Horsekeeping

EL-ARABIA BORDERED OUR PROPERTY TO THE NORTHEAST, and we had been walking and biking past it for six years, since 1998, the year my husband Scott and I traded up our second home. Our rural village of Salisbury was founded in 1742 with the quintessential Congregational Church established on the green. About five thousand souls are spread over sixty square miles, a community remotely wedged into the northwestern corner of Connecticut where the Litchfield Hills graduate into the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts.

New Yorkers during the week, we have been spending blissful weekends and chunks of the summer here for sixteen years. Our friends introduced us through a house they rented on Lake Waramaug a little further south. We visited Bob and Laurie four times, saw our city-circumscribed shih-tzu joyously leap and roll through a tender, greener-than-green spring hayfield, and fell hard for New England—the soft mountains, the distinct seasons, the Puritan remnants, the privacy. Though still renters in the city, when we saved enough money we decided to spend it on such a retreat. During our reconnaissance trip, we drove down curvy Route 41 from Sheffield, Massachusetts, into Salisbury, almost killing ourselves gawking at the undulating spread of forested hills and lake dotted pastures fully in May’s fertile burst. We agreed that the beach, a more conventional choice among NYC thirty-somethings, couldn’t hold a candle to it: this was the most beautiful place we had ever seen.

Our first house purchase, made when we were childless, did not later suit our then-toddler son so we moved from our (now we can admit it) three-story, box-ugly, out-of-place A-frame contemporary into a “real” New England country house, a two-hundred-year-old colonial. Previously nestled up a long dirt road along with five neighbors against a reforested mountain, we would now dwell in the pastoral, flat, long-inhabited, pasture patch-worked, misty river valley. This house holds family histories we can only surmise, long predating paved roads, strip malls and gas stations. It is a needy house, still standing but requiring lavish attention.

Unenlightened urbanites think they want a quaint antique house until they crack their noggins against the low ceiling beams, locate that “country” kitchen unsocially hidden away at the wrong end of the house, and, most irreconcilably, see that the house sits smack up against the edge of the road. Convenient in the snowplow-less days of horse and buggy, roadside agility is not a modern-day asset given that country roads are no longer the sleepy, meandering lanes we romanticize. Country folk speed just like time-pressured urbanites, flying over hill and across dale with chainsaws, leaf-blowers and tools of every variety banging around the beds of their pick-ups. Lacking bypassing highways, the two-lane country roads also support a steady nighttime parade of tractor trailers and, combined with the absence of sidewalks; this means you risk your life by venturing a stroll. Be ready to pitch yourself into the rough at each rumble of an oncoming vehicle.

Though our house was extensively renovated and enlarged by former owners, an old house is an old house: quirky and expensive problems continually manifest themselves no matter how much money we prophylactically sacrifice to plumbers, painters, tree experts, caretakers, handymen, gardeners, pest controllers, roofers, and various other “experts.” Pipes seize up in winter in spite of the thousands of gallons of fuel oil that the forty-year-old furnace sucks down. Ice dams along the roof gutters and slowly melts, working a puddle through the ceiling of the living room requiring re-plastering and a new roof. The workhorse gutters marginally prevent the cascading H₂O from turning the foundation into a soupy muck and flooding the basement into a moist mold that rots the gapped pine floorboards of the uninsulated library. It is the kind of damp we are over-blessed with in merry old New England for three-quarters of the year, and we have to power wash off the external clapboards every few years before each paint job.

Since our house is so aged, with hand-laid stone walls and a dirt floor as the foundation, water in the basement shouldn’t be a problem—except for sinkage: ship-like, a soggy footprint can list a house this way or that, mis-aligning the timber structure, cracking walls, bending floors and otherwise wreaking havoc from roof to attic. Not to mention the dead people I’ve heard were sometimes buried in basements back in the day, residents of our distinguished homestead I would not care to upset. A wished for ghost in theory beats one in practice. Despite the heroic gutters, some water and much else still manages to intrude because an old house is porous, perforated like lace. This has its advantages, I persuade myself, in terms of healthier indoor air. When the price of fuel oil soared in the seventies, people built shelters so tight that they poisoned themselves with the gasses emitted by mundane items like carpet, upholstery, Windex and hairspray, not to mention natural toxins like radon.

But impenetrability is not our problem. Water, mud, cold air in winter, hot air in summer, mice, shrews, bats, chipmunks, snakes, squirrels, frogs, mega-spiders and insects of every variety—creeping and airborne, a large noisy toad or two, and only Noah knows what else, regularly invade our space through attic, uninsulated walls, one-hundred-year old windows in two-hundred-year-old casements and of course, the crocheted stone walls of the basement. My supposedly sturdy, two-hundred-year-old, time-tested dwelling all of a sudden seems a rickety house of cards with a life of its own as regards weather and creatures. I don’t begrudge the animal kingdom its bit of shelter, and mainly I let it be. I try to accept the bats as my friends: one tiny Chiropteran can devour six hundred bugs an evening while flying above my yard, so even when they graze the split ends on the top of my head when diving single file out of the eaves like machine gun pellets shot from a WWII Spitfire, I simply duck. I know better than to get my hopes up for a bug-free picnic the next day, but I imagine five mosquito bites instead of ten on each leg of my two children.

