Three Farmhouses in New England
I used to work at a small, New England college, the archetype of a liberal arts campus with an abundance of brick and trees, dining halls and residence halls, museums and playing fields, plentiful walking paths and a scarcity of parking spaces.
One of my primary duties was to meet with students interested in studying away. In this role, I met individually with hundreds of students. Our initial meetings were only 25 minutes long. During that time I needed to learn about their academic interests, suggest study away opportunities, and outline nuances of policy. I quickly discovered that I needed to know so much more about the individuals I was working with than their majors. And I wanted to know more. How had they come to be at our small, academically rigorous college in the most northeastern state? What sort of learning environment do they value? What about social environments? How do they approach decision-making? How much support do they want when studying elsewhere and adjusting to a new culture?
But how could I possibly sit down and say, “Hi, I’m Kate, what sort of learning environment do you value?” It’s the opposite of an ice breaker; for all intents and purposes, a question like that is a snow machine.
But each year I had hundreds of students to practice on. And it didn’t take long for me to hit upon my opening question.
“Where’s home for you?”
That’s it. Just four words. “Where’s home for you?”
With that one question, asked in sincerity and with curiosity, I began to learn so much about the person across the desk. Some answered right away: town and state. Others told me where they grew up and where their parents now lived, and what it’s like to visit a different house over break. A few described the nomadic life of a military or State Department family. A number held in their hearts homes in both their country of birth and the US. Some students came from the towns immediately surrounding the college; lots came from “just outside of Boston” commonly known on campus as “JOB;” others felt compelled to explain to me, the small town college advisor that I appeared to be, that they were from Brooklyn, which is part of New York City, or San Francisco, which is in California. I developed a special fondness for students from regions less commonly connected to New England: students from Alabama, Arkansas, Texas, Wyoming. We would talk about how different the regions are and how they were already, in a sense, studying abroad within their own country.
“Where is home for you?” With this one question, I began to learn how far from home they had come, or how much farther they wanted to go. I learned about their decision-making process–why they moved across the country, or why actually staying close to home was OK, or what coming to the US for college meant to them. Occasionally, a student would notice how broadly I’d phrased the question and would ask me to confirm if I meant their billing address or something else. “I ask it that way on purpose,” I’d say. “I’m curious to know where feels like home to you.”
And every so often a student would notice the person on the other side of the desk, namely me, and reciprocate the question: “Where’s home for you?” “I’m a New Englander,” I would say. “My parents met and married in Maine, and my grandmother lived here for most of my childhood. I was born and raised in Connecticut, but we moved a lot, while Maine remained the constant in my life. And now I live here. So I call myself a New Englander.”
In case you don’t know, Maine is one of those places where to be “from” there requires constant residency, not just in your own life, but also in the lives and deaths of five generations of kin. Without the requisite in-state birth and burial records, you are simply “from away.” (For more about the peculiarities of Maine culture, I encourage you to read John Hodgeman’s 2017 memoir “Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches.”)
In many ways, I don’t mind being labeled “from away.” I love the richness of a childhood on the doorstep of New York City that allowed school trips to the Met and Radio City Music Hall, balanced with wild blueberry picking and swimming in the forest-edge pond at my Grandmother’s house in Maine every summer.
The house in Maine where my grandmother lived for so many years was called Apple Tree Farm, an old farm my dad had bought and restored in the 70s. It’s one of those houses that has had many lives, going back to the 1800s, maybe actually before. I wasn’t there, of course, for its first two centuries of life, nor for the life it led when my dad, his first wife, and kids moved there, but I know they revived it greatly. They got rid of the raccoons in residence and brought in horses, pigs, chickens, and sheep. The el was once again filled with seasoned firewood, harvested by hand and hauled by horse from the 200 acres of surrounding forest. I’m not sure if the pond down the back meadow at the edge of the forest was dug by my dad or simply restored, but either way it gave cold spring-fed respite to humans and animals alike amid the dog days of summer. Again I wasn’t there for this life of the farm, and I envy my half-sister and -brother for the decade they spent as farm kids.
