Each weekend of the year when my father did not have to work, we packed up and drove to the farm. My Grandparents friends had a retreat in southern New Hampshire and while visiting there something came up for sale on the yonder hillside. They bought the property when Richard and his siblings were young teenagers. I don’t think they quite knew what this place would mean to the family for the next few generations.
My father’s family embraced the country life. I think they may have felt more at home there, in the idyllic valley hamlet, a safe place, a welcome refuge from their jobs and schools back home. Industrious people as they were, they got to work on the neglected state of the house and land with a happy disposition.
The house was not insulated, the kitchen may have already had the hand pump drawing water from the well outside and I’m not sure they had electricity yet for all the kerosene lanterns on every surface. They didn’t care, it all added to the charm. Modern conveniences would come later but for now they plowed the fields tall with hay, planted a vegetable garden, acquired a red-haired horse to saddle up and ride, and swam in the crisp dark waters of the pond at the bottom of the hill to wash off the labor and dust of the day. They built an outside oven from the plentiful boulders found on the property, prompting them to name the place “Rockhurst”.
Off of the main road, and driving up a dirt lane, it was the last house on top of the hill. The white clapboard house with black shutters sat on a few acres of leveled off land. The road continued past the house but was gated off as a conservation region, a wild and inviting swampy timberland called “The Bog”.
Even though there are doors on all sides of the house, it is most convenient to enter by way of the big sliding barn door from the parking area. The house has two stories with a screened in porch at one end overlooking the brook and treelined hills. There are views of the tiny looking Mirror Pond and bridge off one side and the manicured lawn with one huge Oak tree to the other side. The house holds 8 rooms used as bunch of bedrooms, living room, dining room and parlor. Attached to the house is a one-story section joining the house with the large two-story barn which is used as the kitchen area with a pantry leading to the barn. A very rustic dark and wonderful two-story space, the barn is used for storage of lawn equipment, specifically a gas-powered Toro walk-behind finicky sickle-bar mower and Craftsman sit-down lawn mower. Dad would let us stand on the shelf behind him and hold onto his shoulders for a bouncy ride, until I was big enough to operate it myself, being careful to avoid any bulging boulder sprouting from the earth. The barn is where you can find sleds, snow-shoes, and a plethora of handy supplies and tools. And a four-seater, one for every size, outhouse room is accessible from inside the barn. On the grassy knolls beside the house are smaller structures. A well-house with pully system and roof, a coveted cottage for extra sleeping, with a small attached barn where they kept the horse and behind that, a two-vehicle open-door shed for carts and wagons.
Going there often, we experienced all the seasonal effects on the land and surroundings. The sparkles and reflections of Mount Lovewell on the still surface of apt-named Mirror Pond, the neon greenery of everything and the wildflower-filled fields in the summer and spring. The bright turning of leaves everywhere you looked in the fall and the pristine snow laying a white blanket for miles and piled high in front of doorways and roofs in winter. The young adults took up skiing on the fluffy snow in wintertime being so close to Pats Peak and Sunapee State Park.
The best stretches of time spent for integrating with the simpler life were the two or more weeks of vacations during the summer. As we were becoming familiar with everyone in the close-knit settlement, there were Grange Suppers with a small musical band to attend together with old friends, neighbors, and new acquaintances. Old timey Fourth of July parades and fireworks to watch in the next town. Lots of antique stores opened up to treasure find. Visits to the nearby working cow farm for ice cream. Games of Badminton and challenging games of Croquet on the large rolling lawn. Sliding down the hill in cardboard boxes. Learning to ride a horse at a neighbor’s house. Taking off, wind in face, on my brother’s handwrought moped. And playing endless games of cards, piecing puzzles and taking score with an old- fashioned wood and cork pin-ball game.
The pond is where I became a fish. Repeatedly, I would slither under water, into the brisk dark abyss, coming up only for a bit of air and snaking under again and again. I’d jump off from a piling of granite rocks into the water or dive with perfect form off the long wooden plank. The pond had a bridge and dam on one end with a drop down leading to a burbling brook that ran along the main road for miles. The dam had slatted niches to adjust for the overflow of water coming in from far off hills on the other side. There was access to climb down under the bridge through slick rocks, prickly bushes and moist moss, touching down onto the dam’s cement platform to what we called the showers. The small shower-shaped nooks below the open slats created a thick waterfall that flowed steadily over anyone brave enough to stand firmly under the forceful deluge.
As my father and sibling’s families grew, we continued with anticipation to pack up the car and take the well memorized, highway alternate route, to the country, routinely taking a break halfway, for ice cream or fried clams. Sometimes all the clan would reunite with each other allowing us kids to get to know our cousins. If it wasn’t our cousins to get into mischief with, we would bring friends from home and show them all my favorite spots or call on the family a little bit down the road, who had three sisters close in age to us. I had great fun with them, climbing trees or stone-hopping the brook, looking at interesting tombstones in the vintage Cemetery behind both our properties, or horseback riding at a neighbor’s house. The girls had a few sheep and would enter them in the county fair. We’d all pile into the back of the pick-up and thrillingly ride the seven miles out of the valley to the nearest town and beyond, my hair a happy tangled jumble when we arrived.
I had a friend who lived over the bridge by the pond and situated at the end of a long winding hill. Instead of walking to her house, I learned to drive on my own at fourteen being allowed to take the keys and practice maneuvering the station wagon along the nearby roads few cars traversed. A thorough education can come by needing to take a panicky nine-point try at a turn-around on a skinny ditch-lined road while patient, nail-biting neighbors watched from a window. Once I had my license, I felt confident enough to traverse the trek, by myself, for respite, a walk about, a swim and a snooze on the porch. My country fix.
I lived in the city but my heart was in the country. When not there, I felt a visceral, bred in the bones type yearning. The distinctive sounds out the open windows of calls from the Whippoorwills and Bobwhites, the rustle of leaves fluttering in the wind from high in the hills, cows mooing in the distance, the bells from a one-room church down by the pond on Sunday mornings and falling asleep to the roar of the tumbling brook below. To this day I have a tactile recall of waking up to dewy grass every morning, recognizing every patch of tufted grass or mound of feathery soft moss, like old friends, collecting blueberries into clanging tins and slurping them down in a bowl of milk, walking barefoot on the worn blue-grey tar, cracked rural roads, and standing very still at the water’s edge to allow the miniscule baby pollywogs to gently nibble my toes in the shallow sandy depths.
Walking gingerly along the path that stretched directly out from the barn, across a little field, through the woodland and reaching a break in a stone wall brought you to the village’s cemetery. There, I can visit my father’s grave adorned by a huge granite stone, and is where his siblings and parents all now reside. Out from the barn and to the right behind the stone wall, I visit the other smaller cemetery for pets, where my husband Chip and I laid to rest our much adored and forever missed first dog.
Chip loved New Hampshire too and we decided to be married in the aforementioned little white steepled church and celebrated on a warm autumn day on the family farm’s lawn. Keeping to the theme, our small group danced the night away in cowboy boots to a blue-grass band.
Thirty years ago, Chip and I looked in New Hampshire and Maine for a location to call our own but the places we liked were too far from Boston. It wasn’t until a friend proposed we search for a fixer-upper in Provincetown, and luckily within one day, we found the right one. A two-story Cape Cod farmhouse with three shacks that needed some care. We found, here in Provincetown, at the end of the world, a simple country life and a small village existence, feeling blessed with each new day.