Site Title

Nellie Fox, the Fierce Shiba Inu

January 19, 2013

copyright Steven Sternbach

We were considering names. “How about Nellie Fox?” Steve suggested as we sat on a log having lunch, hoping not
to be shot by one of deer rifles echoing from the New Hampshire woods behind us.

            “That’s
brilliant!” I replied. “Who’s
Nellie Fox?” We were en route to
view a newborn Shiba Inu puppy, the only girl in a litter of six, (and along the way, we were forming a
decidedly scary view of the wilds in which she had been born.) Steve explained that Nellie [Jacob
Nelson] Fox had been a second basemen for the Chicago White Sox in the 1950’s. Fox, a 12-time All Star, had died relatively
young, and for years a Nellie Fox fan club had tried to get him inducted into
the Hall of Fame. In 1997, his
last year of eligibility, they succeeded, but that’s getting ahead of my story.

            The
puppy fit into one of my hands.
We paid a deposit and returned seven weeks later to collect her. Pam, the breeder, forgot we were coming
and greeted us with a pointed rifle, reinforcing our skeptical view the neighborhood. “She bit her brother,” Pam announced,
as I wrote out a check. Right
then, we should have reconsidered.
The bundle of less-than-happy fur we were about to collect—she panted
from fear all the way home—was a fighter, and not a very wise one. For one thing, she never grew to be
more than half the size of a normal Shiba and had absolutely no sense about
what she could take on. Exploring
some odd sounds at our otherwise empty campground one night in 2004, I looked down
to see her standing on her hind legs, straining on her leash, and beating the
air with her paws in an effort to get at what I soon realized was a bear the
size of a Volkswagen.

      For her first year Nellie played
happily in the dog park across the street, but when it closed for renovations, any
hope that she might get along with other dogs closed with it. Even as a puppy, she responded fiercely
to anything she perceived as an affront to her sovereignty—a big dog running
over her, for example—and soon lost the ability to distinguish play from
fighting. She didn’t like being
touched, not by dogs and not by humans.
We had to teach her to enjoy being petted, and she never got used to
being brushed. I brushed her fur
and her teeth almost every week for 17 years, and she screamed and struggled
and threatened to bite every one of those 884 weeks! Fortunately, she was not usually aggressive, unless
provoked, and eventually developed a Garbo-esque desire to simply be left
alone, at least by strangers.

            She
was breed-conscious and had an uncanny ability to recognize dogs that were like
her: Huskies, Akitas, other Shibas, and so on. She was drawn to them, even if a fight was likely to ensue, and
as a puppy she fell in love with Jason, a handsome, laid-back dude, tannish-white
and part Norwegian elkhound. She
met him during our dog-park year, and long after the park was closed and she
lost her ability to play with other dogs, she greeted Jason with spasms of joy.

            If
she didn’t like the usual rough and tumble of the dog park, she loved running. Whenever possible, she encouraged dogs to chase
her, and she was so fast that few could catch her. Once during our dog-park year, a young German shepherd took
off after her and fell far enough behind that he found it necessary to “cheat”
by jumping over a low bench in order to shorten the distance between them. Sometimes, with no one to chase her,
she would take off in mad circles, running round and round until exhausted. Frisbee was another pleasure that found
her running back and forth under the flying disks.

            Obedience
eluded her. Shibas are an
atavistic breed, descended, or so the Japanese claim, from pre-history. I once read an article on Carolina
dogs, believed to be descended from dogs that accompanied the earliest
immigrants over the landmass that once bridged the Bering Strait, and I found
descriptions of their idiosyncrasies similar to Nellie’s—the sudden, frantic, spontaneous
digging of small holes, for example.
Nellie’s whole life was one long compromise, trying to conform her
wildness to domestic life. It
wasn’t that she never learned to “come,” she militantly refused to learn to
come. Following my dog book, I
tried treats and a training leash.
As long as the leash was on, she “came” for the treat, but as soon as it
was off, she weighed the treat against freedom and opted for freedom. Steve and I spent a great deal of her
life involuntarily chasing her, and she loved every minute! She wasn’t dumb, but she used her
smarts in the interest of staying wild instead of becoming domesticated. Once on the Cape’s Marconi dunes, when
I dropped her leash, thinking she would run to “Daddy,” she darted under the
fence instead, running round and round the protected dune where we couldn’t
follow. We watched helplessly
until finally Steve was able to grab her leash as she cruised close to the
fence for the fifteenth time. She
loved us, and she never wanted to run “away” exactly; she just wanted to be
free.