As I said, I was born in Connecticut. After my dad divorced his first wife and married my mother, he disconcerted her by leaving their hippie-adjacent lifestyle in Maine to take a job fundraising for his old prep school in Connecticut and thereafter attending Divinity School at Yale to become an Episcopalian priest.
In the meantime, my grandmother–my mother’s mother–ended up moving into Apple Tree Farm. She kept it warm in the winter, running wood stoves for months at a time. Come spring she established gardens that she fiercely defended from deer and weeds. Throughout summer and autumn she would harvest, can, and freeze the bounty of northern New England’s short but productive growing season. The few of the heritage apple trees still bore fruit, a variety called Banana Apples, and these she made into apple sauce.
How I wish I could take you there, to the Apple Tree Farm of my summer vacations and Christmas breaks. Together we would eat cherry tomatoes off the vine until we made our mouths sore, and then eat bread fresh from the oven with Kate’s salted butter, or corn from the farm stand, fragrant from the steamer and likewise smothered in Kate’s. The eggs we would eat for breakfast every morning would have yokes as bright as a school bus and shells as sturdy as ceramic. If we were lucky we’d be up early enough to catch a glimpse of a moose mother and calf drinking from the pond.
After washing up the breakfast dishes and making out beds, we could drive with my grandmother the twenty miles to one of the nearby towns, passing fields of crops and grazing animals and farm stands and occasional gas stations. If we went to Belfast we could go to the Co-Op to buy freshly ground peanut butter to make into cookies, and cream we’d whip and freeze into dollops to add to deserts whenever they needed a little extra. Or we could go to Waterville where we could wander the aisles of Marden’s fabric section, selecting a dozen yards from the hundreds there. We’d bring the dozen back home to wash, iron, cut, sew, and iron again into clothes. Occasionally we’d venture down to Augusta and eat fried seafood at The Red Barn and ice cream from the Gifford’s next door. In the winter we’d stay in, listening to the radio, reading old books, baking, baking, constant baking, and feeding the woodstove, enjoying the hygge without even knowing the word for it.
Apple Tree Farm. That’s the essence of home for me.
//
This essay is about Apple Tree Farm, but it’s also about another old farmhouse in Maine.
About six years ago my husband and I bought an old farmhouse. It didn’t have a pond or 200 acres of woods, but it also wasn’t 20 miles from the nearest supermarket. The house, known as the old Hunter Estate, is from about 1800. The house is built on a 2.5 acre clearing, elevated from the road and adored with massive stands of lilac, beach roses, and quince. The main structure embraces an enormous central chimney, off of which stems six fireplaces. Then there are a couple of els, a garage (a marvel for any house in Maine!), and a 35x50 foot barn. Beyond the barn is another 8 acres of woods. The day we moved in, this was March of 2016, I walked the side property for the first time and came across a brook, wild raspberry bushes, enough pine trees for a century’s worth of Christmases, a preserved deer skull, and a spot I knew my young daughters would turn into fairyland.
The house needed work to be sure. No raccoon removal, fortunately, but lots of 80s wall paper had to come down and even more insulation had to go up. We fixed up an unfinished part of the house adding a bedroom and bathroom. We built a new staircase and replaced appliances. We replumbed every fixture, painted every room, dug beds out front and out back, added paths and a fire pit, saved the high-bush blueberries from weeds, failed to establish an orchard, and Lord knows what else.
Even with the new R-49 insulation in the attic the house was drafty, and even with the new plumbing we had constant leaks. Mowing was practically a full day task, since the ride on mower seemed to break every time it was game time. Winter may have promised a respite from mowing, but snow removal required the same amount of effort and endurance and broken down yard equipment.
But if you asked my kids they wouldn’t tell you any of that about our old farm house. They would tell you about the kid-sized cupboard under the old front stairs, the warming cupboards above the fireplaces, and the crawl space under the kitchen where you can find the soles of old shoes and bottles and bones and nails. They would take you out to the fairy place, showing you what logs are still sturdy enough to step on and which to avoid because they’ve rotten into the brook below. They would remind you not to mow where the low wild strawberries grow on the edge of the woods, and ask to add another pulley with another bucket to service their tree house built next to the white lilac bush. They will tell you where Julian got that scar under his eye (in the pink room on the edge of the white sofa), and where Vivienne lost that tooth (by which I mean the floorboards where she dropped her tooth en route to putting it under her pillow and there it remains, unmovable by parent or fairy alike), and where under the barn Aurelia found the mummified opossum.
