American Villager

We've been spending a lot of time lately on the garden at the River House. The house came with two four by twenty foot raised bed vegetable gardens, which had gone to weeds in the period the house was unoccupied. We've gone in and pulled the weeds by hand, tossing them into a leaf pile down by the river (with a voice in the back of our heads worriedly tisking all the while, wondering if by our laziness in leaving the fully seeded weeds so near we weren't just setting ourselves up for new weeds for years to come.)

We're now deep into composting. The county agricultural extension service offers workshops from time to time on how to compost. If you attend, you get a handsome black plastic composting bin, about the size of a regular garbage can. We attended - along with some friends less interested in the composting bins than we were - and now have a composting center set up along the wall by the highway. We've got one bin working away on a combination of kitchen scraps, coffee grounds and leaves from the old cherry tree. Given that winter is upon us, we don't expect much progress right away, but we still have been going by to pop the lid and stir the compost around to make sure it gets plenty of fresh oxygen.

We also got a book from the local library called Lasagna Gardening. It tells you how to create compost right in your garden bed by layering the compost elements like a lasagna casserole. With more cherry tree leaves from the yard and some strawbales taken from the landfill (leftover from halloween decorations, we think), not to mention various "green" items designed to rot into the rest, we've got our lasagna pie baking under a coating of black plastic.

We have no idea if any of this is going to work. It has been a fun way of working together even as we finish up the plans for the inside, and makes the tour through the heirloom fruit and vegetable seed catalogs feel a bit less dilettantish, on the theory that we've actually got the work underway.

The river skirts the edge of the town – a village, really, of just a few thousand – which grew up along its banks. Time was, this was a manufacturing town. Dozens of factories lined its streets. Lumber was dressed, buggies were assembled, wool was spun, bricks were fired.

The factories have gone now. Rambling old piles of brick that housed mills and assembly shops now contain “antique” shops, closer to flea markets in the quality of their goods, to which older folks in baseball caps and crepe soled shoes flock on the weekends. Along the main street, pegged at one end by our old river house, mildly precious shops filled with knickknacks and geegaws have replaced the older haberdasheries and apothecaries.

Only in part does it remain a workingman’s town. A small college, started to train preachers and the faithful, has grown into a university. Many of the old houses along the tree shaded streets are occupied by the faculty and the staff of the university; others, close by the university, pass year by year to college seniors allowed to move off campus, who take advantage of their private lodging and their ascent to the legal drinking age to throw raucous parties on weekend nights.

Bit by bit, the college has shaped the town. Professors and administrators value good schools, and in part through their support the public schools here are the best for fifty miles in any direction. That in turn has drawn other members of the educated class – doctors and dentists and business people – who live here so their children can take advantage of the schools. Over time, artists and musicians and “knowledge workers” with no need to locate in a particular zip code have migrated here from various big cities, paying for a rambling house what they would have paid for a one bedroom apartment in the city.

The town keeps a balance, however. The educated types have not taken over and deracinated the place, at least not just yet. The biggest restaurant in town serves biscuits and sausage gravy at breakfast, and big platters of greasy country cooking for dinner. The biggest magazine selection is at the Walmart on the road leading north from town, where you can pick up a copy of Combat Handguns magazine but not the New Yorker. There are plenty of people in the downtown shops who remember who lived in our soon to be house in 1940 or 1980, and appear to be weighing us up as worthy or not worthy occupants. When the first day of deer season comes, you know it, even if your own experience hunting deer never got past the second reel of Bambi.

It’s a real town, in a way that many small towns are not these days. It’s not afflicted with second homes owned by big city bankers, nor do throngs of strangers descend upon us during summer vacation. It’s the locals, many of them with family roots stretching back before the Revolution, and the imports drawn by quality of life, existing here full time, living here full time, being really here all the time in a way that is just no long possible in wide swaths of Vermont or along the oceans. It’s our home.

It is an old house on an older river – an ancient river, even by the standards of rivers. The river was here before the hills. The hills rose up from the ground beneath, and bit by bit the river carried the biggest parts of them away, down to the sea. Back when there was no Nile, no Amazon, this river was flowing along just here, joining ancient rivulets to an ancient sea. I say ancient sea, because this old river was carrying water down to the sea before the Atlantic Ocean we know today even existed.

Old as it is, the river is neither mighty (most of the time) nor famous. It is useless for boats bigger than a kayak. Commerce stops a hundred miles downstream, and even when rivers were the highways of a young nation and all boats were small, its contribution to commerce was pretty much limited to carrying flatboats and giant rafts of logs downstream when the spring floods came. The river is old, but almost feeble, except for those times when floods make it a different river altogether.

But it was the house I meant to write about. The River House, as I think of it, although it could just as easily be The Bridge House, nestled as it is under the modern highway bridge, or The Porch House, dominated as it is by two stories of porches looking out over the river. I think of it as a river house because it is the river that drew me to it. I have a thing for water, and although this ancient stream is a tepid tinkle much of the time, it provides a place to drag a kayak and maybe even a small rowboat up on the bank, and most definitely places to sit with a book and read while the river slices by. When I think of the house, I think of the river, and so that’s how it is.

Tomorrow, we remove the last of the contingencies from our contract to buy the house. In three weeks, maybe less, it will be ours, at least by those standards of “ours” recognized by title companies and duly elected Recorders of Deeds. I will move an office in right away, and once a contractor is done moving around bits and pieces to make it suit our modern needs, we will move the family in.