Horsekeeping

For Scott, I knew this peculiar destiny related to the land—but how? Occasionally I nosed around Scott’s past to uncover the seedling of his affinity for rural New England, but came up fallow. Nature poetry is not his cup of tea: he’s more of a history and politics buff than a romanticist or a fictionalist. While I escape into Emerson and Thoreau and the Berkshire writers, he thrives in the competitive maze of Wall Street wrestling other capitalists. He is a poster boy for the great American story. Having immersed his youthful self in countless biographies of accomplished men from sports stars to steel magnates, from the age of twelve he planned to head east for school and a career in business. He worked hard at university, endured unglamorous summer jobs, and made two risky but ultimately brilliant career decisions: first, to leave corporate law for investment banking way back in the mid-eighties before the field became so popular and, second, to leave a ten-year, secure position at a prosperous large bank for a start-up boutique.

Scott was the fourth partner to join; eight years later there were forty-plus in a global operation listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Luck played its part as it does in many a bootstraps story: in his case the right place and time of being a white, educated, ambitious male born in the United States. He made the most of his opportunities, success met him halfway, and, at least from my perhaps protected perspective, he made the hard slog look relatively easy. I marvel at his skill and efficiency, and the security he has provided for our family, especially since money and I seem to part company as congenital fact. Making and hanging on to money is a talent like any other; Scott possesses it, I do not.

Scott had a Midwest suburban childhood, an urban college experience, a Jersey girl wife, a Wall Street job, a Big Apple life: yet, as soon as we paid off our loans and could afford it, he and I took to the country like spring salamanders to vernal pools. I know as a kid my husband spent hours catching frogs (and shooting them with a BB gun, he admitted) in the wetlands near his house, but he never revealed much nostalgia for his younger years in Michigan. His father took him deer hunting once, but Scott sat in the woods and read The Grapes of Wrath—in its entirety. No kills. But that is all I uncovered from my husband’s veiled past: a foggy window to his nascent nature soul.

I hailed from the “Garden State,” not the bucolically equine western part of the state, but the strip-malled, smelly, oil-drenched northeast and southern shore. As a kid, I remember regularly burying my nose into my grandmother’s sweater on certain stretches of the New Jersey Turnpike and watching the stacks of the Budweiser factory pour smoke across the endless squat, laddered refinery tanks beyond. I recognized the landmarks in The Sopranos series’ opening credits and knew people who could slip into those story lines with ease. According to my husband, I am an “animal nut,” but my inclination is toward smallish, easily managed, clean, non-drooling, non-shedding, heavily-domesticated varieties. And Scott and I are not “handy,” as individuals or as a couple. We bicker while simply hanging pictures. Our “suburbanity” and urbanity had not afforded us any traction in the wise and practical rusticity of the country. Even our six-year-old daughter admonished: “Dada, you don’t look like the tractor type.”

In our young married life we never thought we would even stay in this country, let alone settle in stodgy New England. Restless Anglophiles with the youthful spirit of exploration, one year after we purchased our first house in Salisbury, we knocked the dirt of the US of A from our shoes and moved to London for five years, from 1990–1995. Scott accepted a posting there, and we left with few thoughts of returning. Arriving on August 1st, the hottest day recorded in British history to that date, I panicked at the realization that air-conditioning did not exist in either houses or cars. Not comfortable outside the parameters of a 68–75 Fahrenheit degree window, I was all for flying home, pronto. All too soon I understood: we strode coolly damp and dimly lit through the next five years of British weather.

We enjoyed much travel, taking full advantage of a childless existence (fourteen married years) and the short plane rides to the Continent, but we never really fit in with the British and remained outsiders despite our officially stamped passports designating us permanent residents. I missed skyscrapers and food delivery, NYC street life and even rude, impatient salespeople, the twenty-four hour never-close pace, blue skies and white puffy clouds on frigid winter days, the blare of sunshine, the wilting summers, American enthusiasm and naiveté, a fat slice of greasy-good pizza, and the relaxed atmosphere of friends eating out rather than dining in at formal dinner parties planned weeks in advance. I hear London now sports a more American casualness, but I regret this slide toward globalization. My pet peeves largely made England, England, like antiquated paternalistic BBC telly and gun-less Bobbies on bicycles with nightsticks. Many of them carry guns now, and it saddens me.

