Reflections upon loving and leaving North Pomfret

For as long as I can remember, North Pomfret has been my special place.

As a child I learned to ski in snow over my head and to drink sap out of huge metal buckets that sometimes froze to my lips. I drove my cousins’ go-carts on the hilly dirt road and, to their delight, this “city” cousin found more ways to fall off a horse than to ride one. I stacked bales on the wagon and later in the haymow, where we choked on dust in the filtered light. I bit into as many apples as I fancied in the ancient apple orchard, my face dripping with sweet juice. The family farm was my heaven on earth.

While growing up in the 1930s, my father often visited his aunt’s farm. When Woodstock’s Gilbert’s Hill, one of the first ski tows in the country, celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1984, Dad “raced” in the old timer’s relay wearing bib No. 1. In 1934, he was hauled up Gilbert’s Hill by the Model-T-powered rope tows and descended on what he called his hickory sticks.

When my mother first visited the farm with Dad in 1947, the road was so deeply rutted with spring mud that they parked the car and walked the final half mile in the middle of the night.

My father’s brother, Uncle Milt, had no intention of milking a herd after graduating from college. Yet he was summoned by their maiden aunt to Pomfret to do just that. Milt milked 30 cows, one named after me, and lived in an always-cold farmhouse with a wood furnace and spring water plunking into the upstairs cistern. He and my aunt raised three kids, all educated in one-room schoolhouses. In suburban Connecticut, I walked to the solid brick elementary school that my mother attended. In third grade, I had Mom’s teacher.

In 1770, Hannah Putnam, daughter of Revolutionary War General Israel Putnam, married John Dana Winchester and moved from Pomfret to Pomfret, Connecticut to Vermont. They bought 1,500 acres of hills and vales and spent three years clearing the land so they could raise enough food to survive. They settled on the hilltop, Galaxy Hill. Cold air drained into the valley, giving them a longer growing season. Hannah and her husband are buried in one of Pomfret’s three cemeteries, where American flags are more likely to mark graves of the Revolution and Civil War than the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries.

In 1960, milk carriers no longer emptied those old milk cans and required dirt-poor farmers to buy $1,000 bulk tanks, a bridge too far for many. Uncle Milt sold his cows. He also sold the abandoned hired man’s house to my parents. This Civil War-era home has been in my life ever since, filled with more than 60 years of accumulated memories and possessions of parents and children.

Family and friends gathered in this house with little heat and no creature comforts. While John and I raised our family in Charlotte, Pomfret remained special, kids swimming in the pond and exploring fields and woods. For decades, my parents brought our Christmas tree to Charlotte, one of many that my roommate and I planted during college.

Wanting to keep the house and land in the family, our parents gifted it to my brother and me over the years. For more than two decades, our parents were our tenants. The long-term hope was to keep the property in our family 250 years after Hannah and John Winchester bought the land. Just days before my mother left this life, she learned that her granddaughter and my niece, Hannah Bassett, would move to Vermont for a job. She and her husband will eventually live in our family home.

I am delighted, at least my head is, that a new generation of Bassetts will live on the old sod. Unfortunately, my heart has not yet warmed to that message.

I have a few weeks to leave this place that I have loved my entire life. I am walking and walking and walking the beautiful hills of Pomfret, visiting Bunker Hill Burying Ground, a 5-mile round trip from our house via the Old Kings Highway, to visit Dad and tell him Mom will join him there soon. I delight each evening in building a fire, just as Dad taught me, in the Vermont Castings stove.

Mom walked almost daily until her November death at 99. She embraced these hills every day. I meet her friends on our road, in cars, on tractors, snowmobiles or foot. They tell me that their favorite visits with Mom were on this dirt road. Shortly after Mom left us, her neighbors organized a walk to celebrate her. A dozen of them, ranging from their 30s to 80s, began at our house and walked and talked their way along Mom’s favorite route.

I could not be more fortunate; we are keeping this special place in the family for yet another generation. But, I am struggling. Losing loved ones is hard. To lose my mother and this house inside of a month is a lot. In just a few short weeks North Pomfret will no longer be mine.

And my heart is breaking.