Last Look Around
A geography of departure by by Tim Brookes
It’s something my father taught me, something I’ve taught my daughters: before you leave a house, or a bus, or a train compartment, take a last look around. Make sure you haven’t forgotten something.
Which is why I’m standing on the second-floor deck outside our dining room, looking out over the valley in northwestern Vermont where we’ve lived for the last eleven years. In two weeks’ time we’re moving back into the city–Burlington, that is, which passes for a city up here–and I’m taking a few moments out from the mania of organizing and packing to step out here, to look around and make sure we’ve made the right decision. I have that nagging unease, that sense that something important might be left behind.
It was the view from this deck that sold me on the place. The house itself lay down below the height of the road, small, undistinguished, its siding painted Vermont barn-red, its trim a rather weathered white. The rooms were arranged upside-down: the bedrooms were downstairs in the half-underground lower level, and upstairs was the kitchen-dining-living-room, with hardwood floors and a high ceiling. Light flooded in through sliding French glass doors that opened onto a second-floor deck, and the deck overlooked the land: flower beds, a lawn, an overgrown meadow and then a mixed woodland of pine, spruce, maple, birch and a dozen other kinds of tree that filled the heart of the valley and rose to a low range of wooded hills. Ten acres of this came with the house.
Ten acres. In England, where I grew up, you can’t own ten acres unless you are an Earl, or are sleeping with an Earl, or are the outcome of someone sleeping with an Earl. I barely looked at the house. I looked at the land, and saw everything my mother had ever planted in a garden, plus everything that she had always wanted to plant in a garden, but had never had garden enough. I saw blueberry bushes, and immediately bought a couple. I saw apple trees, and blackberry bushes, and grape vines, and a vegetable garden. A wet spot some seventy yards from the house might make a pond, with Japanese maples and a weeping willow. Anything was possible.
That was the vision, and that’s why I’m now out on the deck again, to try to weigh the real value of that view, of this place.
My first thought is that I love this view as much as I did when I first saw it, and that worries me. When we move into town I know I’ll miss ineffable sway of the great trees in the slightest wind, conducting the slow music of the valley. I’ll miss the steadily-approaching storm front; the astonishing moments when the sun breaks through beneath the evening clouds and bursts like blood on Brigham Hill.
I’ll miss the animals: deer, rabbit, squirrels, chipmunks, moose, the midday drone of crickets and the evening drone of frogs. And the birds! Goldfinches, hummingbirds, cardinals, blue jays, nuthatches, titmice, chickadees, starlings, red-caps, red-winged blackbirds, grackles, juncos, whole families of wild turkey, the invisible snipe winnowing its wings overhead.
Yet thinking in such general terms romanticizes the place. It doesn’t help me work out if I’m making the right choice. I need to look more specifically. Let’s do this in an organized fashion, let’s start with the horizon and move closer, adjusting the focal length from the romantic toward the immediate, the practical.
At once it becomes clear that the view is not what it seems to be, nor what it was. The low ridge of hills opposite, the Brigham Hill ridge, was entirely wooded when we moved out here. Now houses–mansions, in many cases, with five or six bedrooms apiece–have been punched into the hillside, and stare back across the valley at us. The whole ridge is starting to look less like landscape, more like landscaping.
The forest that conceals the heart of the valley is probably safe for the time being. Some of it is wetland, but mostly the ancient, mossy ledge is just too close to the surface–expensive to remove, impossible to use as drainage. There just aren’t enough patches of gravel to support septic systems and leach fields. So it will stay, and the hawks and owls will continue to return to the tall trees, diving down into the surrounding meadowland for mice and rabbits.
The open ground between the forest and the foot of our yard is probably also safe, more’s the pity. Fifty years ago this was all farmland and pasture. As the family farms have died off, the forests have returned, and anywhere not under forest has become an unmanageable wasteland, acre after acre of reed canary grass, seven feet tall and tough as bamboo, interspersed with goldenrod, thistles, vetch and young alders along the wet lines. Only a farmer ever had the equipment to clear and maintain this much land. Even the families that have bought lawn tractors–which is pretty much everyone except us–have only been able to cultivate a couple of hundred feet back from the road frontage. The rest of our ten-acre parcels is just more land than anyone can manage, and it has turned to wilderness. In June you can see and taste the air, thick with seed and pollen. It’s impossible to keep a flower or vegetable bed free from these paratroops, blown in on the wind, landing and occupying every square inch of turned soil. All my family now suffers from seasonal allergies, even those who came here having never sneezed in their lives. It’s one reason we’re leaving.
Let’s move closer. Our yard, such as it is, lies between the windbreak that lines the north side of the house and the line of blue spruce that marches down the south-side property line, on my left as I look from the deck. Most of it is lawn–or rather looks like lawn from up here. Close up, it’s more like a jungle cut off at the ankle. Riddled with tiny springs, impossible to mow until it dries out in June, by which time the grasses and weeds are three feet tall and already seeding. When I first looked at the yard I imagined a hammock, a picnic spot, flower beds, vegetables, soccer with the girls. Now what I see is the mowing-line of the lawnmower and I’m down there with sweat trickling down my back and into my shorts, trudging round and round the yard, the blade choking on the June thicket. Yesterday my wife came in exhausted, sweaty and covered with grass fragments, collapsed onto a stool and said, “I’ll never have to mow that lawn again.” She can’t move back into town soon enough.
