Amenia

One of the great pleasures of living in Pleasant Hill (in California – where we will be for another 19 months) is walking along the canal-side trail that intersects our street.  It’s a lovely trail, full of friendly walkers, many, like me, with their dog companions.  Just a few days after we moved here in July I was surprised to find a castle beside the trail on our morning walk.  It hadn’t been there the day before.  It was perhaps two inches tall, ceramic, and neatly painted – the kind of castle you might find in an aquarium. It sat at the base of an oak tree, in an area that had been carefully swept clean of leaves and debris.  I imagine that some child had been playing there.  Perhaps they had left the castle as an invitation for passers by to join their imagined kingdom.  The sight of it sent me down a wormhole of memory.

Beside the little stream that connected our lake in Amenia to the larger lower lake on the neighboring property, I had constructed a kingdom of my own.  The stream crossed under a wooden bridge on our dirt road, close enough to the house for a yell to be heard, but screened from view by bushes in those days. The stream was about three feet down from the level of the road, so working alongside it I was in a very private space, a world of my own.  Here I scooped out a little bay and built a tiny dock from sticks.  I dug a winding stone stairway up to a little plateau where I crafted a tiny house from pebbles, mud, and bits of bark.  I landscaped around it, transplanting violets and moss from nearby. I was the colossus astride this miniature world, imagining its tiny occupant, creating a world and a life for her that I had complete control over.  What an amazing gift to give a child – privacy, safety, and infinite room for imagination. Sixty five years later I can see my little world clearly and feel the hypnotic state of building it alone in perfect peace with the sounds of the stream and the birds, the scent of water and mud. I have been blessed to have a great deal of happiness in my life, but that happiness of a child’s perfect summer is hard to beat.

Our parents gifted us with this paradise, not just by buying it – a stunning accomplishment on its own, but also by trusting us to use it in our own ways, to go off alone, though not out of earshot, to feel entirely brave about wading in a stream, to create our own toys and fun.  They made rules for us – no one could swim in the lake without an adult present until they had passed Mom’s rigorous swim test, no one could hike in the woods alone, and you were never to eat a mushroom or berry you found in the woods with the exception of raspberries, blackberries and wild strawberries which were unmistakable.  I’m pretty sure that was the extent of the rules.  If you were in the house at meal times, there was a reasonable chance you would be fed, unless Mom was busy trying to find the name of a flower she had found, which was slow, patient work, involving her beautiful flower guides spread out all over the table. If you claimed to be bored on a rainy day, you would be offered some unpleasant job to do, so you quickly learned to never be bored.

This paradise didn’t just happen.  First, we purchased it.  Dad loved to recount the story of buying it – how he was waiting in a friend’s office to go to lunch with him, how the friend was on the phone describing the old summer camp his organization was selling, how Dad was intrigued and asked if he could see it, and how he raised the $5000 purchase price over the weekend after he and Mom fell in love with the place and couldn’t find anyone to go in on it with them. In later years Dad often talked about how lucky it was that he couldn’t find a partner – it’s a swamp, they told him – a mosquito infested swamp – you’ll die of malaria!  Dad called himself Lucky Louie – and he was right.  He was lucky, but he was also bold, and he had vision his more timid, city dwelling relatives didn’t share.

When we bought the place, which we always called Amenia, even though that was actually the name of the town, not just our piece of it, it was a wreck.  The old summer camp had closed several years earlier and the place had been vacant all that time.  It was wildly overgrown and hunters and vandals had broken every single window in the house, hauled parts of the grand old cook stove out to use for target practice, torn the doors off and destroyed the stairs leading into the house.  There was no running water in the house, and there had never been a bathroom. There would not be electricity or a phone for all the summers I spent there. The floor was several inches deep in broken glass, beer bottles and cans, and all manner of trash.  You needed all the courage my young parents had to see it as paradise.

The first summer my grandmother Goldie, Mom, and we three kids stayed in rented rooms in the town of Amenia at first.  Dad worked during the week building his party favor business in the post-war boom, but he came up on weekends to help. Goldie and mom, pushing baby Tamar in a carriage, hiked the mile into our place daily to do the work of starting to make it habitable. We have a picture of Mom and Goldie in their house dresses with their hair tied up in kerchiefs, brooms in hand, going at it. They were natural pioneers, and if they couldn’t build the state of Israel they could at least make a home where it would be safe to let the baby crawl on the floor.  I don’t remember what Shayne and I did in that wilderness and junk pile in those early days, but knowing my mother, I imagine we were mostly left to our own devices with instructions not to kill ourselves or get lost.

