Bed and Chicken Dinners

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Brochure (4)During the early 20th century Fort Pelham Farm was a bed and breakfast of sorts as well as serving home cooked meals.  This is a brochure that Olive had in her scrapbook and I thought I’d share it.

Brochure (3)The brochure itself is small, maybe 3″ x 5″ on a textured yellow stock and gives quite a bit of information on a small space.

Brochure (1)As I was reading it this morning I was thinking how nice it would be to have a view of the hopper from the house.  It is completely grown in now so the only view we now have is trees.  Although I have noticed that part of the view just down the road (when the leaves are off of the trees) includes the windmills in Savoy which I can’t say that I’m a fan of.  So maybe it’s better that we have the trees that way I’m not angry that someone has invaded my space albeit from afar.

Brochure (2)The back of the brochure probably fascinates me the most.  “Modern electric power plant”?  Need a little more research into that.  Running water, modern bathroom?  Hmmmm . . .  Then there is the way the entire upstairs is set up.  You have to be pretty comfortable with strangers to all be staying in the rooms upstairs.  There is no hallway between any rooms so you need to walk through other peoples bedrooms to get anywhere near the stairways.  I’m making an assumption that what is now the upstairs bathroom was once a bedroom.  I do remember my father talking about a water holding tank in the attic over the ell which they used for water pressure.  Their water was spring fed and there was a huge cistern in the cellar as well.

Then there are those dinners.  We donated a sign for chicken dinners to the Rowe Historical Society a number of years back.  I have photographs of what is now the living room set up for dining.  It’s difficult for me to imagine cooking for a crowd in the kind of kitchen they were using at the time.  And what kind of flock of chickens did they have?  Must have been substantial unless they bought dressed hens somewhere else which I’m kind of doubting.  I also looked up the value of $3.00 in 1900 just to get a little perspective.  It amounted to $79.10.  They were making fairly good money with their little endeavor – almost $400 per person per week.  You just have to consider that it was a seasonal retreat for people.

Dining Room at Fort Pelham Farm 1930's (7)The photo above is of the dining room.  The floors and layout are still the same and I have to tell you that I wouldn’t mind having the rocking chair in the foreground.

Dining Room at Fort Pelham Farm 1930's (2)I look at these photographs and am amazed at how little the house has changed.  When we do something to it we try to keep within the character of the house.  It’s really too beautifully built to mess with.  We have returned to eating in that room, dividing it into different living spaces.  It’s a wonderful place to entertain friends and family.  Now I just need to figure out how to charge $26.27 for a creamed chicken dinner.

 

 

Homeowner’s ADD

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130512 Heat Gun

 

I’m not fond of this time of the year.  I’ve come down with a bad case of homeowner’s ADD.  I have a theory that everyone has Attention Deficit Disorder but for me it’s really apparent at certain times of the year.

Part of the problem with the home owning part is the house in Rowe does not have heat upstairs (or power for that matter) so any projects that I want to do have to be done in spring, summer and early fall (or just bundle up while you’re doing it).  Last week I had a conversation with brothers-in-law Mike.  He’s working on a house just up the road from ours and swears that whoever built the one he’s in built ours.  There is the same intricate woodwork. We talked about stripping paint.  I have used all kinds of methods of stripping paint, all involving some rather harsh chemicals but he’s been using a heat gun.  Hmmmmm . . .

I had Bill get a heat gun because I have a small room that once had carpet glued to it.  The carpet was removed years ago but the mastic stayed.  This room is above the living room and I had visions of using a chemical remover and having it leak through the floor onto the new ceiling below – not good.  I tried using this head gun to get the mastic off and it was BRILLIANT.  You can only remove a little at a time but once you’re rolling it goes fairly quickly.  The disadvantage is that I have to sit on the floor in order to do it.  It’s hard on the back so I can only do it for an hour or two before I have to give it up.

