This is the story of the loss and reclamation of a house, the story of how one family scattered by a tragic fire reunites 30 years later to once again dwell together in a deep and poetic way. Visitants to the burned-out husk of the house that was once a home—the old Whittier House on Deer Hill—journey through recollections of times before the fire, inspired to build a new home and to re-establish a community around it as the extended family begins to return to the hill. This book is about Life-Together-in-Earth-and-Spirit: how it is found, how it can be lost, and how it may be reclaimed amidst and despite all of the things that can and do happen to us in the course of life. Ultimately, it is a text filled with ruminations on and explorations of the ways in which we dwell together humanely in the Earth. The stories, poetry, and essays herein, set in the imagined landscape of Ross County, Pennsylvania, form a conceptual, spiral labyrinth around the central concepts of “Heart” and “Hearth.” As Heart stands for the spiritual and existential “center” of the person, so “Hearth” symbolizes the “center” of the awakened community. These two concepts form the core of the unique life-philosophy illustrated in these pages. Readers of Montague Whitsel’s novel Ham-Farir: The Faring of Matthew Thorin Dier (2008) will recognize characters such as Daniel Westforth Whittier, Geoffrey C. Whittier, and Edward Whittier, portrayed here in other contexts. Characters quoted in The Fires of Yule (2001) and Wellsprings of the Deer (2002) may also be found here, living out the distinctive life-philosophy of Deer Hill. If you want to know more about Ross County, please visit: www.geocities.com/rosscountypa

Heart & Hearth

Poetic Explorations of Authentic Human Dwelling in Earth & SpiritBy Montague Whitsel

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2009 Montague Whitsel
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4389-1198-4

Contents

ChronologyTo the Reader (12 November 2006).............................................................(a)Prelude: Journeying to Rustic Hearths (1 July 1974)..........................................(1)Introduction: Ruins, Loss of Potential, and the Vision of Heart & Hearth.....................(22)I. A Haunted Touchstone......................................................................(35)A. Impressions of Place (13 October 1974)....................................................(39)B. November Chill (9 November 1975)..........................................................(49)C. A Whittier Ghost (17 July 1979)...........................................................(61)II. Pieces of the Past.......................................................................(67)A. FaeryFire (Elisabeth's Visions, 1782).....................................................(73)B. Tears (Jennifer's Lament, 1868)...........................................................(75)C. The Earth's Purchase (1850)...............................................................(78)D. The Root Cellar (1870)....................................................................(84)E. Down to the Creek (1879)..................................................................(87)F. Dreaming a Home For Christmas (1893)......................................................(91)G. The Crossing (Requiem for Evelyn, 1910)...................................................(99)H. Shutters (1920)...........................................................................(103)I. Canning the Fall (1924)...................................................................(107)J. The Shed (1925)...........................................................................(111)K. Children Playing (1930)...................................................................(115)L. Abandonment (1933)........................................................................(117)M. The Loss of Potential (1953)..............................................................(122)N. The Haunting of Lori Ann Grayson (1967)...................................................(127)O. Returning to the Past (1972)..............................................................(133)P. Empty Boxes (1978)........................................................................(143)III. Intimations of Whittier Hearth (159)A. The Four-Fold Remembrance (1 November 1979)...............................................(169)B. Ghost in the Attic (1905).................................................................(212)C. Apple Buttering (1907)....................................................................(218)D. Hazel Nutting (1915)......................................................................(228)E. Intuitions Through the Gray (1930)........................................................(231)F. The Presence of Yule (1933)...............................................................(240)G. Turning Toward Winter (1946)..............................................................(244)H. Walnut Tromping (1947)....................................................................(250)I. Shades of Autumn Leaves (1983)............................................................(255)Interlude-A Chronology of the Whittiers (21 March 1988)......................................(266)J. Nicholas Day Visitations (6 December 1990)................................................(296)K. Barn Haunting (16 September 1991).........................................................(313)L. The Nicholas Triptych (26 December 1993)..................................................(323)1. Left Panel: Inspirations Near the Hearth (13 December 1993)2. Center Panel: The Legend of Nicholas and the Elves [Text]2. Right Panel: In the Tines of the Night (14 December 1993; 12:30 AM)M. Walking in the Poetic Way (30 June 1994)..................................................(450)N. The Great Old Stag (12 December 1994).....................................................(473)O. Kickball at Four Willows (6 July 1995)....................................................(477)P. The Rendezvous (17 December 1995).........................................................(479)Q. The Ghost Hunters (21 July 1997)..........................................................(497)R. Homage to the Four Friends (23 September 1999)............................................(511)S. The Whittier Yule Calendar (13 December 1999).............................................(525)T. The Life-Philosophy of the Whittiers (20 December 2000)...................................(559)Postlude: Nemeton and Heath Adventures (23 December 2000)....................................(586)"Ode to the Starry Reach"-by Edward Whittier (24 December 2000)..............................(601)Appendix: Genealogy of the Whittiers since the Reunion.......................................(604)

