I've been visiting my dear friend Gina this week, someone who reaches back to my "growing up days" in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Gina now lives near Suffern, New York, in a house that was once a tavern/inn/country store. The front part of her home still has the original hearth and beneath the living room's floorboards there's a space that must've been a root cellar or storage area. She's not clear how old the house is exactly, but it does show up on maps as far back as 1820. It's been a restful few days. I like to think that there have been alot of people who've found rest and rejuvenation at this spot over the years, travelers, seekers of fortune, wanderers, tradesmen and women, along with all the invisible faerie folk that people the hillsides (that's a bit of the pagan Irish and Gina coming out in me.) There's a good, grounded feeling. Staying here reminds me of home because our house in Vermont is on a road that parallels the old stage coach route from Boston to Montreal and the original inn for travelers still stands just off the road about a mile and a half away. After its life as a tavern, it had been a schoolhouse; in fact, our neighbor, now in his late 60's, remembers going to school there as a child, but since that time the building has gone through a series of derelict years and now stands grey and weathered and forlorn. I half expect Miss Havisham to come to one of the windows chomping on a piece of wedding cake. I've heard that someone does live on the property and tends to the building, but I've never actually seen them. There are periodic signs of life, maybe they live behind the building, but all the mysterious comings and goings lend a haunted quality to the place that I enjoy exploiting.
I envy the coming of Spring here in Suffern. Daffodils and croci are already poking their heads up through the ground, and all the hillsides, still brown and grey, teeming with denuded trees, ache for green. You can feel it in the air. Vermont is another story. We're a month away from any flowering activity. Last year, a monumental year for snowfall, the largest in a hundred years, the snow hung on well into April. I found myself forgetting that there ever had been green out there, a form of snowblindness, I'm sure. So you find ways to fend off the encroaching madness. You force bulbs (that sounds heathenish). You plant narcissus and daffodils, amaryllis, even tulips in bowls of small pebbles to fool yourself into believing that spring is just around the corner; you start seeds in little peat-mossed, plastic covered terrarium containers so you can pop-em in the garden as soon as freezes stop (that can sometimes stretch past Memorial Day) and get a jump on the short growing season (90 days tops). Other than that you can knit, quilt, loom, read Victorian novels, write poetry, gather round the piano and sing songs like "Momma's Sleeping in Her Coffin in the Box Car Up Ahead." You may be asking yourself "And why did you choose to live here again?" and don't worry, I ask myself that question too at times, but it all seems to even out in the end. Sometimes I just don't know and go with it anyway.
The sap is running. During my walk down our road the other day I noticed galvanized pails hanging from the sugar maples, the "old way" of gathering sap. I prefer this to the more modern method of blue tubing dangling from tree to tree and oozing into a plastic reservoir somewhere nearby. That practice smacks of a hospital ward to me, as if the sugar maples were hooked up to a life support system. This fantasy is not that far from the truth since you overhear old timers talk about the climate having gotten so warm that it no longer sustains the maples and so they're slowly but surely dying out with the most optimistic forecasts giving them 10 more years tops. (And here on Gina's property all her ash trees are dying off because of an incurable fungus. Ugh.) It's hard to get my mind around predictions, to once more accept that these are the times we live in, that we will see trees, species, ways of life die out, that despite out best efforts, there are irreversibles. So I've decided that in addition to learning what I can to slow the process and to help out in any way I can to put off the inevitable, I will simply appreciate them as fully as I can while they're here.
When I first became aware of Vermont during a brief affair with a guy from the Green Mountain State back in the late 70s, he told me that there was more virgin timberland in Vermont now then there had been at the turn of the last century. I was more into making out and hot times then hearing about fun facts about the woods, but the book of pictures that he gave me of the forested area around his house as evidence was beautiful and despite my desire to be and experience all things that had to do with the city rather than anything bucolic some appreciation must have stuck. Now I wander back through the woods on our property (we have 55 acres, 45 of which is forested) and I marvel at the perfectly laid out stone walls serpentining over the hills and once defining cleared farm land and now overtaken and reclaimed by trees and vegetation. It's comforting to know nature's doing just fine despite our clumsy jabs at progress, some things die out, others take their place. We muck things up a bit by introducing some fungus or parasite which decimates a whole strain of trees and some other tree takes its place.
I'm just rambling today. It feels like a walk through the woods. Thanks for going along with me. I hope you have a good one.
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