{"id":14509,"date":"2016-08-04T07:31:04","date_gmt":"2016-08-04T11:31:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.katrinakenison.com\/?p=14509"},"modified":"2016-08-04T07:31:04","modified_gmt":"2016-08-04T11:31:04","slug":"14509","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/14509\/","title":{"rendered":"chatting with ghosts a visit to E.B. White’s farm"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_9597\"H<\/span>ave you ever wondered by what mysterious alchemy a whim becomes a wish, and a wish a reality?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m pretty sure it requires some combination of love and pure intention to transform an idle fantasy into an actual event. Oftentimes, a spirit of adventure is necessary, too. Oh, and a willingness to envision \u2013 even if the vision itself seems far off and far-fetched.<\/p>\n

This is a tale\u00a0of a daydream that actually did come true, a road-trip story that had its beginnings in the pages of a cherished book and then slipped right out of fiction and into real life. Sometimes, the stars line up. \u00a0Sometimes, all the puzzle pieces fall into place. \u00a0And sometimes \u201creal life\u201d feels, if only for a day, graced by a touch of magic. \u00a0Want to come along?<\/p>\n

\"charlottes-web-book\"Because I became a surrogate mom to a daughter late in life (a tale with its own magic, which I tell here<\/strong><\/a>), the two of us had some catching up to do as we got to know each other. It didn\u2019t surprise me, though, to learn that Lauren and I shared a love of E.B. White in general, and of Charlotte\u2019s Web<\/em><\/strong><\/a> in particular. Having adored White\u2019s enduring classic as a child, Lauren eagerly introduced her two young nieces to Fern and Wilbur and Charlotte as soon as they were old enough to listen. Having felt the same, I shared with her that I\u2019d read Charlotte\u2019s Web<\/em> to my own boys, not just once but many times over the years, eventually relinquishing the final chapters first to Henry, and later to Jack, to read out loud, so they wouldn\u2019t have to listen to me trying to speak through my tears.<\/p>\n

Charlotte\u2019s Web<\/em> may masquerade as a children\u2019s book, but it is really one of the most profound and tender portraits of a friendship ever written \u2013 timeless, ageless, full of light and shadow, humor and deeply felt emotion, oddly endearing details and unforgettable characters, both human and animal.<\/p>\n

It is also, for me, a touchstone, a reminder of what it is to write simply and well, to observe all beings with compassion, to honor life\u2019s impermanence, its fleeting beauty, its enchanting and engrossing twists and turns. And, too, this cherished book is a reminder that love can become sadness, that even the most special friendships end, but that the pain of that loss is always worth enduring in exchange for the rare gift of being seen and known and cared about for a time.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_9555S<\/span>o when Lauren wrote me last fall to ask if I\u2019d be game\u00a0for a trip to E.B. White\u2019s saltwater farm in Brooklin, Maine, I didn\u2019t hesitate before saying \u201cyes\u201d \u2013 a yes which set all manner of things in motion.<\/p>\n

Lauren tracked down the current owners of the farm, Bob and Mary G., who purchased the property just after White\u2019s death in 1985. White was a notoriously private man, and his former house has always been and still is\u00a0a private home, not a tourist destination. And yet, this kind couple\u00a0have inhabited their special place for over 35 summers, with a deep respect for its gentle ghosts and its singular history. Changing and updating only what needed to change, they have also lovingly preserved whatever could be saved, a way of honoring both E.B. and Katharine White and much of the character of their beloved homestead.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, Bob and Mary also understand that for some of White\u2019s most devoted readers, the hunger for pilgrimage runs deep. With quiet hospitality, they do their best to accommodate those who feel compelled to make the long journey to Brooklin, if only to breathe in the salt air and to see for ourselves the venerable old barn that inspired the book we hold most dear in our hearts.<\/p>\n

Over the course of many months, Lauren initiated a correspondence with Mary, arrived at a suitable summer date for the two of us to visit, found us rooms at an Airbnb down the road, and bought herself a plane ticket north. And so it was that the long-awaited day arrived at last. We set out early in the morning from my house in New Hampshire, carrying clothes for all weather, coolers packed with food, provisions for the road, walking shoes and some art supplies.<\/p>\n

\"unspecified-1\"F<\/span>irst stop: my parents\u2019 house on Bailey Island. For a girl born and bred in Connecticut and transplanted south to Atlanta right after college, a first trip to the coast of Maine was pretty exciting in itself. And I loved seeing this old family place I know and love through the delighted eyes of a newcomer. As the mother of sons, it\u2019s quite a treat for me to have the company of a daughter, especially a young woman who appreciates my motherly ways and<\/em>\u00a0my skills with a lobster cracker.<\/p>\n

