A Fresh Start in a New Place

Signing off

2008-10-09T10:03:00.000-07:00

This concludes my posting to this blog. I hope readers have enjoyed it. I appreciate the comments and will stay in touch by visiting other blogs (you know who you are).

Who knows, Kate (and Nora, too) will show up in another guise one of these days. But for the present time, I want to just do some writing that isn't under any pressure or in any format.

I wish you all very well.

Regards,

Kate

And more

2008-10-08T04:58:00.000-07:00

Views inside Meg and Giles' house

Bert's house in Woodfield

Giles and I at dinner party at Paula's

Still more (captions in reverse order!)

2008-10-07T04:35:00.001-07:00

The farm on a misty morning.

Janey and Wilbur

Hazen with Wilbur

Wilbur with me (if he would only stay little!)

Janey

Greta

The small house I fell in love with

Suki

Sara Fowler in Vermont crusher hat

Suki's house

2008-10-06T07:28:00.000-07:00

I fancifully called this spot "The Gates of Heaven." It was the entrance to the second high meadow by my apartment where I first lived. The mountain is Ascutney and is a good height for a monadnock. It looks shorter because the meadows were so elevated. I wish my old camera had been better.

I am jumping around. Here are two of the "Wench" as we called her.

Janey milking a goat. Hazen says, "Just get the milk out."

That monster 40 lb. turkey. Don't turn your back on it.

Pictures, at random

2008-10-06T04:47:00.000-07:00

Two studies of Hazen

Janey, Ben, and Greta on Essex Hill Road
Janey's drawing of the farm of the Red Cupola
Kitchen of the house on Essex Hill Road (Furry, get down!)

More coming. (Oh, I am bad at this!)

2008-10-02T16:16:00.000-07:00

The House on Essex Hill Road. (Untidy wood pile.)

2008-10-02T15:55:00.000-07:00

Thank you

2008-10-01T09:01:00.001-07:00

for your comments which I will reply to soon. I'm working on posting some pictures (have to feel my way) as I'm clumsy at this. So, don't leave just yet.

A bit more

2008-09-30T04:58:00.000-07:00

After I moved back to Denver in the early 1980s, I returned to visit Vermont several times, staying with Paula. The last time I went was when Janey was getting a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts at Bennington College. Incidentally, she painted the picture at the top of the blog when we stayed at the farm of the Red Cupola. She was eighteen then and had had no formal art training. Today, she earns her living as an artist. She has one child, a six-year-old girl.

Greta transferred from the school in California to the University of Colorado and obtained a degree in Education. She taught for awhile, then became a potter and had her own gallery. She is currently an art teacher at a Montessori middle school in Golden, CO. Greta and her husband have four children and live in Denver.

On my return to Denver, I was able to buy a small house and find a job. I became a proofreader for a large law firm and read legal documents for errors. When the work grew tedious—as it often did—I returned in spirit to green meadows and deep woods. The habit of looking at things stayed with me for awhile: the way light fell in the windows of my little house, the way trees on the parkways grew, and the people I saw each day on the bus. Sadly, this kind of supernal vision faded away.

I next worked as a technical editor for a company that studied Soviet weaponry and wrote documents about it for our government. The analysts on the staff were former military people who could speak and read Russian. I had to have a secret clearance. Needless to say, if I’d been tortured by the KGB or sent to a gulag, I would not have been able to tell any of our secrets. But since English is English and whatever the subject matter, verbs and nouns have to agree and syntaxes be correct, I was able to do it.

I have not remarried. I have three other grown children besides Greta and Janey, who all live in Denver, seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. I’ve completed some novels which have yet to see the light of publication. One was a cozy mystery set in Vermont. Two years ago I moved to a senior community, the Twilight Zone that inspired my other blog, Code Name Nora.

In January I’ll be 83. Now that A Fresh Start, etc. is finished, I’ll begin some new writing but I don’t know yet what it will be. If it’s blog-worthy, I’ll post it.

Now, for the Vermonters I knew, lived with, and often bedeviled: (Of course, all their names were changed but they were very real.)

Those lovely people Giles and Meg passed on a few years ago. Suki and her husband Jake have died as well. Paula is alive and still giving parties in her beautiful old farmhouse. John Phipps has died; I don’t know about Carla. She’d be about ninety now. I never went back to talk to her; but she must’ve understood why we left her house so abruptly.

I saw Hazen several times. On my last visit to Vermont, he told me he wasn’t farming any more but had a job across the river in New Hampshire, something to do with teaching or counseling young people. He was clean-shaven and had filled out more. He and Nora had had two children. Sadly, later, they were divorced. (Still throwing tantrums?) I don’t know where Nora is now, but I did see her on one of my earlier visits. She was walking along the road with her small boy and I picked her up for she was headed to Paula’s. We sat outdoors on Paula’s patio and talked quite pleasantly.

Hazen was remarried and glad he didn’t have to slop those pigs and milk those goats anymore. He told me that when Greta, Janey, and I lived at the farm of the Red Cupola, he, Jeff, and Nora smoked a lot of homegrown marijuana up at the barn and were often high. I never suspected! (Maybe I’d of joined in.)

If you’ve gone along on this journey with me, many thanks for your company. Especially thanks to Kenju, Beth, Pat Bralley, Zuleme, and Blucamels. I would welcome any comments readers care to make, or if there are questions, I will answer them.

Thanks again for reading,

Kate

P.P.S.

Chimera did make a lovely fire.

I have some pictures which I hope to scan and show here. So you’re not quite done with me yet.

About the people

2008-09-29T04:35:00.000-07:00

There are things about people that cause you, for some mysterious reason, to love them: the sight of Jake, standing on Paula’s dock, casting for trout so she and I could each have one for breakfast. Foolish, drunken Jake, his long, lanky form, his battered old felt hat, his dirty jeans and heavy shirt, his white hair, drooping white mustache, drooping sad blue eyes, lost Jake, old Jake, with a beautiful, exquisitely-crafted fly rod from much better days, casting so delicately, his long, gnarled fingers of his great, big-veined hands caressing the line, casting again and again so gracefully, to hit just the right spot where a fish had jumped. He looked so damn noble doing that, all his imperfections shown like “shook foil,” and my heart in hiding leapt.

And then, there was the morning berrying with Suki. Suddenly, I circled around her, watching her, spying on her because I was almost felled by a pang that this old woman was so unique, and I was shortly to say goodbye to her and go back to the city 2,000 miles away and who knows if I’d ever see her again in this life. It was a hot blue day and we had stumbled upon a large copse of blackberries. She’d brought her over-the-arm basket in which she’d put little plastic berry boxes, the kind you get at the grocery. She held the basket, I just took the little plastic boxes. We picked and picked because the berries were small, the bushes stunted due to lack of recent rain.

Suki was in her eternal blue jeans which she’s not silly enough to keep throwing into the washer because, by damn, they are working clothes and they get a good, stiff layer of dirt on them, a blue turtleneck, sleeves pushed up, her wide leather belt and old tennis shoes. The heat of the day, the sun, and the picking made her fine-bridged nose glisten, her small, cinnamon-colored eyes shadowed. Her all-American, mouse-colored hair as she calls it stuck out from her head in damp, thin wisps. She thought I was picking as single-mindedly as she was but I slacked. Because I was suddenly so filled with love for her, berrying in the sun on a Vermont hillside.

And Paula. Will I ever forget Paula and the two good belly laughs we had together? Paula is so damn social and she has this practiced, little amused sound she makes that I used to think was her laugh. She uses it frequently because she constantly surrounds herself with people. She is gay, she is funny, she is Mr. Hulot. She’s tall, with long legs (quite shapely, actually, without any varicosities even at fifty-nine because she’s never had any children). She wears a pillow of all the good food she serves around her middle like a fake Santa. She’s very far-sighed and takes her glasses off to read, holding whatever it, a map, the bottom of an antique store teacup, up to her nose. She has blue eyes, old blonde hair shot with grey, uneven teeth, and a great manner with everyone. So great, I suspected, after awhile, it might be a façade. Because as people-loving apparently as she is, she was also reserved, distant. She constantly plied me with subtle questions but when I turned the tables, especially asking her—because it was in context, I’d worked the talk around that way—about the man shed loved in Ireland years ago, named Seamus, she said, “It’s ten o’clock, time to go to bed.”

The first belly laugh came when we found an old jar in an antique store. It was square with a glass top, closed by wires. The brand name on it was ‘Queen.’ She saw it first and pointed it out to me. She said I should take it back to the grocery store in Denver I’d told her about that everyone calls ‘Queen Soopers’ (instead of King Soopers) because so many gay men shop there. We laughed. And then both looked at the jar. Every time we saw something else written on it, we laughed harder because everything fit into the cause of our laughter. ‘Wide-mouthed,’ she read; ‘improved’, I read; ‘tight-fitting.’ Well, we were like girls in church, the proprietor of the antique store must have wondered at us.

The next laugh came soon after, in one of our late evening conversations. I told her about living at the Phipps, the part I’d never told anyone, about finding Carla’s vibrator and not knowing what it was at first. I said I thought it was a new kind of flashlight. Paul doubled up and of course I went on, embellishing, telling how it suddenly started gyrating as I held it and how it was shaped. During this she’d had to get up for a match, and walking her Mr. Hulot gait, she bent and held her pillow tummy as it shook with laughter. I was laughing just as hard and that kind of total laughter is rare for me. I just loved Paula then.

Next: a bit more

Afterwords

2008-09-26T04:40:00.000-07:00

The lovely and the beautiful other!

I awoke at four this morning. And went over many things. Loss of him and the necessity to see and accept reality. The lovely “other.” The other is all outside one’s center. The nonsubjective, the unchanging third-person reality of life. The background, the scenework, the simple ordinary—and for this reason—beautiful, stuff of life; outside ourselves, our thoughts and feelings which are the stuff of dreams, imagination, unreality. This has its value, of course, in many ways, chiefly because it can lead us out of the labyrinth, to an appreciation of the other. What is real and eternal, what doesn’t change with our shifting thoughts, which is no chimera.

I’ve felt this way for days about the other but didn’t until this morning connect it with my inward life, the one of impossible dreams and hopes and visions—which I clung to so desperately because they’re so beguiling. And yet, the other is so much more beautiful. We can look at the other and truly see it where we can’t at the chimera, for it constantly changes before our eyes and we are never sure of what it is. It has true sides but also untrue sides. The other is looking at the back of a bathroom door when one is sitting too tense and seeing a green towel, a blue washcloth, a white hand towel with green letters, Holiday Inn, against the white door, and the beauty of these simple things together, their colors, lifting one out of the center, assuring one there is something else that can be loved. The order of the world, perhaps.

I have lived so long in a world of unreality and dreams. To give up the center is hard for I cling to it because in a way it’s heartbreakingly lovely. But that’s it—it’s heartbreaking because it’s not true. The other is lovely because it’s real. Besides, it’s interesting. It’s enough to fill a heart and mind. And it has no boundaries, it’s infinite. One could never know and see everything about the other. It’s just opening our eyes and lifting them up from ourselves and stopping that machine inside and looking about at everything there is to see.

Although it’s hard to see the connection now, it’s to relax and forgive oneself. For everything that bothers one is in the past and if you’re in tune with the other you’re not back there.

Chimera: an impossible or foolish fancy.

Denver, 1984

Next: about the people

No title

2008-09-25T05:06:00.000-07:00

It’s 8:30 p.m. but I feel like writing. This morning I worked on my novel and ice skated on the pond. Bert Frothingham, Maxwell Perkin’s daughter, who offered to read my novel, called in the afternoon to say she’d read a bit into Part II but decided it was too personal and she wouldn’t read any more.

I am relieved. I feel like an immense weight has been lifted off me. Perhaps now I can write other things. Maybe I should start right away, to fill the void the other leaves. Perhaps tomorrow, I’ll begin.

The End

Next: Afterwords

Next to the next

2008-09-24T05:27:00.000-07:00

I awoke early and didn’t fall back to sleep until about 5:30 and woke again at 6:30. I had painful thoughts about my life but prayed for peace and now feel some of that. I also feel insightful about happiness—that it is nothing more than an attitude. One is happy because one feels and thinks and decides, although not so consciously, one is. It’s a mixture of confidence and faith, hope, love. Of course, by evening time I could change my mind.

Today, I’ll clean my room and organize my writing area. I’ll also take a walk, go to the general store and the P.O. Giles is away, to Aspen, of all places, to attend a humanistic-type seminar, and Meg came for dinner last night. Greta made vegetarian spaghetti.

I love being in a house of my own, being my own mistress. I want to savor every moment because time goes rushing by. My life here in this old farmhouse in Vermont will last until June. The elements of it are winter and spring, walking, survival, and just a few outside interests. It is a peace and freedom I used to dream of, but I’m in danger of spoiling it because I yearn for other things, like the city and people. I agonize over all the old questions of where I should be, and what doing, and money.

“To struggle is to live and the fiercer the struggle, the intenser the life.” Tolstoy, I think.

Bert Frothingham, daughter of famed editor Maxwell Perkins, living in Woodfield in a beautiful, big old house, has read Part I of my novel and said to me, “It is beautifully written and moving. Surely you can do something with it.”

Her opinion has given me a creative upheaval in my brain, overnight, so that since talking to her I haven't been able to sleep. I want to rewrite this story, to make it a true novel. I feel it stirring with me, all those people and the happenings I’ve wanted to write about.

I want to write each morning for at least an hour and by the end of five or six months be finished. My novel will be my first effort in the morning when I feel so full of life and joy. (Although Greta, who’s been reading health books, has told me that my euphoria in the morning is only my blood sugar levels peaking.)

It’s a grey day, spitting snow. Pretty soon I’m going to put a chicken in to roast and go stack firewood.

Grave thoughts

2008-09-23T04:27:00.000-07:00

It was so beautiful. I wouldn’t mind a final resting place like this. Perhaps, some 150 or 200 years ago, the people who lived in this narrow valley, maybe one of the more thoughtful among them, was out on a walk or to visit between far-spaced houses, and stopped in this glade and saw how the sun fell, making shadows on the snow and how, from this small piece of ground, one could see, above the trees on the other side of the road, a glimpse of the mountain. There had to be some reason for locating a burial ground where it was and, obviously, zoning requirements were not a consideration. No condominiums here, no traffic, fast food franchises, office parks, or big, expensive new homes contesting for the land. So, in all this wilderness, the reason must have been beauty.

Well-done, I’d say, if a mite lonely. But then, the others were around in their pine boxes six feet under (probably not that deep in the flinty ground). And in the winter time there’d be no digging because the ground would be too hard. People must die in January as well as in June. It said right here on the granite marker, “Janet, wife of Joachim, died Jan. 6, 1811.” I knew what was done. The stone house on the Strington Road by our late, unlamented landlord, was built to be a mausoleum. Imagine consigning a loved one to winter above ground in that dark, dank place. And Spring, a time of rebirth and beauty, would bring also the reminder, “Got to put Pa away soon’s the ground thaws.”

I looked everywhere around to take in as much as my senses could absorb, what I could see in the moment, and by that other part of the mind, the imagination, unlimited, which saw in instant flashes those names warm and breathing, living, loving, mixed in with granite engraved, arching black limbs of sheltering trees through which golden light fell up the purest and softest blanket the dead could ever have, this gentle snow, not ice in here so protected, but like eiderdown. The play of light and shadows mesmerized me.

I was inconsolably sad but joyful. And I tried to see things. What should I do about, for example, that book that had dominated my thinking for so long? Was anything worth agonizing so over? Was this why I came to Vermont? Was this the whole purpose of my being in this tiny graveyard, on this country road, on this particular winter day? Did I have some kinship with Selene Hamell, who, according to her tombstone, died at twenty-one. A maiden cut off at her blush, full of dreams…

Fey me!

A few days later I was moved to go to Woodfield and knock on the impressive door of a lady whom I could, if I presumed upon a short acquaintance, call friend. She opened it, with the kindest, warmest smile.

“Kate, come in!”

Next: next to the next

Delving into those soggy pages

2008-09-22T04:47:00.000-07:00

“If I reach out my hand and touch your face, the dear corner of it, my hand curving, the tips of my fingers, warm I hope, barely touching it, and my palm, not rough or dry I hope, fitting for a moment against that place on your face; if my hand, which is in my lap now, should do that, I wonder what I would see in your eyes?”

I had told of a foolish love, loving someone who had not felt the same way about me, for a long time, thirteen years, to be exact. I had met him—and his wife—when I was thirty-one, very unhappy in my marriage, with four small children whom I adored. We met at one of those awful parties we went to once or twice a week it seemed, in the era someone called “our party years.” It was late 1950s, when we were young, the men getting established in careers, the women staying home and having babies. Awful because I never felt at ease with the people.

They were my husband’s friends, mostly old Denver money, and transplants from eastern Ivy League colleges come to Colorado after the war for the skiing. His family had once been wealthy but lost their money during the depression. They didn’t lose their social standing, however, so he and I hob-nobbed with the young elite of Denver. There was nothing worse than to have the trappings of wealth without the actual money in the bank.

So, I met this man. He was of the same background as the others, yet very different. His wife and I became friends first, and the four of us did a lot of things together. I fell head over heels, but true to my nature, kept it to myself, except for pouring it all out into my diary. Fantasies, pretend letters, declarations, guilt feelings, the whole bit. I regularly burnt pages in the fireplace so my family wouldn’t find them. Then I began to fictionalize to disguise things and soon enough, decided I could have a novel on my hands. Something about getting it published promised closure.

This couple had a condominium at Vail. My husband and I were frequent weekend guests. At just about the end of the thirteen years, we were there.

Remember, some of these things have been fictionalized.

I had drunk a little too much. Because I told Peter, I’ll call him, before the fire, after the others had gone to bed, of my feelings. We could hear the wife’s bath water run upstairs. He was kind; even tender. And, I suppose, because of the setting and the mood, and the brandy, he kissed me. Gently and then not so gently. I could have had him then, right on the floor before the fireplace but even with alcohol, could not let myself go. Besides, I felt I had thrown myself at him and he was responding out of pity. The next day we skied together, going off by ourselves, on the rim of a large, back bowl. He was a strong and daring skier. We went under some yellow nylon rope that had a small sign hanging to it, “Restricted Area, Keep Off.”

“Come on,” he said, “it will be all right.” We stood close together on our skis, looking down into the immense bowl upon whose edges we could see the ant-like figures of the rest of our party, his wife, my husband, and some others. He said something to me I have never been able to figure out, or to forget. “Everything is changed now.” He bent over and kissed me.

All I could say back was, “What if someone down below has binoculars?” But I was thinking, but everything will stay the same.

But of course, I didn’t care. I felt more daring and alive than I’d felt in a very long time. And off he went, skiing down the uncut powder, pausing to look back at me, smiling. I quickly pushed off to follow in his tracks.

We set off a minor avalanche. He was covered; I, somehow, miraculously, stayed on the crest of it. It took awhile to get him out. While his wife, rigid-faced, held my hand. And my husband kept kissing me, tears in his eyes.

And, so, I’d written about all these things, about my fantasies I’d had in those years, and there were also the random writings to my psychiatrist, just the way they’d be if on one visit you’d talk of this in a rush and the next time, of something far back in childhood.

But no one, not even Dr. Carlyle, had ever read the whole of it. Now, alone in the house with Greta, I was torn with the idea of taking my daughter into my confidence. Lord knows, all those years, my children must have suspected something was going on with me.

On a walk I said to her, “I’ve got to decide about this book. It’s driving me crazy and until I decide I can’t write anything else.”

“Well, Kate, only you can do that.”

Silence a few paces while I struggled with indecision. “I’m about to heat my room with it.”

“You wouldn’t! After you’ve worked so hard?”

“You know it’s very personal.”

“A lot of novels are.”

“You wouldn’t want to read it?”

“I will if you’re sure you want me to.”

We were at the cemetery.

“I’m going to stop here,” I said. “Are you going on?”

Greta nodded, in her black and white wool hat from Nifty Sales, her cheeks red, her breath showing on the frigid air.

“That’s it, I’m not sure.”

Greta smiled, that curved corner, closed-lip smile of rue, her eyes saying, “You’re in a dilemma, then.”

She went on up the icy hill and I went over the stile into the cemetery. Perhaps Abigail, Nathan, Selena, Caleb and the Coulette family could advise. I went to the back of the small plot, brushed some soft snow off the stone wall, and sat down.

Next: grave thoughts

More elementals of existence

2008-09-19T04:34:00.000-07:00

At first, everyone was good about the stoves. Nick, being an almost mountain man, loaded up the big stove in the kitchen with wood at night and twirled the round damper so it drew only a little and all but closed the damper in the pipe. But when he wasn’t around, I took to tending it and then, like all stove keepers become, I grew proprietary about the stoves and did not trust anyone else as having quite the touch I had. However, they could bring in wood. I put a note on the shed door leading into the kitchen, “If you come in bring wood.” The UPS man in December brought some in.

The stove in my room had a respiratory problem, like apnea; it often expired during the night, probably something to do with its long, thin flue through the roof. So when I rolled out from under the controlled environment of my electric blanket, I quickly put on not only long underwear and socks and bathrobe and cardigan, but also a wool stocking cap. The first time Nick saw me in this morning attire, he was too polite to say anything. The temperature on the thermometer mounted outside the kitchen window read thirty-five below zero!

The big stove in the kitchen made it through the night. With a poker, I would uncover the glowing cherries and toss in some wood, close the door and twirl the dampers wide open. There would come that sudden, satisfying “whoosh” as it caught and the fire roared up the pipe. Then I’d damp it down again and make my coffee. There were a few other little details the first person up in the morning had to attend to. Before I could go back to my shrine, my desk, I had to take care of the animals.

They dogged my cold heels, either wanting to be fed, go out, or come back in. Furry would leave his food, intending to go back to it, but Henna would have it down and send the bowl spinning. (I learned to put it up on a shelf.) I would curse them both and throw them out but I hovered around the door, having heard tales of feral cats who loved to eat house pets. One of Henna’s less endearing traits was rolling in carrion, before everything was frozen. When she came in, smelling horribly, she would lie on Nick’s bed or on the rag rug by the stove. She had to be taken to the pond and something thrown in for her to retrieve, several times. Finally, when all chores were done in the morning to sustain the life of our little house, I went to my desk with my coffee.

And yet, I was still unable to write except in my journal. My book was still like a boil with me. I knew I had to decide something about it. It was a living presence in its box on the shelf of my closet. The house had a fireplace and two wood stoves and both of those were roaring now. Nick had left and Greta was up in her room, strumming her guitar, sitting over the cut-out square in the kitchen ceiling where the heat wafted up. I smoothed out the covers on the football-field-sized bed. I had not looked at my book since it came back from the publishers. I got on the bed and opened the box that contained my nascent novel, Chimera.

Next: delving into those soggy pages

Our homesteading efforts and amusements

2008-09-18T04:44:00.000-07:00

When the garden was in imminent danger of frost and there were still some vegetables on the plants we said to one another, “Why don’t we stick them in the freezer?” The mud room, next to the shed, had an old fashioned coffin-type freezer Peggy Thurston had left full of chicken necks and gizzards. We filled freezer bags with Brussels sprouts. When we took them out to use, they were discolored and mushy. We should’ve known we had to blanch them first.

There was an awful smell in the mud room.

“Rotten vegetables shouldn’t smell that bad,” I said. “It’s like something crawled in and died.” We weren’t too upset by the odor at first because the kitchen walls smelled bad also, like broccoli cooking. “Why, do you suppose,” I asked Nick.

“Probably, because through the years, mice have died in there.”

“Oh, gross,” Greta said.

The mud room became intolerable. Besides the freezer, there was a tool closet. I said, “The time is long past to investigate where that godawful smell is coming from. Help me.”

There was nothing in the tool closet. We both knew it came from the freezer. We just didn’t want to find out. Nick wasn’t there when we needed him.

“Let’s move it a little away from the wall.” We heaved and shoved and managed to, a few inches.

“It’s back there, Mom,” Greta whined. “I can’t look.”

I did, with a flashlight. It looked like a football. It was a very bloated rat. “Gross!” I said. With a broomstick I steeled myself, with every sense that could be, averted, to remove it, into a plastic trash bag. “I’m not cut out for this,” I whined.

We were kind of lazy in our habits. Our routine was: write (and play the guitar), read, walk, have lunch, nap, maybe walk again to the dairy farmer’s to get milk, or ice skate on the pond once it froze, cook dinner, and while doing dishes, watch “All in the Family” reruns. We sang the theme song, marching round the table. Also, prepare the living room for our evening in there. Nick generally was out.

Preparing the living room took some doing because we kept it and every other room we didn’t use shut off during the day to isolate the bone-numbing cold that seeped in through the foundations of the house. We laid a fire in the fireplace. When it was crackling merrily, we pulled chairs as close to it as we could without scorching the upholstery. We wrapped ourselves in heavy Army type woolen blankets and installed ourselves in our chairs with our water glasses or decaf, our ashtrays, our cigarettes, our reading materials. War and Peace lasted Greta her whole stay in the house. I read Virginia Wolff. Greta lived her novel. She wouldn’t let me discuss it with her for fear I’d give her a hint as to what, for example, happened to Natasha and Prince Andre’s great romance. When he died, Greta was in mourning for days.

We sat thus for hours by the fire, almost into it, until one or the other of us would say, “Do you want it now?”

“Will you make it?”

We had discovered by the fireplace an old-fashioned popcorn maker, a square wire basket with a hinged lid and long handle. It took some doing to pop corn without grease. We scorched it and then went back to our old method, in a heavy pan with a heavy lid, so that the corn went “boop-boop-boop.”

Next: more elementals of existence

Exploring and lazing and a few long thoughts

2008-09-17T04:30:00.000-07:00

To me, no place in Vermont where I stayed had the walks or the views to equal that first one which encompassed the Gates of Heaven and Don’t Look Back Yet Hill. But Greta walked from our new house and came back to report there were some high open meadows reached by a trail leading up the hill from the pond. Also, she discovered a small, hidden graveyard further on, on the road, hidden because it was slightly elevated and screened by trees. It you didn’t know it was there, you’d pass right by it. Rather than the meadows, which were nice enough, the graveyard became my place to go, which sounds mournful. Sometimes I felt that way but more often felt a sense of peace there. I climbed the few steps up to it, went to the back of it and sat on a stone wall in a way that let me see the angles of the tilted granite slabs just so, have the light strike just so between the trees, and I’d think about some of the souls who had their final resting place there.

In the height of autumn, the road became even more magical, the trees arching over it, dropping their red, russet and gold leaves, casting a rich, golden glow. It was, as Greta and I told each other, “heartbreakingly beautiful.” We were both just a little melancholy.

We foraged for stunted, misshapen apples and firewood along narrow, untrammeled lanes, of which there was a honeycomb. We filled up the trunk of the car with fallen wood for kindling and spoke of the ginseng we’d harvest when the time was ripe. Our lives were as simple as could be. We seldom saw the friends I’d made on the other side of the hill, Suki, Sara Fowler, nor even Meg and Giles. Paula, of course, had gone back to New York, for she was a summer person.

We let ourselves be closed in by the winter. Nick was often away at night to a class he took or at his girl friend’s. Our daily life became elemental, especially when the cold set in, in earnest, and snow and ice encased the land. Unlike the previous winter, this one was going to be bitter. We walked, read, wrote, slept, cooked and cleaned and tended the stoves. A woodsman on the road sold us seven cords of wood. He and his wife delivered it in successive truck loads and split it in our yard. We didn’t pay for stacking, so as the wood was split, it was pitched in great piles about the house. Then it rained, that icy New England rain that glazes everything solidly and so we didn’t get it stacked neatly like good homesteaders. The disarray of the wood around the house, frozen in place, was a constant reminder to us of our ineptness. Something formed in our minds—an idea about something—we called it the “Vermont Ethos.” It came to exemplify how we were beginning to feel.

Nick, our housemate, had adopted the Ethos and loved it. On the weekends, after commuting all week in his VW bug in sleet and storm to Hanover, did he rest? No, with companions as hairy as himself, who came by in their 4-wheel drive vehicles, he went ice climbing!

Suki and Jake, adopted Vermonters from the southwest, adored the Vermont Ethos because it let them legitimately be like squirrels, storing up their provender against a long, hard season that surely came. They loved gleaming glass jars full of the produce of their garden, the fruit of their aching backs. Jake was in his element working on his wood pile, all day long, sawing pieces the size of telephone poles, splitting, adzing, stacking. They also loved to maintain wood fires in stoves, which I soon learned was not so “direct” as I’d imagined.

The Cloughs struggled, perhaps not by choice, but because they had to, yet they were intensely proud of their struggle and looked with scorn upon soft city people.

Sarah, in her seven-league boots, was a part of the Vermont Ethos with her austere unrighteousness of character.

The Parrishes? I wasn’t quite sure. They had enough built-in money they didn’t have to struggle all that much, but they devised small ways to.

Paula loved to party. Perhaps that was her rigor.

As Greta said, “No one jives here.”

I knitted my brow at this.

“You know, like in California. For one thing, there aren’t any black people here.”

“They don’t like the cold.”

“No one is mellow and laid back.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about what we were discussing. It was the life I had wanted, depicted in all those magazines I’d sent away for in Denver.

Next: our homesteading efforts

Fate grins broadly upon us

2008-09-16T05:01:00.000-07:00

And that is how Greta and I finally got our own house in Vermont, over a chance encounter knee-deep in what we hoped was ginseng. The rent was $350 a month, too much for us by ourselves, and despite dispelling Peggy Thurston’s assumption I was a wealthy divorcee, I was able to talk them into our getting a housemate to share it with us. The house had four bedrooms, one upstairs under the dormers, which Greta instantly appropriated, two medium-sized ones off the kitchen, and, at the rear of the house, in an ell, was an enormous master suite with its own wood stove, a blue enameled one, king-sized bed, desk, bookcases, even, a chaise lounge. I could instantly picture myself happily ensconced there for the winter, writing, reading, toasting my feet at last on the “direct heat” I’d craved since knowing what it was.

There was also a large wood burning stove in the kitchen and a stone fireplace in the living room that backed up to the kitchen. In answer to my question “Would it be possible to heat entirely by wood?” the Thurstons said it was a lot of work, but yes. That would save using heating oil in the tank downcellar.

The furniture was old, not as charming as I’d seen elsewhere but acceptable, and many touches for comfort: plenty of sheets, blankets, towels, dishes, pots and pans, a small beautiful pond in back, a barn in which I could put my car, the shed to store wood, and, best of all, a vegetable garden teeming with a late September harvest.

It seemed too good to be true. We were ecstatic driving back to the Cloughs that afternoon.

“If we hadn’t stopped to look at the ginseng,” I said.

“Hey—the ginseng,” Greta exclaimed. “I’d totally forgotten. We can harvest that, too. Kate, we are in business!”

“Do you suppose we can find a decent housemate?”

“Oh, sure,” Greta was confident. “Let’s put an ad in the paper right away.”

Our ad seeking a housemate, “employed male or female” drew a number of responses: several young men who were intrigued, I could tell, by the idea of living with Greta, but wary of me. One became so insistent that he called morning and evening to ask if we’d made our decision. But he was, as Greta heartlessly termed him, “lost.” I agreed. We wanted no problems in this house, only peace with someone normal. Another sent us a “friendship” card upon which he’d written an earnest plea we’d choose him. I didn’t say anything but waited for Greta’s reaction.

“He’s blown it, poor guy.”

A battered Oldsmobile with tail fins lurched into the Cloughs’ farmyard and a battered-looking female lurched out. She was looking for a place to rent, too, but we could smell whiskey on her breath.

“Are there no normal people around?” Greta lamented. And then nice, normal Nick called and we snapped him up.

We liked that he had a quiet demeanor and seem country-wise and interesting. He was from upstate New York and had come to Vermont a few years ago in search of a simpler life. He was thin, wiry, had a curly black beard and semi-long brown hair; was an architectural draftsman at Hanover and brought with him to the house his female golden retriever, Henna. “I hope the Thurstons won’t mind,” he said.

