Bookshop Finds

Farm memoirs or farm novels, usually by women, are among the kinds of books I collect, as well as the back-t0-the-land genre. And always just when I thought I had them all...three more are found.

It's a tough time economically for used bookshops, too, and on a recent trip back to New Hampshire and returning through Ohio I went to too many bookshops doing my best to stimulate the economy. And alright, I admit it, I trolled a few antique malls in Medina and Holmes County, Ohio, too...but more about some good affordable antique finds in another blog. I can't resist a used bookshop (and I'm calling them so here because I think of a "bookshop" as something old and slightly rumply with a certain character–and a "bookstore" as an overlit book place you'd find in a mall or "big box" type megabookstore in the homogeneous suburbs).

A particular favorite back in New Hampshire is Old Number Six Book Depot owned by Ian and Helen Morison in Henniker as well as Books by the Lake, just up the road in Bradford. I've found a lot of Tasha Tudor books there, and other New England regional books and cookbooks, especially. [If there is a particular Tasha Tudor you are looking for it is worthwhile to call them.] Another is the used book section of The Toadstool, a fabulous independent bookshop (and yes, they still exist) in several locations in the Monadnock region where we lived. Of course, their new book section is always alluring, too.


Cookbooks–a woman can never have enough cookbooks! (No matter what her husband says...) Although that book on the Pennsylvania Dutch? A history for my husband (and I picked up loads of books for he and the children, too!).

There was a lovely book written in the 1970s called 84 Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff, about the actual correspondence between a woman in the United States and a very respectable bookshop owner in London. There is a certain romance about an old bookshop and as a student in London many years ago, I enjoyed browsing in shops there, too. [Here is a blog entry that I posted last September over at Cupcake Chronicles about "English Bookshops"] And who hasn't seen the movie Crossing Delancey, based on a play, from 1988 (with a great soundtrack by the Roches)? You will enjoy a romance between a woman who works in a New York bookshop in Greenwich Village and a pickle vendor who, after he cleans his hands of the pickle juice each night, smoothes them with vanilla. It is a lovely movie.


Janice Holt Giles, a Kentucky author, is hard to find in local bookshops so I was pleased to find an early edition of her second novel, Miss Willie, for only a few dollars back in New England. The Soujourner, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, is a later novel about a farmer and his estranged brother. Hal Borland wrote a lot of back-to-the-land books, like another favored author, Lois Bromfield.

Here in Kentucky, whenever I'm in Berea, I go to Robie & Robie Fine Books. College towns are often great places to find good used bookshops and Berea is no exception. The Casey County Library in Kentucky, and many other libraries across the country, have "Friends of the Library" groups that often maintain excellent used bookshops or have annual book sales.


I'm a Barbara Pym fan and discovered this biography by her friend and executor, Hazel Holt, that I had not read before. Jane Kenyon is a favorite poet and Red House, a memoir about an historic New England house in the same family since it was built, is a book I've been wanting to read since it came out.

The good thing about buying a used book is that you are recycling. The "bad" thing, I guess, is that the original author does not get a share of a resale–just like if an artist were to sell a painting for $1,000 and then it gets resold years later for $1 million. The artist gets none of that inflation. I've read that eBay sales are down or that vendors are increasingly dissatisfied. Maybe it is the economy but perhaps, also, people just missed getting out there and hunting for stuff in shops, picking it up and savoring it. There are some things that the computer will never quite replicate. In this era of Amazon "Kindle" I can not even imagine doing without a book, new or old, to linger over in a shop, to treasure in my hands and perhaps later on my bookshelves.

PS Maybe Amazon is hurting, too. On my splash page just now for publishing my blog, there was a usable $20 off at Amazon coupon. But don't worry, I'm not at all tempted. Well, maybe just a smidge...

Wash Day

For once I am actually doing laundry on a Monday and it has been productive in others ways as well. Multi-tasking up a storm here on the ridge, although, alas, not outside much on this glorious day (hopefully a bit of time in the garden after supper–people tend to garden here in summer during the longer, cooler hours "of an evening," as they say). I got caught up with most of our laundry on the weekend but today I washed those things I wanted to hang outside on my old Victorian drying rack, a precursor to the modern ones. The day is just hot–and not humid–and perfect for drying clothes.

