Trimming Grass and Weeds Around
Old New England Property
(Antique) Granite Landscape Fixtures
Part Eighteen
"Being Thinking"
(A)
As
there is no culvert on the bumpy... old... abandoned... road “into there”...
where that culvert should be ... the road is “washed out”. From there on “into” one used to
...walk. “Into” these days is by
petroleum ‘footprint’ sans... actual human footprint. Petroleum power slows little at the wash out. “Into there” is four season. Snow machine winters and... the delight
of “GETTING STUCK” in “MUD SEASON” (spring); “into there” is comprehensive. Nothing much ever ‘is taken’ and ‘comes
out of there’ ‘anymore’; it’s ‘all gone’ “BUT YOU CAN STILL SEE WHERE THE
CHIMNEY WAS” and... should one hunt it down and actually notice... “it”... the
‘old quarry’ “ON THE PLACE”.
Too. Any ‘valuable’ (“saleable”)
(antique) granite landscape fixture... including the select removal of ‘stone’
‘wall’ and ‘field stone’ “from the foundation” has been “took that” too.
When
I stand there; just past the crest of the hill ‘into’... it is not very far
‘down’ to the “SEE WHERE THE CHIMNEY WAS”. AS I am, there, standing... the first plate of the diorama
book... ‘being thinking’ I am... about that.
BY
the 1725 date this land had been English man “PASSED THROUGH”... for a
century... ‘here’ ‘on the coastal plain
Of
Maine.
I
‘Being
thinking’ of that forest HERE just past the washed out road crest “into there”
notice that I, too, crested ‘into there’ AT the
Exposed
granite ledge... that is still exposed ledge just as it was exposed ledge
before there was an English man’s pass through or ‘English settlement’. The forest, I know now from my shadowy
study of the “TREES” that are “about” (surrounding) the exposed ledge, is in
its (“remarkable”) ‘recovery’. NOW
(this 2014 date) this forest is EQUAL to the density and...
Reckless
wild mess that the original “TREES” were... “about” (surrounding) the
...granite ledge.
The
diorama book says that too... in the very first sentence of the text for the
first diorama: “The pre-settlement
landscape was not a stable, homogeneous, unchanging forest”. Then I be thinking after that sentence
that I ‘do see’ the ‘exposed (granite) ledge in the left bottom corner of the
diorama. Too.
Then
I am done with this first diorama.
Walking ‘down’ I, being thinking, turn the page to the second diorama as
I enter the ‘original settlement’.
I, being thinking, notice that ‘head pile’ of old granite field stone
that once ‘ended’ the ‘original wall’ of
Colonial
settler’s ...lone man with his pair of bare hands... granite field stone field
clearance... stones piled... there... then; as long a three hundred years
ago... I
Being
thinking... that...
Is
TOO FAR UP THAT WALL for that early date so, being thinking, that the true...
earliest piled field stone be ‘down close to the house’ (cellar hole).
I...
can not walk down that wall anymore for it (the colonial stone wall) has
been... now for one hundred fifty years... mangled... by, mostly, ‘logging’
and:
I
being thinking denote too
Muddied
by ‘them’ (the ATV) who will not run straight at the wall unless drunk but do
‘crunch over’ at ‘low spots’ back and forth for thrill driving into the mud
hole just beyond and then... back over again
And
again
Down
the old wall to the following their little tin signs that show how they, being
thinking themselves too, can follow a route of wet mud without getting lost let
alone ‘thrown’ when they ‘ram the wall’.
“Gosh
that FIRST man moved them ROCKS by HAND” is not thinking of I
Be thinking.
As
I pick my way down the wall and keeping in the original old field side with the
stones on my right I
Will
head the wall at its bottom that NOW I
Be
thinking was NOT the earliest field stones piled either for it would have been
Right
outside the cabin door... then ‘moved off’ (that early wall of field stones
piled) as the farm yard ‘come to be more settled’. I
Being
thinking that as I “stand” in the ‘recovered forest’ ground that was made farm
yard once.
Once
I be standing there to being
thinking I DO SEE the old open yard TOO; its BACK to the rear of the cellar
hole. The big barn to my
left. The carriage barn to the
cellar hole’s right I
Being
thinking that... I HAVE turned the page on the diorama book again and I am
counting the hundreds of maple sap buckets the were made by hands and hung by
hands and carried full of sap (spring blood) by hands and
Rotted
in piles of ‘too old’ “after”.
“NO
THEY WERE IN THE SHED CHAMBER and old Herbert; HE took them all and sold
them. Yes, yes, yes I being
thinking NOW RECALL his bragging of them sold at FIFTY CENTS EACH “to TOURISTS”
he said... that... I being THINKING that I recall HOW HE with his BARRELS full
of “TOOK OUT” of the ATTIC HERE TOO.
