Peaceful Places

 In every issue of Oprah's monthly magazine are two pages she labels "Breathing Space". These are photographs of scenic places. When you look at them they make you want to fall back onto your fluffy pillows and say "Aaah..." and relax. Someone suggested long ago that she make the pages a tear-out so we could put them in an area where we would be more inclined to recline and look at them. She never took up the suggestion. Dumb mistake.

Looking up Dry Brook that ran along our property.

 In my years growing up in West Shokan, we were lucky enough to have several "breathing spaces." One was a stream running along the property. On many occasions, I would go down to the creek to play. In my later years whether I was 10, 15 or 18, I would climb down on those rocks and let my cares be washed away with the water as it ran downstream.

The foundation of the barn is barely visible in this photo.

 We lived on a old farm that had a large two-story farmhouse and three barns. The largest barn housed our cows, sheep, goats, a bull and chickens at one time or another. Eventually it started to collapse, so someone from town helped my dad take it down. We were left with the foundation of the barn and the round silo platform. When we were little, my brother, Rick, and I would play here and pretend that foundation was our home, our land, our church, or our battleground. All that was there was cement with ruts, where I guess walls had been, and troughs where the milk cans were kept in cold storage. It is amazing when I think back on what we created out of that old cement remnant and how it became a breathing space of sorts where we could practice life.

Looking down Dry Brook Road toward South Mountain

We walked roughly a quarter mile to and from the bus stop everyday during the school year and this was our view in winter. We had plenty of time to think as we walked. The first segment going to school we walked alone. Then we met up with the Molloys and Burghers and Finkens to head down to Monaco's at the end of Moonhaw. Here we would wait to catch the bus. Rarely did we get rides unless it was raining or frigid. But I do remember plenty of times having frozen feet before I made it home. Those walks were priceless times of thought.

One other space of respite you can't see here, is up on the mountain side where I would lie down on my back and watch the clouds sail by. It was there I planned my wedding, dreamed of my family, and planned for the future.

The quiet peacefulness was all around us whether we appreciated it or not. These were our own private breathing spaces. Spaces in time, space away from everyone else, spaces to think, create and dream. My hope is that the generation growing up today has their own breathing spaces, because that's where a lot of creative ideas bloom and problems are worked out. I guess I took for granted the breathing spaces I had growing up. I crave and appreciate the ones I have now even if I have to create them myself as I learned from reading the book, Simple Abundance. I recommend it!

(Photos courtesy of Shep Siegel.)

Memories of Grandmother...

A few months ago, my cousin sent me this photo of my Grandmother in her kitchen.

Grandma Anna Muller

What memories it stirred. The photo depicts her the way I always remembered her. In her kitchen, apron on, ready to go. I think I only saw her sit for meals and once in her living room for about ten minutes. She didn't sit back and relax, but somewhat on the edge of her seat, ready to jump up in a moment's notice to get you something or stir something on the stove.

We tried to go to Grandma's at least once a month when I was growing up. The drive was over two hours from our home in the country. Rick and I amused ourselves in the back seat or slept.

Someone had drilled into our heads how dangerous it was where Grandma lived so we were never allowed outside alone. But one day, I went out on the front stoop and just stood half in and a half out. As I gazed up and down the street of similar stoops I was amazed that I was in the middle of the city and no one was around! Then one door opened a few houses down across the street and a little boy about my age came out. He did the exact same thing I did. As he stood in his doorway, half in and half out, he caught my eye as he gazed down the street on my side. Our gaze held for a minute and as if by some hidden cue, we both stepped back inside and shut the doors! My heart was beating fast. Were we really in danger out there? Why was no one else out there? How was it that at just the precise moment I decided to step outside he did too? Very intriguing for a little kid.

Grandma Muller was of tough German stock who raised seven children (five boys!) and lived into her 90's. Her home was always clean and neat. Never anything out of place. She had two items for us to play with: Lincoln logs and little plastic musical bells. I loved playing with those two toys!

Her home was quiet for being in the middle of Woodhaven, NY (the city). One fascinating place that I found in her home was her bathroom with its skylight and octagonal black and white floor tiles. I am not sure why that held such a fascination for me, but I loved to go up there and stare at the tiles and try to make designs out of them or check out the skylight at different times of the day to see what it would reveal.

The other room that intrigued me was Grandma's bedroom. The door was always shut and we were told, "That's Grandma's room" and though I don't remember being told not to go in there, I remember the feeling that it was off limits. This only made it hold more mystery than my little mind could endure. So only once did I take a chance to creep down the hall to her room. I stood in the doorway and scanned the room. I was awed at the how beautiful it was. Peaceful and neat, very neat. Her room faced out front on the street and spanned the whole width of the house. Her window was open and a gust of wind, blew the curtain sheers into the room. It gave the room an almost ghostlike appearance.  I tried to think my Grandmother in there through the years. When I spotted her silver hair brush, I could picture her sitting at her vanity, brushing her hair as a young woman and then as the matriarch of our family. Grandma's hair was never down, so I could only imagine what long tresses were hidden under her combs and hair pins.

The memories of my grandmother are comforting in a nostalgic way. Her home was a place of peace and quiet. A place of delicious scents from the kitchen and family dinners around her dining room table. A place of mysterious rooms and scary basements. A place of hidden dollar bills that she magically produced to give to us almost every visit.

