22 November 2006 Flower of the Woods

Living in a young state where everything seems to have happened in the last 100 years, one can forget that other parts of civilization are much older. Even one's own history has much more depth. I was reminded of, no, immersed in, some of my family history during Thanksgiving week.

Paul and I spent ten days with my mom and step-father outside of Verona, NY, at the Joslyn Family farm. Ephraim Joslyn moved to this location in 1800 and built the house in 1816. As he sat astride a ridge pole, one of the carpenters called it the 'Flower of the Woods' because most of the lumber came from the woods surrounding it. My great-uncle Edward Joslyn purchased it from the Joslyn Estate in 1945 and spent the following 40 years renovating and restoring the house. Some of the land is still leased out to be farmed. A family cemetary sits at the end of the driveway on the Rock Road.

Edward Joslyn was my maternal grandmother's brother. Uncle Ed never married. He spent the last 15 years of his life at the farm. His other sister, Hazel, and a cranky springer spaniel named Christy lived with him much of that time. When Uncle Ed died in 2001, the farm passed to my mom and her siblings.

I've always been fascinated by the farmhouse. When I was very young, its restoration was still a work-in-progress but we had family picnics there. We usually got to walk through the house, visiting the upper attic with the spinnning wheels and the lower attic crammed with possessions left by various relatives. Uncle Ed and Aunt Hazel finally moved in when I was in college and I visited there a couple times of year. I never did spend a night there until after Uncle Ed died. With its antiques and long history, it's a place where ghosts seem possible -- women in long dresses baking apples pies, men just in from the field smoking pipes by the fireplace.