Chapter One

Heart & Hearth Poetic Explorations of Authentic Human Dwelling in Earth & Spirit (Narratives, Prose and Verse from and about Deer Hill, 1974-2000) - Montague Whitsel

Prelude: Journeying to Rustic Hearths (1 July 1974)

"Ruins are places where the ghosts of our past go! A ruined house is the 'exo-skeleton' of some former site of human dwelling; a stage - now abandoned - where some association of mortals strove to become more fully human; hopefully in the most inspiring way possible for them. ... Come to the haunted places; for in and near them you may find elusive keys to your own potential for authentic dwelling in Earth & Spirit. ... Dwelling is a precarious thing, and is seldom done well!" (ii)

- Robert Werner A Tour of Empty Houses in Ross County [Pamphlet written for the Ross County Historical Society (1972)]

"Where are we going?"

"I want to show you something_ a place_ a house_ something that once meant a lot to me!"

"Once?"

"_Still does," Robert admitted summarily, the sound of his words trailing off as he forged ahead, leading his two friends - who were in an 'anticipatory' mood; feeling like they were close to the horizons of interesting revelations - off the over-grown Wickersfeld Railroad tracks - now abandoned for five years - and into a wasted edgefield.

There they stopped, bearing-taking, and Robert said, with a hint of suspense, "It's up there," pointing out along a line of trees bordering a farm field that was now no longer plowed and tilled-like so many other abandoned fields around Wickersfeld. "We should be able to get there and then back to town before dusk, so you won't be late, Peter."

"Good enough," the younger man said.

Traipsing through the grass and jumping across a stone-lined culvert, they reached an antique artifact of a road, now dirt and grass covered, and started up it. Together the three friends went, poetic in their desires, hugging the edge of the woods as they strode through the knee-high grass along what once had perhaps been some access to human dwelling or else a right-of-way around farm fields now lost to the shadows of progress.

The greening of high summer embraced them. The humidity of the day that was just now passing, still effervescent, kept them sweating subtly as they walked their way, following intuitions of dreams once manifest in physical form; albeit three decades before the clearing of the present. As they rounded the corner of a field, Tom Arland - one of Robert's literary friends - exalted, "We're going to Deer Hill_ aren't we?!"

"Yes_ we are."

"You've told us so much about it, Robert_ but, even in college, I never came out this way to see it!"

"Well, now you will," the Poet said with relish.

As they hiked on up the neglected road, gutted with rain furrows and showing few signs of recent human attention, the two younger men - dressed in flare-legged jeans and tennis shoes, carrying their mesh blue and black tank tee-shirts in their hands - began to notice that the trees they were now passing were much more mature than the ones down along the railroad tracks. Aged Oaks, Ash and a few Maples with younger Tulip trees mixed in among them formed the colonnaded border between the field and that well-remembered place-Deer Hill. All of the trees were in full leaf - as it was high summer - and there were June Bugs humming and various songbirds chirruping and calling, in the edgewoods near them. As it was already past 6:30 PM; the sun was now 'setting' over the top of Deer Hill, which loomed to the SW of where they were-pathing along the flank of the hill nearest town and 'civilization.'

"I've heard," Peter Houston - the new and youngest assistant professor of History at Wickersfeld College - said, "that Deer Hill is still owned by the Whittiers?"

"It is, I think," Robert answered. "_I'm rather out of touch with them. _It always used to be. _The touchstone of my past that I want to show you," he then admitted, suddenly and decisively stepping off the field track, down into some briars and bushes, looking for the way through, "is right across this marshy area-and then up through a patch of young growth trees."

"Lead on," Tom said, feeling an uncertain yet vivid suspense.

Maneuvering his way down a bank into an area where springs, no doubt, oozed out of the northern flank of Deer Hill, Robert cautioned his friends not to slip. "There's lots of skunk cabbage down here," he warned. Robert Werner, the guide on this hike, was a vigorous thirty-six years of age, a poet well-known in and beyond Ross County, and a respected local history enthusiast. He was wearing his high-topped brown hiking boots - despite the summer heat - black straight-leg jeans - boot cut - and an old home-made tee-short; tie-dyed in various faded colors. His longish brown curly hair hung down to his shoulders. He had a bear-claw on a braided black cord suspended from his neck, and was wearing cheap round-lensed workingman's glasses.

Tom and Peter followed the path their friend had forged down through the high grasses until they reached the swampy ground. Once together, the three of them went wading across the little marsh - being certain to miss the prodigious skunk cabbages - striving toward a far bank, up which the Poet quickly led them. Robert had made this pilgrimage only a half-dozen times in his adult life, returning to the touchstones of his past. Now, he was eager to show these two friends of his the site and source of his best memories.