The weather this past weekend was really not conducive to working outdoors.  When the sun came out I tried to pull weeds in some of my flower beds but the black flies were so thick that it wasn’t pleasant at all.  I would come in out of the clouds, both rain and flies, and run down my mental list of the wants and needs indoors.  Most of them run into the wants like the floor upstairs but then there is the matter of turning what was once a bathroom into a pantry.  This involves removing the toilet and sink and all respective piping (after removing all of the junk that’s accumulated in there for the past year).  That little project is rather pressing at the moment because we will soon be coming into preserving season and I want that finished before it starts.  I need an inventory of canning supplies as well as making sense of a large closet that’s been used for a pantry for a number of years. Making sense of it is being kind, I can’t find anything in it and every time I cook something I waste a lot of time digging around looking for that special something I KNOW is in there somewhere.

The wood shop has been cleaned up in the past week and I was thinking about that side table that I really need to make for the living room.  That sounded like more fun than stripping floors and moving toilets.  I restrained myself because I knew if I went out to the shop I would never come back in and those inside projects would be still calling my name.

The thing is that I also spent a good deal of time weaving and rug hooking this weekend – going from one to the other.  I think I need medication.

130512 Floor StrippingBut does this look like fun to you?  Good thing it’s a very small room.

 

A Love Letter

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900601 Mom & Girls (2)

 

I’ve been given time alone for Mother’s Day.  Doesn’t sound like fun to many people but sometimes being alone can be quite an awesome treat.

I remembered these two photographs earlier this morning and wanted to share.  They were taken in 1990 by a dear friend of mine.  I think I had her take them for a Father’s Day gift.  They are also two of just a handful of photographs taken of me with the girls over the years. I treasure them, they speak of the happiness that was ours all the time they were growing up.

They’ve turned into wonderful, brilliant, kind women.  I’m more proud of them than anything else in my life.

On Mother’s Day children come together to celebrate the woman who brought them up.  I’ve never had a real fondness for Mother’s Day only because I’ve always felt that my children were such a gift to me.  For years they were my photographic muse.  They grew up in costumes, in studios, at parks – always with a camera in front of them.  The yearly Christmas card was what I strove for each year, anxiously waiting for the reviews.

I watched them go through their childhood, teenage and young adult years with joy and trepidation.  We all know how hard life can be and you silently hope that your kids won’t ever go through some of the things you’ve been through.  You try to guide them in a direction that will make them happy and content adults.  You encourage each one of them in their interests, nurturing those little sparks.

I hear many of my younger friends with small children of their own now talk about the annoyances of day to day life and I remember it was hard balancing everything in your daily lives.  I want you to know it’s all worth it, it may not seem so now, but it is.

So my children are now adults, I’ve been through the empty nest, I am growing in a different direction.  My life is actually the accumulation of many smaller lives, I think we are all like that.  I see mine as sort of a pie chart sectioned off, it’s not a whole yet but I can see each section as a different phase – who I was with, what I was doing.  They are all in different colors.  The biggest part of my pie chart at the moment is motherhood and it’s bright red.  It stands out.  It was the best thing ever.

So this mother’s day I’m not celebrating mothers, I’m celebrating children, my own. For without them this day would not exist.

900601 Mom & Girls (1)

 

Pear Blossoms

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IMG_20130511_104220I wait eagerly for this each year.  The pear tree blossoming in the back forty.  It is always so beautiful, this year more so because I finally got down there to prune it.  Bill and I drove the tractor down next to the tree and took turns lifting each other in the bucket at different angles to cut off the suckers.  This tree has never been pruned and was rather overrun.  I used the lopping shears and he used his smallest chain saw.  It was more than a little scary being 15+ feet off of the ground and moving into a tree.  I think Bill’s ride was probably a little scarier since I don’t drive the tractor that often.  My ride was fairly smooth backwards and forwards, up and down.  Bill’s on the other hand . . . let’s just say next time he’ll probably opt for a ladder.  At Old Sturbridge Village they always said to prune your fruit trees so a cat tossed into it wouldn’t hit any branches.  Fruit trees like a lot of air.  With any luck we will have more than the one pear we got last year.  The spring has been more “normal” this year with a more gradual warmup so the blossoms didn’t come out too early.  As long as we get some pollinators out there we should be okay.

The patches of what looks like white in the field are bluets.  We always put off mowing the field until these have gone by, the patches get bigger every year.  They are like clouds in the grass.