I have been in touch with Project Laundry List and they've invited me to contribute as a "Clothes Pegger" to their blog [For my first contribution, today, click here.] I have also been assigned two clothesline-related articles for Old-House Interiors and Early Homes about the subject and history of laundry–and the mighty clothesline in our domestic past and present (more about those articles when published in the next month and later this year, with links). It's been a productive "wash day"!

In the meantime, I have been gathering clothesline and laundry-related quotes and, horrors, just realized that I blogged about Wash Day already on my other blog, Cupcake Chronicles, way back in March 2008. [I was either having a "senior moment" yesterday or a complete brain freeze but you will find on that blog some more illuminations on the subject of laundry and all things good.]

Along with "several" wonderful friends in New Hampshire, I contribute the occasional blog posting to Cupcake Chronicles. Our blog started two years ago this August as an off-shoot to our newly-formed book group that is now virtual (although we are privileged to meet in person from time to time). If you enjoy the posts here at In the Pantry you might also enjoy what we talk about at Cupcake Chronicles–not just books but all manner of topics: food, home, recipes, the odd musing or rant, and well, yes, most blog entries usually integrate books in some way. It is a welcome conversation and one way to stay connected with dear friends through the miles. [I post both as Catherine, my alter ego "Della T. Lutes"–who likes home-related discussions–and a few others, and you can click directly on most of my archived posts (some may not be) here or if you go to the right sidebar on the Cupcake page and just click on "Della." I know that you will also enjoy the blogs of Peaches LaRue, Edie and Queenie.]

I will be back soon this week with "more blogs about pantries and food" (to paraphrase Talking Heads), root cellars, and even pie–oh yes, pie. I also have some new monthly mini-columns–"Pantry Cupboards" and another one I wish to introduce–on similar topics and will invite your participation. Right now, I'm on deadline for an article (tomorrow) and must also go start something for supper!

However, I will leave you with this wonderful quote from Mildred Armstrong Kalish's book, Little Heathens–Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression [Bantam: 2008] The Cupcakes read it this past spring and there were moments I was reading it it in bed and laughing so hard my husband thought I was really losing it. This memoir has detailed descriptions of farm life growing up in the Great Depression as well as many memorable stories. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.

From the chapter, "Wash Day" (which was always on Monday):

Is there any sense in trying to make the modern-day reader understand the immense satisfaction we experienced in viewing our bright, clean wash arranged in such a meticulous fashion on the clothesline? Heaven knows we had more than enough to do without this added display of superhousewifery. But the whole ritual was a matter of pride.

There was a rumor in Garrison that a wily housewife, whose husband drove a long-haul semi truck, resulting in frequent and erratic absences, chose the clothesline method for signaling her handsome, blond lover. When her husband was in residence, she pinned the belt of his pants to the line; when he was absent, she pinned the legs of the pants to the line so they hung upside down. I never knew whether this was true or not, but it did make for good gossip.

There were a few years when the women in Garrison hung their panties and bras inside a pillowcase to conceal them from the eyes of any lascivious males who happened to pass by while these unmentionables were drying. But people made fun of the practice and it was soon abandoned. I don’t recall that we ever engaged in that bit of silly primness on the farm.

In the summertime the clothes would sometimes dry so fast that by the time we got the second basket out to the line, the first batch was already dry. We removed the clothes from the line as soon as they dried, being careful not to wrinkle the sweet-smelling, deliciously warm, sun-dried garments. We, meaning Grandma, Mama, my little sister, and I, would immediately put the sheets and pillowcases back on the beds, looking forward to the time when we could lie down on them...

To crawl between crisp sheets, warm and fresh from the sun and air, at the end of a bone-wearying day, is one of the true soul-restoring luxuries of life, which hardly anyone of the current generation will ever know.

The Right to Dry

Dresses hang at an Old Order Mennonite farm in Casey County, Kentucky.

