The field in front

Kids will find all kinds of enclosures to make their own “houses”—bean poles, a shelf of mossy rock, or maybe the sweeping underneath of the front yard willow.

My children found “The Fern House”—a circle of interrupted fern nearly five feet in height that created a growing, green room in the old hay field below our home in French Woods. (For those unfamiliar with the northern reaches of TRR’s coverage area, French Woods is about five miles north of Long Eddy on Route 97 in Delaware County.)

It is the farm that I grew up on and now own with my sisters—which has been in our family since the 1840s.

For a time when my kids were younger (they are now 11 and six years old) the Fern House was a daily destination, an arching, dappled parlor in which to picnic on raisins and Oreos and play hide-and-seek. Interrupted fern will come up year after year in the same spot in its circular fairy ring shape and each year my children looked forward to its new growth.

The Fern House was often our first stop on the daily trek through the meadow which had become more milkweed and moss than hay field. We might visit the broken foundations and stone walls of the log cabin built by Jean Baptiste Prosquine (allegedly once a personal bodyguard of Napoleon ) before he moved to the hill and built the hemlock-floored house my family and I have now lived in for the past 11 years. We might search out the patch of wild thyme or examine a goldenrod gall. In season we would find the roses, gone wild from the bushes first brought on the boat from France. We might end up at the pond. We might extend our walk and pay homage to the sedentary (but still glamorous) log truck with the head lights smashed out.

All are treasures in the eyes of a child. Such are the treasures of an old farm.

The Fern House is gone now—a casualty in the continual process of claiming and reclaiming land (and place and memory). Tom Shea, the farmer who has been working to bring back our fields from their derelict state, plowed a patch to try planting oats a few years ago. Despite the loss of “The Fern House” it was a good experience and we all enjoyed watching the old combine Tom got running to harvest it.

With Tom’s lime, chicken manure, egg shells and frequent cuttings, the field is beginning to look like a hay field again and to produce more bales. This summer has been bad for hay—too wet, so cold—but I hope the field will yield at least three cuttings.

We enjoy the field in front and its continuing purple view. From our front porch we can see toothpick-sized windmills glinting in the sun at the wind farm overlooking Waymart, PA. We see the lights of new cell towers going up and the damage done to the trees by the forest tent caterpillar. The bob-o-links have come back to nest in the returning hay fields, aspen and pine encroach our overgrown pastures and beavers repaired the pond’s dam broken by the flood. So that all you can do is wonder about the claiming and reclaiming of things.

This is the first of my entries for my new (and first) column so generously offered me by TRR. “Root Cellar” will run once every four weeks and in it I hope to share a portion of my life and that of our community—cellar and attic—with you.