I think Scott could have been happy in London indefinitely, but I chafed at a rootless exile, despite my happy years of literary study there. We left five years to the day we arrived, significantly changed and with England a part of us still. We made some good friends, mostly expatriates with lives similarly colored. My first-born’s arrival six weeks before the move home meant we would not go back to American life as we knew it five years earlier: clever of us because return can be so disappointing. But that London cured our restlessness became the best souvenir of our sojourn; we found home. If I had not lived abroad, I would have gone to my grave yearning for greener pastures. I now believe in New York and Connecticut with solid confidence—not with defensive my-place-is-better-than-your-place bombast, but with steadfast, personal confidence of knowing my own heart’s desires. It is not for everyone, but I chose the teeming, exhausting, nerve-wracking, frustrating, glorious New York City, tempered by the Puritan rocky soil and artistic pastoral beauty of New England, and never looked back.

Over the years we have dug into our repatriated territory with a vengeance. Our English sabbatical conditioned us to appreciate the Connecticut countryside: the weekend jaunts to Wales and rural England, the green, green, green misty valleys, the sheep-dotted hillsides, the walking trails encouraging trespass across private property, the ancient stone walls and hedgerows, the rustic pub convenient to refresh the wet, weary foot soldier. For Scott, this might have been the sum total of what turned him into a country boy and thus steered us toward Weatogue Stables. But for me, England’s demure countryside was only a refresher course. When we returned to Connecticut, I embedded in the American forests because they invoked a past I had carefully vaulted. Sure, this Yankee terrain was breathtakingly beautiful. Yet underlying that, I fell in love with “the woods” because they reminded me of long ago people, places and times gone by. Repairing to our tree-insulated, rural home was to dip into my personal warehouse of memory and experience—an amplification of childhood beauty and wonder seared by the melancholy of loss and the hard-earned lessons of growing up.

I learned something that June day in 1968—bad things can happen to anyone, anytime, right out of the blue. I spent the next forty years waiting for the other shoe to drop, anticipating the next horrible thing about to happen; expecting the worst. The twisted goal, I suppose, was to cheat surprises and worry fate into submission. A “dyed in the wool pessimist” my husband insists, but I say I’m a fact-facer. I am also in a hurry: fully informed that life can be short, especially when beautiful, it is best to hit the ground running to get through all you can before your calamity finds you.

A therapist might say I have blocked good memories of my mother to blunt the loss. But I also learned how hard it is to be a parent, especially one with a short fuse, a trait I inherited from both sides. And, my mother was young herself—a parent at barely twenty and snuffed out by twenty-eight. When I reached that milestone age, it hit me, with the force of a punch, just how young it is both to be responsible as a parent and to die. From the perspective of nine, anything in the twenties seems geriatric, light years away. From the vantage point of forty-six, it is more shocking with each passing year. I have outlived my mother by nearly twenty years, and I still feel like a kid most of the time.

But I grasp the good memories when I reach, like her feeding me the chicken skin right from the soup pot as it boiled off the carcass. She would stand in her mini skirt, stockinged and heeled, with her “fall” hairpiece in a flip, towering over the stove, wooden spoon stirring. Craving fat, I also liked to eat butter, by itself, several sticks at a time if I could get it. In comparison the chicken skin seemed more legitimate as a stand-alone food, and I bounced, waiting as my mother stirred and caught the loosening skin. Bumpy, yellowy white and slimy, we called the pieces goose pimples. As she forked up each piece to cool, I’d turn up my head, just level to her hip and the blue/green flame under the pot, and open my mouth like a baby bird. She’d slip the wormlike nourishment in and go back into the pot, fishing for more.