They had kept dogs so I felt they wouldn’t, besides they knew we had our cat. We walked about indoors and out, appreciating the house. Nick and Greta and Henna went swimming in the pond as it was still warm enough in late September. Nick took one of the bedrooms off the kitchen and said, “Sometimes, Trudy will stay over.”

Fine. Janey would come, too, on break from Barnard College.

Nick had lived with Trudy and indicated he was moving to the farmhouse to ease a little out of the situation. We all had our reasons for being there. Greta said all she wanted to do was walk, sleep and read before she went back to school in January.

I was very happy as well. I welcomed being in the farmhouse off a lonely country road so I could sort out what exactly I was doing with myself, my life, all those grand ideas I’d come to Vermont with, and my writing. I thanked the fates for affording me this snug harbor to psychologically retrofit. I moved meticulously into my suite in the ell, installing my papers in the big desk, which sat against the wall by the stove, next to a bookcase. My diary keeping had all but trickled off in the last few months, but I began now to make some entries:

“My bed is as large as a football field and as hard. My head is throbbing for I’ve caught cold from Greta. All my belongings are around me in boxes. I’m going to spend as much time as is necessary to get well-organized because I want order in my life now. I want to be quiet in this house, walk a lot and get myself in good shape mentally and emotionally. I can hardly wait to explore.”

Next: exploring and lazing and a few long thoughts

The house on Essex Hill Road

2008-09-15T04:43:00.000-07:00

One day, Greta and I drove to Woodstock on the Essex Hill Road. The leaves were just beginning to change. We passed a dairy farmer’s place and entered one of the more shady, closed-in sections of the winding, narrow road, so rutted and pitching in places that you had to go slowly and watch for cars coming toward you—perhaps one an hour—when Greta said, “Kate, slow down a minute. Stop, will you?”

“What do you see?” I asked, for she was looking at something on her side of the road.

“There, those plants.”

I looked too, having stopped the car in the middle of the roadway. “Hey, that does look a little like it.”

Greta was out of the car and went a little way into the woods to investigate. The foliage of the trees was dense, letting only shafts of light penetrate into the leafy glades. Greta was standing in the midst of some undergrowth that had distinctively shaped leaves. “It’s ginseng, I’m sure of it.”

I went to see, crouching down on my knees. “It sure could be. We should get that book from the library.”

“If it is—“

“We’ll out-Nora the wench. Oh, oh, I’d better move the car.”

The rarity had happened; a traveler from the other direction had stopped nose to nose with my car. He was in a red Volvo, one of those old, classic ones with the bump on the hood.

“Good morning,” he said. He was a middle-aged man in hat and glasses and looked at me as if thinking he must know me.

“That’s a great car,” I said.

“Thanks. It’s on its third lifetime, I think. Are you from around here?”

“From Creston.”

Greta had come up, too, and smiled at the man.

“Do you live on this road?” I asked.

“Yes, we do, we’ve got a place about a mile further back. We’re just summer folks.”

“It’s a beautiful spot. I envy you.”

He nodded. “My name is Thurston. Russell Thurston. You’ve probably seen it on the mailbox.”

I introduced myself and Greta.

Greta said, “Would you happen to know of any place to rent around here?”

“What are you looking for?”

We told him.

“My wife might,” he said. “Why don’t we just go back and talk to her.”

The house we followed Thurston to, after he managed to maneuver the red Volvo around, was a small farmhouse, red with white shutters, close by the road but not too close. It looked good to us.

Inside, in the kitchen, reached by going through the shed, we were introduced to Peggy Thurston, who was defrosting the refrigerator. A thicket of glass jars, plastic containers and assorted bottles was on the table in the center of the room. Greta shot me a glance, doubtless remembering what I’d said about other people’s iceboxes.

“I have two ladies here who are looking for a place to rent—for how long? Through the winter at least? I told them you might know of a place.”

“Well, let me put the kettle on and we can talk about it,” Peggy Thurston said.

Next: fate grins broadly upon us

What are we going to do?

2008-09-12T04:39:00.000-07:00

We made our trip, had a good time in Newport with Ben and Molly sailing, drove to New York along the coast, a longer distance than I thought it would be, settled Janey into her dormitory room at Barnard, met her roommate, a girl from Beverly Hills whom Janey looked a little askance at because she was wearing leg weights, walked along New York city streets in awe and trepidation, had lunch, and then Greta and I drove back the long haul to Vermont.

All we thought about now was getting our own place. When Greta left, after Christmas, I would probably have to get a job, in Woodstock or White River Junction or Hanover, about the only fair-sized places around to work as a secretary. A secretary? Commuting up to twenty miles each way in all sorts of weather? My spirit shriveled at the thought of it. What had happened to my Secret Weapon?

My novel had been finished before the girls came, before I moved to the Phipps. I’d taken it, in a stout cardboard box, down to the Creston post office and mailed it away, with a prayer and a great feeling of relief, to a New York publisher. “There, I’m rid of it.”

I did feel that way, because it was one of those “have-to-do books, written as Virginia Wolff said, “for expression, not for art.” It came back to me, with a small card of rejection, in about three weeks. I wrapped it with my coats and put it up in the Cloughs’ shed.

I was easily crushed over this book because it was my child, delivered after agonizing labor. I loved it but it was flawed. I knew it was too subjective; I could hardly bear to even work on it. I shuddered just to look at its pages randomly. So how could I promote something that filled me with such dread? I decided writing about oneself was all right to do, it helped exorcise whatever needed to be gotten rid of, but as far as publishing those overheated and extravagantly-stated emotions, well, who would want to read such a book? No one had read mine. I was convinced the rejecting publisher, in the person of a Radcliff or Bennington College English major with the title of Junior Editor, had deigned to glance at only the first few pages.

“Not our cup of tea.”

Perhaps that bothered me the most. When it came right down to it, expressing overriding emotion on a page for someone who had no one else to express it to, was, for some incalculable reason, filled with such pain, ached with such pain, pain that would not be over until-- because there it was; expressed, yet not. Blossoms born to bloom unseen. Hard, swollen buds caught under the breastbone.

Sooner or later I knew I’d have to settle the question of the physical existence of my poor, defused Secret Weapon. It was not the sort of thing one wants permanently in one’s sock drawer. “I’ll think about it tomorrow.” And it was almost tomorrow now.

The demands of everyday existence were much easier to struggle with. We were living on sufferance at the farm. It was time for fate again to take a hand in my affairs in Vermont.

Next: the house on Essex Hill Road

Getting through the evening

2008-09-11T04:38:00.000-07:00

I kept a bottle of bourbon in my room. I went into the kitchen, dim in the twilight because no lights were on, and got a glass with ice and water and went back and sipped my drink alone, sitting on my bed, still uneasy. I heard the new lady come down. I wondered what she’d do with herself. Imagine wandering around in a strange, empty farmhouse. I should be kind and go out and talk to her but I didn’t feel like it. Greta came and we decided we would.

She was out on the side porch. She was a slight, pale, plain-looking girl with long brown hair, no makeup, and glasses. She’d changed from a dress into some jeans, clean and pressed-looking, with mid-heel shoes like out of a Sears catalog. She was reading a paperback book and looked up matter-of-factly, totally unaware of the explosive situation she was in, in fact, had touched off.

“Hi,” we said, and introduced ourselves.

“I’m Alice Foster,” the girl said.

We sat down. What to talk about? My questions.

“Here for a little visit?” Obviously.

“For the weekend.” It will be a long one.

“I’m interviewing for a job at the Creston grade school.”

“Oh, you’re a teacher.” Of course, she looked exactly like the stereotypical one.

“Where from?”

“New York.” A city girl.

Finally, about eight, we all sat down at table. The girls made salad, Nora fixed ratatouille, which we’d had fifty times before. Jeff gave us knowing looks, but said nothing. He and Hazen and Nora talked to Alice, we talked to each other. We did the dishes and Nora, the schoolmarm and the men went up to the barn. We did dishes for over an hour, me washing, the girls drying.

“I have washed a million dishes since I came to Vermont,” I said. “I miss my dishwasher.”

“I miss Denver,” Greta said.

I didn’t even answer. Then I said, “We’ve got to find another place, soon.”

“I know.”

“I guess I really blew it here.”

“No, you didn’t,” Greta said.

“Don’t torment yourself,” young Janey said, in her wisdom. “Who could get along with Nora?”

I felt pretty wretched. A real heavy. How different it was all going to be. If I had been able, back in Denver last year, to have envisioned living with a young, struggling Vermont farm couple, I could imagine my naïve rhapsodizing. I would love them and they would inevitably come to love me, for who can resist-- We would have entered deeply into each other’s lives. Well, we got as far as the vestibule, I’d say, and peered in. What a fool I had been, to imagine I would be any different in a new place than I had been in the old, and that I would understand people any better. I felt low-down, depressed.

“You know, just because it’s beautiful in Vermont, Kate, doesn’t mean that, well, people are going to be any nobler,” Janey offered. I felt, maybe, I should include myself in that judgment.

Next: what are we going to do?

Tense, tense

2008-09-10T05:01:00.000-07:00

I went downstairs. No one was around. It was sometimes worse to have quiet. I wondered where Nora was. I went around the empty house looking out the windows. I felt uneasy but not guilty. Nora had deserved telling off. She was a thoroughgoing wench. As the girls said. But now what? It was the uncertainty that was hard to bear. And what about the stranger who’d precipitated our long-brewing rupture—was she coming back? Then I heard unmistakable footsteps. On the side porch. I just had time to duck into my bedroom and draw the door closed. The quick steps went overhead, into Nora and Hazen’s bedroom. Very rapid, very heavy. Then Taj set up a barking. The steps stopped to listen. Then they glided down.

Feeling as furtive as I acted, I cracked my bedroom door open. I crept into the dining room to look out the window. The cab was there in the yard again, the woman had her bags, Nora, smiling, was greeting her. Now they were coming into the house. I scooted back into my room and closed the door. They went upstairs, talking. Nora’s voice sounded normal, pleasant. So that was it, Nora had quickly straightened her own bedroom for the guest, a paying one, of course. Where would she and Hazen sleep? Up in the barn with the cows?

Nora came down, the woman, who had looked to be in her late twenties, stayed up. When I heard nothing further from any part of the downstairs, I reconnoitered the house. Nora was nowhere to be seen again. And it was about six. No dinner preparations were in sight. Well, whenever and whatever it was, would be one jolly meal. Oh—there was Jeff’s truck. Where was he? Up in the barn with Hazen? The three of them huddled?

I went upstairs to confer with the girls, glancing into the stranger’s room. She was sitting in a rocker, looking through a folder, reading. She looked up, we nodded at each other politely.

Janey was still struggling with her belongings and Greta was reading on her bed. I sat down on the foot of it.

“I wonder if we ought to take a powder tonight,” I said.

“You and your quaint terms. ‘Take a powder.’ You mean, like arsenic?”

“Haven’t you ever heard that? The young are hopelessly, culturally deprived. It means vamoose, scrambola, clear out. Go down to the pub for dinner instead of stay here. It’s going to be tense.”

“Oh, I don’t think we have to do that. Besides, I don’t want to miss it.” And Greta smiled a little wickedly.

“There is no one downstairs, although Jeff’s home.”

Greta shrugged. “Who knows? Except, I’m starving. I hope we have dinner soon.”

“What I need is a drink. I’m going to fix myself one. Do you girls want to join me in my room?”

“I want to finish a little more,” Janey said.

“I’ll be down in a few minutes,” Greta said.

Next: getting through the evening

A stranger comes

2008-09-09T04:31:00.000-07:00

I went beside Greta to see, suddenly feeling like a character in a Gothic novel, peering out from a turreted window of a castle onto the keep below. Nora, who had eyes and ears of a country woman and her acute territorial sense—besides, Taj was barking at the strange apparition of the old green and white taxi from Woodfield—came from the barn with her quick steps. From the taxi alighted a young woman and she and Nora spoke. We watched furtively, wondering what was going on. After a few minutes, the woman got back in the taxi and it crunched out of the gravel, and we heard the screen door slam which meant Nora had come into the kitchen. Then she came upstairs, as we listened to her treads. She came to the door of Janey’s room, obviously to speak to us. She had on her face her shy, little girl look which we knew now was only a guise.

“We’re having someone the general store sent up to spend the weekend. Janey, I’ve rented your room to her.”

It took a moment for that to sink in to us.

Janey docilely said, “It’s kind of a mess.”

Nora said, “She won’t be back for about an hour because she had to go to Woodfield to get her bags.”

“Why, you mean—“ I was suddenly very angry but had trouble gathering my wits. “Why—why didn’t you rent her Ned’s room instead of putting Janey out?” It was Friday and Ned always went home for the weekend.

Nora, even now leaving the doorway, replied, “Ned’s room is always a mess and I don’t have time to clean it up.”

I was swept away by a red fog in my brain. I went, moving quicker than I usually did, over to Nora’s evanescent presence in the doorway. Damn, she was like a snake in her movements. But something Nora saw about me stopped her cold. In the split instant before I spoke I noticed something about Nora’s face. Expectant. Like an enemy’s in battle who sees you raise an axe above his head.

“It wasn’t right for you to rent Janey’s room without asking her. It would’ve been as easy to clean up Ned’s. Why, look at the mess she’s in! She’s packing for school.”

Nora said nothing but her green eyes flicked.

“God, you are the biggest bitch I’ve ever known!”

It was as though I had slapped Nora across the face. It jerked my soft girls up rigid. Nora’s face absorbed the blow but it was a blow she felt. I continued, for it just poured out of me like from behind a floodgate.

“I’m sick of the way you have been with us, your damn moods and making noise and slamming dishes around and throwing around the vacuum cleaner right under our feet, being so damn rude and bitching all the time, we never know what in the hell’s the matter with you, whether you’re mad at us or Hazen or what in the shit—“

I saw moisture come to Nora’s ice-cold green eyes and her chin, that small, well-formed stubborn chin, quiver, and another part of my brain, sitting quietly in a back room watching, said, “Good.”

Then Nora turned on her heel and left the room. She ran down the stairs and out the house. The screen door slammed. We went to the window. But we didn’t see her go up to the barn.

The girls looked at me. I was scowling terribly and shaking a little and breathing hard.

Janey let out her breath in a rush, half loud laugh, half nerves. “Oh! Great! I’m glad you told the wench off.”

Greta was quieter. “Yes, good for you, Mom. She deserved it. But now—“

I could hardly speak. I was madder than hell, still, but reason was pinking around the black cloud in my brain. “Shit,” I said again. There was no other word. The girls both expelled from the lungs nervous laughter.

“Shit,” soft Greta said, “if we don’t get ourselves into situations.”

“She’s probably gone to either kill herself or get a gun,” Janey said.

“Don’t straighten up your room,” I said to her. “Keep on with your packing. If the woman stays, it won’t be in your room.”

Next: Tense, tense
.

More on this same subject

2008-09-08T05:04:00.000-07:00

We talked, perched in Janey’s room. She was packing for school, and had her drawers out and many boxes on every surface. Greta sat in the deep window well. Nora was up at the barn with Hazen. Of late, she was up there more and more and we were not although the girls still loved to help with the animals. But we had decided that was one of the things that teed Nora off.

“She is jealous of Janey and me,” Greta said with disgust.

I allowed that could be it. We had decided that after Janey left, Greta and I would find our own place to rent. I expanded upon this theme. “I am sick of adapting myself to other people’s ways and moods. And the way they cook. And their iceboxes.”

“Their iceboxes?” Greta laughed.

“Yes, their damn iceboxes. Remember Phipps? Full of Dream Whip and frozen fish fillets and dog food and leftover canned peas and jars with things floating in them. Nora’s is full of putrid vegetables, little wax sacks full of leftovers from God knows when, moldy cheese, sour milk, but nothing really to eat. And her damn moods. She has been on a tear for a week now.”

“I knew when we first came here she would be that way,” said Greta, still on the window ledge, looking out.

Janey, her spirit already left Vermont for college in New York, was roused by this provocative remark. “I’m sure. Why, we all got along at first. How did you know?”

Greta turned from the window where she was almost literally keeping watch for Nora’s return, her face looking very rested and healthy, her lovely brown eyes with their characteristic gentle look. “Remember the first day we came, late afternoon? We were upstairs here, unpacking. Then it got about dinner time and suddenly Nora got in the truck and tore off somewhere, like a bat?”

“Yes,” I said, “she went down to the general store to buy some paper napkins for dinner. As if we had to have them.”

“Well,” Greta said, reliving something. “I saw her face in the truck window and it almost scared me. She had a terrible expression on her face.”

“Like what?”

“Just grim. Unhappy. Mad.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” I asked.

“Because it didn’t make sense until now. Besides, I didn’t want to upset us when we’d just escaped from Phipps.”

“Gad,” Janey said, turning again to her packing. “So she’s always been a wench. It’s not things we’ve done here to tee her off.”

“Here’s a taxicab,” Greta said, looking out.

Next: a stranger comes

Conspiring, a little

2008-09-05T04:35:00.000-07:00

More and more we three huddled to talk among ourselves, either in my room—but only if Nora were not upstairs because of the opening between the floors—or out on the porch. We discussed her and the situation on the farm constantly because the tension had mounted. We had no illusions now.

“Do you think the wench will let you take some ginseng to New York?” Greta asked her sister.

“Hell, no,” Janey said. So some of her soft, girlish edges were gone.

“If she can find a patch, we can too,” I said. “We’re in the woods as much as she is.”

“But we can’t do it here. She’d think it was on her land.”

“We won’t be here too much longer.”

“Where will we be?”

That was the question. Janey, of course, was going to school. Greta had decided to stay in Vermont with me until January and then return to school in Santa Cruz for the winter quarter. We had decided we hated living under someone else’s roof. Yet we had thought, in our naiveté, diverse people could coexist, not only coexist, but live happily, with affection among them. Well, our Utopian experiments were dismal failures. Now, on the farm, it seemed, we were like polite strangers with each other, careful not to offend. What had happened? I felt badly over it. The girls consoled me, able to dismiss it.

“Nora is just a wench. And Hazen won’t stand up to her. Jeff is a waffle and Ned is a nebbish.”

“And Phipps?”

They looked at each other and laughed at the ultimate horror.

“Or is it us? Me. Not able to get along with people?”

“Kate, it’s not you. You’re no threat to anyone. Besides, think of all the other people here who love you.”

“Hmm,” I reflected, not too cheered. I was not seeing the others now so much, not even Suki.

“We just happened into two bad situations.”

“But everyone else in Creston thinks Nora walks on water.”

“That’s because she’s so clever, the wench.”

“Well, let’s keep our eyes peeled for ginseng.”

Nora’s moods became more and more unpredictable. I was taken back to my childhood, living with my father and stepmother, where my brothers and I had lived in a peculiar kind of awful unease that lurked behind closed doors and in the late night murmurs of a man and woman’s voices. To move and speak and breathe dependent upon another’s moods, was terrible. Despite my being the older in this situation, I felt the pull of that emotional vortex, and I shuddered inwardly, pulling back as I could not, to save myself, in childhood. “I refuse!”

Next: More on this same subject

Nora's idea to make money

2008-09-04T04:28:00.000-07:00

Like all Vermont people, the Cloughs had various ways of making a living. Hazen sold his services, especially to the gentry set, plowing their small gardens, cutting the hay on their acreage, selling them his veal, pork, eggs, corn and such. Nora had her own ways. She was a master trader and scavenger, with her shed full of items a western antique dealer would have gone crazy over and, besides, Nora could look at, say, a glade in the woods, and where others saw the play of sunlight and shadows, she saw—ginseng.

Ginseng! Just the name sent a tiny thrill along the imaginative spine. Chinese people munched on it? It had marvelous properties to take care of everything wrong with the human body and mind.

Nora smiled her small, secret smile, as she told us, sitting at table, about ginseng and showed us a book she had on it. And she showed us what she’d picked. We compared it to the pictures in the book.

In its distinctive root formation, like the graceful figures of men and women, what Nora found was exactly like the ginseng pictures in the book.

“It most definitely is!” we all judged.

“I’m sure, too,” Nora said. With a little sharp knife, she gave us each a piece of the root to chew. “It should be drier,” she said.

“According to this—“ I was reading—“ginseng is highly prized.”

Nora’s face, although she smiled because she could not help it, took on its “inscrutable” look. “It is. In New York, they’re paying around $90 a pound for ginseng.”

We exclaimed at this. We were rank amateurs compared with downhome Vermonters, but our acquisitive senses had become considerably honed, living as we were, just spending, not earning.

Janey, as guileless as Nora was the opposite, said, “Hey, why don’t I take some when I go down to New York?” Nora nodded. We had the wit not to ask her where her find of ginseng was. I read in the booklet that it grew only in a few places in the world; China and parts of Northeastern and Southeastern United States. Harvesting ginseng was apparently a lucrative business for some people.

I couldn’t say I noticed any rush of wellbeing from chewing on the root. Maybe because it should have been dried. There were many ways to take your ginseng, as tea, and the root chewed or ground into powder.

Next: Conspiring, a little

Is Wilbur destined for the pot?

2008-09-03T04:37:00.000-07:00

Wilbur flourished and had to be transferred to a larger box. He was amazingly smart, much more so than either Taj, the Labrador, or Furry. Janey walked him about outside to do his business. She took him up to the barn and introduced him around. Soon, Wilbur moved outdoors, where he had the run of the place, just like the turkeys, geese, guinea hens, donkey and barn cats. It was comical. He came when called, was curious and nosing into everything, especially Nora’s garden, and always ran up to Janey when she appeared.

One day, the three of us went shopping for clothes Janey needed. Shopping in Vermont meant covering almost a hundred miles. We went to Rutland, to the Bass Shoe outlet store, among others, and returned about six. A delicious aroma met us as we entered the kitchen. Janey ran upstairs with her purchases, to try them on again. I learned we were having…roast pork.

“Not—“ I couldn’t get his name out to Nora, working at the stove. Hazen had come in and was drying his hands and arms after washing up at the sink.

“Roast rump of Wilbur,” he said, serious, straight-faced and sad.

“You are kidding. Isn’t he, Nora?”

The two Cloughs looked at each other. Greta was putting finishing touches on the table. “If it is,” she said, “you’ll have to kill Janey, too.”

“Nora?” I said.

It was too good a joke, of course, the best they’d had on “their side” and they didn’t want to come off of it for awhile.

“C’mon! Janey will be down. Tell me it’s not Wilbur. I couldn’t eat either.”

Nora laughed her quiet, held-in laugh. “No, it’s not Wilbur.”

“Why do you say that?” Hazen asked, seated now at the table. He’d tied a big white towel around himself and held knife and fork in either hand. “Put Wilbur on.”

“Listen, I’m serious,” I said. “Janey won’t think it’s funny. She’s liable to faint. Now, do I have to go up to the barn and look for Wilbur?””

“Look in the pot.”

“No, it’s not,” Nora said. “Hazen, you’re terrible.”

Janey came down.

“It’s not Wilbur,” I said. “But we’re having roast pork.”

Janey stiffened. “Oh, gross. I couldn’t eat any.”

“I thought you liked him.”

“Hazen, stop.” But Nora was hugely amused.

“What is the story on this pig?” I asked. “We don’t ordinarily have it for dinner.”

We learned, like pulling teeth, that Hazen had had to butcher one of his countless pigs because a roving bad dog had gotten into them and torn the throat of one. Janey ate salad and vegetables and soon went outdoors and we heard her call, “Wilbur! Wilbur!”

I wasn’t positive they’d been kidding until I looked out to see Janey petting him, a fat thirty or forty-pound toddler now. Someday, he’d have to go to market, but Janey would be gone before that happened.

Next: Nora’s idea to make money

The matter of the piglet

2008-09-02T04:40:00.000-07:00

Nora returned from the barn one day, holding something in her arms like one would a baby. And that’s what it was. It was tiny and helpless with a fair, pink, hairless skin and a loud, piercing little cry. Only it had a funny-looking nose and four cloven little feet. Nora had it in her apron and sat at the table with some warm milk in a pan and a big, thick syringe Hazen used to give medicine to ailing animals. The little creature was making a fearsome, piteous noise as if its throat was being cut.

“Oh, the baby!” Janey exclaimed, which brought Greta and then me. “It’s a little pig—is it sick?”

“It’s a runt,” Nora said, “and the mother won’t feed it. She’d probably eat it.” She had drawn up milk in the syringe but the little pig was so frantic, moving its head back and forth so quickly, it couldn’t connect with the warm milk, which was dripping all over Nora’s lap. But then it did finally and took it all in.

It was adorable. We’d never seen one so small before. It couldn’t have weighed more than a pound and stood less than four inches from the floor. Nora put it down on shaky legs where it tottered about on its adorable feet. Janey and Greta were enraptured with it.

“Will it live? Can it stay in the house/”

Nora said, “Maybe. Do you want to help take care of it?”

“Oh, could we? I get to hold it,” and Janey scooped up the wee thing and put it up to her cheek. “It’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Watch it doesn’t go to the bathroom on you.”

“Yes, what do you do about that?” I asked.

“Diapers,” Nora said and she laughed.

We put it on the floor again and it did go and we cleaned it up. Soon, it was oinking its head off again and Janey fixed the milk, held the piggy on her lap and fed it. Its tummy, as soft and white and tender as a human baby’s, “swole up.” It went to sleep in Janey’s arms.

She could not part with it and took it up to her room in a cardboard box lined with old rags. She slept with it, too, part of the night, she told us. We named it Wilbur after the pig in Charlotte’s Web. It played under our feet at mealtime, followed Janey around, slipped and slid on the linoleum floor and terrorized the big baby, our cat Furry. We put those two together on the patchwork quilt on my bed and they sniffed each other’s noses. Furry was four times as big as Wilbur. I took their picture nose-to-nose and it appeared in the Woodfield newspaper with the caption “What kind of a strange animal are you?”

Before our eyes, it grew. Hazen said, “Pretty soon, it’ll be big enough to eat.”

“Oh!” Janey cried, horror on her face. “You wouldn’t!”

“What else can you do with a pig on a farm?” he said, straight-faced.

“I’ll adopt it. I’ll buy it from you,” Janey said.

“You think I want a 200-pound pig living in my house?” Hazen continued, his black eyes gleaming and a pearl of corn caught in his black beard.

“Does he have to get that big?” Janey bemoaned. “I wish I could take him to school with me.” We were leaving in a couple of weeks to take her downcountry, to New York, via Newport, Rhode Island, where my son Ben and his girlfriend Molly were spending the summer.

Next: Is Wilbur destined for the pot?

The corn comes in

2008-09-01T04:30:00.000-07:00

The corn came in about the same time the plumbing “went bye.”

I’d always liked corn on the cob but now, having acres of it just off our doorstep opened up a whole new world of eating corn. And the ears we could put away! Hazen would call from the field, “Is the water boiling?” When he was assured that it was, he brought down within minutes a bushel basket of small, tender ears. Nora plunged about fifty or sixty of these perhaps four-inch ears into the huge vat on the stove. It was incredibly delicious. You could eat the cob itself, it was so tender. The women ate three, four, even five ears. The men put away ten or twelve such ears.

Greta and Janey took over the salad making, first going to the garden with a big basket and bringing down lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, onions, radishes, zucchini, green pepper. They made it in a baby-bath-sized bowl and we ate it until it came out our ears. It was wonderful to have these fresh vegetables; everyone glowed with health. But there were a few problems. Nora worried about the well running out. Hazen told her not to worry. I could hear them over my head.

“But they leave that damn toilet running sometimes.” Nora meant the one between the dining room and the kitchen, the small, second bathroom.

“I’ll fix it tomorrow,” Hazen promised her.

He did, he worked on it, but the innards of it were old and he had to jury-rig. The girls were sometimes careless about putting the handle back just so. Occasionally, in the morning, it was running which meant it had run all night. Usually, I was first up, but lately, Nora was beating me. I never heard her, she glided so silently down the stairs. I would come into the kitchen and Nora would be sitting there, at the end of the long table, in the early half-darkness.

I was startled to see her. “Oh, hi,” I would say, awkwardly.

Nora didn’t answer, which wasn’t the best way to start my day. It emboldened me enough to “steal” a little coffee from the madly percolating pot Nora had put on, as I knew how long she let it boil, and I returned to my room to sit at my desk. But not for long. Walking as silently as Nora, I slipped into the little john. The lid was taped down. A sign on it said, “Out of order, do not use.” There was no help for it, I had to walk across the kitchen of the unfriendly one to use the big, major bathroom, where, often as not, Jeff would be singing at the top of his mighty lungs in the shower.

Sheesh! What a terrible situation! Seven people who ate a truckload of roughage every day, on one bathroom.

I glided back through the shadowed house to the off-limits commode and in haste removed the restraining tape, which I later replaced. I was careful to put the handle back up. The girls were in as dire a predicament in the morning. I told them my ruse. Nora caught on and I didn’t know her reaction, could only guess that this small incident—which loomed mightily important just then—fed what appeared to be mounting fury behind her incredible green eyes.

I, myself, caught onto something. Hazen was disappearing into the shed, still in his bathrobe. Later in the day, when no one was around, I wandered through the dark shed. Ah, ha, the sly ones! The Cloughs’ own private, old-fashioned one-holer was out there. No wonder they weren’t so upset about sealing off our privy.

Eventually, Hazen fixed it with new parts from the hardware store. But the battle lines were subtly being drawn.

Nora’s behavior around noontime, when she returned from her horseback ride, became all the stranger and a harder to witness. We’d be sitting at table having lunch—what little we could find to eat; she came in. She’d given up any pretense of amiability and civility although we still could not not say “Hi.” Still in her riding outfit, she would pull out the vacuum, a tank-type affair with a long tube and metal head, and she’d begin to vacuum the living room next to the kitchen, while the three of us exchanged glances of wild surmise.

“Damn, what is she doing, she’s whacking into all the furniture.”

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

By evening, Nora’s pique had not evaporated as it had formerly. Cooking at the stove, she would carry steaming pots of vegetables across the room to the sink to drain them. With everything else done, table set, water or ice tea poured, salad made, the three of us might be sitting in our places, along with Ned and Jeff, all conversing (less than animatedly, in the face of Nora’s attitude, which affected even Jeff’s chutzpah).

And, in an amazing act, Nora would, with her left hand from her position at the sink, throw across the room, toward the stove, narrowly missing our heads, the hot pad holders she’d used. They were like discuses, stiff with an impregnation of grease and food.

“Look out!” Jeff would cry, “here comes another one,” and he would exaggeratedly duck.

We all laughed, it was such a bravura performance. I had never seen anything like it.

But Nora did not laugh.

Next: the matter of the piglet

A special spot in the meadow

2008-08-29T04:48:00.000-07:00

Sitting at my desk in the mornings, in my nightgown, I looked at the view I had of the farm. Grey stone driveway, split log fence that enclosed a fractious pony that had a beautiful face like a sullen Oriental girl’s, part of a neighbor’s house, a line of trees on a ridge, and the sky. The strong sun made it white-blue and I had to pull the blind down to just below the sun. The theme that had occupied my mind for days to write about was that the seven people in the house were unable to express their affection for each other and wanted, almost above all else, to do so. But the attempts they made were clumsy, frustrating, and fell short of the goal. I thought it must be the hardest thing in the world to do this.

I wondered if the others felt as I did, that is, if they felt affection and the frustration. I wished I could write something meaningful about how I felt. A play, perhaps, would capture the situation best, because there was always plenty of dialogue, which was the substitute for feelings. The conversations at the dinner table were almost always of a humorous nature or attempts to make them so. Often, it was a little painful. Hazen, in his put-on, down-home voice, teased us with improbable stories. Greta and Janey liked him immensely but didn’t always know how to take him. Most of Hazen’s glances and deadpan remarks were directed at me. I felt he liked me a lot despite that he was hard on me.

