This is a photograph of the buildings on the West Bradford property as they existed when we made the deal in 1967. As you know -- children, grandchildren and other interested parties -- we are no longer in possession of this part of the property. It passed to Phyllis and Bruce in 1977 and then to Bruce entirely when he and Phyllis divorced in 1984 or thereabouts.
But this is how it looked to the photographer, whom I believe to be my brother Jonathan, when he stood on the near knoll looking westward. Much remains superficially constant but everything is different.
Still in place: the house and barn, the Red Duchess apple tree just to the left of the house and closer to the camera; the big sugar maple on the left, near South Road.
But to my eye, there's much that has changed. Hanging over the house is a very large, very dead elm. There's another infected and doomed elm to the right of the barn. Indeed, the property was sometimes called by us "Dead Elm Farm" when we spent our first summer there, in 1968. There's a chicken house, barely visible, to the right of the white clapboard milk house; there is also another outbuilding once used as a garage and a storeroom for wood visible between the house and barn; there's a porch of sorts at the street side of the house -- all these elements have been removed though they remain vivid in my memory.
But what you can't see, grandchildren, is more interesting than what is visible.
The property was owned for forty years by Tom Roberts, who was probably as old in 1968 as I am now. He knew that he was too tired and probably too resource-poor to maintain ownership. His wife, eight years older than he, was mortally ill, and Tom himself had only a couple of years to live. It was time for him to move on.
The house itself (supposedly built in part in 1856) was out of an earlier era. It lacked a septic system (it had only a cesspool, which was an open sewer into which untreated waste flowed and stunk.) There was a 15-foot deep dug well (you can see a bit of the topmost well tile and the concrete well cover just to the right of the apple tree) from which a very old electric pump pushed water up to an open copper-lined tank on the second floor of the house. There was no water pressure (because there was no pressure tank) but only a "gravity feed" to the faucets and toilet. The plumbing was rusted iron (in) and lead (out). There was no heating system -- the wood stoves that had heated the place were sold at auction before we took up residence. No insulation either, except (we later discovered) the piles of hazelnut shells that generations of squirrels and chipmunks had deposited in the spaces between the split lathe-and-plaster inner walls and the outer sheathing. The sills were rotten and the house was sagging in places -- although, as you can see, the roof line was still deceptively sound.
The barn was in even worse condition than the house. Its partial collapse was the reason -- the last straw -- that Tom Roberts sold out. During the previous winter, the rotted-out floor on the east side of the barn had given way, strangling three of Tom's eight cows in their stanchions. Tom was heartbroken -- he dropped more than one tear when he told us about the disaster. "I hooked them one by one to the tractor and dragged them out into the field, over there, and buried them." He pointed to a spot that would be just about the lower right hand corner of the photograph.
The barn, at first, was a scary place. It took us (Bruce and me) a couple of weeks to get up the courage to enter. It was a disaster area: giant spider webs, peeling whitewash, jumbled and distorted structures for dairy use, piles of twisted lumber. It's now been repaired and remodeled -- completely transformed. But I still treasure the memory of the way it was, at least after it wasn't in danger of further collapse. I miss the majestic 16' by 16' hemlock beams, the spacious haylofts, the hand hewn tree that served for a ridgepole.
Despite the fact that the buildings were way past their prime, barely functioning, I didn't think for a second that we had made a mistake in buying the place. I never thought of reversing course and selling out. I was totally at home from the first breath. I fell in love with the buildings, and even more so with the land.
When Althea took her very first walk on the property, just as we passed what we call the "meander" and crossed over the spill (now enclosed in a culvert) through which water from the swamp (now a pond) courses into the Baldwin Brook, she said, "This is too beautiful to be in private hands."
It's even more beautiful now.
[Addendum October 24, 2019. I suppose I should mention that the decision to buy the property was controversial. My father in particular, ever cautious, was adamant: you don't buy a second home until you've bought your first home. You have no idea what you're buying. The land has never been surveyed; you don't know the boundaries." His reasoning was perfectly correct, but all wrong. Buying the property was the best financial decision of my life.]