M & M’s were another delicacy. Mom adored them. She would eat them in bed, and though I longed for some, that she didn’t always share made those brown flattened spheres all the more precious. I’d eyeball her holding them loosely in an airtight fist, snug and long enough to melt them on the inside. Then she’d eat each one slowly and deliberately, her tongue pressing the still hard candy shell against the backs of her teeth for the burst of warm, velvety chocolate: a delicate click, click: a sweet caviar. I didn’t begrudge her selfishness: rather, I took the message that parents sometimes take to counteract all the giving, and that you are responsible for your own happiness.

Christmas rituals were important, and we followed the many she created to the letter. The real evergreen wore silver icicles—never garland. Spacing the decorations precisely, she draped the tinsel close inside by the trunk before my dad and I were permitted to dress the easier branch tips. More than two or three strands at a time threatened an unforgivable clump and a redo. My allotment always tangled, no matter how carefully she laid it, even and glittering, across my eager palm. With a steamy grip that wrinkled the strands, I endeavored to get it right. I marveled at her poise then, and even now, when I trim our family tree, I tame my inclination to rush.

A romantic, she also kept a special dress for me, used only Christmas morning: long and flowery from the waist down with a green velvet bodice and Victorian buttons that trailed down the back with short, puffy elasticized sleeves that matched the skirt. My femininity, still reverberating around my aging dermis, was born from this magical gown. I knew not to attack the presents until properly attired. I wore that dress through three or four Christmases, but at eight, the buttons refused to meet and the elastic cut into my strengthening upper arms. I willed myself smaller, desperately trying to shrink my burgeoning self. I feared I might outgrow my mother’s affection.

Photos help me remember. My glamorous mother stretched nearly six feet tall and rail thin. Her hair ran the gamut—I saw her as a blonde, dirty blonde, redhead and brunette styled from a long straight flip to a short wavy bob. Mostly I remember soft auburn curls, layered to her chin. She spent long minutes inclined towards the bathroom mirror, myopically close enough to expertly apply eyeliner, mascara, foundation and rouge before popping her contacts in. I would squeeze myself between the sink and the wall, resting my chin on the cool mauve-pink porcelain, all eyes. Her creamy even teeth balanced a straight, strong Italian nose. My grandmother “Nana” passed on her excellent bone structure: Mom’s face angled beautifully atop her statuesque frame. Athletic, she moved smoothly. My father maintains she played competitive basketball two weeks before giving birth to me, her only child.

Eventually topping out at five feet five, I slumped short and dumpy next to her and Nana. Mom tried to help me out through smocked dresses, elaborate buns twirling up my hair, and a flowery pin, but I persisted a pigeon-toed wreck and never did develop a sense of style. I slept in a metal brace supporting two old shoes with the toes cut out in a doctor’s attempt to duck-foot me: a hideous contraption that tortured my body and mind. My beauty rehabilitation felt so hopeless that I fought it all, and my misery registered a sourpuss in every photo documenting the gussied up me. Shrinking in inadequacy in the shadow of these two swans, I clashed with Mom about clothes, about chores, about Dad, about everything.

My mother taught English to gifted junior high students, having gone back to complete her degree after my birth. I distinctly remember, at age four or five, attending her graduation from Kean College in New Jersey. Family and friends were extraordinarily proud since my dad truncated his college career. But her education gave her, what were then controversial, ideals. A passionate advocate of the Civil Rights movement, she regularly debated my father about black Americans’ rights to get ahead in society, too often for household peace.

My parents spent most of their marriage in a house in Linden, New Jersey, that belonged to my father’s mother Mary. About the time I was eight, my grandmother, prompted by her insecurity about money and her dying husband, wanted to move back in, essentially evicting us from a home that she had originally agreed to give to my father and aunt. My father begged her to reconsider because my mother was also gravely ill, having recently suffered a partial cerebral hemorrhage. Inoperable at the time, the doctors gave her six months to live, a diagnosis she was never told. But my grandmother stuck to her plan, and my father never fully forgave her. Making the most of a bad situation, my strong, six-feet four, soft-hearted Dad told my ailing mother to find a house she liked.

She fell for one on Parkway Drive in the nearby town of Clark. More upscale than Linden and with better schools for me, Clark’s proximity to her school kept teaching an option once she, theoretically, recovered. Dad recognized the house as a nothing-but-work wreck, but my mother’s enthusiasm for its rural aspirations on a winding road bordering a “forest” (a patch of woods and a stream) inspired him. He wanted my mother’s last months to be joyful. We think they were. Later, he and I found some peace in her having kept a house of her own before she died.