Mom found the parts of the stove out in the field in front of the house and painted gay daisies around the bullet holes.

Eventually, windows and screens were installed, the huge hole in the roof was patched, the rickety table and milk crates were replaced by real stairs, and the camp’s old mess hall, what we called “the big house” became our summer home. The outhouse, part way up the hill behind the house, was cleared out enough to be usable, though it was still scary, especially at night. I think that by the end of that first summer we had running water in the house, pumped from an artesian well into a huge storage tank by a noisy, gasoline powered pump that Dad wrestled with once a week. After school started that fall, in 1953, we continued to come up from the city on weekends until it got too cold.

By the summer of 1954 we were four little girls, Aviva having been born at the end of March. Goldie, Mom, an infant, a toddler, and two little girls were to spend the summer a mile’s hike from a doctor or pharmacy without a car while Dad was in the city during the week.  It didn’t seem safe. I believe it was in that second summer that we hastily made the camp’s old shower house into a two bedroom guest house – although that is far too grand a name for the rough cabin. It was always called, “the little house”. We started the pattern that lasted through my childhood of always having a visiting family – with a mom, dad, kids and a car.  All the families had at least two kids, so we were our own little summer camp with at least six kids and three adults.  No one had much money in those days, so a rent free week in the country was a treat, even if you had to hike to the outhouse and chase the occasional squirrel out of the kitchen. The families who visited were, like my parents, in their thirties.  They were all building post war lives and careers.  A little hardship in exchange for a pond to swim in away from city heat was more than a good deal.

In later years Dad would get his calendar out and start making phone calls in January, letting families pick the week or two they wanted to spend with us in the summer.  A family would arrive on Friday night or Saturday morning, just as the family who had visited the prior week was departing.  Dad was also there from Friday night to before dawn on Monday, and he almost always came up to spend Wednesday nights too. If the new family came on Saturday, we would often be three families together for the day, with as many as 11 kids at a time.  There were certainly kids we liked better than others, but we had fun with all of them.  The grown ups were busy with their own conversations and the business of feeding three families, and we kids were free to invent our own summer days. We built a succession of increasingly complex tree houses, we hiked into town to buy ice cream and comic books at the Rueben’s drug store, we swam endlessly, picked berries, fished and hiked.  

Miraculously, with all those kids for all those years, with nearly no rules, with a pond and trackless woods, we never had a serious accident and never lost a kid. Perhaps because we had no restrictions to rebel against, we were pretty sensible.  We settled our own disputes, because the grown-ups wouldn’t settle them for us.  Mom and Dad, but especially Mom, created the norms for parenting in Amenia, and it was hands off except if there was real danger apparent. Some of the city kids were a little squeamish about bugs and worms at first, but Mom had a gift for turning squeamishness into curiosity and learning.  She even pulled squeamish parents into her orbit, teaching us all the fascinating ways that insects and other creatures fed, mated, and gave birth. The days were full of play, but they were also full of science, including sex ed.  It wasn’t until I was in high school that I discovered that it was possible to find science boring.

With no electricity, of course there was no TV to divide families at night.  Adults lingered at the table after dinner talking politics, talking history, talking economy, talking art.  Children hung out on the periphery, listening.  That amazing group of adults included an editor of Business Week and later the NY Times editorial page, a professor of urban planning who gave SOHO its name, the chemist who created Coricidin, a hematologist, a school principal and poet, several teachers, a social worker, a painter, a singer and a concert pianist. Conversations were lively and wide ranging.  Listening, we kids learned how to think, how to express opinions and defend them, how to organize facts into narratives.  Grown up conversation was part of our world.  We were so lucky.  As we grew up we began staying at the table, learning to ask questions and to venture our own opinions. My parents assembled this wonderful collection of teachers and role models and created the space where we had access to them. It was a huge part of my education.  

Since my birthday falls on August 30 it became the occasion for grand end-of-summer parties. Aunts, uncles, cousins and friends would come up for a day of swimming, barbecuing, lying in the sun and laughing.  Of course, Dad brought party favors, and I remember the house decorated with balloons and streamers. People would often stay for a bonfire, with marshmallows to roast, and sometimes potatoes wrapped in foil and buried in the coals. It was always a happy day, but we couldn’t keep at bay the realization that it also meant that summer was coming to an end. I didn’t really hate school, but I never wanted to leave Amenia and return to the constraints of shoes and suburban life.  We would continue to come up nearly every weekend until Halloween, but then there would be a long gap and we wouldn’t return for weekends until after Passover.  The weekend visits helped, but they didn’t have the languor of the warm, drowsy, unstructured summer days.