It’s a drizzly, rainy day today but everything is looking wonderfully green and lush.  Something about it just soothes the soul after such a long, cold winter.

The Frustration of Food

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ChickensToday’s level of farming ignorance is unprecedented in history—including all time and all cultures. Never have so many people in a civilization been able to be this far removed from their food umbilical. 

Joel Salatin

An acquaintance of mine, Jenna Woginrich of Cold Antler Farm just received her order of 45 baby chicks today and posted part of an article written by Joel Salatin in response to those who would criticize the practice of sending chicks through the mail.  Joel has the ability to explain in very simple terms why it is possible to have chicks comfortably make the trip from his farm to your house and remain perfectly healthy.  He also wrote this article out of frustration and I’m sure that anyone that raises animals for food can appreciate that but I think everyone needs to read the article.   The article is called  Rebel With a Cause: Anthropomorphism Against Farms, take a few minutes to read it, maybe read it to your kids, you will all learn something.

I grew up when most of our meat was grown ourselves or my father shot in the woods.  Sounds backwards and like I am some kind of hick doesn’t it?  I think something is lost when you don’t make an effort to know where your food comes from.  I believe you have to see their faces, understand what they are and what they give to you, sustenance.  I believe you need to know the kinds of lives that these animals have led and what kind of deaths that they have had in order to make peace with the fact that you are an omnivore and flesh is part of your diet.  Factory farming is farming at its worst, the only thing this is about is the almighty dollar, produce as much as you can as cheaply as possible.  It’s all about volume.

The frightening part to me is now everything you can buy in a grocery store comes from some sort of high volume farming situation.  If you want to know what is in your food you need to seek out the farmers of every single ingredient, visit their farms if possible and buy it directly from them.  I am fortunate to live in an area where there are many farmers of various kinds.  There is a small, family run dairy right down the street from my house in Enfield.  Smyth’s Trinity Farm takes dairy farming to a new (old) level in my mind.  I go there to pick up my dairy products and see all of the girls either in the pasture or in the stanchions in a very clean barn chewing their cuds and seeming very content.  All of their products are processed right there.  Once you start drinking and cooking with their milk, half and half and cream you will never go back to what passes as milk in the grocery store, you realize that you are being lied to about what they are selling you – it looks like milk but it doesn’t taste like milk.

Maybe that’s the problem, we’ve been lied to for so long that we now see what passes for food and something good and wholesome because it says so on the box.  We’ve lost our way, we really don’t know what is good and what is crap.  The gap seems to grow wider everyday.  If you’re reading this you could maybe Google GMO corn, or Monsanto, or the difference between wheat 20 years ago and now.  I can promise you it’s not pleasant reading, any of it, but it pays to educate yourself, you need to know what’s happening to us because of the profitability of big Ag.

Someone that reads my blog commented on what I really eat and if I was somewhat of a hypocrite.  In a word, yes.  I think we all are complicit in the problem with factory farming on every level.  I cook at home a lot of the time from scratch but even those recipes handed down for generations use ingredients that are now questionable.  It would require me to do a LOT of research to make some of my favorite meals from total scratch and I have not figured out how to replace American Cheese . . . sigh.  So I may not always cook as fresh and local as I want to for every meal but you can be assured that I think about and calculate what is going into it.  Then I make a decision about how bad I want that meal and at least know (and try to justify) what I’m ingesting.  Sometimes that’s the best you can do.

The Magic Window

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SophieSophie is a dog that is wound a little tight.  She’s very nervous and barks at every little noise she hears.  She feels as though she needs to be in the middle of everything but can be so noisy that she often is left behind when those little trips happen.  I just don’t want to listen to her barking.

One of the things that sends her into a crazed state is what we refer to as the “magic window”.  Cait believes that is what all dogs think of drive up windows at fast food places.  They know that you drive up and a person hands you food, usually french fries which is a special weakness for all dogs and children.  Sophie starts barking as soon as we approach the magic window and it escalates when she sees the person behind the glass.  It doesn’t matter that there’s food.  At least that is what I thought until today.