So my father bartered his treasured boat for barn-red aluminum siding, and the house perked up. My ailing mother delicately hung wallpaper, organized cabinets and replanted the large yard that stretched out a new canvas for floral visions. A wooden privacy fence added to our feeling of insular, country living by blocking out the reality of suburban sprawl that engulfed eastern and central New Jersey. My father helped my mother shower and dress so she would not have to bend over and flow blood into her “healing” brain. He fretted and made excuses when she insisted on driving me someplace. I was told to help my mother recover by being good.

I was to have my own little oasis in our new house, too: the entire top floor as my bedroom. A roomy finished attic imitated a big girl apartment to my mind, though I baked in the summer up there under the roof. Draping cold washcloths over myself I’d toss and turn on those humid New Jersey summer nights until Dad finally slipped a noisy air-conditioner into the window. As a compensatory act after Mom died, he encouraged my friends and me to magic marker the white slanted walls and ceiling. My artistic father (his brother John was a commercial artist), drew life-size cartoon characters interspersed with my less accomplished scribbling. Roadrunner, a kindly looking vulture, Hagar the Horrible and Bugs Bunny chomping a carrot were among the roguish character angels that watched over me as I slept. My friends made their marks, and during my teen years we posted many hearts with boyfriends’ names, and “Roxanne loves . . .” with a succession of romancers (real and imagined) crossed out. Of course my friends thought our graffiti exceptionally cool, but so did the people who bought our house five years later, because they didn’t paint over it.

Our dining room was a sunny, glassed-in porch overlooking an in-ground steel pool and a backyard shaded with mature trees that required endless autumn raking sessions. Big watery blisters that I couldn’t resist breaking lodged between my thumbs and index fingers but yielded hours of leaf pile somersaults. The grassy yard approached a perfect square, and my best friend Bette Jo, my cousin Mari Ann, my next door neighbor Joanne and I spent whole days spinning cartwheels, round-offs and walkovers as we daydreamed ourselves the next Cathy Rigby or Olga Korbut. My mother never swam in our much-anticipated, refurbished pool. We moved in November, and by June, just days away from our inaugural swim, she was gone.

Dad had many good friends from our large Catholic Czech/Polish community who helped him get by after my mother died. Becky, a broad, white-haired, always dark-suited, functional alcoholic knew Dad through my grandfather’s gents’ bar. When Dad took over Summer Street Tavern in Elizabeth, Becky, in his need, still came around. My father would be readying to open, around ten or eleven in the morning, and Becky would bring the best quality steaks from Barna the butcher that they would fry up for breakfast. Saturdays I’d twirl on the bar stool next to Becky and listen to the men talk. It wasn’t particularly memorable conversation to a nine-year-old girl, but the smoke-deepened, world-weary hum and intermittent laughter soothed. A life-long bachelor, Becky resembled a tipsy Santa Claus—pudgy of body and jowly of face, with venous red cheeks flanking a corpuscular nose, rheumy hound dog eyes and a heart of gold. He’d often palm money into my hand and tell me to go get some candy. At my mother’s funeral, crying profusely, he pressed $10,000 cash into Dad’s bear-paw hand.

So did the swaying “Aunt” Marys who prayed for us, collective surrogate mothers rocking us in a sea of care. Their numbers required tagging—Mary with the gold teeth, Mary with the club foot, Mary with the daughter Anka, Mary P., Mary G. They weren’t necessarily closely related to us, but broadly tied through my father’s parents and the “old country.” We saw each other more or less regularly at Saint George’s Byzantine Catholic Church and the Polish Home, where we danced the polka and ate pierogies, as well as at innumerable weddings and funerals that took place in the large hall above my grandfather’s tavern.