            So
how was it we came to love this dog like our very life? For starters, she was, by all objective
standards, incredibly beautiful.
Descended on her father’s side from two of Richard Tomita’s original Shibas
from Japan, she bore a strong resemblance to “Chibi,” the cover dog on Tomita’s
Shibas book, whose thick soft fur, rounded features, and soulful eyes
made him particularly handsome.
Those features and her small size gave Nellie a perpetual puppy
look. Up to a few months before
she died, people were still stopping us to ask if she were fully grown. (Our
local bookstore featured an amazingly cute picture of her at six months in
their 1996 fall newsletter.)

            Steve
summed it up best when he looked at her one day and said, “If you weren’t so
cute, you’d just be a bad dog!” She
beguiled with her actions as well as her looks. Steve’s father called her a little “vance” (mischievous
child), and she mortified his mother when, on her first visit to their high
rise Brooklyn apartment, she dove under the sofa, a space two inches high, to emerge
minutes later with a desiccated mouse!
My sister, impatient with Nellie’s
waywardness, shook with helpless laughter one night as she
watched her chase June bugs on our deck. For better or worse, Shibas have an amazing range of vocalizations, so I taught
her to sing. She frequently serenaded
us, hoping for a treat, and always accompanied us on “Happy Birthday,” her
favorite song because birthdays meant presents. She could never quite understand that not every birthday was
hers and always looked forward to opening presents, no matter whose. She paced around the Christmas tree on
Christmas Eve as impatient as any child to start opening her gifts.

She
played hard, indoors and out. She
could pluck balls from mid-air and would do handstands to field grounders. Passers-by stopped to watch her play “soccer” in the park, chasing a beach ball around, pushing it with her nose like a seal, while we ran
in and kicked it away from her.
She had a variety of indoor toys for chasing and chewing, but
particularly loved tug-of-war with her rope toy, standing on her hind legs to
wrestle it away from Steve in a pose we dubbed “Tyrannosaurus Fox.”

Although
she was almost nine when we purchased Mill Brook House, she had many good years
there, running through the fields, chasing turkeys, hunting for mice, and fishing
for leaves as they floated down the Mill Brook. We built her a pen from the sturdy fence that had surrounded
the defunct swimming pool we filled in, so she could spend time lolling in the
sunshine and chasing bugs.
Although we tossed balls for her both outside and inside the pen, she
came, in her last years, to distrust the open fields—too many smells from
animals she knew she could no longer defend herself against—and to prefer the
security of her pen. As she aged,
the pen became the last place I could get her to play ball. When Hurricane Irene destroyed it in
the late summer of 2011, she never chased balls again. Becoming ever more fragile and
dependent, she left us a few days after Christmas in 2012, bequeathing
indelible memories of a charming, difficult, unique little personality.

Good night, little Princess…

For more photographs of Nellie Fox, click on the album in our sidebar "Nellie Fox in Pictures" or use this link: http://www.millbrookhousenews.com/photos/nellie_fox_in_pictures/index.html
The Children’s Crusade

January 5, 2013

Bruce Watson's Freedom Summer

In the summer of 1967, I went to Holly Springs, Mississippi with a group of students from Michigan State to conduct a summer workshop for incoming freshman at Rust College, an historic black college, which had lost its accreditation because of low academic standards. Products of segregated schools, Rust students had few academic skills when they entered, giving their teachers little to build on. A remedial program intended to give freshman a leg up in reading and math, the 6-week summer workshop was intended to help the college raise standards and regain accreditation. (Such remedial programs, ubiquitous on college campuses today, were more or less unheard of in 1967, when college classrooms overflowed with more baby boomers than they could handle.)

