Fifty Acres and a Poodle Read online

  “Well …,” he says. He’s getting sick of hearing about the filters; I can tell. This filter bit is sort of my summer theme song.

  “Okay, what exit am I supposed to take?” he says.

  “Nine,” I say. “Right here. Turn here.”

  The hills of Washington County are rolling toward us. That’s how it seems. Like they’re in motion and we’re sitting still. Like we’re at the movies and this is just a film about hills. Hills that remind me of the Cotswolds in England, or the countryside in southern Switzerland. Hills dotted with sheep, and tiny villages nestled in the folds. The road winds like a tunnel through the woods, and then suddenly there is a clearing, and here you are, high on a ridge, overlooking the world, but not overlooking the world like you overlook the world on a mountaintop, where everything is overwhelming, everything is vast, everything is everything. Here, the world you overlook is cozy, quaint.

  “Wooo!” I say. And “Ahhh.” It’s a great adventure in sightseeing. We have been doing this for months, driving into gorgeous scenery, saying Woo and Oooh and Ahhh. We say we won’t buy a farm unless it has one of these vistas. But I’m telling you, we have no intention of buying a farm at all. We have no intention, at least not a stated one, of even moving in together. Yes, we are in a serious relationship, but we are certainly not serious about these gorgeous hills. We have not even once discussed logistics: time, distance, money. Could either of us afford a place with a yard measured in acres? Could Alex afford the time commuting to the city? Would he want to? Could I take the isolation if I moved my office out to the boonies? We have not talked about these things because they would just get in the way.

  Dreams are matters of the heart, things that pull you along as if they have hooked you someplace deep inside. Dreams should not become matters of the head until, well, you’re ready for them to come true.

  “Hey, this place is right near the Century Inn,” I say, looking at the map. “I’ve been to the Century Inn. I had the pork chops. Did you know pork chops have been served continuously at the Century Inn since the late seventeen-hundreds?”

  “God,” he says. “Weren’t they a little tough?”

  “Ha,” I say.

  “Maybe we should have dinner at the Century Inn on the way home,” he says.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” I say. “I love it down here. I love this road. Isn’t this a great road?”

  I once wrote about this road. One of my first assignments, years ago, was an article recommending day trips people could take from the city, and I wrote about the Century Inn, and about Route 40, the “National Pike” on which it sits. It started as a buffalo and Indian trail. General Braddock and Colonel Washington traveled it while fighting the French and Indian Wars. Then, when the birth of a new nation called for an actual “smooth way” to link the eastern seaboard to the western frontier, George Washington chose to pave the National Pike, making it the nation’s first federally funded road, connecting Cumberland, Maryland, to the shores of the Mississippi. Thousands of families followed this route, eager to settle the fertile land of the Ohio Valley. Small towns sprang up. Blacksmith shops and livery stables and hundreds of roadside taverns. Whiskey, dancing, the thrill of a new life in the new frontier, it was all here. This onetime little buffalo trail became known as the “cement of the nation,” celebrated in song, story, painting, and poetry.

  The heyday ended in the 1850s, when, thanks to the invention of the steam locomotive, road travel began to fade. Soon the Pennsylvania Railroad reached Pittsburgh, and the B&O rolled into Wheeling.

  “We hear no more the clanking hoof and the stagecoach rattling by,” wrote a forgotten poet, “for the steamking ruleth the travel world, and the Old Pike’s left to die.”

  So now, at least in this part of the country, the National Pike is a gentle highway wandering through small villages, including the aptly named Scenery Hill.

  We pull into town. The Century Inn is definitely the biggest thing going. There is also a post office and a hardware store, plus a bunch of antique stores for city-folk like us who like to dress up in rugged Lands’ End and Eddie Bauer clothing and take day trips and fantasize about country living.

  “Turn right here,” I say. “Spring Valley Road.” Spring Valley Road drops along the base of the valley, so on either side green and brown and yellow fields stretch above us, like patches on a quilt. For a mile we drop down and then climb up hills that make your stomach sink, sink from the motion and sink from the spectacle. Corn stretches into the horizon in a swirling pattern. In front of the corn, cows. In front of the cows, sheep. There are four short donkeys grazing beside a mailbox.