I was going to blog about root cellars today (very soon!) but instead find myself on this humid Sunday, with the laundry more or less caught up, thinking about clotheslines. The "Right to Dry" movement is not new, a few years old now, and is probably not news to many readers. But this morning it was news to me. [Photo by an unknown photographer, taken during the 1930s, perhaps WPA sponsored.]

While watching some of CBS Sunday Morning with my coffee I learned that there is actually a movement out there to banish clotheslines from suburban developments and other areas. Project Laundry List is an entire "green" movement (and there is even a blog for "clothes peggers"). I was surprised that there even needed to be a movement lobbying for "the right to dry" and hang up clotheslines, especially in this new era of conserving our resources and dollars.



Alexander Lee, director of Project Landry List, which is based in Concord, New Hampshire (another reason I'm surprised I didn't know before, as Concord is about an hour from our former home), told The Boston Globe in an article written in 2008 that, in America, the oft-considered offensive clothesline has an image problem that is not shared in other parts of the world. "We want Martha [Stewart] and Oprah [Winfrey] to make the clothesline into a pennant of eco-chic," he said, "instead of a flag of poverty."


Curtains flap in the breeze at a farm outside of Hancock, New Hampshire.

I've always seen the beauty in laundry hanging and billowing on a clothesline (in fact, an old-fashioned laundry room is as near and dear to me as a pantry). Years ago, at a farm where I lived for a while (not the farm where I grew up) in the former servants' quarters at this sprawling Victorian farmstead, there was a clothes drying yard on the northwest side of the house between the kitchen ell of the main house and large barn (and just behind the connected annex/woodshed of which my apartment was atop). I loved hanging my laundry out whenever I could and would bring it home from the laundromat in town just to do so. The splendid, seemingly private, view of Mount Monadnock sprawling before me to the northwest was only part of that experience for me. The yard was also private, as so many laundry yards once were. [And yes, somewhere there are photos...in a box...someday!]


One of the highlights of writing and styling The Pantry was finding great spaces like this early 1900s farmhouse laundry room, still in use, which we included in the book even thought it isn't technically a pantry (a "laundry pantry," if you will). I styled it using what was already on hand and still in use there. [And I want one!]

A few years before that I lived and worked at the Gibson House, a Victorian house museum in Boston's Back Bay, where I was resident guide (and lived in the old fifth floor servant's quarters, up five svelte-inducing flights of stairs–and yes, I guess I have a thing for living in former servants' quarters!) for a few years in the 1980s. Some laundry may have been hung to dry in the service courtyard behind the kitchen near the back alley. Imagine laundry hanging in downtown Boston or any urban area today!


The laundry room at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Harrodsburg, Kentucky (as above right, also).

But as for people seeing my laundry? Why not? I've peppered this blog entry today with other people's laundry that I have taken in recent years with my digital camera, like this photo, right, of laundry drying in front of the Sawyer Farm in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. The farm is near to the farm where I grew up and we've always been family friends–a place near and dear and still in the same family for five generations. [Their pantries are described in The Pantry.]

I also like to hang up duvets and air out bedding. There is nothing like a line-dried sheet: it has a certain smell and crispness to it and I liken it to having a field grown tomato ripened by the sun versus one in a hot house. They are not the same thing. That said, does anyone like towels hung on the line? I certainly don't but maybe it was a lack-of-using-fabric-softener kind of a thing.



The clothesline industry is big business, too. Lyman Orton, owner of one of my favorite stores in Vermont (and via catalogue), The Vermont Country Store, has seized upon the "Right to Dry" movement and sells many laundry products for outdoor drying and old-style care and washing. Also Lehman's in Kidron, Ohio (where I stopped on my way back from Akron, Ohio last month–Holmes County and environs, although increasingly more touristy in recent years, has been a favorite destination for us for the past two decades) has been selling clothesline and laundry-related products as long as they've been in business. ABOVE: Old Order Mennonite laundry hangs near a bell used to call in the troops for meals.


