Horsekeeping (5 page)

Onto this history we have layered our own experiences. I wielded my thick black notebook of room dimensions and fabric swatches in eagerness to do justice to the beauty the house, one we never dreamed we'd ever be able to own.

“Can you believe this is ours?” I asked Scott as we wandered through the empty rooms after the closing.

“It is hard to believe. We've come a long way, baby,” he joked.

As we admired the molded archway segmenting the long entry hall I pictured kissing him under the Christmas mistletoe.

“Let's not muck it up,” my lovebird added.

And it was Scott's desire to start from scratch, incorporating few furnishings from our first house. Undaunted and true to our sign of Taurus, Scott and I are nesters. We moved frequently as kids, and neither of us had the pleasure of adhering to a long-established homestead, so this house was for keeps. We wanted a permanent familiarity for our kids and
set about filling the house with art and personal knick-knacks accumulated from twenty-plus years of life together while adding ongoing collections. We decorated to please ourselves. We took angled photographs and countless measurements, and I lost myself in fabric books emulating the professional we didn't hire. Weekdays, Scott met me for lunch at ABC Carpet and Home and Ethan Allen to debate rugs and sofas, neglecting food. Combing local antique stores, both the precious and the junky, occupied us weekends for two years. We each seriously took ownership, with a sharp eye for every detail—I'd turn the carved snow goose on the dining table one direction and on his next walk through Scott would reverse it, or even shift it to the sideboard, the nervy bugger. I would put it back.
Why did I have to get a husband who cares so much and notices everything,
I wondered, when my girlfriends complained their husbands couldn't care less. But our battles for decorative control resulted in an eclectic home of tender care and affection, and we can both point to every “treasure” in our house and recall its provenance.

Faced with filling up this overwhelming house on a limited budget, our first purchase was a purely decorative, two-hundred-year-old wooden slatted, oval-shaped barn vent still attached to a portion of the New York state barn that once proudly held it. An artful piece of Americana, built when nails were hand-forged and square, we splurged when we really needed mattresses, chairs and curtains. It holds prideful place inside the main hall and reminds us of those early exciting days creating our first real home, one that our children will grow up in, revisit after they are released into the wild and perhaps return to marry in, one in which we hope to grow old, entertain our grandchildren, and, when tired and ready, die in. Encompassing our family mythology as a living museum curated with love and memory, the “Borden House,” as it is still known locally, makes us extraordinarily happy. We may live, work and school in New York City, but Salisbury is our home. Our house feels almost alive in that it predates us, transforms with each new occupant and, barring fire, will survive us. I imagine it two-hundred years hence absorbing
another family's triumphs and tragedies. As our lives wear it down a little more around the edges, maybe we will etch it into “the Bok House.”

Located at the eastern end of the long Twin Lakes Road, our house sits three-winged and nine-gabled on land studded with evergreen stands of mature hemlocks and white pines. Our eight-acre plot is bordered behind by hundreds of acres of mixed forest: northern hardwoods of beech, birch and maple as well as the eastern broadleaf species of oak and hickory that are more southern. One immense weeping willow resides solitary in the middle of our back lawn gracefully holding a dream-perfect tree swing. A plain wood plank is tied to the ends of two fifty-foot lengths of rope plugged via cherry-picker to a high, uneven branch. Housing purchases tend to be emotional, and I believe we bought this house because of this swing. Elliot and Jane love arching dangerously high into the gracefully hanging softer shoots, kicking down confetti of petite leaves. Because the long ropes narrow at the top, the seat spins like a carnival ride, minus the safety belt. More worrisome, our tree man advised me that the willow is weak, unlike the muscle-bound maple or oak.

“What does that mean?”

When willows fail, they fail spectacularly,” Skip answered.

We gazed up at the tree's massive horizontal arm, perfectly aligned for unobstructed swinging... and slamming a human into the ground as easily as a hammer would drive a thumbtack into corkboard.

“But we don't have a maple or an oak.”

“Then you take your chances.”

We cabled the willow's bicep against catastrophe, and I tried to think that the likelihood of that one trunklike, brain-crushing branch fracturing during the few hours a year my kids fly, spin and giggle into the breeze was miniscule, but my dreamy swing is now tinged by a harsher reality.

