A Ghost Here Now

There is one plot left on the river.  That's it.  Carved out of all of our property that once was on both sides of the banks.  Hundreds of years populating the river valley and once this house is sold, my family will be gone.  It amazes me how we are rendered down to a sign on a building, a plaque in a hospital, a mention in the local history when a fourth grader writes a book report.  A human life has such a small chance of being remembered.  You would think grouped together we would have more of a shot.

This house was a newer one.  The old house sat across the driveway.  It was the only residential home in town large enough to qualify as a bed and breakfast because the previous generation added to the building, forced by familial pressure to stay on the property.  But not willing to concede and actually live in the same original house.  My grandmother broke ranks completely, demanding her own home with her own privacy. They didn't get off the land, but the made it to the furthest edge.

I was terrified to be alone in the family house.  People had been born in the living room.  An aunt burned to death in my Uncle Al's den (later my mother's art gallery, before that the sitting room) after her skirt caught fire. The room at the far end of the upstairs right hall was haunted by a lady whom some very sensible people claimed would sit at the end of the bed. My cousin found a crawl space that was filled with soot from the coal emissions from turn of the century locamotive engines that no one knew existed until he hid in it playing hide and go seek. There were rooms I had never been in till we sold it.

My grandmother's house was warmer, more modern.  It didn't smell as large.  You couldn't lose Easter eggs in it until the cleaning lady found them month later like at the family house.  The basement was lit well, not dirt. There was newer carpeting on the stairs to ride down on your butt. There was light and cookies baking and, for a while, my grandfather built us a pool until one day I came home from college and Grandma had filled it in again. This house had door that belonged to rooms that made sense unlike the ramble of an old building that had been rebuilt over and over. The staircase when straight up sensibly, where at the big house it was either weird angles with raw wood or wide with a banister that should have been easier to slide down but just looked dangerous at the end.

The properties shared a garage and an orchard.  The garage attic was creepy and mysterious.  It had accoutrements left from the nursery that I couldn't identify and half a tombstone that had been cracked off at the family plot awaiting repair.  And it had a root cellar, my favorite part because it was a hole under a building that didn't seem to do much.  The orchard had a peach tree once and apple trees that I loved to sit in and evil tasting grapes.  Mostly, during my era, it was a big field to park cars and a place for critters to eat grass although my aunt did have a garden on the edge by the big house.  This is where they found the musket's missing bayonette holding up a rose bush and Aunt Edie would wage war on Japanese beatles with a jar of kerosene.

The big house was sold in the late 1990's after Edie died.  One lone old lady in a property that had held generations of family, glad to be rid of the responsibility at the end.  "You like it?" She would say if she caught you looking at something.  "Take it!" I'll be dead soon enough she didn't say but meant it just the same. It is still a beautiful home but it is not our problem any more either.  Too much. Too big for families that are smaller now.

And now my aunt will escape a similar fate, albeit on a smaller scale.  There won't be a big house to heat and keep clean.  She is still young enough to enjoy a move into an apartment where the winters won't abuse the soul and if the pipes freeze it is someone else's responsibility.  We have 6 months left as we prepare and disperse the generations of belongings, determining what really was precious enough to hold onto without a house to put them in.  Dissipating our family into paperwork and the few remaining genetic codes alive and reproducing. No more home left. For the first time in 150 years, we won't be a place anymore. For the first time in 300, we won't be attached to valley.

Except our one little plot on the river.

My Favorite Old Blog: Ladies and Gentlemens.....Woodchucks Are Assholes.

Woodchucks are assholes: A favorite repost

Most people who know me in the outside of Callicoon world consider me an urbanite. With the exception of 2 foggy years in a trailer of necessity, I have spent my adult life in New York City up until I moved to a suburb north of Boston. But the truth is am a also a hick. I was raised by tree farmers. "Nurserymen" to the fancy. We had a huge amount of acreage on the Delaware River on both the Pennsylvania and New York sides and more in the mountains. And here are some of the things that I learned from the Borscht Belt sticks:

• Woodchucks are assholes. They look sort of cute for a large rodent. But they can eat an entire nursery. Upon his death, my father requested that his plaque be laid on his parent's grave. But we had to wait because a woodchuck dug up my grandmother's side of the plot and was living there. A hole so big you could shove an eight year old down. See. Assholes.

• If you are twelve and weigh about eighty pounds and you are learning to shoot a gun, stick with a .22. Anything with a higher caliber requires a truck window to prop it up and you probably will still find yourself flying backwards like a dislodged piece of steak post heimlich maneuver.

• Squirrels don't swim well. But they are excellent at floating.

• Walnuts found in the woods and acorns laying in your lawn may be edible but they still taste like ear wax.

• Some red berries are also edible but others can kill you really hard. Same goes for pretty mushrooms. Don't believe your sister. She only wants your Partridge Family lunchbox.

• You are not a wind goddess. You just aren't.

• It is possible to be bitten by a river fish.

• Tractors don't break down unless its raining out and you are way the hell out in the middle of a field. And lightening likes wide open spaces.

• Aloe Vera plants aren't indigeonous to the Northeast. I don't know what it was she was rubbing on her face but it wasn't that.

• If you are in a creek and you take find a really big rock that looks like it could have a space underneath, you can slam it with another rock and an unconscious cat fish may float up. Which may explains why there are not cat fish in the creek anymore.

• It's a shad. They have dorsal fins. But don't tell the tourists from the Bronx because "OH MY GAWD! IT'S A SHAWK! IT'S A RIVAH SHAWK!" sounds really cool when it echos down the river valley.

That's what I have for now. I will continue to ponder.

Read more: http://www.myspace.com/hoohajess/blog?page=4#ixzz11S2pf800