The
second diorama shows a pile of field stones ‘down in’ the ‘cleared’ of the far
right of the...
I
being thinking that Herbert NEVER SAID he ever took ‘any of that’ “OLD GRANITE”
“from that place; THE HARRIS PLACE” he called it; the “THIS” I
Being
thinking that
Standing
in the old ‘recovered forest’ of the farm yard.
The
little cellar hole is the old cellar hole of the ‘first house’. Then they dug the big cellar hole for
the big house. The first house
became the ell of the big house; the ‘old part’ I, being thinking, said out loud. THAT is the chimney ‘can see was’
THERE. The new house chimney brick
was ‘all taken’ ‘out’ a long ...long... time ago. “GOOD BRICK they made THEN didn’t THEY” Elwood said to me one morning while I
being thinking of his
Truck load colonial brick I’d just
said “DUMP IT OVER THERE”.
“CAN’T
SELL IT OR I WOULD HAVE damn.
It”
Elwood then said.
I
mined Elwood’s dumped brick pile for TWENTY YEARS always being thinking how he
was a fool to take his (old colonial center chimney cape) chimney ‘out’. Now that house is gone... though not
before HE (Elwood) was gone.
“THEY” “took the house down” and “moved it”
I
being thinking how HERE; in the diorama’s ‘old place’, “IT (this place) just
Rotted
Into
The
ground”.
But
that doesn’t happen until the fourth diorama. Or maybe... to keep the time true... until the fifth
diorama. And maybe even ‘after
that’. I being thinking.
That
1725
Was
that first stone wall... head ‘up’ by the exposed ledge
By 1740
And
‘kept on at it’ another forty years to 1780 with a
Third
generation ‘kept on at it’ then
Again
and again
For
the SECOND third generation of this head wall ‘up’
I
being thinking of
This
being then SO TITLED “The Harris Place”.
With
the boys growing up
To
go to the
Civil
War.
All
of them went.
I,
being thinking,
How
they died doing that
Or
just never came back.
“OLD
MAN HARRIS WAS THE LAST ONE” they say. “HE BECOME A CRANK”.
“Millie
(his wife)... left him for her SISTER’S.
HE WAS ALONE OUT THERE.
TO
THE END”.
“IT
WAS ALL JUST LEFT IN THE BARN.
HOUSE TOO. The
carriages: JUST THE WAY HE LEFT
IT. BARN BURNED WHEN THEM KIDS GOT
IN. WILLIAM AND I TOOK THE WHOLE
DAMN HEN HOUSE. NO ONE STOPPED
US. NO ONE STOPPED ANYONE back
THEN. JUST ABANDONED. No one wanted it. Any of it.”
“That’s
a pretty short window” I being thinking “but no one understands that. Very well”.
I
being thinking that the twenty years (1830 – 1850) window was maybe forty years
(1825-1865) “if you nurse it”.
It’s the ‘after that’. Some
of ‘em ‘hung on’. Some of ‘em
‘stayed on’ (the old farms remained farmed) “to the first war”. Some of ‘em ‘stayed family’...even to
THIS
DAY
I
being thinking for I, myself, ‘see that’ and am well known for HUNTING that
‘see that’. “Getting in there”
(the antiques of the old farms) I be thinking I pretty much have been ‘being
thinking’ THAT my whole life.
And
Herbert, in the Harris place.
Well. He’s been DEAD forty
years. At least.
Right? That’d
be it for He was in there when I was TWENTY? MAYBE BEFORE.
SEEMS I heard of the OLD CRANK WAY before THAT. MY MOTHER SAID SO. So I’d HEARD THAT ...fifty years
go. At least.
So
Herbert would have been in there SIXTY YEARS AGO; ‘INTO THE HARRIS PLACE’. And Tim’s (Part Nine) FATHER took the
STONE, they say. HE hid it around
but they say that MOST OF IT was sold to MOLLY ANDERSON’S new house. And SHE DIED in 1974.
The
third diorama shows when the Harris place peaked as a farm... in 1830. I stand there in the farm yard
today. That ‘peak’ is a peek of
the whole; 1740 to 1870 ‘peak’.
There, then... the old New England property of the agrarian
aristocracy... becomes
Aura
Halo
Dust
Legend
Religion
Myth
And...
abandoned property... often still owned by ‘the original family’ with that
property still retaining (1870-1915 on, too... one hundred more years... 2014)
the old granite landscape fixtures.
I, being thinking, turn the diorama book’s page to the fourth diorama
To
see that: “FARM ABANDONMENT”.
The
old New England property (antique) granite landscape fixtures
Are,
then (in this fourth diorama) ‘still there’ ‘undisturbed’.
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