Horsekeeping Page 3
CHAPTER THREE
Keep Manhattan, Just Give Me that Countryside?
EL-ARABIA BORDERED OUR PROPERTY TO THE NORTHEAST, and we had been walking and biking past it for six years, since 1998, the year my husband Scott and I traded up our second home. Our rural village of Salisbury was founded in 1742 with the quintessential Congregational Church established on the green. About five thousand souls are spread over sixty square miles, a community remotely wedged into the northwestern corner of Connecticut where the Litchfield Hills graduate into the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts.
New Yorkers during the week, we have been spending blissful weekends and chunks of the summer here for sixteen years. Our friends introduced us through a house they rented on Lake Waramaug a little further south. We visited Bob and Laurie four times, saw our city-circumscribed shih-tzu joyously leap and roll through a tender, greener-than-green spring hayfield, and fell hard for New England—the soft mountains, the distinct seasons, the Puritan remnants, the privacy. Though still renters in the city, when we saved enough money we decided to spend it on such a retreat. During our reconnaissance trip, we drove down curvy Route 41 from Sheffield, Massachusetts, into Salisbury, almost killing ourselves gawking at the undulating spread of forested hills and lake dotted pastures fully in May’s fertile burst. We agreed that the beach, a more conventional choice among NYC thirty-somethings, couldn’t hold a candle to it: this was the most beautiful place we had ever seen.
Our first house purchase, made when we were childless, did not later suit our then-toddler son so we moved from our (now we can admit it) three-story, box-ugly, out-of-place A-frame contemporary into a “real” New England country house, a two-hundred-year-old colonial. Previously nestled up a long dirt road along with five neighbors against a reforested mountain, we would now dwell in the pastoral, flat, long-inhabited, pasture patch-worked, misty river valley. This house holds family histories we can only surmise, long predating paved roads, strip malls and gas stations. It is a needy house, still standing but requiring lavish attention.
Unenlightened urbanites think they want a quaint antique house until they crack their noggins against the low ceiling beams, locate that “country” kitchen unsocially hidden away at the wrong end of the house, and, most irreconcilably, see that the house sits smack up against the edge of the road. Convenient in the snowplow-less days of horse and buggy, roadside agility is not a modern-day asset given that country roads are no longer the sleepy, meandering lanes we romanticize. Country folk speed just like time-pressured urbanites, flying over hill and across dale with chainsaws, leaf-blowers and tools of every variety banging around the beds of their pick-ups. Lacking bypassing highways, the two-lane country roads also support a steady nighttime parade of tractor trailers and, combined with the absence of sidewalks; this means you risk your life by venturing a stroll. Be ready to pitch yourself into the rough at each rumble of an oncoming vehicle.
Though our house was extensively renovated and enlarged by former owners, an old house is an old house: quirky and expensive problems continually manifest themselves no matter how much money we prophylactically sacrifice to plumbers, painters, tree experts, caretakers, handymen, gardeners, pest controllers, roofers, and various other “experts.” Pipes seize up in winter in spite of the thousands of gallons of fuel oil that the forty-year-old furnace sucks down. Ice dams along the roof gutters and slowly melts, working a puddle through the ceiling of the living room requiring re-plastering and a new roof. The workhorse gutters marginally prevent the cascading H2O from turning the foundation into a soupy muck and flooding the basement into a moist mold that rots the gapped pine floorboards of the uninsulated library. It is the kind of damp we are over-blessed with in merry old New England for three-quarters of the year, and we have to power wash off the external clapboards every few years before each paint job.
Since our house is so aged, with hand-laid stone walls and a dirt floor as the foundation, water in the basement shouldn’t be a problem—except for sinkage: ship-like, a soggy footprint can list a house this way or that, mis-aligning the timber structure, cracking walls, bending floors and otherwise wreaking havoc from roof to attic. Not to mention the dead people I’ve heard were sometimes buried in basements back in the day, residents of our distinguished homestead I would not care to upset. A wished for ghost in theory beats one in practice. Despite the heroic gutters, some water and much else still manages to intrude because an old house is porous, perforated like lace. This has its advantages, I persuade myself, in terms of healthier indoor air. When the price of fuel oil soared in the seventies, people built shelters so tight that they poisoned themselves with the gasses emitted by mundane items like carpet, upholstery, Windex and hairspray, not to mention natural toxins like radon.
