One More Spring

March 20, 2001

ONE MORE SPRING

One Tuesday morning a few weeks ago I set off to go to a retirement place promotion brunch and tour. It was a lovely day for a ride. The place was an hour away on familiar back roads. I went purely out of curiosity, positive that I was far from wanting or needing to move, and certainly not in with a bunch of old people. The place was elegant, the brunch was excellent, the staff member at my table was relaxed and friendly. She was the Move In Lady, who comes to your home with a tape measure and figures out which furniture you can fit into your new apartment, and settles it into place when you move.

We moved from brunch, passing the pool, to the meeting room where we would go to movies if we moved there. I listened to the sales department speakers with proper cool detachment, until one said, "Make the decision now while you can make it yourself, instead of waiting until someone has to make it for you."

We toured apartments from very small to immense, and went off with our packets of information. By the time I reached home I was facing reality. Last summer I had to give up mowing the grass. I gave up gardening because the woodchucks ate everything I planted, after the last dog died. There were about ten trees broken from the last storm, which I couldn't cope with, as I would have years ago. If ( when) the next medical disaster struck I couldn't stay here. If (when) I couldn't drive I couldn't stay here. As I drove in the lane and saw the house again, even the stark bare trees looked beautiful, making pen and ink drawings against the clouds. I sat in the car, looking, and told myself I have to have one more spring. I have to see the thousand daffodils down the hill to the brook and up through the woods. I have to see the butterfly bush come into bloom again. It was new last year and I only saw it for one summer. In the two hours after that comment about making the decision, I had done it.

In what seemed like a few minutes, Realtors came, the auctioneer came, I started looking at each thing to see what I could leave behind. The plaster mold of a kindergarten left hand? The Chinese tea caddy with tea from 1941 still in it, that Doug bought for me when we were living on $26 a week, from the restaurant near the Philadelphia apartment? Seventy years of snap shots in all those big albums? Where do you start? To do something, I started sorting an album at a time, scanning the pictures I liked, and getting used to the feeling of discarding things. I hope this gets easier with practice.

Nostalgia led me to look up what I wrote about this beloved place when we moved here. The first born was 13, the man in the middle was 9, the youngest was 4. In the months before we moved, I had broken an elbow carrying boxes of cookie cutters to sell at an open market to get money for a Christmas bike, The first born had broken her tail bone, and the man in the middle had broken a vertebra and was just out of a body cast. We were leaving eight years of captivity in grandfather's house. We were ready for heaven and we found it. Here's part of the Friendly Cooks Club letter dated 'April 1955.

'Dear Cooks,

'Hi!…. This simply cannot be put on paper, but come on and I'll show you around. We'll have a cup of coffee on the front porch. Just across the lawn is the vegetable garden. I've done 20 rows 30' long. The fence along the far edge of the garden has roses, currants, grapes and rhubarb growing along it. I put in 6 new rhubarb roots when me moved and they're showing big rich green leaves already. There are 2 big maples right in front of the house. Down to the left you can se the brook in the meadow - one morning a pair of mallards swam there all the time I ate breakfast.

'Come on around the house - there's white lilacs here at the upper end., and around back are purple ones, so close to the kitchen window that they help decorate the kitchen. There's a little cement stoop to the back door and we can sit and look down at the main part of the brook. It forks up there and makes an island, then joins again and goes over quite a water-fall. B. has dammed it up above the falls to make a pool. Furthest up, there by the fence that keeps Mr. Brush's cows out are the 23 ducks that Willy sent down from the pet shop after Easter. Always in a flock, snowy white, always starved, A little down this way, but still across the brook, are B.'s four pet geese, seven weeks old, tremendous, and white as the ducks, but much braver and more self confident. They bully the ducks just a little, and they play more. Then way over there in the field are the brand new hens, just moved in yesterday. 12 Reds and Black Crosses, and today they laid 12 eggs, and every egg was passed around, and proudly counted over and over. This is all new to the children and exciting beyond belief.

'On this side of the brook is a picnic fireplace and a log bench. Our land goes up there along the cow fence, and about halfway up the hill, with a real view. Not breathtaking but just NICE. Shiny farms and barns and silos in the distance, and rolling fields all different shades of brown and red and green, with mountains in the distance. You're looking south through the valley along the Jersey side of the Delaware. When a storm comes along between the mountains on this side and the palisades on the Penna. Side, just a mile back from the river in most places, the thunder really rolls around, but this house has been here for a hundred years and it has stone between the studs and no wind gets inside.

'Back up the driveway the way you came in is a wagon shed. Around here they built their corn cribs on both sides of a wagon shed, and then ours has another lean-to built to one side. It has a second floor too, once used for pigeons, but we're not using that now. This is the central building of the place so we tend to use it for junk, storage, workshop, etc. Right now it has lots of all that, plus a temporary pen for J's Easter bunny and his wife, and a batch of 25 chicks that came to-day. They're odd breeds - I had a batch of them in Chalfont ten years ago and a cat or a rat ate them and it is a great satisfaction to start over again with adequate wire. On the driveway side of the agon shed are - the building is about the size of a 4 car garage- underneath it are three openings between pillars. We are building cages in there, since all they need is a floor and a front door. One space has 5 rabbits left over from Easter at the pet shop, fattening for the freezer, one is empty, and the thirs had three turkey poults - white ones- just out of the brooder in time for the fancy chicks.

'Here comes L's pet lamb, Pamper, a Dorset-Hampshire ewe, and the favorite of the whole family, except for the dog. Snoozy has been very patient about all the new animals, and shows her real devotion every time she sniffs another chicken or bunny and doesn't bother it. But oh how she looks at us some times. The people who sold me the hens asked me to take along their pet rooster so they wouldn't have to eat him. He is a fresh leghorn and he is the one critter that's just about too much for Snoozy. I used to think Mary'' lamb was just a story but no more. If L. is in the house the lamb is in the house crying, unless she gets into the house by mistake. She has the most charming, perky walk, and we love to see her come racing across the field when she spies L.

'Then further on out the drive is the barn, really two barns at right angles to each other. The wagon shed and the barns all have asbestos siding and slate roofs, and they don't sag anywhere except the doors. We have had quite a time learning to close doors and gates behind us. Mr. Brush's cows and one horse use the barn stalls in winter, in return for a little plowing etc. Mr. Brush is our neighbor in the lovely stone house you passed coming in the lane, the only farm on the lane really - before his place there is a row of new little houses. ………'Upstairs over the dairy barn is a fine, sound, clean loft room, being used for bike riding when it rains, and storage and use of toys like the dress up box that we like to keep but don't use often. The puppets are out there too. Over the stable barn is a hay mow full of straw so the kids can jump in it like they've always read about………"They sit up on the hill under their own apple tree hollering to the echo and playing their instruments….. 'The day L. started ( at the new school) she sat down to
be the pianist for her class's assembly program then in rehearsal…….

"Inside the house - well, it fits us like an old shoe, and is not much fancier. We just like it, that's all. …..And to have my own kitchen - no words for this. To have breakfast and lunch when we're hungry, to clean it up and find it clean when we come back to it - and to have such QUEER things for dinner. We can have casseroles and creamed left-overs and hash, and hot dogs in rolls, and sometimes oh horrors sandwiches for dinner, and we can go down by the brook and have a picnic any time…….."

I had forgotten the chicks and that lamb, but the feeling of having our own place comes back as strong as it was on Moving Day. Now I have to concentrate on the privilege of having had 45 years here, not the sorrow of leaving it, and the pleasure of acquiring and using each of the things that fill the house, and learn to move on to another moving day.