One evening, we had been discussing when the farmhouse had been built. Hazen said 1816 but that no one knew exactly when the ells which New Englanders can’t resist adding to their houses, were built.

“I just love your barn,” I said. “When I walked toward it from my old apartment, there’s a certain point where the red cupola first comes into view.”

Hazen looked at me from the end of the table, his dark eyes and black beard seeming to absorb almost everything. After a moment, his voice came from the beard. “Where?”

I felt a bit on the defensive and pondered my answer. Did the Cloughs mind my having walked through their meadows even though they had been hayed? I had learned just recently, that one should not walk through standing hay. The lesson, an oblique one, had come from Hazen.

He said, one night at the dinner table, “Some damn fool has made a path through the Jennings’ meadow.”

“It was me,” I said, from my place at the other end.

This caused a moment of silence. Then Hazen said, “If I were Jennings, I’d bitch. Must be a couple of bales lost along that path.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

I truly was, for depriving the hard-working neighbor on the next farm of some hay and, also, because I hadn’t used my common sense. But it was hard for me to stay out of meadows, I loved the waving hay, loved to go into the cool, dark forests that edged the meadows, loved to get lost for awhile and then find myself. And most of all, I loved what I called “the swell of the meadow,” of the Clough’s far meadow. The land was elevated and rounded and there was a spot, a very special one, where I came out of the forest about fifty feet, walked up the meadow to a giant elm tree, went some twenty paces south, and there I would stand, transfixed.

In answer to Hazen’s “Where?” I told him.

He listened, looked straight ahead at something in his mind. Then he said, very softly, “That’s exactly the spot where I want to build a little hut someday.”

Nora cocked her head at him. “Why?”

“Oh. I would go there and read.”

Next: the corn comes in

The Cloughs' troubles

2008-08-28T04:47:00.000-07:00

Hazen sounded awful. I asked what was wrong.

“Nora. She wants me to kill her.”

“Oh—no—why, Nora—“ I put my arms, too, about her, to comfort her, for she was wildly distraught. She resisted for a moment, then she turned to me and let me hold her, still weeping. I patted her back, saying, “There, there. Don’t be so unhappy. What has happened?”

Hazen, in short, jerky sentences, told of money worries, problems between his family and Nora, misunderstandings. “But it’s settled now. We’ve reached an agreement about the farm. But Nora won’t accept it.”

“It’s not fair, that’s why,” Nora said, moving away from me like an overheated, disconsolate child who will only let you console it for a moment.

“But it is, it is, Nora!” Hazen said, with exasperated earnestness. “We’ve been all over it before.”

“His family has never liked me,” Nora said, in a low voice.

Hazen sighed and shook his head. “What’s the use?”

I wanted to sigh, too, I felt so inadequate to help. It was obviously some long-standing disagreement. I said, “Maybe, being at the Randolph’s upset you, Nora.”

“Yes, that’s right, it did,” Hazen said. “And she can’t drink at all.”

“Then things will look different tomorrow,” I uttered my small words of trite cheer.

Nora appeared to calm and we returned to the house. In bed later, through the little square hole between our floors, I could hear their voices go on for a long time, without understanding what they said. I didn’t want to eavesdrop anyway. I wished I could have been that strong, wise person I’d envisioned myself being for other people.

None of this was ever mentioned again, but I was much more sympathetic toward the Cloughs’ situation on the farm and especially disposed to be kinder in my thoughts of Nora. And, for awhile, things went along happily.

Next: contemplation at a special spot

Still more about Nora

2008-08-27T04:55:00.000-07:00

Nora made bread once a week, six loaves. She used stone-ground flour bought in 25-pound sacks from the mill close by that ran on water power and not only ground flour but also made cider. The bread was delicious and we ate too much of it so that we ran out, and Nora began to make it more often. She kneaded the dough on a milky white marble slab streaked with black and green. She had strong, broad, but graceful hands. She slapped and threw the huge mound of chocolate-colored dough around as though she were tussling a skinned animal in its fierce death throes.

Watching, I said, “I wouldn’t have the strength to do that.”

Nora took her time but she answered, as if whatever said to her sank into a deep pool without stirring the surface. She looked off as if seeing something the other person couldn’t. But then she would smile her small, involuntary smile and say softly, “Yes, I’m very strong.”

We wondered among ourselves about her, and about her and Hazen.

“She must be mad at us over something, don’t you think?”

“She’s just moody.”

“She doesn’t deserve Hazen. He’s really nice.”

“Yes, she treats him terribly sometimes.”

“Maybe she has some secret suffering.”

“Oh, she’s just a wench.”

In the evenings we all sat out on the porch after dinner and talked and smoked, played the record player and Jeff sprang up to dance and grabbed me in his brawny arms and whirled me around and thrust me out and clasped me close to his hot-machine body. Everyone clapped even though in our wild fandangos we almost knocked all the furniture over and clipped the plants.

“Jeff, you are crazy!” I cried.

“Not crazy,” he cried back, “just full of hootspa!”

“Hootspa! Do you mean chutzpah?”

I’d never know before how to pronounce that word. They all laughed at me but I said I was the only one to reveal my ignorance.

One night, all the women went out drinking together, leaving the men. We had been invited to have cocktails with the Randolphs, a rather stuffy couple. He was a state legislator. On impulse, we asked Nora to join us. She hesitated, and then said she would and got herself up very prettily, in a navy blue polka dot dress and high heels.

She was shy at first at the Randolph’s big house but after a few drinks began to blossom and soon enough was tackling our host on some ticklish issues, such as the government helping small farmers more to hold onto their farms.

George was dignified and portly with a big, bald head surrounded by a fringe of hair. He patiently answered Nora’s assaults. But she was cleverer or quicker than he was, it seemed, coming back at him with jab after jab, and finally saying, “I never told you this before, Mr. Randolph, but you owe me for some piglets.”

She said he’d left abandoned wells on his land uncovered. “And it’s your responsibility to cover them, and some of my piglets fell in.”

She was apparently right for he apologized and said he would pay for the loss of the pigs. In the car going home we congratulated Nora. She hiccupped and said she’d had too much to drink or she never could have stood up to the legislator.

When we drove into the farmyard, we saw Hazen sitting on the small north-side porch, looking rather forlorn. Nora was very arch with him, and we could see a domestic quarrel might be brewing so we three went in and fixed ourselves a little salad. We could hear the Cloughs’ voices, although we had shut the inside door. Then, nothing more for they must have gone up to the barn.

Suddenly, there was a bang on the door. I looked up to see Hazen’s agitated face against the glass and heard him call, “Kate!”

I got up from the table, went to the door, opened it, but no one was there. I stepped out into the pitch blackness, puzzled. Then I heard voices coming from around a corner of the house. I picked my way through gravel and saw, against the white of the house, their two dark forms, Hazen struggling to hold Nora, who was weeping.

“Kate,” he said, “we need help.”

Next: the Cloughs’ troubles

The puzzle of Nora

2008-08-26T04:38:00.000-07:00

Finally, it dawned on us that Nora was in a very bad mood when she returned most mornings from her ride. She never spoke a word, but walked very heavily in her boots and, with her riding crop, actually struck at things in her path, or maybe it just seemed that way to us. That she kicked a yawning cabinet door closed I couldn’t say with surety but that was the impression I was left with after Nora passed through the room.

We whispered to each other, “Moody, moody.”

“You know what it is,” I said. “She hates being a farm wife. The horseback ride is romantic, adventuresome, but then she has to return—“

“To all the tomatoes to be ‘processed’ and the other vegetables just crying out to be harvested—“ The girls took this up and expanded on it. We moved outside in the sun where we could talk, for once Nora was shed of her boots, she glided through her well-known rooms like a vapor.

“Poor girl, she’s overworked.”

Everything was lush now in a Vermont garden. The things did seem to literally scream out. “Pick me, Nora!” cried the beans. “Can me, Nora!” pleaded the softening tomatoes, in a continuum of various containers on the porch. “Shell me!” moaned the sugar peas. Only the carrots and onions and other root crops were quiet.

“And then she has to fix dinner for all of us.”

“Poor girl.”

“Poor girl.”

We went back to do the dishes but, alas, Nora had beaten us to them and was whacking the white plates around so furiously we were glad she seemed to have a supply to last a lifetime. Our glances at each other said it would be prudent to disappear.

“Besides,” we reasoned, “what could be worse for a woman than to have to take in boarders, especially three other women.”

“And she’s so artistic, too. I bet she wishes she could go to a city…”

“The farm maybe isn’t enough for her.”

“She needs a baby,” I said. “They have every other kind of little animal around here.”

By the time we returned, however, from our afternoon, spent either swimming at Paula’s pond or ranging far to thrift and antique stores, Nora seemed in better spirits and we all pitched in to help. We sat on the side porch, which faced the big mountain, to snap beans or shell peas together. We talked and laughed, Nora expanding under the girls’ admiring comments and curiosity about her unique clothes and furnishings. She said most of her things came from thrift stores, auctions, and estate sales. Besides the wonderful things in the house, she had a shed full of treasures she hadn’t gotten around to hardly sorting, like weathered buckboard seats, curving bentwood rockers, high boots with buttons, dresses with lace, little whatnot shelves and corner stands.

Nora also told us tales that made our eyes grow round with wonder and the peas shoot like marbles from under our thumbs beneath the porch’s rattan furniture.

Hazen’s uncle had died of a simultaneous heart attack and blast from the shotgun he was carrying as he crawled over a barbed-wire fence while hunting. Hazen’s mother had been driving a sulky when she crested a hill and met a car head-on. Nora told of a logger who had a tree fall on his leg late in the afternoon in a remote area, and the temperature was ten below.

“He got out the only way he could,” Nora said, looking at us in turn. “He cut his leg off with his chain saw.”

“Oh, gross!”

She used expressions we’d never heard before that had a lovely cadence. “When Hazen was born, his mother almost died. She cast her withers.”

“Goodness!” I said. (I learned later this meant she had placenta previa.)

The men, returning from work in the fields, factory, and from pounding nails, often found us still on the porch, our aprons full of vegetables. From their broad smiles and grins, you could tell they liked to find women doing that.

Next: still more about Nora

A lovely routine

2008-08-25T04:51:00.000-07:00

If I lived in a firehouse or a morning newspaper or a donut factory, I would still be first to bestir the silent pool of consciousness in the morning. I loved it that way. My downstairs bedroom at the farm, directly below the Clough’s—and there was, to my amusement, another of those square openings in the ceiling right above my bed, so we could hear each other’s stirrings—was perfectly located for my dawn prowl to the dark kitchen to make my one cup of strong coffee in my little Italian maker. Soon, Nora, who glided down the steps right outside my closed door so noiselessly I never heard her, put on a huge percolator and let it boil..and boil. I carried my coffee back to my bedroom like molten gold in a ladle and sat at my desk before the window to write.

Then, soon, I would hear the bedsprings creak and Hazen force himself out. I thought, poor man, another back-breaking day for him.

Eventually, I’d have to get some nourishment, so went into the kitchen. Hazen might be gone by now, up to the barn to milk, and Nora would be sitting at the long table over her coffee. She apparently loved to muse also for she was very quiet in the morning. We barely said “Hello” but that was all right by me. A wild-looking dynamo dressed in white painter’s pants would whirl by, with wild laughter and wild, gleaming eyes—Jeff, on his way to his construction job on a nearby house. He made himself a very quick breakfast and was out into the fresh summer morning with a bang of the screen door. Ned, like a nebbish, vanished unseen in the morning.

By the time I fixed my breakfast, almost always the same, Nora’s delicious whole wheat bread, with one of the eggs gathered the night before that were kept in a wire basket hanging by the stove, Greta and Janey were up. They, too, liked to retire to their bedrooms with their coffee to write in their journals or Greta to play her guitar.

Later, we always walked, individually. I would have been happy walking with either or both of my daughters for I’d had plenty of solitary, meditative walking, but I could understand their desire to be off on their own. Then I might go to visit my old friend Suki and have a cup of coffee with her. I had told her about the Phipps and now told her of our new experiences. We all returned to the farm about eleven, famished, and made our lunch. It was particularly nice and peaceful then. The dog, Taj, didn’t even bark at us now when we came in. Nora was still riding Scimitar, her horse, the door was never locked, and it was cool and quiet in the big farmhouse. We foraged in the refrigerator for something to eat, finding salad from the evening before, little heels of cheese, a jar of cloudy jam, and more of Nora’s delicious bread, or if we were lucky, something left from a past dinner.

“You don’t suppose Nora wants to keep this?” we’d ask each other.

“Oh, no, there isn’t that much.”

The dishes for everyone’s separate breakfast were still in the sink, not totally rinsed of egg. We added our few lunch dishes and playfully argued as to who should do them. “It wouldn’t do for Nora to return and see how lazy we are.”

But often, before we had a chance to do them, she was back, for, enjoying our conversation about a fresh-minted insight, we had dawdled at table too long.

“Oh, oh, I hear the thud of horse’s hooves!”

Something in us made us not jump up and start doing dishes, as women before another woman.

Nora appeared in the sun-filled doorway. For a woman small in stature, she had a presence. She looked stunning after her ride. It brought out the color in her alabaster cheeks. And she dressed for it, like a heroine in a period novel. Jodhpurs, boots, a peasant blouse and a bright scarf about her long, tangled, sun-streaked hair. But for some strange reason, her green eyes were like a stormy sea.

“Hi, Nora, how was your ride?”

“Lucky you, with your own horse—“

She was one of those people who do not answer when spoken to, for reasons of their own I had never been able to fathom, being myself always one to volunteer more than was asked.

Next: the puzzle of Nora

More wonders

2008-08-23T04:32:00.000-07:00

If a woman, fixing a sit-down dinner for twelve guests, in a kitchen with three toddlers underfoot—oh, and have the dinner include making light biscuits, timing a soufflé—thinks she is ever busy, distracted, harassed out of her wits, let her meet a man in a worse situation: a small farmer with lots of different types of animals to feed, milk and slop.

Hazen used a milking machine, an individual unit, which he attached first to one cow and then the next, of his herd of about twenty. He emptied the milk into buckets which he set on a bench. Above the bench clustered the barn cats, some with kittens. These cats were unlike our big city baby, Furry, who spent most of his time in my room on the patchwork quilt. At first we were horrified at the way farm people treated their cats or spoke of them, if they ever considered them worthy of mention. They were kicked out of the way, never fed—Hazen scowled at that.

“Why should I feed ‘em? They get plenty of mice and rats.”

The girls’ hearts melted at the sight of some adorable looking kittens and they asked if they could pick them up.

Hazen hooted. “If you could catch ‘em. If they’d let you. They might scratch.”

The kittens were perched above the buckets, a few bold ones leaning down and trying to get some laps of the warm, steaming milk so that they were almost in danger of falling in.

Other toddlers were constantly at Hazen’s heels and under his feet as he moved quickly about the gloomy, odorous interior of the barn on his countless tasks. Two monster turkeys, as evil looking as gargoyles, walked around boldly in tandem.

“Now, watch them,” Hazen said. “They can be mean. One of them jumped up on Nora’s leg once and sank his talons into her.”

“Really?” The girls were a little wary now of anything Hazen told them, but they could believe the ugly looking pair was up to no good. They stood waist-high and fixed one with malevolent eyes in their obscenely wattled misshapen heads, and their lower, shockingly red—like gore—chin appendages shook as if with rage.

“Come Thanksgiving, they’ll be on the table,” Hazen said, which made the girls, even though the birds were anything but lovable, utter soft “Ohs.”

Also following Hazen around were little families of ducks and geese and an unusual looking fowl which were pearled guinea hens. They were speckled and wore little tricorner feather hats. Likewise clamoring for Hazen’s attention were various animals kept in their pens, such as the hogs that were bigger than city folks imagine any animal outside a zoo could be, wallowing in muck and constantly shrieking for food. They were the brood sows. Outdoors, behind electrified wire, ranged uncounted other pigs of all sizes. Hazen just pitched food into them. And then, the three of us, wandering about the barn, trying not to betray our ignorance by asking the numerous questions that tripped on our tongues, came across several calves secured by their heads in wooden frames. Hazen gave these animals some of the first milk he collected.

Suddenly, from some dim memory, it came to me why these calves were imprisoned in this free-wheeling barn, but I had to ask anyway.

“Ever heard of milk-fed veal?” Hazen said.

“Oh, gross,” the girls said, immediately grasping the predicament of the creatures whose hair on the sides of their necks was all rubbed away by their shackles. They had enormous, plaintive eyes. It came to me, to be used somewhere in writing, “She turned upon him the eyes of a milk-fed calf.”

The barn was full of endless wonders for city-bred girls. And Hazen, Jeff and Ned were like any other young men; having pretty, appreciative girls around them put them in their element. Even a cocky, smartass, down-home Vermont farmer. Hazen, with Jeff at his elbow as the Jester, showed the girls every inch of the barn, every bit of straw and manure, every suckling animal, every implement of farming, including awful looking iron things with long handles which he explained were for various “surgical” procedures, such as dehorning cows and deballing pigs.

We all went back to the house, laughing together, Greta and Janey carrying the house supply of milk, swinging in pails. Nora was framed in the screen door.

“Did you get everything done?” she asked softly.

The girls excitedly began to tell her how they’d helped.

Inside, Nora looked at her husband with her pretty green eyes. “Hazen will be spoiled.”

Next: a lovely routine

Learning about the farm

2008-08-19T04:18:00.000-07:00

Living at the farm of the Red Cupola put us next to those marvelous meadows fronting my old apartment, and I introduced the girls to them from the opposite direction. I showed them all my special places, the sugar house, Don’t Look Back Yet Hill, and the Gates of Heaven. They laughed at the names but agreed with me. I only showed them once and from then on, as soon as they could in the morning, both disappeared for long walks alone, not returning for hours. I warned them of pitfalls: getting lost, boggy spots, unfriendly dogs, but they had to learn for themselves and fashion their own ways. We still sometimes took walks together and discussed life and our “insights.” These came, particularly to them, diamond-clear, thick and fast. We’d always shared with each other those great and small revelations that broke upon the beachheads of our sensibilities, but never so happily and spontaneously as during those first few days living at the Clough farm.

Both again confided to me, separately, of bouts of depression. I was saddened for them and surprised. Perhaps I’d forgotten what it was like to be young. I tentatively and lightly mentioned some of my own interior struggles and they surprised me by their reactions.

Greta said, “I hope you’ll take this the right way, but you’ve done what your mission in life was. Now you should just be able to relax and enjoy everything.”

I was fifty-three years old.

“Yes,” Janey said, “you have it, well, made.”

If they only knew, I thought, that I felt as unsure as they did at times, that I had the same needs and wants and desires as they did but in many ways they were light years ahead of me in sophistication. But the old can scarcely tell that to the young for they would not believe or want to hear.

But being here at this particular time, in this particular place, was wonderful for us all. After the first few awkward days, Greta and Janey and the Cloughs and Jeff were going out at night together, to the pub in Creston, a barn dance at the Grange Hall, and across the river to some night spot. They came home a little tipsy and I awoke to hear the men boisterous in the kitchen and the silver laughs of the girls, even, I thought, Nora’s.

The farm was a whole new world of adventure, a step back in time, for Hazen did things much as his forebears had done except he had a few more pieces of mechanized equipment. The girls helped with the chores, even bringing up the cows from a lower meadow for milking. It was quite wonderful to watch from the side porch where I went after dinner to smoke, Janey enter the meadow’s gate, a little nervously approach the black and white speckled bovines, and call out, “Sooee,” cautiously circle them and, with a long stick, tap and prod them up the rocky road to the big barn.

Inside, the milking and slopping operations went on. Besides the cows, goats had to be milked. They were like cantankerous old people. Hazen would grab one and put it on the milking bench and stick its head into a pan of grain to keep it occupied. Unlike cows who had four udders, goats had only three. Hazen kneaded and flexed and strong jets of milk hit in the bucket. After a moment, he said to Greta, “Want to try?”

“Sure,” she said, and he got up from the bench and she sat down.

“Well, reach up there and grab ‘em.”

She did, with her long, slim fingers. “Oh, they feel so funny. You can’t hurt them?”

“Get the milk out,” Hazen said, and he turned away to do something else.

Next: more wonders

Our first dinner there

2008-08-18T04:27:00.000-07:00

The farm kitchen was at least twenty feet long by about fifteen wide. A rectangular wooden table sat in the middle, with wooden chairs drawn up, each chair a little different, all with some sort of interesting detail, ladder back and rung. No cloth was ever used on the table. It was already set for seven places. One of the boarders, Jeff, was already sitting down. A light hanging directly over the table gleamed in his eyes. Strips of flypaper were also hung up. We’d met Jeff briefly while we were unloading our things and had said something to him, like, “We’re so glad to get with normal people again.”

Jeff was a wild Jewish boy. He had rolled his eyes at our comment and laughed a manic laugh. “Wait ‘til you see what goes on here!”

He greeted us now with enthusiasm. “Three women all at once! I don’t know if I can handle this,” and he looked at Janey and Greta and me with a gaze that was so full of energy and good spirits that we had to laugh. Nora, whose errand or whatever hadn’t taken long, was cooking at the stove. She smiled and said softly, “You’ll have to watch Jeff.”

“How can we help?” we asked.

Nora said everything was done. “We’re just waiting on Hazen to come from the barn. In the morning, though, you could help him milk.”

“At 5:30!” Jeff cried.

Janey and Greta looked at each other, not sure if they were being teased or what. “We will.”

“Here comes Hazen,” Nora said, and she began to move very fast about the kitchen, serving up a lot of dishes.

Hazen filled the doorway, seeming to be quite a presence in his own home. His jet black hair and curly beard and black eyes made him look, for a moment, mysterious and unreadable. But he gave us, the newcomers, a big grin and went to the sink and washed up, clear to his elbows, talking to Jeff as he did so. We hovered about Nora, trying to help her, mainly trying not to appear as out of place and awkward as we felt.

When all was on the table, Nora went to where the wood stove sat, down a little from the cooking stove, and hollered up at the ceiling. “Ned! Ned! Dinner’s ready.” There was a small square hole cut out of the ceiling above the stove. A muffled “Okay” came back, and then we heard footsteps come down at the rear of the kitchen where there was another staircase, and the other boarder, Ned, came out of the attached shed door.

He was short, stocky, and very good looking but also very shy.

For some reason, I sat at the opposite end of the table from Hazen, who had Nora on his left.

“Now we have a Momma,” Jeff said. “We needed one.” He followed everything he said with a giggle, almost as shrill as a girl’s.

Ned sat next to Nora, then Greta, me at the end, then Janey, then Jeff. The meal was turkey, with all the trimmings.

“Delicious,” I said. “Do you always eat like this?”

“The first night when we have new boarders,” Jeff said.

I was not to be put off with teasing. “Home-grown turkey, Hazen?”

“It grew up in the living room,” he said, and Jeff exploded into mirth.

“You should see the furniture!”

That end of the table laughed merrily. Janey and Greta laughed too, looking at me. “Ha, ha,” I said.

We had a huge bowl of salad, with everything possible in it. Also, a dish we’d never had before, creamed chard. Also potatoes, green beans and a big platter of sliced tomatoes.

“Seriously,” I plunged in again, “everything here is produced on the farm, isn’t it?”

“It’s flown in from California,” Hazen said, his black eyes, in the overhead light, shining like a devil’s. Nora was hugely amused, although she answered me. “Yes, my garden. If your girls like to pick beans, they can sure do that.”

“Oh, anything. We’d love to learn all about living on a farm—“ I failed to see the warning looks in my daughters’ eyes.

“If you have an hour to spare tomorrow—“ Hazen said.

I decided to shut up and eat my dinner.

After supper, the men went up to the barn. Nora put the food away and also went outdoors because we said we would do the dishes. There was no dishwasher. It took the three of us an hour to clean up the kitchen. That became our nightly ritual.

Next: Learning about the farm

A new life at the farm

2008-08-17T05:20:00.000-07:00

Possessions, possessions, again, their curse!

Putting our things away meant carrying them up a rickety stairs to the second floor of the dark shed which was stifling hot, and the malodorous hides almost made us gag. The corner Nora allotted us had to be reached through a welter of the most ungainly and inconvenient contraptions ever devised, bits and pieces of farm machinery, parts of wagons and autos; generations, no doubt, of Clough artifacts and furnishings. Sweat rolled off us and I thought with longing of the spare life I’d once envisioned. Then, we took what we would need for immediate use in our bedrooms. Nora by now had disappeared, up to the barn, or out to the fields, or any of the countless places farm people can disappear to. We were all out of sorts despite our relief to be in a “good” place now after the “bad” one.

“Mom, Mom!” was the cry. “Do you have any room in your closet or dresser for some of my stuff?”

Together, we looked over our new situation in all three bedrooms. Janey had no closet, but a small chest; Greta had a closet about one foot deep, but no bureau, and in my room, there was a small chest with almost impossible to open drawers and an attractive green-painted and decorated armoire. It had no hanger rod, but hooks, and how many loaded hangers can you hang on hooks?

I said, “We’ll just have to put away most of our things, cut our clothing to the bone.”

But Nora had told us, “Better not put anything into the shed that moths like unless you wrap it up good and use a lot of mothballs.”

So I sent Greta down to the General Store to buy mothballs, brown paper and tape and black plastic leaf bags. Ruing owning four coats, six heavy wool sweaters, wool pants, socks, mittens, hats and all the rest of it, I labored mothballing, bagging, boxing and taping through the hot afternoon and then lugging boxes up to the shed with its charnel house smell. We were so exhausted that we didn’t get everything put away and left a pile of boxes in the back parlor which was seldom used, for a few days. I didn’t think Nora minded but I worried because I wanted us to get off on the right foot here. We fell exhausted into our beds and took naps. When I awoke, I could hear sounds in the kitchen and the deep voices of men. The two boarders must be home. I went upstairs and woke the girls.

“Pretty yourselves,” I teased them. They were heavy-witted with sleep. It was roasting upstairs, under the eaves. Janey couldn’t open her window. It didn’t look like it had been opened for years. I tussled with it and finally managed to swing it out. It was a casement style without a screen.

Greta came and stuck her head out of it. “Nora’s going out,” she said, “in the truck. Wonder where and why now? I thought we were going to have dinner. I’m starving.”

“Well, let’s go down and see if we can help,” I said. “Remember, that’s part of the deal.”

Greta turned away from the window with a quiet, thoughtful look on her face.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing. Let’s go.”

“Wait for me,” pretty Janey said. “I’ve got to comb my hair.”

Next: our first dinner there

I am not a very nice woman

2008-08-16T07:30:00.000-07:00

(Note: I'll be away part of next week, so I'm posting today and Sunday)

John had a hot, set look to his face and he was without his little Tyrolean hat. I was frightened, so I said to him, “Well, we’re almost through and Greta’s cleaning our rooms, and we’ll strip the beds.” I didn’t comment on his coming back twenty miles from work.

He said nothing, only looked at the truck, at us, and cast several looks into the barn as though we were carting out his possessions. Janey and I went into the house. I had to see that Greta wasn’t tied up. She was vacuuming, a very quick once-over-lightly. She turned it off.

“He scared me to death. But he hasn’t come in. Why do you suppose he came back?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But let’s get the hell out of here.”

I raced downstairs, Janey up, to make a sweep of any forgotten belongings. Furry, locked in the bedroom, knowing that something was going on, almost succeeded in running past me, but nervous as a cat myself and fueled with extra adrenalin, I grabbed him. “Soon, little one. A new life on the farm.”

Finished with the house, we went out, and locked Furry in my car. We had to put several big items of furniture in the truck. John was nowhere in sight. “Let’s just keep our wits about us,” I said, looking in all directions as I walked toward the barn.

John was inside it, sitting on the tractor-mower. In fact, he’d started it and was revving it up.

Good Lord, is he going to mow us down?” went through my mind. He drove the tractor out of the barn, then I realized it had been in our way to carry the furniture. But I still didn’t trust him.

We loaded the pieces with much heaving and sighing and fastened up the truck back. “That’s all,” we said. We walked between John on the tractor and the cars, resisting the powerful temptation to walk backwards. Greta got in my car and Janey and I in the truck. We started up and began to move. John was now off the tractor, in the barn, no doubt inventorying his possessions. Suddenly he came running out on his short, fat legs, up to me in the truck as we were almost out of the driveway. I looked down into his hot, agitated face which looked like the top of a bubbling pudding just out of the oven.

“Hey,” he cried in his reedy voice, “what shall I do with that long piece of wood of yours?”

“John,” I said, “you can stick it up your ass.”

The pudding sagged, all the steam going out of it.

“You’re not a very nice woman!” he cried, as we pulled away.

“I guess I’m not,” I said to Janey, “but I just couldn’t help it.”

Janey was overcome with laughter. “I’m glad you said it.”

Going onto Strington Road, I took a final look back at the dark brown house of repressions.

Next: a new life at the farm

Getting away isn't easy

2008-08-15T04:33:00.000-07:00

At dinner, John talked a little while we were silent. I was mentally planning the mechanics of getting everything out of the barn, into the Parrishes’ truck which we’d have to go pick up, and trundled from the Strington Road over the Rush Creek Road, to the Clough’s shed.

“You girls could start on that boat tomorrow,” John surprised us by saying. “Scraping.”

They looked at me.

“We’re definitely moving tomorrow, John, it’s all planned. Bright and early.”

“Where do you think you’re going this time?”

“To the Cloughs.”

“Hmphf.”

“So, will you remember to leave the barn open when you go to work tomorrow?”

He glared at us, but, “Yes,” he said.

None of us slept easily that night. I could swear I heard him up but maybe he was drowning his sorrow with ice cream covered with Dream Whip. When morning came and I eventually heard the tires of his truck grind in the gravel, I leapt out of bed and went to look out the kitchen window. Thank God. The door to the barn was standing open.

We worked like beavers or, rather, a bucket brigade, passing Janey’s U.P. boxes down, and then the girls had to help me with my chest of drawers, sideboard, chairs, etc. down the narrow open stairs and put everything in the yard until we went and got Giles’ truck.

“Whew!” I said, wiping my forehead. “We still have to get my desk out and those blue chairs where John wedged them in the back corner. We’ll have to pass them over the damn boat.” Although I was swearing mildly (for me), it was out of pure relief, not anger. Freedom! Ah, freedom was everything. But no time for philosophy this warm July morning. We were all fairly apprehensive, a little wired from coffee and insomnia and nerves. So, of course, we joked. “What if John suddenly comes back?”

“What if he never left, but parked his car down the road, sneaked into the barn—“

Janey went with me to get the truck. The Parrishes, so nice and sane, offered to help, but I said we could manage. Back at the Phipps’, we loaded the back end but with nowhere near the precision John would use, so that we would have to come back for a second load.

“Janey, come with me to help unload, and Greta, will you start in on the house?” I asked.

“I’ll start, with a little gasoline in the corners,” she said, and, of course, we laughed uproariously. Janey called to her sister through the truck window, “John’ll probably come while Kate and I are gone.”

“He’d better not,” Greta said.

We hastily unloaded at the Cloughs after Nora showed us where we could, upstairs in the shed. Janey and I did a quick double-take at the contents of the Clough shed behind Nora’s rapidly descending back. She moved quickly but curiously heavily.

“Did you ever?” I said.

“Mind-boggling,” Janey said. “But let’s hurry. Oh—gross—what is that gross smell?”

I looked around in the semi-gloom of the shed’s interior but could only scratch the surface with my gaze. “Something or someone must have died up here.” Then we noticed a pile of deer hides. Nora must also be a tanner. They stunk to high heaven.

We bounced back in the empty truck to the Phipps. “Let’s get it all in this—oh—oh—“ Janey literally gasped. John’s red Scout was back in the gravel yard. I spun Giles’ truck in beside it and jumped down from the cab, visions in my head of Greta pinned in a corner by the ogre. She was running the vacuum and he sneaked up on her…

There was a crunch behind us. John walked out from the barn.