I wonder how the priest, Father, later Monsignor Billy, kept the Marys straight. They were all bosomy, barrel-bodied women with tightly permed, dyed reddish hair and skinny varicose-veined legs bound in not quite flesh-colored support hose. Atop their thick necks perched wide, diabetic-flushed faces that wore the jolly look of a hard-earned better life etched over many a painful memory still echoing from across the ocean. They smiled, but their squinting, watchful eyes carried the sorrows of those left behind in homes with dirt floors and one scrappy chicken in the yard. Lovable worriers, they were always shaking their heads and gossip-whispering in Czech about the health, marriage and drinking status of the other Marys’ husbands and their extended families.

In those happy months in our new home my mother played up the idyllic aspects of our arborous patch of grass, a mere speck in the endless stretch of densely packed suburb. She adored nature and flowers, having learned to seriously garden from her grandmother. As an impassioned student of English, French and American literature, my mother fully absorbed the idealized notion of the pastoral and fashioned her house across from the woods as her own Virgilian Arcadia. Perhaps our fixer-upper’s tired appearance afforded extra charm in the way a woodsman’s ramshackle cottage adds to the foreground of a landscape painting.

We only walked together through the woods across the street a few times, but it was enough to have secured a deep connection of nature and motherly love that still carries me. I treasure this and the two “wilderness” adventures we took together, to Maine and the Florida Everglades. Though I grew bored literally to tears through many carsick hours of driving through endless New England forest, the trees awed her. To reach Florida we drove down the coast, and the Spanish moss that covered the southern states’ arbors fascinated her. For years I kept the moss she had collected in a yellowing envelope, until it was crushed into dust from periodic handling. Florida provided me memories of alligator wrestlers, and my mother in sunglasses, tank tops and knee-length shorts down-shifting her dark green ’66 Corvair.

But my mother’s affinity for, and my exposure to the rural were further indemnified by our family visits to Franklin and Lillian Hudson’s makeshift cabin deep in the woods of northwestern New Jersey. This was the real deal. Uncle Franklin and Aunt Lid were friends of my mother’s mother. Tall and distinguished, bespectacled Franklin resembled FDR before the polio. Always respectably attired in a hat, suit jacket and thin black tie, even at the cabin, I still picture him with a pipe and a book. An engineer and an intellectual, he was my mother’s patron, paying her college fees. He shone the proudest at my mother’s graduation.

Franklin was an old-fashioned husband, so Aunt Lid tensed up in that cowed spouse kind of way. Diminutive, with sparse white hair tightly pin-curled, Lillian’s quick dark eyes receded in chalky, powdered skin. Her lipstick smudged deep red and her rouged cheeks referenced a robust Edith Piaf. Her voice pitched high and strained. I got the feeling she did not adore cabin life, but as it was buffered by a real house in Elizabeth, she played along. A genuine affection existed amongst us all, my rebellious father included, because he respected Franklin and, though at odds in lifestyle and manners, they shared a love of rifles, rare steaks, and my mother.

Arrivals at the cabin were always nocturnal: Mom, Dad and me half-lost in the kind of darkness that condenses the brain but quickens the heart with the possibility of adventure. Lacking electricity, our hosts would be waiting to wave us in with a heavy-duty flashlight. Dad always carried me on his shoulders up the hill, and Franklin, through the creaking of crickets on moonless nights, would trace the big and little dippers with his bright beam of light. I could never group the constellations, but I pretended to spot Orion’s Belt and his hound, Sirius. The house was a double height grayish box with a steeply pitched roof and a tin-tube chimney pipe, set off the ground by stilts to escape the damp. Seven splintered wood stairs on the right side led to the kitchen that boasted a wood stove and a black-handled iron water pump, the shack’s only nod toward modernity. Not insulated, it always chilled us a bit, even in the summer.

The kitchen led to a larger main room balanced by a sturdy dining table at one end and unmatched chairs, rockers and end tables scattered over worn braided rugs at the other. Hurricane lamps sat readily at hand against the dark. Along the front long wall stood the heart and soul of the house, an old player piano. Dozens of red and white boxes holding musty, flaking paper piano rolls layered the top of this chipped black warhorse and, as if words competed with the music, hundreds of books occupied shelves that lined the remaining wall space. It was understood that Franklin had read every one. Opposite the piano and adjacent to the kitchen were two tight rooms cordoned off by strung-up plain brown, floor length curtains. Each squeezed a double bed and served as the guest quarters. An upstairs room was reserved for Uncle Franklin and Aunt Lid, and I never ventured there.