Before leaving for Mississippi, veterans of the program schooled us in how to behave, both off and on campus, to avoid either stirring up trouble with white Mississippians or breaking the rigid rules of our host college. Rust strictly forbade any form of PDA—public display of affection—no matter what color or combination of colors the couple. Frankly, this worried us more than the threat of violence, but we heard stories of “varmint guns” carried in the backs of pickup trucks and knew, in a general way, of violence throughout the South, targeting civil rights workers. Although heinous race-based crimes had continued to occur in Mississippi through 1966, the state had, by 1967, settled down considerably since the infamous summer of 1964, when three young men were abducted and murdered, and the state was gripped by a veritable guerilla war. In Freedom Summer, fellow Franklin County resident Bruce Watson documents that war and, to a lesser extent, its aftermath, the relatively peaceful Mississippi that I encountered.

Mississippi in 1964 was considered so violently racist that even Martin Luther King avoided it, preferring to stage his actions in his home state of Alabama. Taming Mississippi was left to SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). “Freedom Summer,” which, working out of Freedom Houses throughout the state, spearheaded voter registration drives and established consciousness-raising Freedom Schools, was the brainchild of Robert Parris Moses, SNCC’s field secretary. Volunteers were recruited from college campuses across the country. In the end about 300 young people, most under 25, participated in Freedom Summer, half of them Northern, relatively privileged, and mainly white; the others members of Misissippi’s chapter of SNCC, veterans of shootings, beatings and Southern apartheid.

On the first day of the project, three of the workers, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, were murdered by Klan members, the county sheriff among them. It would take the rest of the summer for the FBI to locate their bodies and issue indictments. Watson’s narrative jumps skillfully between the FBI search and the events and achievements of Freedom Summer, using the stories of four volunteers from the North, one black, three white, two men and two women, to give a face to the narrative and tie it together. Most poignant is the story of shy Fran O’Brien, who spent the summer teaching young children in a Freedom School, only to be abducted and beaten by Klansmen at the end of the summer. At one point, Fran asks her young pupils to name the countries from which Americans had come. The children begin with European countries and move on to China and India when Fran finally asks them “What about Africa?” “Does that count?” they ask her dubiously.

Threats and violence came non-stop. Highly organized, Freedom Summer volunteers kept in touch via a WATS line (precursor to 800 numbers) and wrote up logs, which recorded each incident. Page 7 in one log leads off with a familiar name: “Holly Springs: … Threats of dynamiting Freedom House tonight. Guys driving around with guns….”

Celebrities came to Mississippi, some to entertain, some to volunteer, among them actress and activist Shirley MacLaine, as well as Richard Beymer, star of the film version of West Side Story, who worked alongside [my congressman] Barney Frank, a Harvard student at the time. “I am prouder of being there than of anything else in my life,” Frank has said. Harry Belafonte, along with a terrified Sidney Poitier, delivered $60,000 in cash to bankroll Freedom Summer’s final project, sending an all-black delegation to the Democratic National Convention. Fannie Lou Hamer, activist from Ruleville, Mississippi, would become a celebrity (although never a wealthy one) because of that convention.

In the years after Freedom Summer, Mississippians came to be embarrassed by their singular status as the most racist state in America and, according to Watson, worked hard to modify that image. Already in 1967, I found Rust students quick to tell me that Mississippi was bad, but Alabama was worse!

So many years after and with later generations of young people famous for their apathy and/or incubation of cynical right-wing extremists like Jack Abramoff, Karl Rove, and Grover Norquist, one wonders why so many were willing to risk their lives in Freedom Rides, Freedom Summer, and other aspects of the Movement. One answer is that the children of the 40’s and 50’s grew up acutely conscious that their parents had fought and sacrificed to win a momentous victory over fascism abroad. They could do no less than fight it at home. And then there was the martyred president, who had admonished them to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship … to assure the survival and success of liberty.” Kennedy himself was taken aback when young people applied his words almost immediately to the Civil Rights struggle, but once spoken, they inspired a generation to fight the battles their elders would not fight.
Spielberg’s Lincoln