Amenia changed a little every year.  The big house was divided into three bedrooms and (gasp!) a bathroom, and a great room. A bathroom was added to the little house. A screened porch was added to the big house, with room for a ping pong table off the great room.  A wide deck was built around the front and the bedroom side of the house. A second bathroom and a new kitchen were added on. And much later electricity and a phone line were added.  Eddie Zaslow, our parents’ dear friend, wrote a wonderful poem memorializing the end of the era of the gas lamps, with their slight pop as they were lit and their warm glow. And every year Dad had the wilderness cleared back a little more.  The plans for clearing were the occasions of pitched battles over the loss of nesting sites and places for rabbits to hide. But in the end, we always had to admit that it was nice to have the brush cut back, even when it meant you could see the house from the place in the stream where I had ruled over my little kingdom.

Early on, Dad had the walls of the little house sheetrocked in preparation for painting.  One of our friends drew a wonderful pastel mural of the lake on the grown-ups bedroom wall, assuming it would soon be painted over.  Mom’s dear friend, Ruth Raff, drew a cartoon frieze around the walls of the children’s room, with animal characters including our cat Lily.  The first animal asks, “Have you been to Amenia?”  The next replies, “Oh paradise, for all us kids.”  Everyone loved those drawings, and the sheetrock was left unpainted for years. “Oh paradise, for all us kids,” became the Amenia slogan.  There was nothing more true you could say. Adam and Eve had nothing on us, and we knew it.  We knew that Amenia shaped us, that it was the scaffold for our understanding of life.  Whatever challenges I faced after I left home, I could always find Amenia in myself.  I knew the taste of freedom and joy.  I knew that woods and water would heal me. And I could always find the vast reservoir of love left in me by my parents, my sisters, our big noisy extended family, and the dear friends who shared Amenia with us.

In 2005 our big sister, Shayne, who had led so many of our adventures in Amenia, died of leukemia.  Her children had managed to bring a bottle of “holy water” from the lake in Amenia to her hospital room, but even its considerable power wasn’t enough to save her.  Shayne was a serious naturalist.  When we emptied the big house in Amenia we found an amazing journal she had kept one summer – I think when she was eight. She had written wonderful descriptions of plant and animal discoveries she had made that summer.  When she was a few years older she became the editor in chief of the weekly newspaper we published (I was the cartoonist).  Later still, when she was in high school, she did a serious study of dragonflies at our lake for a biology class, and none of us can see a dragonfly without thinking of it as a visit from her.  Shayne and I had dreamed of being old ladies together, sitting in the shade at the lake, watching grandchildren learn to swim.

Mom died in 2011, and Dad a year later. Nine of us inherited Amenia, Tamar, Aviva and I, Shayne’s three children, my daughter, and Tamar’s two kids.  We kept the place for four years, but it was challenging.  We nine were scattered around the country and the old place needed a lot more work than we could manage.  In a final act of Amenia magic, friends of Aviva and Peter bought the place.  Even though it isn’t ours any more, we’re so happy to know that friends cherish it. They have been incredibly gracious about letting us come in  to visit.  We can still occasionally see the trees we planted when children and grandchildren were born, the tree we planted for Dad’s 85th birthday, the tree Mom rescued, and the four beautiful maples we planted when we were still four sisters.

The new owners, understandably, leveled the old houses, the big house, the guest house and the outhouse.  They were long since beyond redemption.  But it was so odd to drive in and see the empty space where they had been.  The space looked so small.  How could it have contained so much happiness?  How could we have loved so much there and learned so much?  How could that open space hold so many memories of family and friends, of hot summer days, of cool autumn weekends, of starry nights and hurricanes? The decision to sell it was not hard for me to make, but it was wrenching. Still, I knew that Amenia would always be mine, or perhaps that I would always belong to it. 

My feet still know every mud puddle on the dirt road.  Like Mom, I know where hepaticas bloom and when.  My hands still know the feel of the branches as I climbed to the treehouse.  And my whole body knows the delicious feeling of cool lake water on warm bare skin. Those after dinner discourses still echo in my ears. I always have the scent of steaks on the barbecue, and Dad’s big laugh as he turns them. It is so much to have.