Horsekeeping Read Online Free PDF Page A

a house this way or that, mis-aligning the timber structure, cracking walls, bending floors and otherwise wreaking havoc from roof to attic. Not to mention the dead people I’ve heard were sometimes buried in basements back in the day, residents of our distinguished homestead I would not care to upset. A wished for ghost in theory beats one in practice. Despite the heroic gutters, some water and much else still manages to intrude because an old house is porous, perforated like lace. This has its advantages, I persuade myself, in terms of healthier indoor air. When the price of fuel oil soared in the seventies, people built shelters so tight that they poisoned themselves with the gasses emitted by mundane items like carpet, upholstery, Windex and hairspray, not to mention natural toxins like radon.
    But impenetrability is not our problem. Water, mud, cold air in winter, hot air in summer, mice, shrews, bats, chipmunks, snakes, squirrels, frogs, mega-spiders and insects of every variety—creeping and airborne, a large noisy toad or two, and only Noah knows what else, regularly invade our space through attic, uninsulated walls, one-hundred-year old windows in two-hundred-year-old casements and of course, the crocheted stone walls of the basement. My supposedly sturdy, two-hundred-year-old, time-tested dwelling all of a sudden seems a rickety house of cards with a life of its own as regards weather and creatures. I don’t begrudge the
animal kingdom its bit of shelter, and mainly I let it be. I try to accept the bats as my friends: one tiny Chiropteran can devour six hundred bugs an evening while flying above my yard, so even when they graze the split ends on the top of my head when diving single file out of the eaves like machine gun pellets shot from a WWII Spitfire, I simply duck. I know better than to get my hopes up for a bug-free picnic the next day, but I imagine five mosquito bites instead of ten on each leg of my two children.
    Other visitors get to me when I am cold and huddled in my high-off-the-floor creepy-crawler fortified bed (I’m in denial that anything would dare crawl up the four bedposts, despite their carved footholds). Outside, the coyotes howl it up while tearing the flesh from the bones of the neighbor’s sheep, chasing away sweet dreams. The nocturnal flying squirrels perform their housekeeping at 2:00 a.m. in the attic recesses overhead. At 3:00 a.m. I lie awake imagining the elaborate condo complex they construct. As I wait for their rustling to quiet and envy my husband’s soft snoring, my blood pressures as I plot vigilante tactics that rival Bill Murray’s against the gopher. Furry, cute and innocent my ass: not in the wee hours they’re not. I see red-rat eyes and sharp, salivating teeth. Poison? Metal traps? Death cages? Rifle? I picture myself grease-painted, my hips hoisting a sagging belt studded with Raid cans: bring it on fur ball—I’ve got camo and ammo .
    But to complain is churlish. This old house is lovely with wainscoted and plastered walls and wide-board floors cut from pine trees that were already ancient when our house was long ago hand-hewn with axes, square nails and muscle. Burnished for years by mops and socks, these floors appear marbleized in places. Built for a Mr. Averill around 1801, the house boasts two-stories and higher ceilings than most and was periodically added onto and tastefully modernized since. At one low point, perhaps a century ago, it served as the police barracks. We know one of the “boys,” now my age, whose parents lived in our house for forty-five years, until the early nineties. Each time I run into John in the village
coffee shop or pharmacy I am treated to another anecdote of his siblings’ high jinx. I learned how the kids tiptoed around the squeaky floorboard outside his parent’s bedroom door on their midnight escapades. Now I smile when I slip in to give my sleeping son yet another good-night