Dear Diary: April 30, 2008

From my journal nearly one year ago:

Chris and I sent Baker's pictures to some people. It makes me so sad to realize that those are the only pictures we'll ever get to send our family and friends. No Christmas cards, no school pictures. He'll always be a baby.

Thank goodness for the pictures that the hospital staff urged us to take. I wish we had a thousand more. A friend who is a professional photographer contacted me shortly after Baker died and shared that she is a volunteer for Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep. She offered to retouch the pictures and did an amazing job sharpening up the close-up of his foot that was originally so very blurry. Chris thinks that Baker would have been a barefoot water skier given the size of his tootsies.

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Some random thoughts to finish out the month of April:

I spotted this obituary for a baby named Lizzie Marie Horner and loved the words: She was also loved by many aunts, uncles and cousins. Lizzie enjoyed talking to her family and friends through mama’s belly, and loved to kick daddy in the mornings. She will be forever loved and missed.

We didn't put a printed obituary in the newspaper. At the time, it was too much to bear along with the other details of Baker's burial and memorial service. If we had, I would have liked to say something similar.

The most emailed Boston Globe article on Wednesday (until swine flu took the top spot) was
Bereaved fathers find healing in friendship.

The forsythia wreath we placed on the door of Lazy Cat Farm on Baker's first birthday, April 3rd:















Hyacinths from Baker's funeral arrangements blooming in our garden:

Dear Diary: April 26, 2008

From my journal one year ago today:

This morning, I discovered the birthday cake I made to celebrate Baker. Mom had put the two halves in the freezer. I baked it on April 2nd while in labor. He was alive and kicking then. I threw it in the trash and cried.

I miss my baby. I hope that he is happy in heaven. Our minister says that there is no suffering where he is. I hope that Baker knows that he is loved and that we miss him. I hope that his baby spirit will stay with me and help me through this.

He was so active and alive inside me. I wondered for so long what he would look like. When I finally saw him with my eyes, he was dead. So still and lifeless. It was so wrong. My heart is broken. As C. told me yesterday, this is the worst thing that could happen.

I briefly thought about attempting the same chocolate birthday cake for what should have been Baker's first birthday on April 3 of this year. Then I decided to do cupcakes from a box, and even that felt like too much to expect of myself. Maybe some future year, but not this year. So on his birthday, when we stopped at the grocery store to pick up a few things before making the trip up to Lazy Cat Farm and I spotted the single blue or pink birthday cupcakes, I knew I had found the perfect solution. Later that night in the dark, Chris and I lit the single candle that came with Baker's blue and white-iced cupcake and whispered a tearful rendition of "Happy Birthday" to our sweet boy. Chris read Baker's favorite book, The Pokey Little Puppy, to our two boys, and we were both mercifully asleep by 11:31 pm, the time that Baker was born without breath.

Patience

I suppose now I can check "re-roof a house during a Vermont winter" off of my life list of dumb ideas accomplished. After waiting for 8 weeks for our roofer to have the right combination of weather and healthy, willing crew, I was pleasantly surprised this weekend to find the house with its first new roof in more than 45 years. If you look closely, you'll see our man Vern to the left of the chimney.

This is the time of year to see the land - snowshoes and a light jacket - elevated above the underbrush, and equipped with crampons to navigate the steep terrain, it is arguably easier to hike around now than it is in the summer.

The mud is spectacular. The decomposing road almost convinced me that spring is upon us - but I know better than that - we predicted April 23rd at 11:35AM for the Brookfield Ice Out competition - a raffle to see who can guess the closest day, hour, and minute to when a concrete block falls through the ice on Sunset Lake. Open areas are almost bare, but there is a good 2 feet of snow in places in the woods.

Restoration

Dalene and I met in graduate school in Vermont, both studying natural resources. One of the big topics of discussion and debate among colleagues related to the concept of ecological restoration and land management. When resource managers "restore" a site, what are they restoring it to? Do you design the restoration simply to improve ecosystem function, or do you pick a moment in time - a snapshot of the past - to restore to. In Vermont, restoration might mean reclaiming pasture from overgrown forest - cutting back to the stonewalls that once marked boundaries and loosely kept sheep and livestock penned in. Restoration might mean creating age and species diversity in a forest to begin to approximate the healthy, uneven-aged forest of the area. If one really wanted to push it, restoration might bring us back 14,000 years to a glacially-scoured landscape being repopulated by species following warming temperatures and chasing the ice back to the poles. Restoration is both scientific and arbitrary at the same time.

