The McGraths commissioned my family’s four-bedroom Victorian home in 1910. We know them only as “the McGraths,” no first names. This feels wrong, though it hasn’t always.
I know some details, but nothing personal. The McGraths were dairy farmers, and for decades ours was the only house on our street. Gradually, the family sold off plots to become my neighborhood. Their former barn is our next-door neighbor’s much-added-onto home. The McGraths kept about 5 acres for themselves, the parcel we’ve called home since 2002.
In this house’s infancy, much of the surrounding terrain was barren, due to the tanning industry’s denuding of the millennia-old hemlock forests in the early/mid 19th century. Hemlock bark was used to tan leather, and the tanners did not think – or did not care – to replant. Around the time of my home’s construction, state government stepped in to protect the New York City watershed, allowing second-growth maple, birch, cedar, elm, and spruce to thicken alongside the occasional hardy hemlock. My now-verdant neck of the woods exemplifies a century’s work of green renewal, the best of municipal intervention, and Mother Nature’s resilience in the face of human greed/hubris/idiocy.
As the hills greened and the 20th century marched on, several generations of McGraths lived and died in the McGrath House. In the late 60s, they rented it to a biker gang, who trashed it. In 1974, social worker Carol Vontobel and writer/video artist Parry Teasdale bought the place. Over twenty-eight years, they fixed it up, farmed the land a bit, illegally used a backhoe to bury a horse carcass beneath a towering spruce, raised three daughters, then sold the house to us.
Bikers and Teasdales notwithstanding, to local old timers, our home remains “the McGrath House.” Still, before Covid, aside from the aforementioned bullet points, I rarely thought of the family who built this dwelling, or the life stories enacted here when WWI, the Spanish Flu, the Depression, WWII, the Korean War, and Vietnam were in the headlines.
From the day we arrived, I was in and out, moving hither and yon, inhabiting far-flung spaces, like performance venues, way stations, schools, various forms of transport. I lived the typically itinerant life of a motorized 21st century citizen, privileged to traverse paved roads and cleared airspace, from Kingston to Merida to Cusco and back again; to Saugerties for work, to Rhinebeck to catch a movie, to Hudson to see a play, to LA for a gig, to New York City for a musical and back again in a day.
If I wasn’t doing the aforementioned things, I was thinking of doing them. Wanderlust was my cardinal trait. I cast my mind ever into the future.
The isolation of Covid forced my gaze inward, and closer afield. In these realms, the McGraths loom larger. I wasn’t previously hereabouts – physically or mentally – for long enough stretches of time to feel the lingering presences of those who came before, or to consciously discern the energy of the very structure they built, and the sparks within other life forms an arm’s length away.
Thankfully, since March of this year, due in part to science, I’ve been thrilled to once again trod indoor stages, join anonymous crowds, yell conversation across a café table, and travel, all with significantly less fear of becoming very ill or spreading illness to the vulnerable. In my gradual return, however, I find I am not who I was pre-pandemic. No one I know is.
I have become more like the McGraths. More static, sometimes willfully so. My sharpened awareness lingers. Whatever dilated within me has remained open.
I came to this state of mind fitfully. My family will retain memories of me ugly crying while sitting on the landing, in the kitchen, on the sofa, at the foot of the bed, grieving aspects of an adventurous, peripatetic life left behind; plans scuttled and replaced with an acute terror of encroaching illness and death, a scourge certain to bring woe and loss to my family. Make no mistake: I lost my shit.
But I adjusted, as have we all. Two years on, I am amazed at how we, as a society, have adjusted, and continue to do so. This ability to acclimate in the face of calamity feels like both the bad news (look at us willfully forgetting how good things can be) and the good news (look at us making lemonade out of lemons). I will focus on the latter.
Rather than fire up a vehicle with a combustion engine, here in mid-2022 – I won’t say “post-pandemic” at this juncture – I more often walk this property, sit in these rooms, settle on the wraparound porch with a guitar student, and breathe deep. (Ironically, the cutting edge tech of Zoom has helped me stay financially solvent while I get back to the land.) In quiet times, I glimpse movement in my peripheral vision. I hear echoes. Or maybe that’s my own DNA, sending messages of recognition from way back down my own line. This is how my people – how your people – lived for centuries. I’ve always known that. Now I feel it. Muscle memory from other lifetimes.
Several times in the last few months, and for the first time ever, woodland creatures – specifically a chipmunk and a black-capped chickadee – have eaten from my hand. For them to trust me, I had to be still for many minutes. I’m better at that than I used to be.
I use fewer gallons of gasoline (though this is less noteworthy, $-wise, of late).
Especially when our son and his partner and/or our Brooklyn friends visit – all of them Covid-recovered – and fill up more bedrooms, I could swear I feel the house sigh with pleasure, saying, “That’s more like it.” This structure was not intended for one couple to catch their breath between travels beyond the Hudson Valley; it was meant to comfortably accommodate at least four people at a time, and surely an animal or three, for days upon weeks upon months. The architect and the workers fashioned this as a home from which no one would sojourn long distances almost every day, leaving exhaust in their wake.
I wonder about the laborers who dug the basement to ably take on and dispel water, erected the oaken frame to withstand tons of snow, laid the fir floors to support countless footfalls, cut the impervious bluestone walkway, and hung the chestnut doors to open and slam according to the tenor of the day. Did they know their handiwork would serve so well this house’s residents one hundred and twelve years on, in an unprecedented time of narrowing options and fear?
As they planted the Norway maples that now soar overhead, did the McGraths and their homebuilders envision us in the shade of these trees, laughing, crying, celebrating, raging, entertaining guests, grieving, making love beneath the boughs in 2022?
I would say yes, they did. Everything else – commonplace wonders like the internet, the television, the laptop, the iPhone, pharmaceuticals – they couldn’t conceive, just as we cannot conceive 22nd century quotidian miracles. But the most important stuff was well within their grasp of understanding:
In these rooms, folks will open the windows in spring to hear the creek, the coyotes yipping, the whisper of leaves; meals will be prepared, babies made, love pledged, ecstasy felt, betrayals committed, secrets kept and divulged; parents will farewell children, and vice versa. All of this and more will transpire within, as intended, come what may in the world beyond the valley.
After we’re gone, let it continue to be so.