December 29, 2012

    Every Thanksgiving and Christmas, when our garden is frozen
and we have more time to be in town, we try to catch up with a few movies at
the Greenfield Garden Cinema. This
year we caught Spielberg’s Lincoln on
the Sunday before Christmas and enjoyed it, especially the acting. Critics have heaped praise on Daniel
Day-Lewis for his amazing portrayal of Lincoln, but all of the acting was
superb. Who would recognize Sally
“You-Really-Like-Me” Field as the terse Mary Todd Lincoln? Awards have also been rightly heaped on
Tommy Lee Jones for his performance as Thaddeus Stevens (who, by the way,
really did have a 23-year liaison with his “quadroon” [one quarter black] housekeeper). James Spader, Hal Holbrook, and David
Strathairn gave outstanding performances as did the less well-known actors. Janusz Kaminski’s award-winning low-light
cinematography, capturing the era in the sepia tones we associate with wood,
candles, and early photography, is also treat.

    The film’s story-telling (script and
editing) is uneven, however, and often leaves the audience, at least this
audience, squirming with embarrassment.
Spielberg has never known when to end his films and has ruined many a
good one (The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, Schindler’s List, for example) with too many endings, and Lincoln is no different. We do not need to be walked through the
assassination, his cabinet gathered round the crumpled body, or flashback to
his Second Inaugural. Lincoln
descending the White House stairs on his way to the theater, framed by the dark
arch of the portico, would have been enough. The rest, as they say, is history. (Steve bought me Sunrise
at Campobello on DVD for
Christmas. As Ralph Bellamy’s Roosevelt
begins his speech nominating Al Smith at the 1924 Democratic Convention, the
culmination of a three-year struggle to find a life after polio, the camera
pulls back amid confetti, balloons, and cheers. We know the rest of the story. Spielberg should have studied his prototypes better!)

    Unfortunately for this film, not
only the end but the beginning is mishandled with two soldiers, one black, one
white, telling Lincoln of their exploits on the battlefield and reciting the
Gettysburg Address for him. It
doesn’t get more embarrassingly didactic than that. I once published an article on “Old Age Cinema,” in which I
discussed the characteristics that I thought films created by directors in
their later years had in common.
As Lincoln started out, I
wondered if Spielberg was falling into that category, and not in a good way,
but the core of the film, the fight for the 13^th Amendment, was as
tight, lively, and irreverent as anything Spielberg or anyone else, for that
matter, has made.   That and
the acting are worth the price of admission.
One Year After

October 17, 2012

The one-year anniversary of Hurricane Irene
came and went, and I tried not to notice.
Grass has grown back, as best it could, given the drought. The garden is re-established, still lacking
many perennials but with improved soil and design; we have added a second
garden, especially for daylilies. We
love the broad, mow-able path down to the brook that Jonathan, our landscaper, created out of
the tangle of rocks, trees, and eroded soil the storm left. We still miss our secure dog
pen—created from the fence around the defunct swimming pool that became my
garden—but we’re managing with enough fencing to keep the dog off the
road. With the constant labor
these improvements have required, my sense of trauma has receded.

But
all disasters, natural and man-made, leave silences. For us the sights, sounds, and, yes, smells of the goat farm
are an echoing absence. I stand
long on the bridge by the former farm.
2004 (the year we bought Mill
Brook House) is carved into it. I
can remember the construction and how we first visited the farm, using a
temporary bridge to cross the brook.
John and his aunt had owned it only a year and welcomed more newcomers. We admired the goats and the single
Jersey cow. I was glowing with
excitement over our new adventure.
Hard to believe that seven years later the bridge would split apart and
leave a car dangling over the edge of the ravine.* I stare at the empty farm. A family lives there, but they do
not keep animals. Across the
street the homeowner has purchased four donkeys, one pregnant, as pets. They are shy and often prefer their pen
to the narrow field along the road that she has fenced off for them, but they alleviate
the silence.

I
return some weeks later to take pictures of the reconstructed brook, and then I
hear it: a rooster crowing. I look
at the farm, and there are chickens in the coop and baby goats in the pasture. As if a paintbrush wielded by Disney
were filling them in, the animals are reappearing. A week later a duck appears and sheep. New folks, oh my!

