A Story Behind It All

 We are so fortunate to have two homes -- our old farmette in rural northeast Connecticut, and the cottage in Island Park. Maybe especially with the pandemic, having another place to go that's safe has been a soothing balm in a world out of control.

Of course, every so often we do think, well, maybe we should sell one of the houses. But that decision has been elusive, thus far, because we are too fickle. Sell the Connecticut house, that is a lot more work, with its couple acres and outbuildings and an old house that always needs something...but has so many memories and is meaningful because we saved it from the wrecking ball? Or, part ways with the seaside cottage, much less work, great neighbors, but rising tides and rising flood insurance?

The real story behind what to do is rooted more in the things I have, given to me by my parents, or inherited from relatives and friends, or favorite antiques found at flea markets or on the side of the road. Yes, they are just things but they are things that I enjoy and appreciate. Fact is I wouldn't be able to fit it all in one house. Both houses are small, 1180 sq. ft. and 860 sq. ft.

I think perhaps I will write about some of my favorite things and the stories behind them. Now to narrow that down....

COVID Life

We're now two years into the pandemic. The soul-numbing periods of isolation, fear for the vulnerable, grief for the young and mourning the dead has taken its undeniable toll. 

Yet we wait for the sunrise. We celebrate the mundane: decorating the mantles for Christmas, trimming the herbs that maybe this year will survive winter indoors, organizing a drawer full of old cards and photos. 

The television and social media bring more frightening news; music becomes a better option, as do Facebook sites like "Growing Up in the 50's and 60's". It's impossible to not look back wistfully, even if we were never inclined to do so before.

In the meantime, this day starts with the temperature barely above zero. The furnace is running continually and the woodstove is already heating the perpetually frigid north end of the house. Birds are busily visiting the suet feeder outside the kitchen window, a few brave chickadees and a downy woodpecker.

As my French Canadian grandmother always said, if you have enough to get by, food and a roof over your head, life is good. 

Silver Lake

My Mom is French Canadian and Dad is mostly Irish. Our dinner usually consisted of beef, pork or chicken and canned vegetables and POTATOES. Spices? No. Salt only and plenty of it. Fast forward to 1973 when I move into the dorm at Rhode Island College in Providence. Only about twenty miles away from my hometown of Somerset, MA but culturally, a world away. And the most immediate culture shock was the FOOD.

Eggplant? I had never even heard of it.

A few years later, I moved into a third floor apartment on Dorchester Avenue in Silver Lake. I might have been the only non-Italian on the street. Every Sunday, I'd wake up to the wonderful aroma of  my downstairs neighbor simmering gravy -- and by gravy, of course I mean tomato sauce, Italian style, with some veal and beef and a lot of garlic, maybe canned San Marzano tomatoes from the garden. If I was lucky, I'd get a handout of leftover eggplant, meatballs and gravy or beef braciole. I learned to cook a bit so I could duplicate my neighbor's meals. I learned that you only buy Land of Lakes American cheese sliced as thin as paper, at the local meat store. Pasta must be al dente. How would I know? Everything I ate at home was cooked until it nearly dissolved.

This was a time when the produce man and fish man would still come around every week. You would hear them shouting out as they came down the street, usually on a fairly predictable schedule, with their push cart or battered truck and the housewives would go out and purchase the wares. Old school.

Of course I ate out too. My favorite restaurant was The Original Marcello's on Cranston Street, in Cranston near the Providence line. The interior was '70's Italian decor -- red, white and black and cave-like. There was also another sister restaurant in Knightsville, right up the street, that was more of a diner. The restaurant served up the absolute best stuffed peppers ever made. To this day, I still am trying to duplicate them; the restaurant is long gone, as I recall, it burned down. I had better luck finally recreating the pasta fagiole that the Marcello's diner offered. After about twenty years of failed attempts, the Providence Journal posted a pasta fagiole recipe and the minute I read it, I was pretty sure that was the right one and it was.

Tonight I am (again) trying to recreate  Marcello's stuffed peppers. We'll see. Maybe this is it.

Building Community One Minute at a Time

We arrived at a local restaurant around 5 p.m., for an earlier than usual dinner on what promised to be another rain-drenched night. At this cozy and popular place, there is usually a hefty wait, but because of the early hour, we got a table immediately. Most of the tables were occupied already.

Some nights -- and I know you understand -- you want to hunker down at your table, no matter how close you are to your fellow diners...and pretend you're completely alone. After a long day at work, you might feel just done with people, and talking, being a little bit someone else you're not.

Tonight started feeling like one of those nights. But I noticed the older couple next to us -- a tall gentleman with a Vietnam War Veteran baseball cap, his wife clearly an aging hippie with fabulous crazy dyed red hair. They were finishing up paying, heading out and I told them they were smart to be heading home before the bad weather. We chatted for a few minutes about the weather, that it was getting dark so early, the slippery leaves. We were all smiling and enjoying the pleasant exchange, a model of civility.

Now come dessert and cappuccino time and the young couple to our other side is having an interesting conversation about white or red wine, red can give her a headache, their parents like dry red wines, what wine is like that on the wine list? Well. You know of course I had to oh-so-politely interject my recommendation (Storypoint Cabernet Sauvignon)....which lead to another incredibly light and delicious, erudite conversation about wine, sulfites, white vs. red, dry vs. fruity. Just a few wonderful minutes.

Connecting with the older and the younger. Politics, religion, any other subject prone to controversy never a consideration. If we can build a respectful, open community, a few minutes at a time, can we do it more of the time...all of the time?

Thank you, all of you brave veterans, for defending our freedom to express ourselves. Now let's express ourselves in a way that is equally honorable.