My mother and I shared one of these cubicles, and I always shied at the sight of the flowered ceramic chamber pot peaking out from under the bed. My anxiety about it inevitably induced my urgency in the middle of the night. Try as I might, suffering my mother’s frustration, I just couldn’t whiz in that little pot, no matter how Victorian-prettified, so with our untied shoes ruffling our nightgowns and with flashlights in hand we’d trek to the outhouse. The grass tickled our ankles in the boisterous dark: blind and unsheltered, our vulnerability reverberated in the deep open space around and above us. Up the hill toward the edge of the woods squatted a miniature version of the boxy house, its door carved with a sickle moon. This stinky two-holer was all of rough planks, even the seats, and a bucket of lime with a scoop squatted beside. Beside the ever-present flies, it sported a flamboyant décor. Fertile womanhood plastered every inch of all four walls and the ceiling: overlapping magazine illustrations and photographs of pin up girls, partially clothed, occasionally tasseled, or completely naked. They waved their bottoms, pushed up their breasts and dared all of mankind to come and get some.

No wonder my feminist mother tried to avoid this room, but to me going pee in a hole in the ground became an escapade to be savored, even more so in the secret hours. Here I trained my handheld spotlight on bodies of all types, fancy women with laughing eyes and bleached blonde hair, pouting red lips, fluttery long, impossibly thick lashes; fat and thin bodies beribboned, bowed and tucked into frilly lingerie, fannies arching above seam-stockinged legs stretching from high heeled shoes. They winked and nodded, or so I imagined. My wide eyes glimpsed intimations of sex, at least the female half, and though my mother hurried me, I took my time. When I was older and Mom was gone, I’d go by myself and delight in reviewing my favorites, wondering how classy Uncle Franklin could have done such a thing, a delightful paradox.

The Hudsons followed certain personal traditions. On warmer weather mornings we would stroll up the road to sponge off in the stream, returning to a poached egg and thick-cut bacon breakfast. My parents talked endlessly with Franklin and Lid, sitting on folding lawn chairs in the small clearing around the house while I’d explore the hornet’s nest at the back corner roof-line and pretend to get lost in the woods. After lunch we would aim rifles and handguns at cans and bottles balanced along a fallen tree trunk. I was a pretty good shot, and Franklin and Dad sang my praises enough so that I felt one of the boys.

Plenty of bourbon moistened the dry heat, and at official cocktail time Aunt Lid produced the appetizer with a flourish—pink and white chunk crabmeat, an expensive canned luxury, tossed generously with mayonnaise and mounded delicately atop saltines. With long tree branches, Franklin and my father would be pushing around a massive, rubbery slab of beef in the stone grill pit half sunk into the ground. The open flames crackled the fat, and sparking smoke curled away into the treetops. Salted, peppered, and thick beyond reason, the steak cooked for hours, and even then, it remained too spicy, rare and animal-like for me.

After dinner, we would stargaze again before settling down around the player piano for a sing along. This was my favorite time, and my mother’s, too. With the lyrics printed vertically along the edge of the music rolls, no one could beg off. Between the drink, the comfort of friends and the pressure of custom, everyone sang out, loud and melodious. Being the only child, and as yet unself-conscious, I belted with the best of them. Always centrally included, Franklin enlisted me to pump the pedals, a job necessitating my full body weight angled toward a vigorous rhythm, and I made my song selections in turn with the rest. Later, when I was ten, and after my mother died, Dad bought and renovated a player piano for me for Christmas. Painted a lacquered, cherry red, it wore a brass plate that read: Made exclusively for Roxanne, Merry Christmas, December 1969. An inspired gift, my habitually grand-gesturing father gave me something my mother and I shared to help me remember.