Other visitors get to me when I am cold and huddled in my high-off-the-floor creepy-crawler fortified bed (I’m in denial that anything would dare crawl up the four bedposts, despite their carved footholds). Outside, the coyotes howl it up while tearing the flesh from the bones of the neighbor’s sheep, chasing away sweet dreams. The nocturnal flying squirrels perform their housekeeping at 2:00 a.m. in the attic recesses overhead. At 3:00 a.m. I lie awake imagining the elaborate condo complex they construct. As I wait for their rustling to quiet and envy my husband’s soft snoring, my blood pressures as I plot vigilante tactics that rival Bill Murray’s against the gopher. Furry, cute and innocent my ass: not in the wee hours they’re not. I see red-rat eyes and sharp, salivating teeth. Poison? Metal traps? Death cages? Rifle? I picture myself grease-painted, my hips hoisting a sagging belt studded with Raid cans: bring it on fur ball—I’ve got camo and ammo.

But to complain is churlish. This old house is lovely with wainscoted and plastered walls and wide-board floors cut from pine trees that were already ancient when our house was long ago hand-hewn with axes, square nails and muscle. Burnished for years by mops and socks, these floors appear marbleized in places. Built for a Mr. Averill around 1801, the house boasts two-stories and higher ceilings than most and was periodically added onto and tastefully modernized since. At one low point, perhaps a century ago, it served as the police barracks. We know one of the “boys,” now my age, whose parents lived in our house for forty-five years, until the early nineties. Each time I run into John in the village coffee shop or pharmacy I am treated to another anecdote of his siblings’ high jinx. I learned how the kids tiptoed around the squeaky floorboard outside his parent’s bedroom door on their midnight escapades. Now I smile when I slip in to give my sleeping son yet another good-night kiss, making these boards speak.

I heard about the barn the boys burned down, explaining the mysterious bits of concrete foundation I pondered at the base of the huge willow. We respect the tomb of the family Newfoundland interred beneath the stand of tall hemlocks outside the pine-paneled library bay window, and have a visual of the old dormitory-style layout of the children’s bedrooms, now a spacious master bedroom suite. The pantry bell panel still carries the Borden family designations—“John’s room,” “parlor,” “library” etc.—evidently still in use through the fifties. Some still function, not that anyone remains to do the servanting. My husband tried ringing for breakfast once, but remained hungry, feeding only upon my “yeah, right.” Several years ago John and his family returned to scatter his mother’s ashes on the property of the house she treasured.

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.

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.

I sighed: it was true. I didn’t want to stale our Salisbury life, its fresh snap perpetually newly born of its part-time status. Yet we “play” to a fault squeezing a full life into each forty-eight hours so that we go south exhausted and often grumpy. Our Connecticut weekend life slowly became even fuller than our NYC one, disabling it as a retreat to regroup like most weekenders. Friday nights we hustle our clan and belongings into the car, charge the traffic, stop for kid food, arrive, unload, tuck the kids in bed and hurry to our dinner-date at The White Hart before the kitchen closes at nine-thirty. Then an hour or so unpacking the two LL Bean bags of stuff we can’t seem to avoid even after eighteen years of buying two of absolutely everything, going through the mail, listening to the phone messages and reading the local papers. We are usually up around 6:00 a.m. Saturday, out by 7:00 for an early walk before breakfast, and rush around to farm visits, tennis and basketball time with the kids and bike rides with and without them, the kids’ singing lessons, church, time on the swing, backyard baseball, swimming at the town lake, boating on the other lake, our Saturday night date of a movie and dinner, planting the veggie garden, skiing trips to Butternut a half hour north, hikes with friends, cocktail parties and charity events, weeding the veggie garden, and, and, and!

It’s a crazy pace we know we shouldn’t sustain, and the constant busyness frazzles our marital relationship on occasion—days of the silent treatment, a frosty co-existence requiring energy we don’t have to thaw. We pledge to slow down but balk at giving anything up. And summers pose another challenge. With Scott working in the city weekdays and the rest of us living it up in Salisbury, the weekends are fraught with him refitting into our new routine; we’re still busy, I’m tired of dealing with the kids single-handedly, and he is understandably resentful that it’s not always a forty-eight hour Kodak moment. Lacking day-to-day face time, we spend ten weeks vaguely out of sync with one another. This new farm could only add to our time pressure: one more thing to create, fit in, take care of and, supposedly, enjoy. Scott handles the shifts better than me and is more refreshed by the weekends than drained. But when I am really shattered on Sunday nights, my solution is “Don’t you think it’s time to move?”

Would I still bother with make-up, I wondered? A slave to eyelash curlers and mascara since the age of fifteen, my country weekend routine had pushed morning showers and full facial attention to the evening, if then. Maybe one cold winter day just slides into the rest, the house too drafty to bare skin, nothing to dress up for. Truly practical clothes are not fashionable, and in the lashing cold everyone looks grey and parched, their skin tissue-paper crinkled. Under flannel, puffy coats and hair-crushing hats, who’d notice any effort?

