Day: May 26, 2013

Several years ago, a series of windy nights kept the bedroom door banging open and shut. Maria, ever resourceful, grabbed a heavy volume of the work of Oscar Wilde and used it as a doorstop, where it remains to this day. We both think Wilde would have approved. It was either that or a biography of Winston Churchill. The door hasn’t budged an inch.

People keep asking me why we moved from Bedlam Farm and there are a number of reasons. One of them is that given the changes in publishing, we could no longer afford to live there, although we did not imagine owning two farms for more than a year. Secondly, we wanted to buy and live in our own place together, and that has turned out to be a good and prescient decision. We loved Bedlam Farm, but we love our new home and our life there. One reader said she was disappointed that I was moving, but life goes on, she said philosophically. Yes. And on and on.

Introducing my official muse, never before photographed, shown or seen by anyone but me. Even Maria didn’t know what it was until I told her today. I got my muse nearly 20 years ago at a gypsy shop near New York City. He looks like something out of Maurice Sendak, but is not. He is a thumb-sucker and has always graced the table near my computer. He has inspired me through more than 20 books and I lost him somewhere in the move from Bedlam Farm to the New Bedlam Farm. Today, upstairs vacuuming in the old guest bedroom where Rose used to look out the windows and sleep, I found him, inside of a dresser drawer. I just thought he was lost.

I am superstitious about muses, I believe in them, I have graced this one with a number of pins – my Thomas Paine pin, my ‘”Everyone is Pleased Button,” a sardonic button we wore at CBS News, where no one was ever pleased. And my Buddy Holly button, in his memory. I think he has the right persona for a muse, part troll and part ghoul, I think. I’m not sure what he is, but he is back on the table where I write, where he ought to be. Thought I should share. He pre-dates Facebook by a good number of years but has always worked around computers.

Bedlam Farm went on sale eighteen months ago, and this has without question drained and challenged us. We lowered the price by $100,00 and we aren’t going to lower it any more. We couldn’t if we wanted to, and we don’t, it is, as many realtors have observed, very well priced. I’ve always thought it would sell this Spring and so we are getting it ready to show. We checked everything out today and it is in great shape, although the grass is high, it is so wet no one has been able to mow it.

I must confess to being a bit shocked by the attitude and manner of many of the people who came to look at the farm (my favorite was one Massachusetts woman who sniffed at the farm and said she was used to an attached garage. Not for you, I almost said, but didn’t. After that, I left the showings to Kristin.)

This is the guest room downstairs, I call it the Edward Hopper Room because the curtains and light evoke Hopper and his paintings (the Provincetown poster is by John Dowd, but it is Hopper-like as well). The sign was a gift. Our day at the farm was nourishing, very grounding. We both love it dearly and cannot wait to meet someone who loves it also.

Kristin Preble, our realtor called me last week and said she thought the farmhouse ought to be “shined up” for the Spring, so Maria and I gathered our vacuums, brooms, paper towels and cleaning sprays and went to work. I vacuumed, she mopped. This is my favorite room in the 1861 farmhouse, it was a combination dining room and parlor. This is where pastors came to visit and where the residents were laid out after they passed away. I loved to sit by this wood stove and look out at the barn, we took parts of the old wallpaper and put pieces of it in panels along the floor. The tall windows are beautiful and we had to restore them so the old ropes and pulleys work. It was wonderful to be in this room, this is where many important things happened to me – I wrote seven books in my office off to the rear, spent many nights reading by a roaring fire during blizzards, decided to end my marriage and then spent so many evenings talking to Maria. Album going up on Facebook.

We fell in love in this room, no doubt about it, it was where we first  talked, Maria sitting on that old Victorian sofa, me across from her on Lenore’s couch. The windows look out at the big barn on one side and out into the valley on the other. This is my favorite of any room I have ever lived in or near.

We spent most of the day at Bedlam Farm, and I was looking to feel more centered, and that seemed to happen there. We brought all three dogs for the first time since we moved in October, and they settled right into their old routines, perching up on the porch while it rained. Maria and I spent the day cleaning up, vacuuming, dusting, scrubbing and mopping. Ben has been painting the outside of the house, and we’ve been working to get the house spit-spot for Spring. We have gotten the taxes lowered, and we were very happy to see that the Bedlam Corners General Store has re-opened under new ownership more than two years after it was heavily damaged in a fire. The store looks great and is offering all kinds of new things, from fresh fruit to sandwiches. The church at the center of town has opened a community park and the old Grange at the bottom of our road has been beautifully restored.

I walked around the farm with Red, took the dogs on the path – Maria was really into shining the beautiful old farmhouse up – and, as always, there was a flood of memories. Blizzards, Rose in storms, lonely winters, meeting Maria, talks in the Studio Barn, and I was blinking at all of the work that was done on the farm – new wiring, new foundations for the barns, new drainage systems, a re-built dairy barn, a family room in the farmhouse made out of barn wood, three wood stoves, a new office upstairs, a new screened in porch,  new floors and ceilings for the big old parlor with it’s tall windows. I don’t like to even think about all the money that went into restoring the farmhouse and the barns, it doesn’t matter, I’m not getting it back, it was a different world in some ways. I thought also of my divorce and my breakdown there, my panics and terrors and awful nights.

But it was grounding. The most important and penetrating memories were of Maria, of becoming friends, falling in love. We both loved Bedlam Farm, we both knew it was time to leave. No regrets, just rich and deep memories. I feel myself again, back to the center. Tomorrow I’m going into Cambridge to take photos with George Forss and then we have been invited to a barbecue with some of the people Maria goes horseback riding with. I am also thinking of writing a short story this week and publishing it as a Kindle Single. Maybe about a border collie in Ireland who is taken off his farm and brought to America. I’ll put up a photo album of the visit to Bedlam too.