Elm Tree Farm (cont.)

(The Memoir of my Great Grandmother, Bertha Dodge Nellis)

Part II.  
Early Memories

They were building the sheep shed on the north side of the barnyard in November 1872.    That meant added help in an already large family.  There was Grandfather, Father and Mother, Frank, Minnie, and Tom, beside the help in the house and at the barn.  Uncle Jote had died the year before, and Fred was in Rochester at the University. 

On the 2nd, Mother helped to get the early breakfast that the men might be in work as soon as it was light enough to see.  But as she worked she realized that “the days were fulfilled”, and young Frank was sent post haste to harness the horse and go for the doctor.  Many is the good laugh I have heard, as it was recounted that Frank in his haste and boyish excitement, tried to hitch the horse with his head to the buggy - 1872 was of course long before the day of telephone or automobile, or even very good roads.   Country roads in November can be pretty bad.  It took time to get a doctor in that day.  The doctor, Dr. Solon (?), was already busy on a confinement case.  He cam as soon as he could, but I couldn’t wait for him, so with the assistance the practical nurse could give I arrived first, and mother and child were doing well, thank you. 

No wonder I was a spoiled child.  I suppose I was.  They said Grandfather took me to his heart.  When Father went to tell him that the baby had arrived safely, he found Grandfather crying in the barn. He wiped his tears away, came to the house, and promptly began the business of spoiling me.  Father and Mother lost the two babies within so short a time, no wonder every ache of pain of mine received attention.  The older children no doubt helped in the process of spoiling, but, too, they have been a saving element. 

Thinking without words

It is much faster to think in words.  More efficient.  More transmittable. But in the end all you are left with are words.  And words are just words: a sound, a whisper.  Arguably the greatest invention of our species - words, symbolic thought - but in the context of the history of life on earth as ephemeral a phenomena as the emergence of the iPhone is to human history: a plaything, an experiment, a game, a question mark.  

It is much slower to speak in non-words, in actual things. To think without words is almost unthinkable.

There are human thinkers so beguiled by words that they question the very existence of a realm beyond words, of the Ding An Sich. If it cannot be enclosed by words, by human consciousness, it doesn’t "exist."  (Or at least it doesn't matter. Such idealism, deeply engrained in Western civilization, fuels our obsession with enclosement, architecture, cities.)

Why would one want to think without words?  For the sake of honesty.  To remember what is all around the habitus of words that we have constructed.  To live out in the open for a while. 

How does one think without words?  One way is to think in places.  Landmarks, trails, directions. In the place one happens to be in.  Or let the place think through one’s body.  

And if one loses faith in words, does one not then give up on everything human? Isn’t giving up on writing and speaking a form of dying? 

Words are a kind of artifact, and artifacts are deeply ingrained in how we think of ourselves as human, as exceptional.  Giving up on artifacts, apparatus, tools, clothing, toys, everything but the bare body, the limbs in their movements, the eyes that see, the vulnerable fingers.  

Standing next to my dogs I am struck by the immense distance between us.  Though we are intimates - living and working together everyday - still there is a chasm between they and I.  They live in their bodies, that is all they need and expect.  They are more vulnerable to accident and death than I am, but there is nothing that they need to buy.  They make no deals and contracts.  That kind of wildness is hard to comprehend.  And we are talking about dogs, highly domesticated, genetically modified by humans for thousands of years - not some truly wild thing.  A wild animal is more akin to an alien being, the representative of another world, if we could muster that much respect for anything other than human beings.  

Giving up on our artifacts, on words, on the many little things that make a human life recognizable, common, human.  Is there anything left?   Nirvana?  A state of danger? 

Phone, car, computer, house.  Little things  -  toilet paper, coffee, saved food, cooking pot, box of matches, shoes. To come down from the white world of technology that we have built around ourselves - the fortress, the cocoon - and to return into a naked silence.  What could be more terrifying?  What could be more shameful?  What could be more unthinkable?

And yet is it not beguiling? That kind of honesty and simplicity. To touch the very smallest edge of a excluded, forbidden animality,  To be both less and more than a civilized human.  

To lose everything. To think without words.

Momentarily, here and there, a tiny, invisible release from the machinery that we make ourselves to be. 

Elm Tree Farm (cont.)

The next year, Sept. 27, 1851, the first baby arrived, Charles, he lived to be almost 18 mo old.  By that time the second baby, Fred Budrow, was little more than a month old.  He was born Feb. 4, 1853. 