"It's right through there," Robert said, pointing toward the shape of something looming beyond a stretch of unkempt Forsythia bushes and scraggly Crabapple trees, reaching with one hand to pull one and then his other friend up out of the swampy domain; an existential border-zone through which they had just passed.

"Whoa," Peter said, nearly slipping back down the bank as Robert hauled him up by the hand, "Wish I'd worn my hiking boots!"

"_I'll second that!" Tom lamented as he scaled the muddy bank.

"There used to be a stone spring here," Robert said, "to collect the waters coming out of the ground. But the structure was dismantled by some vandals, back in the early sixties. Now the water just accumulates_"

"Hey man, I know where we're going," Tom then confidently said.

"So do I!" Peter agreed.

"Follow me, then," Robert urged enthusiastically, turning and heading off to the SW.

Weaving between the Crabapple trees and Forsythia bushes; now like one who knew the pathless pilgrim's way by heart-Robert led his curious companions toward the source of so many of his dreams and stories. "We're almost there," he said as they entered a dense thicket of Thornapple bushes, thrown in by Nature - not intentionally planted - for good measure. There they had to slow their pace so as to keep from being scratched or even worse - pierced - by the long spine-like needles of the aging, twisted, apple trees that both Peter and Tom said looked like something out of a nightmare! "You come out here often?" Tom Arland asked, curious as always about his friend's habits.

"Every two or three years," Robert admitted. "My father keeps the place up somewhat; he sends people out to take care of the house, though he, himself, declared that he would never set foot in the place again."

"This is your 'childhood home,' then, isn't it?" Peter surmised.

"Yes. _Quickly, this way!" Robert urged, picking up the pace once again, having gotten through the thicket more or less unscathed.

A minute later, they had emerged from the scrub and brush, and were standing at the back of a lawn that was more or less in good order; recently mown though not weeded or kept up in any more meticulous way. The house - the object of their day's questing walk - stood before them, quiet and alone; one might say it was actually 'lonely' in its aspect. All of the paint had weathered off the house again, yet there were new gutters on it and it was apparent that a new roof had been put on sometime in the previous four or five years. From where they stood, they could see a 1st floor balcony (an enclosed back-porch area), at the corner of the house. A terrace surrounded the house, which was built in some late 19th century 'cottage' style, Tom surmised. It was a two storey structure with a high roof sporting two tall stone chimneys and no doubt enclosing a spacious attic.

About fifty feet from the house, the three of them stopped and stood for a moment, contemplating the house and its environs - all of the relics and remainders of home and human dwelling littering the scene - before anyone spoke.

"This was my family home," Robert Werner said, admitting the obvious, evidence of a subtle sadness tinting his enthusiasm at having brought Tom and Peter out to see it.

"'Werner House?'"

"Yes, that's what it's always been called; by our family name. My grandfather Edmund built the house_ in 1920."

"Cool, man," Peter exclaimed, moving off a few steps from his companions in order to view the back of the house more full-on. "And how long did you live here?"

"I was born here in '38, and we lived here 'til '59."

"You were_ twenty-one when you left?"

"I was in college already, actually_ I was at Springborough University, taking my BA in Literature, when my parents told me they were moving, finally."

At this, Tom and Robert moved over to where Peter had stationed himself. Robert then asked, "Care for the tour?"

"Sure!"

"Like wows-ville, man!"

From the back of the house, the two tall chimneys were in full view. As his friends surveyed them, Robert noted, "Dad's had them repointed a couple years ago," referring to them almost affectionately, Tom thought.

"Is that the back door?" Peter asked.

"It is_ it leads into the 'back hall' and from there into the kitchen_ or into the 'side hall' which will take you to the 'front hall.' I always liked the long hallways that connect up everything in the house. There are four main rooms on each floor, yet the lay-out isn't just a boring old square box affair; the rooms have real character_ as you'll see when we go in."

"You have the key?"

"Dad insists I keep one, 'just in case,' you know?"

"Will you inherit this house, when he_ you know_ 'passes on?'"

"Perhaps, we'll see. My mother's still alive, but my siblings_ as you know_ all died before we moved out of the house."

"I remember you telling us about that," Tom acknowledged, a tinge of melancholy changing the color of his voice.

As they walked along the west side of the house, Peter commented - seeing the back porch; seeming somehow 'haunted' in its aspect - "I'm so tempted to just walk up there and look in at the windows." This is what the three of them often did at old abandoned houses and other ruined structures that they either went out to see or else discovered accidentally on their many long weekend and evening hikes.

"I know what you mean_" Tom agreed, relishing having been brought to this palpable benchmark of the poet's past. "It's the best find we've made," beaming at Robert.