THOUGH I STILL TALKED of trading the city for the country, I remained wary based on my study of English and American literature undertaken while Scott and I lived in London from 1990–1995. Writers have been accused of killing the notion of the American Pastoral since literature began; weekenders can be accused of the same land grab in trying to have it all. I thought back to my work on Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Edith Wharton who cast aside Boston and New York City for rural life in the Berkshires, just a stone’s throw from Salisbury. They showed me the lay of the land: the dream and the reality of both exterior and interior landscapes. They conditioned my expectations of all things rural.

I identified with each of these writers in different ways, and taken all together they gave me depth of field. Hawthorne, a parent like myself, showed me country wonders through children’s eyes in his diary of a few summer weeks alone with his son Julian in Stockbridge. In Pittsfield, Melville, a “gentleman” farmer like me, pointed out the beautiful industry of stone walls, the pleasures of a crackling country hearth, and the serenity of a cow simply moving her jaws around a cut-up pumpkin. Wharton, a domestically inclined person like me, unapologetically celebrated the deep satisfaction of staking a home in Lenox: planting a garden, setting up house, taking friends, dogs and horses for upland adventures. Our shared experience of locality highlighted the woods, the hills, the pastures, the stone walls, the industry, the artistry, and the echoes of old in rural New England life that I had newly encountered there.

Their past still informs my present. I associate the history of place and people with myself and the land now under my feet. These artists depicted themselves puzzling over their landscape and culture. Reading their Berkshire-based fiction and biographies I delved through past layers of my environment, and added my own pictures, words, memories. In Hawthorne, Melville and Wharton’s metaphors, scenes and stories, I recognized what I saw around me and intuited what was gone, a more informed engagement than I could have managed through my own surface vision.

Though all three authors at times gushed over the beauty of the place in their letters and fiction, they ultimately zeroed in on the darker side of country life. Hawthorne’s Faustian character Ethan Brand turned fiendish when he looked too directly into the fiery lime kilns, the author’s pointed warning against the annihilation of the heart by an over-intellectualized head, all in the midst of a “pastoral” environment. He questioned mechanization and progress—the new factories producing iron, paper and textiles popping up alongside rushing rivers and remote hillsides that would denude the entire region of ninety percent of its trees. Do we sin against nature? Can nature protect us from ourselves? Are we, like Brand, driven by forces beyond our control? Is evil a choice?

Melville also worked these themes into his short story “Tartarus of Maids,” “inspired,” or at least enhanced by his visit by horse-drawn sleigh to a Berkshire paper factory to purchase writing stock. Blank faced factory girls produce blank paper, and the monotony of assembly line mechanization is roundly criticized. This all suited my curmudgeonly fear of suburbanization and sprawl, dismal by-products of our nation’s industrial past and current wealth. Fortunately for western Massachusetts and northwestern Connecticut, the smoky industrialization of the nineteenth century blew out before it irreparably ruined the land, but poverty and depopulation followed in its wake and contemporary menaces newly threaten. McMansions pave over farmland, metal barns replace old wooden beauties, chain stores and strip malls render Main Streets obsolete, and I often despair.

Melville and Hawthorne understood that the country life was not a hideout from the “real” world. Both Hawthorne’s Ethan Brand and Melville’s Pierre characters were country boys afforded little protection by their rural upbringing. Life and choices drove them from their childhood pastoral into suicide. And neither author remained in his New England country idyll—they both returned to “civilization,” Hawthorne back to Concord within twenty months, and Melville back to the docks of New York City after thirteen years.

Wharton high-tailed the country life too, though it long continued to define her alter ego. Despite her society upbringing and the intellectual company she preferred, she doggedly protested she was happiest in the country and should have remained the country hermit. Yet, skittish of country isolation after ten half-years in Lenox, she moved to France, never returning to the place she prized. In her autobiography, A Backward Glance, she wrote: “The Mount was my first real home, and though it is nearly twenty years since I last saw it (for I was too happy there to ever want to revisit it as a stranger) its blessed influence still lives in me.” Should I believe her words or her actions? Despite her personal country experience, her fiction portrayed silently suffering characters trapped in hidden rural poverty. Though heavily criticized by her Berkshire neighbors, her novella Ethan Frome remains one of her masterpieces. Its less well-known sister story Summer is similarly bleak.

I wonder whether these authors’ fictional creations persuaded them to leave. Full-time country status ultimately didn’t work for these rural sojourners, and I do not want to go similarly sour on Salisbury. Maybe truth lies in the old adage “too much of a good thing.” The slide into country life can defeat as well as inspire, though for most of us the experience encompasses a middle ground between awe and terror. I have felt the petrifying aloneness of a late autumn sun dropping below the edge of a vast and impersonal forested hillside; a few minutes of such existential angst can last a lifetime, rich or poor, writer or plumber. And, any romantic version of nature was quickly dashed once I got lost in the woods; its seemingly benevolent face turned a sinister cheek. I both yearn for my country idyll and fear its isolation. Maybe it is best I stick with what I’ve got and continue to fantasize about an alternate life.