The other day I came this way and it was downright chilly. I kicked a stone that had a bit of color to it and discovered it was a shard of pottery. 1830’s blue and white transfer ware from England, my favorite. Perhaps a piece of a tea set? Something that will explain the hauntings on this property? Even the forest here on the farm seems possessed of its own spirits, each hollow, each crest, each glade has its feel. As you walk into them it’s as if you’re donning a different coat of emotion. Some areas are unfriendly, some feel sparkly with light, and some you rush through without even knowing why. I always wanted to find arrow heads, traces of whoever feels like they’re watching me right now. Here you always feel watched. I’m getting used to being uneasy. I sigh and hurry behind my dog who is vanishing. My footsteps are loud. Winter will be arriving soon, you can smell it, and anyone with any sense has long since stacked up chords of firewood. In fact there is some burning today . . . Its scent moves through the woods like an invisible snake and turns my head northward. I put down my shovel for a moment to think. No neighbors that way. . . Smoke is delicious in the cold air. It has its own story. Some smoke smells hot, black, while other smoke smells wet and white with a lot of water in it. This one is hot and charry. Sharp in your nasal passage. But the scent of fire doesn’t interest my dog who has his nose deep into the truffly smells of the ground. It’s still exhaling warmth of summer; I feel heat through my leather soles. I whistle quietly. The dog returns to look at me with a question in his eyes. I pick up my shovel and we climb up the hill on a narrow trail. Walking through deep beds of leaves is like wading in the smell of wine corks to the sound of crumpling paper, a true sensory perdition. It works its magic on me as well as my canine friend. I remember spring and summer now like old friends--think of flower beds not weeded, recall a July hail storm, and then remember a special rose that did particularly well, pink and large with almost buttery petals. The dog is waiting for me up ahead. He is standing just where I marked the spot. I join him and begin to dig. Right away I feel the light soil pushing back against the shovel blade, a bendy tree root. Moving over I step on the shovel and it plunges in--things snap underground. Turning over what is there I then squat, poking my finger in bits of color. It looks like a garbage dump…trash from a hundred years ago. Maybe older. An old medicine bottle surfaces after more digging. I pocket it and look around feeling acutely aware of someone nearby. I’ve had dreams about this place. My dog is lying down, watching an ant. There is a snap of a twig and we both start, looking off in the same direction. But there is nothing here. Not that’s visible anyway. Several hundred years ago this was an Indian encampment. I knew that even before the ancient maps on the internet confirmed my suspicions. This land where my farm stands is soaked in blood for when the town of Bath was called Long Reach, it is written that Indians came and massacred every living person here. Now, just on the outskirts of modern Bath, I stand on the highest spot, and the narrowest portage point between the Kennebec River and Merrymeeting Bay. The highest, and driest spot for encampments. It’s as if I knew in my unconscious that this was sacred ground. Every night for the last ten years I’ve beem here, it seems an entire tribe of Indians is standing on this very crest, watching from the darkness as I go about my final evening check of the horses. It’s like a hundred eyes are on you and you are doing everything in your power not to turn to look. Yes, I sound crazy. You would feel the same thing though, here in my shoes after dark. What a lonely place for a farm! Some hundred years after the massacre, in 1796, a white man chose to build a gothic stone house that was much like a fort, granite blocks a foot thick, with vistas both east and west, in this deserted area. What was he thinking? The stone house still sits on one hill, and there is a ravine immediately below it rising up to where I stand now. You can throw a stone from where the Indian settlement was and break a window in my strange stone house. At twilight I’m back in my lighted kitchen, staring from the window across to the hill as it seeps into darkness. There was a cottage there at one time, there were white people farming the area for the last two hundred years, and yet with all the layers in the soil, layers of rubble and trash, layers of buried people and emotions, hopes and tragedies, I am very conscious that we are here rebuilding Rome. Rebuilding and dying, and doing it over and over, century after century, forgetting the wisdom of the ages only to relearn it through battle and suffering each time. It seems so futile. Physical bodies crumble away and mix into the leafy detritus that falls thru my fingers along with the pottery shards . . . but nothing anyone says will make me ever believe that that’s it. Walking through this house and forest I am certainly not alone. A gallery of eyes is following me, judging all the time. I will have to tell you about it. But you know, I came here not believing in anything. I was just like you. . . If you enjoy these daily postings from our haunted horse rescue, please click on the author name above, then LIKE the page. Thank you!
Posted on: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 01:04:35 +0000
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