Tag Archives: memoir

Hilltown Postcards

Stacking Firewood

The wood stove we bought was our only source of heat in that funky house we rented in Ringville. It wasn’t our first go-round keeping warm this way. We did that when we lived for a year in a cabin in the middle of nowhere New Hampshire.

When we first moved to that part of Worthington, we bought long slabs of hardwood from a lumber yard. As you can see in the photos below, Hank used a chainsaw to cut the slabs into burnable pieces that were then stacked beneath the house’s front overhang. I don’t touch power tools, especially ones with a blade, so I helped with the stacking.

We brought in enough wood to last a few days or longer depending on how cold it was. The warmest part of the house was in the living room, which had the wood stove. The rest of the house, especially the bedrooms, was quite cold with ice on the single-paned windows. I seriously doubt the house’s walls had much if any insulation.

Fortunately, our thoughtful friend, Win Donovan came to our house to keep the fire going when we visited my parents at Christmas, the only time we were away during the winter. Otherwise the water pipes would have burst.

I recall someone saying you should only have burned half of your wood supply by Christmas. I always assessed the amount we had at that time. Fortunately, we never ran out.

As the years went on, we upped the quality of the hardwood we burned. It was necessary to burn seasoned hardwood, that is, logs that have dried at least a year after they were cut. (When we lived in Taos, New Mexico, we burned softwood in our passive-solar home because that was all that was available.)

Seasoned wood costs more than unseasoned. The smart thing would be to buy green wood, and then let it dry for a year. We weren’t able to afford that until we moved into the home we built — stay tuned for future Hilltown Postcards. We burned three cords to heat that house.

Each fall we bought firewood from Dean, who lived in town and cut wood year-round. One year we splurged and bought six cords of dry and green wood. We burned the dry wood and let the green logs be. Next year and from then on, we only needed green wood delivered because we were ahead of the game.

In the fall, the green wood was stacked in long rows for a year. We brought most of the dry wood into the house’s walk-in basement and stacked what couldn’t fit beneath the deck. We had to carry the logs to the wood stove upstairs although we also had one in the cellar for those really cold days. 

Yes, we moved those logs a lot.

The chore of stacking firewood fell to Hank and I although I recall our three sons were helpful. The girls would start and somehow wander off before the job was finished. We worked at it for weekends.

I’ve always liked the puzzle of making a free-standing stack. You need a solid base and crisscrossed squarish logs at the ends to keep the rows in place. I so enjoy that clocking sound of wood falling in place. 

It was satisfying to watch the neat stacks rise, and later in the winter, use the wood to keep us warm.

I was inspired to write this post the other day while stacking firewood that will heat Hank’s workshop in our home. He burns one cord max. A half cord arrived to replenish our supply, thanks to our town’s program that supplies up to a cord of firewood free to residents. (Thank you Buckland and the state Department of Conservation and Recreation.) The logs came from trees felled by the power company. Volunteers helped prep the wood.

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Hilltown Postcards

My Teaching Experience

Suddenly, Hank couldn’t work due to a serious injury that was no fault of his own. That meant, I had to step up to support our family. What I made writing stories for the local newspaper would only fill a bag of groceries. Thank goodness, the certificate I earned 18 years earlier as a college senior meant I could teach in public schools, and it was our good fortune, I was hired to fill in for a teacher on sick leave who decided not to return.

At Gateway Regional Middle School in Huntington, I taught fifth and sixth graders, who needed extra help with reading, and seventh and eighth graders, who needed the same for writing. They came in groups to the oversized room I shared with two other teachers. The students sat at tables on my side. 

It had been many years since I took the courses required for my minor in education or did student teaching. So, I counted on what I had learned from my own inspiring teachers. I was lucky to have had many. Plus, as the mother of six, I was used to kids. Five were now school age, including our oldest daughter in high school. One son was among my reading students.

I wanted to make the time my students spent learning a comfortable experience. For instance, I let them chew gum in my class. I figured it helped them relax. But I had one rule: I couldn’t hear or smell it. They caught on fast.

Several had an I.E.P., that is, an Individualized Education Plan because they had been identified as special needs students. To me, it meant they learned in a different way than the larger pack. Two of my sons had I.E.P.s.