\"unspecified-3\"We unpacked the car and struck out on foot, soaking up the sun and working up an appetite for dinner \u2013 lobster salad and champagne, to celebrate our togetherness, the beginning of our adventure, and the singular beauty of a July afternoon in Maine. \u00a0The sunset that first night was perfect. \u00a0We sat at the table for hours, talking, watching day turn to night,\u00a0marveling at the fact that we, who had found each other through, as Lauren says, “the power of the pen,” were\u00a0finally here, doing this thing we’d each\u00a0dreamed about almost forever.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_9630\"Early the next morning we were on our way further downeast, which is to say north on Route 1, the very route E.B. White himself used to travel from his desk at the New Yorker<\/em> to his beloved rural retreat. Seeing the landscape unfurl before us — the fields rolling down to the sea, the old white farmhouses hunkered down into the earth, the yards bedecked by country-fair-worthy zinnias and bright flags of drying laundry flapping in the wind — I could fully identify with White\u2019s irrepressible desire to flee their hot, dry rented rooms on the Upper East Side and relocate to the rambling old house with a barn attached that he and his wife Katharine had bought in Maine. It was 1938 when they left New York, a move EBW himself considered \u201cimpulsive and irresponsible.\u201d He and Katharine had enviable jobs at the country’s most esteemed\u00a0magazine\u00a0and, as White acknowledged \u201ceverything was going our way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even so, as he recalls in his introduction to One Man\u2019s Meat<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, the essays he wrote from Maine for Harper\u2019s<\/em>, \u201cI led my little family out of the city like a daft piper.\u201d<\/p>\n

A friend, upon hearing EBW was departing the city for country life, said, \u201cI trust that you will spare the reading public your little adventures in contentment.\u201d Fortunately, White paid little\u00a0heed to that advice. (Years later, however, he admitted he still heard the man\u2019s leering voice in his mind every time he sat down to write about \u201cany delights that I experience.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Of course, he had no way of knowing his greatest work lay ahead of him, or that it would be inspired by the farm, by his deepening love of nature, by his endless curiosity about spiders and rats and geese and pigs, and most of all by his insatiable pleasure in the world. But as an old man looking back and writing a new introduction to One Man’s Meat<\/em>, he had this to say:<\/p>\n

Once in everyone\u2019s life there is apt to be a period when he is fully awake, instead of half asleep. I think of those years in Maine as the time when this happened to me. Confronted by new challenges, surrounded by new acquaintances \u2013 including the characters in the barnyard, who were later to appear in Charlotte\u2019s Web<\/em> \u2013 I was suddenly seeing, feeling, and listening as a child sees, feels, and listens. It was one of those rare interludes that can never be repeated, a time of enchantment. I am fortunate indeed to have had the chance to get some of it down on paper.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"IMG_9843\"What a pleasure it was to pull this collection of wise, intimate essays from my own bookshelf a month or so ago, and to revisit my old friend on the page before setting out to meet his spirit at the farm where he lived out the best\u00a0of his writing days.<\/p>\n

On the road, Lauren and I listened (not for the first time, for either of us) to EBW reading\u00a0Charlotte\u2019s Web<\/em> aloud<\/strong><\/a>, perhaps the most perfect match-up of author\u2019s voice and material ever. No one could possibly render the contemptuous voice of Templeton the rat with such spot-on accuracy, or so beautifully recreate the dialogue between Wilbur and Charlotte, or offer up such an authentically self-righteous goose gabble as EBW himself. (I know every word of this book, and still it captivates me.) Meanwhile, the miles rolled by. For lunch we ate cheese and crackers and dried apricots in the car, eager to arrive at our destination.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_9522\"T<\/span>he GPS led us this way and that, through villages, past glimpses of marsh and sea, down one long winding road after another. And then, suddenly, there we were, climbing the back steps, knocking at the kitchen door, being welcomed by Bob and Mary, and ushered right into EBW\u2019s study to hear the story of how the large maps White had chosen decades ago for wallpaper had been hung, in his absence, upside down.<\/p>\n

It was a lot to take in: EBW\u2019s office, full now of its current owner\u2019s books and possessions; across the hall, Katharine\u2019s sunnier study, updated but still clearly a space for getting things done; up the steep stairs past original 1700s murals on the walls, to EBW\u2019s bedroom with it\u2019s view across the fields — and, coiled like a sleeping snake in the small closet, the old rope ladder he kept at hand just in case a house fire ever required him to navigate an emergency exit through a window.<\/p>\n

\"unspecified-4\"F<\/span>rom the house and its layers of history, we proceeded out through the “summer kitchen” and into the barn itself. It was tempting to stand there in the dim silence for a while, matching what we saw before us to the description we\u2019d heard EBW read just moments before we arrived:<\/p>\n