Across Twin Lakes Road, over the years we had annexed another sixty-four acres along a sluggish length of the wide Housatonic River. Sixteen of these produce hay harvested for El-Arabia's horses, twenty
is woodland, and twenty-eight sprout alfalfa grown by the local farmer, Mr. Duprey, as feed for his dairy cows. Every five years he substitutes corn to replenish the soil. Once or twice in my Christmas card I had asked the Dupreys if they could plant sunflowers as the rotation crop. I pictured southern France with acres of yellow fringed, seeded black faces bobbing eight feet high to the sun. I mistily envisioned my kids running breathlessly through their thick, fuzzy stalks in the ultimate game of hide and seek; of waking up, country-relaxed and sleepy-eyed, taking my warm teacup outside to survey a spectacular golden carpet, sighing with the wonder and beauty of it all. My fantasy remained rootbound. I suppose that sunflower seeds are expensive, and not appetizing to a milk cow's palate. Oh well. My naïve request probably provoked guffaws from cows and farmers alike at the Duprey holiday repast.

It is dawning on me that farming is hard, dirty work. Once I took Elliot, then a tender four-year-old, to see the milking at the Dupreys': the 4:00 p.m. milking since we slumbered peacefully through the first at 4:00 a.m. Mr. Duprey's stout son maneuvered these bulky, hygienically challenged animals into two lines on either side of a narrow barn. The cows obliged their longstanding routine. Duprey the younger, outfitted in high rubber boots, cast an amused glance at our feet. I pretended not to care that our white sneakers were lace deep in mud and cow effluvia—“big poopie” according to Elliot—and that dozens of buzzing flies, fat black ones and translucent babies, were lighting on every moist surface, including the wide-eyed and open-mouthed face of my son.

I swatted surreptitiously as the lowing cows had their teats splashed with blue disinfectant and sucked into tubes that coaxed milk from their bulging udders into not-so-gleaming silver tanks. Duprey expertly managed six cows at a time, taking about fifteen minutes to get them in, drained, and out again. Since the farm had one hundred cows, the job took four hours, and he did this two times a day, with plenty of other jobs in between. A man of few words, he let the action speak for itself, and after a few polite questions Elliot and I bee-lined to the car. I set
to work sanitizing all thirty-three inches of him, using a full bottle of Purell and the better half of a box of diaper wipes. He finally balked when I tried to swab the inside of his mouth.

Mr. Duprey the elder harvests the alfalfa in our field three or four times a summer. Timing is everything as it takes about two days to chop, churn to fully dry, and then scoop up the cuttings. Rain necessitates several more days of fluffing. The deer pray to the rain god and come nightly to feast away a good chunk of the yield. Once we counted fifty-eight bucks and does in our field: lithe, graceful beasts grazing our own open plain. We'd sigh in awe as these timid, gentle herbivores would catch a warning on the wind and, with white tails held high, collectively high-jump into the cover of brush and trees. Many passing drivers slow to view this New England version of a wildlife park. Some haul out binoculars. One car drove out across the alfalfa for a closer look, stampeding the herd.

Our family was anxious to witness the process of harvest. One July daybreak, we awoke to an old-fashioned dull red tractor with a wide series of blades circling our irregularly shaped field, working from the outside in. The completed geometry of cut greenery swirled a giant's thumbprint. But Mr. Duprey's satisfying neat sweep of the field took two days of tedium in the beating sun atop a steaming, noisy, smelly machine, and ours was only one of many fields to be tended. And, a closer look took more of the beauty out of it.

At dusk I strolled through the newly cut alfalfa. Only a few steps and I noticed some squirming in a groove of denuded soil. Four hairless, gooey creatures blindly rolled in search of cover and mother. Roughly two inches long, these babies were the color of raw salmon. Opossum, raccoon, mouse, I couldn't tell. I could not bear to touch their vulnerable half-formed skin, nor could they bear handling.
Should I stomp them out of their misery or let nature take its course?
In cowardly despair I left them, doomed as they were to death by exposure.