My friend Norma on wash day. Many Amish and Mennonites have large attached rooms to their kitchens that they use for washing and canning.

Many people I know in Kentucky–"plain people" and others–have a clothesline and some still wash their clothes by hand on their back porches. Double washtubs, galvanized tin tubs and washboards–and clotheslines of all varieties–are put to good use here and don't just serve as old-timey porch ornaments. There is a beauty to driving by a farmhouse and seeing a load of laundry on the line, even though there is little romance in actually doing laundry (but there is a calming purposefulness in the task, I will admit). Those who don't see that not only don't "get it," they clearly aren't farm girls or guys, now, are they?


"Monday is Wash Day." I don't recall when every day had a designated chore but what a great idea. Here are some laundry-related items in my laundry room.

I have collected clothesline and laundry paraphernalia for years: old wicker laundry baskets (one an old Shaker one given to me by a dear writer friend who even had her name penciled on it, perhaps for laundry sent out), clothespin bags in the style of dresses and pantaloons (back when they were affordable on eBay and still an occasionally affordable find when trolling in an antique shop), clothespins, laundry "stuff." You are probably wondering, as I am: does she have a clothesline now? The short answer is 'no' – we are waiting to put one in "when we build our new house" (a chorus of late). Right now, I am happy and grateful for my chicken house (which we designed to go onto a roll top and move up the hill when we do build...). Most available land around our place will soon be used for pasturing cattle. However, I might just have to put up a makeshift clothesline this year, maybe to the north of the chicken house on the island in the middle of our driveway loop. Already my porch rails are generally covered with things and I use several old clothes racks, too.



Here is a beautiful, spare poem by the belated poet, Jane Kenyon, who was married to former poet laureate Donald Hall. They lived for several decades in the old New Hampshire farmhouse that was his family home and are two of my favorite modern poets. Hall has also penned several memoirs and children's books, especially Ox-Cart Man and Lucy's Summer. [His current memoir is on my "books to read" list.] "Wash" is followed by the first and last stanzas of another of Kenyon's poems, "Wash Day." Like a true poet, she saw the beauty in the domestic and the every day. ABOVE: The preserved kitchen at the New Hampshire Farm Museum in Milton.

Wash

All day the blanket snapped and swelled
on the line, roused by a hot spring wind....
From there it witnessed the first sparrow,
early flies lifting their sticky feet,
and a green haze on the south-sloping hills.
Clouds rose over the mountain....At dusk
I took the blanket in, and we slept,
restless, under its fragrant weight.


Two vintage Old Order Mennonite quilts at a 2008 auction ~ wish I had bid!

Wash Day (first and last stanzas)

How it rained while you slept! Wakeful,
I wandered around feeling the sills,
followed closely by the dog and the cat.
We conferred, and left a few windows
open a crack.
Now the morning is clear
and bright, the wooden clothespins
swollen after the wet night.

How is it that every object in this basket
got to be inside out? There must be
a trickster in the hamper, a backward,
unclean spirit.
The clothes–the thicker
things–may not get dry by dusk.
The days are getting shorter....
You'll laugh, but I feel it–
some power has gone from the sun.

[For more laundry-related writings, click here.]

POSTSCRIPT ~ When The Pantry was accepted for publication by Gibbs Smith, Publishers, they sent me a lovely little book that they wanted me to use as reference for size, design and "look" for my book design and format. It is called The Clothesline by Irene Rawlings and Andrea Vansteenhouse (and is still available here). It captures the bliss and vintage nostalgia that many feel towards clotheslines and laundry things. It is one of many favorite domestic-themed books in my collection. ABOVE: Vintage photo of two girls in front of a clothesline from eBay (available for sale now).

Local Produce! Bring it!

Local peaches and plums from Harvey Hoover's expert orchard.

