We never had vacations. A trip to Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire where Uncle Bill had a cabin, the Florida trip in ’59…I’m trying to think.

 

And on a dairy farm, in the summer, the workload expands exponentially. The planting and watering of corn; the mowing, raking, baling and putting up of the hay -- 50 to 70 thousand bales. The daily milking, morning and evening, continues unabated, perpetually, daily, seven by 365. But there was that occasional Sunday when the sun was out, the sky was blue, and the latest batch of cut hay was safely in the barn. And in the summer, Sunday School was less a requirement, if existing at all. My parents were still young, as I look back now, and they took a quiet pleasure in organizing a Sunday picnic together. It didn’t take much planning. A few words, “Yes, the alfalfa is in the barn, and the clover I cut yesterday is drying, let’s go. Watte said he could do the evening milking.”

 

“I’ve invited my parents,” Mom said. Her parents grew up on the foothills of the mountain, and it was their old stomping grounds, and they knew the ridge as well as my father did from his Fall wanderings. They’re both buried in Walker Valley Cemetery and foraged the hills for huckleberries when young, plucking the berries and dropping them in a tobacco can, hung around their necks with a cord. Gram grew up just down the mountainside road from Gramp’s family farm, small, hardscrabble rock, with meadow-like fields, and a trout stream that held brook trout back in those days. Determined to get away from the poor soil and horsepower, Gramp worked first in Cragsmoor for the famous painters up there in their summer homes, and brought big, securely wrapped paintings by George Innis Jr. down the mountain by horse drawn wagon to put on the train in Ellenville and shipped to wealthy patrons in Chicago. As soon as he could, Gramp ran away to the rail yards in Maybrook, worked there and learned it all, becoming, in short order, a locomotive engineer.  

 

The picnic basket was either on the back porch, or the upstairs back porch where Uncle Wink had lived with his TB. But this time it was on the downstairs porch and I went to fetch it in the odd, long room, with saved, yet oddly discarded antiques, and with books from the dead great uncles and aunts, all of whom seemed strong readers and well educated even in their absence, and the room held books of histories and a map of Ulster County from the 1800’s. The back room had a sticky door with glass windowpanes covered in a crenulated curtain, and it held the odor of past generations. I found the picnic basket under the corner of a rag rug, folded and piled like its work was done. I ran the basket to the kitchen.

 

“Go get your swimming trunks on and a t-shirt. Your trunks are in the closet,” Mom said.

 

There were eight of us, so Gramp drove his Buick too, and when we went over the mountain turn, the big hairpin turn, I could feel the temperature drop and I saw the water still ran from a pipe driven into the rocks and climbers filled their canteens there and exchanged stories, and up above we could see the climbers, tiny specks on the mountain face, and their precariousness made me shiver, as we continued on the black-toped road and on under the trellis of the mountain carriageway. 

 

Turning down Clove Road, the temperature dropped again, and soon we could see the brook with the flat, smooth stone bottom, and shady hemlock shadows, and the smell was different, and Pop continued down the road until he turned off onto the shoulder and announced, “We are here,” just in the way in the way he turned off the engine and looked at Mom.