Sylvia's Farm by Sylvia Jorrin Read Free Book Online

grandparents’ seven children. My grandfather and my uncle Percy farmed dairy, milking cows by hand in the gentle rolling hills of Perkin’s Corners, Niantic, Connecticut, not far from Long Island Sound. The 1790s house and hundred acres held an infinite source of entertainment for us.
    There was a small coppice of a pithy kind of tree on one side of the cemetery wall that bordered the farm. I never did find out what kind of saplings they were. Soft and cocoa colored inside, they invited one’s knife to turn them into a whistle.
    Sometimes we ran across the beautiful flat top of the wall, laid stone and cement, to get to the little coppice. Other times we skirted the wall and slipped in from the side. It sheltered us and gave us a place for our imaginations to roam, away from our parents, each other’s aunts and uncles. I don’t remember what our games were exactly about, but do remember the feeling of daring and expectancy upon arriving there, and the shadows, and the tiny flickering of light between the trees high above our heads, and how close we felt to each other, and how special it was to have this place.
    One afternoon, crossing back to rejoin the family, I realized that the thick black vine now growing up, across, and down the otherside of this massive wall had not been there before. It was a snake. A large one. I was the oldest of the three of us, all of six at the time; my brother and cousin were both four. I was terrified of the snake.
    My mother was a farm girl whose mother was a city girl. My beloved grandmother made certain her daughters were raised with the city refinement of being thrown into minor and proper hysterics at the sight of such things as snakes. And so my mother instilled in me a real fear, if not a propensity to have hysteries, of this harmless creature slowly making its way across the wall.
    There I was feeling absolutely responsible for my brother and cousin, facing off a very large black snake that was between us and the safety of our parents on the lawn under the trees. “Run!” I shouted to them, and run I did. They followed, two pairs of short little four-year-old legs moving as fast as they could behind me! Breathless, we told the story and were told that of course we should not have strayed to that little wood in the first place.
    I’m quite certain that the size of the snake was thought to be exaggerated. It wasn’t exaggerated in the least. The last time I turned off the highway onto Society Road, went to the farm, and saw that stone wall, I was as impressed with the size of the wall as I had been that summer day. Somehow, the visits to that wood lost their charm after that afternoon. I had become a bit afraid, and that deterred me rather then enticed me back.
    The lay of the land of my grandfather’s farm is not dissimilar from mine. The meadowland before the hill was shorter and there was no creek. But the flat top of the hill is the same. My great-grandparents lived up there, in an orchard that they and my grandfather planted. I never saw it. By the time I was born, my mother had become far too much a city girl to climb ever again to the top. I tried, alone, each time going a little higher, each time drawing back when I became enclosed by too many trees.
    I know I never saw my grandfather take the dog and rifle and go up into those woods to shoot a fox that had killed some of his chickens, but the story is so vivid in my memory that my imagination has assumed the hue of reality, and I believe in my heart that I did watch him and heard him call, “Nelly, Nelly,” and take his beautiful collie and his rifle up that hill and into the woods. I can see his back to me, his head turned slightly over his shoulder, smiling at Nelly, his rifle cradled in his right elbow.
    My grandson, Mikhael, has a subscription to the
Delaware County Times
and nearly every week reads about my life on my farm in what he refers to as the news. “I read about it