Coming home

Walking around our house, I admire the new coat of paint – the bright white front with pale yellow shutters, the unpainted shingles on the sides gleaming with redwood stain – and I remember the first time I set eyes on her.

A warm October afternoon, we followed the real estate agent through a small town, passing over two sets of railroad tracks and by a waterfall.

Surrounded by pine trees, the raised ranch sat on a hill overlooking a pond. It had six-over-six multi-paned windows, a brick face and one-car garage underneath.

She beckoned, and I was captivated. I hadn’t even stepped inside, and I knew this would be where our children would grow up and my husband and I would grow old.

“We have to be able to afford this,” I thought, as the agent began a guided tour.

Entering the house, I should have noticed that the rooms were rather small, there was only one bathroom, and the basement was partially-finished. But instead, I saw only the beautiful oak ceilings, the open country kitchen and keeping room with fireplace, and the wall of bookshelves in the basement that would hold my dearest possessions.

Directly behind the house was a huge kennel for our dog.

I knew my husband was smitten when he walked into the new barn that the owner had built for his sailboat. It had work benches, a wood stove and ample room for any number of toys that were on my husband’s wish list.

The leaves rustled as we walked the three-quarter acre property, inhaling the scent of pine and listening to the quiet.

On the spot my husband made an offer, but it took a week of counter-proposals before the owners, who were in a hurry to move to Florida before winter, accepted our bid. I could not believe our good fortune.

Unfortunately, the binder was contingent upon the sale of our small starter home in the city. As I waited for a buyer, I wrote in my journal, making lists and drawing room layouts, and I prayed.

Three months later an offer was made, which we accepted. I started packing. Two days later, the buyers changed their mind, losing their escrow deposit. I started unpacking.

A few weeks later a young couple saw the house and made an identical offer. This time we waited for the bank to approve their loan before celebrating.

A month later we were handed the key to our new country home, and my husband carried me over the threshold.

Twenty-eight years later, she bears the scars inflicted by an active family of five, but she still captivates me.

'Bee' careful out there

A beach house evokes an idyllic setting where families relax and play under blue skies beside undulating seas for endless hours.

Our summer house at Fogland Beach offers this and more, but other times the place can be downright dangerous.

Last week we gathered at the summer place to celebrate my nephews’ birthdays.

After catching up, we prepared lunch. Firing up the grill, my brother barbecued sirloin tips, onions, peppers and zucchini, as well as stir-fried shrimp in a wok.

For the next hour, we sat at the round table and feasted on a meal that will never taste this good in winter. There is something about the salty air here that seasons the food to perfection.

We sang “Happy Birthday” and handed out the presents but decided to wait before having cake and ice cream.

That’s when my mother suggested we take care of an odd job that had been deferred for a long time. An old antenna still clung to the roof, secured by one rusty bolt from the siding.

My brother climbed a small ladder and tried to unscrew the bolt with a ratchet, but it would not budge. There was also a safety issue: A good yank might take out the antenna, as well as all of us.

Consequently, we borrowed our neighbor’s full-size ladder, and my brother leaned it against the house and climbed.

Scaling the roof, he held onto the antenna and tried to wrench it free from above, while my nephew mounted the other ladder and attempted to remove the bolt from below.

Suddenly a cloud of bees, disturbed by my brother’s trek across the roof, attacked him.

“Most people don’t have any idea about all the complicated life going on inside a hive,” wrote Sue Monk Kidd. “Bees have a secret life we don’t know anything about.”

The woman knew what she was talking about.

There are 400 native bee species in New England, and they live close to us, in the ground and under rocks or in woody materials.

Apparently, these bees preferred a penthouse apartment.

The first impulse when bitten multiple times by angry bees is to back away. In this case, the move would have been tragic.

Instead, my brother became Spiderman. After being injected with bee (rather than spider) venom, he moved at superhero speed across the roof, as if held up by webbing, with the bees in hot pursuit. Then he flew down the shaky ladder.

In true Yankee form, the first words out of my brother’s mouth were an apology to my mother for failing to remove the antenna.

But she was already running in the house for first-aid supplies. There were red, puffy welts all over his legs, and his arms were scratched and bleeding.

Thank God, that was the extent of his injuries, which he shook off as nothing.

If there is a lesson to all this, it is to “bee” on guard when you’re roof climbing and that it is better to have your cake and eat it too.

A house by any other name

Home is this New England village, bordering the Sakonnet.

One of my favorite novelists is D.E. Stevenson, who wrote about Britain during World War II and its aftermath. Thirty-three of her books line the shelves of my home office.