Sing-a-longs continued to stud our family history, through the years of my stepmother and my husband and into my life with my own two children. While my bright red player is long gone, I eventually found and restored a flame stitch mahogany Steinway, made in 1907 when the quality Pianola was king. My son Elliot sings along with the words at ease, and delights in all of my old favorites.

She’s hard-hearted Hannah, the vamp of Savannah, the meanest gal in town. Talk of your cold, refrigerating Mama; brother, she’s the polar bear’s pajamas. To tease ’em and thrill ’em, to torture and kill ’em, is her delight they say. I saw her at the river with a great big pan, there was Hannah pouring water on a drowning man, she’s hard-hearted Hannah, the vamp of Savannah, GA.

We sing You Are My Sunshine, Sunrise/Sunset, Bye-Bye Blackbird and Take Me Out To The Ballgame, and dance to Ballin’ The Jack and The Hokey Pokey. My Jane dresses up as a princess and flits all feathers and sequins and plastic high heels in and around the sound, getting us all up on our feet. “Dance, Mommy, Dance!” It’s corny but fun, and its sweet melancholy connects me to my mother and my children, simultaneously accessing the past, present and future. Even my husband, a player piano ingénue, gets the spirit, and we bellow our best, as a duo, to perfect the challenging range of Danny Boy.

As a finale to each Hudson farm visit, with serious care we would sign the guest book. A mere signature would not do: Franklin expected a colorful record of all we did, saw and ate, and amongst this erudite crowd I felt the pressure of eloquence. Our efforts were richly rewarded: we always skimmed over past entries, noting my handwriting and grammar improvements over the years, and relived visits forgotten. I would like to reread that guest book now, but Franklin and Lillian are long gone, and I’ve lost touch with their children and their keepsakes. After my mother died, my dad, my stepmother Irene and I would revisit the Hudsons’ place and try to enjoy our familiar round of activities. Mostly we managed, but my mother’s ghost permeated the cabin, the chamber pot, the piano bench, the very air. And, childishly lacking tact and consideration, I always requested her favorite songs on the piano.

“He walks with me and he talks with me, and tells me I am his own. And the joy we share as we’re standing there none other has ever known,” and “Lav-en-der Blue, Dilly Dilly, Lav-en-der Green, you’ll be my king Dilly Dilly, I’ll be your queen. . . .”

OUR NEW HOUSE IN CLARK was far afield from the Hudson farm in distance and flavor, but the woods across the street at least hinted at that country retreat we savored. The next-door neighbor girl and I spent endless hours in its tangle of trees and vines building forts, racing along the paths and splashing in the slow stream that fed the broadening river down at the falls. Once we tried to erect a tree house. Our attempt to dislodge a heavy trunk from its wedged position sounded good in theory.

I ran straight and took it square on the top of my head. Not wanting grown-up trouble we went home and quietly applied ice. I prayed I wouldn’t die in the night from a concussion, or a cerebral hemorrhage, a term I’d heard my father whisper.

The woods sheltered an abundance of not so wild life, mainly frogs, squirrels, raccoons and skunks. It was enough to tweak our imaginations about a suburban frontier and even my father caught the pioneer spirit. He found some fresh road kill one day, hit by a car but not demolished.

He walked off. I dropped my bike, all charged up about a real National Geographic-type adventure. I regularly poured over that magazine’s photographs, but the looking always left me hankering for a piece of the drama captured on those pages.

Dad had stepped on the edge of the sack kicking the guts into the brush. We threw his shoes away, but it was worth at least that to my mind. We nailed our prized skin across the tree trunk in the front yard. Over weeks the fur fell out in patches and the sun baked the hide into a homemade chamois Dad planned to wash the car with, but some other plundering creature chewed holes in it.

Our new environment trained me to novel physical and psychical experiences spun by my mother’s choice of house and her sensibilities toward nature. This pseudo-country life, along with player pianos and literature braided a connection between us that withstood parting. Parented afterward by my wonderful stepmother for thirty-four years, I am still more my mother than anyone else. I understand the tenacity of early imprinting raising my own children, how much of their personalities and inclinations, for better and worse, would come from me even if I died tomorrow. I cannot remember day-to-day interaction with my mother, cannot hear her voice, but I feel her influence and instinctively know that I am like her, even if Dad didn’t tell me.

