After Reading West Norwalk Rocks and Rills

Every spot on the walking tour was a place where I felt joy, or sadness, where either I draped my arms around my horse’s neck and wept into her mane and wished time would move faster and I could be gone from there forever, or I stretched backward so I lay my head on her rump and pretended and I was a circus acrobat could I please god stay a child forever. The places that are now “scenic” ponds and “sites of interest” were then streams that trickled next to a gravel drive leading to the most elegant, lovely farmhouse on earth, with a brick-floored kitchen and a deacon’s bench in the mud room, kennels full of English setters and kitchen garden growing vegetables and herbs. The pool on the hillcrest where the house sat overlooked acres of fenced pastures. Now “beautiful homes” reside in these pastures, all landscaped and “Protected by ATF Security” signs festooning the front walks. Princes Pine Road didn’t open to Old Rock Way in my time. It dead ended at the boundary of a huge estate that visitors entered on Old Rock Way through two stone pillars and woods so thick that we couldn’t see the house where, every summer, a huge party was held with an orchestra and guests half in the bag moved all night to dance tunes outdoors and it went on so late that I fell asleep in my bed on Fillow Street listening to the endless melodies of the forties. There was a long flat stretch along Old Rock between the road and the stone wall containing the estate where the rich danced at night. We’d pull up our leather reins and crouch over the horses’ manes and race down the stretch, so fast, throwing up clods of spring grass or mountains of leaves in the fall. Every thing smelled so good, I remember as well today as I did those days when I was only 12 and odors normally went unnoticed unless they were bad. On the backs of our horses we smelled rain, and we smelled oncoming rain, and pine trees, and flowering shrubbery, and everything good that was still there in 1962—unlandscaped, assembled by nature before so many people wanted to buy what we didn’t know we had until it didn’t exist anymore. My parents’ friends lived on Princes Pine. Some of them like Sam and Anne Parsons were Village Creek types who couldn’t quite afford the water views, but compensated by building (all houses were identical) rectangular glass walled boxes with three bedrooms kitchen and living room completely surrounded by woods…no trees, pea-gravel driveways…and heated floors. No furnace or ductwork or embellishments of any kind. Mom claimed the Parsons bought oil paintings of new Englanders at a sale in Darien and falsely claimed they were “ancestors”. Impossible because Mr. and Mrs. Parsons were from Brooklyn and ended up killed on the East River Drive coming home one night plastered from a party in Manhatten. Terri lived there and once she kept her pony tied in the woods for days and the neighbors didn’t know. The woods of those houses backed to the Five Mile River and we’d stand in the water in the winter, hoping to catch a cold and stay home sick from school. Once Terry’s boyfriend Kenny Campbell hid in the woods outside her bedroom window and smoked cigarettes while he waited for her to undress for bed. She never pulled her shade. She saw him that night, smoking, and let him watch her. I babysat for another family on that road, there house was larger and a redwood deck overlooked a little falls of the Alewives river. In the summer evenings that deck was shady and cool and the father and I used to sit out there on patio chairs to wait while the mother got dressed to go out. He always offered me a martini. I was 15. On Weed Street were three places that aren’t even mentioned in “West Norwalk Rocks and Rills”. The Ferndale Monastery and the convent and Faith Baldwin’s house. The cemetery for the old monks backed up to the stables at the Jennings’ house and 75 acres, now Little Fox Lane mini-estates apparently. Hundreds of acres and a lake and endless fields and young seminarians who loved my mom and dad and invited them to hear the Gregorian chants on Christmas eve. Two of them Ned and I forget the other one, used to ride sometimes. They were only 21. I didn’t understand why they were there. I heard it’s all condominiums now. There was a path through the woods the nuns used to carry the clean laundry back and forth to the priests. My sister hinted at odd things that went on. I had no idea what. Faith Baldwin’s place was named “Fable Farm”. She was a hugely popular writer for women’s magazines like McCalls magazine and Family Circle in the 1950s. I rode by her stone walls and her mailbox that said “Fable Farm” a thousand times and never saw her once. Every morning, however, I heard ring-neck pheasants who prowled through the remains of the orchard across from our place.