Just like Apple Tree Farm, our home spread to the places beyond the farmhouse itself, which I petitioned to be called Crabapple Tree Farm. There’s Popham Beach, where my husband and I got married and took a walk on an unseasonably warm day right after we discovered we were pregnant with our first child. There’s Cafe Creme and Mae’s Cafe in Bath where many Saturday mornings and special occasions were marked, respectively. There’s the route I would drive as my girls napped, up the Cathance River Road, over to Bowdoinham, down past Merrymeeting Bay, and down Foreside Road in Topsham, and then I’d drive the loop round again if they still had some sleep left in them. There’s the college where I worked, and the day care where each of our three children spent their happy first years. Down in Harpswell there’s the Dolphin Marina for the best fish chowder, always served with blueberry muffins, and Damariscotta for the soda fountain at Rexall’s Pharmacy and Pumpkinfest every October. And of course the houses of our family and friends running up and down Coastal Route One, from Montville to Woolwich and Georgetown, from Bath to Brunswick to Portland and beyond.
//
We are thinking now of selling Crabapple Tree Farm. For every wide floor board, exposed beam, remains of 19th century graffiti, and fireplace there is also a leak, a window that needs replacing, concrete that needs patching, and an oil-hungry furnace that needs constant feeding. It takes a lot of work and a lot of money.
Of course our kids don’t understand about work or money. They only have memories, and a hoped for future back in that house. “Please, please, please don’t sell the house back in Maine,” they’ve said to me. “Please don’t do it. It’s our home. We love it. You can’t sell it.”
On Sunday night, Julian had already fallen asleep. I’d finished reading chapter four of The Bridge to Terabithia and was about to sing the two older girls to sleep, when Aurelia once again pleaded into the dusk: “Don’t sell the house, you can’t. It’s my one true home.”
And so, at the wrong time of day, I told the for the first time what had happened to Apple Tree Farm.
“My dad once had a farm, a great big farmhouse nestled into the woods in Maine. When I was a little girl my grandmother lived there. And I loved it so much. It had a big wood stove and always smelled like baking. Down the meadow and on the edge of the forest was a pond. There was a garden and a barn and memories of Christmas and birthdays and sewing clothes and frozen dollops of whipped cream melting on summer desserts.
“But when my parents divorced my father said my grandmother could no longer live there. So she had to move and another house became her home and held our memories.
“And you know what, when my parents divorced my dad promised that the farm needed to be kept, not sold, so that my brother, sister, and I could have it. But then one day, without telling us, he sold it. I’m still not sure really why he sold it, he must have had his reasons, but to me it was the saddest loss, and I’ll never understand it.
“Then a long while later, when we were all together again in Maine for my wedding to Papa, my siblings and I all went up to Apple Tree Farm. The house and the barn and the pond and the gardens were still there, and a new family was making memories in it. And I’m so happy for that new family, even while my heart aches that my dad sold it.
“But I tell you, you can make memories anew. You can establish your own farmhouse some day like I did and hold it tight.”
Hold it tight.
//
Where is home for you?
Just like that my throat clenched, pulling tight, up into my mouth. My lower lip tugged my chin taut.
I was a teenager again, talking on the phone. “What do you mean, Dad sold the farm?! How could he do that? When did he do that? Why, why, why?”
I felt all the grief of that news arise anew in my adult body, the distance of 20 years and 3,000 miles bridged as if by tesseract in an instant.
In the dusk at the foot of my daughter’s bed, my body, my emotions, time itself, seemed to refract as if through a prism.
