Connections: My Grandparents’ Farm
“Summertime and the living is easy.” Not. At least it’s not if you live here and find it a pain to have to adjust your daily life to the influx. Pretty soon it’s going to be time to limit our forays to the market, or anywhere else that requires driving, to midweek.
That this is going to be a big summer was made clear last weekend when restaurant after restaurant was booked for Mother’s Day brunch. We called four before rethinking our initial plan to go to Montauk or Sag Harbor, and finding one not only happy to take us but that had moderate prices: the friendly and affordable Harbor Bistro, which looks over Three Mile Harbor. It was bustling when we arrived, but wasn’t quite fully booked, apparently, only because folks weren’t aware that it had just reopened after a winter break.
I enjoy the changing seasons, of course, but my feeling about summer is ambivalent. There are so many terrific ways to take advantage of it here, on and in the water, in the yard and in the woods, enjoying bounteous fresh produce and local fish . . . and, yes, the East End of Long Island is beautiful. But it’s far from a pastoral idyll, and that’s the problem: My childhood summers on my grandparents’ farm in the Catskills spoiled me.
As faithful readers of this column might recall, my grandparents’ place wasn’t a working farm by the time they bought it, but it was on a dirt road with a dairy farm and a chicken farm the closest neighbors. I was happy to be done with school, of course, and to just be there with nothing to do — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say to be there finding something to do.
Finding something to do. Is that becoming a lost childhood art?
A big, two-story barn with a metal roof, which was noisy in summer rains, was a hideaway with a buggy on its second floo,r where make-believe was easy. A rocky and cold brook, where it was easy to get your knees skinned, was exciting to wade in, and there were hills full of blueberries.
Thinking back, I remember simply having fun by wandering down to one of Farmer Rowe’s pastures, where I would stand at a fence and look at his cows. I like cows to this day, but as a child I used to imagine that I would have one of my own some day and call it Petunia. (Observing cows — without even a parent there to record it with a smart-phone and post the images to Instagram. How many kids would find that a delight today?)
The owners of the chicken farm were parenting a granddaughter, who was older and tougher than I but nevertheless would invite me on occasion to help with something she was up to. One summer, I even helped her build a playhouse in a vacant part of one of the coops. And another thing: There were no ticks; at least we didn’t know about them at the time. (Deer ticks and Lyme disease, I’m told, have manifested themselves in that corner of the Catskills by now.)
The first chance I get, I’m going to tell my grandchildren some of these stories. They are, like all their friends, apt to be quite programmed this summer, with day camp and surf lessons and the like. I wonder if they’ll get it?