Fortunately, I worked with an aide who was a great teammate. I recall one fifth-grader, who I will call David, liked to stir things up instead of learn. So, my aide and I came up with a plan — she and David would trade places for a class. David would be my aide while the real one acted like him, being a disruptive pain in the you-know-what, even wearing his trademark suspenders. Was our idea a success? I believe so. At the end of the school year, I gave David an award for being one of my most improved students, which he accepted with gusto at a school assembly.

The curriculum was set for the reading students. My aide and I worked closely with them. However, it was up to me to come up with ways to inspire the writing students. So, I gave them writing prompts I felt would motivate them as they wrote on one of the classroom’s early model Apple computers. Here’s one prompt: “I am your worst nightmare” — the line from a Rambo movie. Yes, that was a hit.

In the spring, the school held a short story contest every year for the seventh and eighth graders, so my students worked on their entries during class. The contest was judged by people outside the school. Needless to say, I was thrilled when three of my students’ stories placed.

Meanwhile, Hank was healing from the torn tendons in his shoulder. He did what he was able to keep the home going. Our youngest was only a toddler. The next-to-youngest went half-day to kindergarten. Plus, we had moved Hank’s father, who could no longer live on his own, into a rest home in Northampton. 

We scraped by as best we could. Hank has always been a careful woodworker, but unfortunately someone on the contractor’s crew wasn’t, so he fell through a hole 18 feet onto his shoulder. The contractors declined to give him any money while he was unable to work because he was a subcontractor.

Yes, we contacted a lawyer, but any kind of settlement was at least three years off. Those who were treating Hank’s injuries agreed to wait for the money owed them. His goal was to get better, and he did finally, that summer when he returned to work. By the way, those contractors had the nerve to ask him back.

How did we manage on a starting teacher’s salary? Barely, but then household expenses were rather minimal. TV channels came free through an antenna on the roof. No cell phones or computers. (I wrote my stories for the paper on a funky laptop it supplied and transmitted the copy through the phone line.) No car payments and the vehicles had basic insurance. Water came from a spring in the cellar. We heated with wood. Our rent was $300.

I recall a few days before Christmas finding a box of food and an envelope containing $70 on our doorstep. When we asked around, no one would claim responsibility for this good deed.

My thoughtful mother sent boxes of quality clothes for the kids she found at rummage sales held in her town. She took them shopping at a jeans outlet in Fall River when we visited. One time she mailed me a box of clothing. My mother was a cafeteria worker, so she knew what would be suitable for a teacher to wear. I smile thinking of that.

The end of the school year was approaching. The district was having a tough time financially, so positions were being cut. I found out I wasn’t being hired back when a first-year teacher rushed into my room, saying joyfully her job was saved because “they were letting the reading teacher go.” I recalled saying, “That’s me.” Flustered, she left. Minutes later, the principal came rushing into my room to break the news in a more professional way.

For a while, I contemplated getting my master’s degree, soon to be a new requirement for a permanent teaching license, even taking night courses at a state college. I applied for an open position at Gateway, was a finalist, but didn’t get the job.

While I thoroughly enjoyed the classroom experience, I concentrated instead on finding opportunities in the field of journalism. Later, when I became an editor, then an editor-in-chief, I most often hired rookie reporters. I would tell those who were recent grads: welcome to grad school. Once again, I was a teacher.

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Hilltown Postcards

An Unfortunate Accident

It was supposed to be an ordinary Monday. Hank went to work that summer morning 36 years ago, doing finish carpentry for local contractors building a house in the next town. I stayed home with our six kids. 

But that day Hank got badly hurt because of somebody else’s carelessness. 

Hank and his helper were setting up to work on the house’s third floor, which required moving a pile of wood left on a large sheet of plywood in the room’s center. But when Hank lifted the plywood, he fell through the large hole it was covering. The sheet of plywood should have been nailed, but it wasn’t, so he dropped 18 feet through the hole and managed somehow to land on his shoulder on the first floor. If Hank hadn’t, he would have gone another eight feet or so to the cellar floor. 

Hank got himself out of there and drove to a hospital’s emergency room, where he was told it was probably a bad sprain, and then he went home. I was stunned when I heard what had happened.

