My memory of our first visit to the farm was one of joy; it was hugely exciting for all of us. I think we probably visited as a family before we actually moved there, but those early visit memories are a bit mashed up together.

I remember there was a warning sign on steep Mexico Lane, the dirt road that led to our driveway, which remarkably was paved. 

(Later on we would have a dozen sports car roar up our paved driveway, thinking it was a main road – these folks were lost on a road rally. The fancy sports cars would get all tangled up where the driveway ended. in front of our barn and spend a few frantic moments getting sorted out before they would roar back down the driveway, having wasted precious minutes.)

That warning sign at the top of Mexico Lane – I was too young to read it, but it was explained that it said No Bicycles allowed. Seems some boys had lost their brakes on the hill and crash and might have even died… A decade later I did bike down that terribly steep dirt road, but kept to a slow speed and apparently, didn’t die.

Over the years I got to know our land so well that I could take you on a blindfolded tour of every field: The Barn Field, The Garden Field, The Brook Field, The Upper Brook Field, The Field Below the House, and one more field below the barn that never got a nickname. But that field was where the 37 Chevy sat for many years because we could not get it out of there.

There were all those fields, there was the stream where we built endless dams, there was the hill that we climbed and from which you could make out the bridge towers of the George Washington Bridge, about 50 miles south. There were giant boulders here and there, a tame one at the end of the lawn and a huge round one at the top of the mountain, left behind by a glacier. 

It was the country, no question about it.

When our grandparents came for their first visit they expressed concern about bears.

Our parent’s dear friends David and Selma came to see our new digs, and when they left our cute little dog ran after them – and never came back. The first of many dogs.

And cats. We had generations of cats come and go.

I can distinctly remember my mother raising concern about poison sumac, which is ironic for a few reasons. First, because we never had any poison sumac, but we had gobs of poison ivy and all of us ran afoul of it. But also ironic because 50 years later I built an educational website about poison ivy and sure enough, most people were more concerned about poison sumac, just as my mother had been. (Poison sumac only grows in very wet areas, and though we had some I never saw it.)

The house was really a summer house, sold to us by a nice family that even gave my parents part of the payment as a 2nd mortgage so they could afford it. I think that family was charmed by my family’s tremendous energy excitement, and bottomless naivete.

I was four years old when we moved there; I had no chores to do. But my oldest brother, Fred, who was 13, took on the biggest share of the work to try to bring the place back into shape as a working farm.

He put up barbed wire fences in places, electric fences in other, held in place by white ceramic insulators nailed to trees. We all fell victim to shocks from the electric fences.

Eventually we got a cow and some pigs, all of whom were not impressed by any of the fences and would often get loose.

We got a John Deere tractor: my mother insisted on a model that had wide front wheels, not the sort where the front wheels were tiny and close together.

(Many years later I interviewed Merle Watson, the son of the great folks musician Doc Watson. Merle was driving the sort of tractor my mother forbade us to get; Merle’s rolled on him and killed him. My mother was right out that.)

I remember we had a garden the first summer, but since my birthday is in July, we must have moved around the beginning of August, which is pretty late to start a garden, but I think we did. Eventually that garden became enormously productive: I would bring a wheelbarrow full of cucumbers, peppers, eggplants, tomatoes, squash, and corn nearly every day.

But to start with we were in a house that had been expanded from a cabin into a large summer house and which had only one kerosene heater in the living room. I think my father and brother Fred raced against time to build a heating system with an oil furnace before it go too cold.

Looking back I am endlessly happy that my daffy parents moved us there, even though we lost our Nordica Drive friends. It was magical for a young boy: the woods, the fields, the stream, the mystical swamp.

But it must be noted that my father never quit his city job: he drove half an hour back to Croton-on-Hudson to get the train and a 45 minute ride to Grand Central, then another 30 minutes by subway to nearly the tip of Manhattan Island where he worked as the editor of a trade magazine about coffee and tea. Which was not the kind of writer that he always wanted to be.