  “Here it is,” I say to Alex. “Wilson Road. Turn here.”

  Wilson is a dirt road winding back into a forest, tunneling into a cathedral of trees. We see a driveway. We see a pond, blooming with lilies à la Monet. We see a barn, a crooked old thing baking in the sun à la Wyeth. I sit here hoping this is the place, thinking: This can’t be the place, this is too beautiful, this is too perfect. I look down at the directions, up at the place, down at the directions, up again.

  “Oh, my God,” I say. “This is the place.”

  “This is the place?” he says.

  “This is the place,” I say. My eyes are bugged out. “Okay, don’t get too excited,” I tell Alex. “Do-not-show-any-enthusiasm-to-the-sellers,” I say, stepping out of the car, at which point I do twirls like Marlo Thomas in That Girl. I look up and around and around and around. Then I breathe. I take the hugest gulp of fresh air.

  A woman comes out of the house, approaches.

  “Is this your place!” I say. “Jeeeeezus! It’s like heaven!”

  “Welcome,” she says, extending her hand. “Fran,” she says. She is tall, lanky, really tan. In her mid-forties, I’d guess. Kind of dainty for a farm wife, if you ask me. I was imagining someone a little more … substantial.

  She tells a few things about the property. The barn was built in 1887 by the Amish, and it is an authentic Pennsylvania “bank barn,” a two-story structure built into the side of the slope. She tells us that the huge gray bird with skinny legs standing in the pond is a resident blue heron, and it likes to eat frogs. The pond is fed by several freshwater springs, as well as a stream zigzagging beneath a towering chestnut grove, which we are welcome to go look at later.

  Then she leads us toward the house, a funky house, a strange-looking excuse for a house. We enter through a door into the basement, where there are four other people who have also recently arrived. We can hear more people upstairs and soon realize that there are other tours ahead of ours. There must be ten families here to take a look. I had no idea there were so many other people sharing my dream. This panics me. I think these tourists should go back to the antique stores and buy some stuff and take it home, like they’re supposed to.

  We stay in the basement a long time looking at pipes and tanks and other basement things. Fran is awful proud of these pipes and tanks and is talking on and on about them, but I don’t process a word she is saying. I am busy jumping for joy inside. It’s hard to tell if it’s this place, or if it’s me. Do you feel wonderful inside because of your beautiful surroundings? Or do your surroundings look beautiful because you feel wonderful inside? Which comes first? It is becoming increasingly difficult for me to separate the inward from the outward.

  Fran eventually leads us upstairs. The rooms meander, and as I meander along with them, I find that I am unusually forgiving. I am not usually this open to fake paneling and dropped ceilings with water stains and kitchens with indoor-outdoor carpeting. This is hardly the grand old stone farmhouse I had envisioned in my dream. But there is something lovable about this house, sort of like the South Side house. It’s a lovable house in that it is a house that needs love.

  We continue our tour and head toward the new addition that has been recently completed.

  “This is my studio,” Fran says. “Sorry if there’s fumes.”

  She opens the door.

  �
�Wow,” I say.

  “Whoa,” Alex says.

  The room is vast, with a cathedral ceiling, skylights, and giant windows opening to the pond and barn. It’s the kind of room I dreamed about when I was a kid, sitting in that old shed. I would sit there and imagine my life as a grown-up: I would have a big renovated barn that would fit all my favorite things: my paints, a potter’s wheel, a pinball machine, a pool table, my record collection, a basketball court, and maybe a stable of horses.

  All of these things, and more, would fit in this room.

  Fran paints huge canvases and says she needs a room this big. Her husband built the studio for her as a separate building. Then later he put on a small connecting addition, so the old farmhouse and the new giant room are one.

  Which is to say the house makes absolutely no cohesive design sense—modern on one end, fake paneling and dropped ceilings on the other. The net effect is something like a chalet stuck onto a trailer. It’s a house with an identity crisis, all right. “Poor house.” This house needs me. This house needs Bob, snoozing on a window-sill. This house needs Betty prancing around, and a good dose of Marley entertainment, too.

