Category Archives: Family

Wildflowers

Spring arrives slowly in Alaska. Piles of dirty snow sit on the north side of the house and in the shadowed patches on the south. Near our front porch the white mounds defy the sun, and hopes for an early spring are usually disappointed. This is when my thoughts turn to Whirlwind Hill and wildflowers.

“Front Door with Snow,” Carol Crump Bryner, gouache and colored pencil, 2013

My mother, who grew up roaming the fields and hills around the farm, knew her wildflowers and birds. The repeated rhythms of her stories about gathering spring flowers on the mountain come back to me in a list of names – hepatica, spring beauty, adder’s tongues, Dutchman’s breeches, trillium, violets. When she was growing up, she and her brothers and sister picked these wildflowers for May Day baskets.

The old-fashioned ritual of hanging baskets of flowers on doors on May first, “May Day,” knocking, and then running away to hide, appeals to me, but it’s not something that’s going to happen in Alaska. Instead, I hang a blue metal basket of hopeful pussy willows near the front door to remind me that spring will arrive eventually.

While my mother was still alive I continued a tradition started by her older brother Francis. Every spring when the adder’s tongues (also called trout lilies or dogs-tooth violets) bloomed in their usual spot by the spring at the cow pond, Francis picked a bunch and brought them up the lane to the farmhouse for his mother, my Grandma Hall. When my mother could no longer walk to the pond I picked them for her. They’re such lovely and cheerful little flowers, but they do have a slight reptilian quality because of their spotted waxy leaves, tongue-like stamens, and curled back petals. They grow in colonies that, if undisturbed, can last for decades. I find them in the same spots, year after year. They come back, much like I do to Whirlwind Hill, because their roots are there.

“Adder’s Tongues,” Carol Crump Bryner, gouache and colored pencil, 2013

From Lydia’s journal, May 5, 1924 – “Nice day. Agnes took Francis to school this morning – he took a large bunch of Adder Tongues he picked down in the meadow to Miss Martin. They are very nice, in full bloom. I think they will make her smile.”

On Monday: The Kitchen

Foundations

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Last spring we had a Hall family reunion. We came from all over the country to gather on a Saturday in May at the Crump barn on Whirlwind Hill.

On my first day back east before the event I took my favorite walk around the Whirlwind Hill block. The three mile circle starts at the end of our driveway, winds around the reservoir, passes the swampy and woodsy stretch of Scard Road, straightens out and turns to the right on Branford Road, then turns right again to navigate the roller coaster that is Whirlwind Hill. Names of former and present neighbors, some still on their farms or in their houses, come to mind as I pass by – Hale, Riotte. Keogh, Scard, Barnes, Bartholomew, Cella, Foster, Mahan, Kranyak, Pyskaty, Farnam, Parks, Williams, Hall, Ives, and Guidone. Near the end of the walk, on the last downhill stretch, I reach the site of the Hall farmhouse that burned in 1971. Since then, the remains of the house have been taken away, but the foundation endures – a dirt-floored, stone-lined hole invisible from the road because of the trees and weeds and bushes that grow where the house used to stand.

Farmhouse Foundation, May 2013

My feelings about this spot are bittersweet. I’m sad that the house is gone and that trees grow where the walls should be. But I’m happy that the foundation is still there for me to look at. Looking at it is not easy, however, because I’m afraid of ticks – the little ones that you can hardly see and that give you Lyme disease. I had to steel myself to make my way through the brushy growth to reach the edge of the cellar hole. I stayed only long enough to take a few photos and spent a long time afterward brushing imaginary bugs off my legs and arms and head.

For the reunion on May 4, I sketched a very rough family tree putting our great-grandparents William Ellsworth and Lydia Jane Hall at the top. My cousin Nancy and I made nametags that were color coded to indicate the Hall brothers and sisters who were grandparents to the cousins in my generation. At some point during the day people started adding to the tree – family members whose names I hadn’t known, or didn’t remember, and names of the newer generations, many of whom I was meeting for the first time.

Hall Family Tree with Additions

The poster board filled up, and by the end of the day it had begun to look like the old foundation. A small stone here, a larger one there, all joined by the mortar of family. I suppose this is a tenuous comparison, but it pleased me to think of the strength of family ties this way.

We had a glorious day – sunny and warm and infused with the joyful cheer that comes when families gather to celebrate the past and build memories for the next generations.

Hall Family Reunion, photo courtesy of Charles Peters

On Friday: Violets

OBoy!

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A few weeks after my first birthday my mother wrote in her diary – “Carol awake at 7:00. Had good day. Walks quite a bit saying “OBoy, OBoy.”

Carol in 1946

Sixty-seven years later I say “OBoy” again because I’m excited about starting this blog. For the past year I’ve immersed myself in the history, documents, and memories of my family’s farm on Whirlwind Hill in Wallingford, Connecticut. I’ve thought, written, and made art about this place, and I’m ready to share the results with a wider audience.

I never thought I’d have a blog. And yet, here I am, venturing into a technology far removed from the people and times that are my subject. My Hall ancestors kept journals, wrote letters, sent postcards, made wills, signed deeds, and posed in their best clothes for portraits.

Lydia Jane Hart Hall

They felt a need to record their lives, and I’m grateful that they did. I like to think they would welcome this modern way of passing along history. My great-grandmother, Lydia Jane Hart Hall, whose journals are a rich source of information about farm life, was often housebound and lonely in the last years of her life. A community of writers and readers would have pleased her.

Our own lives revolve around the stories we have in our heads. Some are told by others, and some we tell to ourselves. There is reality, and there is memory, and often the two are so entwined they’re hard to separate.

My family had a farm on a hill in Wallingford, Connecticut. My mind is full of what I’ve heard about my ancestors and their life there. In my physical world the detritus of their existence has taken on even more meaning now that my parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles are gone.

I’ve started writing some of the memories and history down so that my children won’t have to say the sentence William Zinsser claims is one of the saddest he knows – “I wish I had asked my mother about that.”

Please join me on Mondays, Wednesdays, and occasional Fridays, here “On Whirlwind Hill.” I’m launching this blog in April – a time of spring and beginnings. I plan to bring it to an end in April 2015, but who knows – that could change. I welcome comments, stories, corrections, and the company of family and friends.

On Wednesday: A Piece of the Past