One of my favorite books from early childhood was an illustrated edition of Eugene Field's Victorian-era poem, The Sugar-Plum Tree. Another book in the same format and by the same author was a bedtime favorite, Wynken, Blynken and Nod, which also featured The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat. [Readers of The Pantry might also note that I included a quote from Field on the very last page of the book, one of my favorite descriptions of why I love a pantry.] If we were entirely unpacked–one day!–I would be able to locate the book in an ideal world and photograph some of its lovely, memorable images. Perhaps you, too, have favorite childhood picture books that you'd look at for hours on end, before you could even read? What I loved about the book, especially, is that it made me crave fruits and berries, not candy or sweets (OK, well, I could have eaten the chocolate cat and gingerbread dog on many occasions!).

In our on-line book group over at Cupcake Chronicles, we've been reading food-related books this summer, starting with Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. She describes, in good detail and with recipes, her family's food journey in one year to eat more locally and sustainably from their Appalachian farmstead and environs. It is an admirable idea and involved her husband and daughter, too. As a mother and chief cook, I imagine it would have to involve the whole family, as it should.

Reading this book has made me think more about eating red, delicious strawberries in season and trying to buy, as much as possible, fruits and vegetables in season (and canning and freezing them for winter). It is a feat only possible with sacrifice and one I'd like to at least attempt. [Now I can better appreciate why citrus fruits were so precious to the early colonists and later pioneers.] We already shop locally for–and are starting to raise–most of our foods. My goal is to go to a big grocery store once a month, if necessary. [Another reason to have a pantry and root cellar! Sometime I will share our root cellar woes...]

We live near Casey County where there are abundant produce markets and auctions and even farmers who will often sell things right out of their patch. As of mid-July the summer squash, cukes, corn, beans, new potatoes, onions and tomatoes are in, as well as local peaches and plums. Lettuce and peas are May events here (into early June, if you're lucky, because of the heat that kicks in).

The strawberries are long gone, the local blueberries are dwindling but the wild blackberries, bring 'em! (We've found a thicket of them near one of our fields and will be heading there soon.) And soon there will be cantaloupe (or "mush melon" as they call it here, an altered version for "musk melon") and watermelon–lots and lots of watermelon! Summer apples are also starting to come in as well as local peaches and plums.



Last week I was even surprised to find rhubarb still at the local produce market at South Fork. I chopped it up, like celery, and threw it into quart bags in our freezer for winter pies, cobblers, maybe some jam or chutney, when or if I'm inspired. [While I was away in June, my friend Anna did the same thing for us–and for herself–with some rhubarb we had ordered from a local farmer.] In the meantime, I'm pleased that the clumps of rhubarb I dug from my old New Hampshire garden last year–offspring several times over of the rhubarb at the Gray Goose Farm where I grew up–is doing well in their pots in the shade, waiting for me to figure out where to put them! Now, that's patient rhubarb.



Last Friday, which seems to be working out for me for produce runs, I got a craving for something to munch late afternoon. A friend of mine had a daughter out selling blueberries for $2.00 a pint. I don't know if they were local but I bought one and munched it down. Delicious and way better than grabbing a peach cream-filled donut at Sunny Valley Bulk Foods! I also went to 501 Produce, more off the path for us, where I bought three quarts of blueberries for our freezer. The week before I had bought twelve pints of blueberries at the produce auction for $3.00 each. A bit high but I wanted them. Our own bushes, twelve of them, are five-year old transplants and have just started to bear this summer. We managed to get a gallon or so.

My own first Kentucky garden is still pathetic. Here is the object lesson: if you are fortunate to go away for two weeks by yourself, in early June when the garden is just starting to crank, don't expect your husband to tend your garden amidst everything else! In other words, mulch, mulch, mulch before you leave and no "crab, crab, crab" upon return, even though your garden is choked in crab grass. I've managed to unearth the pepper and tomato plants from their crab grass prisons and I got the cabbage and broccoli in too late for them to head (now it is too hot). Our plan is to let the chickens "have at" the garden as soon as tomatoes are done. Then we'll till it up and try some fall or late summer crops. After that, lots and lots of chicken house compost that can percolate for the winter. The nice thing about gardening is that there is always another season.