  “Okay, let’s get out of here,” I say to Alex. We’d really better get out of here. I didn’t feel this way about any of the other farms we’ve seen on our farm-shopping trips. I did not feel even close to this way. We’d better get out of here.

  “You want to take a hike out back?” Alex asks. As long as we’re here. As long as we’ve got our brand-new Eddie Bauer trail-blazer hiking boots on. We don’t even say good-bye to Fran; we slip out while she’s talking to some architect who’s saying the giant room sure would make a great drafting room, while his kid is saying no, Dad, this is a room for a big-screen TV, a huge TV, and an air hockey table.

  The land behind the house features a most inviting path through the brush. Alex and I walk, and we don’t say much. The silence is strange. Not strange between us, but strange because I am unaccustomed to country silence which is so very … thick.

  “Can you imagine being able to take this walk every day?” Alex says finally.

  “I would take it every single day,” I say.

  Our voices sound as if they are stabbing the silence, and still it doesn’t puncture. And there are all kinds of colors around us. I mean, there is every shade of green, and tall blue wildflowers with yellow buttons, and jagged purple weeds, bright purple, the brightest purple, and then there is the silky sky and, in the distance, the velvety hills. All kinds of colors and all kinds of textures. And I feel, I just feel oxygen everywhere. Like, thank God. Thank God the concrete is gone. I am finally able to breathe.

  We reach the crest of the hill and turn left, past a grove of craggy apple trees that look exactly like those trees in The Wizard of Oz. I’m half-expecting a branch to start moving, turn into an arm, and start pummeling us with apples. But no. These are friendlier trees. Or these trees are busy. These trees are buzzing with the loudest bees. These trees must have a headache from all these bees.

  We walk along the ridge above the property and can see the house and barn below. It’s a nice view. But not one of those views. Not one of the Scenery Hill views. Thank God. Because we said we would consider a property only if it had the view—not that we are considering buying property at all. But that vista. If you were going to live in Scenery Hill, you should definitely have the Scenery Hill view.

  We continue following the trail, the farm down the hill to our left, the woods to our right. I wonder what’s in the woods, wonder where the property line is. So we make our way into them, searching. It isn’t a very deep woods, just some towering maples and a thin wall of very nasty briars to tiptoe through. Soon we reach the edge of the woods.

  “Oh, my God,” Alex says.

  The woods open to a valley, a giant valley, a valley like you’d see on the label of a salad dressing or something. The view. The vista. Miles and miles of hills. The hills are round, like the beer bellies of men, belly after belly, huge, fat, laughing. The hills are dotted with tiny sheep, and lonely barns, and swirling crops.

  “Uh-oh,” Alex says.

  The view.

  “Okay, the first thing we would do,” he says, stomping his foot, “is put a gazebo right here.”

  “Right here,” I say.

  I look at him. Does he mean this? I can’t tell if he means this. I really want him to mean this, to be here, to be in this dream with me. This dream that suddenly feels like it is coming true. Is it coming true? I don’t want it to come true without him.

  Because it’s here. Everything is here. The view is here. The privacy, here. The woods, here. The … air. This is it. This spot under my toes is where my future begins. I know this. I hope he’s with me. I really hope he’s with me.

  Because the train has left the station. The train has left the station big-time. I know; usually I’m chugging toward something a little more manageable. A set of All-Clad professional cookware, say, factory fresh, with only a few dings, and for sale at half price. Or a huge clump of Christmas fern growing wild on the side of the road behind some blackberry bushes, which I know is the perfect fern for my garden back home if only I could—ouch—get to it.

  “I love this place,” I say, spinning around and around, my head tilted back, watching the lacy treetops twirl against the bluest sky.

  “I love you,” he says.

  “I love you, too,” I say, stopping my spin. “But you know, I love this place.”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “Let’s move here,” I say tentatively. Tenderly. Holding steady in the silence that follows.

  “That’s what I was thinking,” he says.

  “Really?”

  “It was,” he says.

  “Me, too!”

  And then we don’t say anything, not for a long time. We just stand here looking at the view.

