2005

The day after our nuptials, Bettina and I rented a four bedroom, two story house from the innkeeper where we stayed. It had been the post office, the general store and the gas station of a village called Debruce which was now a triangular crossroads with a central flag pole that flew no flag. The old Texaco pump was still in the yard mounted on a poured concrete slab that was imprinted with an 8" long bear's paw; along-side that, was an illegible date scratched in the wet cement. Our honeymoon was making this house our weekend home and exploring the Catskills while stopping at yard sales and bric-a-brac shops and picking wildflowers along the roadways.

Driving past country properties, the idea of buying a place arose; and a place for me was a farm with a barn and some land to walk on. Seeing an ad in the Times; I called the local realtor, took the directions, and drove from Liberty toward Jeffersonville to meet him. Finding the street sign which had four bullet holes in it, we turned off into a gray wood and climbed a steep, dark hill with dense budding birch and ash trees crowding the narrow curving road; when we got near the top, before the road leveled off, we were driving toward an opening of azure sky. Coming out of the trees into the sunlight, we found bright malachite hills. On the left, were hay fields sloping up and sloping down on the right, was a pasture with brown and white cows grazing behind 3 strands of rusty barbed wire loosely strung on crooked locust posts that lined the road. Driving on, we found the farm lane and turned right into dark hemlocks that touched overhead shutting the light out. Bumping along the lane to come out of the trees, we saw the house and barn on a hill in an expanse of open fields. This drive to farm had the same emotional curascurio that human life stories have; it was exhilarating going from light to dark, not knowing what would come next, but being incrementally pleased by our discoveries; and like a fairy tale, the journey ended in sunlight. I said to Bettina, "This is it."

The barn still had cows in it when we first saw the farm; but they had been sold when Bettina and I drove back from the closing in Kingston. While there, we had movers move our belongings from the house in Debruce to the farm in Swan Lake and this happened on that April day of our second wedding anniversary. We bought this farm for its rural charm, its seclusion, its views and the small pond, the orchard, the woods, the open fields, the rustic buildings, and for its radical difference from the 6th Avenue loft where we lived, and where I was comfortable except when Bob, the upstairs neighbor, played his bagpipes late into the night, playing as if he had learned his music from Philip Glass, which he had not. Looking back, we bought this place with a vengeance, from a desperation that only those shut up in a city can know: no longer would we measure our lives by square footage of Manhattan real estate, we would measure it by acres of land. Reasonably or not, we had come to a place called the country.

Eugene Wyatt