SHE DIED IN JUNE, after her cherished tulips nodded their heads and dropped their petals. She and Dad were dressing for her tenth high school reunion. I bounced between the bathroom and bedroom doors excited by these two giants’ romantic, sophisticated night out. My mother knew she still had her looks and anticipated the ritual preening among classmates. A Cinderella released from the page, she was transformed before my very eyes for the ball. Hair high and curled, eyeliner, mascara, powder and lipstick expertly applied, enhanced her face concentrating in the mirror, and a long green taffeta dress accentuated her small waist. We were all squeezed in our tiny bathroom when she cried out once and collapsed. My trim, handsome father, who had, according to the doctors’ estimates, been anticipating this moment for six cruel months, caught her, and laid her across the bed, now Snow White.

Was I ordered outside or did I run from fate? I shuffled in the grass alongside the driveway, just waiting. I doubted anything too awful could happen to someone so powerful: mothers were always in control. But they whisked her into the ambulance and away, with her full skirt rustling, the siren’s dirge crying into the distance, and the fresh green trees swishing in her wake. She died the next day of a “catastrophic cerebral hemorrhage.” I waded through the chaos of days and days of everyone’s tears. I attended the wake. I liked the fuss everyone made over me. My father blanketed her casket and the viewing room with hundreds of her favorite gardenias.

From then on, this tragedy branded Dad and me, and the Marys forlornly shook their heads in our direction, a miming Greek chorus. I swallowed all pity by refusing to be pitiful. Still I felt marked, tattooed, and strength seemed my only life raft. In my confused attempt to spare Dad more pain, and though I forced tears when he took me across the street into the woods to tell me, I never cried about it again. At nine, I was too old to act the baby, and too young to be grown-up, but I opted for the adult route. I packed up my heart and became the woman of the house, ironing, cleaning, cooking, organizing—at least in my own mind—and stoically muscled through to bolster Dad. We carried on, in fits and starts, and he and I made good lives for ourselves, first together and then apart. We try not to dwell on the past, though that effort keeps it present, and we have much to be thankful for. But nearly forty years later, we both live on high alert, bracing ourselves against the next catastrophe.

When I had my own children, I realized that a nine-year-old boy still has a high-pitched little girl voice, still needs to be tucked into bed at night and wants his head held when sick. But for me the bell went off too early, and I raced toward a less-tender adulthood, indoctrinated to life’s blows. And once that first burst is made, there is no gathering that momentum back into the starting gate, stepmother or no. When my mother died I was handed a bag of grief. If I had been a few years younger, I’d have held it for awhile and set it down, forgetting it. Had I been older, twelve or thirteen, I’d probably have clutched it a while longer and then slowly would have unpacked it, placing memories here and there, spreading bits of her around to release the pain, emptying the bag. At barely nine however, I held that full bag, tending it carefully, and never let it go. Unlike the Spanish moss, my grief never disintegrated. What a loss my mother was to me and our little world.

But she had awakened me to the magic of the woods. My rural affinities connect me to her and reach deep emotionally and back chronologically to times infused with essential elements of childhood, adventures and loss. My home in, and appreciation of, more authentically rural northwest Connecticut is built upon my mother’s securely laid nature foundation. Just that the “wild” was important to her, that she was deeply affected, was enough. A romantic at heart, she valued nature and I took notice.

Once she died I engaged the country as a tool to remember until the pain dulled and nature grew pleasurable in its own right. I share “wild” adventures with my own children, both by subtle example and outright manipulation. I make sure they get outside: in Connecticut we routinely brave ticks and bears to traipse through the woods around our house, kicking through the stream in our Wellies, building forts, crashing through the undergrowth collecting beetles, frogs and spotted salamanders, theorizing over rotted animal carcasses, toting home skulls and femurs, startling deer, picking wild berries, and not forgetting to sit and hear the wind rustling the trees’ canopy, the crack and thud of a falling branch, the water smoothing river stones, the bark of a crow, the woods’ collective non-silence. Rather than grow apart from my mother all the years I approached and passed her age, I understood her better.