In 1938, Elizabeth Aldrich wrote a letter to the town of Windham, from her Washington, D.C., home, congratulating the town on its anniversary celebration.

In part, she wrote, “After the haying season is over you will pause to give a birthday party to celebrate the ripe old age of the town of Windham. I am away from the town most of the year but it seems that I return with a fresh perspective each summer. You will be celebrating Old Home Week after 200 years but I celebrate it every summer when I get to the top of a certain hill.

“Maybe the old dirt road looks a trifle narrower than I had remembered, but when I see it after many months, my heart gives a little jump for joy. There is the rabbit foot clover and the bunch berries and the old stone wall. I want to touch them right away. There is the niche in the woods where the school house used to be and the stone over the well where the pump used to be. There is Julia Mayberry’s frog pond where we used to skate, and the cedar at the fork in the road, and the hill where we used to slide in the winter – and the brook where I caught a trout.

“Why do I feel this way? I think it’s because I once had a good neighbor in Ida Trickey. She taught me the names of the flowers, the trees and the birds – and to consider the children most of all. Show them the blue berries of the juniper and listen with them to the rapid scale of the bobolink.

“The wealth of the world may never come, but the joy of life is mostly to be found in an appreciation of the small things just beyond your doorstep. Yes, I should like to see the white steeple of the lovely old church on Windham Hill set against a blue enamel sky with the maples ablaze around it but I may never see it again. I envy you who stay right around the calendar – but you should envy me my homecoming each year.”

Elizabeth Stanley was born in the late 1800s. She married Loyal Aldrich, a scientist, who worked at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. He was the director from 1942 to 1955. They lived in Windham for part of the year, and were Quakers who lived on the Pope Road in the part of town where many Quaker families settled. Elizabeth was a talented artist and many of her sketches of the wildflowers of which she wrote, are preserved at Windham Historical Society.

Their son, Stanley Aldrich assisted his father at the Smithsonian and on world-wide excursions, and returned to Windham in 1957 where he taught mathematics at the high school. His wife was the music director for the school system.

Elizabeth Stanley Aldrich died in the early 1940s and is buried at Friends Cemetery not far from her old home.