The Mill Brook at Mountain Road before the hurricane

The bridge at Mountain Road after Hurricane Irene

The Mill Brook at Mountain Road today

*A picture of the car hanging off a collapsed
Mountain Road, which we included in our blog entry “Good Night, Irene,” was
published three (!) times—once in reverse on the back cover—in the recent book of
the same name, Good Night Irene, by
Craig Brandon, Nicole Garman, and Michael Ryan. The book details the stories and destruction from eight
locations in New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont (mostly Vermont). About 25 pages are devoted to the Deerfield
Valley from Williamstown to Greenfield, with several pages and pictures covering
Charlemont.
Robert John Geist 1912-1985

June 28, 2012

On a recent visit to Mill Brook House, my sister asked if I remembered eating in our dinette when we were kids. From the 1920’s-1940’s dinettes, small alcoves with a built-in table and benches, made smaller more efficient kitchens possible. Ours was generally packed with no fewer than five people, my mother presiding over the meal from a stool at the end of the table, my father in the corner, pressed against the window—the better to observe his bird feeders—instructing us in all that interested him. “Of course,” I exclaimed, “I learned everything I know about history and politics in that dinette!” Well, not everything. I went on to earn a history minor and a Ph.D. in art history, but in that cramped space my mind expanded as it absorbed my father’s most dearly held beliefs: Hitler was bad, the New Deal was good, Roosevelt was practically a god, World War II a noble cause, and racism, red-baiting, Republicans and Joseph McCarthy all bad. Republicans were bad only if they held office; otherwise they were merely misguided, and he stated his reasons simply: their policies made the rich richer and the poor poorer. He had no use for political independents either because, he insisted, organization was the only way to get things done. In one discussion he noted that the Depression had also made the rich richer and the poor poorer. Though young, I was fully engaged and reminded him that, according to his own accounts, the Great Depression had made everyone poorer. No, he countered, the very rich had gotten richer. (Who, experiencing our own Great Depression, can doubt the wisdom of that insight?)

         Appropriately, my father shares his centennial with Fenway Park and Woody Guthrie. He was an avid baseball fan at a time when sports enthusiasm was considered déclassé among intellectuals and academics, and, if he could never really relate to “Woody’s children,” the leftie balladeers of the 1960’s, he appreciated the original as well as the tragic severity of the Dust Bowl Woody emerged from. Musically challenged, he nevertheless collected the work of Odetta, Lead Belly, and Burl Ives. Only later in my life did I understand them as precursors to my beloved folkies of the 60’s.

         Although my father died well before I married and almost 20 years before we bought Mill Brook House, we feel his influence here. An intermittent gardener, he enjoyed tending plants, and when I was small, he and my mother gardened seriously in an attempt to save money on food bills, a challenge I’ve taken up at Mill Brook House (with mixed results). He began his academic career in Cornell’s School of Natural Resources, specializing in ornithology. Although he would switch to English for his Ph.D., he never lost his love of birds, one of our special delights at Mill Brook House.

         Beyond these enthusiasms, another of my father’s enduring legacies was his great respect for neighbors. Shy and academic, he found small talk difficult, even painful, but he always maintained a special relationship with our neighbors, befriending them, supporting them when needed, and cooperating on numerous projects with them. The value he placed on neighbors was different from my mother’s all-purpose gregariousness; it carried a moral force.

         When we moved to Mill Brook House, I made a point of meeting and greeting all our neighbors up and down the road. On Christmas Eve I left treats at every door. I understood instinctively that for second-home owners, especially, neighbors are a lifeline, as Hurricane Irene would prove, and this, at least in part, because my father had taught me early on that neighbors constitute a special class of friend.
You CAN Get There from Here

May 3, 2012



For the first time since we bought the house, we made what used to be our annual trek to Tanglewood. Armed with eggs (boiled) and cheese from Goat Rising and bread and muffins from the Country Store, we headed southwest to the music camp. Arriving around 10:30, we found a shady spot for the car and spread out our brunch under the trees in the parking lot. The gates opened at noon, and soon after we went in and toured the lovely grounds outside the Koussevitsky Shed. The program was, uncharacteristically, a Pops concert, featuring Alec Baldwin and Arlo Guthrie. We, uncharacteristically, had seats inside so that we could see them both. Baldwin read excerpts from Kennedy brothers’ speeches, and Arlo was, characteristically, Arlo.