Next: I am not a very nice woman

The Farm of the Red Cupola

2008-08-14T04:28:00.000-07:00

I went ahead and crunched in the gravel of the big farmyard. A black Labrador met me, yapping, and I wouldn’t get out until Hazen came in on his red tractor. I was praying, “Please, dear God, let this work out!” The girls would love this. Coming to meet Hazen, besides the dog, was a little pig, a covey of quail, two of the biggest turkeys I had ever seen, a kid goat or two, and a pretty little horse nickered at him from a fenced enclosure. Hazen petted and booted the animals out of the way and they quacked and scolded him, and we walked toward the farmhouse.

It was a classic of its kind. White, with a faded green roof and faded green shutters, attached to a big, red, two-story shed and beyond that, surely one of the prettiest barns in all of Vermont. Weathered, huge, perfect in design, somewhat dilapidated, topped with the red cupola and the chanticleer upon that, the good talisman of my walks from the apartment when I’d lived there and gone across the meadows. I had loved this place from the moment I first saw it, and had a spot way back where I used to stop and gaze from, when this red cupola first appeared, like the superstructure of a ship riding atop billowing seas; only the cupola rode the hazy green waves of the meadows. A sweet, intense de-ja vu sensation came to me as we walked in the gravel toward the faded screen door. This was one of my secret places of fond imagination. I was at last to enter it. Nora suddenly appeared in the door and watched us come up.

We went into a large farm kitchen, centered by a huge table. Nora looked at her husband, then at me with a shy, soft look of curiosity. Her short, straight nose was sun-burnt and her lashes and drawn-back, pinned-up hair glinted as a true blonde’s does from the sun. She waited for him to speak. He had a soft voice. “Do you want some boarders?”

Nora smiled and her bleached brows went a little up and her green eyes slid over mine for a moment. “I don’t know,” almost like a little girl.

Not one to mince words, especially now, I spoke right up. “My two daughters and me.” Nora seemed very shy and diffident and she and Hazen exchanged the kind of look intimate married people do.

“Those two rooms upstairs?” he said to her. “Let’s go up.”

We walked through the downstairs because the stairs were on the other side of the house. I liked all that I saw passing through—some wallpaper and some wicker furniture. Of course. It struck me as so right in a farmhouse. Especially after Phipps’ gaudy panorama. The stairs were beautiful wood. I commented. Nora said nothing. I suspected Nora was probably overwhelmed by me, why I didn’t know, but apparently I had that effect on people, especially young ones.

Even without notice, Nora’s rooms were in order. Whereas Paula’s and Meg’s were immaculate, well-cared for, authentic farm house rooms, the Cloughs’ were everyday, hard-used ones, but furnishings of the same stock. Their floors were not polished but weathered, the wallpaper so old it had that look of having mildewed, dried out, mildewed again, and been parched by generations of summer heat and winter cold. But it was all charming to me—hooked rugs, candlewick counterpanes and homemade quilts on the beds, old chests, trunks, rocker. One small bedroom led into another larger one and had to be walked through. I could see the logistics wouldn’t be so good for my privacy and writing. But, any port in any storm…

The Cloughs sensed what I wanted.

“You could have the downstairs bedroom for yourself,” Nora said, and we went back down and looked at that.

“Ah,” I said, made suddenly very happy. “Perfect for me. Because I like to get up early and do some writing.”

Nora laughed and batted her stubby golden lashes, a characteristic of hers, which I thought girlish and appealing. “The only thing is, my father might come in sometime during the night and just get into bed. This is his room when he visits,” she said.

Hazen added, “He’ll be too drunk to know.”

We went back to the kitchen to talk terms. I learned they already had two boarders, two young men, who were away working during the day. Hazen said, “What do you say to four hundred a month for the three of you. Two meals a day, can’t do laundry here, gotta do it in town because the well runs low sometimes. And you can move in right away.”

I agreed to everything, with a feeling of great relief. “We’ll come tomorrow.”

Driving back to the hated house, I was at peace and reflective. Another new chapter in my Vermont experience was about to begin. Fate seemed to be writing it. I never knew what was on the next page. But my imagination guessed. We would all live there, seven of us, work hard, share simple pleasures, home-grown food, our cheeks would blossom with health, and we would, although I’d have to be very subtle about it, care for one another. As the oldest person, I’d orchestrate.

Next: Getting away isn’t easy

An encounter with a tractor

2008-08-13T04:34:00.000-07:00

“Well, girls, might as well unpack. We haven’t any place to go to now.”

They were very disappointed. Plus worried. “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know. Let me think a bit.”

I went over in my mind the physical characteristics of Creston, up one dirt road and down the next, seeing the houses and who had a place to rent. We could probably find an apartment in Woodfield, but I didn’t want to live in the town. There were a number of rental places I knew about, but all were taken. There was a small, beautiful brown farmhouse on the Rush Creek Road that was for rent but for more money than we could afford. It was just up from the Clough’s farm. But with the girls to help pay the $400 a month, we could squeak by for the summer, if the owner didn’t want a long lease. It was worth a try when one is desperate. So, leaving Greta and Janey sitting dispiritedly among their stacked belongings, I got in the car and drove to the Rush Creek Road.

My knock on the door of the brown house was answered by a young, very pregnant woman. She said she and her husband had just moved in and signed a year’s lease. I drove slowly out into the roadway, thinking I would have to impose on the hospitality of Suki, Paula, or Meg—which I hated to do. Or go to Woodfield. I heard the noise of a tractor slowly making its way on the hill of the road, so I waited in the drive. It was driven by the young, black-bearded farmer, Hazen Clough. He wore a red baseball cap and rode like a little kid enjoying himself immensely. He waved and I waved back. The tractor went about three miles an hour up the grade. I got out of my car and went to talk with him. He stopped. He had snapping black eyes.

“Hazen,” I said, “do you know of any place I could rent?”

He had a toothpick between his teeth. “What do you need?”

“Anything. For myself and my two daughters who just came from Denver to spend the summer with me.”

“Thought you were all settled at the Phipps.”

I shook my head and grinned. “Everybody knows that?” I scarcely knew Hazen, only of him. His wife, Nora, had been a little friendly to me.

“Small town,” he said. “News travels fast.”

I felt he was putting on a little thicker than usual Vermont accent. I frowned in frustration. “We were, but it didn’t work out.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“You know Phipps?”

“Oh, of him. The boys at the General Store gossip. He’s a little, uh, strange?”

I nodded, but I didn’t want to get into the particular strangeness of Mr. Phipps.

“We really have to move and soon. Iris Hamilton was going to—“

“We have room.”

“—but her well ran—“ My mouth fell open. “Pardon me?”

“I said we have room. We could put you up.”

“You could? All of us?”

Hazen, his black eyes gleaming with something—amusement at the predicament of a flatlander or just simple good nature—nodded his head.

“Yeah, we could. Room and board. You know, we take in hunters. And now, we sure could use the money.”

“Oh, that would be marvelous, Hazen. You’re a lifesaver.”

He quickly shot back, “You’ll have to help with the chores.”

“We will.” And then I saw he maybe was kidding.

“Let’s go back to the house and we’ll talk to Nora and show you around.”

Next: the Farm of the Red Cupola

We talk to Iris

2008-08-12T04:34:00.000-07:00

Carla wasn’t coming home for ten more days. After John left the dinner table to take the dogs out, their choke chains rattling, their toenails scraping on the kitchen tile, we three let out long breaths and exclamations.

“No way we can stay here for ten more days!”

“I know. We can’t. I’ll call Iris and ask her if we can live with her. I’ll tell her it’s a real emergency. Maybe she’ll understand.”

“I can’t bear another night here,” Janey said.

“I think it’s good you didn’t mention about the picture,” Greta said.

“I know. No telling what he’d do. I’ll call Iris while he’s gone.”

“Come over and we’ll talk about it,” Iris said.

We sat in her parlor. It was true Vermont, worn, wide-plank floors, furniture with faded slipcovers, rocking chair, old, good pieces.

“The big problem I have,” Iris said, “the well’s so low. Hardly have enough water for the cows. And your girls have such long hair. How could they wash it?”

We couldn’t deny that was a problem.

“Well, why don’t we try it for awhile,” Iris said, “and see how it works out.”

The girls wanted to just go without telling John, but I knew we couldn’t do that. I had considerable belongings on the upper level of his barn to say nothing of the girls’ things they’d sent by United Parcel.

I went into the living room to tell John we were moving the next day. He was laughing his head off at a TV program while eating a cake-batter-sized bowl of ice cream. To my surprise, all he said was, “You were supposed to wait until Carler came home.”

“I’m sorry,” was all I could say.

The night passed without incident. When I heard him leave in the morning, I felt enormous relief and went up to make my coffee. I looked forward to living on a real Vermont homestead with a real Vermonter at last.

The girls were up early too and we packed. I’d called to borrow Giles’ truck. About eight the phone rang. It was Iris.

“The well is too low,” she said. “I had to send down to Suki’s to get enough water for the cows. I’m sorry.”

Next: an encounter with a tractor

Telling John

2008-08-11T05:20:00.000-07:00

We looked the picture of diligence for any man returning home from work to see —Janey at the sink, Greta at the counter, and me at the stove. They, more honest than their mother, didn’t deign to look at him. I noticed he looked at them, however, with his little darting eyes. Would he catch on that the situation in the house had changed? He’d have to be an ox not to.

“And, so, how was everything at work?” How does one ask a man who works in a plant about his nuts and bolts?

“Fine,” he said, shoveling the dinner in. But I thought he was on edge and watching us.

“A nice day. We went for a drive.”

“First, we did our chores,” Greta said. I almost kicked her under the table.

John had his jaw a little stuck out and his eyes swiveled first at Greta, then Janey, then me.

“More potatoes?”

I knew my daughters were waiting for me to broach what we’d agreed I should this very evening—that we wanted to move, soon. But I was nervous; my stomach was tight. But we had a right to leave, we hadn’t signed on as indentured servants.

“John—“ I began, and the girls caught their breaths. “We have to move.”

John, chewing on a pork chop bone, grease on his chin, looked stolidly at me, indeed, ox-like.

My words tumbled out. “We need a little more freedom (Lord, we had plenty there). We’re not used to living with someone else. Or working for anyone.”

He stopped chewing. His greasy jaw was jutting forward and his head had dropped lower, like a dog’s.

I finished up lamely. “I want Janey and Greta to have this summer free before they go back to school. I guess we’re more the loafing kind.”

“Yes,” Janey said, “I need to do a lot of artwork.”

There was dead silence in the intolerably hot kitchen.

John looked around, his head still low. He looked at the pair of dogs, lying immobile, watching his every move. He smiled his idiotic smile at them. “You’d like this bone, you two, wouldn’t you?” And he waggled the chop bone at them. Their eyes went to it and their ears moved.

I frowned and stole quick glances at Janey and Greta. A warm flush suffused me. “And, so, John, we’re going to leave in a day or two.”

The head, like the turret on a low, squat tank, swung around and the eyes, like slits in the turret, cranked up. “You can’t leave.”

I gulped. “Oh, but we have—“

“You can’t leave. You promised.” There was a clatter. John was holding a knife and it struck against a dish. Why, he was quivering. Besides grease on his face, sweat was breaking out. I looked at him, both repelled and fascinated. His high, squeaky voice poured out.

“What kind of a woman are you, why that would be immoral for you to leave me all alone here with Carler gone. You promised you would stay. You have got to stay. All of you.”

Jiminy Christmas! I had to look at the girls. Their eyes were hot and their mouths hung a little open.

I wet my dry lips. “Well,” I said, and I could hear my own voice quiver, “I’m afraid that we are going to.”

“Yes,” Greta said.

“For sure,” Janey said.

John started shaking his head. Not side-to-side, negatively, but up-and-down, positively, his slack mouth tight together. For some reason, this gesture seemed much more ominous, as if he was now convinced of something, like a course of action we had left him no option not to take.

Next: we talk to Iris

Considering our options

2008-08-08T05:32:00.000-07:00

Out on the dirt road, going by the familiar houses surrounded by hills and trees, our world seemed to right a bit, and it was a little hard to reconcile or even believe what we’d just experienced at the Phipps’. But gross was the overriding consensus. I wished now for the resources of the city, to be able to call Dr. Carlyle and ask him what this meant and is this guy dangerous. My feeling was that he wasn’t. He was just a dirty little old man. But I couldn’t be sure. I drove up Duchess hill road slowly, to Suki’s. Could she put us all up?

A car with Massachusetts plates was in her drive. She had mentioned her son and his family visiting. I drove on, past the bend and the Barn where I’d used to live. “I don’t know, girls, it may take a little while to find a place.”

“It can’t. What about Paula?”

“She has a houseful, like she does all summer.”

“Well, then, Giles and Meg.”

I had thought of that, of course. They did have room but it was an awful lot to ask. Meg did not like cats and besides I felt her equilibrium was still a little uneasy about her husband where I was concerned. But if things got really tense at Phipps, of course, we’d have to flee, in the night.

As we approached her house, Iris Hamilton, the elderly farm lady from Bible Study, came out and went to her mailbox across the road. I stopped to say hello to her and introduce Janey and Greta.

Iris was shy but gracious. I hadn’t visited with her since the girls came. I felt a funny thing about her. We were separated by age and culture, but I knew instinctively that the old, down-home farm woman and I could be good friends if only there weren’t those barriers. She was in a different time warp from me.

“How have you been, Iris?” I said through the window. She wore, as always, a print cotton housedress and heeled shoes, a real country woman’s garb.

Iris shaded her eyes from the sun. “Better, I think,” she said, in her soft, pleasing Vermont accent, looking shyly into the back seat at the two girls.

“We’ll come soon to visit you,” I said. “Did I tell you I moved from my apartment to the Phipps’ house on Strington Road? Do you know them?”

She said she’d heard of them.

“But we’re moving again. Uh, it didn’t work out there. Say, if you hear of any place, let me know.”

“Yes, I will,” Iris said, and I recalled later, there was rather a speculative look on her face.

We had to go back to fix the afternoon meal because we’d agreed we wouldn’t let on to John that anything was amiss until we had a definite place to go to. However, in very diplomatic fashion, I would tell him that very evening over dinner that we were going to move. I wondered if he would notice his room had been freshly vacuumed.

As fate had been kind to me in Vermont—and it was getting speedier—we were no sooner home, concocting the meal, when the phone rang. It was Suki.

“Iris just called me,” she said. “What’s going on? Are you going to move in with her?”

“Why, I don’t know. What did she say?”

“She said ‘maybe.’ She asked me if you could be trusted.”

“Hmm. And what did you answer?”

“I said ‘as far as I know.’”

“Well, that’s all you could know. We do have to move, Suki, and soon. I’ll tell you about it later.”

John was due home any minute. The gourmet meal had to be ready. We were going to stupefy the little man through his weakness, his stomach. Oh—maybe that wasn’t his chief weakness. Oh…gross!

But my spirits were lifted. That Iris would consider having us as renters was a tremendous compliment from a native to a flatlander. The girls liked her and her house. “Can we?” they asked.

“I don’t know. We have to wait until she makes the first move. Oh, oh, here he is—“

Next: telling John

Gross!

2008-08-07T04:22:00.000-07:00

The next day, before anything could interrupt, such as the sun getting too warm and golden and Paula calling to invite us swimming, we parceled out the chores. Janey began on vacuuming the hundreds of yards of dark green carpeting, Greta scrubbed the kitchen, and I did the laundry.

The house resembled the Happy Worker’s Farm. I was in the lower level, could hear the whir of the vacuum, kitchen chairs being scraped about. Then the vacuum went off. I heard Janey cry out something, and feet running in the kitchen. Then both their voices.

“Gross! Oh, how gross!”

It sounded more gross than usual. I went to the bottom of the basement steps, still holding one of John’s shirts I was ironing. “Hey,” I called up, “what’s going on?”

No answer for a moment, only their loud and outraged-sounding exclamations and then that sudden burst of laughter of the young which is the only response they can give to something that defies speech. What in the heck had they discovered now? I rushed up the stairs. They were both in John’s room.

“What?” I demanded. “What?”

They were in the little alcove that held his bed. Greta had a look of the most intense disgust I had ever seen on her face. Janey was smitten with red and white mottled skin. They were still shock-laughing, almost hysterically.

“Oh, Kate, you shouldn’t look—“

I went in and looked about, frowning in bafflement.

“There,” Janey said, “on the wall.”

I followed her gaze, a shrinking one, to a spot up and beside John’s bed in the alcove. To a picture or drawing, of something. I hadn’t my glasses on.

“What is it?” I asked. I couldn’t tell at first. I went closer and then drew back a little to focus. “Oh—“ I said. “Oh! How gross!! Ohhh!!!” And I was seized, like the girls, in the grip of that awful, mirthless laughter, at the unspeakable. What I was looking at was, in living color, a very close-up, I guess it was called, “crotch shot.”

“Shit! Let’s get out of here.”

“Let’s do!”

“Let’s do!”

We went down into my room to talk over how we could.

“You know,” I said, “I’m almost positive that picture wasn’t up on the wall before. Because I’ve vacuumed his room before and put laundry away.”

“Oh, that’s even grosser,” Janey said disdainfully.

“And scarier,” Greta said, “That he put it up for us.”

Our laughter was gone as we tried to consider what that meant. We agreed we’d have to get out of there, and soon. But where to? My apartment was rented to someone else. Could someone put us up temporarily? A lot to ask of these private New Englanders.

“Let’s hurry and finish the work,” I said, “and then go out in the car and maybe we’ll get some ideas. I’d have to borrow a truck to move our stuff.”

“You mean we have to spend the night here?”

“Yes. And we can’t let on.”

“We’re going to barricade our door tonight!”

Next: considering our options

Pushing it a bit too far

2008-08-06T05:03:00.000-07:00

They caught onto the little man too quickly and in their young, heedless way, made every dinner we had with him an adventure in teetering on the brink. It was a good thing the master of the house was obtuse. One evening, we ate outdoors at a picnic table. John grilled hamburgers. Now there was a place in Denver called Ridge Home, which sheltered developmentally disabled people. In our snide family, the word for anyone the cruel young ones thought was slow or different was “Ridge.” They called each other that. “You’re such a Ridge.” “Don’t be so Ridgely.”

This afternoon, John behaved more Ridgely than usual. He sputtered inanities and non sequiturs which rendered the supersensitive girls quivering jelly pots, ready to spill over into manic laughter at the slightest stimulation, such as looking at each other. I whispered to them, “Be careful. You’re pushing it.”

But I was the one who tipped their precariously-held laughter out. We were at the table; it was a clear, early evening. I glanced into the distance and commented, “Look, you can see all the way into New Hampshire.” And waxing poetic, “the ridges of the hills.”

Janey’s green eyes filled as she looked at Greta, whose brown eyes swam. They put their hands to their mouths but the devil mirth spilled out like pea soup vomit, and they both ran from the table, calling out they had to get something for the meal, leaving me with John. His little reddish eyes had a funny expression in them.

Later, in the kitchen, after we’d done the dishes, a mound of them, and left the pots and pans to dry themselves in the sink drainer, he was still in a peeve and repeated his “Carler never leaves dishes in the sink.” I grabbed up a towel to dry them and put them away, feeling we had to humor him. The girls only exchanged glances and sauntered out of the room.

“Tomorrow,” John said, in his pipsqueak voice, “I want you to vacuum. The house really needs it. I don’t want Carler to come back and find a mess.”

“Why, we’ve been doing it,” I said, a little nettled. But my quick, warm flush was cooled by the just as quick recollection that in our excitement over being together, time had elapsed between “hooverings.”

Greta and Janey came back to suggest we go for a walk.

In parting, John said, “Be sure and vacuum in my room.”

Next: Gross!

Greta and Janey arrive

2008-08-05T04:36:00.000-07:00

They had called from Denver to say that they had a drive-away car, a big van, and were headed for their brother Ben’s place in Cambridge. They arrived safe and sound and I drove downcountry to get them. They were so excited that I didn’t stay overnight but turned around and drove right back.

I didn’t tell them my feelings about the Phipps’ house or John, only just said, “He’s a little weird.” They liked their room and were charitable about the rest of the house. The three of us were in the kitchen putting the last touches on dinner when John came home. It looked like a polygamous household. We three females towered over John and he was a little cowed but seemed to recover at the table under Greta and Janey’s soft, girlish ways. He showed them the delayed dog-bowl trick and they reacted as I had, whispering “gross” to me.

John was actually rather festive. He asked them what they liked to do, leading up to saying they could scrape his boat down for him. “And do you like to swim? Carler and I have talked of putting a pool in.”

I could see the girls were just like I had been. Everything was marvelous and exciting to them. Doing the dishes, Greta said, “He’s a cute little man.” I held my tongue. We cleaned up the kitchen quickly so we could get out for a twilight walk. I took them up to the graveyard to show them the view.

“Kate,” they pronounced, “you’ve found a paradise.”

“I know. Say, where did you get this ‘Kate” business?”

“That’s who you are now.”

I’m afraid we slacked off on our chores in the first few days because we were social butterflies. Paula had us immediately for dinner along with all my favorite people, Giles and Meg, Suki and Jake, the Ashtons and a few others Paula hauled in. Greta and Janey’s eyes were knocked out by Paula’s house.

“I know,” I said. “Every house in Vermont is like this. Well, all except one.”

“Kate, you’ve got to get a house here as soon as you can! Just think—visiting for holidays and summers—to have here to come to!”

I loved hearing them be so ecstatic. I probably wouldn’t tell them of my on-and-off yearning for Denver. I still wasn’t decided, though. But I saw it all fresh again through their eyes. The three of us went slightly insane. I showed them all my secret walks and private places, the meadows and the views from certain spots. We walked in single file, me leading, in my green felt crusher hat which they laughed at and then liked so much they wanted one. “Kate,” they kept marveling, “you’d be crazy to ever leave here.”

In a week’s time, their eyes were dewy and they were laughing softly and pushing each other and me. I took them around and introduced them to people and we were entertained. Tish Brewster called to see if they’d help with the Woodfield Antique Show. Sara Fowler enlisted them to serve at the Bean Suppers, held in the grange hall which brought hundreds of people in every Saturday afternoon from miles around. I was tagged to make pies every week all summer. But I loved to make pies.

Our days were poetry. But there was one thing inexorable about our routine—the 4:30 p.m. supper. Sometimes we barely made it but with the three of us, the tossed salad would fly and the fish cakes or whatever would be quickly seared. “Just shoot Dream whip over everything and John will be happy,” Greta said.

Next: pushing it a bit too far

I arm myself

2008-08-04T04:33:00.000-07:00

I sat up, my heart suddenly not beating. Then it started thudding. The noise stopped. I listened, straining every sense. Then it came again. The floorboards above me were creaking.

Oh, God, I thought, it’s John.

I tried to follow where the footsteps went. They sounded through the kitchen and stopped. There was thick carpeting in the hall before the basement door. Next would come the slight metallic “click” of its opening. But I wasn’t going to wait for that. I sprang out of bed—I’d left a nightlight on in the bathroom and by its dim glow fumbled my way to something I’d remembered seeing on a bookcase in the next room. A large, ornate vase. I found it, gripped it, and crept stealthily to the bottom of the stairs. But all I could hear now was the dull, sickening throb of my heart.

So John was a midnight prowler. He was either going to the refrigerator for ice cream or he was going to come down here. If he did, I’d not hesitate to bop him with all my might. Wait… what was that? The sound of a door.

But not the one to the basement. Maybe the front door. What the hell? I heard barking, John’s voice, the door close, and footsteps again. Then a toilet flush. Then, bedsprings creak. Then nothing. My heart came back to normal.

When I went upstairs in the morning, John was gone. When he came home that afternoon I was again at the stove and prepared for him. Sure enough, he came up to me and tried to kiss me. I put my hand against his chest and pushed him away. “Don’t do that!”

“Oh, sorry.” He stepped back, in his little Alpine hat, looking chastened.

“Save your kisses for Carler,” I said in some flustration, while still stirring something on the stove. “I’m not that kind of woman.”

His florid complexion got even redder. “I just wanted to be friendly. I didn’t mean anything.” He turned away, the dogs at his knees, and began to talk to them and pet them.

I realized I couldn’t stay haughty for long, however. We were like two people marooned together on a desert island. I got him to talk at dinner although he was probably the most boring human being I’d met so far. I asked him what the noise was last night.

“Cows,” he said. “In our yard. I had to shoo them off. Came from the Peterson’s across the road.”

Afterwards, I cleaned the kitchen to a farethewell. I’d cooked a small roast for dinner, with carrots and peas and potatoes. Only four more day until the girls came, thank God. Three females could handle this little man and, besides, they loved to cook. But they could be pretty hard on people, once they got their number. I’d have to caution them.

Next: Greta and Janey arrive

Dinner with John

2008-08-01T04:54:00.000-07:00

The kiss was on my cheek. I was so flabbergasted I couldn’t say a word. He stepped back, one of the dogs came in and he patted its head. “Hello, how are you, Goldie, have a nice day?”

“Dinner will be ready soon,” was all I could get out. I put it on—white fish, white potatoes, little knobs of boiled Brussels and iceberg lettuce salad. I was still in shock over John’s behavior but felt it would be worse to say anything about it now. I could see he was a bit nervous himself. I realized I could have given him the dogs’ dinner and he’d have eaten it as he did this one, slurping a little, saying “This is nice.”

“Well, how was work?”

He thought a moment. “Busy.”

I pushed a few buttons with him, couldn’t help it, I’d trained myself too well. His interests. Sailing. Engineering. His conversation was liberally sprinkled with “Carler fixes this.” “That’s the way Carler does it.”

I said a few things, just for balance, about myself, such as “They could never make the charges stick,” and “…running the vacuum topless,” but couldn’t get any rises of interest out of him. John had weak-tea colored eyes, small and set close together, a large nose, and a high, domed forehead tapering at the top of his bald head. He closely resembled one of the Addams’ family.

The horrible meal over, he said he would help with the dishes.

“Oh, no, you must have things you want to do. Take the dogs for a walk.”

“Carler always rinses the dishes in very hot water.”

“Sure.”

He left, being almost pulled off his feet by the mastiffs straining on their leashes.

I washed and rinsed—did he think I didn’t know enough to take the soap off—and left the dishes draining in the rack. He was back before I could escape downstairs.

“I’ll dry those,” he said. “Carler always puts things away.”

This turned out to be his fetish. One of them. No dishes, clean or otherwise, left in view in the kitchen. The dish cabinets were engineered to hold the max, but one had to take down columns in order to insert more parts.

“There,” he pronounced, “now I’ll set my things out for morning.”

He put out a mat, cereal bowl, juice cup with liner, spoon.

“I’m going downstairs,” I said, and before he could say anything, did so, shutting the door behind me. I didn’t return above stairs but watched TV, attempted to read, and went to bed early in a bad mood. I felt guilty over John and resolved to try harder with him. But I realized I was in a worse trap than I’d been in, in Denver.

Along about midnight, I awakened for some reason. A good one. There were noises overhead. Someone was walking about.

Next: I arm myself

Ruminations

2008-07-31T04:35:00.000-07:00

Although I missed my meadows, the countryside around the Phipps’ area was beautiful in a different way. That first morning I walked on the dirt road and came to a strange structure beside it. It was low, built of big stones, and the door had been removed. It was a place where the bodies of those who died in the winter were kept until the ground thawed. It was full of dead leaves. I walked past it, up a slight rise, and came to a magic spot, the cemetery. The ground slanted so that the tall, thin granite markers in various colors of grey marched in rows up and down the hill. The dates on them went back to the 1700’s, and the names were wonderful; I particularly appreciated “Submit,” mother of thirteen, buried next to her husband. (If one can wish in eternity, I would think she’d want not to be next to him.) I sat on the stone style in the wall and fixed the markers so they were in a perpendicular line to my eye and marched right over the gentle breast of a green hill.

I’d have to tell Giles not to visit me like that any more. I wouldn’t hurt Meg for anything. Had he really only wanted someone to talk to, friend to friend? The line here was narrow that people must walk. And I wasn’t proud of myself for having snooped around in Carla’s room. How would it be when she came back and all of us were ricocheting around each other? Oh, how I missed the freedom of my life as I’d known it before! I had sold it for a mess of pottage (however that went).

An interesting leafy path took me to a clearing on which sat my dream house, the one built by young Rodney Blood. I gazed at it, seeing flowers around its foundations—there were none. Being in the Phipps’ house made me feel worse because it seemed as alien an environment as if I’d stepped into a surreal sci-fi landscape.

And, if there was another thing I disliked, it was other people’s refrigerators! I forced myself to think about the dinner I had to prepare that night—no, that afternoon—for John.

Who could eat dinner at 4:30? Somehow, I’d move that time back but I couldn’t today. I was the kind of cook who decided what the family would have for dinner about 5 p.m. Now I was mistress of the most programmed household east of the Mississippi. Taking a deep breath, I opened the refrigerator door. I settled on a package of frozen fish fillets and Brussels sprouts; I’d boil potatoes and make a salad. Dessert—drat dessert—too late for jello with his blasted Dream Whip; maybe just a blob of that in a bowl…rolls? Shoot, it was growing late—

It was already 4:30. Dinner wasn’t quite ready but then, John wasn’t home either. 4:35. I worked frantically at the stove and setting the small table in the kitchen for the two of us. Who could possibly dine before six? Without a drink first?

Chrome light bounced in the windows. I looked out to see the little man with his Tyrolean hat sitting up like a marionette, smartly backing up to park his car precision-like. Worse than other people’s iceboxes were other people’s husbands, if they were like John. He came in, still wearing his hat. I halfway smiled at him from the stove.

“Hello,” he said. He came up to me and before I knew what was happening, put an arm around me and kissed me!

Next: dinner with John

Giles and I talk

2008-07-30T04:47:00.000-07:00

Giles came in, looking so good to me, so wholesome and normal. I could tell by the look on his face he felt a little like a schoolboy playing truant. I’d have to be totally blasé, as though his visit was just the gesture of a friend to a friend.

“Giles! Hi. What are you doing? Just in the neighborhood?”

“No, I came to see you.”

He wore a blue oxford cloth shirt with his khakis. He came up to me and put his arms around me and gave me a little hug which I returned halfway.

“Old girl,” he said.

“Old, yourself,” I said, and he put his cheek against mine for a moment. This has turned out to be some morning, I thought.

I took Giles’ hand to forestall any leaping romantic thoughts (with a woman dressed as I was, in a very morning face) and pulled him toward (not the bedroom where my naughty thoughts had just been) but the explosion of chintz and plants. “I thought you were John,” I said, “come back to surprise me.”

Giles laughed. “I think I surprised you anyway.”

“Well,” I said. “What are you doing? Errands?”

“Yes. This is called ‘going to the store.’”

Oj—Giles—what would Meg, my dearest friend in Creston, think? We looked at each other and smiled sheepishly. He was damned attractive. I wondered if he were serious. Was it simply because there weren’t that many available women in Creston, and I was the gay divorcee from out West?

“Sometimes, I need to visit a friend I can talk to, just like Meg does with you,” Giles said.

“Your snowmobile buddies don’t do it for you?”

“No, that’s all guy stuff.”

“But you can talk to Meg.”

“Oh, sure, but sometimes she gets the darnedest notions. Like this morning. Do you know what she asked me?”

“What?”

“She asked me, ‘Do you think Kate thinks I’m jealous and possessive?’ ‘Why would she?’ I said. And she said, ‘That day I acted like that at church.’”

Hmm. My faint suspicion was right, then. I said, “It wasn’t the singing that upset her but my being next to you.”

“That’s right.” And Giles smiled ruefully as though women were the greatest puzzle of the ages. I hated myself for saying this, but I did anyway.

“You say that kind of sadly.”

He looked at me for a long moment. “Kate. It’s been awfully tough, sometimes, trying to deal with her jealousy. And I’ve never given her any reason to be. Oh, except for one time.” He paused like he was on the brink of a pool but then dove in.

