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The Neighbors – 376 Brush Hill Road – Part XI – The Neighbors

September 28, 2022

The Bachelors Our nearest neighbors, to the north, in a modern glass-fronted ranch house, were two men known to us as “the bachelors.” I have memories of one of the bachelors working with my father, occasionally, on projects that crossed the property line. Were they trying to eradicate poison ivy…or just raking leaves? Maybe both…at different…

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376 Brush Hill Road – Part VIII – Shenanigans

September 16, 2022

A big house, a big barn, and a big yard offer many opportunities for mischief—especially for two little girls, the youngest of six, who are only sixteen months apart. Thus Kathy and Karen seem to have caused my mother more gray hairs than all the rest of us combined (and let’s be honest, she was…

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376 Brush Hill Road – Part IV – The Third Floor

September 9, 2022

Servants. We children (appropriately agog) were told that the third floor was originally the domain of servants. Nobody knows how many. And that was why the bathroom at the top of the stairs was so different from the one on the second floor: claw foot tub, basic white sink, bead board wainscoting rather than ceramic…

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376 Brush Hill Road – Part III – The Cellar

September 8, 2022

To open the cellar door was to enter a very different world. The stairs, narrow, worn boards, unfinished and uneven, took you down to an open, mostly unfinished space. The house, on its foundation of giant field stones, was built into a slight slope, so the cellar was deep and dark toward the front, but…

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376 Brush Hill Road – Part II – First Impressions

September 7, 2022

I remember running through the house more than once during those weeks when the sale was being negotiated. Its spaciousness was mind-boggling. This was not just a house. It was “a mansion.” Both upstairs and down, the three rooms across the front of the house had windowed bays. The front hall was a full-size room…

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You CAN go home again!

July 17, 2019

Full disclosure: I haven’t read Thomas Wolfe’s famous novel though I have read about it. Unlike Wolfe, I have never written a Great American Novel. But I have, quite recently, gone home. Four years ago, Mr. Penfire and I sold our house in Massachusetts and moved to southern California to be near our children—and grandchildren….

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