Other children followed: Mary Elizabeth born Feb 26, 1856, Frank Benjamin, born Nov. 7, 1857, and Thomas Augustus, May 10, 1860. 

The children’s grandmother, Phoebe Forbes Dodge, lived to see them all except Thomas Augustus.  In April 1859, she left her home and family to the care of Louise and Catherine, and she too was buried in the Taunton school graveyard, not cemetery then. 

Six years later in 1857, the “white plague” had entered both the old homestead, and James’ home and Catherine and Mary were freed from their sufferings.

Catherine or Aunt Kate was very skillful with her needle.  She did the most beautiful embroidery on finest mull caps (Grandmother wore caps, collars, under sleeves, wristbands, ruffles, etc.)  When the terrible cough developed, of course she must be kept out of cold air.  No one in that day dreamed of the healing of fresh air and complete rest.  She sat in her chair by the window and embroidered - I supposed she literally stitched her life away.   

There must have been help there for Louise had married James Goddard of York, in April of 1861and was living in her own home. 

I do not know how long Mary was sick, but it was for some time.  Even when “Tommy” was born she was ailing.

I can picture the anxiety and grief of those years, at the thought of separation, and the thought of the young family to be reared and the mother not there.  I have heard Father say that he thought he couldn’t face it, and that when they knew that the end was near, he and Mary were one day talking about it, and she promised that if she was allowed she would come to him in spirit.  Father said he never felt in the least that she was near.  She died November 15, 1865, and she lay in Taunton graveyard.

There followed a period of hired help, and sometimes no help to be had, help from neighbors and home, and more hired help which seemed to be inefficient and rather flighty.

Father was lonely.  He needed someone to care for his family and he asked Lucy Hull Blakeslee to “be his wife and a mother to his children”.  She lived about three miles away, west of Creigsville in the town of York.  Of course the old love never died, but he did have a new and very genuine love in his heart, and on November  14, 1866 James and Lucy were married at the Blakeslee homestead in the town of York.

Minnie told me that when Mother came into the home they were all so glad to see her.  They thought she was perfectly beautiful.  I know she was a fine looking woman.  She was young - twenty-five - and well, and gay.  She came with courage and cheer in her heart, and on her tongue was the law of kindness. Her friend used to call Mother “Old Peaches”, I suppose from her coloring.

I asked Mother what she did when she first came into the house. “Oh,” she said, “I kissed them all around, and Tommy climbed into my lap - he was only four - and he put his arms around my neck, and I asked him if he was going to be my little boy now; and he said yes.”

Mother needed all the courage she could muster.  It was no easy thing to go into a home with a ready made family, even if she was heartily welcomed.

The first baby, Arthur Blakeslee, was born in the house on the corner, and the second one too, Alice Louise, but very early in Mother’s married life they moved to Grandfather’s home, where there was Uncle Jote and Grandfather left.  So Mother had a new element in her family; but she was equal to it.  Grandfather loved her, and they said would do anything for Lucy, often called “Lute”, or “Lutie”.

I couldn't for a minute think there were not little frictions and annoyances, what home doesn't have them where there are growing and developing young people and three generations in the home?  But there was love in the home, and the desire for peace and happiness and the good of others. 

Little Arthur Blakeslee, who was born April 26, 1869 lived only until the first of July 1870.  In the December (27th) of that year Alice Louise was born - a new baby for empty arms and hearts.  But she too died before she was two, in April of 1872.

Once when I had a sick baby of my own and Mother and I were talking about those two children that she had lost, I said to her, “I should think you would have felt what was the use of having babies, if they came only to die.”

“Well, I did feel that way”, was the reply. 

Animals in a Landscape

I keep trying to look at humans as animals in a landscape.  Just a peculiar kind of primate creature walking around.  It's very difficult. A challenge.  Because we just have so much stuff all over us and around us, an elaboration of machines, buildings, decorations, hairstyles.  We carry around so many stories and artifacts.  I've been trained and educated to read the human story; it happens so fast I can't keep myself from making instant distinctions about race, age, social class, lifestyle choice.  All the human codes and signs.  We hallucinate so much onto the simple reality of human animals in a landscape.  Of course our landscapes are, for the most part, dominated by human construction which makes it even more difficult to dissolve the enchantment we have placed on ourselves.  All the things we must do because we are locked into our hallucination of the human condition.  As I said, I'm not very successful at this, but I'm working on it.
On the other hand, I passed a Golden Retriever in somebody's car at the supermarket and she gave me the big Golden Retriever smile, just beaming love out into the world with reckless abandon.  Maybe I'm hallucinating the love of Golden Retrievers but it made me feel all warm and fuzzy anyhow.