He’d had an affair, short and intense. The words came pouring out. “…I lived out all my sexual fantasies…if Meg ever knew…”

I was not too surprised that such an attractive man as Giles had had a “fling” for which he obviously felt no little guilt. But I was appalled at myself for pushing buttons with him. Using one of those powerful phrases I’d picked up from Dr. Carlyle.

I was afraid Giles might say, “Now what about you?” so I quickly said, “I’m glad we had this talk. I see what you mean about men. They have no one to really express themselves to. Women are always crying on each others’ shoulders.”

“Yes, Giles said. “I feel so close to you, Kate. Now, don’t worry, you don’t have to say anything. And I’m leaving. Say, what about Phipps and you, here alone together? What if he makes some moves?”

“I’m bigger than he is. Besides, he’s just an old codger. I’m sure he’s past all such thoughts.”

“No man is,” Giles said.

He left, leaving me much to think about. One thought was…the heck with housework. I had to get out of that house. So I took a walk.

Next: ruminations

Nosing around a bit

2008-07-29T04:24:00.000-07:00

It was a beautiful end of June morning with the sun coming out strongly. One of the things I had always liked doing was wandering, alone, through the rooms of a house to absorb its environment. But I’m afraid I received very little pleasure from the Phipps’; it so distinctly wasn’t mine. I wondered how my daughters would react to this house. Well, as I recalled, their upstairs bedroom wasn’t too bad. To refresh my memory, I went upstairs, shutting the door of the stairs behind me to keep the dogs back.

Yes, the bedroom was pretty nice, a tad fussy, but bearable. The furniture was old and brown, the bedspreads candlewick white, there were two small desks and even a rocker. Also, it was dormered and that always gave a look of coziness. I wondered how they’d coexist with Carla up here. Well, to my knowledge neither of them were addicted to hard rock although Greta did strum her guitar occasionally.

And, so, how was Carla’s room? As people left to their own devices in strange houses might do, I wandered in there. It was smaller, perhaps looking so because of the double bed; John had twins in his room. Idly, thoughts of “did they ever room-hop?” came to my mind. They weren’t so terribly old, both in their early sixties.

Carla had a small shelf of books by her bedside. It seemed natural to peruse the titles. There were some doodads as well, a small notepad, perhaps a diary. Well, I certainly wouldn’t read it. Perhaps only glance at the first few lines to get a feel for the kind of person I was going to be living with for the foreseeable future. But, no, the pad was blank. Next to it was a cardboard box which I picked up without thinking. It was open at one end, had no labels except for the words, “Made in Sweden.” As I leaned to put it back, its contents slid out. Ah—some kind of flashlight…pink and rounded…and then…although I’d never seen one before, it dawned on me. Damn! I would be curious. A pox upon me. I stuffed it back in the bookcase and left the room. Carla must’ve packed in a hurry. Or maybe she had a traveling model. I guess she didn’t visit John in his room.

I went back downstairs. I was rather unnerved and fixed myself a second cup of coffee. Then I heard a car’s tires crunch in the gravel driveway. John back? Oh, no! I looked out. It was a familiar blue stationwagon. Then I saw long, khaki-covered legs and topsider shoes get out and start for the house. And here I was, in my little boy shirt and cords, no lipstick on. He was being very daring. But the Phipps’ house was well socked-in with trees. Actually, I was damned glad to see Giles.

Next: Giles and I talk

John and I alone together

2008-07-28T05:24:00.000-07:00

John was to drive Carla to a place in New Hampshire from where she’d ride with a friend to the airport in Connecticut. They asked me to go with them. I felt I should, although Paula had invited me to a swimming party at her pond. When we dropped Carla off she said, “Now, John, on the way home, take Kate out for a nice dinner so she won’t have to cook.”

We stopped at—the Golden Arches. John asked me if I liked the food. I had received the impression before that people here did not look upon it the same way I did, but rather, almost as if—could it be—eating there was a treat. So I held my tongue. John was my sponsor-employer and, as with anyone new in my life, I was still feeling my way for I had not abandoned totally my concept of “embrace” although much of the naiveté had rubbed off the edges.

John seriously strained any good impulses I might have toward him by ordering two Big Macs, a double order of French fries, a shake, and a hot apple pie. He had a single-minded expression as he chomped on all that hot, steam-soft food I had thought never in this life to taste again.

“Hmm, good,” he said.

“Uh, what brought you to Vermont?” I asked, and so on.

Under my deft finger of inquiry, I learned the Phippses had come from Pennsylvania, he was an engineer at a tool manufacturing plant in a town 20 miles from Creston, and he had absolutely no curiosity about me, at least apparently.

We arrived home and were almost flattened by the welcome from the two dogs as the two cats, sleek and well-furred like two ladies in their sables, were cooler but every bit as insistent on their food as the slavering dogs. John prepared their dishes while instructing me on so much of this mixed with so much of that.

He set the dogs’ dishes on the floor. They lunged forward but were stopped cold by his high-pitched scream.

“Wait!”

It would’ve stopped a bull rhinoceros.

“Wait until I say!”

I couldn’t believe this display of raw human power or ego. Saliva dripped from the dogs’ tongues and their desperate eyes fixed on their master. John waited beyond a conscionable minute, so that I felt like saying, “For God’s sakes!”

“Okay.”

The dogs went for their food and in seconds it was over. John left to take them for a walk and I went downstairs to write to the girls. They were leaving California in a few days for Denver where they would spend about a week and then come East in a drive-away car. Their letters to me almost danced off the page.

I heard John come in and his footsteps despite the heavy carpet, and then the TV start up. Soon, I began to hear some sort of noise from out the window. It was an animal-like sound like, well, a hyena, but surely not in Vermont. Perhaps it was on the TV program. I heard it again. Could it be? Yes, it was. John laughing.

After a little while because it seemed unfriendly not to, I went upstairs to say goodnight to him. He’d fallen asleep in his chair, his head back, his chin dropped down. Beside him was a bowl to rival the dogs’ in size, with a few puddles of ice cream in it. Naughty John! As soon as the keeper of the refrigerator goes away. I was afraid he’d gain twenty pounds before she came back.

I gently shook him. If there was one thing I hated to do, it was wake people up. Especially, people like John.

“Fmph, fmph,” he mumbled so I left him to his own devices.

In the kitchen, I saw he’d laid out his cereal bowl, coffee cup and juice glass for morning. At absolute compass points. That night I didn’t sleep very well. I kept imagining I heard footsteps overhead. It was with relief I heard the Scout take off about 6:30, and I went up to get my coffee and meet my day.

Next: nosing around a bit

How Carla "does things"

2008-07-25T04:40:00.000-07:00

Carla called down to me about 4:30. “Dinner’s ready, Kate.”

I supposed on Sunday they ate early, like some people did.

“Oh, Carla, what a meal!” I exclaimed. Several times. “How can I follow in your footsteps?”

How indeed! Carla had stuffed and broiled huge mushroom caps and garnished them with a dollop of sour cream dusted with herbs; fixed chicken breasts glazed with wine; fresh asparagus vinaigrette; biscuits so dainty and delectable I ate three before I could stop myself; an exquisite salad, all served on a table set with silver, crystal and a bouquet of garden flowers.

“Oh, I’m sure you can do it, Kate. You’ve raised five children.”

I wasn’t sure at all. But I suspected this day’s dinner had been a wee bit special. Carla kept emphasizing she didn’t want to “make John fat.” And John, who ate with single-minded attention while she and I chatted, threw in now and then, “Carler, does this have real butter in it?”

“No, of course not,” his wife replied.

Carla served her husband a little jewel of a dessert—ruby red gelatin, molded, with a dollop of Dream Whip.

“You’ll get along fine, Kate,” she said. “John is easy to do for. His schedule never changes. Oh—a good thing—you don’t have to get up in the morning for him. And he comes home early and wants dinner so he can do some work before bed.”

I nodded, loving that I didn’t have to face John in the morning.

“So, dinner at 4:30,” Carla smiled.

Ulp! I was just having my wake-up-from-nap tea about then. And, later, my bourbon. Dinner at 4:30 wasn’t civilized. I could see I’d have to make some concessions in order to be a kept woman. I suggested I fix John’s dinner for him, but eat later myself.

“Oh, you must eat with him. He’d feel badly if you didn’t”

I sighed inwardly but also figured that when Carla was away I’d ease the dinner hour back even if I had to reset the clocks.

While Carla was there, she showed me “how I do things.” Being German, she was a fanatical housekeeper (the Irish aren’t so plagued). She pulled out a canister-type vacuum, with more attachments than I’d ever seen.

“I plug it in here,” she said, standing in the back hall. “And then I can go everywhere with it.”

She proceeded to demonstrate as I followed her about. Carla was also one of those exceedingly vigorous women. She flipped over couch cushions with one hand while running the brush attachment over the cushions and inner recesses of the couch and chairs. “Because of the animals.” She ran the brush over everything in sight, up the draperies, the leaves of the 101 houseplants, lampshades, a footstool, throw pillows. Then she changed attachments and briskly vacuumed every inch of the ugly green carpet.

I limply followed her about with a dust cloth, feeling like I’d been plucked out of a mid-Victorian orphanage, wondering how I was going to coexist with this house. I was the kind of person who just about had to love her surroundings or else they might be neglected. I reproached myself for gross ingratitude.

Before Carla scrubbed the kitchen, on her hands and knees, she upended the chairs onto the table, like a restaurant does at night, and washed their legs.

Next: John and I alone together

Moving in

2008-07-24T04:44:00.000-07:00

I gave notice on the apartment but my lease was due to expire anyway. I had been there nine months. It was no doubt time for a change. As I packed my belongings, I wondered. Fate had signaled to me clearly, had it not? What would it all hold for me and the girls? I had time to muse because, somehow, I had mysteriously gathered practically another household together.

I had the round braided rug I’d just bought, three chairs, a small sideboard, a bedroom dresser, a night table, a set of dishes, many pots and pans, the table I’d made in woodworking, my desk and its chair, brass candlestick holders, the flare from the woods I also used as a candlestick holder, two standing lamps and two table lamps, several straw baskets, a piece of snowmobile bridge I used as a spice rack, the big plank that served as a plant stand, huge wooden pieces of an unfinished coffee table, and about six suitcases worth of clothing, including an olive green duffle coat that Meg had had in her rummage bag, rubber boots, brown suede boots, black and brown high heel dress boots, three coats, several jackets, umpteen old cardigan sweaters and turtlenecks, corduroy pants, wool slacks, a long Pendleton wool skirt—plus cross-country skis and boots. Ye gads! I’d arrived here with what I could stuff into my car; half of this wouldn’t even fit in the car, but if it did, it’d be three or four carloads full.

I was embarrassed for John to see how much stuff I had. I began to help him put things into the Scout, but he stopped me.

“The ironing board later. The big things first.”

He tussled my furniture, I helped lift, and he wedged things in with mathematical precision, reversing, turning upside down, easing in, interlocking legs like his life depended on a perfect fit. I was amazed. Then I tried to put in the ironing board.

“I think it’s better on the side,” he said, and he shot it in as though he’d fashioned a groove for it.

I threw things willy-nilly into my own car. I thought, these people are really organized. Seeing that trait pleased me because I needed to be inspired that way.

When we arrived at their place, John stowed things away into the top floor of the barn the same way. Everything had to be just so.

Carla was smiling in the kitchen, obviously preparing a gourmet feast, from the aromas. It was about three o’clock, on a Sunday afternoon. “We want you to be happy here,” she said. “Just tell us if anything isn’t comfortable.”

I continued to be overwhelmed by largesse. They’d put the downstairs apartment in such painful order I hated to muss it up with my motley belongings. There were at least a hundred hangers in the enormous closet—sheer paradise—shelf space, the bathroom with tissue waiting to spring up, coordinated towel set neatly folded, even toothpaste.

I chuckled to myself as I heard the footsteps of my hosts overhead. I could not believe my good fortune! Why, here were quarters practically as commodious as the apartment, private bath, own entry, cunning desk in a window—oh—I couldn’t stand it—pencils, paper, and pen laid out! Bookshelves, a TV, clock radio, electric blanket—all for free! And the room upstairs for my daughters, free, too—the run of the house—the use of Carla’s big car when she was gone to Europe—my eyes misted. My cup runneth over.

Next: how Carla “does things”

Getting in deeper

2008-07-23T05:16:00.000-07:00

We went downstairs so I could see my diggings, and I was pleasantly taken by them. There was a very large room, with its own entrance, a combination bedroom-sitting room, with laminated-type furniture and pink plastic lampshades that curled under, but who cared? All I could think about was saving the $500 plus a month I was spending out of savings, which drainage, with nothing coming in, was making me too nervously insecure to be able to write. There was also my own private bathroom.

Then we went to the second floor to see where the girls would sleep. Two bedrooms were up there. I was surprised when Carla said, “This one is mine and your daughters can have the other one.” So they didn’t sleep together. Well, maybe it was because John snored or something. After all, they were a shade older. The bedroom for the girls was nice and spacious, with twin beds and desks and rockers. It was a bit frilly but acceptable even to those two with severe tastes. I permitted myself to exult out loud a bit.

“Gosh, this is so nice. Really, can you put up with us all?” Now, we were almost like old friends. I decided John, up and walking around, was a cute little man.

“Of course, it will be fun.”

“I’ve got a lot of stuff at my apartment.”

“John will put everything up in the barn.”

“I’ll have to borrow a truck.”

“John has his Scout.”

“Shall I wait ‘til the girls come?”

“No, we’d like you to move in as soon as you can. You know, I’m going to Europe the 17th?”

“No, did you mention it? How long will you be gone?”

“Three weeks. That’s all. So it would be good if you and I were here together before I leave so I can show you a few things about John’s diet—“

“Don’t say diet.”

“—food, and we can go grocery shopping together.”

Things had developed so quickly, that this new bit of information, that Carla was leaving soon on a trip, and John and I would be alone together, didn’t faze me. Actually, it might be good to have the woman of the house away while the hired girl dug in.

Next: Moving in

I become a hired girl

2008-07-22T04:59:00.000-07:00

“We’re a very relaxed household,” Carla said, with a smile. “Easy to get along with. And the dogs are big babies. We have two cats also but they stay mostly outdoors.” I could see one curled up on the couch. I felt I should say immediately that my two daughters and big kitty were imminently coming, but Carla launched so vigorously and enthusiastically into what she wanted to tell me that there was no opportunity to explain myself short of rudely interrupting.

“…John gets home early from the plant and likes to have his supper so he can do some work before bed. There’s always so much to do around a country house—“

This is not a country house, I thought.

“But we’re very casual and relaxed about everything and not demanding.”

“Tell her about my food,” Phipps piped up.

“Oh, yes, John is on a perpetual diet.”

“Not ‘diet.’ I’m just restricted.”

“He’s restricted.”

I could see, although he hadn’t stood up yet, he was a roly-poly. I could also see they had accepted me, hook, line and sinker. Wait until I told them I was to be a trio, and soon.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m rather here under false—“

“Now, let’s show you the house,” and Carla popped up.

“Mrs. Phipps—“

“Carla, please!”

“My daughters are coming.”

“Your daughters? Oh, well, you can certainly have visitors.”

“There’s room,” Phipps said.

“No, I mean they’re coming to spend the summer with me.”

Carla sat down again. But she continued to smile, and it seemed her husband leaned forward a bit.

“How nice. Two daughters?”

“Yes. They’re eighteen and twenty.”

The Phippses looked at each other.

“Are they strong, healthy girls?” Carla inquired. And, before I could answer, she said, “They can help John do all sorts of things outdoors. Refinish the boat, paint the barn, help with the dogs, my garden—“

I was very surprised at this reaction and still couldn’t quite grasp Carla’s meaning. “But I’d pay for their food,” I protested.

“Oh, no, my no,” Carla said. “They’re not going to eat us out of house and home. And, besides, John loves young people around.”

“Yes, that will be nice,” he said, without much expression.

Oh, oh, I’d forgotten Furry. Might as well throw his little body on the heap, too. “They’re bringing our cat.”

“Fine, just fine.”

I couldn’t believe my good fortune. It scarcely soaked in as we got up and took a tour of the house. The three of us could stay all summer, free!

Next: Getting in deeper

A little light housekeeping

2008-07-21T04:46:00.000-07:00

“Wanted, girl or woman to share spacious house in Creston with couple in exchange for light housework. Private room and bath, meals. Call…”

I read this standing before my front window, overlooking the meadow. I looked out, thinking about it. Too bad such an ad hadn’t been in six months ago. What that would have saved me. I looked through the rest of the newspaper. Then I read the ad again. Which house? What couple? Gosh, if I were free to do that it would be perfect. I went about my chores, doing the few dishes I had, giving a lick and a promise with the broom on the kitchen floor. What would it be like to live with a couple? And what did light housework mean? I was a very light housekeeper now. I went for a walk, then had lunch and a nap and then called the number in the ad. I was just curious.

A nice, warm-sounding woman’s voice answered the phone. The house was on the Strington Road, which was beautiful, but not a place I knew very well, nor had I ever heard of the “Phipps.”

“We’d like to talk to you,” Mrs. Phipps said. “Could you come this evening about 7:30?”

“All right,” I answered. Now, why was I wasting both our times this way? The girls and Furry were coming in about two weeks.

The house was a dark brown cape, well off the road. If you didn’t know it was there, you’d never notice it. It didn’t look so very large, but after I parked and walked toward it, I saw it was three levels in the back where the ground sloped away. There was also a two-story, new-looking barn. Everything was in good repair, in fact, neat as a pin. I knocked and the door was opened by a smiling, red-haired woman.

“Good evening,” she said, offering her hand. “I’m Carla Phipps. And you must be Kate. Come in and meet John.”

I stepped into a very large living room, which so immediately overwhelmed me I scarcely saw the man sitting at the far end. I always expected the usual New England look—polished wood floors, old, good furniture…but no, this room was wall-to-wall carpeting, dark bottle-green in color, and fabric, lots of it, in a brown, yellow and green floral design. It was everywhere, up the walls on draperies, across the window tops in valances, on a couch, loveseat, and three or four overstuffed chairs; plus scads of honey-toned wood—maple, I supposed; a heavy, too-ornate room, with, it seemed on that first glance, a hundred plants and scores of little figurines, framed small pictures and doodads. But my attention to this room was interrupted by dogs, rushing to meet me—huge, golden-red, with lolling tongues a foot long.

“Down! Stop that now!” Mrs. Phipps said sharply to the lead dog. And to me, “I hope you don’t mind dogs. Now, behave, both of you. I’ll put you out!”

The dogs drew back a little. They didn’t bark or growl at me, they just seemed clumsy and heavy like the room.

“John, this is Kate,” and I was led up to a little man who didn’t rise from his chair, but held out his hand and looked at me rather shyly, with small eyes that, in the lamplight, looked dark red. He had a long, broad nose and a high, domed bald pate. I sat in one of the flower-bedecked chairs, and Carla crossed the room and sat in a matching one.

I heard myself say, “What a nice room,” as I looked around. It was truly awful. The oppressive dark plush carpeting went on into a broad back hall opposite me and seemed also to flow into rooms adjoining.

Carla led the conversation while her husband, like the dogs, just watched me.

Next: I become a “hired girl”

Small occurrences of fate

2008-07-18T04:54:00.000-07:00

And then, those small occurrences of fate conspired. Months ago, I had told people, happily, of the girls’ coming.

“We’ll take them to the fair at Topsham, and canoeing,” Giles said, and Meg, antiquing with me, guided me to things to fix up the second bedroom in the apartment, such as a braided rug, handmade, a real steal for $20. The young couple upstairs offered the loan of twin beds and the testy widow had an old couch she didn’t want. I realized, in saner moments, I couldn’t let my girls down. I couldn’t deprive them of the “Vermont experience” nor would I tell them of my feelings, my ruptured honeymoon. Maybe I was just going through a normal, should-be-expected stage of transplantation, the last dying throes of separation from the old. I lightly discussed this with my mentor, Suki.

“I’m surprised you haven’t complained before,” she wisely said.

“I guess you’re right,” I agreed.

So I set to fixing up the bedroom, got all my extras out of it, put down the rug—how nice and cozy it looked—Scott installed the beds for me, and I reclaimed Clara’s couch from the trash dump. I had a big piece of the black and white toile material left from the draperies that I put over it, and everything looked very nice. They would be here in about a month. They were flying to Denver first, to see their father and brother Will and friends, and to put our big cat, Furry, on a plane for Boston. They hoped to get a drive-away car to Boston, and then I would drive down, get Furry and them at Ben’s in Cambridge. I began to get very excited about their coming. That was all I needed here, some family, and I’d be all right.

And, then, as sometimes happens, so that you think, how fantastic it is, fate intervened in my carefully made plans, in a very small, almost inconspicuous way. There was an ad I just happened to read in the Woodfield Chronicle and it changed everything.

Next: a little light housekeeping

2008-07-17T04:33:00.000-07:00

“Despair to drowning…”

“Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.”
--Gerard Manley Hopkins

Slowly at first, but then, gathering weight, a feeling settled upon me. I didn’t know quite what it was; I’d awaken earlier even than my worst hours—at two or three-thirty—and lie in bed, cowering, icy-cold under my electric blanket turned high, sometimes see the moon stream brilliantly in, sometimes be forced to get up by some unknown impulse and stare out at the ghostly meadows; face blank paper at my desk and be unable to put down a word, drink the coffee I knew would make me feel worse.

In the light of day, outdoors, at the top of a gentle rise, I would feel better and try to puzzle out what was bothering me so much. I looked at the clouds and hills and trees and rock and red leaf, trying to draw from them the joy and comfort I used to, but these things seemed cold and dead to me. Instead, I began to see other things.

A boulevard, an intersection, lights, colors, movement flashing; a mirror-paneled building, a mortuary on a certain corner, a tile supermarket sign, a brick house, a brick wall, patterned furniture, a small garden plot, and I sighed with an ache. I walked through all the rooms of my little house, rooms that I’d done something to, from the floor to the ceiling. I longed to touch my dishes, my furniture, the fabric of my chairs. I was homesick, sick for loss of my home, my stove, my dishwasher, my washing machine. I had dispossessed myself, oh, what had I done to myself? I had become a wanderer in a strange land, with alien people…

This mood settled in upon me despite all my efforts and euphoric moments and I avoided seeing the few people I knew. Creston shrunk even smaller. It seemed to me that if I could not immediately burst through this tiny, repressive landscape and be back in my old environment, with all the noise and clamor and tackiness and things I loved, I’d surely die on the spot or turn to stone.

I walked and walked and prayed and prayed to dispel these feelings. But the ache was deep in me. I began to long for my childhood. Scenes of a town in Oklahoma came back to me, huge old lilac bushes I had played among, tunnels of greenery, my secret paths, my parents, brothers, nuns who taught me, the corridors of grade school… I sobbed inwardly with loss.

There was nothing for it. I’d have to write the girls and tell them we would meet in Denver this summer and have a Denver summer. We’d rent a big apartment together, all get jobs, and figure out our lives.

But I kept getting letters, more than usual from them.

“Our slogan when we feel low, to pick ourselves up, is ‘Vermont in June,’” Greta wrote.

Janey quoted Hopkins: “O, wildness and wet, let there be no end to wildness and wet,” and said how tired she was of the city, even small Santa Cruz, and longed to be in the “fretty chervil” of Vermont.

How could I disappoint them?

Next: small occurrences of fate

Inside the house

2008-07-16T05:53:00.000-07:00

I called that evening and the next afternoon, accompanied by Meg whom I’d told and who also wanted to see it, went, very excitedly, in the ell door. It led into the kitchen. Rodney, a husky young fellow about thirty-three years old, with a blond beard, and his wife, Laurie, despite their calm, reserved manner, were obviously pleased that I liked their house so much. They gave Meg and me a tour.

It was perfect, everything about it. Upstairs were two bedrooms, with dormer windows, plus a bedroom on the first floor. It had a dry, spic and span basement which its owner still referred to as a cellar. There was a wood-burning furnace, the first I’d seen. It had a thermostat and, according to Rodney, was efficient and economical. Neat stacks of wood Rodney had cut from his own land were in the corners. The house also had something I’d read about, with a degree of amazement, in Yankee magazine.

“Not a Clivis Multrum!” I exclaimed. This, I really had to see. It was, of course, the earth toilet, promoted out of Woodstock by none other than a Rockefeller, that recycled human waste. Rodney took me to the business end, in the cellar, the receiving tank. He opened a small door on the side and reached in and brought out a handful of dry, odorless “humus.”

“Great for the garden,” he said.

Meg and I said, “I can’t believe it.”

We went back upstairs. Rodney, of course, had built all the kitchen cabinets and they were beautiful. He gave me the overall specifications and a rough figure on how much it would cost to build a similar house. Under $35,000, not counting land!

So now, I had a new, substantial idea in mind. The ultimate dwelling place of my fantasies existed in solid wood, brick, and a garden-friendly, fertilizing toilet. New fuel for my imagination, which had been sorely in need of it because, deep in my bones, I’d missed a home more than anything else. I began to spend afternoons and evenings at my desk, drawing floor plans complete with furniture and refiguring budget projections.

But perhaps it came too late.

Next: “Despair to drowning…”

My dream house

2008-07-15T05:26:00.000-07:00

It was on Blood Hill, where Sara Fowler had mentioned there were some good trails. I parked my car on the Strington Road, opposite the cemetery. The path quickly left the road and wound into the woods, going gently up Blood Hill (named for a family, not a shedding).

Almost always when I walked I was in a state of early morning euphoria. But later on my spirits were apt to plummet for I was fighting extreme feelings of loneliness which settled in upon me at night. I was thinking too much of home, a home, wherever it was once or would be in the future.

And soon enough, this day, I came to an open area of high ground and what should be there, outlined against its own patch of cool blue sky but a perfect little house! I had been struck so many times by houses in Vermont that I’d run out of adjectives but there was something immediately different and appealing about this Blood Hill house. It looked like mine! The one, I suddenly realized, that was the composite of my dreams. I stood there, agape, looking at it.

It took me a few moments to realize that it was not an old house but a fairly recently built one, which realization deeply excited me. If someone could build a house like this, why so could I! And as much as I admired the really old houses of Vermont, they scared me because I hadn’t the money, savvy and muscle to keep them constantly in repair as was required, especially their operating centers, “downcellar.” Both Paula’s and Suki’s houses had floors a marble could not sit on in any spot without rolling; nary a door jam or window could meet a square—all charming details but, nonetheless, intimidating to a flatlander. A thorough, loving knowledge of an old house was required to live successfully in one.

This small house in front of me looked like it’d been there for a long time but even my untrained eye could see it had none of the sags or marks of age. The clapboard was weathered a soft sable grey which was accented by vertical pieces of wood that framed the ends, doors and windows that were painted blue, a shade just like on the abandoned sugar house in the woods I loved so much.

The house was a cape style and it had a small, neat ell, a thick center chimney, double-hung windows and a traditional New England door you’d have to step up to—no little porch; obviously, one entered in the New England manner, through the door in the ell.

It didn’t look like anyone was home for there was no car or truck and no snarling dog. So I went a little closer and peeked in the window. I saw wide-plank wooden floors and white plaster walls. A small bay window in the back overlooked a garden. There was a child’s swing set so young people must live here so the chances were good the house had been built by its owner. The name on the mail box was Rodney Blood.

On the way home, I stopped by Suki’s. She put out two cups and the decaf and we went into the den and poured water from the ever-simmering teakettle atop the ever-burning wood stove. I told Suki about the house I’d just seen.

She knew it, of course. “Cyril Blood’s boy. He built it himself two or three years ago. Why don’t you call him and tell him how much you like his house? I’m sure he’d be delighted to show it to you.”

Next: inside the house

Suki and I take a wood-working class

2008-07-14T05:34:00.000-07:00

The scene: a large, high-ceilinged, warm, dusty, garishly lit, half-a-century old room in the West Lebanon High School filled with wood-working machines. Around these machines fumble a half-dozen adults, men and women, young and old and an instructor who looks like he was a carpenter back at Nazareth. There are also two country-style dames in corduroy pants, flannel shirts, worried expressions, and sawdust-touched hair. The thin, distracted-looking one is me, the other, with glasses slipping down her nose, is Suki.

I’m holding a thick, wide plank which looked like it had lain in the woods for a quarter-century. It had. I’d found it, a huge piece before Jake cut it up for me into manageable lengths, about three miles from my apartment. It was easily twenty feet long, a foot and a half wide and two inches thick. Although it was lying partly in mud, I could see it was straight and unblemished. A piece of wood like this at the lumber yard would cost maybe $20. I was delighted because using it was in keeping with the Vermont ethos. So I pried it up and began to drag it over rocks and brambles, hill and dale, toward my apartment. It took me three days to haul it in. When I tried to cut it into car-size pieces with a rusty saw with a broken handle I’d also found in the woods, Jake came over with an old Skil saw and dismembered the leviathan board for me. In his cadaverous voice he said, “Must of come off Mt. Ararat.”

In class now at the machines, surrounded by people who had pungent-smelling new walnut, maple, beech and pine, I wished I’d not been so frugal. Mike, the instructor, had looked at my wood with dubious respect. “You’ll have to run it through the planer several times.”

Suki helped me and we managed to send it through the machine that scalped it and revealed it to be fir, not the pine I wanted. I was going to make a small, simple table, Shaker style, with a square top and a single turned leg that fit into a crossed-foot base. Next, I had to use the table saw and wished for Mike to help me but he was busy elsewhere. The trouble was, I was chicken; my hands were nerveless and sawdust clung to a mustache of terror on my upper lip. I set the guides and started the timber through. The saw knew all the time. It not only rejected the wood but threw it across the room, just missing striking Suki in the head!

Mike finished the cut for me and put me on the lathe which I thought a bore and not as easy as Mike made it look. Suki, who was making candlesticks out of walnut, and I braved ice and snow to travel to West Lebanon about six times. Eventually, I finished the table. Suki had stain and poly. So all the class had cost me, save the modest entry fee, had been my self-esteem as a liberated female who could someday build her own house as I read often in those fairy-tale New England magazines that women were doing. But I consoled myself with the thought if I lost even one finger, it’d be hard to type on my novels. Besides, there were plenty of marvelous carpenters and builders in every town and hamlet of Vermont. Soon enough, I discovered just the right one to construct my dream house because he lived in the one that, all along, I wanted, but hadn’t realized it until one day I came unexpectedly upon it.

Next: my dream house

The Woodfield bakery

2008-07-11T04:43:00.000-07:00

Tish Brewster had called to remind me of the promise she had wrung from me to produce “delectibles” for the Historic Woodfield House Bake Sale, to be held every Thursday. Cursing any interruption now in my novel endeavors, I nonetheless baked Wednesday evening and in the morning loaded my creations carefully in boxes and took them over the back road to Woodfield.

Inside the big red building was much activity. Iris and Annie and Faith from Bible Study were there, and Nora Clough, carrying loaves of dark bread and some donuts. Her eyes only momentarily slid over me. My pecan tarts and cheesecake bars were received with appreciation and I was asked to name my price. I only rounded off what I’d spent on ingredients and charged that. It would all go to Woodfield House.

People were coming in off the streets to investigate the good smells. I hung around to see how things went. Soon, I sat down and had coffee with a charming New England lady who had a lovely, warm smile and the figure of a girl. “Kate, how are you?” she asked. “I’ve been thinking of you.”

This was Bert for Roberta Frothingham, the daughter of a man in whose time I wished I’d lived, Maxwell Perkins. As we ate sticky buns, I was picturing her as one of the five Perkins girls, privy to that world of literature inhabited by Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Majorie Kinnan Rawlings and Taylor Caldwell, to name a few. Perkins, the famed editor at Scribners, brought them all along in their careers.

