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Sorry folks this post is mostly for my daughters and myself. It will not be of much interest to most readers. My girls did not get to visit or know this side of their heritage as they were growing up. I have shared lots of verbal history with them but with the exception of when they were very young they have not had a chance to visit these places.
Below are pictures of the house that I grew up in from age 13. Not only did I grow up in it, but I invested between five hundred and one thousand hours a year in labor to help build it. As a related aside, Miranda Lambert's The House That Built Me can get me choked up.
All the stone in the house and in the landscaping was harvested by myself or my dad from old local farm foundations built out of the limestone readily available in the area.
REMODELING AN OLD FARMHOUSEMy folks started with an old farm house which they completely gutted and rebuilt. After stripping off all the walls, floors, ceilings and windows we redid all the electric wiring, windows, insulation, floors and walls. In addition to gutting and rebuilding the portion of the house that was originally built in the early 1900's, major additions and build-outs like dormers and bay-windows doubled the total square footage of the house. Everything was rebuilt to extremely high quality standards. The new windows were all top of the line Andersons. The sub-floors are all double half inch plywood with direction of the two layers rotated ninety degrees. The vertical walls and interior ceilings are all insulated to at least R20-R30 and the ceilings facing the outside elements are insulated to R30-R40. Instead of drywall the whole house was redone with rock lathe and then sand plaster. All new electric, heat detectors, intercoms, smoke detectors and centralized vacuum cleaning ports were installed.
All the major addition construction was done by contractors but all the demolishing and rebuilding of the old house was done one or two rooms at a time by family labor while we were living in the house. For approximately a year we had to have a mobile home set up next to the house so that we would always be guaranteed availability of heat, indoor plumbing and a working kitchen. I am sure that as a grown up I would have found all this very uncomfortable but as a kid it was like a year long camping trip right at home.
My folks started out with about forty acres and then purchased neighboring land until they owned around two hundred acres. This is the view from the fence line behind the house. The house sits at 2,200 feet on top of a ridge line halfway between Cazenovia and Hamilton (home of Colgate college) New York. Even enlarged it is hard to get an appreciation for the view but the distant horizon is about 30 miles away and in the winter the night lights of two local ski slopes can be seen about 20 miles away. This is looking west and there are pretty good sunsets. Nothing compared to those from the summit of Old Rag but probably better than 95% of the world gets to see on a daily basis.
Here you get a little bit of a glimpse of old barn which was converted to a three bay car garage.
Yee HAH. First snow for me this fall. Just a dusting but definitely first snow. While I was home a local news station had a contest going on for people to send in films of their best snow dances. This is skiing and snowmobiling country and while snow brings its share of misery it also brings lots of fun recreation and first snow is joyously welcomed by all those anxious to dust off their skis and tune up their snowmobiles. At some point over the next five months the snow banks in front of my parents home will reach a minimum of eight feet and if it is a record winter they might get to fifteen feet. Of course the snow depth in the fields never exceeds around three feet but because of blowing winds the plows have to plow back snow almost every day and the banks just build up bigger and bigger until a big thaw comes along.
The next picture is a look up the road in front of my folks home. Our nearest neighbor lives in this direction. They are about twice the distance away as you can see in this shot. Too the right is the house and the thirty mile view. In my youth the left side of the road had five hundred acres of commercial Christmas tree farm which in turn bordered on five square miles of State Forest. I was able to get a lot of winter work cutting and dragging hundreds of Christmas trees out to large flat bed trucks in the fall. For about three years I spent about six hundred to one thousand hours a year earning around $2.85 per hour trimming these same Christmas trees.
Christmas Tree Trimming And The Sound Of The Wind
I would go from tree to tree one row at time. Sometimes I would have the company of another tree trimmer but most often it was just me and nature. There is almost a perpetual breeze of five to ten miles per hour blowing around my parents home. This wind and the other sounds of nature were often my only company. I can not explain it but this is where I learned to listen to the song of the wind. It speaks to me at a very deep level. I say speaks because it definitely feels like it is communicating to me but not in a way that I have any language to explain. Not having the constant sound of the wind singing to me is one of the things I miss the most living here on the flat lands of the mid-Atlantic. Being able to hear the breezes and winds sing is one of the things that gives me great comfort and rejuvenation during my circuits on Old Rag. The first time I heard Allen Menken's and Steven Schwartz's Colors of The Wind I was alone with my I-Phone and the song touched a very deep part of my soul. I cried up a storm of ecstatic tears.
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When I was about 25 I vacationed with some Sperry Univac coworkers of the same age on a car camping vacation to western national parks. It was fascinating to me that when we were in the Dakota Badlands my coworkers who had grown up in the Long Island suburbs confessed they were incredibly uncomfortable, stressed, having trouble sleeping with the wide open spaces and with no signs or sounds of other humans. The very reasons I was feeling relaxed, comfortable, rejuvenated and happy was the very thing that made them feel stressed and uncomfortable. I had never really been conscious of how different and even weird my formative years had been. Being totally alone way out in the backcountry feels like being home to me.
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During my early school days I was picked up by a station wagon school bus that would pick up about five outlying kids and then drive us to a point where we would transfer to the classic big yellow school bus. Because of drifting snow on our road there would be days when only those on the station wagon school bus route would have an official snow day. Unfortunately my Dad would always make sure that he would get us to school on his way to work in Syracuse.