Stevenson described the sleepy English and Scottish villages in great detail and gave each of the houses a special name. Consequently, the reader could imagine the structure, the lay of the land, the historic as well as natural setting of the place.

Some of her picturesque names are Well Cottage, House on the Cliff, Archway House, Mountain Cross, Square House, Underwoods, Bridle House, Broadmeadows, Hillside House, Summerhills, Dower House, King’s Lodge, Swan House, Amberwell and Bridge House.

Inside, these homes are furnished with pieces handed down through the generations, and each has a story to tell.

According to Stevenson, “Fletcher’s End is the name of a beautiful old house in the English Cotswold Country; it was built in the days of Queen Elizabeth and the oak beams which support the heavy stone roof are of the same wood as the ships which fought the Spanish Armada.”

Some American houses are referred to by name, and the “summer cottages” of the rich in nearby Newport come to mind: The Breakers, Chateau-sur-Mer, The Elms, Marble House and Rosecliff.

One of my favorite nonfiction American writers, Gladys Taber, called her seventeenth-century Connecticut farmhouse, Stillmeadow, and her Cape Cod cottage, Still Cove. Fifteen of her books grace my shelves.

“The ancient house speaks to us,” she wrote in “The Book of Stillmeadow” in 1948. “Footfalls sound on the steep stairs, doors open softly, floorboards creak, echoing lives lived here long, long ago. And I think echoes of the lives of our family will be here, too.”

Our summer house near Fogland Beach lacks a name (Fog House?) but engenders all the qualities of Stevenson’s fictional homes. Furnished with the old rock maple couch, armchair and rocker that my parents bought when they married in 1950, it is decorated with my grandmother’s lamps and my grandfather’s cherry wood end table.

Sometimes if I listen intently, I can still hear him gently tapping his pipe on the table, emptying the tobacco into the ashtray.

“Your mother wouldn’t like it if we sold the furniture she gave us,” said Bel Brownlee in “Fletcher’s End” by D.E. Stevenson. “It would hurt her feelings to think we didn’t appreciate her kindness. People’s feelings are more important than … tables.”

The cautionary tale of Dolly Copp

Winter ended this morning when I awoke to birdsong, the official herald of springtime.

Sitting up in bed, I scanned the backyard through the multi-paned window searching for my companions; but despite the symphony, they were hidden from sight.

But what really caught my attention was the grimy window. The bright March sunshine showcased a winter’s worth of dirt that had accumulated on the panes.

Catching spring fever, I started a mental running list of things to do: wash windows and screens; vacuum and clean windowsills; wash, iron and hang curtains; vacuum cobwebs off ceilings; scrub fireplace bricks; paint front door red and lintel white; power wash unpainted shingles and brick walkway; stain railings along front stairs; power wash deck; hang basketball hoop; plant seedlings; weed and cultivate kitchen garden…

Then, I remembered the cautionary tale of Dolly Copp and stopped myself.   

Many years ago, I discovered an obscure sign near Gorham, N.H., in the deep woods of the White Mountains National Forest, marking the site of the Copp Homestead.

It read: “Here Hayes Dodifer Copp made his farm about 1827. He built a log cabin and barn and carved the farmland from the wilderness. On Nov. 3, 1831 he married Dolly Emery and brought her to this glen. A frame house replaced the cabin. Here travelers found fine food and comfortable beds. Dolly won early fame for her handicraft. Her woolen homespun linen and dyes of delicate blue, her golden butter, rich cheese and maple syrup were much sought after by the “city folk.” After 50 years of storm and sunshine, pinching poverty and substandard comfort, Dolly said, “Hayes is well enough, but 50 years is long enough to live with any man.” Dividing their possessions, Dolly and Hayes separated and left this valley.”

These words moved me so much that I wrote them down to reread whenever I get too ambitious.

Suffice to say, Hayes was not responsible for the breakup. The daily grind of housework eroded the marriage: the never-ending pile of laundry to scrub at the washboard by the stream; the dishes stacked near the hand pump; the unmade beds; the cobwebs in the outhouse; the batches of watery maple syrup, curdled cheese and butter that refused to churn; fingers stained a delicate blue; scratchy woolens on the loom…

My mother told me that my grandmother was a meticulous housewife. But there were times when she was in the middle of scrubbing the floor with the bucket at her side, and my grandfather asked her if she wanted to go for a ride. The bucket was left where it stood. She knew the secret to a happy marriage.

So whenever I get that overwhelming urge to clean, polish, scrub and fix things, I think of Dolly toiling for 50 years, only to call it quits and send Hayes packing.

History is a great teacher, and I plan to profit from Dolly’s mistakes.