Bert was in charge of volunteers for the library and tactfully suggested I might consider working an afternoon or so a week. I began my evasion but then decided Bert would appreciate a truthful excuse. I told her I wanted to give all my time to my novel.

She said, “How wonderful, Kate, of course you do. Someday, you can address the library group on it.”

“That’s a thought,” I said.

“Can you tell me what your book’s about?” Bert asked. Her gaze at me was kind and encouraging.

“It’s about some incidents in my life. You know, we all think we have a novel inside us.”

“But most of us are not clever enough to bring it out,” Bert said, continuing to gaze at me with approval. She was so nice, so warm and positively emanated that certain granite-bedded strength of character that suddenly the idea popped into my mind of asking her to read my book. But I wouldn’t until it had shaped up more and I saw what I had.

Before we parted, I said, “No doubt you know our famous writer in residence, the recluse?” I did not mention his name for she would know I meant J.D. Salinger.
“Oh, yes,” Bert said. He was in here just a little bit ago.”

I gulped. What if he had bought one of my desserts?!

Soon, I added another item to my bake sale offerings that made me a little famous. Chocolate peanut butter cups, said to rival Reese’s. I worried a little that the recipe called for a tablespoon of paraffin. What was that do to people’s insides? I found tiny muffin cup liners at Woodstock’s incomparable general store, F.O. Gillingham’s. Besides peanut butter, there were two kinds of chocolate in the recipe. They turned out beautifully and sold out in about fifteen minutes.

Many months later, at the Woodfield drugstore, the plump wife of the druggist said to me, seeing my name on some pictures I’d had developed, “I’ve hated you for a very long time.”

“I’m sorry, I won’t make them anymore.”

“Oh, please, don’t stop.”

Next: Suki and I take a wood-working class

To carry on with this

2008-07-10T05:09:00.000-07:00

We ended this perfect day back at the Parishes, although I said, half-heartedly, “I should go home,” but neither would even listen to that. We pulled our boots off before the stove which had kept a good glow in our absence. Then we had Meg’s lentil soup with some hearty bread and darned if she didn’t have some of my pecan tarts I’d made for the Woodfield Bakery. We halfway watched TV, lolling contentedly, sipping decaf, me smoking, all of us exuding healthy, tired vitality. Meg was a little quiet, content to listen and gently laugh at Giles’ and my banter. Both hugged me when I left and grazed my cheek with kisses. Driving down the hill, the headlamps of my car playing eerily in the fog, I felt the warm glow that comes from a day well-spent.

But I was worried over Meg. Some secret sorrow revisited her. That next Sunday, it was my turn to drive us to Mass. It was the usual, high-spirited, almost rollicking Mass Father Balliett orchestrated so well—songs to put you in a sentimental mood and then his sermon which riveted your soul to your backbone. During the rather haunting song afterwards, Meg suddenly got up and fumbled her way past Giles and me and ran out the door! Giles and I exchanged looks of surprised consternation.

“I’d better go see,” he whispered.

I stayed until the end of the service, another ten or so minutes, wondering if Meg had suddenly taken ill. I figured that when I came out, they’d be having coffee at the diner, but no, both were waiting for me in my car. Meg’s eyes were red and swollen. When I got in, she grasped my hand.

“I’m sorry, Kate,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Something about the singing made me sad.”

By the time we arrived at the Parishs’ house, she had pulled herself together and smiled at me. “Come in,” she said.

I replied that she should rest this day, that they’d seen enough of me.

“Oh, never,” Meg said.

“We’ll see,” I said, and didn’t go up that day. I stayed home, and before bed, played with my quilt scraps again on the floor. Poor Meg! Somehow, someway, I’d help her. And Giles, too, of course. For if Meg was suffering, he must be, too.

Next: the Woodfield Bakery

And, as for the Parishes

2008-07-09T04:58:00.000-07:00

I was feeling a little strange about going there so often. Wouldn’t they get tired of seeing me? But that’s what it was, to live in a community of so few souls. Meg called me soon after the dinner party. “Come up for tea,” she said, “it’s that sort of day.” And I accepted.

We had tea in blue pottery mugs by the stove, and then Giles said, “Don’t get too comfortable because we have to go for a walk. I want to show you girls something in the woods.”

“Brr, I wonder how cold it is,” I replied, yet pulling on my boots.

“Only ten below,” he said, with a gleeful smile like he had a big secret.

He led us on the walk in the land beyond their house. There was considerable old snow drifted by a stand of evergreens, and when he walked through it, I tried to follow in his footsteps. Meg was behind me. Giles looked around and saw what I was doing and lengthened his steps, so that I had to take giant ones, which I did, laughing. Then he started taking baby steps, laughing too.

“Giles, you idiot!” I called out. I looked around at Meg to see what she thought of her husband’s nonsense but she appeared lost in thought, looking down and seeming to be struggling just a little to keep up.

We went into the woods and I saw what Giles had been talking about. Everything was encased in ice, trees and shrubs and creeks, as if all that grew had been caught in an instant and “locked in,” as the natives said, frozen in time.

“Oh, it’s so beautiful!” Meg and I both exclaimed.

“Look here,” Meg said, pointing to a little waterfall that was terraces and purled turrets of crystal. The sun was out but it was half in shadow in the woods.

“Come on,” Giles said, “there’s something else.”

We following him, making little crackling sounds on the frozen moss and brushing against twigs that popped.

“Look here,” Meg would say, “look here,” wanting to point out something exquisite to me.

“Are you coming?” Giles called, through the ghostly trees.

“Yes!” we cried.

He led us to a swamp where the ground was covered with luminous black ice with strange, misshapen things thrusting upright from it, all sheathed in crystal. Giles said, “I’ve never seen it like this before. It must be because some unusual climatic conditions have come together, maybe it happens only every fifty years or so.”

He looked at Meg. “Do you like it?”

The roses were flaming in her cheeks. “Yes,” she said. “I’m so glad it happened for Kate to see.”

On the way back he couldn’t resist sliding down some of the frozen streams and I tried too until I saw him go ass over tincup. We laughed, those real, outdoor laughs.

Next: to carry on with this

The Furies

2008-07-08T04:58:00.000-07:00

Something—I called it the Furies—continued to stand around my bed in the long hours of the night. Some nights I awoke in such a sweat of terror that in a lighter mood the next day which invariably came with the dawn, I thought it a wonder I didn’t short out my electric blanket.

My troubles seemed to be compounding. Money continued to be one. I thought the good folks at the Vermont National Bank must wonder and exchange comments about the woman from Colorado. “She’s juggling again between accounts—writes a rent check and then rushes in to transfer from her savings to cover. And nothing coming in.”

I also felt keenly my have-not status among the haves. Despite my original idea of settling among the common people, I’d been drawn to, who else, but the privileged: Paula, the Parishes, Sarah, the Ashtons…all except maybe Suki and Jake, but they’d once apparently had money or come from money so that no matter how downhome they became, they were stamped (just like a nouveau riche can never quite carry anything different off). I felt like Gatsy among the Daisy and Tom Buchanans.

Oh, those dinner and cocktail parties and teas and bridge parties I’d suffered through in Denver! For all the world, they were universal.

I was often invited to the Parishes. So were other people who were politely curious about me. I was asked: “Denver? Did you know so and so?”

I had, actually. The name mentioned was invariably one of the “haves.” Not the type to do it halfway, I mentioned the times we were all skiing together at Vail and Aspen. And the funny thing was, I had been among the “beautiful people.” But I’d had to overdraw my bank account to buy my tow ticket.

One guest, from Washington, D.C., talked about her new condominium converted from an old brownstone in Georgetown. The woman mentioned neighbors by the name of “Chenery.” An unusual name, and time again for me to slip in my little bon mot.

“Would they be related to Penny Chenery Tweedy—as she used to be known before divorcing Jack?” I inquired innocently. I knew they were all the time. So I reminisced about dear Penny and me, in the good old fifties days in Denver. Penny, by the way, had been the owner of the great Kentucky Derby winner, Secretariat.

I had known her. One can’t just make up these things out of whole cloth at a Vermont dinner party in the eighties. She and I had gone to a movie once when our husbands were away fishing together, and another time at a dinner party we’d discussed how neat it was to put men’s khaki and seersucker wash pants on metal stretchers to dry. I could tell, over the candlelight, crystal and silver that Meg put on, that my little name-drop had sunk in.

I also managed to let it be known that my daughter, Janey, oh, yas, was slated for Barnard College soon (on scholarship and a grant) and of son Ben, with his sailboat and house in Cambridge (if only my listeners could see both of those!)

Going home after this party down Duchess Hill Road, with the winter moon out brightly, illuminating the gentle hills, past farms of country people, I cursed myself bitterly. Where was that good person I had envisioned being whose mission in her third life was to put aside all pretence and purely love her fellow human being? Well, I was a long way off because when I did things like this—and it seemed I could no more resist the urge to do so than a winter-starved trout gulps down a willow fly—I not only disliked myself but the other people. Oh, woe and double woe!

Next: and, as for the Parishes

Meeting the author of a shocking book

2008-07-07T04:46:00.000-07:00

The woman in whose house I’d stayed at Keene, NH, Ellie, and with whom I’d kept in touch via phone and an occasional note, called and said, “Kate, can you come down for lunch tomorrow? I want you to meet my friend, Julie, who’s just had a novel published.”

Is any news more welcome to a struggling writer who is unsure of just about every word? But, “How wonderful,” I replied, “I’d love to.”

Ellie took us to the nice if a bit stuffy Keene Country Club, a stone’s throw away from her big house. She told me a little about the author we were meeting and her book when I picked her up and we drove to the club.

“I guess the book has caused a sensation in town. It’s rather shocking, especially to have been written by one of the Keene ladies, the wife of a prominent doctor. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m dying to.”

I was dying to meet the author, a housewife, mother, woman, just like me, who’d pulled it off. I was already feeling spiteful toward her but Julie disarmed me very quickly with her modest and friendly manner. She was tall, slim, brown-haired, in her forties, and her conversation was down-to-earth and simple. But I lapped up every word, over our white wine and lobster bisque.

“My book is practically a potboiler,” Julie said, “but it has some, uh, ‘saleable’ parts. That’s what my agent told me. In fact—“ and Ellie and I both leaned forward, “—the rape scene sold it.”

I took a sip of wine. “That’s very interesting.”

“It’s a gang rape in a small Vermont town,” Julie said.

Ellie quite sensibly asked, “How could you know how to write about that?” as though Julie had written about English drawing room society in the 19th century.

By her expression, the new author signified it had not been easy. “The hardest thing I’ve ever done. I interviewed the sheriffs of different places, talked to district attorneys and did some reading. Oh, well, that isn’t all the story but I guess it’s the high point. Maybe it would be too much for you to read.”

“I want to,” Ellie said.

I mumbled something. I was trying to imagine myself writing about a gang rape by motorcyclists. Then Julie asked me about my writing. Oh, for a subject that could be brought out into the sunlight rather than hidden in the dark recesses of my psyche, like, well, a good, wholesome hot time in an old Vermont town. But I had developed answers, and gave these. Julie generously offered the name of her agent.

Before I left Keene to drive back to Creston, I went downtown to the long oval square, to the bookstore. In the window was a big display of Julie’s book, red-jacketed. A few people were holding copies, leafing through. I didn’t go in and later wished I had.

Meeting Julie made me all the more dubious about the commercial possibilities of my book, but there was no turning back now. I was determined to finish the damned thing and ship it “off” somewhere. I tentatively named the book Chimera—“a foolish or impossible fancy.” It began to dominate my thoughts, not only when I was awake but unconsciously. A few times I awoke from a deep, winter-bound sleep to a “night fury” as I called it. Dread gnawed at me; it was too personal and I was too private a person. But in the daytime, up and feeling vigorous, the book seemed the only thing I really must do. I wished I could get someone’s opinion and had briefly considered a nice lady I’d met at the Woodfield bakery project, Bert Frothingham, who was, incidentally, the daughter of the famed editor, Maxwell Perkins. But we scarcely knew each other. Ask Meg to read it because she’d given her diary to me? No, I couldn’t lay my overwrought pages on the gentle Meg. Suki would think it was a bunch of nonsense, pragmatic Paula, if I sent it to her, would say, “I don’t see why if you felt this way, you didn’t…and, also…”

So I just kept plugging away. If worse came to worst, I’d simply borrow a little time on Suki’s stove, and there was always the woods, which Vermonters had used for a dump for centuries.

Next: the Furies

What goes down must come back up

2008-07-04T05:19:00.000-07:00

It was lovely to start out in the meadow, cutting the first track. The skis zipped and at the end of the meadow’s crown, before the stone wall, I fell down. Getting over the stone wall was a feat; for some reason, I didn’t take the skis off. Then, into the Clough’s property and that was good going, open and spottily shrubbed and wooded, then over the frozen creek by the snowmobile bridge.

I hesitated—go left into the alluring woods, much more open now, beautiful and austere with light, fresh snow—or to the right, to the Cloughs’ several meadows, with their swoops and glides? The first time, I chose the woods, and soon enough, going up trails more inclined than I’d remembered, with numerous impediments to snare the unwieldy skis, my heart began to pound and the sweat pour off me. Going down a trail was hair-raising to keep from, as in the classic cartoon, leaving a track on either side of a tree trunk.

It was hours more before I reached the sugar house and could again see the barn where my apartment was. I was wringing wet and sobbing for breath, my cheeks burning, branch-whipped. But it was living, I could tell. Places on my body were throbbing that hadn’t been used for years. I fell into bed later for my nap like falling into a hole and pulling the top down over me.

On my next cross-country ski excursion, I went into the Cloughs’ meadows and that was much better, although lots of herringbone-stepping to get from the low part to the high, to the big old elm tree, from which point I could first see the red cupola of the barn. And to see that, about 8 o’clock on a frigid January morning, with the sun just coming out and striking it, was something.

During the long winter days, I plowed along on my novel, typing the handwritten pages most of the afternoon and reading and writing a little in the morning. I either had a great book on my hands or I was perfecting my typing skills. I couldn’t really judge. But meanwhile, not too far away, were other writers with other novels and one of these got published.

Next: meeting the author of a shocking book

Reentering the past

2008-07-03T05:04:00.000-07:00

I had gone to bed “Vermont-style.” Which meant I turned the electric blanket on high and put my nightgown under it to warm it. Then I sat on the edge of the bed to take off my boots and socks and pants, getting into the covers partway; then took off the upper clothes and dropped everything on the floor. In the morning, this procedure is reversed. Cautiously put out feet, pull on heavy socks, a wool bathrobe, and a large, baggy wool cardigan sweater. And sometimes, a wool hat.

I turn up the thermostat and wince at the crackle of the electric baseboard. Electricity practically doubles in price for the winter months. Which made me long for “direct heat” from my own wood stove…someday.

I go to my small desk. It is 5 a.m. and dark as night behind the black and white toile curtains which I keep closed in case a deer or bear is looking in. Notebook paper and sharpened pencils are to hand. But this morning I wasn’t going to compose. I was going to begin to read the contents of the breadbox, my painful scribbling from my worst times back in Denver. I would read it only in the mornings when I felt the highest because later in the day I couldn’t handle it. Funny. I’d think about the whole thing later and ask myself…if I feel so squeamish about it, what makes me think I could ever bear to have it published?

And the answer was…if it were a book, accepted by a publisher, all of a piece, that would put a certain “stamp” on it and then I wouldn’t feel the same way about it. I do now because it’s so…raw. Besides, think of all the other writers who have laid bare their souls in print.

But there was no question or doubt in my mind about needing the “wealth” a successful book would bring. I already knew what I was going to do with it. I was going to buy the meadows around the apartment. It was rumored the out-of-state owner wanted to sell. Then I’d need, of course, to have a home built and I knew just where it would go. But I kept changing my sites… So my pipe dreams went. But not at my desk in the morning. I reentered the past.

And, I must confess, after not having looked at these pages for quite a while, to being, in a word, enthralled. I sat back with a dawning appreciation. “I’ll be damned!” I could even see a path through the maze and made some notes on how the book could be structured.

The coffee I kept filling my cup with made me too charged to sit much longer than an hour. I looked through the curtains. It was lighter than usual, because the meadows were white. All I would have to do was step into my new cross-country skis and push off from my doorstep…until I came home, hours later, a sodden mass of quivering blubber.

Next: what goes down must come back up

Our Christmas celebration

2008-07-02T04:47:00.000-07:00

We had a funny Christmas, all of us being broke. Anne and Richard cadged a sad little tree from a lot man. We made ornaments of foil, jar lids and colored paper from magazines. We burnt orange crates in the ridiculous little fireplace, cooked a huge turkey and sat about for hours at the table talking, ignoring the gravy-encrusted kitchen, about life and insights, imparting ours to each other as if summer lightning were striking all around us.

Janey’s eyes grew dark and seemed to swim, and her slim, graceful hands outlined the shape in the air of what she wanted to express. Her hair, caught like static gauze against her sweater, she unconsciously tucked severely behind one ear, a gesture that seemed to be to clear her head, to let its ideas emerge.

Greta sat on a high stool, presenting her profile to me, her long black hair framing it, which she kept tucking back too. She had a book of Emerson on her lap and read passages to illustrate some point that had been proposed.

Anne’s brown curls stood out against the white wall behind her. Her eyes were made turquoise by her deep-colored wool sweater and she, too, used her hands which were small and rounded like a child’s.

And me—I sat at the head of the table, listening more than talking, first to one and then to the other of my daughters, will full attention, except I also had other thoughts such as how lovely they were, each different, one auburn, one blonde, one dark-haired; grey-blue eyes, green eyes and sable brown.

They all shared one overriding characteristic, in their veins, ichor of the gods, something that animated, that made them beholders, and this was what we were talking about.

I had mentioned my fey feeling about “seeing into the interstices.” Greta, Janey and Anne listed with absorption and then all struggled to be the first to respond.

“Mom! I’ve had that very same experience.”

“I have, too.”

“So have I.”

“I guess we are all crazy,” I said, but I was deeply pleased we were so much in tune.

We took long walks on the beaches despite the chill, blustery weather. It was beautiful in a different way than Vermont, but the same washed-looking skies with clouds that looked harrowed. I loved being with my daughters but after a while I longed for Vermont, my walks and, yes, my solitude. But that was going to end this summer. Before we parted Janey and Greta told me they wanted to spend the summer with me! But as soon as they told me I was overjoyed because being with them made me realize how much I missed my family, and how much having at least two of them with me would alleviate if not banish the built-in loneliness of the north country.

I’d dropped a note to Meg and Giles and when I arrived via bus in White River Junction about nine at night they were waiting for me. It was wonderful to see the welcome in their eyes. We went back to their house and compared notes on our Christmases. There was snow! Enough to cross-country ski. I’d received a pair as a gift from Ben and Molly.

As I settled myself later under my electric blanket in my quiet little apartment at the edge of the meadow, I thought: now, to open that breadbox. I have six months to work on my novel before the girls come.”

Next: reentering the past

Visit to California

2008-07-01T05:06:00.000-07:00

Suki took me to White River Junction, one of the jumping-off places for the outside world, where I caught a bus for Boston. I spent the night with son Ben and his girl friend Molly and he put me on the plane the next day. It went to San Francisco by way of Dallas.

My oldest daughter Anne and her friend Richard met me at 2 a.m. and took me to their apartment in Berkeley where we crashed into bed.

I arose early the next day and was very quiet making my coffee which I drank in the living room before a wooden spool coffee table. My eyes traveled around Anne and Richard’s possessions. Goodwill furniture, thin Oriental rug, many green plants. Che poster, a bumper sticker with the telephone bell in the center and the words “We don’t care, we don’t have to.” On the coffee table were issues of a magazine called Keep Strong, and Anne’s brown wool beret that had a small red star pinned to it. This was 1979 and that was the mood then.

Anne would be 27 soon. She was soft-spoken, slim, with honey-brown, shoulder-length hair, a child’s skin, and grey-blue eyes that had a twinkle in them but seemed to be holding back like the eyes of a child taken to school for the first time. She had dropped out of high school, gotten a GED, and took sporadic courses at California community colleges. She worked as a waitress now. Richard, from a wealthy family, a wonderful musician, played piano in a bar.

My younger daughters, Janey and Greta, drove from Santa Cruz in Greta’s old VW and ran up two flights of stairs in their eagerness to see me. They looked wonderful and said the same to me and liked my garb of New England thrift store clothes. We bummed around Berkeley, spending a little money on T-shirts and earrings from street vendors on Telegraph Avenue. Then we drove to Santa Cruz. Anne and Richard were to join us in a few days, driving a Renault worth at least $50.

Janey, seventeen years old, had been accepted as a freshman at Columbia in New York City but had wanted to take a year off. She had never been away from home before. Greta, two years older, was in college in Santa Cruz. I could see that Janey’s messy ways were gone now that she had to share in a house with several other roommates. I was touched to see her belongings so neatly folded and a shelf by her bed holding treasures children who leave home choose to take with them—books, little vases, tiny ornamental boxes and a few family pictures.

Furry, our large cat from Denver, shared the room with them. He wouldn’t come near me for days and ran when I attempted to pet him. We agreed he was mad at my desertion. I saw he had no ruff of fun around his neck. “What is wrong with him?” I cried.

“He has the damn mange,” Greta said. “We’ve spent a fortune at the vet’s.”

Janey added, “We have to bathe him every week and put this awful medicine on him.”

“Can you take him back to Vermont with you?” both girls asked quickly.

“No, wait ‘til I’m settled.” I wasn’t ready for complications in my new life yet.

The housemates were a handsome surfer whom both girls had fallen for and gotten over because he was a slob to live with, a garrulous California girl who told them absolutely everything, waking them up when she came home from dates, a “weird” girl whom they suspected of kleptomania, and other people who dropped in and out.

I stayed on the enclosed front porch that had many ill-constructed windows. The weather in December in Santa Cruz couldn’t be worse; it rained the whole time I was there, and sometimes gale force winds caused everyone to scurry along huddling in lightweight clothing. When Anne and Richard came they slept in a room vacated by someone who’d gone home for Christmas.

We had a lot of fun. They took me walking through the California woods which were amazing. The light in them was evergreen, everything covered with green furze and enormous, unreal looking trees. Also, something on the ground called banana slugs that you didn’t want to step on.

Next: our Christmas celebration

My foray into business

2008-06-30T05:25:00.000-07:00

Woodstock was bustling with Christmas shoppers. I started up the main street, with a brown paper sack containing my British Soldiers terrarium, feeling an attack of diffidence and thinking I should have tied a red and green satin ribbon around the jar.

I noticed in the shops there was no end of clever, artistic, expensive handmade items.

“I wonder—I have here—“ and I took out my humble container of magnificence.

“British Soldiers, eh? That is nice? Where did you find them?”

Everyone asked me that, for apparently they weren’t that common. The first several shop owners admired but said they didn’t think so. “Time‘s so short. And you’d have to put them into something nicer. Like a Christmas tree ornament.”

I’d thought of that, myself. There were glass blowers around, notably Simon Pierce at Queechee.

“Besides,” one shopkeeper said, “how do you know they’ll keep their color, not die?”

What a thought!

I walked downstreet to one of the fanciest shops, the Pomfret, a little away from the rest. The older, white-haired woman proprietor took one look, and then another in the light.

“Oh, yes! I would be very interested in stocking these. See what you can do. But soon.”

I promised I would and then went back upstreet because I could never be in Woodstock without checking out Nifty Sales. It too, was thronged. I bought a pair of Bogner stretch ski pants for $5 in case we got some real snow this winter, a couple of blouses for the girls, a vest and a wool scarf. Then I had an ice-cream cone and walked up and down window-shopping.

One thing after another interfered with my good intentions and I didn’t get back to the Pomfret shop. I left the jar on my window sill when I went to Berkeley for Christmas and it was still looking good when I came back. When I passed through Boston and had a scrod dinner with son Ben and girlfriend Molly at Fannieul Hall, I discovered in a store a small glass bell with a lid made by Libby that would be a perfect container.

Next Christmas, I told myself.

Next: visit to California

A discovery in the woods

2008-06-27T04:48:00.000-07:00

One day I was walking along a familiar way. A light snow had fallen during the night. I entered the first meadow and some urge took me to the left, into the woods. I stepped over a frozen stream under whose ice the water flowed and made my way, meanderingly, through loosely-spaced fir trees and stumps where large trees had fallen down. The sun was out, glistening on the fresh flakes of snow caught like jewels on every surface. I walked upslope and came upon a sight that stopped me in awe.

It was a half-rotted stump covered with a light dusting of snow crystals. The sun illuminated something small and green growing atop it and spilling down into the broken-open, disintegrating parts of the stump. There was a touch of red that caught my eye more so, so I bent down and looked closely at what was growing on the stump. And exclaimed out loud a line of poetry my daughter Janey had taught me: “The dearest freshness deep down things!”

It was moss or perhaps lichen. The way it was growing, its configuration on the old wood, was absolutely stunning. I’d heard, vaguely, of British Soldiers. Before me, undoubtedly, were Her Majesty’s platoons. Each little emerald iota wore a tiny bright crimson shako. The moss grew densely, standing about as high as one-half my little fingernail; and one of the most intriguing things was that this patch, viewed with a miniaturist’s eye, sent some of its battalions onto a steep slope, the sides of the spongy wood so that it looked like a porous rock or shale cliff that the tiny soldiers, their shakos gleaming, were scaling. Well, enough of poor attempts to paint with words a minute bit of creation no artist could capture. I tore myself away and continued my walk but marked in my mind the spot—by a coil of barbed wire and a large boulder.

When I retraced my steps going home I decided to take a little piece of the stump with me. I broke off a portion about an inch by two and carefully bore it in my mittened hands. I put it in a clean half-size peanut butter jar, put the lid on securely, and set it in the sun on a window sill.

The moss seemed more perfect and beautiful inside the jar, isolated from the rest. I had a small magnifying glass and studied the scene with it. I thought, God’s loving touch upon the world. Here, all the time, existed such a perfect thing and but for chance, I’d have gone my way without ever seeing it.

That afternoon, I had a visitor, whose knocking roused me from a deep nap. It was Ava Ashton, the theatrical lady who’d been at Meg and Giles the other night. She wore high top boots, a tam-o-shanter, and a dark cape. Her cheeks glowed from the cold. I struggled to right myself, dressed in my old grey sweatshirt, and offered her some tea. She’d not visited me before and apologized for coming unannounced. I assured her I was glad she had. As we settled ourselves with tea upon my meager furniture, Ava looked about.

“Nice, Kate, so cozy.”

She commented on this and that, asking me where I’d acquired things and appreciated the replies because everyone in Vermont was a scavenger. I showed her the WWII metal flare, like a bowling ball, I’d found in the woods and used as a candleholder. Then, remembering my find of the morning, showed her the little terrarium of British Soldiers. I was delighted by the extremes of Ava’s enthusiasm.

“Kate, it’s exquisite! Just look at the perfection—“

And then—“do you know what, you could sell these. It would be perfect now, for Christmas, the red and the green. I’d love to have one myself.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Why, in some of the fancy shops in Woodstock. Was there much more where this was growing? And, you know, I think it’s lichen, not moss.”

“Yes,” I answered, “quite a bit. Isn’t that funny? I was thinking of a cottage industry.”

“Kate, this would sell. I know it. Maybe for $10.”

“Hmm,” I exclaimed. I was delighted by Ava’s reaction. She suggested I see how it lasts in a week or so.

After ten days, the red shakos were held as proudly high and the green was as deeply colored. In fact, the tiny moss looked better because it had adjusted to its environment and formed a dew-dappled atmosphere but hadn’t clouded the glass. Infinitesimal pearls of moisture made it gleam.

I took it up and drove to Woodstock with my sample to see what I could see.

Next: my foray into business

An idea to make money

2008-06-26T05:37:00.000-07:00

The approach of Christmas, my first away from home, depressed me and sharpened my worries, particularly the financial ones. I was flying to California soon to be with my daughters, my ticket had been expensive, and I could only buy thrift store presents. Where had all the money from selling my house in Denver gone?

At the time, it had seemed a huge amount. But I’d bought a car, paid bills, paid the kids off, and outfitted myself for the rigors of New England life. Plus, I was spending about $500 a month for living expenses. And had no income coming in. That was the rub. I’d planned to sell writing, which I had, to the tune of $75—an article to Our Sunday Visitor and one to the Valley News. Now was it time—after Christmas, that is—to line up some housecleaning jobs or ask to clerk at the General Store? (Then I wouldn’t have my beautiful walks among the lilies of the field who toiled not neither did they spin.)

I had felt somewhat embarrassed before native Vermonters who seemed to work twice as hard as other people. I’d not gotten to know my fellow apartment dwellers because they were gone to office and shop during the day. The young couple upstairs even worked evenings selling Amway products. The middle-aged widow in the unit next to me commuted in all kinds of weather to teach school in White River Junction. (She’d looked me up and down and pronounced that I was “still young enough to work.”)

But there was another type of New Englander who got by in a place where there was so little industry without being slaves to formal jobs. They hawked wares that were homemade; in every corner of every church bazaar, on village greens, even by the side of the road. Right in Creston was a woman in her eighties who made dolls out of apples that were sold in shops in tony Woodstock. And Nora Clough, at the farm of the Red Cupola, was known for her weaving with home-grown wool that she hand-dyed. The constable’s wife, when she wasn’t boiling maple syrup, was crocheting dollies.

Surely there was something I could do. I was not a bad seamstress and still had Suki’s sewing machine. Design the perfect blouse? But figuring the cost of material and even a low price on my labor was discouraging. The ideal cottage industry used a raw material that was extremely cheap or, like the apples and the Cloughs’ raw wool, free.

Plant an idea and it begins to grow. But, as is so often the case, when it sprouts, the brain is slow to recognize.

Next: a discovery in the woods

The winter social season begins

2008-06-25T04:49:00.000-07:00

Meg launched it by deciding we should have a potluck supper. She invited Suki and Jake and the theatrical couple, the Ashtons, Frederick and Ava. And the spare woman. But I didn’t feel that way because in the country, it seemed, and with people this age—all just a few years older than me—we didn’t even think about such things.

I stood in front of the Parrish’s roaring Rumsford fireplace, a specially designed one that threw out so many B.T.U.s you could stand before it only a few minutes—in a cast-off pair of black velvet slacks and a grey angora sweater and, for a few moments, had the party’s three men to myself. It was one of those moments out of time I was too aware of and hardly up to handling.

Jake said, “Kate, Kate, did you know you have a dimple?”

Frederick, a lovely, dapper little man with a brush mustache, said, “I believe you’re blushing. Or is the fire?”

Giles only smiled at me.

I thought, I am blushing and it is because of the fire. But not on the cheeks you see. Some other woman might have said that and carried it off. I escaped by saying, “I’d better help the ladies serve up.”

Immediately, the Parrishes and I became inseparable. I was up the hill at their house just about every night, at Meg’s invitation. And during the day, it was walks in the snowy woods, tea at my apartment later, Christmas shopping trips to Hanover…what fun that was!

My former husband Rick had hated shopping. He had no tolerance for crowds or malls. He’d give me money, pay me off, just so he wouldn’t have to go. On the few occasions I’d succeeded in dragging him along, he’d become almost lunatic. “You’ve had me in every bleeping shop in this bleeping mall and you still haven’t made up your ----- mind!”

A shopping excursion with the Parrishes was different. In the first place, Giles did not wear his oldest clothes. He wore a Brooks Brothers shirt, a tie and a nice, not new tweed jacket. He didn’t get impatient, he was fun. He and I (and Meg, too) laughed together!

We started in Hanover by having Meg’s favorite apricot pie and coffee at Lou’s Café and discussed the shopping we wanted to do. At the wonderful Dartmouth bookstore, for sure. We went there and separated but kept seeing each other’s heads above the stacks until Meg went upstairs to pick out books for her grandchildren. I was researching something about writing when I looked up to see Giles across from me in the next aisle. “Bookstores always make my head spin,” he said.

