The Farmhouse
The Farmhouse
Memories, while they last...look like old photos in my mind.
The Frontier Psychiatrists is a lagging health themed newsletter in the “hysterical realism” space. Today is a short piece of writing. It’s not apropo of much. It will be illustrated with the real photos taken by your author in the very place this short scene was written about.
The path that led to the farmhouse was obscured if you didn't know what to look for. There was a long bike path between the township of Amherst and North Hampton. That's what you call the town in New England—a township. I'm not sure what the difference is.
There was a path, but it was originally just for walking. I don't know what distinguished one path from another kind of path prior to the advent of college kids on bikes, but it hadn't really designated a bike path. For the theoretical purpose of cycling. This was an era before cell phones. So if you were walking or riding a bike on the bike path, you were dead to the world. And no one expected you to be alive to it. It was understood that people would be available sometimes and not available other times.
The place that I liked to go, to f- off, and disappear to the world, had an exit that didn't look like much of anything from that bike path. There was one section where it went over a stream, and I knew that right after a little bridge over the stream if you took a hard left and circumvented a rock that looked like it blocked the way but didn't, there was another accessory path. That path was narrow and sometimes overgrown, particularly in the early spring. By fall, things have died down a bit. In that, many of the leaves have died. This particular fall, after a year of utilizing the bike path without a bike and another couple of months in the second year of college, I left the path with a very heavy camera case and tripod. I don't know what was wrong with me. That's a lie. I know what it is. I'm particular. I don't have a problem with schlepping things that are needed for particular activities.
I enjoy activities that require a lot of kit.
The tripod was made by a company called Manfroto. They are Italian. And they make very Italian tripods. This tripod was designed to support the weight of an extremely heavy camera. Which is what I had in my hand. In fairness, it was a box, that carried an extremely heavy Camera, and it's associated accessories, and had a piece of tape, across the side come out with marker on the tape. The marker clearly indicated something very reassuring, I hoped, to authorities. It read, in large black print letters:
“not a bomb”
That should calm everyone's nerves.
Tripping slightly, I put down the box and readjusted the tripod on my back. In subsequent years, this tripod would be lost. I would have to buy another one—this subsequent tripod was made of carbon fiber. The initial tripod could've been made of carbon fiber if I had had a shred of respect for myself.
This auxiliary path was about a foot and a half wide because paths didn't have regulatory standards around their width when they simply meandered through woods. After about five minutes of robust strides, with some stumbling on my part, and about a 3% grade upward, I eventually terminated on the clearing.
It was almost perfectly circular. This is in my memory only. I'm sure it wasn't a Perfect Circle. Ovular was an overestimation. But in my memories, it is circular. So I'm just going to say it was perfectly circular. You're going to believe it. Because that's the kind of trust I'm building beween us, as author and reader. I'm going to say a thing is perfectly circular, and you're going to understand that it's worth believing it was perfectly circular. It makes for a better story. You put your trust in me, when it comes to “a good story.” Both of us are in a position where if I write “it's perfectly circular,” well, then, for your mind, and your enjoyment reading, it's going to be perfectly circular. It doesn't matter what the truth is or was. It might even be perfectly circular today if the right trees got knocked down or the right bushes grow.
In the middle of this perfectly circular clearing, which measured about 800 yards in diameter and was more or less astride the top of a hill, what is a farmhouse. It was in the northwest quadrant of the circular clearing. It did not have any part of its foundation on what would've been the center of the circle.
The farmhouse was old. 1800s Old. Nobody lived in it. It's hard to imagine why anyone would've lived in it. But nobody lived in it now. It was, I am told, the property of one of the five colleges. I assumed to be Amherst College, but I could've been Hampshire as well. Presumably, a farmer lived here at some point.
The curious thing about the clearing was that the grass, or at least much of the grass, had been mowed. It wasn't clear who mowed it. It wasn't clear how they got a mower here. It might not even have been an electric mower. But it has been grass. And it has definitely been mowed. Not… recently.
Mowing timeline uncertainty notwithstanding, I picked up the not-a-bomb case, readjusted the Manfroto tripod, and continued walking toward the northwest quadrant of the Perfect Circle, where R. was waiting.
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