Maggie's Farm

A re-post from last year -

Unless they happen to be in the tourist trade or the mini-mart business, the Yankee native does not tend to welcome visitors to his corners of the woods. Maybe this applies to all of small-town USA.

You get the feeling that the old families don't welcome out-of-towners, much less furriners. And whenever they see a New York license plate in town, they worry and grumble. I'm sorry, but it's just the way the folks are: "Please respect our space and our ways and we will try to tolerate yours as long as you keep them somewhere else."

City people might term it parochial, but it's actually a strong sense of proprietorship and protectiveness towards something valuable - "Our town."

I guess we like things as they are, or, preferably, as they were. The old-timers still refer to my place as "Peck's farm," even though old Amos Peck, the fourth generation on that land and a member of a founding family of the town, ascended to his reward in 1932 and his kids sold the old chicken and dairy farm to a dairy farmer down the road who was looking to expand his herd. One wonders whether there is a covert message in it: "You don't really belong there - you are just a transient with a mortgage."

It takes two to three generations at minimum, I think, to get past being a newcomer. To be an old family, I'd guess five generations minimum. (That makes sense to me. It is an indication that your family might be committed to the town, and not just passing by the way people often do these days, viewing land as real estate rather than as a place to anchor for your future generations.)

Yes, it's about different views of land and of "place". Ideally, your ancestors would have helped build our simple 1742 Meeting House/Congregational Church, which remains the only place of worship for seven miles.

I have mentioned in the past that our modest place (which is one component of the abstraction which is Maggie's Farm) abuts the Farmington River in north-central CT, whose happy rippling and sighing I can hear from my pool and from my poolside hammock.

We have eagles, ospreys, Wood Duck, trout (mostly stocked but with some sea-run I think), herring, and maybe soon we will have a return of fishable numbers of migratory Atlantic Salmon, thanks to the fish people. We canoe the river all the time, counting the herons and the Kingfishers, and cleaning garbage from the banks when we find it.

But do not come here. We prefer it quiet and private.

Photo above: A classic Yankee front door-mat. It does NOT apply to Maggie's Farm: you are the visitors that we welcome.

Photo below: Fishing on the Farmington in early morning mist.