Published: June 19, 2008 01:20 pm         

In for the long haul ...

Jim Atwell

You know the truism: You really can’t lay claim to your own house till you’ve owned it at least a half century.

That’s how it is in the country — not just around here, but in any rural area. If you’ve only owned a place for 20 or thirty years, others will still call it by the former owners’ name.

I do it myself. If I’m trying to explain where Anne and I live, I can joke and say we’re at the dead end of Cemetery Road. But if I want to clinch the matter, I have only to say, “We’re in Stanley Stucin’s place.”

“Oh, sure,” people will say. “Nice people, Stan and Frances.”

I’m sure they were. Frances, we’re told, was a warm, energetic woman who raised chickens and a big garden, and pretty much kept up the place herself.

Stan evidently lived life at a more measured pace. About my present age when I met him, he was a lonely widower anxious to get out from under “Stone Mill Acres” and carry on with the rest of his years. These, it turned out, were sadly few. Anyway, if Anne and I manage to hang on here for a few more decades, the eventual new owners will get more than house, deed, and Anne’s richly composted garden plot. They’ll get the need to explain that they’re living in “the old Atwell place.” I like that.

Meanwhile, we two are making a move to establish a permanent place in Fly Creek. We’re planting our flag, as it were, by buying a plot in the graveyard that’s in sight from our driveway. That seems apt, too.

Judy Cook, superintendent of The Fly Creek Valley Cemetery, is searching the maps for us, looking for a vacant single plot up in the old section, beneath the big evergreens and hemlocks. (We both plan to be cremated, so a single plot will do just fine.)

“I’ll turn up a nice one,” said Judy, “dry, and without a lot of roots.” For no rational reason, I like the idea of “dry,” but a root-free plot seems more of an advantage to the hole-digger. Maybe that’s what Judy was thinking, too.

I first explored that sprawling old cemetery in 1977, just after my late first wife Gwen and I struck a deal with old Stanley for his house. One autumn morning I was wandering around far back among the graves when, emerging from the mists, appeared a big granite stone inscribed ATWELL. I looked closer and saw similar inscriptions. A whole passel of Atwells lay resting there. I went back to the house and told Gwen we’d picked the right place to buy. We were expected.

I asked Judy Cook to look for a plot at least a little distance from those Atwells to avoid confusing any future genealogists.

A Maryland Atwell, I’m separated from the local distant kin by at least six generations. I found that out with Mabel Atwell, who taught a couple of Cooperstown generations herself, drilling in the old subject complements and subjunctive clauses. (Mabel, bless her, is part of that passel herself now.) We researched it together in census rosters. It was the redoubtable Mabel who made the definitive judgment. She clapped shut the book of rosters, planted her fist on it, and declared me a shirttail cousin to her late husband. And that was that.

If Judy can swing it, I wouldn’t mind a plot near one of Fly Creek’s Civil War casualties, since a couple of them actually died in my native state.

A tall obilisque just above the winter vault records a young man killed at Sharpsburg. Another has a Fly Creeker dying right four miles from my own home. In an exchange of ill prisoners, he’d been brought by steamboat up the Chesapeake to recover at Annapolis before being shipped north to home. But he worsened and died. In my boyhood, that place was still called “Camp Parole.” The most moving Civil War markers, though, are on the graves of two brothers, killed in battle within a year of each other.

Side by side, the stones can bring tears almost a century and a half later, for their carvings must have been chosen by a desolate father. On the earlier stone, a hand extends down, holding the handle of a hook. From the hook dangles a single link, for a second link had broken free from the first and is falling away.

On the later stone, the second link has also broken free; the hook hangs empty. The second link has fallen to the earth. It lies rejoined to the first.

I hope our old house stands for another 200 years. I hope eight or nine more human generations shelter under its sturdy roof.

Lots more, I hope, will feel pride of ownership, though, like us, they’ll really only have a short-term lease. But meanwhile, Anne and I have made plans to stay in Fly Creek, just up the road, under those handsome tall trees.

This hamlet is home and always will be.

Find out about Jim Atwell’s book, “From Fly Creek — Celebrating Life in Leatherstocking Country” at www. JimAtwell.com.