I have never encouraged people with Tanglewood on their mind to stay with us, and if that is the only destination, there are closer places for rent. But for anyone staying with us a week or two, Tanglewood should make the short list of day trips. The ride, alongside lakes and streams through pleasant countryside and forests, takes about an hour.

From Charlemont, take Route 2 through town to 8A South. Turn left and travel for about 10 miles. Turn right when 8A joins 116 and left when 8A leaves 116 to continue south. When 8A ends at Route 9, turn right and follow 9 into and through Pittsfield until it joins Route 7. Follow 7 south to 7A in Lenox and turn right on 183. You’ll see signs for Tanglewood.

If you’re traveling with a dog, seek out the wooded section at the far end of the East Parking Lot. Arrive before 11:30 and tell the parking lot attendant you want to park in the shade. At that hour, you’ll have your choice of spots. Pick out the most densely covered, and your dog will be fine throughout the concert. We always check on ours during intermission, and this time found her so fast asleep she didn’t know we’d come and gone.

For tickets and box office hours, go to tanglewood.org.

(photos courtesy Steven Sternbach)
MassMoCA

May 3, 2012

True confession: I dragged my feet getting to MassMoCA. After six years in the Berkshires and numerous trips to North Adams, we finally made it there January 1, 2011. I’d never been a fan of contemporary art, even though this was ostensibly the area of my Ph.D. But as a medievalist-turned-film-historian, I was much less interested in contemporary plastic arts than celluloid ones–film was still on celluloid back then–less interested in philosophical/theoretical meditations, than theological/humanist ones. MassMoCA, however, awoke my dormant medievalist and turned me into a believer.

It starts with the building. As much a monument to an era of faith—faith in industry, the American worker, and the rivers tumbling out of the mountains of the Northeast—as a Gothic cathedral, as huge, awe-inspiring, and archaic, the rugged old mill buildings that house MassMoCA are as present as the art they house. Built between 1860 and 1890 for the textile firm Arnold Print Works, the buildings were purchased in 1942 by the Sprague Electric Company, a major R&D firm that made electric components until overseas competition drove it out of business. Their cavernous spaces are ideal for monumental installations that mingle with rough brickwork, vaults and arches, high windows, and heavy wooden beams from a bye-gone era.

Purchased for a museum in 1986, the site didn't open until 1999 as its founders dealt with on-going funding difficulties. Since opening with 208,000 square feet of renovated space, the 13-acre campus has doubled and now includes a concert hall, artist workspace, office and retail space, as well as its 110,000 square feet of installation exhibit space. Unless an artist aspires, Christo-like, to complement nature, only his or her imagination limits what can be displayed here.

Among the most arresting works we saw were Orly Genger’s miles of intricately knotted, orange rope that burst through one wall and lay in piles in an adjoining room and Katharina Grosse’s enormous icebergs of Styrofoam and brightly colored earth.

Orly Genger, Big Boss, 2009-10

Mounded up in front of two stories of huge windows, its spray-painted primary colors straying onto several of them, Grosse’s installation, indeed, reminds one of a cathedral.

Katharina Grosse, One Floor Up More Highly, 2010

Evoking both the subject matter and aura of 17^th century still lifes, particularly dark Spanish ones, Petah Coyne filled one windowless room with islands and hanging orbs of dark flowers, decorated with stuffed birds and animals, an installation that, eerie and claustrophobic, was disturbingly beautiful.

Petah Coyne, Everything that Rises Must Converge, 2010

Of the installations we saw, only Frederico Diaz’s cascades of black balls, arranged near the museum’s entrance, remains, but only until March.