Like resource managers, historic preservationists must define restoration. Every layer of wallpaper, every addition, every moved window, kitchen improvement, and floor finish is part of the historic fabric of the structure. The 1790 12 over 12 windows and the 1960's wallpaper are all a part of the house's history. What do we keep? What do we trash? If we were truly restoring the farm to 1790, I'd have to build an outhouse. The chimney mass would have to be rebuilt and the little hearth upstairs, long gone, that the children used to stay warm by, would have to be recreated.

The truth is, our restored landscape is going to be part wilderness, part 1850's sheep pasture, and part 2009 retreat. The restored house will have indoor plumbing, a modern refrigerator, 200 year old hardware and flooring, hand blown windows, and with luck, high speed internet. The landscape - human and natural - cannot be restored to a specific time - it cannot help but reveal the good, the bad, and the ugly of its history.

Like the land and the house, our healing, our grieving, has to be designed to embrace and incorporate our history. We cannot roll back the clock, pick a moment in time, and restore ourselves to when we were naive enough to take our son's safe arrival for granted. We wouldn't want to go back for too long to the painful, shocking, unreality of the days immediately after Baker died. But we need some of that to make it real - like keeping a hideous scrap of wallpaper in the back of your cabinets where you can see it. Our personal restoration then becomes a melange of our individual pasts, our early carefree days as a couple, the excitement and hope that we had as we waited for our sweet Baker to arrive, the unspeakable suffering that we have endured having lost him, the bond between us that has been cemented, and Baker's little brother that is on his way. That is our landscape history. That is the fabric of our collective building. It is our story, and it is the way that we incorporate our dear baby into our lives.

Someone asked me who the Lazy Cat is

Here he is in the fur and flesh. He loves naps, laps, and nose scratches. Hemingway taught me how to properly relax during my pregnancy with Baker. Little does he know that someday soon he will earn his kitty vittles hunting mice at the farm.

Underway!

Giving up secrets

At long last the roofers and carpenters have begun their work, and just in time, too as temperatures have been hovering in the 20s during the day and dropping to the way cold at night.

We think the house was built in 1800, but that’s just a guess. We haven’t completed deed research or definitively dated the structure. We know that it is certainly early 1800’s, but that’s about it.

It was a pleasant surprise this morning when I talked to our carpenter, a local guy who has restored most of the antique homes in Pond Village. He knows old. He told me today that the frame looks “real old.”

He thinks that the house was built in two pieces. We know that there used to be a shed addition that had a two bay garage and probably a woodshed. There certainly were other structures at other times. The barn foundation remains from a time when a small dairy herd roamed our field, back before the fields became forest again. Evidence suggests that part of the house burned at some point, and was rebuilt.

The current best guess is that the oldest part of the house is an 18th Century frame – I hope that it’s pre-Revolution, but only time will tell.

Leaf Peeping at the Farm

Custom Grief

200 or so years ago, the craftsman who built our house selected strong timbers from this rugged land, felled the trees, and worked them with an adze – an axe-like tool perfectly suited to this task. This craftsman worked at a time when so-called scribe rule framing was the norm. The frame was completely hand built – and each joint is a custom work of art.

The term scribe rule refers to the precisely fit joints – although every corner post and rafter perform basically the same function, they were shaped by hand and “scribed” to fit in a certain place. “Marriage marks” helped the carpenters reassemble frame – they are essentially numbered to be precisely refit. Our house has those marks – most visible in the rafters in the attic.

This type of framing dates the house pretty well – scribe rule was gone in VT by about 1810, replaced by “square rule” – the frame parts had greater uniformity and interchangeable parts which made construction easier and faster, and compared with our modern milled lumber and balloon frames, was still highly custom.

I think about our grieving process like our scribe ruled house – it’s not mass-produced, but rather it is “Custom Grief.”