What of the fruit trees and bushes I imagined, the vegetable plots, the perennial borders? I can’t begin to calculate how many hours of youthful energy I put into those visions, turning heavy soil with a fork and spade, hauling up weeds by the roots, flinging stones off into the forest. Yet after eleven years there are only two visible remnants of all my efforts.
The first, just visible down in the bottom right-hand corner of the yard, is a tuft of green above green–the top leaves of gooseberry bushes, struggling above the ragged stockade of reed canary grass and thistles. That whole corner was the site of my first garden, my first patch of fruit bushes, where I tilled, raked, planted and weeded every spring and summer until I realized how clayey and wet the soil was. At the same time I discovered the calculus of proximity: everyone in my family, even my daughters, loved gardening within a twenty-foot radius of the house. Every step farther away, and the frequency of our attentions dropped rapidly toward zero.
The other fruit-and-veg relic is a strange wooden oblong, right in the middle of the lawn, under an ash tree. Fifteen years ago, it was the box for a bunk bed I made my first daughter, Zoe. Over the years it lost its legs and came down to floor level when my second daughter, Maddy, didn’t like the height. Then she moved on to other beds and I took it outside, filled it with sand and made her a sandbox to go next to the swingset I built, but she outgrew the sandbox and hated the insect life the back yard supported. The structure finally hit stride two summers ago when I realized that it contained the lightest, cleanest soil on the property, perfect for carrots, radishes, lettuce. Now, just as we’re about to leave, its soil is striped with bushy green lines, even as the wooden frame is starting to decay. It is a perfect garden feature, an accommodation between design and Nature.
The view says everything about my floral ambitions, too. At the head of the yard, right beneath the house, the flower beds, built in section using railroad ties, reach out left and right from a set of wooden steps that descend from the upper lawn to the lower. I weeded and replanted these beds every year for seven years, rooting up the invading grasses, the fledgling maples, the wild grade, brambles and ground ivy.
The result is a strange, bittersweet sight. Isolated clusters of brilliant color–poppy, columbine, giant allium, azalea, bleeding heart, Asiatic poppy–burst above a tough scrub of nondescript weeds, flowering briefly like a swimmer not waving but drowning. Only the day-lilies had the muscle and the density to hold their own ground, so each year I broke them up and spread them around the house in a skirt of green and orange.
I had one, and only one vision that broke through into physical reality and clung on: an ornamental pond, five feet long, in a small hollow at the southwest corner of the house. Our leaving is bringing out its best: violets and forget-me-nots bloom all round the slate waterfall, the flag irises and the pink astilbe are coming into bloom, and the hostas will follow them. The goldfish are ten times as big as when I bought them, and the local frogs have found the pond and taken up residence. This is gardening on a scale I can manage; in a couple of years it may be the only sign I was ever here.
Leaning on the rail, trying to take in the whole view, it strikes me how misleading it was, and is, and perhaps always will be. The best times we had, out in the yard down there, were never in summer, but winter. With the ragweed and the autumn wasps finally gone, we went out as a family, throwing snowballs, sledding down the snow-buried steps and flattening out a run that just missed the bluebird houses on the galvanized poles and ended up in the welcoming but astonishingly prickly branches of one of the spruce. Once we rented a portable hot-tub for Maddy’s birthday and half a dozen eight-year-old girls in bathing suits leaped in, warmed up, leaped out into the deep snow, squealed and leaped back in again, over and over, for more than an hour.
This ten acres says, inaudibly but clearly, a message about home ownership, and perhaps about our whole tenure of life: it says that a home is less what it is and more what it might be. Every property is a garden of the mind, a garden of good ideas and good intentions.
Finally I get it: what I’ll miss about this place is not the place itself but the possibility that it might become something else. What thrives most in this soil is dreams and intentions, yet the view from the deck is full of good ideas now abandoned: the trellis that was never entwined with morning glories, the pear trees that never fruited, the tree-house that was outgrown, the slate path that was overgrown.
Hanging on the birch tree, the epitome: a multicolored hammock that speaks to everything I wanted from this plot of land, a place to lie in the sun and read a book, sip some lemonade, surrounded by flowers and growing fresh fruit and vegetables. Between the pollen, the weeds, the flies, the wasps, the aging knees, the lack of equipment and money, it never happened–and now it won’t.
I can’t stop staring at that hammock, becoming increasingly aware of the trap: the bitterest loss comes from giving up not what is, but what might have been—the same sense of possibilities that animates us, gives us direction, pushes us beyond anything that is reasonable. The clump of flag irises I finally persuaded to grow down below the birch tree are now in full Tyrian flower, but I can let them go. The thing that makes me sorry to leave, sorry almost to the point of tears, is that stupid hammock.
This is my last look around. No, I don’t think I’ve forgotten anything. Time to go.
This essay was first published in Vermont Magazine.
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