If Youre Going to Live in the Country | Page 2

in the road brought a pleasing prospect

into view, the horses could be certain of ten minutes for cropping
roadside grass. Most of all, no farmhouse nestling beneath wide-spread
maples or elms went without careful consideration of Father's constant
daydream, a home in the country.
These driving trips often included overnight stops with relatives living
in villages undisturbed by the screech and thunder of freight and way
trains, or with others living on picturesque old farms. Afterward there
was always lively conversation concerning the possibilities of Cousin
This or That's home as a country place. This reached fever heat after
visits to Great Aunt Laura who lived in a roomy old house painted
white with green blinds in a town bordering on Lake Champlain. A pair
of horse-chestnut trees flanked the walk to the front door,--a portal
unopened save for weddings, funerals, and the minister's yearly call.
From here could be seen the sweep of the main range of the Green
Mountains. The kitchen doorway afforded a view of Mount Marcy and
the Adirondacks never to be forgotten. It was the ancestral home with
all the proper attributes, horse barn, woodshed, tool houses, and a large
hay barn. Father's dream for forty years was to recapture it and settle
down to the cultivation of rustic essays instead of its unyielding clay
soil. However, he was first and last a newspaper man and his practical
side told him that Shoreham was too far from Broadway. So it
remained a dream.
His city-born and bred son inherited the insidious idea. Four years in a
country college augmented it and, as time went on, the rumble of trucks
and blare of neighboring radios turned a formerly quiet street on
Brooklyn Heights into a bedlam and brought matters to a head. Great
Aunt Laura's place was still too far away but explorers returning from
ventures into the far reaches of Westchester County, and western
Connecticut, had brought back tales of pleasantly isolated farmhouses
with rolling acres well dotted with trees and stone fences. Here, thanks
to the automobile and commuting trains, was the solution. A country
place near enough to the city, so that the owner could have his cake and
eat it, too.
After some months of searching and several wild goose chases, a

modest little place was found. The original plan was to live there just a
few weeks in the summer, possibly from June into September, but the
period stretched a bit each year. Now it is the year around. We are but
one of many families that have traded the noise and congestion of city
life for the quiet and isolation of the open country. Nor do all such
cling to the commuting fringe of the larger cities. A good proportion
have their country homes some hours' distant, and the city is only
visited at infrequent intervals.
Wherever his country place is located, however, there are certain
problems confronting the city dweller who takes to rural life. They are
the more baffling because they are not problems at all to his
country-bred neighbors. The latter assume that any adult with a grain of
common sense must know all about such trifles as rotten sills, damp
cellars, hornets that nest in the attic, frozen pipes in winter, and wells
that fail in dry seasons.
Of course, no one treatise can hope to serve as a guide for every
problem that comes with life in the open country. This book is no
compendium. It concerns itself only with the most obvious pitfalls that
lie ahead of one inured to well-serviced city life.

WHY LIVE IN THE COUNTRY?
[Illustration]

CHAPTER I
WHY LIVE IN THE COUNTRY?
The urge to live in the country besets most of us sooner or later. Spring
with grass vividly green, buds bursting and every pond a bedlam of the
shrill, rhythmic whistle of frogs, is the most dangerous season. Some
take a walk in the park. Others write for Strout's farm catalogues, read
them hungrily and are well. But there are the incurables. Their fever is

fed for months and years by the discomforts and amenities of city life.
Eventually they escape and contentedly become box numbers along
rural postal routes.
Why do city-bred people betake themselves to the country? The surface
reasons are as many as why they are Republicans or Democrats, but the
basic one is escape from congestion and confusion. For themselves or
their children their goal is the open country beyond the suburban fringe.
Here the children, like young colts, can be turned out to run and race,
kick up their heels and enjoy life, free of warnings to be quiet lest they
annoy the elderly couple in the apartment below or the nervous wreck
the other side of that suburban privet hedge.
The day