Once in a time when we were young...

This is the Cornwall Village gang in a photograph taken by a patient parent during the summer of 1951. I'm the one in the group on the right wearing a sweater, head tilted, making some kind of remark. Weesie McLeod (now Dunn) is the light-haired, younger girl on the left who's laughing. Her sisters Helen and Libby are in the back row with Billy, their brother. My sister Mary is in front of me, my sister Miss Lyd is to my left; My brother Robby is in the car looking out the window.

We were as free as birds then. Elements of this bunch roved the Village during the day, building forts, swimming in the farm brook, organizing green apple fights -- all without the supervision or knowledge of any of the adults in our lives. I suppose they watched as we surged through the backyards, but no adults were with us when we swam in the wonderful and heavily polluted farm brook. High points of the day were the noon siren, which I still hear up the hill at my house, and the ride to the lake. The first meant lunch could be had at home or somewhere else. The ride to the lake had to be negotiated with one of the parents using a little wheedling, never whining, and never the same parent two days in a row. If we could have reached the pedals we would have driven ourselves. Which would have been fine because we weren't supervised at the lake either.

The happiness of those days drew me back here as a grownup and I live among the colors and sounds of those child days. The Holstein milking herd is gone and the farm brook, once a beautiful brown and yellow color, runs clear. My brother Robby now owns the farm fields. When he brought a local herd of cows and a bull back into the fields, he had to fence them away from the brook and water them from a well dug for the purpose. He and Dan, who owns the herd, had received federal funds to re-stock the land and protecting the banks of small streams is in the federal wetlands regulations.

On closer examination, I wonder where I got that nice haircut? Usually, I went to a men's barber in Providence who just chopped it. It may have been that my dear grandmother, who loved clothes and parties, had taken me over to her hairdresser in Litchfield for a trim. She always hoped I would love to flirt as she did.

Storms and Gardens

Doc and I sat on the porch and inhaled this storm, one of the many which have hammered the 14th colony over the past six weeks. Thanks, or no thanks, to the 'net, we can obsessively watch the weather as it slides into the Hudson Valley, pauses and then lunges across the river into Connecticut. Twice the storms rolled noisily out to sea, turned and came back as three-day nor'easters.


I think the storm above looks like the last act of Gotterdammerung, an explosion of darkness and thunder.




This is the rosebush behind our house, one of the original climbers, Dr. Van Fleet. Its root stock is so strong that it's used to propagate other types. It has a mind of its own, canes thick as baseball bat handles and thorns like dragon's teeth. The canes arch up and over and root in whatever they can find. No wonder it's a survivor.

In spite of all this rough and tumble, Dr. Van Fleet is a perfect, many-petaled, chunky blossom with a rich, spicy scent. The color is faint pink with deeper tints inside the bloom. And it goes and goes and goes. It's on its fourth week this year, because of the rain and the cool. In a hot July the blossoms arrive, sigh and faint away, littering the grass with petals as soft as baby's skin.

The bush is a safe haven in any season for birds and the chipmunk scouts who watch and wait along the stone wall. There is a bobcat in the neighborhood and all the smaller animals are on alert, staying close to the house where people are. The proximity of humans doesn't seem to bother this bobcat, however. One morning we found him drinking from the birdbath, 10 feet from our back door. We had to shout at him to make him leave. Rocky stays close, as cats in their later years usually do, unwilling to risk as he once did.