But impenetrability is not our problem. Water, mud, cold air in winter, hot air in summer, mice, shrews, bats, chipmunks, snakes, squirrels, frogs, mega-spiders and insects of every variety—creeping and airborne, a large noisy toad or two, and only Noah knows what else, regularly invade our space through attic, uninsulated walls, one-hundred-year old windows in two-hundred-year-old casements and of course, the crocheted stone walls of the basement. My supposedly sturdy, two-hundred-year-old, time-tested dwelling all of a sudden seems a rickety house of cards with a life of its own as regards weather and creatures. I don’t begrudge the animal kingdom its bit of shelter, and mainly I let it be. I try to accept the bats as my friends: one tiny Chiropteran can devour six hundred bugs an evening while flying above my yard, so even when they graze the split ends on the top of my head when diving single file out of the eaves like machine gun pellets shot from a WWII Spitfire, I simply duck. I know better than to get my hopes up for a bug-free picnic the next day, but I imagine five mosquito bites instead of ten on each leg of my two children.
Other visitors get to me when I am cold and huddled in my high-off-the-floor creepy-crawler fortified bed (I’m in denial that anything would dare crawl up the four bedposts, despite their carved footholds). Outside, the coyotes howl it up while tearing the flesh from the bones of the neighbor’s sheep, chasing away sweet dreams. The nocturnal flying squirrels perform their housekeeping at 2:00 a.m. in the attic recesses overhead. At 3:00 a.m. I lie awake imagining the elaborate condo complex they construct. As I wait for their rustling to quiet and envy my husband’s soft snoring, my blood pressures as I plot vigilante tactics that rival Bill Murray’s against the gopher. Furry, cute and innocent my ass: not in the wee hours they’re not. I see red-rat eyes and sharp, salivating teeth. Poison? Metal traps? Death cages? Rifle? I picture myself grease-painted, my hips hoisting a sagging belt studded with Raid cans: bring it on fur ball—I’ve got camo and ammo.
But to complain is churlish. This old house is lovely with wainscoted and plastered walls and wide-board floors cut from pine trees that were already ancient when our house was long ago hand-hewn with axes, square nails and muscle. Burnished for years by mops and socks, these floors appear marbleized in places. Built for a Mr. Averill around 1801, the house boasts two-stories and higher ceilings than most and was periodically added onto and tastefully modernized since. At one low point, perhaps a century ago, it served as the police barracks. We know one of the “boys,” now my age, whose parents lived in our house for forty-five years, until the early nineties. Each time I run into John in the village coffee shop or pharmacy I am treated to another anecdote of his siblings’ high jinx. I learned how the kids tiptoed around the squeaky floorboard outside his parent’s bedroom door on their midnight escapades. Now I smile when I slip in to give my sleeping son yet another good-night kiss, making these boards speak.
I heard about the barn the boys burned down, explaining the mysterious bits of concrete foundation I pondered at the base of the huge willow. We respect the tomb of the family Newfoundland interred beneath the stand of tall hemlocks outside the pine-paneled library bay window, and have a visual of the old dormitory-style layout of the children’s bedrooms, now a spacious
master bedroom suite. The pantry bell panel still carries the Borden family designations—“John’s room,” “parlor,” “library” etc.—evidently still in use through the fifties. Some still function, not that anyone remains to do the servanting. My husband tried ringing for breakfast once, but remained hungry, feeding only upon my “yeah, right.” Several years ago John and his family returned to scatter his mother’s ashes on the property of the house she treasured.
Onto this history we have layered our own experiences. I wielded my thick black notebook of room dimensions and fabric swatches in eagerness to do justice to the beauty the house, one we never dreamed we’d ever be able to own.
“Can you believe this is ours?” I asked Scott as we wandered through the empty rooms after the closing.
“It is hard to believe. We’ve come a long way, baby,” he joked.
As we admired the molded archway segmenting the long entry hall I pictured kissing him under the Christmas mistletoe.