While I usually dreaded the trip, I never lost the sense of family time and joy my father felt at going "home". She may not have been the cookie baking, story reading Grandma of my dreams but she was my Grand Ma in her own special way.

My cousin included the following notes with the photo:

My own apron when I remember to use it.

Remember Grandma and her aprons?
Remember making an apron in Home Ec?

The History of 'APRONS':

I don't think our kids know what an apron is.

The principal use of Grandma's apron was to protect the dress underneath, because she only had a few.  It was easier to wash aprons than dresses and they used less material but, along with that, it served as a potholder for removing hot pans from the oven.

It was wonderful for drying children's tears, and on occasion was even used for cleaning out dirty ears.

From the chicken coop, the apron was used for carrying eggs, fussy chicks, and sometimes half-hatched eggs to be finished in the warming oven.

When company came, those aprons were ideal hiding places for shy kids.

And when the weather was cold, Grandma wrapped it around her arms.

Those big old aprons wiped many a perspiring brow bent over the hot wood stove.

Chips and kindling wood were brought into the kitchen in that apron.

From the garden, it carried all sorts of vegetables.

After the peas had been shelled, it carried out the hulls.

In the fall, the apron was used to bring in apples that had fallen from the trees.

When unexpected company drove up the road, it was surprising how much furniture that old apron could dust in a matter of seconds.

When dinner was ready, Grandma walked out onto the porch, waved her apron, and the men folks knew it was time to come in from the fields to dinner.

It will be a long time before someone invents something that will replace that 'old-time apron' that served so many purposes.

AND --

Grandma used to set her hot baked apple pies on the window sill to cool.

Her granddaughters set theirs on the window sill to thaw.

They would go crazy now trying to figure out how many germs were on that apron.

I don't think I ever caught anything from an apron but LOVE.

The Muller Family Homestead

The Muller homestead is up in the Catskill Mountains of New York state. Take the Thruway to Kingston, then drive up Rte 28 to Boiceville,. Turn onto 28A, drive in to Watson Hollow  to Moonhaw, to Drybrook (or Druykill as it is properly named), and then to Hillside. As you can see by all the road names we is in the boonies.

Great place to grow up though. That is until you were a teenager and especially if you were a girl. Once guys found out where I lived, they asked me to meet them somewhere. When Jim came to pick me up on our first official date, he ran out of gas way up in Allaben trying to find a gas station that was open! I had to go rescue him with gas from our lawn mower. Is that the start of a great love story or what?!?

My parents moved to this home before I was born. They had five kids of their own and lived with two other couples (I can't remember if the others had kids or not). All three families move up to the country to build houses. Those houses still stand today in the Town of Ulster, Lake Katrine and Halcyon Park.

The home was a large farmhouse with two porches and three barns. After a while, my father bought out the others and they moved on. So it was just the Mullers when I came along. My maternal grandmother had moved in with the family at some point, but she died shortly before I was born. They had added on a bedroom and bath off the kitchen for her when she came.

The house was warm and cozy with solid pine paneling in the living room and low ceilings. Originally there were four bedrooms upstairs, but later walls were removed to make two larger rooms. I was the sixth of what would be seven children total. So the extra bedroom downstairs, not to mention second bath came in handy. The back porch was a coal porch and was eventually taken down. But we had a lovely porch along the entire front of the house and a stream running along the one side of the house.

I loved growing up there. We could climb the hill outside our house and feel literally on top of the world. We could swim or skate in the stream. We had trees to climb up into or when they fell over by a storm, forts to hide inside of. We would use our imaginations to create horses or houses or ships in the huge rocks down by the stream. We also had a massive rock in the back yard that was split and allowed us to play on it or in it. There were ponds with polliwogs, fields of deer, and raccoons, possums, squirrels, chipmunks, skunks and mice. In addition to that our family raised a bull, goats, chickens, and later sheep. We never had a dog, as Dad said they would chase the deer away. I did get a cat when I was in my teens.

At night we would sit on the porch listening to the peepers (frogs in the ponds) or later in the summer, the katydids, crickets and cicadas. Some nights we watched meteor showers or satellites flying through the air. The nights up there were as black a coal or pitch black as we used to say. We always had the stream to cool and calm us on those hot summer nights. People who visited always thought it was raining outside because of the stream.

It was a great place to raise kids. My mother used to say she always wanted to live in a a place where she could yell as loud as she wanted and not be heard by the neighbors. The only neighbors were "summer people" and were not around most of the time.

It was small town life at its best. You could go visit anyone and doors were always unlocked. Cars were in the driveway with the keys in them. I remember going to one elderly man's house to visit him just to have him bring me a ladle of ice cold water from his well where he pumped it by hand. My brothers and sisters and my husband (truth be told) all attended one room school houses for their primary schooling.

We never had organized sports, or were driven to games when we were kids. We would just walk down the road, kids would gather and soon everyone - girls and boys - would be playing baseball, or swimming at Red Rocks or Flat Rock or go sledding at Asam's hill. It seems so old-fashioned and such long time ago. but it really wasn't. It was a different way of life than most experience today and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Feel free to click on the title to go to the website to see the house and surrounding area.