Frederico Diaz, Geometric Death Frequency–141, 2010

A retrospective of conceptual artist Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings occupies one entire three-story building. From 1968 to his death in 2007, LeWitt created mathematically-based line configurations for wall drawings that were subsequently painted on real walls by a team of assistants. Conceived in 2003 in cooperation with LeWitt and his wife, work on the MassMoCA project began in 2007 with three LeWitt assistants directing a team of 62 artists, who filled walls erected in the 27,000 foot interior of “Building #7.” The exhibit moves chronologically and vertically through LeWitt’s work with the 1960’s and 70’s on the first floor, the 80’s and 90’s on the second floor, and the incredibly colorful and exuberant work of the late 1990’s to 2007 on the third floor.

Sol LeWitt, A Wall Drawing Retrospective

Mindful of his wall-painting predecessors, LeWitt once said, “I would like to produce something that I would not be ashamed to show Giotto.” My inner medievalist says that he has. The exhibit will be on display for the next 25 years, but don’t wait for the last day to see it!

For more images of the MassMoCA exhibits from 2010, click on our MassMoCA photo album in the column on the right side of this blog or use this link: http://www.millbrookhousenews.com/photos/Art/

For information on current exhibits, see massmoca.org.
Mill Brook House Reopens June 1

April 12, 2012

Flower by flower, Mill Brook House is coming back. There are bluebirds in the birdhouses, yellow-bellied sapsuckers tapping up a storm in the woods, and a great blue heron is frequenting the Irene-enlarged stream that runs behind the house. Having channeled the entire Mill Brook for one week, the stream is now large enough to support thumb-sized minnows that interest the heron. Frogs, silenced by the cold snap after the March heat wave, will be calling and singing again soon.

A giant log swept in by the storm and lodged against one bank of the Mill Brook, where it runs through our land.

It has been an arduous and sometimes frustrating road to recovery, but we are almost there. All of our systems had to be rebuilt or replaced, work that was finally complete by Christmas 2011. Our humble thanks to the diligent tradesmen who persisted until everything was working again. Thanks, too, to our neighbor Ian, who had the good sense to tie our propane tank to the deck, lest it join hundreds of other tanks washed down the Deerfield in the storm. Sadly, our secure dog pen, which took the full force of the flood, was completely destroyed.

Clearing sand and debris, front and back, so that our garden and driveway could be restored took most of the fall. We continue to work on resurrecting the garden, the lawns and the meadows and removing flotsam from the woods.

Jonathan Winfisky clears sand from the backyard. Jonathan runs heavy equipment in the summer and blows glass in the winter.

Living with our cheerless landscape through the fall and snowless winter was depressing, but with spring’s renewal finally here, each survivor that pokes its head up in the garden, each new blade of grass—even the garden’s unwanted grass, which we carefully remove and plant elsewhere—and every returning bird bring enormous joy. Mill Brook House is coming back!

We will be ready for guests on June 1. For prices and availability, please check our listing at: http://www.homeaway.com/vacation-rental/p144555 .

Look what the cat dragged in!

Jonathan Winfisky's glass (above) can be purchased

at the Grow Gallery in Shelburne Falls.
Re-Opened Route 2 Greets the New Year

January 3, 2012

A year that started out so hopefully for us in Charlemont, a new windmill and an old store turned 150, turned out to contain multiple weather disasters for Western Massachusetts with Hurricane Irene causing the most distress in the hilltowns.

Avery's store c. 1880

The Mill Brook off course during Hurricane Irene

As 2011 drew to a close, however, there was much to celebrate in the re-opening of Route 2 between Charlemont and North Adams. Six miles of this major artery, closed since the hurricane on August 28, re-opened the week before Christmas. Until we traveled the newly opened roadway, we had no idea of the magnitude of the damage: entire mountainsides had washed onto the road, which had toppled into the river in many places. With crews working round the clock, what should have taken an entire year to complete was finished in less than four months, although men and machines are still at work to stabilize the landscape.

Route 2 in Savoy, December 30, 2011

Stabilizing the banks of the Cold River

Thankful for this 23 million dollar Christmas present from our state and federal governments, we pray that continued "recovery" continues to bless us all in 2012.

Happy New Year from Mill Brook House!!
Good-bye, Goat Rising

November 18, 2011

Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye

With enormous regret we announce the departure of John Miller and Goat Rising from the farmstead at the corner of Route 8A North and Mountain Road. Goat Rising, under new ownership, has moved to Plainfield while John and his Jerseys have joined the centuries-old Appleton Farms in Ipswich.