“I know, me, too,” I agreed. Bookstores were lovely but unless one had a ton to spend or a lifetime, one gets a little frustrated in a bookstore. Giles came around to my side of the stack with a book in hand.

“Have you read--?” he asked me.

No, I hadn’t. But I was willing to consider it and looked at the book with him, our heads together. When next I looked up, Meg was a few paces away, looking at us. For no reason, I felt a little hot. Giles closed the book with a too-abrupt snap.

“Nah,” he said, and “what did you find?” to his wife.

Meg’s nice eyes crinkled and she showed him her choices.

We went in and out of most of the stores on the main street and ended up at the fancy clothing store next to the Inn. Meg and I looked at long wool skirts and silk blouses while Giles gamely stood by, his arms loaded with packages.

Meg draped a wool tapestry shawl over one shoulder. It was rose and blue and most becoming to her.

“Nice,” Giles said, “why don’t you get it?”

“Oh, it’s too expensive,” she said, glancing at the tag.

“Go ahead,” he said, “be nice for Christmas.” So she did.

What a nice man.

Next: an idea to make money

Below stairs of an old New England house

2008-06-24T04:59:00.000-07:00

I’d never been below stairs of an old New England house before. It boggled my mind that it didn’t collapse on top of us. The foundations were stones, chocked with dirt, it looked like. Perhaps the weight of the giant timbers atop them compacted them so they’d never go anywhere.

I followed Jake about the moldy, mildewy-smelling cellar as he pointed things out to me, the oil storage tank with its gauge so obscured who could read it, the hot water burner, whose numerous pipes and gaskets inexorably seeped onto the dirt floor, the pump sitting in a pit of black water, all the little flywheels and sprockets and overhead and knee-level lines and tubes of the house’s support system, all of which seemed to be leaking and corroding.

“Gosh,” I uttered, “do you and Suki understand all this?” but I wasn’t answered. I was hard put to know how to be with him as Jake didn’t seem to absorb at all what another person said to him but lived in some arctic landscape of his own.

There were woodpiles and tires, harness bits and tools, coal, valises that might have gone overland by stage coach; well, too much to absorb. I was very intimidated by “downcellar” and thought that if I ever had my own house in Vermont, I should probably have a new one even though the old ones reeked of charm; a little less charm upstairs would be better than this Gothic pit below.

What we had come down to see, Suki’s preserves, were on long rows of shelves up to the low ceiling. Gleaming glass jars that Jake guided me along, pointing out that the green things I could plainly see were beans and the pale ruby red matter was what I’d helped make, applesauce, and so on, to some years-back pickled beets and even, corn on the cob. I struggled to come up with enough adjectives as I felt Jake expected. I was relieved when we returned upstairs and I bid the Simonses adieu. Jake saw me in courtly fashion to the door.

I was a little disappointed at his return, selfishly so, because I so enjoyed visiting Suki as it had been. What would it be like now with Blank Jake around? And as for the other male returnee into our cozy little feminine world, what would that be like?

Well, to steal ahead and look at a diary entry gives a hint:

“There was so much I did not realize at first about Meg’s and Giles’ relationship. But I should have; I was dumb, blind, naïve. In my defense, I’ll say I’d never been in a triangle before. And our setting was perfect—the lonely country in the winter when the dark and cold close in, where there isn’t the pulse and clamor of a city in the background to absorb and divert one’s thoughts and feelings…”

Next: the winter social season begins

Jake

2008-06-23T04:45:00.000-07:00

Jake looked like a retired British Army Colonel, tall, thin, very straight, with a long, sad face, pale eyes, a drooping yellowish mustache and a very distant air, underneath which lay sudden irascible and erratic outburst of behavior. But, as Suki told me and I found out for myself, “He’s spent. He blows but there’s no force behind it.”

Jake was outdoors inspecting the property when I dropped by. Suki gave me tea in the little room off the kitchen.

I was curious as to whether the free-spirited country woman was glad to have her husband back because almost any warm body in a big old house in the winter was better than no body at all, and maybe she still had a feeling for the old fellow.

“I suppose he’s very glad to be here,” I said, employing my declarative sentences.

Suki nodded.

‘He’ll probably be a big help to you.”

Suki looked at me over her teacup, and again I was put in mind of a smart, indeed, wise animal, with quick bright eyes. “Maybe,” she said.

Jake came in the kitchen door then, noisy and stomping in his Sorel boots. We two women looked at each other as we heard him run water, open drawers and creaky cabinet doors.

“We’re in here,” Suki called out. “Having tea. Why don’t you join us?”

A hollow-sounding, “Don’t mind if I do,” came back. He came in with a teacup rattling in a saucer, one of Suki’s best. I greeted him and he didn’t seem to know what to say to me. I had taken a seat across the room, and Jake sat in the green leather chair. He looked around, his watery eyes bulging a little.

“Suki has done a good job out there.”

Suki had her glasses on the end of her nose. “You approve?”

“Suki is a marvel,” he said, his eyes still fixed on me. “Did you see all the cucumbers she canned?”

“No, but I know she did,” I replied.

“And the applesauce and tomatoes and green beans and pears.”

“I know. She gave me some.”

“Suki—“ and Jake paused. “Suki is one hell of a woman.” It was said without much passion.

“Drink your tea,” Suki said. “And for gosh sakes, don’t drop that teacup. Why didn’t you use a mug like Kate and I do?”

Jake took a long slurp of tea. “Kate, you’ve got to see Suki’s preserves.”

I smiled. “They should be in the county fair.”

“Do you want to see them now?”

“No, she doesn’t want to see them now, she’s having her tea.”

Jake put his teacup down with a clatter and placing his hands on his high bony knees, outlined by his pants tucked into his boots, he got to his feet like the raising of the hulk of a ship that had been washed ashore and lain there for years.

“I’ll show you, Kate, if you’ll follow me,” Jake said in a sepulchral voice, and he walked out of the room.

“Sheesh,” Suki said, “the old fool. Just stay here.”

“Oh, I’ll go downcellar. I never have. I’d like to see your preserves,” I said.

Suki shook her head and picked up a newspaper, so I followed after Jake, who was waiting at the cellar doorway off the kitchen for me.

Next: below stairs of an old New England house

Giles

2008-06-20T04:31:00.000-07:00

I remembered what I’d heard and read about Meg’s husband:

“Giles is not like the men we’ve apparently known.”

“He looked so handsome today…”

“You’ll be afraid to meet him from what I’ve said.”

I had to confess I was a little as I drove gingerly down the lightly snow-dusted winding country road the five miles into Woodfield to go to church.

Meg turned as if she’d been watching the door, smiled and beckoned me to come and sit with them. She gave me a hug, reaching across Giles, and introduced us.

“I’ve heard so much about you,” both Giles and I said, smiling broadly. We exchanged a few more comments until Father Balliett came in and we all stood up to sing, still looking now and then at each other, smiling with our eyes as our mouths were open in choir-boy fashion. My singing was a practiced near-pantomime. Giles, beside me, sang quite well.

He was, I was thinking, very much as I had expected. Only more so. He was damned attractive, not pretty-handsome. Kneeling beside him, rising and standing, I could sense a certain something come from him that I’d only experienced from a few males in my life before.

It was a warmth that was both physical and emotional. An “accessibility” and indulgence toward others. I wondered if only women felt it. I knew right away Giles was one of nature’s charmers. I kept thinking about this even when Father was delivering his usual mesmerizing sermon (whose subject matter I couldn’t have told a moment later).

No wonder Meg wrote like that in her diary…no wonder she missed him…what would it be like to be married to a man like that? Awful!

When it came time for exchanging “peaces,” Giles gave me a hug and whispered in my ear, kind of amusedly, “Peace, Kate.” I felt as yielding as a broomstick, pulling away from him and giving Meg a hug, difficult to do a body removed. She felt as fragile as a sparrow.

In the diner after Mass, Meg said to Giles as we slid into the booth, “Sit with Kate so I can look at both of you.” Her blue eyes beamed upon us.

I leaned forward to her. “He’s exactly what I expected.”

Giles laughed. “How do you know?”

“Oh, I just do.” I didn’t mention having read about him in Meg’s diary.

As soon as I got home, I had to put down my impressions:

“Giles is tall and distinguished looking, flat-bellied (I always notice that). He has dark hair touched with grey, eyes greenish blue, and something boyish about him; kind of a spirit of play which is surprising in a man of his accomplishments.”

And then this the next morning:

“I went to the Parrishes for drinks last night and they made me stay for supper which Meg cooked on top of the stove in the room next to the kitchen. Then we watched Baryshnikov dance on TV. Giles made popcorn…”

Suki came back from Washington with her husband the very same weekend. Jake was also just what I had expected and more.

Next: Jake

To go on with this gloomy bit

2008-06-19T05:11:00.000-07:00

Despite all my efforts to enter deeply into my new place, I was still suffering strange sensations: a painful disorientation that was both psychic and physical.

Like the absence of familiar landmarks I’d known in Denver (who could imagine I would miss the sight of condominiums against a polluted horizon of the front range of the Rocky Mountains?). Joined with everything now being strange, no matter how lovely the strangeness was.

And, oh, it was, some of it, “heartbreakingly lovely,” as I said to myself, walking in New England meadows and woods and coming upon something natural and ordinarily insignificant such as a weathered fence, grey stones, and a spot of fern against the sky at a certain moment at a certain spot. I must have gone by this same place before and noticed not much. Perhaps I brought to the appreciative encounters something different behind my eyes. At such times I felt laid low by the apprehension of unreal beauty. And I puzzled the mystery: it had to all come together in a special way. Was it the angle I saw it or the light on the different textures of wood, stone, living plant?

But at the same time I was still foggy in my thinking. Suki time after time on our weekly shopping trips told me how to figure out the minor tangle of freeways and go by back roads to Hanover but whenever she wasn’t with me, I continued to get lost. And she would tell me things I should know about living in the country, “lore” based on common sense, and it would go in one ear and out the other.

Also, I had new worries I hadn’t had in the city: about money, a home, mere security.

I had never been without a home before except briefly after college when I lived with other girls in apartments. I’d had my parent’s home before and afterwards my married homes. Until someone who is used to a home is without one, it’s almost impossible to appreciate how it feels not to have one. Especially here, it seemed, in a place where a person’s home was of the most basic importance.

In memory, I went through the rooms of my former house in Denver and ached for them. I could understand why ghosts of departed owners haunted old houses. I even went back in memory to my childhood home with my parents and relived some of those days with the most intense nostalgia. Then I’d come back to the present in Creston, Vermont, and tell myself how silly I was being. Remember, I told myself, a house and all it represented was what you wanted to be free of! The laundry and the dishes and the kids’ messes and the yard work and the grocery shopping and those hundreds of trips to the mall!

But at night, with dinner over and the shades drawn and it being too early to go to bed, I was unbearably lonely. Like chill at ground level, isolation crept into me. I wrote a lot in my diary at the oddest times, putting down the time because it was unusual for me to write except in the early morning:

“8:30 p.m. – it’s begun to dawn on me what a large chunk I’ve bitten off; to live here alone, to start all over again on such a small nest egg. But it‘s not just money, it’s being alone. It will take a very special attitude for me to survive here.

“I had a grasp on a feeling this morning but it’s so hard to hold onto. It had to do with unleashing myself and enabling other people to do so with me. A kind of love—charity—that overcomes the gap between us. One has to center outside oneself but it’s so hard, I’m so naturally self-centered. To be happy here I have to ‘enter’ into the place and the people. And I don’t even know what I mean by that. How still it is here; I can almost listen to the silence.

“I’ve just learned from Suki that she’s taking Jake back. He’s had a lung removed, I guess.

And this journal entry finally came:

“I was happy to see, in the Parrish’s driveway, car tracks when I went to Mass Sunday. They were at Mass. Giles is close to what I expected, very nice. We had coffee at the diner afterwards.”

Next: Giles and Jake

Striking out with Sarah

2008-06-18T04:40:00.000-07:00

Indeed, my campaign or mission or secret obsession was not going very well, not at all as I’d planned. Other people were not reading me right, and instead of it being fulfilling to me, I was having weird backlashes from my efforts. I wrote in my diary:

“Loving people, binding them to you with hoops of steel, is a mission fraught with pitfalls. People don’t act like they are supposed to, they don’t say ‘put’ as I want them to, and also and chiefly, I am no different than I have ever been. No nobler, no wiser, no more insightful. I have too many human needs of my own to be met. Why, if I met someone like me now, I don’t know what my response to her would be.”

A pure illustration of this “shoe on the other foot” situation occurred.

I ran into Sarah Fowler at the post office. She looked the epitome of mature health and vitality. I commented on her glowing cheeks.

“It’s ice skating,” Sarah said. “On Pierpont Pond in Woodfield. In fact, I’m going this afternoon. Do you have skates?”

“I do.”

“Well, then, come and then come home for tea.” And Sarah smiled her rather reserved but still warm smile.

I was glad I’d had the wit to throw a pair of the girls’ black high school hockey skates in the car along with everything else I could conceive of needing in Vermont. Besides, skating blithely along silver streams in New England was part of my fantasy.

I could stand upright on them. I could even, as I got going on Pierpont Pond, keep going for awhile. It was a lot of fun and very invigorating. There were about a dozen other skaters, mostly older people. It was wonderful to see men and women in their sixties and seventies with apple cheeks and rheumy eyes sail along a little totteringly, with good wool scarves trailing in their wake. Why, was that not the venerable Fanny Cox, mother of Archibald? She was 88? I asked Sarah if it could be her.

Sarah nodded. “She had to give up skiing so now she skates.”

Sarah had to do some shopping, so left me at the pond, with directions on how to find her house.

Sarah’s house was big, white, and dazzling in the sunlight and remains of snow on the ground. It had a number over the doorway, 1842. I had only briefly thought such numbers were addresses. It was the year the house was built.

I knocked at the back. But Sarah had gone to the front. We “hallooed” at each other, and I went in the back, through a mud room filled with boots, neatly stacked wood, and skis in the corner. Sarah wore wool slacks, a heatherish blue sweater and a sort of Muluk boot.

We went into the big living room, filled with the late fall sun and gleaming wood surfaces. A monster wood stove stood on the fireplace hearth.

Embrace! But how to? What is the key to this enigmatic person? Could she not see, was it not apparent, my good intentions toward her?

“The view from this window is beautiful,” I said, sitting down in a chair by the hearth.

Sarah twisted around to look at it too from her place on a settee underneath a portrait of a Victorian-looking forbear. “Yes. And today is clear.” She sounded like she’d heard this comment before.

“This is delicious cake.” It was a raisin and nut spicy one.

“Thanks. It’s called Herman. More tea?”

I figured it would probably take several years for us to get to know each other because we were somewhat alike, each too polite, too willing to have the other talk, and too innately reserved. I longed to cut through the ribbons and red tape of social interchange. But it was,

“Yes, I wanted to start a new life in a place where nature is important…”

“Uh, are you writing something now?”

“No,” Sarah replied, “I’ve been too busy with other things.”

It occurred to me that Sarah was sitting on a couple of big stories that would have excited me tremendously. One would be an interview with Fanny Cox and a picture of her skating, for, say, the Boston Globe. And the other would be an exclusive interview of someone Sarah doubtless had at least a nodding acquaintance with, J.D. Salinger.

But remembering the barbed wire we found in the woods, I thought that Sarah would not think it proper or cricket to disturb what did so well left alone. That was New England breeding, the hallmark of it, as unmistakably as it was on the bottom of the thin porcelain cup I was holding.

Aware of not overstaying my visit, after a few more perfunctory remarks, I took my leave, in the beautiful gloaming, the sun making long pink slashes on the halfway snow-covered hills. I felt a bit deflated, some sort of opportunist in the immaterial realm. I would have to give all this a lot more thought or chuck it altogether and let my own natural self emerge as it may. The only trouble was, what was that self?

Next: To go on with this gloomy bit

How it goes

2008-06-17T05:03:00.000-07:00

Scarcely a soul was in the Hanover Inn at three minutes to six. Mich was not. I went downstairs to the ladies room to check myself out. I was wearing a long black coat, charcoal wool slacks, both from the thrift store, and a soft grey angora sweater bought new in Londonderry at a great place close by a waterfall. In the mirror, my white face seemed to float in a sea of charcoal. All I needed was a white collar to make me look like a Puritan.

I remounted the stairs and saw him from the side. He was sitting on a large ottoman against the wall. He looked much smaller and rather miserable; certainly no air of anticipation hung about him, just a too-big coat as though he were sitting in a collapsed tent. I wished to exit through a side door. I went up to him and said in my soft voice, “Good evening.”

He didn’t hear me.

“Um, um,” I cleared my throat. He turned his head and stared blankly at me for a moment. I smiled, a sweet, wide, new smile.

“Oh, hi,” he said, rather lamely, not leaping up which confirmed my suspicion he was suffering second thoughts about his big mouth.

But he got to his feet and our evening began. He asked me if a salad wouldn’t be just the thing and led me into the basement cafeteria of a college dormitory, brightly lit and full of noisy students, all of them, male and female, dressed in stiff straight-leg jeans, down vests, plaid shirts and huge hiking boots. I felt as out of place as…well, a Puritan lady.

Mich managed a weak smile because he spotted a girl he knew and waved and called out to her. We got in line and he drawled out of the side of his mouth, “I’ve made a science of salad bars. If you’re really hungry, watch me and do like I do.”

He began to pack into his bowl, the size of an ordinary cereal bowl, cherry tomatoes, green peppers, carrots, etc., then he layered on, as in a compost pile, sprouts, spinach, and lettuce and compressing it with the back of a fork, dumped several ladlefuls of dressing onto the peak of what he was holding down. He put a liner plate on top of the bowl and with a deft flip, turned it over and held it with both hand. I watched this performance but did not try to match it.

We paid, both of us, and went to a table. On the way, Mich spoke, smiled but couldn’t wave to a few more people. I sat opposite him, all my conversational ploys totally fled.

But I shouldn’t have worried. Mich had recovered his exuberance. He placed his inverted salad before him and slowly lifted up the bowl. It sprang out onto the plate. “I like salad,” he said. “Tell me about yourself,” between chomps.

“Well, I’m divorced—“

“So am I. About six months ago. She lives in—“

I listened and when I could get it in, said, “You say that with some pain in your voice.”

His jaw stopped moving for a few seconds. His big black eyes studied me. “You’re right. I still—“and on he went. When his former wife had received fair treatment, he began on his mother. When I saw another opportunity, I seized it.

“And how did that make you feel?”

His eyes positively twinkled at me. “Oh, just awful,” he sighed.

I had forgotten that I hated chamber music; to me, the sounds were tinkling, discordant, and interminable. Mich enjoyed it tremendously, audibly, visibly. He was like a roaring bull beside me. He whistled, laughed, clapped, chuckled, dug me in the ribs with his elbow in appreciation of the godawful noises coming from the stage.

When the lights went on at intermission, Mich waved at and went to talk to people, not all of them students, but some white-haired, dignified-looking people who invariably turned to look at me. They had those serene, distant blue eyes such college town people have, and one thinks they are, if one only had the good fortune to know them, the most interesting and achieving people ever. Like, say, the woman in her seventies who is writing her 14th book; and also, they have quite active sex lives which they sometimes talk about. I sank deeper into my coat collar as I watched Mich also talk to younger females. He whipped out a little notebook and wrote something. Then he came back and settled into his seat, smiling hugely.

After the concert, nothing would do but that we have some coffee and “talk” some more. Mich told me about his graduate studies and a girl in one of his classes. Finally, at the fender of my car, under a quaint Hanover street lamp, he took a keen look at me.

“Say, I’ve been talking about myself all evening. You know, you’re an incredibly good listener.”

“I was,” I said drily, “an interrogator for the CIA.”

His mouth fell open but before anything further could come out of it, I leapt into my car and sped off, down the hill and across the river.

As I fell into the heaven of my bed, I seriously wondered about my mission here as a “Catcher.”

Next: Striking out with Sarah

I meet someone!

2008-06-16T05:28:00.000-07:00

I wrote in my diary:

“So far my new life has been almost totally woman-oriented, but I like that. It’s not threatening or upsetting, it’s comforting. And I don’t at all consider myself in the market. And, anyway, as Suki says, men are generally a nuisance.”

Things were about to change. In a big way. First, I had an “adventure,” all on my own.

We met at the public radio station in Woodfield during the station’s fund-raising campaign. His name was Mich, pronounced Meesch, and he was enormous, black-bearded, French Canadian. He was the only male, sitting at the head of the table with several other women and me. He dominated with his broad smiles, hearty laughs and outgoing remarks on everything, mostly music, such as “Aren’t the concerts at Dartmouth great and did you go to such and such?”

At this time, I hadn’t been to a concert and confessed as much.

“Oh, you haven’t? What a shame!” Mich said expansively.

“My friend (meaning Paula) who would go with me is a summer person. I guess that’s why I haven’t been,” I explained.

He came back immediately with, “I would be delighted to have you go with me to the next concert there, which just happens to be Wednesday.”

“That’s very kind of you,” I said, sounding, I felt, extremely poised and proper, but I was quite flabbergasted and wondered what the other women must think. But no matter what they did; Mich and I exchanged slips of paper with our phone numbers.

“Call me if you’d like to go,” he said. He lived in Hanover and was doing graduate work at Dartmouth.

The invitation both excited and agitated me. I realized it was prompted strictly by Mich’s excessive, exuding gregariousness, and that only a silly, middle-aged divorcee would see anything else in it. But how did I know for sure? Anything was possible.

I mentioned it casually to Suki the next day, hoving into her doorway as usual after my walk. Suki was always doing something strenuous, like taking the stove apart or canning cucumbers.

It was not her way to advise on something like this. She just gave me a look through her glasses, sliding almost to the tip of her sweaty nose (the kitchen stove, this time, was in pieces).

“Sounds interesting,” she said.
I helped myself to instant coffee and water from the ever-simmering teakettle. ‘I guess I will go. Golly, he’s about the age of my son, Ben. Maybe he has a mother thing.”

I sensed a slight air of disapproval from Suki. I was beginning to learn that beneath the naturalness of her lifestyle beat a conservative, indeed, old-fashioned heart. Which I was to go on to learn was in keeping with most country folks.

“Great!” Mich enthused when I called him. “Why don’t we have a little dinner before? I’ll meet you at 6 o’clock at the Hanover Inn.”

“I’ll wear a magnolia in my hair,” I quipped.

He laughed heartily.

Next: how it went

I practice sophistry

2008-06-13T05:33:00.000-07:00

The next Tuesday we met the Parson surprised me by calling upon me to say the opening prayer. I had practiced a bit in the bathtub and in bed at night but ended up saying the Our Father. Everyone else, it seemed to me, had a full-blown, extemporaneous prayer on the tip of their tongue that covered all bases: the weather, our being together exploring God’s word, and the hope we’d do a good job of it. Catholics prayed in a circumscribed manner, I felt. So I cudgeled my brains to do better the next time.

Back in Denver I had belonged to a theology group conducted by a clever Jesuit from Regis University, and he was somewhat sly. He told us some outrageous things, such as that the famous stigmata, Theresa Neumann, could have used menstrual blood. (Hearing him use that word was a shock in itself back in the fifties.) When we exclaimed, Father only raised his eyebrows and took another sip of his Scotch. Our group felt it was very sophisticated, being made up of lawyers, doctors and avant garde housewives.

Now, in Creston, Vermont, sitting in the basement of the meeting hall with Faith (or was it Hope?), florid-faced Agnes, gentle, tonsured Rick, Rev. Redfern, the Constable’s wife, the Harrises, and other good souls, I had the temerity to throw out this old bone, gnawed on for centuries:

“Man is incapable of acting against his own good.”

It sounded innocuous on the surface until I began to illustrate:

“For example, if you save someone’s life, you do it for ego gratification or something like that.” Also, “if you commit a sin, say like adultery, there’s some good in it for you or you couldn’t do it. Everything we do is based on a self-serving motive.”

It took a few moments for this to sink in during which I thought can it be they haven’t heard this before?

Rev. Redfern dryly proposed for me a situation: “Now, Kate, suppose a man works hard to support his family—“

Agnes popped out: “Are you trying to tell me that I do some things because I want
to--!”

And even gentle Rick and the unflappable Parson Willis snapped at my heels. I had only one answer: “whatever a person does it’s always because there’s some good in it for him. Even self-sacrificing, noble things. Think about it.”

Of course, my argument sounded plausible but was silly. I should’ve kept my mouth shut and listened to these good folks and learned. I hadn’t learned very much from the theology group in Denver because the Jesuit was a little too blinded by his own brilliance.

I thought briefly of using another one of his conundrums, the one about God’s knowing what our lives would be and how his knowing was not predestination, and giving the hackneyed analogy of: “If you were on a mountain overlooking a bend in some train tracks and saw two trains approaching from opposite directions, you would know they were going to crash but your knowing doesn’t make them crash—“

But fortunately I thought better of it.

Next: I meet someone!

Parsing the Good Word

2008-06-12T05:17:00.000-07:00

One Tuesday morning I went down the hill to the meeting hall attached to the white steepled church. A small group of men and women were there, not yet gathered around a big square made of two school cafeteria-type tables put together.

“I’m so glad you came, Kate,” Parson Willis greeted me. “Did you bring your bible?”

“No, I’ll have to get one.” Oh, that right away marked me as a nonreader of the Good Book.

“I’ve some extras,” and the Pastor put a red paperback bible in my hands and directed me to find a place at table. I recognized a few faces, Annie from the Coop, and Iris, the widow with the “country woman’s windows” full of geraniums I’d admired. I sat next to an elderly gentleman who wore wire-rimmed glasses. He kept eyeing me, sidewise. He was another Parson, retired, the Reverend Redfern, Icabod-Crane-like, kindly, dry, incisive. He and the reigning Parson kept the square table alive because Redfern never let any doctrinal tidbits drift off amorphously. Tenets had to be tied down.

Parson Willis began by calling upon the woman next to him to open with a prayer.

This lady, who looked to be a tired housewife in her early forties, with long, dark hair pinned behind her ears in slapdash fashion, started right off, asking for heavenly guidance in our study, and thanking the Lord “that today, we have a new soul join us…”

A man began reading in Job. He had mutton chop sideburns; next to him sat his wife who wore a small hat. The Harrises. They were the dogmatic couple who did not always agree on their dogmas and who didn’t look at each other but just spoke straight ahead to the rest of us when they disagreed. Another man was asked by the Parson to sum up the reading.

He was young, with a fringe of soft brown hair around a balding pate. He spoke in a hurried, intense voice. “’Even you speak as senseless women do,’” he quoted. “’Job reproaches his wife who tries to shake his faith in God.’” I think that means that if we accept good things from God joyfully, we shouldn’t grumble when something bad happens to us.”

“Are you saying that God sends evil to us?” It was the sharp voice of Agnes, the fundamentalist. “It doesn’t say that in my bible, and I bet it doesn’t say it in yours. Why do you say that?”

“He didn’t say that, Agnes,” Parson Willis said.

Agnes didn’t look at the Reverend. Her eyes were hot tea colored and her cheeks were flushed. “I’m asking him—“ and she looked at the meek-mannered fellow—“why he says God sends evil.”

A stir went around the table and the dogmatic couple spoke at once. The retired minister, Rev. Redfern, raised his chin and closed his eyes when he spoke. Even I said something. It all sounded like Babel.

Parson Willis boomed out. “Hope, you read the next verses, to 17.” When she was done, we discussed that. Then the Parson bowed his head and prayed for “patience, understanding, charity. To emulate Job.”

Next: I practice sophistry

The basic stuff of life

2008-06-11T05:20:00.000-07:00

Suki had a wonderful assortment of grains in her kitchen in old glass jars with glass lids held in place by wires that clamped over the top. Some of the jars were very old, the glass wavy and thicker in places. Some were pale green and blue. I found similar jars at secondhand stores, and I hauled home from the woods a portion of a snowmobile bridge and with a rusty saw reclaimed from around the foundations of an abandoned house, made a shelf to hold my jars. Now I had to get the grains. So I went with Suki one evening to a meeting of the Creston Food Cooperative, held in the eye-catching home of a young couple who lived in a converted stable, which had also been a cheese factory a long way back.

There were about a dozen people in the big upstairs room, which was reached by means of a trapdoor. I knew a few of them now by sight; it was nice to enter a place and spot familiar faces. We sat in a circle around the all-important wood stove and concentrated on long lists of things to order.

I felt there was something deeply satisfying about shopping for the basic stuff of life at the basic level, cutting out the supermarket, bypassing packaged, process foods rich with chemicals.

Suki helped me make choices, and others offered the benefit of their past experiences.

“The Fontana is worth eating,” Pastor Willis said.

“Avoid the dried figs, no good,” the wife of the egg and potato man said.

The constable’s wife, Annie, said she had a way of cooking scrod so that it tasted just like the higher priced cod—“boil in vinegar and water and serve with drawn butter.”

I ordered pinto beans to make my old favorite of the Southwest, Mexican food. Suki and Pastor Willis were willing to split with me five pounds of raisins and three of pecans, stone ground flour, cocoa, dates, carob chips, lentils, herbal teas.

There were also natural soaps, pomades, shampoos and menstrual sponges, which some of the young wives ordered; one husband asked, “For breakfast?”

Before I knew it, I was writing out my check for $38 but my pantry should almost last the winter.

“And now, folks,” said Pastor Willis, who served as the group’s coordinator, “who can go to Pompanoosic next week to help break down?”

Bill Jones’ wife said she would. I wasn’t quite sure what it was but also volunteered to help break down in Pompanoosic.

The Pastor, a thin, grey-haired man with a deep voice and a long nose, who conducted services in the village church, thanked me. “Sometime, Kate, we’d like to have you come to Bible Study,” he said.

Before, I had avoided things like Bible Study Groups, but in keeping with my resolve to “embrace,” I told the Pastor I would maybe do that.

Next: Parsing the Good Word

Suki's story

2008-06-10T05:12:00.000-07:00

“Oh—“ the older woman, too, stretched out her hands to the stove. “Jake and I got tired of traveling around in mining camps, and he was drinking because that was all you could do in the boonies.”

She told about visiting friends in Vermont and seeing this place advertised. “We offered eight, back in sixty. It was rundown and they were glad to take it.”

“Gosh, if there were only bargains like that now,” I said. But I would be intimidated by a house like Suki’s.

Adroitly, so I hoped, I probed a little about the rake, Jake.

Suki snorted, as if remembering all sorts of traumatic times, but slowly began to talk. Soon, I was picturing them, on mule back, winding along precipitous, rocky defiles in the heart of Mexico, to some abandoned mining claim, Jake secretly pulling on a bottle he hid under his slicker and Suki with three small kids tied to her mule.

Suki grew downright talkative, helped maybe by getting up, each time a little more lumberingly, to have another shot of bourbon. I thought, and Jake’s the alky? But nothing in Suki’s speech suggested it was affecting her. She was a large woman and no doubt used to handling a good amount to drink. I laughed at her stories and was a little shocked at some, such as a description of setting ant hills afire with gasoline.

“Had to,” Suki said.

“You’re very pragmatic,” I laid on her.

“Got to be in the country. Can’t be soft and be a country woman.”

Remembering my labors on my various houses and the raising of my children, I replied with certitude, “At heart I’m a country woman.”

Suki looked at me with a bourbon-polished eye. “You’re gant. And pretty sweet.” But she smiled as she said it.

Hmphm. Gant must mean thin, maybe weak-looking, too. And I knew I was being far too sweet. It was a fine line to walk with people, between being outgoing and still being in charge of one’s self.

When I left, Suki said, “Come back anytime, I enjoyed it. You’re very therapeutic.”

I made my way home with the aid of a flashlight. How easy it is, I thought, to get on with people. You just have to listen to them.

“9:30 p.m.

“I’m rusty not writing for awhile. I want to put down something. What it means to be a country woman.