Our little one of a kind person has been lost. In the same way that he is a one-off, artisan made, unique boy, we cannot get by with production line off the shelf grieving. Like the frame of our house, we have to carefully fit our grief, and the memory of our boy, into our lives. We try to fit the pieces together precisely, hewing the joints out of the large, heavy, irregular timbers of our pain and creating something strong, square and true to withstand the winter of our loss.

Moo Cows

4” of snow at the Farm. It’s not even November. Mother Nature firing a shot across the bow. Time is marching on.

Cold nights, falling leaves, and SNOW tell us that time is marching on while Baker is forever a newborn in our minds and hearts. It’s soothing on the one hand to know that the earth still turns on its axis and we’re revolving around the sun, moving into shadow for a few months, but on the other hand it’s a cruel reminder of the life that Baker doesn’t get to live – the ghost costumes he won’t wear, the mittens he won’t lose, the snowballs he won’t throw.

He’s forever a baby, our baby, stuck in the suspended animation of his interrupted life.

We’ll put the Farm into suspended animation for a while – draining the pipes and making the old place weathertight against winter storms.

It’s a place apart from our everyday lives where we can think of Baker unencumbered by routine and obligation. At home we think, “Would Baker’s room be warm enough?” “How would it feel to be working part time?”

At the Farm I can think about him at another level– the spiritual level, the universal level. I see my boy in the sunrise and hear him in the rushing brook; I feel him in the wind that rushes up the valley and sweeps under the door, and I laugh at the Holsteins at our neighbor’s farm and think about Baker “mooing” at his cow friends.

Ripple

There is a road,
no simple highway,
between the dawn and the dark of night,
and if you go,
no one may follow,
that path is for your steps alone.

I included this Grateful Dead lyric in my high school yearbook, and at the time, it was just a favorite line from a favorite song and I thought I was being “deep” by quoting it. In the pre-dawn hours Saturday, as I was driving north on Interstate 89 to pick up a brush mower, the song came on the radio and practically pushed me off the road.

I had been mesmerized by the fog rising from the cold valleys, and the intense magenta sunrise, and the steel blue silhouettes of the Green Mountains – the little sliver of Camel’s Hump that sticks up, and the panorama up through Mt. Mansfield – familiar strangers from better times in my past.

I hadn’t heard the song in years, and it hit me between the eyes – “this is your life!” “This is the new reality.” The old me has been replaced by the new me, the me without the boy, or with the memory of the boy, his spirit in the sunrise and in the morning fog.

We don’t choose our road, and we don’t always get to pick our traveling companions, and some of them get lost on the way, but we keep moving along. I woke up Saturday night after the storm had passed – windows leaking, branches falling on the roof, wind howling – and the stars had come out. I could see the silver maple out the window pure black against the bright starlit sky, and I thought of the Universe and of Baker in heaven and was sad because he should be nearer to us than that. We like to call him our spirit baby, and hope that his baby spirit is with us on our road – if the path is for my steps alone, I hope that’s because Baker is in my arms.

Happy .5

Today the boy would by 6 months old, a pudgy little pumpkin. I'd be home with him, probably taking him on a long walk in his stroller, introducing him to blowing leaves and to the first chilly air of the season. Might almost be time to break out Aunt Steph's chunky knit hat to keep the ol' noggin warm.

Instead, we find ourselves with empty arms, looking for something to love, and setting our hands to work on another stage of our lives. We bought the farm (!) not to fill Baker's unfillable void, but rather as a place of refuge and renewal where through the process of restoring the old house and bringing the land back to productive use, we may create a space to remember our boy, and welcome family and friends to gather.

There is something timeless about the work that lies ahead of us. We are preparing the house for winter, in much the same way that the original inhabitants did 208 years ago. We'll mow the fields once more, and we'll try to seal out the cold and wind as best we can. A new roof will go on, and will offer protection to a frame that was cut from timber on this very land, and has survived the decades and generations, settled, skewed, and weathered, but strong.

I imagine those people who came before us and lived in this tiny house, the babies that were born here, those that didn't make it, and whose memory is erased to history. Like them, we have no choice but to find a way forward, grieving our lost boy, carrying him with us, and fixing the roof.

Happy .5, Baker.

It's official

Chris and I are now proud owners of Lazy Cat Farm, bought in honor of our beloved baby.