John and his aunt purchased the farmstead in 2003, the year before we bought Mill Brook House. As John added Jersey cows to the goat farm, the herd increasing each year, the farm’s limited pastureland became an increasing liability. The addition of the Curtis Country Store to the farm’s enterprises, delightful though it was, turned into another liability. Recession, bad tenants, and a devastated real estate market combined to make for steep losses. But the straw that broke the camel’s back seems to have been Hurricane Irene and the damaged bridge over the Mill Brook in front of the farm. The months-long four-mile detour over dirt roads meant headaches for John and his family getting out and deterred customers for the farm’s store from coming in. More losses.

Ironically, the week John moved, the bridge was finally repaired.

The boutique farm with its prize-winning cheeses, raw milk, fresh eggs and delightful animals was the highlight of our neighborhood, a favored destination for a walk for ourselves and our guests, a wonderful of source not just of local produce, but of produce from animals we knew personally. John’s mother was a superb baker, and after the Country Store closed, her cookies and muffins appeared serendipitously next to the ice cream freezer in the farm store, providing a quick pick-me-up after a day of painting or laboring in the garden.

True, it wasn’t all Irene’s fault, but the loss of Goat Rising after so many other losses from the hurricane is painful and deeply felt.

I attach my review of Brad Kessler's memoire of goat farming, which evokes our own fond memories of Goat Rising.

Book Review: Goat Song

This book was a natural choice, given the goat farm down the street from us. Raising goats is clearly not for the dilettante or the faint-hearted, and we’ve seen evidence of that, too, in our immediate neighborhood. One neighbor thought she would rescue a male kid, slated to be shipped off to more or less certain death by Goat Rising. (Few males survive in the world of domesticated goats, where milk and cheese are the goal.) Our friend stuck it out for several years, taking him for walks among the stones and boulders in the Mill Brook, but he finally became too much for her (though I believe she found another home for him, where he could continue being a pet). Further up the road in Heath, we met a woman keen to raise goats as a hobby, but the young kids we saw on her property at the time have long since disappeared.

            These failures become understandable when one reads of the sheer hard labor involved in raising goats in Brad Kessler’s Goat Song, which Kessler’s poetic style does not disguise. The book makes a good companion and intriguing counterpoint to Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about her year-long quest to live off her land or that of local farmers. Where Kingsolver is polemical, Kessler is lyrical and philosophical (and far more economical with words). Where Kingsolver gives us current information about government policies and the sad, wasteful state of our food supply, Kessler delves into our pastoral and etymological history—all the English words that derive from Indo-European, Greek, and Hebrew for goats and herding, along with slivers of poetry and wisdom on same, passed down from the earliest civilizations to the present. Where Kingsolver may leave us feeling frustrated at the imperfect state of our of lives and our government—most of us don’t have the time, the land, or the money to eat as much local produce as we’d like—Kessler leaves us feeling ennobled by our rich pastoral heritage, even as we experience it vicariously through his labors

     Surprisingly, this tiny, erudite volume involves a certain amount of suspense: when one of the goats sickened, I couldn’t stop reading until I learned the outcome. Ditto when the herd was threatened by coyotes. (The battle with the coyotes calls to mind Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, where two characters duel over the merits of conserving vs. killing these predators.)

            Romantics will revel in the connections Kessler discovers between pastoralism and the notion of a lost paradise, as well as his discussions of shepherd-kings, poet-herders, and the haunting music of herding. Animal-lovers will understand better what they already intuit but society too often denies: that out of our deep connection to animals arises our humanness. Foodies will enjoy Kessler’s blow-by-blow description of cheese-making, although theologians and devout Christians may wince at the parallels he draws between cheese-making and Christianity, however much the two crossed paths in ancient monasteries.

            By the end we understand that this rich tale has been Kessler’s own spiritual journey, even as it has rubbed off on us and contributed to our own enlightenment. “A goat has led me here,” he writes in his penultimate paragraph. “I’m the boy in the Yiddish tale who’s followed her all along—she always knew the way back home.”

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