I later learned that naturalists request farmers hold off on the first cutting until the ground-laying birds have abandoned their nests. Even
so, plenty of other creatures take time to wean, and the farmers have no choice but to occasionally plow over fawns, turkeys and other smaller unfortunates whose desperate parents can only flee the path of the steel grim reaper. The farmers say they can't see the hidden animals, only feel the “thump,” and I suppose this is both the good and bad news. Farmers do not have the resources or the time to be in the rescue business, though they do it when they can.

How would I adapt to my new role of farmer? Certainly I wouldn't be milking cows in the wee hours like Mr. Duprey or dragging a plow across the fields, but I would be more than a casual weekend onlooker. Could I grow a thick skin, look death in the face every day, treat animals as commodities and not as kin? What category is horse? From what new angle of vision would I reconnect to the land as food rather than ornamental backyard? Would I sink in deeper, tilting the urban/rural balance even more in favor of the country? Could I continue to regularly flip the rural/urban switch, a debate I already had each Sunday night when I'd rather be curled up with a book in Salisbury as the sun dips down, rather than crowded for two-plus hours in a child- and animal-filled Suburban hurtling our way down the perilous Saw Mill Parkway back toward the concrete jungle? Back to school and homework; the bleating Blackberry of Wall Street work; the elbow-jostling crowds racing along the sidewalks to beat the traffic lights; the pedestrian and driver rage; the economic competition and social one-upsmanship; the stressed-out people on foot, in subways, buses and cars; the exhaust fumes; the noise,
noise
, noise, NOISE; the effort required to squeeze in a museum, a play or a dinner at a nice restaurant on occasion in order not to waste living amidst such a brilliant offering of culture and cuisine; the time tension that makes Scott and I unnecessarily cross with one another.

The country supposedly offers respite, the weekday world at bay. Riding up Fridays unfailingly relaxes and excites, the start of our time in the place we prefer, rather than its end. Once we hit the Red Rooster in Brewster for non-processed chicken tenders, perfectly unhealthy fries
and ice-cream heavy milkshakes that require strenuous sucking, we breathe easier into the second half of the journey. We greedily track the interim five days' worth of change that occurred in our absence. In the spring we race the darkness to see the latest blooms, especially that one profuse daffodil field along the roadside hill in Amenia. “Isn't it beautiful?” we sigh every time. We watch for the annual migration of frogs and salamanders that first rainy, forty-five-degree Fahrenheit night in April, arguing about Scott's speed—“You hit one,” “No, I didn't, that was a leaf ”—and roll down our windows to get the full effect of the peepers' cacophonous mating chirps in the wetlands at the foot of our road. “Do they make you feel like a horny old toad, dear?” I'd tease, and he'd “peep” back at me with a guttural mating croak of his own.

The autumn is not outdone by spring's prizes. We keep tabs on our favorite flashy trees, comparing their color to years past and debate what makes a vibrant foliage year, the experts' theories different every year and no closer to reliability—dry year or wet, cold snap or a slow cool? The blustery wind that whooshes us, still dressed in our city duds, through our front door into sheltered warmth, the welcoming waft of the extinguished fireplaces reminding us their useful time is near. In the winter we watch the temperature gage drop as we head north, a degree variance of twenty or more that our family bets on at various landmarks—“I say eighteen at the top of Smith Hill” Elliot guesses, but Jane goes for seventeen and wins. I especially like the black, dark nights when it is impossible to see without high beams that search mile after mile for a quick-darting opossum or swooping owl. Or, those deep hours of low, fat moons that wake me and through the skylights cast my large shadow as I tiptoe, shivering out from under the down comforter and across the cold tile floor where I gratefully reach the rug only to face the freezing toilet seat. Returning to my bright-as-day bedroom, I find Scott also awake and ready to snuggle me into his heat. “How do your feet get so cold so fast?” he asks.

But the ride back on Sunday is a push against the tide of the dream into the wakefulness of work, school, city stresses.

“Do you think we could live in Salisbury full-time and be happy?” I sullenly asked Scott as we flowed from route 22's two lanes onto 684's six.

“I think so, but timing is everything. We're too young, and we still like New York. At least
I
still do.” He arched his eyebrows at me. “Most people who make the switch have tired of the city, or at least its expense.”