When you traverse the winding back road and reach the crest of a hill, you are met with a trio of rusted mailboxes and a pair of driveways. One leads to a small brick house, but you take the first, a beaten down gravel track that leads into the distance with no building in sight. You turn onto this well-worn path, your car doing battle with a minefield of potholes. On either side of the driveway, rolling hayfields make up the landscape, eventually giving way to tree lines and pasture fences. The pasture is empty now, but you can imagine a trio of horses staring at you as you continue your journey, two grays and one chestnut with splashes of white all over his coat. They snort at you but lose interest quickly.
A sign looms closer, bearing the legend: LINTON STONE FARM. You round a bend the property sprawls out before you. A white farmhouse guarded by a towering maple tree in the front yard sits atop a hill overlooking a little red barn and a mix-match of horse pastures. Parking your car in the triangular driveway loop, you get out and set foot onto a meticulously painted and well-loved Four Square court.
The place is deserted, but you can certainly feel the history of a place like this.
You walk to the hill leading down to the barn, and the pastures and you can imagine the place covered in snow and sledding children. The fence at the bottom of the hill, of course, poses a danger to any person who is unwilling to bail off their sled before experiencing full impact. Surely, this was the fate of many.
The inside of the barn echoes slightly, empty. Once, these stalls would eagerly await the return of horses from the pasture. In the meantime, water buckets must be dumped and refilled, and stalls must be scooped out.
The chicken coop near the house is empty as well, void of the bustling motion and noise of a dozen hens that had once been there. The children who had grown up in this house had watched these chickens hatch, raised them, and took care of them throughout the seasons. The kids would go out in the mornings when Mom needed an extra egg for a recipe in the hope that there was one left over. They would be afraid to face the wrath of a broody hen, the pain of a sharp, defensive peck.
A pole stands alone by the side of the kitchen where there had once hung a clothesline that operated by way of a pulley. Sunny, breezy days were once decorated by rows of T-shirts, dishcloths, and bed sheets swaying gently on the line.
Inside the kitchen, you find a floor of old, worn tiles that would be icy cold in the dead of winter. The cabinets are all closed and empty, although they had once held a whole host of pottery plates and bowls for stirring together brownie ingredients.
You move to the empty living room. This place had once held a piano and a dining room table big enough to comfortably sit the family of six. They all had a designated spot around the table even as the years when on and it became less and less likely that every child would be present for family dinner.
In another empty room, you can just remember the echoes of the TV’s speakers as they pumped out football games and parades and movies while the family lounged on couches or curled up on the carpet with a pillow and blanket. In those days, the moment you were on the floor, you would immediately be joined by a gray and blue pup eager to use you as a pillow. In the corner, where the plaster is peeling off the stone walls no matter how many times there was an attempt to fix it, you can see there was once a Christmas tree. The family would sleep in this room all together once a year when they put that tree up, falling asleep amid the twinkling lights strung along its branches.
The house shivers with memories of twenty-three years spent in this place. There is a crack running up a downstairs bedroom door because of all the times it was slammed in anger. There is a map of scribbled pencils lines in the corner from where a child decided to draw a map of a land that only he knows about.
You can feel it as you walk throughout the house, but I know it. I know of the moments that were shared in this place. I know that this was the place where four kids (and a plethora of our friends) grew up, were educated, and became the people that we are today. This place is marked by late night bonfires and summers spent swimming and cold winter mornings learning math lessons by the wood stove. We learned how to read and write. We built a half-pipe and tore it down to build a cabin. We hosted Halloween parties, Fourth of July parties, and parties when we just felt like partying. We fought and laughed and learned to deal with one another.
It was in our parent’s bedroom that my sister told us that she was getting married.
It was out in the driveway that my dad taught my brothers the how to forge metal and take care of horses.
It was in an upstairs bedroom of that white farmhouse that I was born, getting to breathe life and see my family for the first time within those walls.
We played in the mud and got lost in the woods. We grew up.
A year ago was when the final decision to move was made. The developers were coming soon to level the woods and turn our home into a construction site. Unable to bear witness of such destruction, we left.
There is a new home. Several actually, as the siblings grow old and babies are born, and everyone moves about a dozen times. This new home bears the marks of the old. We have the same plates, same pictures on the walls. It is easy to go a day without thinking of the old home, but so much is wrapped up in the memory of that place that it is impossible to avoid forever.
As you turn to leave the house, once so full of life, love, and family, you seem to gain one final glimpse of that family. They are younger than now, seated around a dinner table on Christmas eve. The daughter is laughing hysterically because of something the eldest son has said. The younger brothers are fighting for leg room under the table. The mother and father smile at each other, a little sad because they are the only ones who understand that this moment in life will not last forever.
If you see this, really see it, then preserve the memory. This home was a glorious place to grow up, and if all I can keep of it is the memory, then I will do my best to preserve it forever. Goodbye, Linton Stone Farm.
