So sometimes I don't know how to start a blog post or other piece of writing... and this is one of those times. There are days, many, when I feel as though I have nothing to say. And then there are the days when there is too much. And sometimes, on those days, what I say is a stand-in for what I don’t. Or can’t.
- I could start by setting the scenes as I usually do...As I began this, I was in the living room on a dense and humid afternoon and Herb was in the shower. We were going off to dinner at the home of friends. They live around the corner, and we were taking roasted potatoes with tofu and broccoli. It was one of Herb's recipes. I seasoned the potatoes with ground mustard, garlic, kosher salt, lemon pepper, and dried oregano from last year's garden.
- Or I could tell the story of the baby bird that had fallen, or been pushed, from its nest in the big maple. It had pin feathers of black and brown, with some white, and sky blue cartilage under the wing. His back was bare. Perhaps it had been pecked. The inside of his mouth was a brilliant orange and it seemed impossibly bigger than his whole head. Betti and Nelson had been here and were about to pick raspberries when Nelson nearly stepped on it. He took the ladder off his red truck, a chock from his stepfather’s airplane wheels to stabilize the ladder’s foot, and he climbed up to replace it in its nest. Later, when I found two babies on the ground, the second one younger, pink and leggy, Emmett came over twice, to return first the pair, then the older one again, to the nest. He brought hay with him the second time and made an aurora to help stabilize the shallow nest.
- Or I could start by reviewing the day. I had gone for a walk at about 9 a.m. As it's Saturday, the post office closes early - at 11:30 - and Liz (who works at the post office) would be off to ride her horse and get him ready for a show the next day. It was also dump day, which is sort of a holiday in Middletown, because you are bound to see friends, and catch up on the news. I knew that if I started out my walk at 9, I could be back in time to stop to see Liz, and run an errand to the dump even though it wasn't really needed.
I decided to walk north and rounded the corner of the cemetery. There were a few cars parked at the little restaurant run by our friend Sissy. I passed the house our friends had sold about three years ago at the husband’s insistence. He had wanted to be closer to town, and to their social events, and medical care, should the need arise. Though they had lavished care on the house and gardens, it had increasingly become a burden he said, and now, they were creating a smaller version, pushing out the boundaries of their city plot and planting tomatoes in pots on their second floor deck.
I passed Lois and Paul's verdant gardens, and the house of the woman who had helped me rescue our Simon from the streets and gardens of the town. The house across the street is rumored to have sold after several years languishing on a depressed housing market. But now, it is one of five reputed to have sold in recent weeks, after a long dry spell. There’s a look about a house that hasn’t sold, of neglect perhaps, the berm along the edge of the road bare in spots, the realtor sign sinking, one leg deeper than the other. And there is something of an echo.
As I approached the library, I saw a friend parking her car. She isn't someone I know well, but her husband has done some furniture restoration for me. My friend, let's call her Carol, wasn't at the wedding, but she was at the funeral we went to a week later. She was a member of the Congregational church in town, and I think she once told me it was part of why she and her husband had decided to settle here, why they had bought one of the old houses in town --a cape, set back from the road, on a lovely piece of land. I think though, they have left the congregation now, but my memory is fallible, and it’s been a long time.
Carol's father died recently, and her mother had died less than a year before. Maybe it was 6 months. Carol had cared for him here, for some time before he passed, as she would have liked to have cared for her mother, but the house here was just too far away from the house in Connecticut where she spent summers. "I could have tucked her in," she said, and I was struck by her need to nurture her mother as she had her son, and the patients whose disabilities make them dependent on her for care.
When I bumped into her at the funeral some weeks ago, it had been more than a year since I had seen her or her husband. He hasn't done any work for me lately and I haven't been walking the Buxton Loop the way I used to. And that's when I would see her. She told me that she had been occupied with caring for her father, and now that "he is with mom," she had been trying to sell the house and its contents. They will try to interest a land trust in taking on the trails her grandfather had carved into the 160 acres of woods and meadow, trails that have been overgrown in the four years since her mother got sick. Her sister wants to get rid of as much as possible, and sell the house as fast as they can, but Carol is struggling with the end of generations in the house and on the land--eight if you count her son.
"My home is with my husband and son," she said. "It was different for my mother. The house was her home. My father never liked it there, but her mother's mother had grown up there....I have her journals and it was different then. In one of them she says, 'we were going back to B_____ today but then we realized there wasn't anything we needed to go back for, so we just decided to stay another few days.' They could do that then. They'd spend their time burning off the roadside or fixing the barn, or straightening up the house. She'd talk about the peas that were growing. And you could just tell, she was happy."
But now, the house that has been in the family for 200 years is about to be sold. An auctioneer has been taking pictures of “the contents of this old farmhouse and barns. We have not dug though all of the barns and hiding places, so I’m sure there will be more nice country items at this auction.” “Contents and country items.”