"Well first, I'd like to show you the front of the house, the old carriage house - where we kept our horses and buggies back in the forties - and then the bungalow; where my Aunt Vera and her husband Charles and their kids lived."

"Did they stay here after your parents moved out?"

"No_ they had gotten themselves a small apartment in town in the early 50's."

"Let's just see the house, first, if that's okay?"

"Sure_ that's fine."

As the three wanderers reached the front of Werner House, Peter noted to himself just how 'stately' the structure seemed, yet how small it really was; just a single family dwelling of a now antique fashion. Yet the trim and the shape of the roofs, the angle of the gables and the casements of the windows all said 'dignity' and 'character' to him.

"Shall we go in?" Robert suggested, no sense of nostalgia tainting his words.

"Yes," Tom and Peter affirmed almost in unison as Robert led them up onto the front porch.

Getting out his key, he inserted it in the front door lock which, when it turned, made a heavy metal sound, unlike that of the much more cheaply made locks on contemporary houses and apartments. Then, with a degree of familiarity that struck his friends as reassuring, Robert gave the big heavy doors a push, causing them to swing open on their old hinges, opening into the house. The double doors creaked, and Peter suddenly shivered, feeling Robert's old house to be like something out of an old ghost story; all emptied-out of human dwelling as it was!

"Well, here we are, in the front hall," the older man said, stepping into the place of his own childhood's most potent memories, long gone to seed. For just a moment, Robert felt that deep, searing sense of 'homelostness' that he'd often tried to exorcise - or else come to terms with - via all his poetry about the nature of dwelling and icons of home. Shaking himself slightly, he then pronounced the words: "Parlor to the right, library to the left. Straight ahead and to the right," leading the way down the wide hall, "is the dining room, and there," pointing down to their left, "is the longer 'hall' I mentioned. _I'll now take you around like a 'real estate agent,'" he quipped, somewhat wryly.

"There oughta be a law_" Tom retorted, sarcastic.

Robert laughed as he led his friends back the 'side hall,' a narrower one than the front hall, as it shared its space with the stairwells leading to upper floors and down to the cellar. At the end of it they came to a small, old-fashioned toilet on the left. The old claw-foot tub was still anchored in place, though - Peter could see - the artifact had a long, deep crack in its side. The old toilet had been removed from the room. On their right was the 'back hall.' "We're now at the back door, where you guys wanted to come up and look in at windows. _And here," Robert said, motioning to their right, "is the kitchen; the heart of the house."

"Cool, man! Look at that ancient stove!" Peter remarked, seeing before him a speckled blue-enameled, wood-burning stove with steel claw feet and chrome trim that remained as perhaps the last functional fixture from times when the house was still a home. Secretly he wanted to go out and gather some twigs and small branches and stoke up the heavy iron- framed stove. He longed, suddenly aesthetic, for a fire to be lit in the antique kitchen as dusk came on.

"I often think we should take this thing out of here_ before some thief gets it."

"Yeah, and like_ put it in a museum," Peter - ever the historian - exclaimed. "Looks to be in good shape, too."

"Like I said, dad has people he trusts come out here and work on the house. _You saw the new roof and gutters, of course. He's also had the hardwood floors cleaned and polished a couple of times and, in the winter, he has a man come out and light a fire in the hearths periodically - once a month, I think - so that the flues will stay clear of birds' nests and such. When windows get broken, he has them repaired, and he's about to have the outside walls scraped and given a fresh coat of paint, I think."

"Why doesn't he just rent it out?" Tom asked.

Robert didn't answer; which made Tom feel that he had struck a nerve of some kind.

"Where do your parents live now?" Peter asked to break the sudden tension.

"Over at Willow Commons."

"Oh yeah_ the senior apartments up by the Russian Orthodox Church."

"That's the place. It's decent enough."

At this admission, a more or less informal wandering through the 1st floor of the house began. Robert let his friends lead the way, going where they wanted. First they went through the little Pantry - full of empty shelves for china and all manner of pots and pans - into the old Dining Room, where they came to the main hearth of the house. They then went out and down the front hall to the Parlor, where they examined the solid oak trim on the mantle over the hearth. "This hearth," Robert commented, "is the 'other side' of the hearth in the Dining Room; it's a 'double-hearth.'"

"It's huge," Peter noted.

"I remember it so well_ playing here as a child; eating here in the Parlor-with a huge fire kindled both here and in the Dining Room. The house just became radiantly warm, what with the hearth in the library also lit! The hearth_" Robert said, almost sighing, "it's such a touchstone to me; as I've oft said, no doubt-it's the compliment of the kitchen, which is the heart of the house."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Heart & Hearthby Montague Whitsel Copyright © 2009 by Montague Whitsel. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.