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Below is a picture of main street Cazenovia the town I consider my hometown. Even though the hamlet of Erieville is just three miles away from my folks house and Cazenovia is nine, Cazenovia is where I went to school, where our church was and were we shopped so I consider it my home town. Before my parents could afford to buy the home shown above we rented various homes all within the Cazenovia School district so from first grade through graduation from high school I attended Cazenovia Central Schools with mostly the same 130 plus class mates. When I would walk down these streets in my youth I knew 80% of the people I would see on the street along with pretty deep backgrounds on their friends and family. This is a town whose local paper used to have announcements about children returning home to visit with their parents. "Bobby Look will be visiting his parents for Thanksgiving." Of course there are downsides to everyone knowing so much about everybody else but one of the pluses is that as a kid of even nine or ten I would often bicycle to a friend's home three to eight miles away and both I and my parents knew that there were watchful eyes that would pick up a phone if anything was amiss or I was up to any mischief.
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From first grade until now Saint Peters Episcopal of Cazenovia church was my parents place of worship. I have incredibly fond memories of my times as a choir boy in what was a fun and very good junior choir. I was a member of this junior choir from age seven until about age twelve. We had very wonderful and creative junior choir directors who made sure our little group had a lot of fun and produced some pretty good singing. I remember that in third grade I saw a TV show about the Vienna Boys choir after which I harbored a dream that I could find a way to become a member. After sixth grade I became more interested in sports and left the junior choir but those years of having fun and producing music with close friends were very special times. Wearing the choir robes and the silver crosses with the different colored lanyard ribbons(color represented your years in the choir) was kind of cool too.
I include the next picture as an example of the size of the hundreds of trees I planted as eighteen inch saplings in my early teens.
Good old Cazenovia High School. It does not show up well in this picture but what is now Cazenovia Middle School is attached in the back right of the picture. In my youth what is now a Middle School was the Elementary and had grades K-6 and the high school building contained 7-12. The two buildings are attached by a common kitchen facility. Despite its small town status it was a special institution. My graduating high school class of 130 plus had seven National Merit semi-finalists (including me). I was told by my local representative that through his office I had a guaranteed entrance to West Point if I wanted it. I often wonder how my life would have gone if I had chosen the military academy route. At the time I had no idea about how special either of these two things were. In my mind they were just things that normally happened to high school kids that did well in school. It was not until I was raising two high school children of my own that the light bulb went on.
The next picture is of Tuscarora Reservoir AKA Erieville Lake. My parents home sits on top of the hills on the right hand horizon.
This is a picture of the community pier on Cazenovia Lake. During the summer months this park serves the role of a pool and I took swimming lessons all the way up through Senior Life Saving. I am not sure if they still do it but a popular activity/test for the advanced swim class was to swim from the pier to the other side of the lake and back. This is about a total distance of two miles. Not in this picture but just up the lake shore to the right is Willow Bank Yacht club. This is where I learned to sail, Swordfish, Sunfish, Comets, Lightnings and Flying Dutchman.
During my youth my parents belonged to the Cazenovia Ski Club which while it is called a private ski club it is better to think of it as a co-op where everyone pitches in to groom slopes, make snown, man lifts and so forth. There are minimal volunteer hours and membership fees that keep it running but you can ski for as long and as often as you want for no charge. I skied intensely here for one year when I was six and then discovered hockey at age seven and did not go skiing again until after I graduated from college. We had an outdoor hockey rink that the town operated and there was no charge for being on the ice and it was not unusual for me to spend 20-30 hours on ice per week depending on game schedules ect. My siblings and parents did make use of the ski club though. One of the few things I regret a little is that I did not avail myself of the Cazenovia Ski Club because of my single minded focus on hockey.
I include the next picture as an example of the size of the hundreds of trees I planted as eighteen inch saplings in my early teens.
Good old Cazenovia High School. It does not show up well in this picture but what is now Cazenovia Middle School is attached in the back right of the picture. In my youth what is now a Middle School was the Elementary and had grades K-6 and the high school building contained 7-12. The two buildings are attached by a common kitchen facility. Despite its small town status it was a special institution. My graduating high school class of 130 plus had seven National Merit semi-finalists (including me). I was told by my local representative that through his office I had a guaranteed entrance to West Point if I wanted it. I often wonder how my life would have gone if I had chosen the military academy route. At the time I had no idea about how special either of these two things were. In my mind they were just things that normally happened to high school kids that did well in school. It was not until I was raising two high school children of my own that the light bulb went on.
The next picture is of Tuscarora Reservoir AKA Erieville Lake. My parents home sits on top of the hills on the right hand horizon.
This is a picture of the community pier on Cazenovia Lake. During the summer months this park serves the role of a pool and I took swimming lessons all the way up through Senior Life Saving. I am not sure if they still do it but a popular activity/test for the advanced swim class was to swim from the pier to the other side of the lake and back. This is about a total distance of two miles. Not in this picture but just up the lake shore to the right is Willow Bank Yacht club. This is where I learned to sail, Swordfish, Sunfish, Comets, Lightnings and Flying Dutchman.
Quite often the lake is covered in white caps.
During my youth my parents belonged to the Cazenovia Ski Club which while it is called a private ski club it is better to think of it as a co-op where everyone pitches in to groom slopes, make snown, man lifts and so forth. There are minimal volunteer hours and membership fees that keep it running but you can ski for as long and as often as you want for no charge. I skied intensely here for one year when I was six and then discovered hockey at age seven and did not go skiing again until after I graduated from college. We had an outdoor hockey rink that the town operated and there was no charge for being on the ice and it was not unusual for me to spend 20-30 hours on ice per week depending on game schedules ect. My siblings and parents did make use of the ski club though. One of the few things I regret a little is that I did not avail myself of the Cazenovia Ski Club because of my single minded focus on hockey. Here is a link to Cazenovia Ski Clubs web site:
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