See the Wild Goats

So I got an invitation to a sustainability forum at a fancy hotel on the other side of the island and I couldn't resist going, despite the evident ridiculousness of the idea that I would drive two hours to listen to speeches by very important people about saving the world from people like ourselves who consume resources with abandon, driving here, flying there, which is all justified of course because we are so important.

Lounging on the black lava at the intersection where I turned towards the fancy hotel were three or four wild goats, idly watching the traffic go by in seeming complete contentment and bemusement. Really, I think they were laughing at us in our shiny metal contraptions hurrying here and there, trying to get to somewhere that they already are, all day long.

But goats are not sustainable because they eat native vegetation, so they should stop being so smug, darn it!

Elm Hill Farm (cont.)

So many changes have been made in the house, would we recognize it as it first was!

I’ve been told that at first what is now used as a dining room was the kitchen.  That makes it seem more reasonable to have the pantry and the cellar stairs where they were when I was very little.  They still had a big fireplace in the kitchen, and there was a big chimney between the front rooms that had two fireplaces both downstairs and upstairs, for heating the sitting room and parlor and the two big upstairs chambers.

If the family moved in 1834, young Jotham would have been fourteen, Louise eleven, James nine, Augustus seven, and Catherine, or Kate as she was known, five.

Though produce still had to be hauled for some distance the coming of the great Erie Canal, “Clinton’s big ditch”, had opened up a market for all that could be raised.  The land was new and fertile, no great rocks to be picked off the land, though of course stones always could be found, as a few stone walls testify. But they did not have to make miles and miles of wall to get rid of stones as in New England or a mountainous country. 

More people had been coming in all through the years, the little village of Moscow, 1 1/2 miles away was a thriving center, and Grandfather prospered.  There came a time when it would seem as though they reaped the round of their labors.  At least some of the things they had are greatly prized by their descendants like their solid silver, their mahogany pieces and some dishes. 

Jotham and James, as I have said seem to have had no “schooling” except what the red school house afforded.  Louise  went to some female seminary for a time, perhaps Catherine too.  But Augustus was the “smart” of the family and for him was given the larger opportunity.  He studied law, and some time went to Savannah, Georgia.  I was told, to my childish horror, that he owned slaves.  His picture used to stand in our sitting room - a young man with a serious face, a fringe of brown whiskers under his chin, and abundant brown hair, and wearing a stock.  I’m told he was fond of good clothes.

In May 1853, Augustus died of fever in Savannah. His body was sent home in a leaden box, and he was buried in the graveyard back of Taunton school house.  He was only twenty-six - just beginning - and I’m sure his death was a great grief to the family.  

As James matured his education was supplemented by wide reading of history and biography.  There must have been a real love of books and information in the family.  Grandfather had an unusual library for his day, all books of solid worth.  James even taught district school a few terms.  One place I know of was the school on the upper Mt. Morris road, beyond the John White farm.  Some time he went to Ohio, probably lived with his relatives, and taught.

Girls were interesting to him.  I’ve heard him tell of going to parties, quilting bees, apple parings, etc.  I’ve no doubt he was interesting to girls, too.  If he was as nice as a boy and young man as he was when I knew him, how could it be otherwise.  I remember saying to him, “I wish I had been young when you were, and you would have taken me to an apple paring.”

When he was twenty four or five he was “stepping out”, and his stepping took him down the road toward Moscow half a mile or more to see Mary Elizabeth Budrow.  Her home was just off the main road on one that went to the “bank”.  Mary was one of thirteen children.  When the thirteenth was born some friends came to see the new baby and the mother.  As she looked at the cradle in which the baby lay she said, “You ought to have a new cradle, there have been twelve babies rocked in that one.”  Mary’s mother was said to have a quick wit, and she flashed out, “Well, I’ve raised the first dozen in this cradle, I guess I can the second!”

James Lloyd Dodge and Mary Elizabeth Budrow were married Nov. 7, 1850; and went to live in the house on Teed’s Corners.  Sometime more land had been purchased on the corner, two parcels, on diagonal corners, and the house built, and there the new home was established.