The barn was very large. It was very old. It smelled of hay and it smelled of manure. It smelled of the perspiration of tired horses and the wonderful sweet breath of patient cows. It often had a sort of peaceful smell\u2014as though nothing bad could happen ever again in the world.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The cows and horses are long gone, of course. And yet, as White himself had once observed about the place, \u201cCertain things have not changed.\u201d There were the farm tools, hanging neatly on their hooks.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_9493\"Tacked to the wall, a yellowed paper inscribed with a family\u2019s most-used phone numbers, with Henry the hired man\u2019s four essential digits at the top of the list. (Henry stayed on, we were told, for many years after EBW and Katharine were gone, caring for the house and the gardens the way he always had when they were alive, until he, too, departed this earth.) There was the trap door that opened up to the manure pile on the lower level, where Wilbur passed his eventful days.<\/p>\n

And best of all, perhaps, there was the old, sturdy, thrilling rope swing, the very swing that was much loved and much used by EBW himself, and which he memorialized for all time with his description of the swing in Zuckerman\u2019s barn:<\/p>\n

You straddled the knot, so that it acted as a seat. Then you got up all your nerve, took a deep breath, and jumped. For a second you seemed to be falling to the barn floor far below, but then suddenly the rope would begin to catch you, and you would sail through the barn door going a mile a minute, with the wind whistling in your eyes and ears and hair. Then you would zoom upward into the sky, and look up at the clouds, and the rope would twist and. . . \u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Could we take a ride?<\/p>\n

\"Unknown-2\"Indeed we could.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_9535\"A shady lane\u00a0led past the garden, alongside the pond, and down through the trees to Allen Cove and EBW’s hallowed writing cottage at the water\u2019s edge. The door was open, as if someone was expecting us.<\/p>\n

\"unspecified-5\"It was here, in a plain wooden cupboard hung on the wall, that EBW stored his works in progress.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_9516\"It was here, by a window lifted open to the sea, that he sat alone with his typewriter. And it was here that photographer Jill Krementz captured him at his craft on a summer day in 1976 \u2013 perhaps the most iconic, most romantic, best-loved portrait of a working writer ever taken.<\/p>\n

\"unspecified-2\"At the end of the day, Mary told us, Henry would appear at the door to carry EBW\u2019s heavy gray Underwood\u00a0back up to the house.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy not just leave it down at the cabin?\u201d a friend once asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause,\u201d the hired man patiently replied, \u201cthen he would have to have two.\u201d<\/p>\n

L<\/span>auren and I lingered for a long time at the cabin. We sat on the hard wooden bench and gazed out the window at EBW\u2019s beloved view of water and sky and shore. We imagined what it might be like to live in the serene old house and to work in this simple, sacred cottage by the sea. We listened for echoes and watched the dust motes dance in the air. And we imagined EBW here \u2013 half farmer, half literary gent, as he called himself — breathing eternal life into a pig who wanted to live and the\u00a0spider determined to save him.<\/p>\n

It was surprisingly easy, in this remote, unchanged spot, to conjure the spirit of a writer who passed away over thirty years ago. I remembered exactly where I was when I heard the news of EBW\u2019s death: riding the M bus on an autumn morning from my own overheated, too-small New York apartment to my job as an editor in midtown Manhattan. I saw the\u00a0front-page notice\u00a0in the New York Times and felt as if I\u2019d lost both a mentor and a friend.<\/p>\n

\"unspecified-6\"And now, thanks to\u00a0countless twists and turns of fate, here I was all these decades later, sitting at his desk. Here I was, looking out his window to the sea, the sound of his voice reading aloud still fresh in my ears. Here I was, having long since left the city for the country myself, having married and raised sons and written books and buried dogs and lost loved ones. Here I was, having learned and survived my own hard, sad lessons about the limits of friendship. And having found, just as Wilbur does, that a grieving heart recovers and that this blessed, beautiful life goes on — a life full of sea breezes and sunrises and sunsets, wonderful books and unexpected adventures, and a beloved daughter-by-choice with whom to share it all.<\/p>\n

\"unspecified-9\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Have you ever wondered by what mysterious alchemy a whim becomes a wish, and a wish a reality? I\u2019m pretty sure it requires some combination of love and pure intention to transform an idle fantasy into an actual event. Oftentimes, a spirit of adventure is necessary, too. Oh, and a willingness to envision \u2013 even […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15183,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,29,14,49,15],"tags":[116,158,277],"class_list":{"0":"post-14509","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"category-friendship","9":"category-soul-work","10":"category-writing","11":"category-writing-and-reading","12":"tag-charlottes-web","13":"tag-e-b-white","14":"tag-maine","15":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/600x600.png?fit=600%2C600","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14509\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/katrinakenison.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}