“Let’s not muck it up,” my lovebird added.
And it was Scott’s desire to start from scratch, incorporating few furnishings from our first house. Undaunted and true to our sign of Taurus, Scott and I are nesters. We moved frequently as kids, and neither of us had the pleasure of adhering to a long-established homestead, so this house was for keeps. We wanted a permanent familiarity for our kids and set about filling the house with art and personal knick-knacks accumulated from twenty-plus years of life together while adding ongoing collections. We decorated to please ourselves. We took angled photographs and countless measurements, and I lost myself in fabric books emulating the professional we didn’t hire. Weekdays, Scott met me for lunch at ABC Carpet and Home and Ethan Allen to debate rugs and sofas, neglecting food. Combing local antique stores, both the precious and the junky, occupied us weekends for two years. We each seriously took ownership, with a sharp eye for every detail—I’d turn the carved snow goose on the dining table one direction and on his next walk through Scott would reverse it, or even shift it to the sideboard, the nervy bugger. I would put it back. Why did I have to get a husband who cares so much and notices everything, I wondered, when my girlfriends complained their husbands couldn’t care less. But our battles for decorative control resulted in an eclectic home of tender care and affection, and we can both point to every “treasure” in our house and recall its provenance.
Faced with filling up this overwhelming house on a limited budget, our first purchase was a purely decorative, two-hundred-year-old wooden slatted, oval-shaped barn vent still attached to a portion of the New York state barn that once proudly held it. An artful piece of Americana, built when nails were hand-forged and square, we splurged when we really needed mattresses, chairs and curtains. It holds prideful place inside the main hall and reminds us of those early exciting days creating our first real home, one that our children will grow up in, revisit after they are released into the wild and perhaps return to marry in, one in which we hope to grow old, entertain our grandchildren, and, when tired and ready, die in. Encompassing our family mythology as a living museum curated with love and memory, the “Borden House,” as it is still known locally, makes us extraordinarily happy. We may live, work and school in New York City, but Salisbury is our home. Our house feels almost alive in that it predates us, transforms with each new occupant and, barring fire, will survive us. I imagine it two-hundred years hence absorbing another family’s triumphs and tragedies. As our lives wear it down a little more around the edges, maybe we will etch it into “the Bok House.”
Located at the eastern end of the long Twin Lakes Road, our house sits three-winged and nine-gabled on land studded with evergreen stands of mature hemlocks and white pines. Our eight-acre plot is bordered behind by hundreds of acres of mixed forest: northern hardwoods of beech, birch and maple as well as the eastern broadleaf species of oak and hickory that are more southern. One immense weeping willow resides solitary in the middle of our back lawn gracefully holding a dream-perfect tree swing. A plain wood plank is tied to the ends of two fifty-foot lengths of rope plugged via cherry-picker to a high, uneven branch. Housing purchases tend to be emotional, and I believe we bought this house because of this swing. Elliot and Jane love arching dangerously high into the gracefully hanging softer shoots, kicking down confetti of petite leaves. Because the long ropes narrow at the top, the seat spins like a carnival ride, minus the safety belt. More worrisome, our tree man advised me that the willow is weak, unlike the muscle-bound maple or oak.
“What does that mean?”
When willows fail, they fail spectacularly,” Skip answered.
We gazed up at the tree’s massive horizontal arm, perfectly aligned for unobstructed swinging... and slamming a human into the ground as easily as a hammer would drive a thumbtack into corkboard.
“But we don’t have a maple or an oak.”
“Then you take your chances.”
We cabled the willow’s bicep against catastrophe, and I tried to think that the likelihood of that one trunklike, brain-crushing branch fracturing during the few hours a year my kids fly, spin and giggle into the breeze was miniscule, but my dreamy swing is now tinged by a harsher reality.
