The Art of Living: & Other Stories by Gardner John

Author:Gardner, John [Gardner, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, ebook
Amazon: B00AG8G06O
Goodreads: 19104758
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1981-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

COME ON BACK

Forty-five years ago, when Remsen, New York, was called “Jack” and nearly all the people who lived there were Welsh, my uncle, or, rather, my maternal great-uncle, E. L. Hughes, ran the feedmill. His name is no longer remembered in the village, and the feedmill is in ruins, set back behind houses and trees so that you have to know it’s there to find it. There’s a big sprawling Agway that already looks ancient, though it can’t be more than fifteen or twenty years old, on the other side of town.

I seldom get up to that area anymore, but I used to visit often when I was a child living with my parents on their farm outside Batavia. My grandfather Hughes, whom I never knew except by the wooden chest of carpenter’s tools he left my father and a few small, tattered Welsh hymnbooks he left my mother, had originally settled in the village of Remsen, or just outside it, and for years, even past the time of my uncle Ed’s death, my parents made pilgrimages back to see old friends, attend the Cymanfa Ganu festivals, visit the white wooden church called Capel Ucca, and keep a casual eye on the mill’s decline. At the time my grandfather and his brothers came over, Remsen was generally viewed, back in Wales, as a kind of New Jerusalem, a shining hope, a place of peace and prosperity. There was a story of a Welshman who landed in New York, and looking up bug-eyed at the towering buildings, said, “If this is New York, what must Remsen be!”

In those days it was a sleepy little hamlet beside a creek. Though the Depression was on in the rest of the country, you saw no signs of it in Remsen. On the tree-lined streets with tall houses set back from them, each with its roses, small vegetable garden, and grape arbor, there were shined-up square cars, mostly Model A Fords, and occasional buggies. (My uncle Ed, one of the richest men in town, had a black-and-green Buick.) Milk was still delivered in squarish glass bottles by an orange horse-drawn cart; coal for people’s furnaces came on a huge, horse-drawn wagon, black with white lettering: W. B. PRICE & SONS, COAL & LUMBER. The horses were chestnut-colored Belgians, I remember, so immense and so beautiful they didn’t seem real. At the end of almost every driveway, back behind the house, there was a two-storey garage with chickenwire on the upstairs windows. If you shouted from the driveway, one or two of the chickens would look out at you, indignant, like old ladies; but however you shouted, even if you threw pebbles, most of them just went about their business. The people were pretty much the same, unexcitable. There weren’t many houses, maybe twenty or thirty, a couple of churches, a school, Price’s lumberyard, and a combination gas-station and market.

As we entered, from the south, my uncle Ed’s high gray mill reaching up past the trees into the sunlight was the first thing we’d see.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.