I write of a field in autumn. Early November to be precise. Not yet barren. Faded. Gray. Not yet frozen. Damp with cold. If you live within the metes and bounds of New England, you know or once knew such a field. For me, it is my grandfather’s former pasture behind Main Street and Lakeshore Road in Boxford. Part of a farm that once took top prize in the Green Pastures Championship for the state of Massachusetts. To prevent a final harvest of million-dollar homes, Pops stewarded his slopes and narrow forest into a trust when he retired the cows and hens. The field begins where the lane below the cow barns crosses between twin irrigation ponds, into which mallards still tumble and where black snakes hide. From there, it rises until multiple longlines of bluebird boxes run out just below the summit.
Across New England, these fields are our icebergs. We calve off sections each year to create tarred cul-de-sacs. Though few of us still plow in rows, if you spend seasons working or walking a field, you learn when the blackbirds will return to trill in spring, the times of day hawks will circle in summer heat, when the crows will murder every evening, and when the Canada honkers will drop in to feed in fall. If gulls come on a January morning, you know that a Nor’easter is sure to hit.
There are fields where balls are thrown or kicked, as parents cheer and cars pull quickly in and out, but I prefer one not paved or turfed. One with a distant barn like I see from the top of the pasture my grandfather once stocked with Holsteins and edged with coops that summered 20,000 Rhode Island Reds. When Dad was 13, his toboggan glanced off a bluebird pole halfway down this hill. His passengers rolled off, but Dad’s right leg wedged under the crust as if stuck down a manhole cover. He claims he grew four inches convalescing in a cast.
As a teenager, I brought dates or buddies here. Under a Weymouth pine, I stored a backpack with cards, cigars, and mosquito spray. If we had beer, we snuck those up too. From our perch, we eyed the chateau that went up over the old manure pit because, well, Pops could not save the entire farm from suburban blight, and hey, who doesn’t want a comfortable retirement? In the fading light, we smiled at fireflies and spied the shadows of foxes double-checking empty henhouses. Before a summer storm, we watched the wishy waving of the trees. In the fall, we marveled at nature’s fireworks show.
Nowadays, I prefer to walk this field alone, under full moons or morning mists as I imagine Gram-Gram’s silhouette in the window as she corrects school papers late into the evening or Pops crossing to the milking barn in the early morn. My uncle once caught three fox pups and stashed them in an empty shed below, intending to sell them at the Topsfield Fair. Anytime the word “fox” is mentioned, Dad retells me how their coarse cries kept him up all night and how, in the morning, only tufts of the mother fox’s fur were left where she pried the wire off the window.
Pops is gone 45 years. An early death attributed to not covering up when he sprayed pesticides for a bountiful harvest. My father recently told me a story that I had never heard, a rare feat. The day his younger brother left for Parris Island, Dad met his dad and brother at the train. I imagine my dad, an eager young real estate agent in shirt and tie, alongside his farm-faced father in field clothes and thick glasses. I see them wave to my uncle, his head full of the red hair I inherited, not yet lost to Marine clippers or to time. My father speaks of the stress on Pops’s face as the train jostled away his youngest son and the farm’s future. I wonder if they stayed and talked awhile and what my grandfather thought as he drove his yellow Ford back to the barn.
When I sat on my log atop what was once our hill to write Gram-Gram’s eulogy, a woodpecker kept tap-tap-tapping as if pounding out a novel in birch. I have forgotten what I said that day in church except for this: “The lives of farmers and teachers are tied to the seasons. Gram said she did not want to leave this life in the dark or rain. All Memorial Day weekend, fat drops left welts on the screens to her room, but Monday morning the daisies at her bedside eased back open. It was a good day to go to the barn or classroom, so as the sun rose up, she rose up with it.”
Each year, there is less time to walk here. And fewer fields elsewhere to traipse. Each year, the roads not taken grow more numerous. My mind tilts often to a farm and field I once breathed in fully. Without warning, I am there again, if only in my mind.
Roger “Rusty” Chadwick, is a lawyer and preacher. He lives on Fish Brook in Boxford with his wife, one of their four boys, and mother-in-law. He can be reached at preacher.rusty.chadwick@gmail.com.