I felt the swell of grief, and then a surge of determination greater than any desire or goal, a solemn commitment to myself to reclaim the home I’d lost, that had been taken away. My brows pushed up my forehead opening the outer corners of my eyes with a realization that I’d kept that vow. I felt comfort, pride even. And then the inner corners of my eyes pressed down on my cheekbones as the light kept rushing through the glass, refracting the whole into each constituent color. I felt in my body my adultness once again. I felt in my rounding shoulders my fatigue from stressing about persistent water damage and broken mowers and heating bills. The tiniest part of me wondered anew why my dad had sold Apple Tree Farm. He probably had his reasons. You don’t let an old farmhouse into your life lightly, and you don’t let it go lightly either.
And so my daughters and I wept together. We three wept in appreciation and gratitude for the house and the land and our time there. We wept at the thought of leaving New England, with its outrageously colorful autumn and perfect snowscapes, defiantly crap springs followed by glorious summers spent at the beach or swimming in streamfed ponds enjoying light until ungodly hours and fireflies after that. They cried in disappointment and incomprehension why anyone would choose to give up such a perfect place, knowing nothing of mortgages or maintenance or ever-rising #2 heating oil fuel prices. And I cried, feeling the pain and responsibility of making a decision out of free will, of choosing to sell this beloved home despite my children’s pleas, knowing that it was my decision not because someone else thrust it upon me or because I had no other choice, but because it was the path I saw to making other things possible. My shoulders still forward my head went back and I sobbed at the decision I’d made knowing it would stay in my children’s hearts as my dad’s decision had stayed in mine. And I wondered how the light would speed forward through our lives. Would they years from now find their ways back to Maine, laboring to fix up farmhouses amid acres of forest, attempting for the third generation to finally establish the family’s residence in order to eventually gain credibility as “Mainers.”
//
“Where is home for you?”
Right now we live in Mexico. It’s not surprising that I get asked this question a lot. I’ve taken to answering with less nuance, in part because I hobble when speaking Spanish and partly because I know neither Maine nor Connecticut have made enough of a cultural mark to be understood abroad the way New York, Texas, and California have. So I tell people I’m from just outside of Boston. Sometimes someone says something about the Pats or the Red Sox, but for the most part they move quickly on to the second question I’m always asked: “What are you doing here?” This is the answer I’m still working on.
//
There’s one more farmhouse in this story. It’s another part that happened before I was around so as I write this I realize I’m drawing on the lightest sketches of memories and information. But I remember now that the way that my grandmother knew so well how to take care of Apple Tree Farm–to feed its woodstoves and clear the snow from the barn and survive ice storms and make the most of the gardening season–is because a decade before she’d restored an old farmhouse near Exeter, New Hampshire called Wobbly Farm. At that time she was in her 50s and 60s. She was divorced and living alone, but she always loved making a beautiful and functional home. So she took on all the jobs of restoring an old New England farmhouse, fixing windows, replacing pipes, installing appliances, keeping the house warm and the well pumping. She loved that farm. But at some point she had to sell it.
A few years ago, my mother, husband, baby, and I were driving back to Maine and found ourselves driving through that part of New Hampshire. On an impulse we decided to try to drive past the farm to see how it looked. I’d never seen it before but my mother recognized it instantly. We pulled into the driveway and I waved to a man on a ride-on mower. “Excuse me!” I shouted over the mower. It stopped and I approached. “Hi, my name is Kate. This may sound strange but my grandmother used to live here.” “Oh,” said the man, who looked to be in his 60s. “You’re Helen’s granddaughter?” “That’s right!” I said, delighted and disbelieving the man knew my grandmother’s name. “Did you know her too?” “Oh yes,” said he. “I bought the place from her. She did a terrific job restoring it. I basically just try to keep it looking as good as the day she sold it to me.” I smiled. “Would you like to take a look around?” “Oh yes we would!” and I waved the others out of the car. The man showed us around the house. He’d kept wallpaper she’d hung, and all the appliances still worked even almost 40 years later. In the barn was a recording studio my uncle had owned, a time capsule of analogue audio equipment. And the gardens. The gardens my grandmother had established he’d continued to nurture, all these years later. The place looked great. My grandmother, who had died three years before, would have been so happy.
I suppose some people stay in their place forever. And some people move on. I suppose I’m from the people who move on. But I don’t leave lightly. And just because a place isn’t my billing address anymore doesn’t mean it isn’t still home to me.