But his injury wasn’t a bad sprain, as we found out during a visit a couple of days later to another hospital. The impact had torn muscles in his shoulder. He was in pain. 

It was obvious Hank wouldn’t be able to work for a while, so he reached out to the contractors to see if they could pay him until he was able to work again. But they said no. Hank was a subcontractor and not an employee. He had no benefits.

We were in a fix. Hank did his best to keep our family going with what he earned although we lived modestly, renting a small house in Worthington’s Ringville section. We had an old pickup and a station wagon. Most everything we owned used to belong to somebody else. 

I remember going to the house to help Hank remove his tools. I saw the piece of plywood covering the hole, now nailed in place as it should have been. On the advice of others, we contacted a lawyer, but our case wouldn’t be resolved for years. 

This accident also meant our plans to build our own home on land we bought the previous year would have to wait.

But more importantly, how would we be able to take care of our family. I was working as a correspondent for the local newspaper, getting paid by the story, but that was a pitiful amount of money. I would have to get a real job.

Fortunately, I had listened to my mother and got my teaching certificate, which in those days was permanent, when I went to college. You never know when you might need it, I remember her telling me in what turned out to be prophetic piece of advice. (Thank you, Mom.)

So, I applied to be a substitute teacher at the Gateway Regional School District. Hank would stay home with our youngest child who was not school age, plus the next-to-youngest who went a half day to kindergarten. We would live as simply as possible while he recovered.

Then luck was on our side once again. I had only worked a couple of days as a substitute teacher when I was asked to fill in for a teacher who would be on a six-weeks leave of absence for medical reasons. She taught reading to fifth and sixth graders and writing to seventh and eighth for those students who needed extra help. Later, the teacher decided not to return. 

This turn of events meant a steady income for our family and an experience I treasure still. More to come.

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Adventrue

Riding Rosalita

We called her Rosalita—a vintage VW camper van we bought for $800 and drove from Boston to Mexico. Hank and I were newly in love in the mid-seventies and ready for adventure with my daughter, Sarah. Rosalita would take us there.

In the state of Guerrero, Hank, bored from highway driving, turned onto a road that appeared to be a shortcut to where we were heading. Soon we were on a dusty trip with no certain destination in a foreign country. We didn’t pass homes. We didn’t see people. Finally, though, we came to a sign. Hank put Rosalita in reverse to read it, but the right back tire slid off the road’s shoulder. He couldn’t do anything as the van toppled slowly onto its side into a brush-filled gully. Thankfully, we were unhurt as the van didn’t have seatbelts.

Our plan was for Hank to hike seven kilometers back to the highway to find a garage with a wrecker, while Sarah, then two, and I waited. But just then, a bus rumbled toward us filled with local folk and livestock, and decorated with plastic flowers and statues of Jesus and Mary. The driver hung out the open window after he stopped the bus. His passengers gawked at the gringo family who had overturned their van. The driver motioned for Hank to climb onboard. I told him to go. Who knew when another bus would pass again? I gave him my straw hat and most of our cash.

After the bus left, I searched inside the van for a blanket, papers, food, and water. Sarah and I found a shady spot beneath a tree, but we weren’t alone for long. People came down a path, presumably from the village whose name was on the sign. They talked rapidly and gestured in Spanish. Even with my infantile knowledge of the language, I understood that Sarah and I were in danger. Men with big hats and guns—banditos—would come after dark. They would take everything we had. I must gather our valuables and hide. Now, I was scared.

It couldn’t have been 20 minutes when a dump truck, heavy with chrome and a fringe of pompoms circling the windshield, barreled from the direction we had come, its air brakes hissing as it stopped. Two men jumped from the truck’s bed with axes. The driver, their patrón—dark-haired and all-muscle, and a gut beneath his t-shirt—dismounted with Hank, who smiled and looked a little silly in my straw hat with the flat, wide brim I had bought in France. The bus driver, bless him, had stopped the truck to explain we needed help.

The patrón began barking orders to his men who chopped down two trees and stuck them beneath the van. Using the trees as levers, and a tow from the chain on the truck, they pried Rosalita upright and pulled her forward until her tires were on the road. I cheered.

