Uncle Jim and Aunt Lucy’s
My Uncle Jim and Aunt Lucy lived in one of the oldest farm houses in the great (albeit little) state of Rhode Island. This was until a few years ago when they left the house and Uncle Jim moved to Newport to run his Newport Tower Museum (yea, he’s that guy from the History Channel).
Growing up in New York City, going up to Uncle Jim’s seventeenth century rural abode for the weekend was always a trip that inspired excitement tinged with complete and utter terror at being in the middle of the wilderness, a land sans Duane Reade and where the closest pizza delivery actually came from the next state over. I was constantly on the lookout for foxes, which probably due to Doctor De Soto were scarier to me than all the lions, tigers, and bears combined.
We would always leave busy, bustling Manhattan in the late afternoon, piling into our ramshackle 1982 pea green box of a Volvo covered in stickers (and at one point with black duct tape where there had once been a functioning window). Three hours later we would arrive in Foster, well after the sun had bid adieu. Sh*t had gotten real. Because Rhode Island had stricter laws on when you could buy beer at night, Dad would always make a quick beer run beforehand in Connecticut. Dad’s had to have his Becks.
Six-pack secured, we’d then turn off the highway onto Tucker Hollow Road, the start of which was flagged by several mailboxes. It was too out of the way for any postman to drive all the way down to deliver the mail to these lone stars, my relatives being among them. We would then begin our descent into obscurity, driving what seemed like miles down a long dirt road into the deepest darkness imaginable (to a second grader at least). With dense forest on both sides, all you could see were the silhouettes of the skyscraping trees and the rubble of the dirt road that continued ahead of us, lit up a pale ghostly yellow from the headlights. Dad would drive slowly down as if something might dart out in front of us and swallow us whole (one time a frog did jump out in front of us, not sure how that ended for the little fella).
And then all of the sudden the warm lights of Uncle Jim and Aunt Lucy’s would twinkle in the distance, I’d stop holding my breath, and we’d park the car in front of their farm house. My siblings and I would fall out of the car, and as we stretched our stiff legs and arms after the long drive, squished up against each other in the back seat (Emily always got b*tch), we’d look up at the sky filled with more stars than we’d ever seen combined in our little lifetimes in New York City.
I always expected us to be wrapped in silence, since there were no sirens, no other cars, no people, no honks, but nature is always abuzz. The sounds at Uncle Jim’s were different than the ones we knew, and we’d listen to the howling of the wind, maybe the croaking of a frog, the hooting of an owl, bugs singing themselves to sleep or to keep themselves awake as we ran down the stone pathway to rap on the front door.
Uncle Jim’s house was built in 1726 by some rogue European settlers, probably from England — the doors had latches instead of doorknobs, tin sinks, lots of quilts, and wooden everything. They even had a big working fireplace — we had one in New York City, but it had a fake fire that lit up orange only when you plugged it into the wall. Sometimes field mice would get in the house through old cracks in the wall. I was always petrified of seeing a mouse, ever-wary of all the eaves and rafters, but it added an extra edge of intrigue to the whole trip.
Uncle Jim and Aunt Lucy had kind of gone with the whole old-timey feel, and there were antique dolls and kitschy trinkets around the house, which at when we arrived at night always seemed to amplify my jitters about being in their historic, isolated house. But I loved to scare myself as a kid (I still sort of do), and I’d let my mind race when I’d wake up and have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, convincing myself the porcelain dolls would come alive and put me on a Salem Witch Trial.
My fears of the darkness were always assuaged when morning came, and the sun would light up the fields and woods of the property, just beckoning us to run right out the old Dutch doors to play. We’d dash outside into the field, our shoes tingeing wet with the morning dew, something that entirely bewildered me as a city girl (“It didn’t even rain last night!”), and we’d push each other on the huge swing that our cousins had installed on the massive tree that overlooked the property, and run around the barn. The woods surrounding the house were extensive, and lands nearby were open for game hunting at certain times around the year, so sometimes we would wake up to gunshots, or, more poetically, to the death of a young deer.
I remember it snowing heavily once, and my cousins taking us out back to sled down a big hill. I didn’t understand the concept of “rolling off” and sled myself right into a tree, knocking a blood-riddled tooth out of my mouth. I was so embarrassed to have been such a lame-o in front of my older cousins, but I was assured that the tooth fairy wouldn’t hold it against me. My cousins also installed a rock climbing wall in one of the barns, Uncle Jim made his own camera obscura, Aunt Lucy had stunning Icelandic horses, and at one point one of the barns was home to the largest ad-hoc live sound systems I’ve ever seen. Since there was no one for a couple of miles we could bang the pots and pans as loud as we wanted, and I can still feel my ears ringing from gonging a frying pan too intensely.
By the end of the weekend I was never scared anymore, wistful at departure time even. Looking back on it I think I enjoyed going into trips to Uncle Jim’s half-petrified — a little suspense never hurt anyone, especially an unruly seven-year-old on the way to the woods for the weekend.
