On a recent visit to Mill Brook House, my sister asked if I remembered eating in our dinette when we were kids. From the 1920’s-1940’s dinettes, small alcoves with a built-in table and benches, made smaller more efficient kitchens possible. Ours was generally packed with no fewer than five people, my mother presiding over the meal from a stool at the end of the table, my father in the corner, pressed against the window—the better to observe his bird feeders—instructing us in all that interested him. “Of course,” I exclaimed, “I learned everything I know about history and politics in that dinette!” Well, not everything. I went on to earn a history minor and a Ph.D. in art history, but in that cramped space my mind expanded as it absorbed my father’s most dearly held beliefs: Hitler was bad, the New Deal was good, Roosevelt was practically a god, World War II a noble cause, and racism, red-baiting, Republicans and Joseph McCarthy all bad. Republicans were bad only if they held office; otherwise they were merely misguided, and he stated his reasons simply: their policies made the rich richer and the poor poorer. He had no use for political independents either because, he insisted, organization was the only way to get things done. In one discussion he noted that the Depression had also made the rich richer and the poor poorer. Though young, I was fully engaged and reminded him that, according to his own accounts, the Great Depression had made everyone poorer. No, he countered, the very rich had gotten richer. (Who, experiencing our own Great Depression, can doubt the wisdom of that insight?)
Appropriately, my father shares his centennial with Fenway Park and Woody Guthrie. He was an avid baseball fan at a time when sports enthusiasm was considered déclassé among intellectuals and academics, and, if he could never really relate to “Woody’s children,” the leftie balladeers of the 1960’s, he appreciated the original as well as the tragic severity of the Dust Bowl Woody emerged from. Musically challenged, he nevertheless collected the work of Odetta, Lead Belly, and Burl Ives. Only later in my life did I understand them as precursors to my beloved folkies of the 60’s.
Although my father died well before I married and almost 20 years before we bought Mill Brook House, we feel his influence here. An intermittent gardener, he enjoyed tending plants, and when I was small, he and my mother gardened seriously in an attempt to save money on food bills, a challenge I’ve taken up at Mill Brook House (with mixed results). He began his academic career in Cornell’s School of Natural Resources, specializing in ornithology. Although he would switch to English for his Ph.D., he never lost his love of birds, one of our special delights at Mill Brook House.
Beyond these enthusiasms, another of my father’s enduring legacies was his great respect for neighbors. Shy and academic, he found small talk difficult, even painful, but he always maintained a special relationship with our neighbors, befriending them, supporting them when needed, and cooperating on numerous projects with them. The value he placed on neighbors was different from my mother’s all-purpose gregariousness; it carried a moral force.
When we moved to Mill Brook House, I made a point of meeting and greeting all our neighbors up and down the road. On Christmas Eve I left treats at every door. I understood instinctively that for second-home owners, especially, neighbors are a lifeline, as Hurricane Irene would prove, and this, at least in part, because my father had taught me early on that neighbors constitute a special class of friend.