Many years ago we lived in a farmhouse, which sat at the base of 200 acres of sloping hills in Columbia County, two dairy farms and some six miles west, of the Massachusetts border. I had come across it one morning looking for a shortcut, on a whim. There it stood, a humble sentinel of pasture long overgrown by saplings, shrub, and hawthorn. Its windows beckoned in endearing smiles of six-over-six, despite the awkward gaps where one or two were missing. The house was old, but not decrepit. Cedar clapboard dressed three sides in weathered-brown. The fourth, which stoically faced north and up the hill, was faded to a softer, wizened gray. Its fireplace had long been lost and with that had gone a portion of its pride. And yet it stood after seven years of solitude, patient and unassuming. It was its self-effacing fortitude, I think, that won me over.
The dirt-floored basement was the only part of the house with remnants of its past inhabitants. Narrow, rough-cut wooden shelves along two fieldstone walls were lined with dusty jars containing the probability of pickles. The others were filled with applesauce, or perhaps, tomatoes. It was difficult to tell—but they were prolific. The heaps of jars that weren’t full, spilled out of many mildewed cardboard boxes, whose bottoms dissolved when I tried to lift them. In one of these I found a little oil lantern. Its etched-glass base was garnet colored, and fit perfectly into the cup of my hand. Once scrubbed and filled with oil, I set it on the kitchen table, and there it stayed. It was the first light lit in the morning, and the last blown out at night in the years we lived there.
