A friend’s memories: A hard, but good life
The mist filled the valley, rising up and wandering through the roads above. It came and went with invisible breezes and fingered its way into the old cemetery where Stanton and Becker roads intersect.
How many mornings has the mist been here, I wondered? Hundreds? Thousands? I was on a mission to revisit the memory of the place that Judy Roche shared with me a few days earlier. The roads and the mist made all that she shared even more poignantly real. A kind of eternal verity about memory and home.
Hers were memories of walking barefoot on unpaved roads, riding to school on the bus after already working on the farm for hours, playing in that old cemetery, building “houses” in the copse of trees where she could play with her dolls and blizzards that left eight feet of snow without the warning of “lake effect,” when neighbors came to dig each other out so that farm life could continue.
“We moved here in 1953,” she said as we pulled into the driveway of the deserted farm on Becker Road. “It was a grand house compared with our former home, where we pumped water into the kitchen sink with a hand pump and where the bathroom was decidedly outside. This house had 13 rooms with indoor plumbing and water in the sinks that came out of faucets. Heck, we even had a sewing room and a music room. The music room had an old piano and no heat. The sewing room was a necessary space. Everyone made their own clothes and there was always mending to do.”
The farmhouse, built in 1887, was poignant in its silent emptiness. Above the screened-in porch brick-a-brac gave evidence of its Victorian roots. Judy had pictures of the house with her. One in particular spoke to the family that lived in it. There they were, all seated around a picnic table, eating their evening meal. “We ate out there a lot,” Judy said.
Weeds, some taller than our shoulders filled the spaces between the barns, now shabby and needing repairs. Judy recalled that one of the silos was built in 1967.
“We raised cows and horses,” she said, pointing out the cow barn, the horse barn, barns for hay and straw, the pig barn and the chicken coop, all shelters for the necessities of a working farm.
“My mother was so young and energetic her whole life,” Judy said. “She would get up before the sun to prepare breakfast for us, who were all also up early to get our chores done before school. Besides all of the housework she had to do, the cooking and sewing and cleaning, she had a kitchen garden and all of the work that entails.”
Judy said her mother was a teacher, “leaving for work after breakfast to teach at many of the one-room schoolhouses. She worked for 15 years at the Red and White on South Street in Marcellus. She [also] helped with all of the farm work – the cows, the horses, haying – everything. She was a phenomenon.”
Judy said there was something about that life, about a kind of isolation that farm work requires, that pushed them to connect with others.
“When my mother got older, my father planted a separate garden and built that shed,” she said, pointing out a small building to the left of the driveway, “so that my mother could have a farm stand, Brenneman’s Mini Mart. It was an income, but, far more importantly, it was a way for my mother to spend time with others. The hours of conversations and friends that she made were gold. How do I capture who she was? I remember that she cut pussy willows each spring to bring inside, a joyous way to welcome the new season. She was so good to me, the youngest of four, spending extra time to be with me, to teach me, to encourage me. “
Judy and I spent time travelling the roads that traverse the space between Skaneateles and Otisco lakes – Willowdale, Willow Hill, Becker, etc. – walks that included a history lesson about who had lived in which house, most replaced now by families with other names and other stories. She remembered the people and the vagaries of their lives, the good times and the hard times.
“Right here, the town plow got stuck in a snowstorm and stayed where it got stuck until spring,” she said while we were standing at the corner of Willow Hill and East Lake roads. Later, she showed me a picture of her Dad and brothers helping to shovel a way to the plow.
Another time she reminisced: “I rode my bike to visit a friend who lived in the house where the 1820 House restaurant is now. My mother worried so about my riding along Route 41, which was like a superhighway compared to Becker Road.”
We stopped at a fenced-in area, marked “Town of Spafford Fire District Training Center.” Judy remarked that a pond visible beyond the fence was dug by the Grange so that there was water to fight fires, adding that the pond was also the local swimming hole until some abused it. She then pointed to the willows that were abundant around the area. “This is where Mom cut her pussy willows.”
Reflecting on those long-ago days, she summed up that time in her life.
“I remember berry picking and making jam in the spring and getting up early to feed and milk the cows in winter,” she said. “Haying in the fall, collecting eggs from chickens, helping with the field crops – we made what we needed and we made do. This was our life.”
“You know, work was life and life was work. It was all one. By today’s standards, it was a hard life, but by ours, it was a good one.”
Ann Ferro is a mother, a grandmother and a retired social studies teacher. While still figuring out what she wants to be when she grows up, she lives in Marcellus with lots of books, a spouse and a large orange cat.