“Jake had been drinking and Suki wanted to get rid of him. But the facilities wouldn’t take him as long as he was lying drunk in bed. Suki went up to Paula’s for dinner and when she came home, about 9:45, she found him on the floor, passed out, naked from the waist down. She let him lay, just like that. Maybe he’d tried to put on his pajamas or maybe he’d wet his pants. He’d come after the bottle of Vodka in the kitchen—all day she’d been serving it to him in bed—but when she went up to Paula’s, she put it up high, on top of the cabinet.

“She called the sheriff, the fireman, the alcoholic control officer, and they came from Springfield, with an ambulance, to take him away. Took them about an hour. She didn’t cover him. Then she could get a court order, barring him from the premises, because she had three witnesses that he was ‘a menace to himself.’ After they left with him, she drank two glasses of milk laced with gin, and fell into bed and slept until seven. In the morning, she turned the radio up high, drank more milk and gin, and sat in a bath as hot as she could stand.”

Next: the basic stuff of life

Suki comes back

2008-06-09T05:05:00.000-07:00

I had some idea back in Denver where I hated driving but did my share to the far-flung malls, that things would be different in my new life. That I’d dig into my cozy place and lead a much simpler existence, in which my material needs were reduced to the elementals—good grain bread, greens from my garden, country eggs, comfortable old clothes, and strolls to the chandler, the bootmaker, the chicken man; strolls to church, library, country store; strolls to friends’ houses.

But the reality in rural New England was—jump into a car and drive, drive: seventeen miles to Hanover to go to a movie or the fine arts center; five miles to Woodfield for Mass; twelve miles to a used furniture store in New Hampshire; twelve miles to Woodstock for long underwear and turtlenecks at Nifty Sales, and uncounted miles to grocery shop, Suki-style.

My mentor returned from seeing her husband, Jake, in a veteran’s hospital in Washington, for nothing could keep her away for long from her beloved animals, grains, preserves, wood stove, all those creature comforts of home. She invited me to go along on her weekly shopping trip.

We left right after lunch and hit two grocery stores, a farmer’s market, a cooperative, and a health food store. Then, there were two last stops—at a place that had the cheapest cigarettes and to buy a jug of bourbon.

It was close to six when we were on the back road into Creston. I said, out of my six-week familiarity with the landscape, “I always feel good when I get to this point in the road.”

I realized the audacity of my remark when Suki looked at me for a moment without speaking. Then she said, “We’ll make a country woman out of you yet.” When we got into her farmyard, she offhandedly said, “You might as well stay for dinner.”

We had chicken livers, brown rice, stir-fried kale mixed with carrots and onions, and for dessert, a dish of yogurt topped with a dollop of frozen orange juice.

We sat in the small parlor off the kitchen, Suki in a funny three-legged chair and I in a green leather wing chair, well-worn and comfortable, and ate on TV trays. Between us was a tiny wood stove on a raised hearth of stone. I watched Suki minister to it, putting in the short pieces of wood in a certain way and adjusting the front and back dampers like a musician might tune a violin. I took in all the paraphernalia for a wood stove, asbestos gloves, shovel and bucket for ashes, wood box, wood carrier, and the obligatory tea kettle—never the whistling kind—on the stove to add moisture to the room. I stretched out my hands to the warmth. “Someday, when I have my own place here—“

Suki narrowed her spice-colored eyes at me. “You think you will stay?”

“I have no doubts,” I answered. “I love this place. It’s exactly what I imagined when I used to fantasize in Denver. I even wrote in a diary I kept, ‘and one small, respectable mountain.’ I never expected that.”

Suki lit one of her numerous cigarettes.

“And, besides, I have no other place to go. I could never go back to Denver. I couldn’t afford a house there again because the prices keep going up.”

“I hope you do stay,” Suki said. “We need people like you, who will add something to the community.”

I reflected, relaxing in the warmth of the small, cozy room… I would be a wise old woman of the hills, who’d come here as a “younger” some 20-30 years ago, to whom all the folks told their innermost… and I was reminded we were talking about me too much.

“What about you, Suki,” I asked, “what brought you here?”

Next: Suki’s story

Learning about Giles and Meg

2008-06-06T06:35:00.000-07:00

Meg’s handwriting was hard to read at first but then I got used to the t’s and a’s and e’s being not quite closed. Right away, I could tell that Meg was not like me, not a great pourer-outer. There was very little “I.” Some sentences referring to herself began without a pronoun. She wrote matter-of factly about day-to-day activities. But one figure, person, immediately dominated. Giles.

They were in California, in Marin County, visiting a daughter. “Walked in a grove of redwoods this morning. It is the other side of the moon from Creston. Told Giles I was already homesick for Vermont. He reminded me how hard it had been for me to feel Vermont was my home…he looked particularly handsome, wearing the new tie I gave him, which made his eyes look as blue as the ocean.

“Writing now looking down on Pacific. Giles sleeping like a child beside me….”

I stayed with the diary for several evenings, finishing it. I wasn’t bored at all but left wanting more because Meg was a spare writer but not unvivid. They’d gone from California to Ireland and then to New York and then to visit friends in Marblehead.

“Giles loves to sail. The lines around his eyes are gone and he’s his old relaxed self. We’re closer now than we’ve ever been…”

All was not roses in Meg’s diary. She wrote of worry over children, that old familiar theme. They had four children and they were much more glamorous than mine. But the family was, too. Giles was a Yale man, had been a high-level executive with a foundation and was wealthy enough for him and Meg to retire to Vermont still in their fifties. Meg wrote of feelings of inadequacy and now and then, although she did not put it down in so many words, heartache. I wasn’t surprised. Giles sounded much too charming.

At one point in the journal, Meg’s handwriting changed dramatically. It became large and ran off the page. She was ill, in the hospital. She didn’t say why, but it sounded almost like a breakdown. I was relieved when her handwriting got small and neat again.

Back in Vermont, toward the present time: “Going to Paula’s tonight…” and then, one of the very last entries. “I am getting to know Kate. What courage she must have. She is very attractive.”

I closed the notebook and put it on the table. I thought of my own diary, my fevered pouring-out to my young psychiatrist because fifty minutes a week had not been enough to tell the strong feelings I was having that still, despite my seeming calm in Vermont, had not been laid to rest. I thought of Meg or some other person reading my diary. My stomach tightened. I could hardly bear to reread it myself. Meg’s diary had not been like that, even when she was in the hospital. If anything, then, it told only of basic things. Or was I failing to read between the lines?

The white breadbox in which I kept my diary was on the shelf of my closet, next to the carton of quilt scraps. The sight of it kept it in my mind. I didn’t want to get into its pages yet, not before going to California for Christmas as I’d promised the girls I would do. Because I knew that as soon as I opened that breadbox, I wouldn’t be present in my new world, and it might spoil my visit with them.

So it was the box of scraps I toyed with that fall before going to bed at night. In the morning, having left them out, I thought they looked funny as I stepped over them. How different my feelings were from those at night, with the curtains on their big brass rings drawn, my sitting and arranging and rearranging the scraps like Tarot cards, trying not to think of anything.

Next: Suki comes back

Quilts and Meg's diary

2008-06-05T05:54:00.000-07:00

The weather worsened, there was little but snow on the TV, and a long evening to fill before bedtime. I remembered the box of material scraps I’d brought and got it out of the closet and sat on the floor and laid the colored pieces out, trying to visualize a patchwork quilt. This was not quite a wise thing to do on a lonely, cold evening two thousand miles from all I’d known before.

For among the scraps were pieces of memories: my slipcover material; I’d forgotten that, and when I saw it, the rust, white, black, and grey modern art nouveau flowers in a country where you’d never find its like, I was suddenly pierced and immediately back in my little home in the Columbine state, sitting on this material, surrounded by my other beloved furnishings.

But of course, I wasn’t, I was sitting on the ridiculous center of an old Oriental rug on an unfriendly vinyl floor, with cast-off furnishings, and looking out the window at a scene bleak enough to strike frost into the average heart; November dead trees and grass rimed with icy rain.

Like an expatriate rubbing it in deeper over gin, I continued placing the scraps, a flounce from Anne’s hippy skirt, kitchen curtain material, dresses I’d made, Will’s amputated denim legs, stuff that went back to when I’d made Greta and Janey matching outfits.

Rearranging quilt scraps endlessly (and never beginning the quilt) became one of my evening pursuits. And then I remembered something else I’d put away and forgotten. Meg’s diary.

I settled down one evening in the old down chair, a blanket wrapped around my knees and feet, up on a footstool the young couple upstairs had put out for the trash and I’d reclaimed. I thought about Meg a few moments before opening the diary, written in a black, ledger-like book. I saw her face, her expression somehow more vulnerable than a 52-year old woman’s should be, her smooth tan skin with the rosy glow underneath, and her white hair, short and full, framing her features, which were rather delicate. I had known her less than a week when she’d given this to me. “I want you to know me better…and Giles, too,” she had said. All right, I would begin to do that.

Next: Learning about Giles and Meg

A change going on in me

2008-06-04T05:43:00.000-07:00

Before very long, I began to notice a change going on in me. The air, the sun, the woods and fields and the solitude and simplicity of what I was doing, what I kept seeing—hidden, lovely things—were working their magic on me. I was sleeping much better, losing my indoor pallor and my spirit “twitching,” and not thinking of very much at all. I had no deep thoughts, no sudden insights. But I was beginning to experience a strange kind of vision, a different way of seeing that was as elusive of being put into words as it was to experience. I called it, in my diary, “seeing into the interstices.”

“Suddenly, I’m beginning to ‘see’ into the spaces in between things, into the interstices. I can’t say exactly what I see, because what happens is a sensation, a fleeting sense of something different that I perceive; also, it’s as if the surfaces of trees and bushes and dirt roads and stones and fences recede, or change in some way, or move, or blur, so that the spaces they’d occupied stand out. Everything for a moment is changed, as if reality has not fallen away but become more real. I am still walking on the road, everything actually is rooted and solid as it always is but I see differently. In between things. As if the things themselves are not so important, but what surrounds them—what I imagine surrounds them—is.

“The effect upon me is soft and gentle, calming. Nothing seems to matter and yet at the same time, everything counts and has its proper place, is all necessary, including things not there on the road, houses with their people and the lives they lead, and radiating from them, all their multitude of events. Also, that I should not worry over the usual because there is definitely something else, and it is in total order and completely beautiful.”

Next: quilt scraps and Meg’s diary

The farm of the red cupola

2008-06-03T05:03:00.000-07:00

Starting out from my apartment about eight o’clock on a grey, cold morning but with the sun struggling to break through, I entered the first meadow. The half-frozen stubble crackled under my boots, and some mornings I was so fortunate as to come upon “God’s handkerchiefs” as Suki told me they were called—spider webs on which dew had frozen. The slanting rays of the sun turned them to delicate crystal.

I came to the next meadow through the Gates of Heaven as I’d named the opening in the stone wall and walked its crest downward to the beginning of the woods. Now shafts of strong sunlight fell through the trees. I crossed a brook on stepping stones into a forest of deep shadows but could see another open meadow ahead. Part of this was enclosed by a single strand of wire with white porcelain spools spaced on it.

I didn’t have to be told that it was electrified, but I wouldn’t go in there anyway for it was full of hundreds of pigs in all sizes, tiny ones and their huge mothers and an occasional tusker, belonging to the Cloughs. I skirted that and went to the left, climbing to a special high spot in the meadow, at the base of an old elm tree. There I stood and gazed at a sight almost unreal in this age, a scene of utter peace and beauty.

The first thing to see was the red cupola of the barn, riding like a little ship on the billows of the meadows. It was the topmost part of the barn, a square structure with a peaked roof and chanticleer on a weather vane perched on it. As I walked forward, it slowly rose from the waves of the fields, the huge old brown barn under the cupola, the white farmhouse with the red shed attached, the farmyard with the tractor and pickup truck, the massive forked stump of the oak tree that had been split by lightning, the fields, the horse running around in its enclosure, the geese, ducks, domestic pigs, goats, pearled guinea hens and several turkeys—free-ranging, out-0f-the-barn animals—and a big, black Labrador, all come into view.

Still a ways from it, I would pause again and gape. It all sat in a low spot of folds of hills, like a toy farm a child sick in bed would play with endlessly, with all its cunning little figurines, in the folds of his coverlet.

At first, I didn’t dare go any closer because I was shy of being seen on my walks, especially by native Vermonters whose land I was trespassing upon. Later, I got to know th3e Clough farm very well.

I turned then and went into the woods, onto one of the “tote” roads, narrow pathways upon which, years ago, things were toted. It was faint but not hard to follow, until I came to “stump city,” a clearing that had been logged about twenty years ago. It was full of brambles but a wide swath ran through it; among the brambles, tangled in profusion, were wild blackberries, and also, from their impenetrable depths, once or twice I heard the keening of a fisher cat and caught a hint of feral scent.

I followed the swath, passing the unmade beds of deer, the impressions they left in the grass, and onto a wagon path which led to the highest hill around, which I climbed, never looking back until I got to the rounded summit. Then I turned and before me spread “my Vermont,” the hills and meadows of Creston; and beyond, in a purplish-grey haze, the hills of New Hampshire. I usually sat there for awhile when the dew wasn’t too heavy and even, sometimes, on very warm days, lay on my back and watched the clouds overhead, and more than once, fell asleep.

Then I’d go down the hill on the last leg of my walk where there was one more delight, the abandoned sugar house. When I first came upon it, not expecting it, I couldn’t believe it.

It sat beside a lively stream, above a tumbled-down stone wall, in small hollow lacy with ferns and sweeping trees. Sunlight played upon the old wood, the rusted corrugated roof, the distinctive sugar house roof with a smaller one atop it, open-sided, to let the steam of boiling sap escape. The frames of the doors and absent windows were a shade of color that must have been produced by weather and age; a grayish blue, that with the deep, aged brown of the rest of the structure and its overgrown green setting, was utterly beautiful. It sat, a little away from the path, like a part of the forest, spotlighted in the shadows by the light falling through the trees. I stayed at a distance, loving just to look at it.

And, so then, by way of the path, I returned to the starting point, the fallen-down white gate on which I’d stepped to enter the first meadow.

Next: a change going on in me

Exploring on my own

2008-06-02T05:18:00.000-07:00

I walked in the area around my apartment and thought, despite what is said about the glories of Spring and Fall, that this time now must be one of the most beautiful of the year. I loved the pale wheat color of the stubble in the meadows left from haying, the look of leafless trees against the washed sky which was different shades of grey. Things did not look as sharp as they would later in December and January; in November they were softer, with what had so recently left, the sap of summer, the rust of fall. The sere white-tans and greys were very calming and peace-inducing to the spirit.

The woods were more open; I began to notice where I hadn’t before. The way a certain tree grew, transfixing the sky on a certain hill; the way a small creek seeped between rocks; the way, looking back over my shoulder on impulse, I saw the juncture of a curve of hill, a line of woods, the grey of sky and the deep brown of a distant barn. These things came together differently and in varying shades depending on where I stood when I looked and the time of day. Coming up a slight rise of ground or around a “corner” in the woods, I’d stop and say, “My Lord—“ I couldn’t get enough of looking and looking back, peeking, my eyes spying sudden, unexpected delights. I surprised deer that surprised me. We looked at each other for a terrified moment, eye to eye in recognition, and then they were gone, flashing, if they were does and young ones, as most were, a white spotted bottom and the underside of their tails, which fluttered like ostrich feathers as they leapt away.

I saw wonderful houses and stole up on them in Indian fashion, flitting from tree to tree. Smoke came from their chimneys for fires were needed constantly now as the air was penetratingly chill. The houses, no matter if they were in need of repair or had some inelegant touches like sagging ells, looked like places where people lived—not just were sheltered, slept and ate—like so many houses looked in the city, with their neatness and monotony of line. These Vermont houses, most of them dating to the 1800’s or earlier, had been built, I felt, for both function and artistry. Thus, the porch with its spindled railing to sit upon summer evenings and to dry laundry on in bad weather; the peaked roofs, many of them rusted tin so the heavy snows would slide off before they caved the whole place in; the chimney, usually in the center of the house so the brick itself helped keep it warm; the proximity to barns so that at 30 and 40 degrees below zero, the walk to do the chores wouldn’t be so tortuous, and so many other little touches, all honest and commonsense.

There were a few other houses, too, or that had been houses, but were slowly falling to pieces. These were the abandoned ones, where, I was told, a hermit had lived or something untoward had happened, like a young boy hanging himself, or a woman drinking herself to death, or a house had been partially consumed by fire. They were perfect food for the imagination with their hollow eyes of windows, holey roofs and broken timbers. If you looked in, or even dared to go in, which could be dangerous because you could go plummeting “down cellar” through rotten floor boards, you might see mattresses chewed upon by varmints, cabinets broken open, rusted utensils, a chimney with most of the bricks fallen down. All that good Gothic novel material.

Soon, I fell in love with one place and it became the focus of my walks. It was the Clough farm, directly across the meadows from my apartment, where the remote, green-eyed Maud lived. I fashioned a special way to it that included all the secret, delicious discoveries I’d made about the place, where, for some reason, I’d set down.

Next: the farm of the Red Cupola

Looking for the Crown Point Road

2008-05-30T05:08:00.000-07:00

Sarah brought along two other people for our walk, a woman, Martha, and a man with the lovely first name of Crofter, both of whom lived in Woodfield. Crofter wore very thick glasses and was almost certifiably blind. Sarah’s rather remote blue eyes looked very green because she wore a simply cut felt hat of deep green called a “felt crusher” that was practically the national hat of Vermont. They sold at the General Store for $4. I knew I’d have to have one.

On the way to Enosburg, Sarah gave me a little history lesson. “The Crown Point Road was used by Washington’s men to transport cannon along,” she said. “It goes all the way to Canada.”

I was soon to think that if the Minutemen had as much trouble as we did that day, it’s a wonder we ever won our independence. We walked in deep, dark woods, along creek beds, in heavy brambly underbrush, even forded streams. I saw no clues to go by yet the others spotted discreet indications that, some centuries ago, men had sweated on this very spot pushing something quite heavy.

Sarah and Martha and even Crofter with, I supposed, a keen sixth sense, frequently called out to each other.

“-----moss here!”

“A-----tree!”

Sarah directed my attention to some barbed wire which had, when I could make it out in the tangled underbrush, a very unusual pattern.

“That would be worth a lot of money to a collector,” Sarah said, in a tone that inferred only a crass person would think of removing it from its natural habitat.

We bushwhacked up swales and through almost impenetrable thickets. Sarah got a scratch on her cheek that bled which didn’t slow her down in the slightest. I felt she was built for the long trail and, no doubt, could a have made it soon enough to Canada. I was relieved when we stopped for lunch, upon the ruins of a small house. We sat on the stone foundation, all that remained, and shared sensible things, nuts, raisins, fruit, cheese. I struggled to remember some of my lynch-pin remarks, and Sarah blinked several times at my utterances.

“People here are certainly vigorous, especially women.”

“You don’t seem to miss city life.”

“It must be hard to find the time to write.”

Sarah replied, “I only do it when I have something very definite to say.”
So much for diary keepers.

On the way home in the car, I pondered my role. I didn’t think I’d struck any sparks with Sarah. I told myself to relax more with people. “You’ve got the rest of your life here, for God’s sakes.”

On my own, I seemed to have no problem. And if one wanted to be on her own, November was the month to choose, and the Vermont countryside the place to be.

Next: exploring on my own

Good old Bill Jones

2008-05-29T05:09:00.000-07:00

When I drove into the farmyard, a yellow dog on a chain lunged toward my car, not barking but making horrible strangulated noises. I sat in the car and waited. Not even if the eggs were from the golden goose would I open the door and set foot down. I was about to back out and settle for eggs from the General Store when a man came from the barn and up to the car window.

“How many?” he asked.

“One,” I said.

He went back into the barn. I was sure he knew I meant one dozen. He must be gathering them out of the nests. He soon came back with a carton worn soft with use and warm with its contents. I opened it to look at my first box of country eggs. They were dappled with turd and a few stuck tufts of hay, in a variety of sizes, mostly big, and brown.

“Don’t wash them until you use them,” Bill said.

Something to do, I supposed with leaching out nutrients. There must be a lot on those eggs.

We visited a little. Bill had broken teeth, a ruddy complexion, and red-rimmed eyes.

“You’re the Colorado woman.”

“Yeah.” I wasn’t too surprised to hear that.

When I ate my way through the eggs (they were delicious,) I returned for more. In season, Bill also had potatoes for five cents a pound. Bill’s wife taught school and he stayed home, but like every Vermonter, did three or four odd jobs for other people. He showed me his woodworking layout in the barn and two calves that were most appealing. One got sick and he had to give it, so he told me, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

I was imprudent enough to make a joke about this, by now feeling pretty comfortable with good old Bill. His wife happened to be home that day and I had gotten on a friendly footing with her, too. We were all standing out in the barnyard.

“You mean,” I rashly said to the wife, Darlene, in some kind of context, “you’d kiss a man who kisses a cow?”

The Joneses laughed, a little. Little did I know each would probably rather kiss a cow than each other. But along with my other ploys, I used humor to unlock people’s hearts.

It worked pretty good on Bill because he began to call me up to tell me he had fresh eggs. As if I didn’t know he had eggs.

“Bring you up some right now.”

“I don’t need any now, thank you.”

“Going up that way.”

I wiggled out of that call but there were others and, finally, a show-down.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to personally deliver eggs to me,” I told him.

“Why, just being neighborly.”

“I know, but people might misunderstand.” I didn’t want any shilly-shallying with good old Bill Jones. Who pressed his lips to cow’s.

“You’re just so friendly,” Bill said.

I realized I had been, too much, too indiscriminately, and resolved to pull back and contemplate things a bit. Being by now addicted to turdy eggs, I found another outlet. Later, I felt strong enough to buy Bill’s potatoes. In the meantime, I tried to learn a few New England secrets, on how to be with my fellow man.

Next: looking for the Crown Point Road

Facing my own resources

2008-05-28T07:18:00.000-07:00

November, which is called the unkindest month, came, and my new friends were gone. Paula left to winter in her brownstone in New York City. Meg went to join her husband Giles and would not be back until the middle of December. And Suki, whom I’d counted on to be my rock and mentor, departed for Washington because her long-lost reprobate of a husband, Jake, was in a hospital there. Each left me something.

Paula entrusted to me her fine little Sony TV and radio, and added a jar of chicken stock and another of pears poached in wine. Meg, to my great surprise, handed over her diary, a true gift of self. I was touched by her confidence in someone she’d known but a short while. “I just want you to know me better. And Giles, too,” Meg had said.

Suki gave me a key to her house in case I wanted to borrow a book or sit before a fire. (I wouldn’t, when Suki was gone, I might burn the place down.) Also, Suki tried to ensure I wouldn’t be lonely, and before she left took me to a meeting of the Creston Historical Society. There, she presented me to a tall, dignified looking woman in her early sixties whom she introduced as “Our resident historian, Sarah Fowler.”

Despite that Sarah looked at me with keen blue eyes and shook my hand in that Vermont bear paw grasp, I received the immediate impression that here at last was a truly reserved New Englander. Sarah had written, some years ago, the history of Creston, and regularly contributed articles to the very magazines I had targeted for my own offerings, Vermont Life, Country Journal, and Yankee. I was very interested in Sarah Fowler but something told me to go slowly, a wise precaution which Suki confirmed.

“She’s a born and bred Vermonter,” Suki said, “but she’s lived away for years in the city and is well-educated. Also, she has lots of glue. Sarah is probably our most solid citizen but she isn’t easy to know.” (Glue was Suki’s word for money.)

Sarah was also the soul of politeness. She asked me how I was faring and if I had done or seen this or that, and if I liked to walk.

“Oh, yes,” I replied. “It’s probably the main reason I came to Vermont.”

“We’ll walk sometime,” Sarah said.

Walking and another activity. But, of course, embracing is not something that can be done overnight or by merely reaching out one’s arms and drawing in. In the mornings, early, sitting at my desk, I had grandiose highs of walking on the dirt road, into the tiny village, the post office, the general store, and, as in an enchanted world, discerning instantly the secrets of people’s hearts and they, mine. Would not everyone see immediately about me that I was very well disposed toward them, indeed?

I went into the post office in Creston, much smaller than the one in Woodfield. I had rented a box there for all the articles and stories I was going to be writing before I started on my novel, some under pen names. I had one for my serious self and one for my frivolous self. With some embarrassment, I’d had to tell them to the clerk, Esther.

I went into the General Store. It was, like most of them, a dimensional sketch of what such a place should be, by an artist like Grandma Moses. It had ancient wood floors and good smells from fresh donuts made early and delivered every morning by country women; hams, cheese, maple syrup, hunting supplies, beer and so on. Three or four old duffers sat at the counter and drank coffee all day long. I figured they knew who I was, for they nodded but didn’t speak. If anyone ever did, I would have to first.

Tish Brewster came in, like a radiant sunbeam. Seeing me, she exclaimed, “Well, hello! Just the person I wanted to see. Did you hear about the bakery we’re having?”

I braced myself.

“For Woodfield House. You’d be perfect. Oh, do say you’ll help!”

How could I not? The bakery, Tish explained, was to be an event of every Thursday, beginning after Christmas when “the very best bakers bring their wares to be sold for a slight profit to benefit our activities.” Before I knew it, Tish put me down for pecan tarts and mini-cheesecakes.

Next, I went to the town hall to see if I was too late to register to vote (I was) and was happy to see Sarah Fowler. She said, “I was about to call you because we’re going for a walk Wednesday, probably from Enosburg, to try to pick out the Crown Point Road. It should be about a five or six mile walk.”

“Oh, I’d like to,” I said. “I can do that.”

Sarah nodded as if she didn’t doubt it one bit and why shouldn’t I be able to, younger as I was than her.

“Bring a lunch. I’ll pick you up about nine,” Sarah said.

Going home, I stopped for eggs at a sign that said 75 cents a dozen.

Next: good old Bill Jones

Matching wits with Paula/visiting Suki

2008-05-27T05:01:00.000-07:00

Paula said, “You must still be feeling odd in your new environment. But you’ve done very well.”

“You ladies have kept me so busy I haven’t had time to sort myself out,” I replied.

“You will soon after Meg and I leave,” Paula said.

“What do you do in New York all winter?”

“Go to plays. Museums. Shop. Have dinner parties.”

I was interested in hearing something about a personal life, but Paula‘s light-hearted, matter-of-fact manner did not encourage me to go too quickly, although, with her, there wasn’t much time left.

“And I suppose you miss your family,” Paula said.

“I haven’t really thought about them too much.”

“And Rich? Your ex-husband?” Paula said, surprising me.

“Not at all! On the contrary.”

“On the contrary, what?”

“I feel much freer than I have for years.”

Paula said, very lightly, “I suppose you’ve had lots of affairs and things.”

Wow. It suddenly dawned on me that most of what Paula said was not questions. I had to pause to regroup and did not answer her last remark which I could do since our huge salads came.

After lunch we drove to Woodstock and Paula showed me the Nifty Sales Company, a fabulous thrift store, and helped me pick out a grey wool coat with a fleece-lined collar and cuffs, just what I needed, for $12, and a blue wool cardigan for $2. Then we walked around in the afternoon sun with all the tourists Woodstock was full of, licking ice cream cones.

In my diary, I wrote of this day:

“I felt so happy and relaxed. Paula has a sense of fun I love. I’ll miss her when she leaves but maybe then I’ll get down to serious writing. But I think I could go on for a long time having this kind of lovely, relaxed, simple day.”

And of the last few days I wrote in my swelling diary I hadn’t been sure I wanted to keep:

“Today is rainy. It started about 8:30 and now it’s 3 p.m. Temperature about 36 degrees. It feels colder than it is but I like it, this grey, weeping Vermont day. I walked from 7:30 a.m. to about 9, in my new red rain jacket and hat and rubber boots, went up by Suki’s into a faint road, through the trees to a meadow that had cows in it. I was wary of the cows and stayed by a stone wall in case I’d have to leap over it out of the path of a charging bull. But all they did was munch. Sat on the stones at the top of the pasture and looked at the fog and rain enshrouded hills and said, ‘this is my Vermont.’

“Made split pea soup today and banana bread. Just had some with tea, looking out the rainy window. Can’t say life is all bad when you can do that. I haven’t made my draperies or straightened up my papers or typed my articles—but will. Suki has invited me to come Sunday after Mass to make applesauce with apples from her trees.”

I took the soup and banana bread to Suki’s. She made a salad and we sat in the den by the wood stove and had sherry first. Cream cheese on the banana bread. Then we went across the road to her orchard, taking some long-handed hay forks to knock the fruit up high off. The day was intermittently sunny, spitting sleet, and windy, but invigorating. Suki takes all apples whether they’re half-eaten by a deer or chipmunk. Cuts them up, cooks in huge vat with little cider, runs through food mill, puts in sterilized jars, and then in hot bath for 30 minutes. While it was cooking she showed me family pictures as we drank Earl Grey tea with honey by the stove. Her children, grandchildren, weddings.

Suki looked very distinguished young, a lot like Kate Hepburn, craggy features, wrinkles, a pert alive look, close-cropped all-American mouse-colored hair (she calls it.) Got home about six. A good day well-spent. My share is eight pints of ruby red organic applesauce.

Suki had a card from her husband. He’s in a hospital in Washington, D.C., and she’s going to go to him.

Next: facing my own resources

Shopping, New England style

2008-05-26T05:09:00.000-07:00

We went to the White River Junction, Vt., West Lebanon, N.H. area. There were clover leafs and ramps and a shopping center with Penney’s, McDonalds, Rich’s discount store, and K-Mart. I said something to Meg about being unable to escape commercialism even on Pitcairn Island.

She said, “I felt the same way you did. But the funny thing is, after living in the country for awhile, you appreciate these stores because where else would you find the things you need?”

She was right, of course. By the time we headed for the hills of home, several hours later, I had purchased rubber boots, a necessity in the damp meadows and fall rains to come, a rain hat with broad brim and a rain coat, both fire-engine red, to wear when the hunters descended in a few weeks time. We also ate at McDonald’s, at Meg’s suggestion, and I didn’t say a word. I was glad, however, it was on the New Hampshire side of the river.

Meg took me to a couple of thrift stores where I bought a small rickety table to go between the two blue chairs, brass candlestick holders to center the dining table with that Suki had loaned me, a nice pair of corduroy pants and a heavy, handmade sweater for fifty cents.

Suki had also loaned me her small portable Singer sewing machine. The next day, I planned to start making curtains and clean my apartment thoroughly. But Paula dropped by and asked if I wanted to drive to South Woodstock with her, to a glass blower’s. For a moment I flashed on the kind of person I had been, the quintessential housewife. I could see that here grown people played. That they were wealthy people who were retired did not occur to me until I met some other kinds of Crestonites.

So off I went with Paula and it was one of those rare times. We again went on that magic road through the forest which, in the few days since I’d been on it before, had become a golden pathway. The trees were in full color and they grew so profusely along this narrow, winding, up-and down sunlight and shadow dappled road, that looking ahead was like looking into a tunnel filled with golden light.

“How is it it’s not overrun with developers?” I exclaimed to Paula. “Back home such beauty would be subdivided and sold to t he highest bidder.”

“Because of the winter and the economy. But I suppose it could happen if Vermonters weren’t so careful about land use,” she answered.

The glassblower’s shop was closed so we went to a stately old place, the Kedron Inn, for lunch. The tables in the half-deserted dining room were set with snowy linen. We sat by a window overlooking a stream with a water paddle, and ordered wine and spinach salads.

By this time, I’d totally altered my attitude toward Paula. At the post office, I’d felt she was aggressive, now I felt she was more of an elusive personality. I sorted over my bag of tricks. Whenever I’d had my sessions with Dr. Carlyle, he would merely sit and wait for me to begin. And, sure enough, Paula began. But she had her own bag of tricks.

Next: Matching wits with Paula/ visiting Suki