where they built a house centered on sustainability. In 1978 Edie came to Yankee Publishing in Dublin, New Hampshire, and the work she was always meant to do, began.

Her feature stories ranged from issues like land development and water pollution to an exploration of the Connecticut River that took 20,000 words and five issues to share all that she had discovered. Edie possessed the rare gift of finding people whose lives were virtually unknown but whose stories, she felt, needed to be told-for example, the oldest newspaper columnist in the country. "I listen to people's stories and I never tire of it," she once wrote. "I am constantly amazed at people's lives, how the most ordinary people come alive with the most unusual stories." For years, it was a rare issue of Yankee that did not feature an Edie Clark portrait of a person or town, but also writing as tender as when she spoke of her never-ending love for and sorrow over losing Paul and about caring for her mother in her final days.

After her divorce from Michael Haman, in the fall of 1984 she married Paul Bolton, a shy and gifted carpenter. They built a small house together, but after only a few special years, cancer took Paul at age 39. Shortly afterward, awash in grief but determined to embrace the memory of their time, Edie began The Place He Made, a book about their life together. When it was published in 1995, The New York Times Book Review called it "a triumph of the human spirit ...sure to take its place among the best of the literature."

Edie's first Yankee column, "The Garden at Chesham Depot," established her as the magazine's own E.B. White. As she once described her writing, "I didn't want to pass myself off as an expert gardener, so I hoped my readers would accept me simply as a lover of the miracles of the earth and a teller of stories." When she left her home in Chesham to restore an 18th-century farmhouse, her readers followed her journey a few miles up a winding country road, where she would begin a new column, "The View from Mary's Farm.

Edie wrote about snapping turtles laying eggs in the garden, the smell of fresh summer hay, and snowdrifts so deep that plows broke trying to free her road. Readers shared in the beauty that she found in every season. Who could ever see frost on a window the same way again after reading this passage: "I would lie there, still snug in bed, and watch the light of the sun bring the night's frost painting alive. I thought of this window as my winter garden, where blooms came faster and more dramatically than any flower ever could."

Her work led to residencies at the famed writers retreats MacDowell and Hedgebrook, as well as numerous honors and awards. She taught writing at several colleges and gave talks and workshops around New England. She loved singing, and performed in the Dublin Community Church choir as well as in a local concert of Handel's Messiah. She also hosted numerous holiday gatherings for more than 20 people at a time.

All the while, Edie was dealing with Lyme disease and back pain that was at times severe, which her friends thought was the reason she began having falls in 2016. What nobody knew at the time was that the falls were being caused by a series of small strokes. She would call her friends, abashed to be asking for help, and they always responded, getting her back on her feet, into a chair or bed, and they would entreat her to go to the hospital. She always said she'd be OK. But maybe she knew that wasn't so-much as her dogs always seemed to know, she'd once written, when things would not be OK. Maybe she sensed that if she went to the hospital, she would not return.

Which is what happened. The last years of her life were spent in several rehabilitation centers, most notably her residence, the Jaffrey Rehabilitation Center. Though caring nurses attended to her needs, Edie felt she had lost everything dear to her: her Mary's Farm, her mobility to go where she wanted, and most of all her ability to write and, as her eyesight declined, to read.

But even when Edie was unable to write, she was leaving another legacy with the friends and family who came to visit. She never gave up hope that one day she might recover. She never lost her laughter, or her delight in some delicious morsel or the sight of hummingbirds in the nursing home's garden. Friends brought her to Sunday church and on outings-she called these "jailbreaks."

And Edie's readers never forgot what she meant to them. Whenever Yankee reprinted one of her essays and urged readers to write her, they responded. Hundreds of cards and letters poured in, which friends would read to her. These notes could make her smile and tear up at the same time. The love that strangers felt for her words reminded her of what had been lost and, no matter how much she wanted it, was likely not to be found again.

These readers, nearly all people she has never met, would tell Edie about their own lives. They would write, "Although we have never met, I feel like I know you in so many ways" ... "Reading you makes me smile every single time" ... "Everything will be OK" ... "A devoted follower." During the pandemic, many wrote to say that even in their dark hours, when they opened one of the anthologies of her Yankee essays, their days brightened and they felt hope return.

That, too, remains Edie's legacy.

Edie Clark was predeceased by her parents and her beloved husband Paul.

She is survived by her sister, Chris Clark; her close lifelong cousins, Mac (Marcia) Odell, Susan (Ed) Hand, and George (Hazel) Odell, Barbara Cowan and Rick Larson, Carol Cowan, and Nancy Riegel; Genevieve Drevet, her hospice nurse who was there for Edie's mother, Edie's husband Paul, and Edie herself; her new special friend, Tae Young Cho; and wonderful friends too numerous to list but she loved them all.

A memorial service will be September 28 at 11 am at the Dublin Church. A book reading with book sales is being planned. Edie loved good causes, and she would be pleased by any donation in her memory to go to the Chesham Church and Historic Harrisville (historicharrisville.org/donate), or to the Authors Guild Foundation (authorsguild.org/foundation/donate).

To view Edie's Online Tribute, send condolences to the family, or for more information, visit www.csnh.com.