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Chapters 1 through 6 are here.
Part 2: Flavia
Chapter 7
If I had it to do over again (famous last words!), I would have torn the place down. It was one of the older dwellings on the Cherrytown loop—roads that had never seen a single cherry, but which, once upon a time, were overrun with feral crab apple trees. Hard little crab apples might pass for cherries if you weren’t paying attention. The tanners who settled this part of the Catskills probably used them for hard cider. By the 1930s, though, when the place went up, the tanners were long gone. They’d stripped the bark off the native hemlocks, polluted the streams, and moved on.
I bought it to save it: two hundred acres of mostly untouched woods plus a residential structure, more shack than house. The man who’d been living there since the Depression was one of those mountain hermit types, but he'd had distant relatives who'd waited out probate and were being courted by developers. You wouldn’t expect a developer to be interested in a parcel some hundred miles from New York City at the end of a twisting road, but you’d be wrong. There's always someone willing to bulldoze a hillside if the survey looks promising. So I decided I’d make the relatives rich instead and then donate the land to the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development.
Except they didn’t want it.
“What am I going to do with it?” I moaned.
“I’ll live there,” Neal said.
And within two months of the day I signed the deed, he'd moved in.
Hardly anyone who knew him understood why he would leave the small but bustling city of Kingston, where he had so many friends, where everyone knew his name, where he was one of the cocks of the walk, for the isolation of a mountainside.
But I understood.
And now he didn’t live here anymore. He didn’t live anywhere. He was dead. I’d been with him here most weekends for the past five years—and in plenty of other places besides, of course—but those other places weren’t imprinted with him the way this one was. Here was the kitchen where he cooked for me, the garden where he grew me kale and heirloom tomatoes, the bed where he brought me to sweet moan.
( But wait! There's more! )
Part 2: Flavia
Chapter 7
If I had it to do over again (famous last words!), I would have torn the place down. It was one of the older dwellings on the Cherrytown loop—roads that had never seen a single cherry, but which, once upon a time, were overrun with feral crab apple trees. Hard little crab apples might pass for cherries if you weren’t paying attention. The tanners who settled this part of the Catskills probably used them for hard cider. By the 1930s, though, when the place went up, the tanners were long gone. They’d stripped the bark off the native hemlocks, polluted the streams, and moved on.
I bought it to save it: two hundred acres of mostly untouched woods plus a residential structure, more shack than house. The man who’d been living there since the Depression was one of those mountain hermit types, but he'd had distant relatives who'd waited out probate and were being courted by developers. You wouldn’t expect a developer to be interested in a parcel some hundred miles from New York City at the end of a twisting road, but you’d be wrong. There's always someone willing to bulldoze a hillside if the survey looks promising. So I decided I’d make the relatives rich instead and then donate the land to the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development.
Except they didn’t want it.
“What am I going to do with it?” I moaned.
“I’ll live there,” Neal said.
And within two months of the day I signed the deed, he'd moved in.
Hardly anyone who knew him understood why he would leave the small but bustling city of Kingston, where he had so many friends, where everyone knew his name, where he was one of the cocks of the walk, for the isolation of a mountainside.
But I understood.
And now he didn’t live here anymore. He didn’t live anywhere. He was dead. I’d been with him here most weekends for the past five years—and in plenty of other places besides, of course—but those other places weren’t imprinted with him the way this one was. Here was the kitchen where he cooked for me, the garden where he grew me kale and heirloom tomatoes, the bed where he brought me to sweet moan.
( But wait! There's more! )