The only damage was a cracked mirror. Oil was still in the crankcase. The patrón acted as if nothing extraordinary had happened as he pocketed the cash Hank offered. He went his way with his men. We, too, were on the road, trying to get out before dark, crossing two streams and stopping once to clean the dust choking Rosalita’s air-cooled engine. (Later, an inspired Hank painted Rosalita’s name in gold across her front white bumper.)

We drove to the ocean and eventually to San Cristóbal de las Casas, where we rented a house. That’s a vintage postcard above of the town in Chiapas I never mailed to a friend. Alas, we didn’t own a camera then.

 Rosalita rode high as we traveled to mountain villages, where the indigenous women doted on Sarah and sold us textiles. We left Mexico months later when we ran out of money and one night the federales made a sweep of the town, targeting foreigners. Ah, but Rosalita got us back home safely again.

A version of this story ran in Storied Wheels, a SOMOS Publication in Taos, New Mexico.

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Hilltown Postcards

Bad Neighbors

In my last Hilltown Postcard, I wrote about good neighbors. As promised, here is one about bad neighbors. The names have been changed for obvious reasons.

When we built our house and moved from one part of Worthington to another, we encountered a whole new group of neighbors. Just like in Ringville, we had good neighbors, many come to mind, but here we encountered a few bad ones. 

What constitutes a bad neighbor? Frankly, the things they do just make them unlikeable. It’s a good practice to just stay clear after you figure that out like the neighbor who went off the deep end.

George used to be a decent friend before he became our next-door neighbor. Like us, he bought a piece of land and built the house he owned. Hank even worked with him. But things went strange between us, really strange.

Once when Hank went to George’s house to borrow a tool, he claimed our kids were breaking into his house. He said they moved his furniture, but only enough that he would notice. George was certain it was happening because he stuck a blade of grass between the front door and jamb, and it was gone when he got home. Hank stormed home in disbelief.

Then one of our sons caught George glaring at him through the woods.

Hank went to see the town’s police chief, who told him George had complained about our kids many times, but he didn’t believe any of it. The problem was solved when he sold his house and good neighbors bought it.

As the former hilltown reporter for the Daily Hampshire Gazette, I covered a few neighborhood disputes brought to a town board to be resolved. Most often the dissent concerned barking and/or vicious dogs their owners didn’t properly restrain although there was a notorious hearing involving pigs I wrote about earlier.

I can think of two dog situations in our new neighborhood, including one mutt that made it risky to walk along that part of the road in case the animal was loose. I recall a neighbor on a walk once flagged down a car and jumped inside for a ride home when that awful dog got loose.

Another neighbor had a Doberman Pinscher he didn’t tie up and we didn’t trust, with good reason it turned out, because the dog turned on the daughter. The man shot the dog, then left the body in the woods because the ground was too frozen to bury it. Wild animals picked the carcass clean. I recognized the tufts of fur when our dog dragged the bones to our yard. Anyway, the man moved away soon after that happened.

I recall a few incidents that get your head shaking when what a person does in private goes public. Ranking as the absolute worst was the creep who got arrested for watching his teenage daughter while she showered. 

One time, we heard loud banging coming from a neighbor’s house. An ousted husband was repeatedly smashing the front end of his pickup against the door of a newly built garage. The cops were called.

Then there was the teenager who stole his mother’s car and crashed it in another part of town — an accident that badly injured him.

In another incident, a neighbor hooked up with the wrong people, thankfully very briefly.

One night Hank and I had finished watching the film, “Pulp Fiction,” when a state trooper knocked at the door and asked to use our phone since cell service was nearly nil in those days. It didn’t take much to get the trooper to say two men had gotten into a fight, and one guy, who happened to be a new friend of our neighbor Sandy, stabbed his buddy through the throat. The man had fled to the woods, and he was calling in dogs to find him. He would likely be going back to prison. He hadn’t been out that long. I believe he and Sandy might have been pen pals.

I thought for a moment I should tell the state trooper I was a reporter for the local newspaper, but I didn’t. I would instead pass the story to another reporter. The police dogs found the stabber hiding beneath the floorboards of a shed, and he was sentenced later to seven years after admitting in court he intended to kill his friend.

Sandy turned into a model neighbor, except for an occasional barking fit by one of her dogs, but they were harmless. Last I knew, she had a beautiful garden and worked hard at it.

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