Meanwhile, as always, anything in a container or pot or window box–like most of my flowers and porch plants–is thriving. Maybe that is just the way I should garden, especially with the abundance of local produce almost at our doorstep. At least that's what my husband thinks: grow berry bushes and fruit trees and leave the rest to Casey and Pulaski County farmers. But if I'm anything, it's both stubborn and determined.



I've included two pages of another version of the poem, from a beloved set of childhood classics that I found years ago in a bookshop when my daughter was little, The Bookhouse, edited by Olive Beaupré Miller. It comes in a rainbow of volumes and progresses in reading readiness and ability. My grandmother had a set for her children when they were young and I used to spend long hours reading them on summer days at the Gray Goose Farm. The illustrations are the best and typical of the 1920s and 30s in children's literature. Some publisher would do well to reprint them (and they would be great for homeschoolers, too–they can still be found, on occasion, in used bookshops). In case the print is too fine for your eyes, here is the written poem. Now, doesn't it make you want to eat fruit?

However, as my now 21-year old daughter used to love to repeat when I read this poem to her, "HURRAH for that chocolate cat!"



The Sugar-Plum Tree
by Eugene Field

Have you ever heard of the Sugar-Plum Tree?
'Tis a marvel of great renown!
It blooms on the shore of the Lollipop sea
In the garden of Shut-Eye Town;
The fruit that it bears is so wondrously sweet
(As those who have tasted it say)
That good little children have only to eat
Of that fruit to be happy next day.

When you've got to the tree, you would have a hard time
To capture the fruit which I sing;
The tree is so tall that no person could climb
To the boughs where the sugar-plums swing!
But up in that tree sits a chocolate cat,
And a gingerbread dog prowls below---
And this is the way you contrive to get at
Those sugar-plums tempting you so:

You say but the word to that gingerbread dog
And he barks with such terrible zest
That the chocolate cat is at once all agog,
As her swelling proportions attest.
And the chocolate cat goes cavorting around
From this leafy limb unto that,
And the sugar-plums tumble, of course, to the ground---
Hurrah for that chocolate cat!

There are marshmallows, gumdrops, and peppermint canes,
With stripings of scarlet or gold,
And you carry away of the treasure that rains
As much as your apron can hold!
So come, little child, cuddle closer to me
In your dainty white nightcap and gown,
And I 'll rock you away to that Sugar-Plum Tree
In the garden of Shut-Eye Town.

Chicken Houses I Have Known

Anna and Melvin's chicken house was to have been the cupola for their round barn, but it proved too big so it made the perfect place for chickens.

I've always been partial to chicken houses long before I had any chickens–or a hen house–of my own. For several years I've collected chicken-related things in anticipation of the day that I had chickens to raise. Not just practical chicken house things like feeders and waterers but "eggs for sale" roadside signs, Staffordshire hens-on-nest, even a fabric folk art chicken, at right, made locally by a woman in Liberty, Kentucky. We use it in the kitchen for stuffing plastic bags up its well, you know.



LEFT: A nineteenth-century chicken painting on the wall behind the rubber "Chicky" (that you get when you roll double twos in Bunco) for an October night of Bunco that I hosted at our Kentucky home last year. ABOVE: A row of Staffordshire hen-on-nests in our Welsh dresser.


We get all of our chicken feed and supplies at Goldenrod Feeds in nearby Casey County–in fact, my husband is heading there as we speak to get some feed and return some chicken crates.

It is heartening to know that chickens are now thriving in all parts of the country–even in urban areas–as more people are raising them for eggs and meat. There is even a national radio program now called Backyard Poultry with the Chicken Whisperer–who knew?


Our Cornish X chickens, at about seven weeks old, fattening up nicely. They were bred to eat, drink, sleep, sit and poop (a lot). The ultimate chicken "couch potatoes," their growth rate is astounding.