Across Twin Lakes Road, over the years we had annexed another sixty-four acres along a sluggish length of the wide Housatonic River. Sixteen of these produce hay harvested for El-Arabia’s horses, twenty is woodland, and twenty-eight sprout alfalfa grown by the local farmer, Mr. Duprey, as feed for his dairy cows. Every five years he substitutes corn to replenish the soil. Once or twice in my Christmas card I had asked the Dupreys if they could plant sunflowers as the rotation crop. I pictured southern France with acres of yellow fringed, seeded black faces bobbing eight feet high to the sun. I mistily envisioned my kids running breathlessly through their thick, fuzzy stalks in the ultimate game of hide and seek; of waking up, country-relaxed and sleepy-eyed, taking my warm teacup outside to survey a spectacular golden carpet, sighing with the wonder and beauty of it all. My fantasy remained rootbound. I suppose that sunflower seeds are expensive, and not appetizing to a milk cow’s palate. Oh well. My naïve request probably provoked guffaws from cows and farmers alike at the Duprey holiday repast.
It is dawning on me that farming is hard, dirty work. Once I took Elliot, then a tender four-year-old, to see the milking at the Dupreys’: the 4:00 p.m. milking since we slumbered peacefully through the first at 4:00 a.m. Mr. Duprey’s stout son maneuvered these bulky, hygienically challenged animals into two lines on either side of a narrow barn. The cows obliged their longstanding routine. Duprey the younger, outfitted in high rubber boots, cast an amused glance at our feet. I pretended not to care that our white sneakers were lace deep in mud and cow effluvia—“big poopie” according to Elliot—and that dozens of buzzing flies, fat black ones and translucent babies, were lighting on every moist surface, including the wide-eyed and open-mouthed face of my son.
I swatted surreptitiously as the lowing cows had their teats splashed with blue disinfectant and sucked into tubes that coaxed milk from their bulging udders into not-so-gleaming silver tanks. Duprey expertly managed six cows at a time, taking about fifteen minutes to get them in, drained, and out again. Since the farm had one hundred cows, the job took four hours, and he did this two times a day, with plenty of other jobs in between. A man of few words, he let the action speak for itself, and after a few polite questions Elliot and I bee-lined to the car. I set to work sanitizing all thirty-three inches of him, using a full bottle of Purell and the better half of a box of diaper wipes. He finally balked when I tried to swab the inside of his mouth.
Mr. Duprey the elder harvests the alfalfa in our field three or four times a summer. Timing is everything as it takes about two days to chop, churn to fully dry, and then scoop up the cuttings. Rain necessitates several more days of fluffing. The deer pray to the rain god and come nightly to feast away a good chunk of the yield. Once we counted fifty-eight bucks and does in our field: lithe, graceful beasts grazing our own open pla
in. We’d sigh in awe as these timid, gentle herbivores would catch a warning on the wind and, with white tails held high, collectively high-jump into the cover of brush and trees. Many passing drivers slow to view this New England version of a wildlife park. Some haul out binoculars. One car drove out across the alfalfa for a closer look, stampeding the herd.
Our family was anxious to witness the process of harvest. One July daybreak, we awoke to an old-fashioned dull red tractor with a wide series of blades circling our irregularly shaped field, working from the outside in. The completed geometry of cut greenery swirled a giant’s thumbprint. But Mr. Duprey’s satisfying neat sweep of the field took two days of tedium in the beating sun atop a steaming, noisy, smelly machine, and ours was only one of many fields to be tended. And, a closer look took more of the beauty out of it.
At dusk I strolled through the newly cut alfalfa. Only a few steps and I noticed some squirming in a groove of denuded soil. Four hairless, gooey creatures blindly rolled in search of cover and mother. Roughly two inches long, these babies were the color of raw salmon. Opossum, raccoon, mouse, I couldn’t tell. I could not bear to touch their vulnerable half-formed skin, nor could they bear handling. Should I stomp them out of their misery or let nature take its course? In cowardly despair I left them, doomed as they were to death by exposure.
I later learned that naturalists request farmers hold off on the first cutting until the ground-laying birds have abandoned their nests. Even so, plenty of other creatures take time to wean, and the farmers have no choice but to occasionally plow over fawns, turkeys and other smaller unfortunates whose desperate parents can only flee the path of the steel grim reaper. The farmers say they can’t see the hidden animals, only feel the “thump,” and I suppose this is both the good and bad news. Farmers do not have the resources or the time to be in the rescue business, though they do it when they can.