"If you wanted to start up a dairy farm like it was in 1904 when the school here in Middletown was built, you could do that. They just put everything in the attic and the barns. There's a butter churn, and someone was a shoemaker. There's a Hoosier cabinet I'd like, but I don't have room. I told my sister to take it, but her husband wouldn’t have it in the house. Mice. She said since I wanted it, I should have it. When I put on an addition for my kitchen I'll have a place for it, but I don't have room. I took a candle out of a box that was inside a box in that cabinet and put it in a Twinkie to wish my sister a Happy Birthday and she wouldn't touch it. It’s not just the pre-diabetes. No mouse came near that! "
So Carol has spent uncounted hours going through 200 years of her family's life, 200 years of what they did, and what they believed and what they imagined; 200 years of the daily rituals as well as the special occasions--the graduation dress, the wedding dress. She has the teaspoons that belonged to her great grandmother and her sister. "They're small. Don't take up much room." And she has a lock of her great grandmother's hair. "It could have been cut yesterday." She has her mother's journals, and "mom wrote in the journal that they forgot to put their initials in the cement for the new cistern-- 'for the generations that follow.' Ouch" she said, her voice rising at the end, as it would if you had been struck. She has the letters that were written when her grandmother and grandaunt were fighting over the ownership of the house. "There was a lawyer involved."
There are ceramic jugs with blue outlines of birds. One is dated 1878. Two years earlier, the telephone had been invented and a year after that, Edison would invent the electric light bulb. There is a "great wheel" spinning wheel I would be interested in, its main wheel five feet across. There's flax. There's a blanket chest and a wooden bowl and oil lamps and a painting or two.
The auctioneer has a contract that says if they have photographed it, and it's on the web site, it is going to be sold, and she realized that the quilt she made for her parents is on the bed. She isn't proud of it; it isn't her best work. But it feels odd, she says that they are going to sell it. She doesn't have a place for it here. She doesn't have a bed the right size. And someone buying it probably won't know it isn't her best work. But, she says, it still feels odd.
“I’ll call the auctioneer about the wheel,” I said, “and maybe the blanket chest. It would be good to have some of your family’s things nearby wouldn’t it?”
I walked on, and I passed the Catholic Church where another friend is getting married in October. She’ll be moving to the town where she grew up, but her mother now lives in Maine, and she will be grieving for her beloved Vermont. “But I’m tired of living apart from my best friend,” she says. She may have the same piper that out friends Josseline, Joseph and Chloe “gave” us for our wedding.
I passed the Tarbell farm, where Rodney and Alida are building a new house up in the back pasture where they can see the sunset. The “beefers” were walking across the driveway the other day when Alida was sitting under a tree during her lunch hour, watching the men move their equipment around. They’ve lived in a 19th century farmhouse with cats and next door to cows for the 11 years I’ve been here and lots more before that. And now they’re building from the plans of a manufactured house they saw when they were in Pennsylvania. She loved it on first sight, she says, but the men are making some changes that they say she’ll love.
I walked over Fox Bridge where I take my “catch and release” mice in their “hav-a-heart” traps. And I walked along the river, beside the corn fields and back to the house where Herb was writing at the butcher block table my parents bought when I moved into my first apartment after college. There was a feather on the grass, with a brilliant yellow shaft.
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So I am wondering what it is when the things we love, and the gifts we crafted, are sold to someone who doesn't know their story.
I am wondering how it is that the knife we loved to use to cut vegetables becomes just another knife. Or when the only person who knows that there’s a volunteer tomato plant growing in the basket of petunias we were given as a wedding gift is not there to see it bear fruit. Or when the spinning wheel becomes an object to prop in front of the mantle, rather than a tool with that squeak at the crest of the turn and the drive band that pops when the weather is cold and dry..
In Carol’s family home, the original stairs are there. They were stored in the barn, when the center chimney was replaced by a hallway, and the fireplaces that surrounded that chimney were removed.
"I know I am romanticizing it," Carol said. "My husband and son don't want to live there. There's Lyme disease, and my husband is a magnet for ticks. My friend used to say that she feels sorry for people who are attached to a house. And now I know what she means. You have to move; you can’t always live in the same place, and it's your family that matters. And it's just a house after all." And then she added, "My sister thinks it hates her."
What is it to have a home and lose it? And what is it to believe a house so animated that you think it hates you? And what is it to want a house, and live every day in that place of longing, of the belief that the quest will bring you "home"? And to believe that the house you want, that was destined to be yours is waiting...on the other side of something... a horizon you can't quite see?
H and I nearly bought a house once. The well was toxic. But it was set back off the road, and there was a lovely kitchen, and we could sit together and watch the changing light through the window with all the small panes of glass. But tonight, I walked to the compost pile at dusk with the peelings from the potatoes, and I saw the mother robin flying off from the nest. As of then, the nest was full.
Herb says this post isn’t finished. He may be right.
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