“We stop at the old farmhouse to feed the cat, stepping gingerly over the threshold as if entering a museum called “home”. Someone else’s family archive etched into the floorboards, its particular waves of crookedness, unfamiliar & strange. “Look at this bedroom,” Nikki says, as we traverse the dim corridors, passing stuffed bookshelves, faded tomes of James Joyce all in a grouping, among other more random volumes, of an era. Life here had started long before I was born, I know, and I feel a sudden pang of loss. My grandparents left homes behind, largely due to the pressures of war, or death. Their original places were far across the sea, now likely covered over, with suburbs, or city sprawl, possibly even transfigured by boundary shifts, that long ago forced out their ethic kind. We would not ever have a lovely, quiet house in the country, for generations to grow up in, unless we started, today, from scratch. So be it, I think. As we stoop under a low beam, we find that the farmhouse bedroom holds a pair of classic twin beds, draped carefully with handmade patchwork quilts, their simplicity anchored by a steady light: two windows to the north, and one, to the east. The ceiling low, and safe. A palpable sense of being tucked in, or of a child crouching in the dark, peering out at fireflies in the backyard on a summer’s night, causes time to secede. I catch my breath, again, feeling the pain in my chest, of dislocation, of immigrant rootlessness. There is no way around it. Stepping out again, Nikki disappears to look for the cat. A small, sunny addition built on the south side, has allowed the beloved pet to find refuge in a cozy loft and her resident bed. I pass an old post, plastered with outdated wedding itinerary and horse show schedules, of scrawled notes written somewhere in the long past, still treasured for their minimal content, peppered with first names, like “Connie” and “Ren”. The fridge still mimics its predecessor, the icebox. To be honest, nothing is level. A step down is required, to gain traction, into the dining room. A long table, designed to seat eight, at least, sits comfortably taking up most of the room, next to a modest wood stove. My eye catches a huge map, the primary wall decoration, and this will occupy my attention, for the rest of our short visit. On closer examination, I’m baffled as I try to decipher how four quadrant maps, topological in nature, can be so well fitted together, and laminated into a seamless whole. not un-similar to formica, but translucent. Here we have an enormous bird’s eye view: of all the mountain peaks, lakes and ponds, marshes and forests, between Ripton and Goshen. I begin, with my finger, to trace the roads I know, only to find them petering out into nameless tracks and dotted lines that end, somewhere in between the two towns. This is yet more history, left behind, for inquiring generations to ponder. I’ve learned to check map dates at the bottom, and one quadrant says “1927”. Each of the four is dated uniquely, yet, somehow, they all describe the same place, moving through time. How a wilderness, or partial wilderness came to be inhabited, and driven by horses, then cars. Most of us are aware that this is where Robert Frost came up with poems, about fences, and neighbors, and snowy evenings. But, it feels more heavy, more ominous, more miraculous, somehow, when looking at these maps. I hear Nikki transferring her laundry from the farmhouse’s modern washer to its modern drier. It all seems surreal, as I struggle understand. My grandfather was firmly repatriated and had traded in shining shoes at his uncle’s tailor shop, for running a treadle sewing machine by 1927. Living within range of New York City, his world was almost urban compared to here, where thru roads remained hard to come by. In Vermont, the likes of “Horrid Mountain” were named appropriately, for the going over of things often meant trouble. Rooting here was an all-in operation. You needed to survive, first and foremost, if you wanted any offspring. “I can’t believe these maps,” I say, as Nikki emerges from the back of the house, having cleaned two cat boxes, and tidied up, while I was busy with geography. “Look at this,” she says, pointing to dozens of scrawled marks on a vertical timber, indicating the progressive heights of generations of children, by name. Again, I feel deprived of my lineage, irrationally so. “It’s not far to the gap,” I say. “and the pavement will be clear, and salted.” We get in the truck, and pulling out of the awkward driveway, look right and left for traffic. There isn’t any.”
