Coming Home Four - Marge Thaws the Water

Fourth post of a four-part narrative.

The memory is still strong as I retrace that long ago ride on Black Pete. The trail brings me near enough that I decide to check the spring. We no longer need the spring since we drilled a well, except as an excuse to go for a walk. My first walks to the spring were with my mother before I was old enough to bring Mr. Frost’s poem that I quote at the beginning of these posts. Instead, we brought my younger sisters and later my younger brother.

We have a good spring. I have never seen it go dry, though it tends to go back under ground and emerge in a different spot every 75 years or so. Our spring is almost exactly 1/4 mile up the hill behind the house. We have good pressure except when it gets clogged with leaves or dead frogs. Mr. Frost didn’t mention the frogs. I guess because that would be an illustration of what my old friend George Cobb would call “More truth than poetry.”

I can’t say just how far it is by way of the trails which wind their way up the ridges but I’m sure it’s quite a bit further with three little kids in tow. I know it’s a quarter mile “the way the crow flies,” which is the way the teenage boy drags the welder cable up through the snow because that’s how much welder cable Steve Adams said we used when he came out with his welder truck to thaw the buried galvanized pipe. This was a fairly common dilemma and solution in those times.

Fortunately, the buried pipe only froze that one time. But then there was the plastic pipe. Sometime before my time (1940’s possibly?) the spring moved about 500 feet south and because it was across ledge, one of the forebears placed plastic pipe on top of the ground. In theory, this was OK because we left the water running all the time anyway. I say in theory: remember those frogs? Debris or accidentally shutting off the water for more than a minute or so in the depths of winter would freeze the plastic pipe.

My dad wasn’t around to speak of when I was a kid, so when the water froze Mom would bundle up whatever kids were around and hike up the mountain through whatever snow was on the ground and drag the pipe down to the house. Then we would wind it through the rooms, back and forth, (Don’t kink it!) and leave it to thaw overnight with both ends in the bathtub. The next day we would reverse the process. The first six feet of pipe coming out of the spring box was steel and would need to be thawed, so we would gather dead branches from the pines that surrounded the spring and build a fire under the pipe. My mother would bring hot dogs which we would cook (or more likely burn) on green sticks. Needless to say, us kids thought this was an excellent adventure. It wasn’t until we were grown that we all said “Wait a minute. You don’t suppose Mom thought this was less fun than we did, do you?”

Actually, I knew how much fun it was. Somewhere around twelve years old, I took over the care of the spring including the frozen pipes. One very cold spell when I was in high school, the water froze and after school I hiked up and got the pipe, got it home in the dark and wound through the house. The next day, after school, everyone helped me get it unwound and out the door. You had to be very fast when it was that cold to get it all going uphill and drained before any water could refreeze in the pipe. I did that, dragged it up the mountain, don’t remember how deep the snow was, went through the whole wood gathering, steel pipe thawing fire, no hot dogs. Got the pipe hooked up, walked home in the dark and by the time I got back to the house my sister, Debby, had forgotten and shut the water off and it was frozen again. One of the advantages of having such a porous memory is that I have a hard time holding a grudge. This is a perfect example because I had completely forgotten this incident until Debby brought it up and said she had felt guilty about it ever since, 40 years or so.

Somehow, Marjorie brought us through all that without us thinking much at all about being poor, though thinking back I see that she thought about it a lot. I thought she rolled her own cigarettes because the rolling machine was so cool. She kept meticulous records of every cent. She found jobs that she could do and bring us along. A child care crisis is picking apples for 25 cents a bushel on the weekends because you need the money and they let your kids run wild so you don’t have to pay a babysitter. That was probably my first spending money. They paid ten cents a bushel for picking “drops,” another anachronism. About the only rule for kids was ”No throwing apples!”, so we had to spend quite a lot of time doing that, but eventually the lure of those dimes would inspire me and I would scramble around for a while filling wooden bushel apple boxes.

The orchard boss was Frank Bishop, a kindly, humorous man. In those days locals did all the picking, mostly women, and they had a lot of fun teasing Frank. My mom was too shy for that, but looking back I think he may have been extra kind to the woman with the pack of wild kids and no husband at home. I distinctly remember him hustling over to carry the tall wooden ladder for her between trees. At the end of a good day I might be able to show him 20 odd boxes of drops I had gathered and he would solemnly count out a couple dollars and a couple quarters into my hand. That was big money to me at the time.

Only later did I realize how poor we were and that was one of my mother’s great gifts to us. Through winter cookouts and apple picking and lots more physical and mental challenges, she shielded us from how hard it must have been for her. I wore my older cousins’ “hand me downs” and felt nothing but honored. My cousins, Dave and Donny were, after all, Gods.

We have resolved to only grocery shop once every two weeks during the Covid 19 shutdown which has reminded me that, once she had a regular paycheck, every other Friday she would cash it after work and buy groceries.We looked forward to those Fridays because there was apt to be ice cream. A&P Neapolitan, but we didn’t know there was anything else. She didn’t ration anything and we never worried about there being enough food. (though in retrospect, I bet she did sometimes) but we knew when that ice cream was gone that was it till next payday. Meanwhile, even members of her own family were telling her to sell the farm and get a place she could afford. Two hundred and fifty acres and a solid, if outdated, set of farm buildings would pay for something with town water, central heat and put money in the bank. Later when asked why she didn’t sell the place she said, “I never did anything to earn it, so I never felt like it was mine to sell.”

Now Mom was with my sister because Parkinson’s made it impossible for her to live at the farm on her own. She longed to be home. When I got back to the house after my walk, I got a fire going in the old wood furnace and spent the evening perusing the ancestors' journals. I had to decide if that five-generation history and that shelf full of journals mattered enough to change my whole life plan. In the end I decided it did. About 10 o’clock I emailed Mom. I told her if I could sell my farm in Barre we would move home and she could move home with us. The next morning she emailed everyone in the family. “We’re moving Home!”

  I was 55 when I finally figured out that this valley is my home. I can be a little slow on the uptake. It took 20 years of being elsewhere and a year of rediscovery. Until that year I never understood how anyone could be in a romance with two people at once. Because I loved the family farm in Sudbury and I loved our little farm in South Barre. That year when it looked like the farm was going to fall out of the family unless I came home I would go to Sudbury on the weekend and wander the pastures and woods and say, “I love this place, I can’t let it go.” And then I would go home to our beautiful little hill farm in South Barre and walk down to the waterfall and the beaver pond and say the same thing “How can I possibly let this go?”

How? With the help of the Vermont Land Trust. They helped me find and finance a wonderful young couple to take over the South Barre farm and turn it into a successful organic vegetable operation. They call it Bear Roots Farm because of my stories of bear sightings. And my Mom got to spend another four years in the home she loved in the little town where she was known and loved by all.

Sign next to Town Hall handicapped ramp

on Town Meeting Day