  THREE

  BETTY, COME!” I SHOUT, AS I DASH THROUGH THE South Side yard. “Come on, girly. We’re going to visit your cousin Marley.” Oh, jeez. Now what is her problem? Why is she just standing there on the deck? She loves to ride in the car. I’m late. I told Alex I would be over at his house an hour ago. “Betty, come!”

  Betty?

  Oh. The invisible fence. “Sorry about that,” I say. I forgot to take her little receiver collar off. I had this fence put in only a few days ago, which means I now have an intricate pattern of wires running underneath the flowerbeds. Betty wears the receiver collar, which means if she goes in any of the beds, she gets …zapped. Poor Betty. Her first zap was, oh, my heart sank. She screeched her highest screech and went tearing inside. She hid under the coffee table. I could not get her out. She stayed there all day and all night, peering out with the saddest Marilyn Monroe eyes.

  It worked, though. And I’m sure my flowers, at least those remaining, appreciate it. But then again, maybe it was stupid to get the fence, seeing as I’m probably about to buy an entire farm. But I had already ordered it, and, well, maybe I’ll keep this house. I don’t know. Do I sound confused? Do I sound nervous? Transitions. This is what it is to be in transition.

  “Here you go, good girl,” I say, removing her collar. I open the back door to drop the collar in the kitchen, where Bob is lying, stretched out in the sun. Well, here goes nothing, Bob. Wish me luck. Alex and I are going to put a bid on the farm today. You’re going to love it there, Bob. There are probably thousands of mice in that house. Or maybe not—maybe just one or two. All right. ’Bye, Bob. Be back in a few hours. Enjoy your cottage cheese.

  Betty and I hurry out to the car, and as I head over to East Liberty, I think about that moment on that hill just two weeks ago.

  I love this place.

  I love you.

  Let’s move here.

  That’s what I was thinking.

  This is what we said. But this is not all we’ve said. Ever since, it seems, everything has gotten so complicated. What he wants, what I want, where he came from, where I came from, what baggage he
’s lugging, what baggage I’m lugging, what we better watch out for, what it would mean to do this or that, what the implications, the ramifications, the reverberations would likely be.

  And the truth is never complicated.

  We keep “processing,” as shrinks like to say, the decision to buy the farm. He seems to need to process this a lot more than I do.

  “We don’t know the first thing about farming,” he said last night at City Grill, a South Side restaurant with excellent grilled shrimp.

  “True,” I said. Then I said, “How hard can it be?” That was all the processing I was really able to do on that point.

  “It’s kind of far away,” he said.

  “True,” I said, refilling his wineglass.

  Scenery Hill is exactly forty miles from Pittsburgh. But it’s straight highway, with only one traffic light to get through. I can make the trip in forty-five minutes without traffic, and sixty minutes with. Well, that’s not bad at all.

  “If this were New York or Atlanta, that would be an average commute,” I said.

  “True,” he said.

  “If this were Washington or Los Angeles, Scenery Hill would already be suburbs,” I said. “The farms would be chopped up into plots with big houses and perfect landscaping out front. There would be the Scenery Hill Mall with a fourteen-screen movie theater, and there would be a Taco Bell Drive-Thru.”

  “True,” he said. “But you love the Taco Bell Drive-Thru.”

  “True,” I said.

  We talked about money.

  “Where in the hell are we going to get the money?” he said.

  “Well, I don’t know,” I said.

  We are, neither of us, moneybags. We are normal working stiffs. But hey, we have good credit ratings. And we both have some investments we can cash in. Not only that, but we both have equity in our houses. We’ll pool our resources, make it work. Whatever. I mean, if I have learned anything about money in my thirty-seven years of living, it is to ignore it. It just scares you. Never, ever add numbers up. It just makes the numbers bigger and scarier. It’s like, what if you had to add up all the meals you would need to eat to keep yourself alive for the next forty years? What if you had to sit and calculate all those sandwiches and all those potatoes and all those pounds of broccoli and all the trips to the store to buy all that stuff and all the time it would take to cook it? Well, you’d be too exhausted to eat. You’d be too worried about how in the world you were going to accumulate nineteen thousand pounds of chicken.