Trimming Grass and Weeds Around Old New England Property (Antique) Granite Landscape Fixtures - Part Nineteen - "Not Walking Up There"

Trimming Grass and Weeds Around

Old New England Property

(Antique) Granite Landscape Fixtures

Part Nineteen

"Not Walking Up There"

            If the bad taste is Thoreau dumping plaster behind his hut, Harvard’s ‘obtain more wood’ etiquette, new New England’s funky fantasy of landscape decoration using (industrial) cut granite to, for example, put the mail box ‘on’, ATVs ‘back trailing’ old New England properties, construction equipment backing up (“beep, beep, beep, beep”), commercial ‘rock dealers’ (“HARDSCAPE”) with their end of town strip store roadsides, dry masonry old stone wall tear downs, creepy new sandblast engraved granite ‘motto’ “signs”

And

            No one sitting on the porch

Playing scrabble

            By the sea

            Above the untended and unintentional

            “Wild roses’ ”

            Wind ruffled blossoms

            Shedding petals

            Anymore.

            I just “the Hell with you” and “park over there”?

            There is

No one walking in the woods

On old New England property

Anymore?

            “Popped my flip flop and

            NEED

            To get in to

            The Target

            End of the isle special

            With the ones I like

            Are the

            Marshmallow yellow

            Though I like the (marshmallow) GREEN ones

            Too.

            ...

            We can go after that.”

            Go where and ‘why bother’.  Just scuff along the walk way.

            Then take the sand path

            “That’s poison Ivy

            Ricky said”.

            Inland one half mile at the head of the salt marsh

            That is ‘over there’ from here at the beach

            Was where the FIRST frame house was built.

            It’s actually a whole mile ‘over there’ now that I look at it.

            We’re not walking up there today...

            Anyway, right along the top of the ridge from the cemetery;

            Where the ridge turns back to go inland,

            Is where that cellar hole is.

            It looks down to the river on the other side (of the ridge).

            They could come up the river to right below the homestead but

            The salt marsh over here; down below on this side; the OTHER side from the river, was what they wanted most:

            “CLEAR FIELD”.

            Anyway.  No one knows that’s there (the cellar hole).  Anymore.

I do and always look over at it when I drive by.  You can see it from the road.

The thing is

That the

            Angle

            Of the cellar hole shows how carefully they choose

            That site.

            Now

They’ve moved the original house up the hill and

            Re-built it bigger

            Across the road

            But that wasn’t done until,

            Like,

            The nineteen seventies.

            The old pound:

            That’s off of that red cape that’s just up the road.  But if you look from the cellar hole you can see the pound was right off behind that first homestead site.  People think now that it was a town pound and goes with that red cape.  The red cape was built in the nineteen nineties and the pound was part of the cellar hole homestead.

            They didn’t have a town pound where there was no

            Town.

            The reason the (colonial) homesteads had a “pound” is that they didn’t fence “IN” any animals.  IF they wanted a fenced-in-animal... they put it in the... (field stone walled... small... square... “BOX”) “pound” to “HOLD THEM”.  The rest of the time... the pigs, et al, went where ever they pleased.  They mostly ‘hung close’.  “Fencing” was originally done to ‘keep out’... of, like, the garden.  Not to ‘keep in’.

            It don’t matter.  We’re not walking up there today.  But you can see the old pound right from the road.

            My pound, on our place, is right off the back door to the homestead.  Right up above where it (the house) ‘sits on ledge’ (Part Six).  The rest of it (the surrounding land) was all open.  Then.  Now its has three cul-de-sacs and

            Twenty-eight houses

            ‘In there’;

            On it (the old farm land) “over there” (past the pound)

            That pound will still work if you put something in it.  Like a beef steer or pig.  No pig can clamber over the stone walls.  Also... the pound ‘sits on ledge’ so... a pig cannot dig out either.  Cows have trouble digging out too.

No one knows our pound is there and I don’t show it to anyone.

            A pound is an old New England property (antique) granite landscape fixture.

            “It’s pretty cool actually” this thirty something guy said to me.  I had just ‘dropped’ a modest size ‘standing dead’ old cherry tree just below the back wall of my pound.  He came up through the woods from the nearest subdivision cul-de-sac.  He’d “heard you”.  He was wearing camo cargo shorts, a camo ball cap, a Maine microbrew beer tee-shirt and black and orange sneakers with no socks.  All were soiled.  None were foul.  He asked me how long I’d had my (chain) saw.

            “It’s a big one.” He said.

            Then, referring back to my “a lot easier than with an axe” chain saw tree drop comment he queried “They really just used an axe?”

“That’s all there was.” I said.  “It was easier for them to pile up these field stones into a square walled pen then it was for them to fence a pen using trees and an axe.  The stones were right here and its easier to pile ‘em up then swing an ax.  Piling the field stones help ‘clear’.  Too.  Safer too.  They cared about safety.”

He looked at me and said “That’s like something they’d say on TV; like on a history channel or something”.

“That’s why he lives down on that cul-de-sac.” I said to myself later.

            I’d already thought about how I’d have to retaliate for his incursion into to my chain saw dream world by doing a drive-thru of his cul-de-sac world... you know... “SEE” his ATV he’s got for sale “IT’S ON THE TRAILER – THAT CAN COME WITH IT TOO” “parked” “out by the street”.  Then I got a grip on myself.  I don’t need to be nasty and do stuff like that.  He’s already buried in that ATV and he’s HAPPY being buried in it.  His wife wants him to sell it.  He don’t want to.  “GOES RIGHT UP TO FIFTY ON THE ROAD PAST THE MAIL BOXES”.

            Those are on granite posts.

            “I JUST LIKE GOING IN THE WOODS” he said.

            IF you get poison ivy by stepping off the sand path to the beach... does that mean that the beach ‘has recovered’ from earlier usage or... is the poison ivy invasive?  Is the poison ivy invasion equal to the sand path that is, too, invasive?

            Or was the sand path always there.

            And what about the trash that’s been dumped along the sand path in the poison ivy (‘litter’)?  Is that bad taste?

            I’m having trouble keeping this all straight.  It used to be I could just go outside and trim the grass and weeds around the (antique) granite troughs (Part One) and

            Call it a year.

            Every now and then some visitor would say “What’s that?” about a trough.

            No one ever notices the millstone (Part Three).  That’s because, as I made clear, of where it’s pitched.  And that it’s pitched.  And how that is the proper Wasp way to display an old millstone.  That’s my most exposed point when it comes to my rather extensive... collection... of old New England property (antique) granite landscape fixtures.  Although I have a healthy gathering ‘on property’, I, too, have a very vast gathering ‘scattered’ that I ‘visit’.  A lot of those have stayed with me forever.  Others ‘come and go’.  Like Tim’s cap stones he’s getting ready to ‘go on vacation’.  

If you have ‘granite steps’ I will... with knowing eye... check them out and, most probably, say nothing.

            I’ll do the same for a ‘half burial’ millstone.  The same for a tear-down-and-rebuild stone wall section.  Too.  It’s pretty hard to get even a flinch out of me these days when it comes to

            Old New England property

            (Antique) granite landscape fixtures.

            I do keep my collection well trimmed of

            Grass and weeds.

The End