Yesterday we drove back from Crab Orchard with our 24 (several died in their first weeks) 8-week old Cornish X birds, all dressed and half-frozen and ready for our own freezer. I found a butcher up there, J & V Slaughterhouse on route 39 a few miles north of town, run by Joe Yoder, a burly and friendly Amish man originally from Delaware. The drive, an hour each way, is lovely but long. When my Mennonite friend Irene heard we were "going all the way to Crab Orchard," she insisted on butchering our chickens for us (and two other women I know, not Mennonites, just had a "plucking party" and put up about 200 chickens in several hours–so that put me to shame, too!) I've "done" chickens only once–when I was 11 and helped my mother and her siblings put up about fifty chickens for the freezer after my grandfather had died. I thanked Irene but had already made arrangements this time around.


An old Kentucky chicken coop on a former home place in Pulaski County.

Besides, in the heat of July I did not want to risk contamination or mess. We had 12 chickens kept whole for roasting (at $2 a chicken) and 12 in parts (at $3 each). So for $60 plus gas and the four hours transportation time/gas (including delivery and pick up the next day)–as well as the price of the chicks and their feed for two months–I thought it was well worth it. However, next time we will have a "chicken frolic" in a cooler month–like November–and raise some meat birds for our friends who will help us. It does make sense to do them ourselves and save time and gas, and to just learn how, but not a job I will welcome doing (maybe I'll take noon dinner duty for the assembled instead!).


The brick poultry house near the magnificent round barn at the Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

On my recent trip to New Hampshire I saw my friend Judy's chicken house in action for the first time. Her daughter, Courtney, designed it and was just building it last summer when we were packing up to move. I love its gables and whimsical quality. Courtney even wood-burned designs around the decorative windows, which include a Renaissance or Moorish-inspired double-arched window in the peak of one of the gables.

Meanwhile, Judy's other daughter, Lindsay, a landscape gardener, has taught classes on how to butcher chickens. [NOTE: Judy's in-wall pantry and Hoosier-turned-display hutch for her collection of LuRay Pastels are both featured in my book, The Pantry–Its History and Modern Uses.]


The horse barn-turned chicken coop-turned office at the Gray Goose Farm in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, once occupied by four generations of my family for almost sixty years (1946-2005).


RIP: This barn, converted for chickens, in southern New Hampshire is now among the barns of the past.

When in New Hampshire I also learned of the sad but inevitable demise of one of my favorite barns over on Route 10 just south of Keene. Thankfully I'd gone around and taken many photographs a few years ago of old barns in the region. This center-aisle barn American-style barn from the mid-19th century was converted at some point into a chicken barn. Note the dormers and many windows on the south side. Someone told me it had been demolished and the house set fire for practice by a local fire department. I was just as glad not to have driven past it while up there.


Our chicken house in late June. I was surprised to find several established clutches of day lilies that survived the winter-time construction over Miss Lillian's former perennial bed. They emerged in front of the entrance step as they had for years before, just as groupings of peonies came up on the south side.

Of course, I'm pleased with our own chicken house–a duplex we had built this winter to my design. With it's 100 square feet on each side for hens and meat birds, who have to live separately, and two adjacent fenced-in yards, it has worked quite well. Our hens have yet to lay–probably in September as they are not quite four months old–but they've settled in nicely, despite a few losses (to natural causes and the dogs). We even have a rooster and I welcome his crowing at all hours. PHOTO: Our chicken house, in late May, with peonies blooming all around.

We've realized we can not free-range the chickens with the dogs around so a compromise has been reached: the dogs can free-range until late afternoon, then they will be cooped on the back porch while the chickens free-range until dusk. This will likely change during the winter months when there is nothing to graze on. [And sadly, our little Patch has been missing since July 3–I fear another predator or a neighbor but am still hoping he will return.] PHOTO: Stew, our "surprise" Barred Rock rooster from Murray McMurray Hatchery, struts his stuff on their first day of free-ranging, which we will try again in the future with some modifications and provisions, mostly dog-related.

I am fast learning that life on a farm, and with chickens, is not without its challenges, compromise and the occasional mishap. It's really all about cooperation and community, just like it is, ideally, with the human race. And a reread of The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald, author of the "Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle" series of children's books, is long overdue. Now, it's also high time I stop blogging and go make dinner. Yes, that's right, we're having chicken! PHOTO: Judy holds some of her jumbo-sized eggs.