The Scourge of Yard Work

Haven't we all so looked forward to Spring! A few weekends ago, I realized that the pile of old bricks and leaves in the corner of the bulkhead and back addition of the Foster house needed to be moved...or the painters wouldn't even be able to access the lower clapboards and foundation.

It was a beautiful day, warm in the sun, cool in the shade, a gentle breeze. It felt good to be performing some manual labor, moving bricks in a wheelbarrow and pulling vines and raking leaves. I worked diligently until this mindless project was done, and felt pretty good about it. That night I was a little achy, but in that good kind of way.

By noon the next day, my feeling of accomplishment became a feeling of burning and itching as angry welts covered my forearms. The vines I thought were bittersweet? Not so much. Clearly, they were poison ivy vines.....or something of that genus. No telltale leaves, the vines were sort of orange colored and weren't going to let me escape unscathed.

A week or a little better of cortisone cream and nightly Benadryl got me through it but, wow, it was miserable! I remember as a kid being exposed to poison ivy and nary a bubble. What happened?

So gardeners and weekend warriors tackling yard work, beware. A Tyvek suit might come in handy.

House Restoration Roller Coaster

I would have written sooner; I have had whiplash from the careening roller coaster that is named "Old House Restoration Project".

We got the well in, hit water at 240 feet but had to rather inconveniently relocate it near the front walkway. Yes, there is a camouflage plan.

The work on the house has been a fascinating look at circa 1770 house construction. The post and beam skeleton is as strong and supple as ever. The sills needed only some relatively modest cleaning up; they are still solid. It's been heartening that a number of old house experts have looked at the basement and marveled at the perfectly straight dry stone foundation, dry timbers and enormous chimney base. That being said, though, wavy floors abound, as in any old house, and we attempted some leveling as much as practical without dismantling the entire structure. Probably the most impressive feat was bringing the rear wall of the house back about 8" to where it should be. If you know anything about old post and beam houses, you know that between the posts, there is often vertical planking, not used for structural support but as an anchor for exterior clapboards and interior lathe and plaster. Well, the vertical planking wasn't attached to the plate anymore and the wall had just sort of waved outward. Not really a serious structural issue but now it is as straight as it can be; the interior wall was studded the new-fashioned way and the exterior wall was brought in flush with that.

This house has always been lived in, and the inhabitants over the years made improvements, some of them unfortunate. The second floor is close to original, with two feet wide chestnut planks, and an original cove ceiling in the largest room. The first floor was once divided into a duplex; original fireplaces were traded for parlor stoves, and the original buttery gave way to a bigger kitchen in what was probably once a bedroom. Some old pumpkin pine floors remain but others are more newly installed wide pine boards, and there are some narrow oak board floors, too. Simply put, there wasn't anything much very original to the house. And therein the dilemma was what to do: try to return the interior to the long ago past, or embrace a more contemporary style -- the latter very foreign to me. Yet, that is what we have done and I have to give our contractor and his design consultant (the Mrs.) kudos. I never thought this old house would be clean, streamlined, and as a friend of mine said "contemporary with a vintage feel".

We took a wall down between the kitchen and old sun room and that created an open space from the hearth room through the kitchen and all the way to the new windows overlooking the back hill and fields right down to the Ponaganset River. New windows (yes, I acquiesced) were next, then a lot of carpentry work, sheet-rocking, plastering, new plumbing, electrical updates.....we are finally almost on home stretch. Most of the interior is painted. The exterior was power washed for paint -- new color scheme! -- but that was during the warm spell a few weeks ago and you all know what is on the ground now! It is not painting weather, alas.

Finally last week I breathed a big sigh of relief because it finally hit me: this old house is saved. It has a new lease on life and here's to hoping for a devoted and deserving new caretaker.

Old House Chronicles: Well, well, witching well......1/13/16 #2

Tomorrow we close on the Foster house. Today was a flurry of activity and last minute details before the rehab work starts. And a banner day, because we got an almost definite A-OK in the new well placement.

I figured the new well could be dropped right where the dug well is....a good vein of water that only dried up in August. The dug well is about 16 feet deep; when it's dry, you can see the dirt at the bottom. Another 100 feet or so in the same location would be perfect.....right?

Not so much. This house is in a little linear village, originally settled in 1720. Over the years, and a lifetime before there were any water or septic regulations, the village inhabitants graduated from outhouse to cesspools. Some modernized further with septic systems. Most private wells were eventually drilled deep but some houses, like ours, have dug wells. Old school country stuff. Unfortunately, though, modern regulations call for those things to be a certain amount of feet apart and therein is the issue. Old well is too close a placement to the neighbor's septic. So the new well has to be moved to the northeastern side of the house. It's going to be a real challenge for the well drilling truck to fit where it needs to go. Power feed needs to be disconnected and I have to get a tree guy out ASAP to trim some branches.

My neighbor there, an 85 year old walking fund of all matters country, called me a few nights ago.
"You know, you've got to witch that.....you might not hit water." She reminded me that all the neighbors to the north had troubles finding water, but she had hers witched and it serviced two houses, never an issue at less than 75 feet. She had the same person witch the well at the restaurant she once owned, and same thing, hit water right off. It's funny how one spot can yield access to a great vein of some underground stream, but 20 feet away is just ledge.

In case you town and city folks don't know about witching a well, it is using a person, known as a douser, who has the skill, the special magic, to use a live twig or branch to locate water sources. Here is a link to a great article that appeared in Mother Earth News a few years back: http://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/witching-for-water-zmaz70ndzgoe.aspx

I haven't found a douser yet and I'll ask my well guy what he thinks. I'll bet he knows someone who does it and probably believes in it, too. I'll keep you posted. Fingers crossed. I figure my odds of hitting water are a lot better than hitting tonight's Powerball drawing.