Once a week I go to the drive up window at my bank.  It’s a very small bank in what seems like the middle of nowhere.  Every time we go the teller gives me cookies for the dogs.  We just started going to this bank about a month ago and it is on the way to Rowe so Sophie is always sitting in the front seat next to me. The first time we stopped she lost her mind when the teller appeared in the window.  She opened the drawer and there were two milkbones in it.  I gave one to Sophie and one to Chester.  The teller gave me two more with the receipts.  Sophie stopped barking.

Since that time Sophie has not barked once when we’ve gone to that drive through.  This seems to be somewhat of a miracle to me.  Maybe it’s not just the cookies, maybe it’s the teller. All I know is this is the only window I’ve found that is truly magic.

Weaving Wednesday 6

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IMAG0543-1

 

Last night at class I started by winding the warp onto the warp beam for the Maltese Cross throw that I’m making.  The warp is JaggerSpun Maine Line 2/8 wool yarn (it’s yummy).  This is my first foray into wool and it behaves a little differently than cotton – it’s “sticky” so extra care was taken as the threads came through the lease sticks.  The warp is 36″ wide so it’s just fitting on the loom.  This loom is the same loom that I have in Rowe.  I’m seeing many wool projects in my future, mainly because I just love the feel of the yarn.  Somehow loving the feel of it makes every part of the process that much more enjoyable.

IMAG0544These are the chained warp threads from the front of the loom as they are being wound onto the beam.  I warp from the back to the front.

IMAG0550This is the view from my seat as I was threading the heddles.  You can see a little piece of the draft hung on the castle of the loom, that’s my instructions, it shows what thread goes into what heddle in order.  There are a total of 432 threads in this particular warp, I had half of them threaded by the time I left last night.  Next week I will be finishing up the threading and sleying the reed.

It seems like such a production when you try to describe it to someone but I find all of it to be very relaxing.  I need to concentrate to make sure threads are in the right order, and they aren’t crossed.  The perfectionist in me tries to make sure everything is in order so when I throw my shuttle the first few times I’m not looking at it in disgust trying to figure out how many mistakes I have to fix before I can weave.  This is where I think the perfectionist trait pays off, weaving is very unforgiving.  If it’s wrong, it’s wrong.  Of course some of those errors quite possibly are only things that I would see – but I would see them from across the room.

 

Pay it Forward

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130429 (7)

All along the Mohawk Trail through the town of Charlemont someone planted daffodils years ago.  It’s probably a 10 mile stretch of the road on the north side where there are clumps of various types of these flowers.  I look forward to seeing them every year and am always sad to see them go.

Daffodils also grow in what seems to be random places.  You drive by what may once have been someone’s home, now gone and there are daffodils blossoming on what may have once been their front yard. I find the resiliency of these flowers amazing.  Not only do they come back year after year they multiply.  A few turn into hundreds.

This is one of the things I’ve learned about gardening over the years – it’s slow.  Whenever you are planting perennials, shrubs or trees you always have to think years down the road.  Don’t plant things too close together or you will end up digging them up.  Take into consideration the spread of some plants before you plant them.  I have echinacea that takes up a good part of a garden now, that was the intent.  It has other things growing with it but I love that sea of pink in the summer.

Bill thinks the idea of planting new maple trees in the front yard of the house as pointless because we won’t live to enjoy the shade.  I say plant them now so my grandchildren will have beautiful trees shading the front of the house in the summer like they did when I was a child.

Perennial gardens are gifts to future generations in my opinion.  Some of the gardens I have in Rowe were planted by my mother, most of the plants cames from her friends and aquaintances.  She planted them for herself and to beautify the property but as a gardener you know that she probably knew that the garden would go on long after she was gone.  I love being able to go through my flower gardens and know where the peony came from or the dark purple iris.  They came from people I loved dearly that are no longer with us.   I love my gardens because I remember a day spent with Bill or my sister sweating with a shovel or moving stones.  Year after year I will walk down the stone path and see how my flowers are filling in.  A few years from now I won’t have to worry about the weeds because the perennials will have taken over.  A few years after that I will be dividing things up and giving them away – to people I care about.  It’s all about paying it forward.

The Debate Over the Ethics of Photo Restoration

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Wonderful blog post on photo restoration. A must read for anyone interested in their family legacy of photography.